Archive for the ‘Podcasts’ Category

[Podcast #355] Feed Them Well with Jennifer Anderson

Brave Writer Podcast

What if feeding our kids didn’t have to feel like a test we could pass or fail?

Registered dietitian and Kids Eat in Color founder Jennifer Anderson joins us to talk about raising capable, curious eaters without getting trapped by nutrition trends, food guilt, or rigid rules.

Jennifer Anderson and family
Jennifer Anderson and family

We explore:

  • picky eating,
  • growth and weight concerns,
  • food advertising,
  • introducing unfamiliar foods,
  • and why the “best practice” isn’t always the best fit for the child in front of us.

Jennifer also shares ideas from her new book, Feed Them Well, for helping kids care for their bodies while enjoying food.

Come rethink what it means to feed our children well.

Show Notes

Parents are surrounded by food rules.

Start solids this way. Never serve that. Buy this ingredient. Avoid that one. Make sure your child eats vegetables. Don’t pressure them to eat vegetables. Watch their growth chart. Don’t make them self-conscious about their growth chart.

No wonder feeding kids can feel less like lunch and more like an exam.

Registered dietitian Jennifer Anderson, founder of Kids Eat in Color and author of Feed Them Well, offers us a much more humane starting place: curiosity.

Trade certainty for experimentation

We love a formula because a formula promises us an outcome. Follow these steps and your child won’t become picky. Feed these foods and your child will be healthy.

Actual children have other plans.

Research can tell us what happened more often within a particular population. It cannot tell us exactly what will happen with the child sitting at our kitchen table. That means we can use good information without turning it into dogma.

Try the strategy. Watch your child. Gather information. Adjust.

That isn’t inconsistency. That is responsive parenting.

Look at patterns, not isolated foods

It is easy to become preoccupied with whether an individual food is “good” or “bad.” A more useful question is what our child’s diet looks like over time.

Did they skip vegetables today? Fine. We can offer some tomorrow.

Have vegetables disappeared for months? Now we have information worth responding to.

Could bedtime snack use a little more fiber? We can work on bedtime snack without reinventing breakfast, lunch, dinner, and every snack in between.

Small changes count.

Let food be food

One of the greatest gifts we can give children is freedom from the idea that eating reveals their moral character.

Cake doesn’t require a lecture. Vegetables don’t need to confer virtue. A child’s body size is not a report card.

Sometimes the most nourishing food is also the food a child is willing or able to eat. For a child struggling to gain weight, calorie-dense foods may be medically useful. For a child going through chemotherapy, the food that stays down may be the right food for that season.

Context matters.

Curiosity belongs to the adults too

When dinner becomes tense, we can ask ourselves a few questions.

Why does an unfinished plate bother me so much?

Was I taught that wasting food was unacceptable?

Do I fear certain foods because of my own history with dieting or body image?

Our children aren’t the only people bringing feelings to the table.

The more we can separate nutrition from shame, anxiety, and control, the more room we create for children to develop what Jennifer calls an embodied independence: the ability to enjoy food, inhabit their bodies, notice what those bodies need, and make thoughtful choices for themselves.

That may be the long game.

We don’t need children who follow our food rules forever. We want young adults who can feed themselves with flexibility, pleasure, good information, and confidence.

And that begins with something delightfully ordinary: paying attention to the child in front of us.

Resources

Connect with Julie

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Produced by NOVA

Brave Writer Podcast

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[Podcast #354] Working Parents and Homeschooling

Brave Writer Podcast

Can you really homeschool well while also holding down a job? Yes, but the answer may require us to rethink when, where, and how learning happens.

With Brave Writer president Dawn Smith joining us, we explore:

  • flexible schedules,
  • morning meetings,
  • night schooling,
  • body doubling,
  • buddy reading,
  • planning from behind,
  • and the art of “triangling in” support.

We also look at why homeschool doesn’t need to imitate a nine-to-three school day and how ordinary moments, from breakfast to dishwashing, can become rich opportunities for connection and learning.

Come discover how work and homeschool can fit into the same family tapestry.

Show Notes

For many families, paid employment, caregiving, freelance work, and other responsibilities don’t disappear simply because we’ve chosen to educate our children at home. The good news is that homeschooling gives us something conventional school schedules don’t always offer: flexibility.

The first shift is to stop imagining homeschool as a miniature school day running from morning until mid-afternoon. Most families don’t need six hours of direct instruction. In a classroom, many minutes are devoted to transitions, classroom management, passing out materials, moving between rooms, and waiting for a group. At home, a focused block of explicit instruction can accomplish a great deal in much less time.

That leaves us free to ask a better question: Where are the pockets of time that actually work for our family?

Maybe we read biographies over breakfast. Maybe math happens before a morning meeting. Maybe history gets a leisurely Saturday afternoon. A teen who does her clearest thinking at night might do “night school” with us after dinner. Science could become a summer deep dive instead of appearing in thirty-minute increments five days a week.

Learning can also weave itself through the parts of family life that don’t look much like school.

Try planning from behind.

A conversation about a novel while washing dishes counts. So does listening to Latin vocabulary on the drive to piano lessons. When our children tell us about the books they’re reading, they are organizing ideas, remembering details, and making meaning. When we look back and notice those experiences, we’re planning from behind, giving them the credit they deserve.

Work schedules can become more flexible too.

Some of us do our best concentration work before the kids wake up. Others need a protected afternoon block while a partner takes over. When children are old enough, independent project time can create room for work. A child might even share our workspace, quietly drawing, reading, or building LEGO while we work beside them. That kind of “body doubling” can satisfy a child’s desire for proximity without requiring our constant participation.

We also don’t have to do all of this alone.

A spouse, mother’s helper, grandparent, tutor, online class, homeschool friend, or childcare provider can become another point of support. We sometimes call this triangling in help. For a parent who works full time outside the home, that support may be essential rather than optional.

And yes, there will be trade-offs. We might work from the corner of the library while our kids attend an activity instead of chatting with the other parents. We might say no to an outing because our work block matters too.

The goal isn’t perfect “balance.”

Family life rarely distributes itself into neat, equal portions.

Instead, imagine a tapestry. Work, appointments, activities, and responsibilities form part of the structure. Learning threads its way through all of them. The pattern changes as our children grow, our work changes, and new needs emerge.

We aren’t trying to preserve one perfect homeschool schedule forever. We’re creating a family culture flexible enough to change with us.

Resources

Connect with Julie

Connect with Melissa

Produced by NOVA

Brave Writer Podcast

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[Podcast #353] Only Connect: The Power of Partnership in Homeschooling

Brave Writer Podcast

What changes when we stop treating homeschooling as something we do to our children and begin learning alongside them?

Connection is at the heart of meaningful education: connection to ourselves, to the subjects we study, and to one another.

On today’s Brave Writer podcast episode, we explore:

  • how curiosity leads to purpose,
  • why collaboration matters more than perfect independence,
  • and how low-stakes practice can help children build confidence without turning every lesson into an evaluation.

From fractions and cookies to grammar, handwriting, games, and writing revision, we look at practical ways to turn abstract academics into learning that feels useful and alive.

Join us and discover what can happen when we trade coercion for connection.

Show Notes

Only Connect: Why Partnership Changes the Way Children Learn

What are you learning right now?

Maybe you’ve taken up gardening, crochet, breadmaking, chess, painting, or a new language. Think for a moment about how you went about learning it. Chances are, nobody assigned it to you. You became curious. You found a reason to care. You searched for a book, video, teacher, class, friend, or expert who could help.

In other words, you didn’t learn alone.

That experience offers us an important clue about homeschooling. Learning is deeply connected to curiosity, purpose, and other people. Yet we can easily expect something very different from our children. We hand them a worksheet, explain the instructions, and hope that eventually they’ll become “independent learners.”

But complete independence isn’t really how human beings learn.

Collaboration Is Not a Failure of Independence

When something is easy and familiar, children often enjoy doing it on their own. A child may happily bake cookies without help, read an entire fantasy series independently, or settle into a comfortable copywork routine.

Then fractions get harder. Grammar feels baffling. The next writing assignment seems impossible.

That’s exactly when collaboration matters most.

Our children know more than we do about what captures their interest. We know more about how to find resources, break skills into manageable pieces, locate experts, or make connections they haven’t noticed yet. And there are plenty of things neither of us knows. Those become opportunities to learn together.

This is one of homeschooling’s great advantages.

Make the Abstract Concrete

School subjects are often abstract. Children are gloriously literal.

Instead of starting with the definition of a verb, imagine encountering the word splattered in a story. We can say it aloud. Splat. We can notice how the word sounds like the action. Maybe we even drop something and listen.

Suddenly we have an experience.

Now terms like verb and onomatopoeia have something to attach themselves to.

The same thing happens when fractions show up in a cookie recipe, geometry appears in a sewing project, or writing becomes necessary for a role-playing game. We haven’t abandoned academics. We’ve given those academics a reason to matter.

Skills Before Results

This principle is especially important in writing.

When a child hands us a page, our eyes can immediately find every misspelling, missing comma, awkward sentence, and misplaced apostrophe. But correcting everything mostly demonstrates what we know.

Instead, we can ask: What skill is this child actually practicing?

Maybe they know capital letters and end punctuation. Great. Let’s ask them to edit for those things. Maybe apostrophes are brand new. Let’s give them low-stakes opportunities to experiment with apostrophes without holding them responsible for conventions they haven’t learned yet.

The writing then becomes information. It shows us what to practice next. It doesn’t become a referendum on the child’s ability.

We are growing skills, not demanding polished results.

Let Connection Lead

When resistance appears, more pressure is rarely our only option.

We can become curious instead. What would make this meaningful? Where does this skill already exist in the child’s life? Could we do it together? Could we lower the stakes? Could we experiment? Could we connect the idea to a story, tool, game, question, community, or purpose the child already values?

Home education gives us time to ask those questions.

We get to accompany our children down the path of learning, sometimes leading and sometimes following, always paying attention to where they actually are.

Only connect.

That may be the whole job.

Resources

Connect with Julie

Connect with Melissa

Produced by NOVA

Brave Writer Podcast

Posted in Podcasts | Comments Off on [Podcast #353] Only Connect: The Power of Partnership in Homeschooling