Calm in the face of chaos, otherwise known as modern parenting

I just got back from a refreshing and fun homeschooling conference. Homeschooling conferences are their own sort of thing: part conference, part costume party, part mass therapy session. This one was no exception.

During the Q&A part of a talk I gave, one of the moms in the audience told me something like “I feel so reassured by how calm you are.”

I was a bit taken aback.

People have said this about me before, and all I can think is that I must be a really great accidental actress. It’s not like I try to put on a persona or try to broadcast something that’s not true, but calm?

Really?

Calm?
My sister gave me a weird, tingly facial mask for my birthday. Calm. I am calm. As long as I can get those crawling bugs washed off my face Right Now, I am calm!
My sister gave me a weird, tingly facial mask for my birthday. Calm. I am calm. As long as I can get those crawling bugs washed off my face Right Now, I am calm!

Like all parents today, I feel like there is way too much coming at me, way too fast. Just a few facts of modern parenting will suffice:

  • We grew up in a world that seemed like it was going to last forever (or at least “billions and billions of years,” said in a Carl Sagan voice). Our kids are living with global warming and homegrown terrorism.
  • We grew up with toys that seemed wonderful and sometimes magical, but we knew how they worked. Our kids play with magic of a very different sort every time they turn on a screen.
  • We grew up in a world where you had a menu to choose from—the TV Guide and the limits of what your town (and the Sears catalogue) had to sell you. Our kids can get everything, nearly everything they can imagine. Instantly, or at least with two-day free shipping.

Our kids don’t just have their own slang for the world we know; they have their own world which didn’t exist when we were kids. The rate of change is fantastic. The rate at which we are acquiring knowledge about ourselves and the natural world seems boundless.

My parents had Dr. Spock to turn to for advice. We’ve got Drs. Galore—not just MDs but PhDs, LMFTs, PsyDs, and PhGs (Philosophers of Google, that is). Everyone is telling us that whatever we’re doing is wrong, and they’ve got all the answers.

Our kids are being diagnosed with disorders that didn’t exist when we were kids. We just used to have weird kids. Now we’ve got Asperger’s replaced with Autistic, Sensory Processing Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Bipolar Disorder…

We’ve got more disorders than we’ve got orders.

We’ve got public schools, private schools, charter schools, magnet schools, schools of choice, and homeschooling.

Heck, when I was a kid, you just went to school.

And if you’re homeschooling, you’ve got Christian homeschooling, secular homeschooling, eclectic homeschooling, classical homeschooling, unit studies homeschooling, not to mention outschooling and hybrid schooling.

Calm? Am I calm yet?

We parents have too much choice. We have too much input. We have too many people telling us to do too many things. We are both supposed to sign our kids up for Kumon and let them play in the mud. We are both supposed to inspire our kids and teach them to toe the line. We are both supposed to give them strong self-esteem and not praise them too much.

It’s a lot. It’s a very large lot in which we are playing at parenting, never sure we are doing the right thing.

I keep coming back to the word “calm.” If I appear calm, it’s not a charade. It’s not me trying to reassure you that it will be OK.

Calm is just me in the midst of the chaos we call modern life. I know that there’s very little I can do outside of that little space I operate within, so I just do what I can. If I can help one other parent feel self-assured enough to be a slightly better parent, I guess I’ve done my job in the world. If I send my kids out into the chaos with a few tools to use for their survival, even better.

I am calm, because what’s the point of adding to the chaos? We have no idea where this world is going, so we might as well enjoy what we have around us and try to spread a little bit of goodness out from our tiny space.

Calm. I am calm.

The Value of Competition

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.

When I first became a homeschooler, I was surprised by the number of parents I met who were against allowing children to compete in any way. Activities in our public homeschool program were designed as “everyone wins” events. We hardly saw any homeschoolers at our county science fair, despite the fact that it was very welcoming to our kids. Parents were always on the lookout for cooperative games so that their children wouldn’t have to compete with each other.

Other homeschooling families I know also love to enter the science fair.
Other homeschooling families I know also love to enter the science fair.

The rare competitive homeschooler seems to be the exception: often they are homeschoolers specifically because their achievements leave little time for school. A high-level competitive gymnast seems more common amongst homeschoolers than a child who just likes the challenge of competition at any level.

In our family, however, we have an instinctive enthusiasm for competitions. It isn’t that our kids are generally high-achievers; in fact, they don’t necessarily place in competitions they enter. But we all feel the excitement and fulfillment of identifying a target, working toward it, and seeing our work alongside others who share our interests.

Science mania!

The science fair is a good example of a competitive event my children love. It is a huge payoff for project-based learning. Whereas other projects might gather dust on a shelf or become presents for Grandma, the science fair moves from independent exploration, to documenting the work, to sharing with fellow young scientists, and on to speaking with (and hopefully receiving awards from) judges.

My kids enter almost every year; they often win awards, but not always. The big payoff for them, however, is the experience as a whole. As an unschooler, I’ve become a sort of pied piper for the science fair. The first year my child entered, she was the only student in our public homeschool program who was interested. Over the years, I gushed enough about it that we’ve seen a bigger participation level, but nowhere near what I would expect for a well-managed, free, and inspiring educational event.

Shunning competition

So what’s up with avoiding competition? It turns out it’s not just homeschoolers. In “Losing is Good for You,” Ashley Merryman (New York Times) explores the phenomenon of parents shunning competition. She cites sports leagues in which all the children receive trophies, regardless of participation or performance.

“By age 4 or 5, children aren’t fooled by all the trophies,” Merryman writes. “They are surprisingly accurate in identifying who excels and who struggles. Those who are outperformed know it and give up, while those who do well feel cheated when they aren’t recognized for their accomplishments. They, too, may give up.”

When adults deny obvious differences between children, they send a confusing message. On the one hand, it’s a message of conformance: Don’t try to be different because even if we know you are, we’re going to pretend you’re not. On the other hand, it’s a message about the futility of working hard: Don’t try to improve because Johnny who didn’t even bother to come to practice is going to get the same reward as you.

Starting with the self-esteem movement in the late 1970’s, Americans altered how praise—both verbal and token-based—is given out. We wanted kids to feel good about themselves, so we started to say “good job” when our parents might have said “how could you miss such an easy pitch?” We wanted to celebrate kids who had been traditionally at the bottom, so we phased out games that would point out physical differences, competitions that would point out intellectual differences, and pretty much any situation in which a child might get the message, “you’re a loser.”

Growth mindset

The work of psychologist Carol Dweck has made waves across education in the United States, but when it came out, lots of parents and teachers looked at it and felt like they ought to say, “Well, duh!” It turns out that you can empirically prove that all this mindless cheerleading is bad for kids’ self-esteem. In a very simply designed experiment, Dweck asked kids to solve math puzzles. To half of the kids, the researchers said, “You are so smart!” To the other half, they said, “You worked so hard on that!”

Not surprisingly, the “so smart” kids suddenly had something to protect. They were so smart, and they’d better not let on when they had trouble with something. The “so smart” kids went on to perform miserably on a slightly harder task, whereas the “hard working” kids were pumped up by the researchers’ enthusiasm for their hard work, and they worked even harder and achieved more.

It’s true: in competitions, a few kids win and lots of kids lose. The thing is, in well-run competitions any kid who has a solid foundation of self-respect is not going to be fooled. When my kids and I look at the winners in a competition, we discuss whether we think the judging was fair. More often than not, my kids admit that the winners simply put in more work, had a more original idea, and did a better job of explaining what they did.

Competing for satisfaction

We love Santa Cruz Soccer, which emphasizes cooperation in competition.
We love Santa Cruz Soccer, which emphasizes cooperation in competition.

Recently I read an article about cultivating intrinsic motivation that was making the rounds amongst teachers. I noticed that the author pointed out the value of fair competition.

“Intrinsic motivation can be increased in situations where students gain satisfaction from helping their peers and also in cases where they are able to compare their own performance favorably to that of others,” writes teacher Saga Briggs.

She says “favorably,” but I would broaden that: I think that my kids gain satisfaction just from seeing where they lie in the continuum of human achievement. My daughter still plays soccer, even though she’s never been MVP. She celebrates the achievements of the great hitters on her softball team, pointing out how much they practice. My son sometimes declines to enter a competition that he judges himself unprepared for. It’s not that he has poor self-esteem—it’s that showing his work alongside the work of others who share his passions has given him a good perspective. He knows how hard he’s going to have to work to compete, and when he honestly isn’t willing to do the work, he would rather sit on the sidelines and cheer people who were.

Of course, a child who doesn’t enjoy competition shouldn’t be pushed into it. But by the same token, denying children the right to stand up and proudly declare their achievements does not bolster their self-esteem. Our kids are just as smart as we are….if not smarter. They know when people are putting them on, so if we continue the charade that kids’ achievements are all the same, we’re not doing them any favors. Yes, it’s great to celebrate all children’s abilities, but avoiding competition puts our children into a manufactured world where hard work is not acknowledged and their achievements are just another thing to gather dust up on a high shelf.

References:

Losing is Good for You” by Ashley Merryman

25 Ways to Cultivate Intrinsic Motivation” by Saga Briggs

Goal-setting full circle

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.]

Topic #2: Homeschooling changes the adults who do it as much as the kids. [Here, here, here… heck, just read all my posts about homeschooling and you’ll see it’s a theme!]

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.]

GSLogo

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.
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!

Now available