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Picking the scab off the nuclear family

Posted on by Suki

The nuclear, 2-parent family, the gold standard of American parenting, is a relatively new concept. In the past and present, America and communities around the world function well—perhaps better—with a more communal approach to raising children.

The pandemic, I’ve noticed, has been picking at the scab that holds the nuclear family together. Quarantined families, in many cases, have become truly nuclear. A few of my students report that they literally haven’t had a face-to-(masked)face conversation with another human since last March. Most of my students report that they are spending way more time with their families than they ever did.

Of course, in some cases this has been a wonderful gift that Covid has given families. Many of us were stressed out and overscheduled, and the last nine months gave us some breathing room. We rekindled interest in cooking or crafting. We had time to play board games with our kids. We finally got around to painting their bedrooms.

But let’s face it. The human organism was not designed for the nuclear family. We thrive in situations where small communities trust and support each other, shifting the responsibilities of raising children to multiple adults who each have skills to offer. In that situation, no parent needs to be the perfect parent for their children.

But here we are, so what do we do about it?

Some families are thriving, and to you I say, good job! Enjoy!

But other families are experiencing more stress than ever:

  • Spouses have seen their relationships deteriorate
  • Teens are angry and resentful, or depressed and withdrawn
  • Kids are missing daily infusions of joy they used to have when they and their families interacted with others

I’ve been talking with my teen students on how to deal with this, and here are the fixes we came up with.

Remember that you can’t control other people’s emotions

This is such a hard lesson! Depending on our personalities, we respond to our family members’ emotions (especially negative ones) by either blaming ourselves or blaming them, internalizing negative emotions or lashing out with them.

Remember that we can control our reactions

We want to blame our reactions on others, but really, how we react is our choice. But it is true that we have to practice reacting appropriately. Few of us are born ready-made with Zen-level patience!

We can do a few things to practice controlling our reactions:

  • When we react badly, go back and figure out what we should have done. Then tell the person we reacted to about it—aka, apologize.
  • Try to stop when we see ourselves following a pattern of reacting and blaming.
  • Practice the healthy responses when possible.

Parenting peels off scabs of its own

Parents generally find that parenting peels off the various scabs that they formed to deal with life. Some parents don’t want to question their own reactions, and it becomes especially hard for them once their teens assert themselves as individuals. My teen students see that all the time, and it’s confusing to them. As parents, we can help them by verbalizing what’s going on.

“Hey, I’m sorry I’ve been complaining so much. Being stuck in the house and going to Zoom meetings stresses me out!”

“When I was growing up, my family just kept out of each other’s way so we never had to face the fact that we didn’t get along. But now, we’re stuck together so let’s try to figure this out.”

Be empathetic about our teens’ situation

Teens are stuck in between. They hopefully experienced some independence before Covid hit, and now they are stuck with and completely dependent on their families. We parents need to acknowledge that and support our teens in seeking whatever independence they can find—and that’s usually going to be done through a screen.

Don’t give up on each other

I tell my teens whose families are struggling that it’s important not to give up on their relationship with their parents. If we assume that our family members are doing the best they can, we will feel better about our relationships with them. We all have to cut each other some slack right now.

With care and patience, scabs will heal.

Parenting your LGBTQ+ child

Posted on by Suki

I started a new online course for LGBTQ+ youth and their allies because I noticed that my queer students needed a place to congregate, learn about themselves, and be their full selves without fear. We’ll be learning about history, literature, film, health, mental health, and anything else that comes up during the semester.

Some of the parents in the course requested that I share some good LGBTQ+ resources for parents that will be accessible outside of Rainbow Room. I thought that was a great idea, so you can now access my LGBTQ+ Parenting Resources page on this site.

If you have just learned that you have a queer child, you may feel like this is a challenge you aren’t ready to face. But just like all parenting challenges, this is one that will strengthen your relationship with your child and help you grow as a person.

Here is some general advice if you are at the beginning of learning to parent your child. Much of this advice was given to me by others and has proven itself useful.

  • Always remember that your child is still the same person. They may ask for new pronouns or surprise you in their choice of dates, but they are the person you love and nurture.
  • Practice unconditional love. It’s so important that they feel that your love is not dependent on their pleasing you.
  • Defer to your child in how they want to present themselves to the world. Some kids will want to be out and proud. Others will have their reasons for being more circumspect. Don’t out your own child.
  • That said, you are your child’s advocate, and if your child sees you not advocating for them in one area, they will receive a clear message that you don’t support them. Make sure to politely and kindly remind people who misname or misgender your child. Make sure to stand up for your child when they are criticized for who they are.
  • Recognize your child’s individuality and know that they need to make mistakes. I call this “I got your back” parenting—you don’t always have to be out front fixing things for them. Your child needs age-appropriate autonomy and privacy.

I hope the resources are helpful and that you feel positive about parenting your rainbow child!

The Final Snub Says it All

Posted on by Suki

The smallest snub can be the biggest gesture.

This is the role of the First Lady, to welcome the new one with grace and humility.

Newspapers report that Melania Trump has not reached out to Jill Biden to welcome her to her new home. Now, I suppose this isn’t surprising. Her husband has never admitted that he lost the election.

It may not be surprising, but it is deeply shocking. No matter what sorts of actions American presidents have taken on the national stage, their wives have had one job and one job only: to be gracious. 

First ladies have taken on many roles, from Jackie Kennedy’s promotion of the arts to Hillary Clinton’s attempt to solve our healthcare dilemma. But no matter what else they did, first ladies knowingly signed on to the job of being everyone’s First Lady. Their job has been to humanize their husbands, take over the care and nurture of the White House, make everyone feel at home in their home, and then pass the job on.

No American first lady has gone into the job thinking that she was moving into a permanent home. They knew that their part in the history of this country was a gender-determined role as homemaker, peace maker, she who keeps up the public face.

I’m willing to overlook all the other nasty gossip that came out about Melania Trump (though the recordings are a little hard to wipe from my memory), but this last gesture is a step too far. If the Senate doesn’t convict Trump of inciting sedition, they at least could convict him of having exceedingly bad taste in his [temporary] life partners.

The gossips say that Melania cried on election night, 2016. They say she didn’t cry tears of joy for her husband. She cried, I can only guess based on her subsequent actions, because she was actually going to have to extend grace to others. The world had always bent to its knees in front of her, and now she was going to have to do a little bending.

Apparently, even that was too much.

Women’s liberation is [almost] complete

Musing about Melania Trump leads me to look wider into the society of Republican women. I was raised in a conservative town and I know the unwritten code that conservative women follow. These women knew their place and they knew their role. They were the nurturers of children, the keepers of home, the supporters of their husbands, and sometimes, the movers and shakers of charity and social good in their communities.

Conservative women still love to dis feminism, but it’s clear that they have learned its lessons. Just look at the recent Capitol riots. Women can act just like men? The zip-tie guy’s mom went in to cause mayhem at his side. Women don’t have to be sweet and perfect? It was a woman who walked off with a computer from Nancy Pelosi’s office. Women should dress pretty? The women in that mob were almost indistinguishable from the men, dressed in t-shirts promoting hatred and division, red caps to hide anything they might have done to their hair that morning, even military gear.

Women used to talk sweet even when they were spewing the rawest hatred. No more. Kimberly Guilfoyle’s GOP convention speech? Well, I’ll just leave it at that.

Like it or not, the role of the First Lady is to be nurturer, keeper of the house, paragon of graciousness.

The people who talk tradition trash tradition

So I circle back to Melania and then all the incredible breakage of norms perpetrated recently by Republicans. I can’t help but think that we are in a children’s story about Backwards World, where you wake up and everything you used to experience has been turned around.

In my childhood, it was the left screaming bloody murder at the establishment. It was post-hippie liberated women who took it on themselves to dress and act however they wanted. Conservatives were…conservative. They didn’t want change. Heck, the women had not even changed their hairstyles since 1958.

I can’t imagine those people I grew up with making any apologies for a band of hoodlums that entered the Capitol building and laid waste to it.

The Republican party is not the conservative party anymore. They don’t want to conserve the earth for their children. They don’t want to conserve decorum in our government. They don’t want to conserve the proper operation of our society.

“Whatever it is, I’m against it,” indeed.

As soon as the Capitol dust settled, they were back to using the word “unity,” as if they understood the term in the slightest. For years, the Republican party has gained power through insinuation, fear, and lies. You can say this about Trump, he does sometimes tell it like it is. He’s the one who said out loud that Republicans can’t win without voter suppression.

Republicans have realized that true conservatism has died a silent death. While Reagan courted evangelicals and Gingrich courted revolutionaries, the true conservatives became truly outnumbered in their party.

Republicans trash tradition because they are no longer conservative. They are liberal in the most general sense of the word: They want change. And the change they want is to do away with everything that has held this country together. They are against compromise. They are against fair representation. They are against loving their neighbors.

They are even against welcoming a new First Family into the White House. 

Really, has it come to this? 

I find myself inexplicably shocked and saddened by Melania not welcoming Jill into the home that the voters gave to her to keep and protect. It’s weird, because I think this whole First Lady thing is awkwardly archaic. I simply don’t believe that the role should exist. And in fact, I don’t really believe that the presidency, as it is currently defined, should exist either. But that’s the topic for another essay.

This essay is about sadness. The sadness of knowing that all across America, there are women who approve of Melania Trump’s behavior. They are readying themselves to snub their own neighbors. Maybe they will look across the aisle at a recently divorced mom and decide that her kids can’t play with theirs. Or they’ll look at the charity work they do and wonder if it’s beneath them, the way that such work is clearly beneath Melania Trump.

The fabric of conservatism is now frayed. Conservatism used to be a strong wall that liberals had to push against, thus strengthening both the left and the entire system as a whole. But now, instead of pushing back against tradition and conservative policy, liberals are pushing back against an angry, disillusioned mob who thought that the Trumps would pull them up by their bootstraps. 

Instead, the Trumps have pulled their followers down into the gilded muck where they have spent their lives, wrestling with the slick-skinned demons of their own creation.

It’s a made for TV moment, for sure.

Educated: A belated book review

Posted on by Suki

I have to admit that I resisted reading Educated by Tara Westover when it came out with a big splash in 2018. I was, frankly, so done with the “homeschooling as child abuse” trope that I didn’t even bother picking it up.

But strange things happen in a pandemic, and one of those is you are sitting on the couch in the evening, having finished your latest book, scrolling through your mom’s Kindle account and you come across that book you resisted reading…

And so I read it, and was (perhaps not surprisingly) pleasantly surprised. Westover’s book does not promote the “homeschooling as child abuse” trope in the slightest. In fact, I would suggest that anyone who maintains that opinion read the book as a way to understand the difference.

On the fringe of the fringe

Westover was raised in an Idaho Mormon community in a family way at the fringe of the fringe of their community. Westover considers her father bipolar, though he has never been diagnosed. Whatever his diagnosis, he was clearly manipulative, paranoid, and delusional. Westover’s mother was both victim and then co-conspirator with her husband. The family maintained fragile ties with their more mainstream extended family and community, but they lived largely insular lives where the children had no idea what the outside world was like.

The psychological abuse and neglect from her parents stemmed from their extreme views: about the roles of women, about eschewing modern medical treatment, about blind obedience to the father’s authority. Another source of abuse was the constant psychological distress of living in a household that is constantly preparing for the end—which is always just around the corner. The physical abuse, however, came from an older brother. Himself a victim of their father’s paranoia and manias, the brother takes the “education” of his sisters into his own hands, his physical abuse stopping time and time again just short of murder.

The “homeschooling as abuse” trope would have you believe that this abuse was able to happen because of homeschooling. But throughout the story, Westover documents the complicity of relatives, neighbors, and their community. Homeschooling, it turns out, was neither a cause nor an affect of the abuse.

Through the support of a different older brother, who has escaped to college, Westover decides to “educate” herself. She eventually gains a high enough score on the ACT to go to college, and from there proves a brilliant student who can’t be kept back.

Is this homeschooling?

In some ways, Westover’s “education” at the hands of her parents was classic unschooling. Her mother taught all of the children the basics of the three R’s, and both parents gave them life lessons. Her father put the children to work in his (physically dangerous) business and enlisted their support for his constant preparations for the end of days. From a young age, Westover also acts as assistant to her mother’s (illegal) midwifery and then her highly successful essential oils business.

Since unschooling focuses on releasing children from the tyranny of standards and curriculum so that they can pursue their own passions and do meaningful work, one could argue that Westover was “unschooled,” albeit unconventionally.

However, this is not Westover’s view or mine. What happened to her was not unschooling, but baldfaced neglect. She entered the world only with the skills that she fought for. She often had to hide her studies from her domineering father and her passive or enabling mother. She was lucky to have mentors in her college-bound brother and a friend in town. Any resemblance her education has to unschooling is only on the surface.

The village raised the child

Westover’s story, in the end, isn’t about homeschooling at all. In fact, she makes a point of noting other homeschooling families in her extended family who are giving their children a real education.

Her story is about the strength of the human spirit, the importance of believing in factual truth, and perhaps most of all, the role of “the village” in raising children. Westover’s father’s manias and her brother’s abuse make her family an outlier in some ways. But in other ways, her story is a classic one: what her immediate family couldn’t give she got from others.

An older brother acted like a parent.

A friend in town acted like a brother.

A college administrator recognized a need to meet her where she was.

A roommate patiently educated her in the ways of the world.

As much as Westover’s father believed that it was his family against the world, it was the world that made sure that his neglected children could thrive.

A final rift

There is one sad theme to the book that feels unresolved. Near the end of the story, Westover muses about the fact that her siblings who “got out” are successful, with PhDs and lives in the mainstream. The children who stayed, without even a high school diploma, are still fully within their parents’ sphere of influence, their choices limited.

Westover realizes that this rift forces her to choose between her education and the myths her family survives on. Like many survivors of abuse and growing up in extremist communities, she has to choose between fact and family, a break or a continuation.

In the interview linked below, she draws a connection between the choice she made and our current political environment. It’s worth a read.

The ultimate homeschooler?

Westover’s education didn’t come from homeschooling. But in another way, Westover is the ultimate homeschooler—despite her parents’ influence. She took ownership of her education and her life, a process that is difficult for teens even in the most supportive families. She educated herself, then she let herself be educated.

This isn’t a book about homeschooling, but it is a book about learning, perseverance, and coming to terms with family. It’s well worth a read.

Further reading:

What is “learning through success”?

Posted on by Suki

All of my teaching is informed by my most difficult parenting task. One of my children had undefined “developmental issues”—with an emphasis on undefined. No one could tell us why it was happening or how to help him.

Without a diagnosis, I started to research techniques used for students with various special needs. That’s where I happened upon the concept of “learning through success,” which upended my ideas of what education is for and how it works.

Traditional approach: learn through failure

Traditionally, a teacher in any discipline tells a student what is “wrong” with their work and gives them reason to correct it. Often, those reasons are based within reward/punishment systems designed to make students focus on their failures.

But students in special ed fail every day

By definition, a student who needs “special” education is failing in some way that a typical educational approach can’t remedy. So when a student is sent into the special ed system, it’s because of failure.

Imagine: If you were designing an environment in which students fail at the most basic tasks, what’s the worst design you could come up with?

Answer: Traditional school.

Why focus on success?

Good special ed teachers don’t focus on their students’ failures simply because there are too many of them. Focusing on success allows them to inspire their students and motivate them.

The fascinating thing about focusing on success is that lagging skills almost always come along for the ride. The teacher is aware of the lagging skills and taking them into account, but not asking the student to focus on them.

What if students don’t have special needs?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Success_sign.jpg

First of all, I believe that all students have special needs. But that’s beside the point.

Focusing on success, it turns out, is a more effective way to teach all students. Focusing on success doesn’t mean ignoring your students’ mistakes, but it does mean appreciating their successes and motivating them to do more.

In my classrooms, I notice that when I point out one student’s success in a task, other students who have failed in that task feel more motivated to work on it. And when a student’s success is pointed out, they feel more motivated to drag their lagging skills along.

All students learn asynchronously

State-mandated standards and curriculum can give parents the false impression that their student should always achieve in the center of some designated “typical” student. The truth is, all students learn at different rates.

Focusing on success allows students with lagging skills to feel motivated and successful in their areas of strength.

It’s about motivation

Focusing on success doesn’t mean giving students empty praise. And it doesn’t mean ignoring their mistakes and lagging skills. It does mean giving them the energizing feeling of making positive forward motion. And that’s what learning is all about.

And that’s why in my classrooms, we focus on success.

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