SYPM 005: Getting Confident About the Decision to Homeschool

  School districts are starting to make plans to reopen - some with sneeze guards between desks; some on reduced schedules to accommodate the amount of space needed for social distancing, while some are going online-only for the Fall semester. How will your child cope with this? Did your child adapt well to online learning when schools closed?  Will they find it relatively easy to see their friends but not be close to them?  There are some children for whom these arrangements work well, but for others parents see big trouble ahead. What are the options?  Even if you've never considered homeschooling as a realistic option in the past, it might now be the tool that gets you through the next few months.  But are you terrified that you don't know everything your child needs to know?  And how could it possibly work for your family? Join me for a conversation with Dr. Laura Froyen, who is considering homeschooling her two children next semester - even though she has a Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies and wrote a dissertation on supporting young children in learning to read, she's nervous that she doesn't know everything she needs to know - so if you're worried about this you're certainly not alone! We look at what we know about how long children actually spend learning in school (the answer is going to shock you!), how you can work AND homeschool, and how you can get confident that you really can support your child's love of learning - even if you know your child will eventually go back to school.   Click the banner to learn more about The Confident Homeschooler:       [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast where I critically examine strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. In this series of episodes called Sharing Your Parenting Mojo, we turn the tables and hear from listeners. What have they learned from the show that's helped their parenting? Where are they still struggling? And what tools can we find in the research that will help? If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE guide to 7 Parenting Myths We Can Safely Leave Behind, 7 Fewer Things to Worry About subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us   Jen Hello, and welcome to Sharing Your Parenting Mojo. We are here with Dr. Laura Froyen today to discuss the topic of homeschooling. She's thinking about whether and how to do it over the next few months. And as we were chatting about it, we figured that some of the things that she's thinking about right now are probably similar to some of the things that other parents are thinking about too. And so we thought, why not just get on a call and discuss them live and share what we're thinking and what we're learning with other people as well. So that's kind of what we're going to do today. So welcome, Laura, do you want to tell us a bit about yourself and your background first?   Laura Absolutely. Thanks for having me and agreeing to answer my questions Jen. So so I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and I have my PhD in Human Development and Family Studies with a specialization in couples and family therapy. I am currently a peaceful parenting and respectful relationship coach and course creator, but I started right out of grad school in an academic job. And so I did my dissertation on how family processes influenced the home learning environment and children's early literacy skills. I'm a big believer in delaying, reading, teaching, active reading, teaching until in a developmentally appropriate age. I've always been deeply curious and, you know, interested in the prospect of homeschooling, but then also not sure if I could ever handle doing it. I have a very strong willed personality, I tend towards control. It's something that being in the respectful parenting world as a constant exercise and letting go for me. My oldest daughter is my best teacher in that way. So I guess I just I'm so glad that I get the chance to learn from such an expert on this, as I'm trying to make a really conscious and informed decision for my family.   Jen And I think the thing that stuck out to me when you were saying that you wanted to talk about this was that you have a PhD in a related topic and you've studied reading, and you still feel unsure about how to best support your child in learning to read. And so when parents are thinking, oh my goodness, I don't know how I'm going to even do this. How do we even support my child? They're not alone, right? Even you're struggling with this.   Laura No, I literally am an expert in how parents support their kids and learning to be at home. And it's still like I my youngest is five, she just turned five. She had a quarantine birthday. And she would be learning to read if she went into 5K in the fall. And I am so intimidated at the idea that no so if we homeschool for this next year for just the fall or kind of whatever, it ends up looking like that she'll go into a school system and I am worried about her being behind because, like it's, we're not in as a Scandinavian country where she wouldn't be allowed to learn at her, you know, reading at a developmentally appropriate age. We're in the US, and it's the reality of it. So yeah, no, of course, parents are not alone in this. I think like I think I have a couple of things that are coming completely normal parent, like even like all of us are, you know, we all are. The experts make mistakes. We have questions, we need support, and it's okay.   Jen Yeah. Yep. Awesome. Well, thank you for, for owning that for all of us. And yeah, I definitely mess up too. And we figure things out as we go. And we move on, we adjust and we move on.   Laura There's something so intense about the idea of like, teaching your kids. So you know, like, I mean, I feel so much more relaxed about parenting, just because I know like, we're resilient. Like our relationship is resilient, like attachment relationships are built to be resilient and, and open a bit. There's just something so intense about being charged with our child's learning, you know, and, yeah, so I'm looking forward to hearing about that from you about, like, what are my options and approaches to homeschooling? What do I need to be thinking about?   Jen Okay. Well, let's start there, because I think that's a really nice place to start. And it's so interesting what you say about needing to teach my child. And that's such a kind of a Western idea, basically, from someone who has been through school and I went through school you went through school, we have this idea that our the teachers role is to know everything that there is to know. And they hold the knowledge. And the child's job is to kind of wait there with this ready and open mind. And the teacher pours the knowledge out of their jug into the student’s vessel. And that's how knowledge is transferred. And so when we're thinking about different approaches to homeschooling, I kind of think on a continuum where traditional schooling is kind of at that end of it is at one end of it. And then there's a whole continuum of potential approaches to the other end where we just see learning as part of life. And so if we kind of talk through what are some of those, well, anything that's curriculum driven, is based on this idea that the teacher knows what there is to know. And their job is to teach the child and so when you're doing this at home, I mean, there are books that you can buy of 100 curriculum options. And you can go through and you can pick one that covers all the subjects that you want to study. And you can pick, you can just decide to focus on reading and math. And just buy those ones, there's any combination of these things that you can do, and build your own approach to it. But it is based on the idea that somebody somewhere knows the essential things that children need to know. And you're kind of saying that…   Laura Like, I don't even believe that. I know!   Jen Yeah, and by saying, I'm going to go with that approach, you're essentially saying, I do believe that I do believe that there is a set of skills that somebody has decreed is the right skills for children to have, and where I don't know what that set of skills is. So I'm going to trust somebody else, I'm going to outsource that aspect of the decision making. And so when we do that, what we're doing is we're kind of absolving ourselves of responsibility for needing to know everything our child needs to know and that can feel good that can feel like a weight off our shoulders. That somebody else has decided this stuff is important. It's not just me. And if I follow this, my child would know what they need to know.   Laura Yeah, you're speaking to me. Because I am such a perfectionist, a recovering perfectionist, I work on my perfectionism every day. But like, I sometimes get paralyzed in doing something new because I want to do it the right way. Yes, I have this concept that there is a right way. And if I could just know the right...