Archive for the ‘Podcasts’ Category

Podcast: Raising Kids Who Are Good Inside with Dr. Becky Kennedy

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Dr. Becky Kennedy is a clinical psychologist and the founder and CEO of Good Inside, as well as a mom of three, and she’s rethinking the way we raise our kids. Her goal: To empower parents to feel sturdier and more equipped to manage all the challenges every parent faces.

As home educators, we know that you’ve compounded the challenge of parenting by spending every waking moment (and those rare times you’re actually getting some sleep) with your precious ones.

In this Brave Writer podcast, we tackle all the topics from video games to tolerating frustration to thinking through how to deal with a child that expresses a lot of resistance and anger. Dr. Becky Kennedy brings an internal family systems perspective to the job of parenting but offers us so many practical tools. She’s never one to offer advice without breaking down exactly how to implement it in your home.

Show Notes

What does it mean to be “Good Inside”?

We all tend to incorrectly correlate behavior with identity. There are certain behaviors that are just not acceptable, like a child hitting a sibling or lying to their parents’ face—but someone can perform those “bad” behaviors without being “bad” inside. When we approach parenting—and even our own lives—with the belief that people are inherently good inside, we can approach our behavior with a sense of curiosity. Where does the gap between our identity and our behavior come from? And how does that change the way we intervene when undesirable behaviors emerge?

For one thing, it changes the way we view how an action comes to pass. In their hardest moments, children aren’t deciding to act out. Decisions require regulation, control, and forward-thinking—things that no child has in the midst of a difficult situation. As adults, we would rarely decide to yell at our kids, but sometimes it may happen, and that’s with decades of practice and development beyond what our kids have. Kids deserve our compassion when acting out, because it’s something that is beyond their control.

The importance of sturdiness

As a homeschooling parent, you have a lot of responsibility on your plate. You are directly responsible for your child’s education, such as teaching reading, writing, and math. But what do you do when your child says they hate math? That’s where this concept of sturdiness comes in.

Sturdiness is about embodying your authority as a parent. It’s a balance of boundaries and having respect for your child. By being able to create that balance, we are able to answer a vital question our kids have: “Am I safe?”

When kids see that their emotions are out of control—and those feelings are so overwhelming that they cause a parent or teacher to feel out of control—that makes them feel more afraid of those feelings. They start to believe they will never be able to control them. That’s why we set boundaries. And empathy and validation are best friends to boundaries. Because we can keep our boundaries and still let our kids feel as if we are working with them instead of against them.

Creating the right relationship to technology

Technology has changed the way that we think. It’s shortened our ability to focus—or rather, it’s made focusing on anything other than hyper-stimulating activities to be more difficult.

We are building a blueprint of expectations from life at an early age. Part of that is how much challenge we have to tolerate before seeing a reward. One thing technology has done is make it incredibly easy to get satisfaction with minimal effort. When we think about all of the difficult things we have to teach our kids, such as reading, it can take a tremendous amount of effort in order to see some results.

Nothing else is going to be a direct replacement to video games or technology to your kids. We don’t want to trick them into thinking that reading will be just as easy and stimulating as their iPad. But we do have to set boundaries, say no, tolerate their pushback when we have to make that decision, and help them move forward.

Becky wants us to remember that, above all else, parenting is hard. It is objectively too much work for one person, or even two, to take on alone. Have faith in yourself, give yourself grace, and be willing to rest and reset when needed.

Resources

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Podcast: Avoid the Meltdown

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It feels like a natural part of teaching to look at our child’s work and note where it could be improved. Yet oftentimes, giving suggestions can often leave young writers feeling judged, inadequate, or underappreciated.

The good news? It’s possible to offer your young writer editorial feedback without triggering a meltdown. On today’s podcast, I’ll share some tips you can use to give your kids helpful feedback that will help retain their confidence and independence.

Show Notes

Principles and practices that may help:

  • Kids need to know that they are the authors who have the final say over their writing.
  • The positive feedback can’t be seen as “buttering up” before delivering the “real feedback” which will then be critical.
  • Remember that your feedback makes an impact even when she doesn’t take your advice.
  • Not every piece of writing needs to be improved. 
  • Finally, don’t worry if it appears that she’s resistant to feedback for a long time.

It takes time to build trust between writer and editor.

If your child senses that you consistently are on her side, that you affirm what works well, and that the feedback you offer is for her consideration, not as a command, she will come to trust you. If the feedback you give results in a wonderful change that makes the writing spring to life, she will then be likely to ask for your input the next time, rather than being suspicious of it.

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Podcast: Overcoming Resistance in Learning

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Parents sometimes confuse two important issues. They care about their students getting the appropriate education, and so they prioritize what they consider the right subjects taught in the right ways through the right programs.

Meanwhile the child is resisting. That resistance is expressed as a global unhappiness with the subject or any effort required to address the subject. To create a desire to learn, the child must find the work personally meaningful and useful in some way.

In today’s podcast episode, let’s talk about how you can connect learning to something in the child’s current life.

Show Notes

Two ways parents respond:

  1. One kind of parent doubles down and requires the child to complete the work despite the whining, complaining, and poor performance.
  2. The other kind of parent tries to accommodate the resistance by making the task easier or letting it go for a period until the subject never gets done.

The first kind of parent doesn’t know how to get the child to be happy.

The second kind of parent doesn’t know how to ensure the child makes progress in learning.

Let’s look at a third way that will address both parents.

(more…)

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Podcast Best of: The Bermuda Triangle of Education

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Kids are savvy! They know that when you teach them something, there’s a sort of implicit catch. If you show a child how to make their bed, they know you’ll expect them to start making the bed themselves every day. It’s a small thing, but when that obligation is there, it leads to resisting the learning of new skills.

To kick off the start of the school year, we’re revisiting one of our favorite podcasts: The Bermuda Triangle of Education. It’s an encore performance of this popular episode as a way to go into this year.

In it, I discuss the question I get all the time: How do I teach my child to read in a way that makes them love reading? This question, and questions like it, have three parts to them that I call The Bermuda Triangle of Education.

Show Notes

Click here for the episode’s show notes.

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Podcast: Raising Happy Humans

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For homeschooling parents, happiness feels like the lowest level of ambition. When other parents would say “I only want my kids to be happy,” we’d scoff. We wanted our kids to be virtuous, to make a difference, to be leaders in their generation.

But we parents have very little control—over our own lives, let alone the lives of our kids. The struggle to become an adult means entering a world of complexity and ambiguity, no matter how much we want to protect our kids from it.

In today’s Brave Writer podcast, I’m going to share a story of when I came to realize that, hey, this happiness thing may not be so bad.

Show Notes

A moment comes for all parents. The cold ring of the phone too late at night that means something. A car crash, drunk driving, the police. Some moments paralyze: childhood cancer, learning disabilities, mental illness. Others overthrow hopes and dreams: “I’m pregnant,” “I just got kicked out of college,” “I’m struggling with an addiction.”

I didn’t want any of these moments. Neither did my group. We’re homeschoolers. We hope to control shape our kids’ values enough to keep our Xanax consumption to a minimum.

My group, the ever-resourceful, energetic crowd who orchestrates Medieval feasts (complete with costumes for the whole family), who’ve read thousands of pages aloud to little kids while nursing babies, who bake bread from scratch, use pies to teach fractions, cook an extra meal for the friend who is sick, who study history late at night to stay ahead of their kids the next day…. this group has strong ideals of family and how it all ought to look by the time their young ones turn twenty.

I love these mothers. We’re all neurotic and nutty in similar ways. We obsess over things like completing math problems. After all, no self-respecting home-educated child is allowed to give a wrong answer. At home, all problems can be reworked, can’t they? Yet at the same time, a week can go by where no math problems are worked at all due to life’s crazy interruptions and the went-missing-again math book.

We worry about everything and yet believe we have the power to protect, educate, and control outcomes bar none.

We’re a contradictory movement. Our core membership wants to roll back the clock to an earlier time when family values were “conventional” and unambiguous (at least in perception) yet we are strongly anti-convention in today’s world. Homeschooling is the bold hippie choice for education!

A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of attending a bridal shower for the future daughter-in-law of one of my good friends. This shower was filled with homeschooling mothers, many of whom hadn’t been together in years. As we looked at each other and knew bits and pieces of our children’s stories, emerging adulthood didn’t look as pristine as we’d imagined when our kids were little.

This bride, for instance, was “knocked up.” Not the game plan of most homeschool families. Yet what struck me about the extraordinary event was the cheerful goodwill in that room—the earnest desire to celebrate this marriage, this baby, this family in the making. In fact, she’s not “knocked up” but pregnant with a baby by a man she loves. Where’s the tragedy again? What’s the disaster? 

As a forty-something adult at the time, I realized (as I thought of all the various families represented in that room) that I had sunk to the lowest level of ambition for each of our children: I hoped that they’d all simply be happy. 

The surprise of shot-gun weddings, depression, secret lives of sex or smoking, loss of ambition, failing in college or getting kicked out, dabbling in drugs, questioning parental values, losing faith, lost scholarships, changing majors, and even the endless treadmill of “proving oneself” with good grades and high achievement… this is young adult life in all its messy fullness.

What I loved that day when we gathered to celebrate a young woman’s pregnancy was the calm care that inhabited all the conversations I witnessed. Maternal anxiety to “have it together” or to “be a testimony” had been replaced by genuine affection and hope that all would be well, and a love for one another born out of shared understanding—life is what happens while you make other plans.

To have friends to turn to when things don’t go as planned is what constitutes a rich life. That morning, I felt wealthy. Today, I know I am.

Resources

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