A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Join your child in the adventure of living! In the end, what leaves the best impression on your kids is your hearty, enthusiastic participation in the stuff of life.

Last year I spent a weekend with family—especially my five adult kids and their dad. Caitrin, my youngest, got married. What I noticed about all of our family interactions? The stuff Jon and I enjoyed doing the most WITH them is what they still love to do and talk about.

For instance, they’re all readers—big ones! They continue to play games, particularly word games that require lots of nuanced (read: playfully argumentative) discussion around definitions.

Each child is an activist for their values and beliefs. They are attachment parents and aunts and uncles. They believe they can learn to do anything they want to learn and then they teach each other. In fact, Caitrin did all her own flowers for the wedding because she thought she could learn—and then did!

They travel easily and two of them even live abroad. Also: they’re so funny!

Jon and I loved words, books, movies, discussions about our beliefs and values, inside jokes, living in other countries, and marching (at demonstrations!).

So do they.

We aimed to raise good citizens—adults with values and competencies. That’s who we got! It’s impressive and humbling and so satisfying.

You’re forming the culture of your family right now! What do you love to do and do well? That’s the HOME education you are best at giving and it’s the easiest to give.

Lean in. You’re doing so much more right than you even realize!

Remember, habits are often caught more than taught.

This post is originally from Instagram and @juliebravewriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!

Traditional education models train kids to devalue their own thinking in favor of right answers and a teacher’s instructions. Little children who are used to exploring the world with their hands and wild imaginations are gradually conditioned to save those impulses for “after school” until they give them up all together before they even get to junior high.

And then we wonder why our teens appear to be inflexible, unable to grasp nuances. They’ve been conditioned by tests and homework to know that there is a right answer. They’ve lost their capacity for wonder. Teens who have retained their imaginations and their wide-eyed wonder are often seen as “not serious” about school or as “immature” or “socially inept.”

A Gift

If there were one gift I could give parents, it would be the ability to protect their children’s natural, not-jaded curiosity through the teen years. To:

• have a teen boy who is delighted by knitting or a teen girl who wields a power saw,
• converse with a teen who is enamored of fantasy novels to the point of writing their own and imagining that it could be published,
• know a teen who becomes so tender to the plight of abused animals, that teen chooses to volunteer at a shelter,
• raise a teen who plays with LEGO, who climbs trees, who secretly enjoys reruns of the PBS cartoon Arthur.

It’s one of the gifts of home education.

Let’s preserve conditions that promote wonder no matter what ages our children are.

It’s easy to associate learning with struggle and pain. Yet studies show that when you’re relaxed and happy, you’re more receptive to learning.

I challenge you today.

Gather data on who your kids are and how they learn.

Notice when your child appears “alert and relaxed.”

Take the day off of any “formal” lessons. Just sit around with your cold cup of coffee (let’s be real, is it ever hot by the time you drink it?) and pay attention.

When does your child drop into an activity and become absorbed?

If you are beset by a gaggle of wanderers in your house, help them out.

Give them art supplies, a sewing machine, colored pens, all sorts of paper, binoculars, the beeswax candle kit you keep “saving” for a better day, modeling clay, a unicycle, window markers, all the LEGO kits, the collection of dolls and their outfits, access to the baking mixes, the glue gun, shovels and pails, a calculator, a deck of cards, board games…

• See what they do.
• See how long they do it.
• Notice when they need help and when they reject it.
• When you see a smile, pause, and note to yourself what just happened.
• When you see frustration or a wandering mind, check in. Make another offer, join the activity, bring a snack.

Dedicate today to learning about how your children learn…for themselves.

Renate and Geofrrey Cain say that the best state of learning is “relaxed alertness.”

I invite you today to relax and be alert.

Notice when relaxed alertness kicks in for your kids. How did that happen?

Maybe jot it down for next week.

Most of our products have weekly planners and skills trackers that help you
do this kind of noticing and record keeping to help you be an effective parent educator.

Check out our bundles.

Knowing you’re loved and feeling loved are not identical.

What feels like love to you?

If your spouse tells you that your haircut isn’t flattering, does that feel like love?

If after a long night with a wide-awake baby, your friend tells you that you aren’t a good friend because you canceled your coffee date, does that feel like love?

You can know someone loves you, even when they are distant or cruel or telling you hard truths. It won’t feel like love but their love can be cognitively accepted. We go to therapy to understand that the love offered missed the mark emotionally, but we can accept that it was real.

But to FEEL loved? That’s something else. When you feel loved, you don’t need therapy to tell you that what is being expressed is love. It takes no work to feel it. That kind of love is a balm, a pleasurable experience—it delivers:

• safety,
• connection,
• and trust.

The best news?

To show love is easy. It requires no flowers or candy.

Just listen.

Your child is giving you clues to their inner world every day. Sometimes we’re exhausted by the acts of love and service we offer freely—washing clothes, tying their shoes, making them delicious food. Even as those are loving, for a child to feel loved, they need something else.

They want a kind, listening ear—a person who will hold space for their:

• thoughts,
• emotions,
• worries,
• and wishes.

Kids feel loved when they feel free to be known as themselves.

The challenge, of course, is not running ahead to solutions or worries of your own. It’s a shift to get behind your child’s eyes to see the reasonableness of their point of view. It doesn’t have to be the right point of view—just that given all that the child knows today, this is how they see what they see.

This means sitting on the tendency to have words. Let’s get quieter and kinder and more spacious and more attentive. Let’s work on doing less and loving more.

Let’s listen.

This post is originally from Instagram and @juliebravewriter is my account there so come follow along for more conversations like this one!

Being an engaged learner for your own sake is the most important lesson your kids can learn from you.

If you have that hunger to know, feed it. Live it in front of your children. Take time for it. Read books, study, watch that PBS special on art history, or go to a bird watching training session.

Let your children see how it’s done.

Instead of trying to recreate school at home, where the parent is the curriculum director, educator, and principal (and the child is the student), dive into HOME education, where parent and child are both on a learning journey—

• sometimes shared,
• sometimes parallel,
• sometimes the child teaches and the parent learns,
• sometimes the parent teaches and the child learns.

Learning is a lifetime habit and source of joy, and it’s important enough to demand your time and energy.

The kids will be fine, sitting on the floor playing with Legos while you get a full drink of French Impressionist painters.

Promise.