My post about kids wanting to learn and grow is featured in this week’s Homeschool Carnival at Dewey’s Treehouse!
There are also a number of holiday reading posts that offer many suggestions, plus other posts that share, as “Mama Squirrel” says, “Home stuff, School stuff, Thoughtful stuff, and Silly Stuff.”
Image by Rick McCharles
There’s a strange mix of expectation and freedom that yields the highest quality learning. It’s not enough to simply give freedom to your kids. Sometimes they drown in it.
“Mom, I can’t think of anything to do.”
“But how does this game work? I just want to understand the rules.”
“I can’t hit the ball. What am I doing wrong?”
“Where do I start? There’s too much to read and too many ideas to think about.”
“How can I grow up to be an actress?”
Kids want answers to these kinds of questions. A coach will help a baseball player to know what is going on with that swing. It’s not interference to give feedback and help. It’s too much freedom to simply say, “Keep swinging. It’s up to you!”
An aspiring actress needs to test her stage presence. She needs opportunities. These don’t come by singing in the living room alone.
Kids (all of us) want some structure. They want some hand holds or guard rails. They want scaffolding. The far extreme of this “freedom” continuum is the distorted view of unschooling where parental involvement looks like parental interference. Parents are so hands-off, sometimes kids don’t even know their options!
On the other end of the continuum, though, are parents who are so involved and invested, they withhold dinner and scream at their son until he finally masters two-handed piano playing…and winds up in Carnegie Hall at age 16.
We wonder: Is that the right route? After all, Carnegie Hall is a good gig if you can get it!
I often find the word “balance” an irritant (please quit telling me to live a balanced life—I just want to live a life and not have to “balance” it all the time). So I am not going there. But, I don’t want us to one day scream bloody murder at our kids and on the other day, abandon them to their own devices, unwilling to help them out of a boredom jam.
What I want to say is this:
Expectation can be either an enormous motivator and support when becoming all you are meant to be, or it can defeat and tear down the fledgling aspirant. The amount and the type of pressure determine whether or not your child will flourish and thrive, or shrivel and withdraw.
Just because a child achieves a goal with or without undue pressure is not a validation of either extreme methodology either. Underneath is a relationship to you—and to the self—that is being daily created behind the achievements.
What we want is bold and big:
Personal accomplishment combined with healthy self confidence and relaxed, trusting relationship with the parents.
How do we get there?
We feel most connected to each other when we are in a relationship that creates emotional safety. A child’s performance or lack of achievement doesn’t determine whether your kids feel loved or safe, whether a parent smiles or hugs, whether a parent shows pride and admiration.
To that end, parents have to pay attention to their kids. They supply resources, answer questions, provide imagined scenarios, and create possibilities.
Parents know how to find what is “out there” and how to bring that to children. Parents can help match a child to the information, opportunities, instructors, tools, and environments that facilitate growth in a child’s chosen interest.
For example, when my kids got fascinated with vintage dance because of the BBC/A&E Pride and Prejudice series, I hunted for a dance studio in Cincinnati that taught vintage dance. Found one. Couldn’t afford it. Figured out how to get my kids in for free (we spent Monday afternoons stuffing mailboxes with dance flyers, come wind, rain, hail and snow!). They danced.
It was not enough to know they wanted to dance. Nor was it enough to leave them to it on our back deck. They needed my help to find lessons so they really were learning to dance! That’s the right kind of support.
When they didn’t want to go to class, I still took them because of the commitment and the need to not get behind for the big ball at the end! I helped them fulfill their commitment. We stuffed those mailboxes every week, even when no one felt like it. That’s the right kind of pressure.
I didn’t, however, expect them to go on to be competitive vintage dancers. That kind of pressure would have been my agenda, and not theirs.
My job was to support a vision, and an enthusiasm, and a commitment.
Their job was to show up, to participate, to “pay” for the opportunity and privilege, and to enjoy it. They could determine if one season sated the curiosity or led to new aspirations.
As you work with your children, keep in mind these two aspects of parenting:
1) Freedom to dream big, to have desires, to explore unusual interests, to find ways to bring those dreams to life.
2) Involvement that provides resources, gentle accountability (within reason—if the experience turns out to be one that is crushing the child’s spirt, dump it!), and helpful support (payment, driving, attending events, providing the right supplies…).
The only pressure a child should feel is the pressure to live up to his or her potential and to realize his or her dreams. That comes from within. You can’t create it or induce it in the child.
You must not put on pressure that comes from your agenda. That’s when you cross the line.
Your job is to match your child’s enthusiasm—don’t do more for the child than the child is willing to do for self, but don’t limit your child by ignoring how you can help, since you are the adult with connections, money, and resources.
The right kind of freedom and expectation.
The right kind of pressure.
Cross-posted on facebook.
The little ghost of public school past may whisper that you are behind at any given moment. She expects six subjects per day, carefully divided into hour-long segments, with lunch dissecting the day at noon.
You, on the other hand, had a busy month. You had a baby; you worked part time; your husband was sent on a tour of duty with the military; your youngest got tubes put in her ears; you found out you were pregnant and now are exhausted and nauseous; the remodel is taking an extra month; your mother-in-law had hip surgery and is staying at your house; a hurricane blew into your city; your car broke down; your dog’s cancer became terminal…
Any one of those could be you right now.
Life exhausts all of us some months and homeschool vanishes. When those months come during the “official” school year, we panic and try to make up for lost time the next month. We feel pressure to “catch up.” We transfer that pressure to the kids, and sometimes short change the subject matter in our hurry to rush ahead to the “right” place in the text book or lessons. Life becomes harried and unhappy very quickly under these conditions.
Let me start with a little demythologizing to help you.
Did you know, for instance, that in school when a teacher leaves due to an imminent birth, the new substitute sometimes puts on a video each day for a week or two before the lesson plans kick in?
Did you know that sometimes schools go through trauma (shootings or vandalism or weather-related damage) that lead to skipping whole chunks of information when the regular school hours return?
Did you know that some teachers are not as effective at teaching as others?
Schools are not uniformly efficient in following schedules or completing lesson plans every year, in every subject. Know that, so that you can successfully “flick” the ghost of public school past off of your shoulder. You are not a school and you are not required to follow a school schedule or system. Even schools can’t always get it done!
Now TRUST home education! You homeschool for good reasons:
1) tailor-made learning,
2) variety of learning activities and experiences,
3) the ability to speed up and slow down,
4) self-teaching by the kids,
5) flexibility!
When you feel like a month went down the tubes, follow this principle:
FEATHER in the subject areas over the course of a few weeks. You can choose to simply get back to the easy workbooks (like math and handwriting) for a couple weeks while you sort through what else you’d like to do with your kids. You don’t have to resume a full homeschool schedule for every day of that month. Start small and build. It’s okay to not know after a month from h-e-double toothpicks what else you want to do besides those easy lessons. Use the new month to find out.
PREPARE for the other subjects before you expect output from the kids. Rather than racing ahead into the unfamiliar material, take time to read the instructions, grasp the vision, and understand the philosophy of the materials. Get to know the books or guidelines, over tea or coffee, while the kids watch videos or play with Legos or jump on the trampoline. No harm comes to them while they play and you prepare.
All kids benefit from well-planned lessons. Take your time to offer your kids a meaty experience, rather than a rushed one, thrown together by guilt.
Read,
process,
imagine,
plan,
envision,
prepare,
schedule,
execute.
A side-note: I have a problem with “open-and-go” as a philosophy of learning. While convenient, particularly with a large family, some of the learning (the rich, deep, invested learning) needs to be the kind that takes consideration and thoughtfulness. What will your kids remember from their homeschooled childhoods? Workbooks that were so easy to use, a parent could open them, give the instructions to the child at a glance, and then return to the computer or the laundry or phone?
Or will they remember the month you took two weeks to think about a month-long writing experience, where you discovered the ideas ahead of time, prepared for the experience with enthusiasm, tools, and know-how, and then executed that experience with lovely, distraction-free, carved-out time and nurturing?
I know you want the latter. We all do. You can create it. Take your time to get there.
Trust that home education works. Because it does.
Feather in the subjects one or two at a time, with space for them to take hold, before you get all the plates spinning at once.
Prepare for the more challenging subjects, consciously, while your kids are busy in the same house, if need be. Plan for rich experiences that take up the entire morning and displace some of those other subjects if need be.
Image by Xlibber
We won’t be able to share all the Where Brave Writers Write submissions today (we plan to highlight many fearless writers in the coming weeks, even after the Kindle Fire giveaway is over) but here are a few more fabulous photos! Enjoy!
The deadline for entering the Kindle Fire Giveaway is tonight at midnight EST.
A random drawing will be held on December 11, 2013. We will notify the winner via email then publish it to the blog.
All images (cc)
Last night one of our friends (one of the former support group leaders, in fact) was in town. She fired off an email to a bunch of us with a date, time, and location to reunite.
Thirteen met. I haven’t seen some of them in a very long time. Not all of them were/are close friends, though some are. But we’ve been in co-ops and support groups, we’ve attended conferences and committee meetings together. Two helped me put together The Writer’s Jungle the first year I spoke at CHEO (Ohio’s state convention). Another was responsible for that invitation to speak!
We went around the table one at a time sharing “where our kids are now” – seeing pictures of grandbabies, hearing about weddings, and new adventures post-homeschooling (like refurbishing a camper and traveling). Each one shared about her post-homeschool search for career and/or meaning (so many volunteers, so many teaching in some capacity, several have gone back to school and earned new degrees, some are working at jobs they like or to help with finances at home). Some were enjoying freedom to be at home and not required to do anything.
As the evening wore down, conversation around homeschooling itself took over. A few thoughts repeated themselves and I thought of all of you.
Don’t rely on the promises of systems. All those books you buy—even mine—be sure you tailor everything you do to your kids and to your unique family. Conventions are especially prone to promising outcomes if you follow the rules of whatever system. A unanimous “not true” followed. Kids are their own persons and no system delivers the vision you create for them. They must choose for themselves. Take everyone else’s experience with two big grains of salt!
The stay-at-home parent is the homeschooling parent. Therefore, it winds up leading to a lot of marital dissatisfaction when the (usually) wife expects the full time employed husband to be in charge of the homeschool. Rather than enjoying her chosen career (educating the kids), she can wind up resentful that her husband doesn’t match the “role models” at conventions. Everyone doing what they care about doing and supporting each other is enough. This was a big discussion point last night.
There are things going on in your home you don’t know about and won’t find out about until your kids are grown ups. This leads to a great number of fabulous family stories to be shared over holiday meals between your kids who love each other. One mom said the stories usually start with, “When we were supposed to be doing our school…” Ha ha! Loved this one.
Homeschooled kids, no matter how they were home educated, do tend to be close to each other as grown up siblings. So great to hear that across the board.
Some kids still live at home into their twenties. Some got married at 18.
Many mothers are burnt out by the end of the homeschooling years.
Some adult kids swear they will never homeschool (and put their kids into schools they never went to!) while others have chosen to homeschool their children. Some of the homeschool mom alums are helping home educate their grandchildren!
Adult children are grown up small children. Some will struggle into adulthood. Some will thrive. Some will cause you profound worry. Some will move you to embarrassing pride. And often all of these in one family. Homeschooling doesn’t guarantee outcomes—it does promote family closeness in most of the cases I’ve seen.
I loved seeing everyone. The most incredible part of being with these women is seeing how much stronger they all seem on this side of the journey—confident, able to think for themselves, clear about who they are, vibrant women making contributions. That’s a wonderful benefit, I think.
Keep going!
Image (cc)
Cross-posted on facebook.
