Must Parents Be Teachers Too?
The 7 Secrets of Successful Parents
By Family Therapist Randy Rolfe
Many parents today are struggling with the challenge of closed schools and of guiding their children with distance or virtual learning, mostly online. There are over 100,000 elementary and secondary schools in the United States, and over 56 million students are enrolled but with the closing of so many school systems to help limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, kids are forced to continue their education at home. This has caused major confusion for parents who have been content to turn their children’s education over to the schools. Many parents are wondering if now, in addition to the fears of the virus and the disruptions to their own work schedules and income, they must also now become the teachers!
Conflicting roles is just one of the challenges distance learning has caused for parents at the end of the school year and now the beginning of a new one.
If a parent is working from home during the lockdown, how do they figure out a schedule to get their work done, be a parent, and also be a teacher to supervise their kid’s studies?
If they are essential workers and must be out of the home, who do they call on to watch the kids and how do the studies get done?
Is their school’s remote learning good enough to keep their child at grade level for the future?
How can a parent handle the extra stress on the family system and on the individual members caused by changing expectations and recommendations about the pandemic, the economy, and political issues and unrest in an election year?
How can everyone just get enough sleep and decent nutrition, so that tempers don’t flare and kids don’t fall asleep in front of their on-screen lessons or gain extra weight from extra snacks?
And what happens to sports, physical education, art and music, and hanging out with friends?
Image by Jonathan Borba via Unsplash
Schools play so many roles in a child’s life and cover a lot of ground that used to be up to the parents and community not too long ago. We are suddenly discovering what a huge impact they have, and how we have been taking it for granted.
When our children started school, we were fortunate enough to be able to be picky about what school they would attend. We chose carefully and were satisfied with the school we chose. But we had grown up in the sixties and we wanted to have as close to a natural way of living as possible for our family, to promote our health and happiness. We had emphasized natural childbirth, nursing on demand, responsive parenting, simplicity and living close to nature as well as giving our children room to explore while protecting them from dangers too difficult for them to comprehend.
Our children were both born in upstate New York where we had bought an old broken-down farmhouse which we renovated by hand over the course of four years. We were both Philadelphia lawyers, but we were quickly tired of the commute from the suburbs to the city for our jobs, and we wanted to live closer to nature, “homesteading,” and living off the land, following the example of my great uncle and aunt Scott and Helen Nearing, who inspired thousands of couples to do the same.
But like so many of those couples, we couldn’t make a go of it financially, and we felt we weren’t using our skills sufficiently to contribute to the world. I had traveled in 29 countries every summer with my parents growing up and wanted to make a difference. So we moved back to the suburbs of Philadelphia and we assumed we would have to “mainstream” our children in school once they were school age. However, once they were in school for a couple of years, we discovered we wanted more time with them than the school day permitted. And we thought school took up too much of their time too.
I was teaching classes on nutrition and parenting by then and heard about homeschooling. And in my parenting classes, I discovered that most of the challenges parents were having were related to school.
1) How to get the child up in time.
2) How to get them to do their homework.
3) How to fit in the extracurricular activities which would round out their experience, give them more fun, or build their resume.
4) How to deal with teachers whose approach didn’t seem helpful.
5) How to deal with majority rule by parents’ groups.
6) What to do about the snacks and lunches the school offered.
7) The poor models offered by bullying and disrespect for difference.
8) The amazing waste of time standing in line.
9) The unnatural situation of having one authority figure overseeing 20 kids; stopping and going, talking or being quiet according to bells; being separated by age, all doing the same thing at the same time; and then being tested, judged, and compared, not for the child’s sake but to assure the teachers and parents that learning was happening.
It all started to seem so unnecessary. So when our son finished third grade and our daughter first grade, we decided to rearrange our lives so that we could homeschool. We set aside the guest bedroom as their school and ordered curricula and workbooks and guides for their grade level. Our school district didn’t allow home education, so we homeschooled under cover for three years. Then the Pennsylvania legislature passed standards for all school districts state-wide, to allow home education, under pressure from the home education movement. Our kids learned about government by going to the state capital in Harrisburg with us and other homeschooling families to lobby for the new legislation!
All this is to say that the best advice I ever got about homeschool, was from a leader in the homeschool movement, Peter Bergson, who founded Open Connections. I asked him how a parent becomes a teacher, and he said, “You don’t have to. Just stay the parent and it will work out just fine.”
To put it another way, every parent is already a teacher, the primary teacher in a child’s life. So you can just continue doing what you’ve always done. I call it Toddler Mind.
1) Create a safe, stimulating environment, with clarity around acceptable behavior and reasonable boundaries.
2) Be a model yourself of curiosity, problem-solving, life-long learning, and enjoyment of adult life.
3) Give regular encouragement, trust in their innate desire to learn, and communicate your love and respect consistently and often.
Of course in the older grades, there are specific things and skills that must be learned. When we were homeschooling, Pennsylvania had one of the strictest plans in the nation, and still does. We had to spend a certain amount of time on each designated subject, and we had to have the kids’ work product reviewed at the end of each school year. But still, we found that all the academics could be covered in 3 to 4 hours, and the rest of the day gave our children time to pursue their own particular interests, invent games, work out, talk with friends and more. We arranged field trips to factories, museums, parks and more with and without other families. We committed to driving anywhere within an hour’s drive to get them together with their friends and other families. And though some of those field trips aren’t appropriate or possible right now, there are so many more resources available with courses on the internet and on streaming TV, with Zoom get-togethers and more. Experts are predicting that 1-2% of parents will in fact decide to homeschool after schools are all open, because of their new experience of having their children learning at home.
Another homeschooling mentor of mine, Dr. Robert E. Kay, a psychiatrist who specialized for decades in adolescence, said, “Kids love to learn, we just don’t like to be taught. Just tell them they can’t study something until their brain can handle it and they will master it before you know it,” he likes to say.
And a top motivational speaker and philosopher, Bob Proctor, told me, “We don’t mind change. We just don’t like it imposed on us.” So the silver lining of our children not being able to go to school is that parents have an opportunity to rethink their beliefs and goals, for parenting, for their children, and for life.
I titled my first book on parenting, “You Can Postpone Anything But Love,” because I had discovered that being the best parent I could be and giving my all to my kids now, in the present moment, would be the most satisfying thing I could do in my life and the best thing for them. My career, whatever that might turn out to be, could wait.
So with this opportunity forced upon us by the current pandemic, we need to ask ourselves what is a teacher, that we think we need to become if our children must do school at home?
It’s so easy to go quickly to the image of the hard-working woman in the front of the room with 20-30 kids at desks in front of her, and she has the nearly impossible job, if you think about it, of teaching them something they may or may not be interested in, while at the same time maintaining enough order so that those who don’t need the lesson don’t get bored and become a distraction, and so that those who need the lesson more than most can actually grasp the lesson in the time allotted. Our current model was created when books were expensive, hard to come by and when the new industrial economy wanted workers who were good at following orders, had a minimum of basic academics, and weren’t looking for a whole lot of satisfaction in their work. Few people want that to be the end game for their children in today’s world. There are so many other models for teaching.
This is an authoritarian model, with individuals assumed to be as homogeneous as possible. That is no longer an advantageous model in today’s economy and workplace. Employers are calling for initiative, originality, self-motivation, collaboration.
Dr. Kay recommends that parents do best to leave school up to the child. “Don’t even ask for grades, or whether their homework is done, or whether they have completed the lesson.” Instead, he says, make clear that you are confident that they can handle their schooling the way you handle your own adult work, and that you are there for them to answer any questions and to help them solve any problems when and if they ask for your help.
He found in his practice that to their parents’ surprise, children’s grades almost always improved when the parents backed off and stopped trying to be substitute teachers at home.
Parental expectations have more power than we think. If we expect to have to be disciplinarians to get a child to watch their lessons on line or to get their homework in on time, then that may well be the case. But if we trust the parent-child relationship and set up positive expectations that the child will take their responsibilities seriously, then chances are good that after a bit of patience and adjustment, that is what will happen.
To paraphrase inventor Henry Ford’s famous saying, if you think you can or you think you can’t, you are right. It works with your kids too. Be the supportive, loving, guiding and resourceful parent you’ve always been, and your child will be just fine.