Note: I have written a Parent Guide to accompany my new book, Homeschool with Confidence, which is a goal-setting guide for homeschooled teens. Although it is meant to introduce the concepts in my book, it might be of interest to parents in general (school and homeschool). Feel free to download it here if you are interested in reading more.
Dear Parents,
Congratulations on your recent acquisition of a teenager! I promise you will not be disappointed. Your teenager should be expected to display common teen features, including surliness, flashes of brilliance, sudden mood swings, unparalleled sweetness, antisocial tendencies, social neediness, advanced sense of humor, and unfailing attraction to all manner of digital devices.
This guide will help you guide your teenager through my goal-setting curriculum, following a few simple steps:
Do not, under any circumstances, let on to your teenager that you are guiding them
Do, always, give your teenager unconditional support and encouragement
Do not let on to your teenager that you feel invested in the outcome
Do let your teenager know that you see a bright future for them.
Confused? Welcome to being the parent of a teenager.
Sociologists have found that the concept of “teenager” is not common to all cultures and across the span of human history. It may be a unique phenomenon of modern industrialized societies.
However, that doesn’t make your job any easier. You are trying to guide someone who doesn’t want to be guided, mentor someone who may actually believe they are smarter than you, and stay sane in the process.
It’s a tall order.
Why goal-setting?
My new book was inspired by working with my kids and my students.
When my older child was 13, I started to see a difficult near future. Though he’s generally a pretty mild-mannered guy, we were getting a lot of pushback and defiance about things that I didn’t consider important at all. It was wearying. I’m sure at some point I must have said this: “If you must fight with me, can you at least choose something meaningful to fight about?”
I started to read about teen development and realized that goal-setting might be a way to get around some of the communication difficulties we had. I couldn’t find a curriculum that wasn’t full of school and organized sports, so I did the homeschooler thing: We muddled through with what we had and adapted what we could find.
I was amazed at the changes in our relationship, and immediately started to integrate what I’d learned into my parenting and teaching. (I teach in-person classes and also online classes at Athena’s Advanced Academy.)
It’s really quite simple. Goal-setting allows you and your teen to:
Get to know each other on a new level, as humans with ideas and desires rather than just parent and child
Develop a common understanding of your family’s values and concerns
Develop a common understanding of your teen’s values and concerns (which may be different)
Create a system of planning that is both focused and flexible
Learn a new vocabulary to communicate without value judgments and emotionally loaded expectations
I was sad to see that after the demise of the long-running Home Education Magazine, the publisher chose to take down the entire site, and with it the archive of years of articles that they published. I wrote for HEM for only the last two years, but I loved being able to contribute to an important voice in homeschooling. Since these articles are no longer available online, I am re-publishing mine here on my blog.
In the time that I’ve been homeschooling, major progress has been made by scientists studying how we think and learn. What we thought we knew about learning ten, twenty, or thirty years ago is being turned on its head in study after study showing how our brains actually do tasks.
Homeschoolers can stay ahead of the curve by applying our knowledge of learning well before schools catch up.
Mainstream American education has hardly reacted to the new data that is coming out daily, still attempting to force children to learn in a way that never really suited anyone, though we all suffered through it. But that’s no reason why we homeschoolers can’t look at the research and take stock of how they work with our own children.
Your physical brain
Modern imaging technology has encouraged an explosion in brain research. We used to have to figure out how the brain worked by observing people, recording their actions, and dissecting the brains of the deceased. Modern imaging allows scientists to watch brains learning, growing, and changing in real time, and much of what they have learned shows that educational theory lingers in the dark ages.
We used to think that the brain had relatively isolated areas for different functions; now we see that although language is centered in one part of the brain and movement in another, those two parts of the brain are interconnected and “help” each other learn.
We used to think that creative people were “right-brained” and technical people were “left-brained.” Imaging shows us that although certain processes make take place more on one side of the brain than the other, complex processes take place throughout the brain. Scans of people in high creative mode—from painting to designing technology—show their brains lighting up in concentrated areas on both sides, not simply glowing on the right side as previously predicted.
Understanding how your child’s brain processes information and emotion can help in how you face homeschooling obstacles.
Educators base teaching theory on the idea that people have different “learning styles” in which they can be categorized as a single type of learner, such as “kinesthetic.” Modern brain research shows us that we all learn through all available senses, and hasn’t been able to validate the learning styles theory at all. In fact, evidence indicates that providing a rich, multi-sensory environment is the best way to go.
We used to believe that teenagers were largely “grown up” both physically and mentally. Brain imaging shows us that in some important ways teens’ brains aren’t “grown up” at all. The last part of the human brain to become fully functional is the prefrontal cortex, where the “executive function” resides. The executive function is what filters input and makes decisions, and isn’t fully developed in most people until the age of twenty-five.
So what does this tell us as homeschoolers? First of all, our goal should never to be to “teach” our children one subject in one way, the way that public school does. Our children are learning and making connections all the time, whether they are doing a math worksheet, playing Minecraft with their friends, or working in the garden. The skills that a child uses to do math, play Minecraft, and garden are not isolated; they overlap in complex ways.
Secondly, we now know that brains that have learned how to do one thing well are better prepared to learn anything else. This deep learning is more important than the topic being learned. As long as our kids are making connections and growing new pathways in their brains, they are creating the structures that will allow them to build on what they’ve learned.
Lastly, we know that just like with athletic ability, the important thing is that children are using and exercising their brains. This is important in different ways at different ages:
Babies and toddlers need tactile experiences. The more babies interact with the physical world and with other humans, the more they learn.
Younger children need to be allowed to explore. Trapping them in the same room every day and restricting them to the same curriculum doesn’t take advantage of their natural inclination to learn through experimentation and exploration.
Research shows that during the early teen years, ages 10 to 13, a large amount of “pruning” happens—brain connections that are not being used are discarded. So the early teens, contrary to common belief, are not just a time of social growth. These children need to be inspired to use their brains optimally at this important time.
Our teens need meaningful work, and at the same time, they need a lot more support than our culture is inclined to give them. Homeschoolers are lucky in that we can foster strong mentoring relationships with our teens. At this time in their lives, teens need to be allowed to “steer the boat,” while knowing that we are there to back them up if their still-forming executive function is not up to the task.
The old model of the human brain told us that people were born with a certain amount of ability, and then as older adults we started to lose that ability. The idea of IQ, that there is a number that can sum up what a brain is capable of, was largely embraced and promoted.
I like this quote: “A brain is a river, not a rock!”
Recent research has turned this old belief on its head; there seems to be very little correlation between the basic building blocks that a person is born with and his or her eventual success in career and life. Research shows that as long as you are “smart enough” to tackle the job you love, what counts are some other factors.
One of those factors is called neuroplasticity. We always knew that children’s brains grew, both physically and in ability. But it turns out that even though brain development does slow down in adults, it doesn’t ever stop. If learning is all about making connections and then building on those connections, neuroplasticity is all about keeping those connections alive and active. The more we work on learning, the more flexible and agile our brains remain, and what we work at learning matters.
“Anything we repeat enough reinforces itself by creating brain connections to support that specific behavior,” writes Dr. Mark Bertin. “Routines built early in childhood neurologically sustain themselves around nutrition, exercise, reading, technology and countless other aspects of life.”
Many parents note that although their children learned quickly and easily before puberty, suddenly their teens find learning “a drag” and seem more intent on social relationships than academics. Part of the problem is due to the fact that our traditional educational approach pretty much shuts off creativity and exploration in the early teens. We don’t expect that our young children will want to learn by sitting quietly, listening, and then regurgitating, but suddenly we do expect this of our teens.
Brain research has shown that as teens’ academic explorations drop off, their neural connection-building also drops, with very real effects on their future achievements. The main thing to keep in mind when your teen wants to retreat from learning is that “use it or lose it” really is true of the brain. Research is showing that using the brain and continuing to grow new neural pathways guards against mental decline later in life.
Cultivating an openness to learning is essential.
Another important factor about your child’s learning is what psychologist Carol Dweck has dubbed “mindset.” In her research, she demonstrates that people with a “growth mindset”—people who believe that they can do something if they work hard enough at it—achieve more than people with a “fixed mindset”—people who believe that they have a set intelligence and ability level.
In your homeschool, keep in mind that constantly praising your children can be detrimental to their learning. “You’re a great artist,” may seem like the nicer thing to say, but “you worked really hard on that painting” will be better for your child’s self-esteem and willingness to tackle more complex projects.
Finally, research into stress and learning has resulted in fascinating new ideas that go against both the achievement-oriented prep school model and the happiness-oriented free school model. It turns out that, as you probably know, stress is bad for your kids. When children’s brains are stressed, their brains go into “flight or flight mode.” Instead of processing the incoming information in their prefrontal cortex, it is sent directly to their reactive “lizard brain,” where it is often lost. That’s why when your child cried while doing fractions yesterday, you find out that today she’s back to where she started, remembering little or nothing she worked on the day before.
On the other hand, the stress-free life turns out also to be detrimental to your child’s eventual academic and career success. It turns out that there is a zone of “optimal stress,” where a student is challenged to stretch beyond his comfort zone into an area where he has the skills to succeed but is not as confident. We see this on the playground all the time: a child resists trying the monkey bars when they are simply unattainable, but one day after seeing a friend do them, she is willing to undergo some “good stress” in order to achieve a new skill.
Learning resources:
“Losing is Good for You” shows how mindset can be changed through overly generous reward systems: http://tinyurl.com/kayszup
“The Brain-Boosting Product You Already Have in your Home” offers some good, practical advice based on neuroplasticity research: http://tinyurl.com/meyuzv4
The old view of brain development and learning saw it as separate from the development of the physical body, but modern research proves that nothing could be further from the truth. Physical health and lifestyle play a huge role in everyone’s brain health, but especially in the development of children’s brains.
The brain loves being worked in a variety of ways—PE is not an elective!
Research shows that children who get ample exercise and time in nature are calmer, more creative, better students, and eventually better at pursuing their goals. Every homeschool (and school, for that matter) should prioritize non-academic activities that support academics. Our kids may think that they are happier playing video games inside, but their bodies need aerobic exercise and nature in order to work at their optimal level.
That’s not to say that video games are all bad. In fact, research is showing that the “gamification” of education can help kids learn. We homeschoolers already knew that kids can learn more about adding and subtracting while playing Monopoly than by doing worksheets, and that’s true of a lot of learning. Video games that offer deep learning opportunities (which doesn’t—sorry, kids—include shooting at birds flying across your screen) can enhance children’s education, when not done to an extreme. Similarly, video games that develop strategy skills and reflexes (yay, now we can shoot birds!) have also been shown to improve academic ability….when not done to the exclusion of other healthy activities.
There is one area where computers are causing learning problems, which homeschoolers should notice because it’s become so prevalent: multitasking. Although modern humans take great pride in their multitasking skills, and modern life requires more and more of it, it turns out that multitasking is detrimental to learning. When deep learning is the goal, distractions need to be kept to a minimum. So although your child says that she can play a game on her iPod while listening to the audiobook, research quite conclusively proves that she’s only listening with half of her brain, and much of what she thinks she’s taking in will get discarded.
Finally, modern brain research is clearly leading us away from old-fashioned ideas of predestination and fate. Human brains are highly malleable and highly individualized. Children who are “bad at math” grow up to become mathematicians. Children who are fascinated with science at the age of six end up as professional artists. And adults who have embarked on one career find success and fulfillment by changing to another mid-stream.
You may be distressed that, for example, your adopted child didn’t get the optimal upbringing for the first two years. Of course, we want all children to get as many opportunities as possible, but your adopted child now has the rest of his life to become the person that he wants to be, regardless of what he missed at first.
You may worry that your autistic or dyslexic child will not have the opportunities you hope she will have. But research is uncovering more and more ways in which “different brains” can even be optimal in some situations. Author Jonathan Mooney speaks about growing up “learning disabled” and then realizing that as an adult, he could offer his “neurodiversity” as an asset. (Check out his Youtube videos to hear his poignant and very amusing story.)
Or you may have a neurologically typical child who doesn’t excel in any area and you worry that he won’t find a calling at all. Research shows that there is no sense in assuming that every child will develop at the same rate. Hopefully, with the gift of time, creative exploration, and a rich environment, your child will find his calling.
The most important thing to understand about educating any child is that your child can’t help but learn. You are there as a coach, guide, mentor, and cheerleader (as long as you don’t say “good job” too often), and it’s up to your child to do the rest.
As homeschoolers, we take on a huge burden: we determine the environment in which our children’s brains develop. The nice thing about modern brain research is that it validates many practices that homeschoolers have been preaching for years: Allow children to develop at their own rate, give them ownership in the learning process, don’t worry about natural variations between different children’s skills, and keep them stimulated and inspired with a rich, varied learning environment.
This is Part 7 of a guest series I wrote in 2012 for Great Potential Press, which published my book, From School to Homeschool. A change on their website made it inaccessible, so I’m republishing here in celebration of National Parenting Gifted Children Week. To read the complete series, click here to start with post #1, “The Role of Parents in Identifying Gifted Children.”
Parenting a gifted child presents unusual challenges. Parenting a gifted child with behavioral differences places new burdens on top of those challenges. Although no one has the one magic ticket to make your life easier, experienced parents of gifted children offer variations on the following advice to help you negotiate the process of raising your wonderful, difficult child.
1. Don’t depend on one theory of parenting.
It’s unusual for a well-loved parenting theory to work without alteration for kids with behavioral differences. Take the parts that work, get rid of the parts that don’t.
2. Keep records.
A parent’s point of view about her child’s behavior can vary widely over only a matter of months. Children tend to coast along for a while then go through rapid periods of change. Parents often find themselves saying, When is this EVER going to end? Then some months later they realize that whatever it was had ended and they hadn’t noticed.
3. Expect regression.
This is totally normal, even for neurotypical kids. It happens in every area of life: potty training, academic learning, sleep habits… Parents of unusual children should try not to be disconcerted by normal regression.
4. Get the help of a good occupational therapist.
The best ones will have some background in issues of giftedness, though the very best will be eager to learn whether or not they have the background. A good occupational therapist will be interested in the whole child.
5. Find a general Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) whose approach works well with your family.
Your LMFT will be able to help you work through ideas and also give you a sense of how unusual your child’s behavior really is. Once parents become sensitized to having an unusual child, they tend to lose perspective. In other words, “usual” kids aren’t perfect, either.
6. Don’t jump on every new theory you see, but then again, don’t discount everything as out of the question.
There is so much more information available to us now than to parents in previous generations. In one way, this is blessing. Parents today have access to advice from a wide variety of sources. But on the other hand, parents can go crazy trying to follow every piece of advice. Your child, and your family, will stay more sane if you take each piece of advice under consideration, but don’t jump on every train that passes.
7. Some simple nutritional changes can make a big difference.
There are a few dietary changes that every parent of a difficult child should try. These changes have been shown to work well with a large number of gifted children, and they are not difficult ones to implement:
– Supplement with Omega-3 oils. They influence brain function, and parents often see an immediate difference in their kids, especially in their ability to maintain stable moods.
– Try to up the protein intake and lower the simple carbohydrate intake. Simple carbs are really bad for kids whose brains are on overdrive. Protein, especially early in the day, gives them something to work on.
– Try to avoid artificial colors and preservatives, especially sodium benzoate. These have been shown to exacerbate problems with kids who tend toward hyperactive behavior.
– Have “hyperactive” children’s ferritin levels checked. Recent studies are showing that kids who have normal general iron levels but very low ferritin (stored iron) levels show ADHD-like behaviors. (See ‘Relationship of Ferritin to Symptom Ratings Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’, Oner, 2007) Iron supplementation is easy and may show large benefits.
8. Be willing to give your child the support he needs to succeed.
Some parents fall into the trip of letting their children fail because they assume that kids “should” be able to handle what other kids handle. But a gifted child who fails repeatedly because of inadequate support will never learn the joy of succeeding. When possible, set up enough “successful” activities to balance the challenging activities. If the child is in school, work with the teacher to provide positive feedback on progress, no matter how small.
9. When possible, make reasonable accommodations for your child’s differences.
Sometimes parents expect gifted kids to be more resilient than neurotypical kids. But simple accommodations for common problems can help gifted children thrive. For example, many twice-exceptional children have difficulty with handwriting. This translates into the child being unable to express herself in writing. In this case, a reasonable accommodation would be for the child to learn keyboarding or dictate homework to a parent. Handwriting itself can be worked on separately, when it is not interfering with the creative process.
10. Be willing to call him a child with special needs.
This is a big step for many parents of twice-exceptional children to take. Your child does have special needs, even though he also has special talents. And all children deserve to have their needs met so that they can reach their potential.
11. Put on your mask first
Finally, don’t forget that the parents of gifted children need help, too. Find a support group, in person or online. Getting input from other parents who have similar challenges will help you be the best parent you can be.
In homeschooling and writing, things have a way of intertwining themselves without any sort of prior intent. Here are two topics that I’ve written about before:
Topic #1: learning about goal-setting is of particular importance to teenage homeschoolers. [Read more here.]
This summer: The melding of two of my favorite topics.
I decided [why, oh why do I decide these things?] that first of all, I was going to write a book on goal-setting explicitly for homeschooling teens.
Secondly, I decided that I would offer an online class in the fall based on the book. [Read about it here.]
So, what did I inadvertently do? I set myself a goal, and then forced myself to be accountable for it. Paying students are already listed in my classroom, expecting to get their copy of my “book” in October.
I actually do know why I do these things to myself: When I was young, I thought that people “just did” things and how their work got out into the world was a mysterious process that hopefully I’d be swept into at some point.
I am spending more time on music, less time on trying to help every wayward organization function more efficiently.
In other words, I had never noticed that people who get things done actually set goals, figure out the steps to get there, and make themselves accountable in some way for reaching those steps and, hopefully, the final goal. This is not something I’d ever done, not as a child, a teen, a young adult, or even a mother of small children. I apparently thought that whatever life threw at me was what I would get.
But homeschooling (and parenting in general) has a way of getting you to look at yourself and notice things you hadn’t bothered to think about before.
Why didn’t I set goals? Why didn’t I make myself accountable for them? What was stopping me?
I’m not going to psychoanalyze myself (fear of failure? low self-esteem? the alignment of the planets?), but I have noticed a change since I’ve been forced to look more carefully at how I’m raising my children. I’ve started to look at the things I’m doing with a little more of a critical eye. It was a huge step for me just to go through a series of simple questions:
Is this activity fulfilling for me?
Is it taking up time that I should be using for something else?
Is it leading me in any particular direction, or am I just spinning my wheels?
Do I have any particular goal here?
Thinking like this got me to making a few changes in my life. I self-published my chapter book, Hanna, Homeschooler, knowing that it wasn’t really suited to a mainstream publisher, anyway. I am spending more time on music and less on trying (futilely) to help every organization I come into contact with work more efficiently.
Full circle
Writing this book on goal-setting is sending me full circle back to what I think is most important about goal-setting: being self-reflective, focusing our attention on what matters, and realizing that “success” is all about feeling like we’ve done our best, and not at all about being declared “successful” by someone else.
I still spend plenty of time on non-goal-oriented activities (never discount the value of a glass of wine with family or friends in helping you reach your goals!), but I feel more focused, less like I’m putting out fires and more like I’m setting fires for myself!
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!
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.
Congratulations on your recent acquisition of a teenager! I promise you will not be disappointed. Your teenager should be expected to display common teen features, including surliness, flashes of brilliance, sudden mood swings, unparalleled sweetness, antisocial tendencies, social neediness, advanced sense of humor, and unfailing attraction to all manner of digital devices.
It’s unusual for a well-loved parenting theory to work without alteration for kids with behavioral differences. Take the parts that work, get rid of the parts that don’t.
There are a few dietary changes that every parent of a difficult child should try. These changes have been shown to work well with a large number of gifted children, and they are not difficult ones to implement:
Sometimes parents expect gifted kids to be more resilient than neurotypical kids. But simple accommodations for common problems can help gifted children thrive. For example, many twice-exceptional children have difficulty with handwriting. This translates into the child being unable to express herself in writing. In this case, a reasonable accommodation would be for the child to learn keyboarding or dictate homework to a parent. Handwriting itself can be worked on separately, when it is not interfering with the creative process.
