Category: Parenting

The working homeschooling mom (or dad)

Posted on by Suki

One of the top concerns I hear about homeschooling from potential homeschoolers is employment. The parent destined to be the primary homeschooler (usually the mom but more and more often the dad) is concerned about whether they will be able to continue working.

Suki and book
I wrote my first book while in the thick of homeschooling two kids.

The concern is an important one, and not just for the obvious reason. Yes, the loss of income can be difficult for homeschooling families. Sometimes there is already an unemployed or under-employed parent whose time will be better-used in homeschooling, but often families take a financial hit when they decide to homeschool.

But beyond the question of money is also the question of the primary homeschooler’s self-image and personal fulfillment. Working is often as much about personal goals as it is about finances. If you have built a career, leaving it behind can be personally damaging. Focusing on your children to the detriment of your feelings of fulfillment and self-worth does not lead to successful parenting, much less to successful homeschooling.

Luckily, homeschooling and career are not mutually exclusive. Lots of homeschooling parents work and homeschool successfully, though it always requires a certain amount of flexibility and compromise.

In my own case, I started with the benefit that my work had always been done from home on a flexible schedule. Before children, I worked as a freelance writer, graphic designer, online marketing consultant, and small publisher. Once I had children, and then once I started homeschooling, I found that I needed to make adjustments.

But although I started from a flexible work situation, the main reasons I succeeded in continuing my work were the help of friends and family.

DLC
I started a homeschool co-op with other moms and brought my computer to classes and meetings so I could work on the go.

There is no way I could have continued working without the support of my husband. We had agreed when the children were babies that he would be the primary parent in the evenings so that I could get work done, and once we started homeschooling we expanded our arrangement. After dinner I would go into my office and it would be “work time” for me. During this time I was able to write a book about homeschooling, a chapter book, and numerous articles.

The other major thing I did was to set up a variety of homeschooling support systems:

  • Kid exchange:
    I found friends who had children in a similar age range and who had similar needs. This wasn’t as hard as it sounds! We each would devise something we would do with our little pack of girls to give the others a morning off. For example, I live next to a redwood forest, so I led forest hikes and taught nature studies. Another mom was an excellent seamstress and taught sewing.
  • Paid care:
    I paid money to a babysitter when necessary. I didn’t really have to do this much after my daughter was about six, but it was an option I used.
  • Public resources:
    I registered both children in a public school homeschool program that offered a drop-off class day each week. You might not have this option in your area, but sometimes private schools offer this as an option, too. This program also led field trips, so the parents who lived near each other would sometimes offer to take each other’s kids on the field trips to give time to the other parents.
  • Cooperative homeschooling:
    I started a homeschool coop with other homeschoolers. We all taught classes there. Part of my job was to get wi-fi set up so that I could bring my computer and work while my kids were playing or in classes with other children.

Those were very, very busy years. That said, I worked a fair amount. I remember one day at my daughter’s gymnastics class I was worked very hard on a magazine article, sitting in the parent area with my computer.

At the end of class I looked up, and the mom next to me said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so focused on their work before!” It was a skill that I had to develop once I realized that I’d get very little quiet, focused time at home with no kids. But it worked out. As the kids have gotten older, of course, they have needed me less. Now I can put in something like a 2/3 workday, and actually spend evenings with my family!

Just like homeschooling itself, how you end up juggling work and your children will depend on your family’s needs, values, and interests. For more ideas, read my article “How do we get by? Homeschooling families talk about how to make ends meet.”

Goal-setting and young teens

Posted on by Suki

We’re in the thick of homeschooling high school, with a junior getting serious about looking at college and next year’s freshman thinking she might go back to homeschooling. Thinking about homeschooling my younger child again sparked me to think about what we’ve done that’s successful, and what we might change.

Goal-setting helps kids understand that their education is for them, not for their parents!
Goal-setting helps kids understand that their education is for them, not for their parents!

Amidst the complexity of homeschooling high school, one success does stand out. I think it was at a homeschooling conference where I  heard the advice that young teens need to be taught goal-setting. At that point, my son was largely unschooling, following his own interests. He was doing great at that, but I knew that once he entered the high school years and what he did started to “count,” homeschooling might get more complicated.

So I made a decision (in fact, I set a goal!): Once a week we sat down together and went through a goal setting curriculum I’d found online. [Goal Setting for Students, in case you’re interested.]

The curriculum was not a great fit for homeschoolers. It was very school-focused, of course, and every time they used sports as an example in the text, my sports-averse son would swear it was the stupidest thing he’d ever done.

Focusing on goal setting at that age, however, turned out to be an incredibly important step in preparing my son for homeschooling high school.

Lesson #1: We set and meet goals all the time

This was the first thing my son and I took away from formal goal setting studies. It’s the most basic part of goal-setting, yet I realized personally that I had never been taught to do this in a formal way.

For my son, it was an introduction to meaningful reflection—the process of thinking about your thinking. [I wrote on this topic on my KidsLearn blog here.] This is not something that most teens do instinctively, so at first it’s a bit like being a kid walking in his dad’s shoes.

Lesson #2: Goals allow us to focus our actions and prioritize

If you never think formally about your goals, you can find yourself spending a lot of time spinning your wheels. The decisions we make on a daily basis reflect whether or not we are focused on our goals. Homeschooling high school offers many more choices than school does, so having specific goals allows students to make decisions about which direction to go.

Lesson #3: Big goals can be broken down into a series of steps

Big goals, which are often quite distant from a teen’s everyday life, can seem too complex. But when broken down into steps, big goals become more manageable. The path you have to take can also appear more flexible once you start seeing that each step can be modified according to current needs and desires.

Applying goal setting to homeschooling high school

Once we had the concept of goal setting down, we had the foundation to do the work that is now paying its dividends. We went over all the ways that our son could spend his high school years, and how each choice might apply to his eventual goal of making it to a good university.

Goal-setting needs to emphasize that there are many ways to get to any destination.
Goal-setting needs to emphasize that there are many ways to get to any destination.

It became very clear to him that his choices would have a direct effect on whether he meets his goals. And more importantly, it became clear to him that they were his choices, not his parents’. Once he stated his goals, it would be up to him whether he met the challenges facing him or not.

When kids attend a high school, their success depends in part on how self-motivated they are. But successful high school homeschooling requires self-motivation. At the time in life when their biology is telling kids to rebel against their parents and strike out on their own, it’s nearly impossible for a parent to “force” a teen into anything.

Once a teen has set his or her own goals, however, there is no forcing involved. The essential vocabulary of our conversations about school work has changed.

In a non-goal-setting household, a parent might say, “You have to do this or you’ll get a bad grade.” The threat of punishment in the form of grades is how the parent attempts to force compliance.

In a goal-setting household, a parent can say, “So what grade do you need to get in this class in order to meet your goal?” In this case, the student’s behavior is turned back to his or her own stated goals.

In a non-goal-setting household: “If you don’t do the work you need to do, I’m going to make you go back to school.”

In a goal-setting household: “You chose to homeschool so this is the path you’re taking. If you feel that was the wrong choice, should you reconsider school as an option?”

The word choices are only slightly different, but they always turn the decision-making back to the student and his or her goals. Conversations that might have turned immediately emotional and adversarial become productive conversations about goals and priorities.

Nothing in parenting is easily resolved; teens are going to argue, they are going to change their minds, and they are going to make mistakes. But getting goal-setting vocabulary into your homeschool in the early teen years can help students become more successful when independence is what they crave.

The back and forth we need

Posted on by Suki

I’ve always been big on walking. I probably learned it from my parents. We lived on a dirt road at the edge of town. At the end of a long, hot summer day we would saunter out of our house and down the road, dogs at our heels, a string of cats following further behind. I don’t remember that much was said on these walks. We’d greet neighbors occasionally, or perhaps remark on the color of the sunset.

Later, I became a runner, and I ran religiously—perhaps compulsively—until various joints gave out in my thirties and I had to slow to a walk again.

We are only part of the way through Oakley’s book, but it’s turning out to be a good choice for a family read-aloud if you have teens who are starting to face difficult learning situations.

When my children were small, walking became a luxury. Neither child really enjoyed being in the stroller. As soon as they could walk, I had to slow down to toddler speed. For a while we had a golden age of swimming lessons—I could register them for lessons and pop off to the adult pool for a much-needed break. But for the most part I got little exercise.

My body rebelled. When the children were small, I remember scheduling an appointment with my doctor because I’d looked up my symptoms and found out I had leukemia.

“I’m happy to run blood tests,” my doctor said. “But I don’t think you have leukemia. I think you have children.”

I wish she had given me a simple prescription to cure what ailed me, but it took my back going out to get there. By the time my son was ten and my daughter was six, I was getting no walking time at all. I was in the most intense time of parenting a child with undiagnosed special needs. My husband was working over the hill,* coming home exhausted and irritable. I developed an excruciating pain in my hip.

(*That’s Santa Cruz-speak for working in Silicon Valley, which is a hair-raising mountain highway drive away from where we live.)

It turned out that the pain was being referred from a malformed spine, and there was only one treatment that worked to keep the pain at bay: walking.

I realized that the health of my family depended on my being able to get out on my own each morning, so my husband and I juggled schedules and made it happen. Soon after, he took the cue that we could juggle schedules again and find time for his bike riding. We both became healthier and happier people.

Research is showing from every which way that our bodies and minds need the repetitive back-and-forth of full-body exercise. Whether you walk, swim, bicycle, or (I’m suggesting this inspired by my daughter’s newest craze) pogo-stick, repetitive movement is a key part of mental and physical health.

Inspired by my inability to keep up with the Coursera course “Learning How to Learn,” I bought the book by Barbara Oakley that the course is based on. I figured I might not be able to keep up with the course, but if I put the book by our dinner table, I might get around to reading a bit out loud each evening.

Ah, the days when I not only had the time to run, but also intact tendons!
Ah, the days when I not only had the time to run, but also intact tendons!

OK, I’m going to admit that we are a highly imperfect homeschooling family. Our reading has been—I’ll put this nicely—sporadic. However, during tonight’s reading I moved into familiar territory as she talked about how sometimes, what you need to do in order to solve a problem is step away from it. I remembered those warm Midwestern nights, the panting of the dogs, and the giggling of the kids as we’d see our cats strung out in the road behind us.

There are many things that we lost as we moved toward today’s goal-oriented, success-focused culture. One of the things we lost was our innate understanding of taking it easy. Walking (or swimming, bicycling, pogo-sticking, or whatever flavor of repetitive motion you prefer) is a gift from nature. It not only realigns a malformed back; it realigns our brains and helps us work through problems even when we don’t know we have them.

It’s easy to blame the Internet for many of our ills, but I know I’d never have found this information without it. I remember myself lying on the couch that summer when my kids were 10 and 6, wondering how I was ever going to survive the physical and mental anguish. I had no idea that a simple thing like walking was key to that solution, and much more.

 

Further reading:

 

Risk-taking and lifelong learning

Posted on by Suki

As adults, it’s sometimes hard to remember that feeling of vulnerability that kids have when they’re learning new things. That’s one reason why I continue to value the experience of trying new things out in the world—I think it helps me be a better teacher.

One thing I’ve been doing recently is solo jazz singing. Although I’ve sung in classical vocal ensembles for years, I got shy about performing as a soloist. Last spring I decided to defeat that shyness, one way or another!

I took a jazz singing workshop at my local community college, which was a blast.  [See “In praise of adult ed”] Another thing I’ve been doing is going to a jazz open mike to perform.

Suki singing
This is a picture of me singing with a jazz ensemble.

It’s great to get up there and be nervous about how well you’re going to perform, but then realize that the important thing is the joy of learning and expanding your boundaries. The people who come to this open mike range from rank amateurs who are just learning to pro’s who want a friendly audience to work through new material.

It’s hard to remember, when I’m there, that this is an unusual experience for most adults. For most of us—and I include myself in this category much of the time—life is about doing what we’re used to and what we feel comfortable with. Once we’re adults and we have a career (or not), we are less likely to take the sorts of risks that kids take for granted.

It’s possible, in normal adult life, to go months without going to a place we’ve never been before, have in-depth conversations with new people, and choose to do something in front of other people that we aren’t sure we can do.

Yet it’s this sort of striving that keeps us alive and learning. Certainly, we can go for months without having a conversation that pulls us out of our comfort zones, but those are the months that get lost in the mists of our memories. We’ll have these long stretches of time from which we can remember next to nothing, but then retain vivid memories of one conversation we had at a school gathering we didn’t really want to go to.

If we adults make an effort to keep striving for new and challenging experiences in our lives, it makes us better teachers and parents. My students, I try to keep in mind, do the equivalent of getting up in front of a jazz band nearly every day of their lives. They are always facing something new, and their bravery is inspiring!

My Aha! Moment

Posted on by Suki

A while back I was contacted by the Aha Moment crew about taking part once they got to Santa Cruz. I had never heard of them, so of course my first instinct was that this was some new kind of phishing invented to fool Internet-savvy homeschooling moms. It turned out it wasn’t—it’s a real thing and a real job. This really nice group of young people travel the country in a trailer tricked out as a TV studio, interviewing locals at each stop and putting their interviews up on the Web.

I had two reactions to the idea of taking part:

1) I don’t really have “aha moments,” so it wouldn’t be authentic

2) Why would I bother?

After watching videos from the first location that popped up, I decided to watch videos from San Francisco. That’s what sold me. I realize that this is just another way for Mutual of Omaha to try to make us like them, but it’s insidiously wonderful in a weird little way. As soon as I switched to San Francisco—though the trailer, the lighting, and the editing were the same—it was a whole new experience. Those were San Franciscans I saw on the screen. It was so cool to see my former city of residence, the place that I always wanted to live until I lived there, and then always wanted to go back to when I could, represented in this funny little modern sociological experiment.

It felt cool. I decided to do it.

Then I had to find my “aha.” As I said, I don’t really think that way. But once I did, what I wanted to talk about became obvious.

I’m not saying you should go watch me, but I will say that this is a fun and curiously interesting portrait of America that those fuddy duddy insurance guys are bankrolling. I got very little time to chat with the crew, but I could see why they enjoyed their jobs so much.

Choose a city and watch! It’s lovely in a weird, millennial sort of way.

And, OK, you can watch mine here:

Now available