Pretty much anything you expect of your kids and students comes back to you. If you aren’t polite around your children, you can’t expect them to be polite when you aren’t around.*
* expecting them to be polite to YOU is another subject altogether!
If you ignore your kids and stare at your phone when they’re in the room, they are likely to do the same.
Being a lifelong learner is yet another place where you have to lead by example. Do your students or children see you learning? Do you try always to sound like you know everything? Then you are raising them to shy away from admitting they don’t know something and finding a way to attain that knowledge.
Make a model of yourself. Talk to your kids about what you learned. Tell your students that you are struggling to relearn to play piano after 30 years.
Assess your role
An older teacher once said to me, “I’m always the dumbest person in the room.” It wasn’t a comment on his self-esteem, but rather on his teaching method.
Of course, he had many of the answers that his students were searching for, but his job was not to be the Sage on the Stage. It was to be a guide and mentor.
Some parents seem to think that if they step back from being the authority on everything, they will lose basic parental authority. But that’s simply not true. Children are more likely to respect the authority of someone trustworthy and open than someone who cuts off debate.
Join in the fun
Let’s face it: being a lifelong learner is actually fun. And your kids are more likely to blossom at this task if you’re by their side. Consider everything that you come across in daily life to be a learning opportunity:
Weird bug in the house? Look it up and identify it.
Relative states an offensive opinion at a family dinner? Go home and engage your kids in learning about the issue.
Kid is suddenly fascinated with a topic you find mind-numbingly boring? Unnumb your mind and find out more.
…and if you don’t have any, you have to make it up for yourself!
I was reading an article in from a March New Yorker (yeah, I’m a little behind) about the opioid epidemic, and something really struck me as relevant to all of us, especially during this pandemic:
What Case and Deaton have found is that the places with a smaller fraction of the working-age population in jobs are places with higher rates of deaths of despair—and that this holds true even when you look at rates of suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease separately. They all go up where joblessness does.
The people they are referring to as “jobless” here are not people who are actively seeking employment. They are people who have given up. It turns out that the opioid epidemic is worst in places with higher rates of people who have simply given up on work.
Humans are built for meaningful work. We thrive on it. And it’s clear that “meaningful” doesn’t have to mean important, exciting, or high-status. A fellow school-mom told me that she found her job as a garbage truck driver extremely fulfilling, and I could go on and on about people I’ve met in all walks of life who found satisfaction in a job well-done—no matter what the job.
I think that this leads to an extremely important parenting issue during this pandemic:
Our kids need meaningful work
Any good teacher will tell you that their job isn’t to teach, it’s to inspire. All kids will learn if they feel that it’s the meaningful work that they are doing in their lives. Anyone can transmit information. Good teachers create an environment where learning is the job that kids are inspired to do.
But in a time of pandemic, lots of our kids are “stuck at home.” Their teachers are pixels on a screen, and now we parents are on the front line of helping them find meaning in what they are doing.
It’s a hard job! The other day I had a discussion about college during the time of Covid with my teen students, and it’s clear that this carrot that they were dangling in front of themselves is looking less like a carrot and more like an illusion, a whoopee cushion, or a relic from the past. Looking forward to college was the way they made the work they were doing feel meaningful.
Come fall, it’s going to be harder for them to find meaning in their studies. They and our younger children will all need a new way of finding pleasure in a job well done.
We ALL need meaningful work
So we parents are going to have to help inspire our kids to find meaning. But that means we have to look at our own lives and find it, too. A lot of adults out there are out of work, semi-permanently furloughed, part-time… Many of us have lost the rhythm of life that inspired us and made us feel pride in a job well done.
I’ve always felt that the number one thing parents can do for kids is to model the behavior they want to see. That means that we have to figure out a way to find meaning in what we are doing—whatever that may be.
Let’s avoid a new epidemic of despair
The New Yorker article points out that any person can become physically addicted to opioids. But the epidemic happened in places where a large amount of the people didn’t have work that gave their lives meaning.
As this pandemic runs its course, one of our jobs is to continue to be productive members of the society we live in, even if we’re stuck at home. Watching fear-mongering videos and going down Internet rabbit holes with other scared people is not going to give us what we need.
Humans need meaningful work. What does that mean to you?
This is a given. Maybe in the distant past some men of letters believed that they knew all of humanity’s learning. They were wrong. Even then, it was impossible to know and understand it all.
Now, it’s even harder because we know how much we don’t know. It’s easy to feel unlettered if your metric of being educated is “knowing everything.”
Kids today have enormous amounts of knowledge that you didn’t have. Adults watch in awe as a child navigates a new electronic device, finds what they’re looking for in their first web search, and explains the limitless, arcane knowledge they have about a fandom.
Yet adults are worried that their children will graduate from school with these ill-defined “gaps in learning.” Recently the newspapers have teemed with articles about how children who distance-schooled this past semester will be “behind.”
We have the world of knowledge in our pocket
The reality is that what we need to know has changed. We used to commit a certain amount of information to memory because it was simply too arduous to go find that information when we’d need it. That’s no longer true. Kids see no purpose in learning in a 19th century mode when they live in the 21st century world.
It’s true that memorization is a good skill to have, and exercising our memory is like exercising a muscle—it’s good for us. But it’s no longer true that there is one specific body of knowledge that must be memorized. If kids choose to memorize arcane fandom knowledge instead of a 19th century poem, it really doesn’t matter. In either case, when they need information that they didn’t commit to memory they can access it immediately.
“Important” is a cultural designation
Maybe you think that there is a body of information that is important for every person to master. That body of information used to be chosen by certain men in power throughout the ages.
But how would you go about deciding it now? One person’s important knowledge is another person’s irrelevant information.
I actually do think that there is a body of knowledge that every educated person should be familiar with, but frankly, I think that it’s an ever-changing body of knowledge, and it’s too large for any one person to master.
Create lifelong learners
If we take what I’ve written as true:
There’s too much information
We have immediate access to information
There is no set body of knowledge that we can agree on
…what do we do?
I like this quote: “A brain is a river, not a rock!”
Our job as educators has changed. We won’t succeed just by implanting a body of knowledge into our students’ brains. As soon as we do, there will certainly be changes to that body of knowledge and our students will be out of date again.
Our job as educators and parents is to nurture lifelong learners. How do we do that?
Longtime readers know that my family has used almost every type of educational approach for our kids. We like to joke that the only type of school that we haven’t tried is Christian Military Academy!
My younger son is currently about to graduate from a mainstream public high school (his choice), and I have to say, I have been pleasantly surprised at how well they have handled this crazy situation that was dumped in their laps. I’ve heard lots of complaints from parents in other districts, but I share none of them. It’s not perfect, but my son’s teachers got well-trained, really quickly, and they are trying hard.
Teachers are doing their best to maintain connections with their students.
One of the things that our district is doing really well is parent communication. OK, perhaps they are overdoing it: I don’t actually need a text message to tell me to read my email!
This week they asked for parent input through ThoughtExchange, a nifty little tool for exchanging ideas.
I had one thing to say and I hope I said it well: the public school system needs to be more flexible.
Rooted in tradition is not necessarily good
Public schools have not grown organically. They were formed on a specific model of learning, and all changes have taken place as if that model is not worth questioning.
When people have come up with better ideas that built on top of that model, they were tolerated. The charter school system, for example, was built on top of the standard public school model.
When people have come up with ideas that require throwing that model out the window, like the great educational thinker John Holt, for example, public schools would have none of it. They had certain tenets that would not be questioned:
All students must learn in age-homogeneous groups.
All students must be required to be on campus a minimum number of hours.
All students must study state-mandated curriculum.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Enter the quarantine
This pause in school-as-usual can be seen two ways:
It can be seen as an irritating interruption, to be gotten past as soon as possible.
Or it can be seen as an opportunity.
I prefer opportunity.
Integrate home and school
Kids do better emotionally when they feel nurtured, loved, supported—all that stuff they have in a healthy home. We have cut families out of schools by design, and yet principals wail about lack of parent participation. Schools are simply not designed to be emotionally healthy and integrated with home life.
Now that we’ve got parents and home intertwined with school, let’s not give that up.
Stop demonizing alternatives
This is my teen attending an online class while jumping on the trampoline.
When you judge a fish by how well it climbs a tree, the fish comes out looking pretty lame. Alternative schools are for kids who need alternatives. That means that the alternative will not reflect the demographic make-up of the surrounding district. When students and families choose schools, they make choices based on themselves, not the society they live in.
Yes, we should make sure that all choices are open and welcoming to all families, but districts need to allow for differences. For example, stop demonizing a program that attracts struggling students for its low test scores.
States have to stop assuming that all cultural groups are the same. Programs that suit the unique needs of a cultural group are not equivalent to racism. Equal education does not mean the same education.
Principals have to stop coming into schools and trying to strip the individualism out of the school in the name of “quality.”
Offer maximum flexibility
In a world where families can choose 20 different types of toothpaste, education is presented as a monolithic single choice.
That doesn’t fit with our culture. Some students, certainly, not only need to be at school for the allotted time but also need aftercare. Some students thrive in standard curriculum with a typical school day schedule.
But many students don’t. Parents around the country are remarking on the positive changes they are seeing in their children:
My kids are learning so much more at home.
My teen is sleeping—finally! And waking up a reasonable human being.
My kid who was bullied has had a huge dip in her anxiety level.
We started following my kids’ interests and suddenly they love education.
Live and LEARN
If public school administrators and teachers don’t learn from this experience, they’re in the wrong profession. Teachers talk about creating lifelong learners—this should be the goal of everyone. We should all look at this situation and see what we can take away from it that is positive and good.
I was happy to see that I wasn’t the lone voice for thoughtful reconsidering of what school should be in the ThoughtExchange conversation initiated by my district. Let’s make sure the districts hear our voices, and don’t think that reversion to the status quo is any sort of achievement.
Something I notice is that advice articles for mental health often speak to adults about adult problems. But our kids often face the same challenges—especially these days and especially when it comes to anxiety.
So this isn’t my advice, per se, but rather distilled from a bunch of articles I’ve read. But it is mine in that as a teacher of a pack of highly sensitive, perfectionistic, creative kids…I know a little about dealing with kids and anxiety!
So here’s the advice, from parent/teacher to parents/teachers:
Give them accurate information
Kids know when we’re lying. And when we don’t give them full information, they go try to find it online or from their friends or siblings.
Yet parents are tempted, over and over, to withhold information from their children. Whether it’s how babies are made or the effects of illegal drugs, parents can be tempted to hope that by sticking their heads in the sand, they’ll save their kids some heartache.
But accurate information is the key to figuring out the root of anxiety. And kids of any age can handle accurate information that is offered in an age-appropriate manner. Telling your kids “don’t worry about it” isn’t really going to fly, whether the issue at hand is making babies, taking drugs, or a worldwide coronavirus epidemic.
If you haven’t done so, make a regular habit of having conversations (formal or informal, whichever works best in your family). Update your kids on what is happening and what’s being done. Make sure they trust you enough to go to you first for answers.
Let them know that they can’t think their way out of this
This is a classic situation for runaway anxiety: Fear in humans starts in our “lizard brain,” the deeper brain that we have little conscious control over. But the part of our brain that we think about as our “thinking” brain, the prefrontal cortex, is pretty darn egotistical. It thinks it can think us out of any problems we face.
But we can’t think ourselves out of fear of something that really is fearful and really is menacing us. We have to accept that this coronavirus is scary. For your kids, it’s the realest, scariest thing they’ve probably ever faced.
Help your kids accept that fear is part of this situation, but that trying to think ourselves out just sends us into a brain spin. If your kids were already prone to anxiety, you know what it’s like. They think and think and with each think get deeper into the spin of anxiety.
The only way out of this is forward, and the only way out of this without fear taking over our lives is to accept that this situation is fearful, but to focus on what is being done to fix it.
Give them a positive role to play
For a long time, American parents have operated on the premise that kids are better off not knowing about or taking part in the problems around them. We want to protect our kids, and modern day American life has given us the tools to do so.
But even in normal times, protecting our kids from everything does them a huge disservice. Remember a lifetime ago when we were preoccupied with helicopter parents? Well, we’re still helicoptering. We need to land that copter and find a way to include our kids.
Use whatever resources you have to give them a role to play, however small. Can they make videos for other kids? Can they sew masks? Can they help you choose a food kitchen to donate to?
It’s not pollyannaish to put a positive spin on this situation—it’s a survival mechanism.
I hope you are all weathering this as best you can, staying healthy, and enjoying more time with your children.
