“I can’t teach my child because every time I try to help them, it leads to a fight.”
“We’re in a constant battle of wills over homework.”
“I need a tutor, because my child won’t listen to me when I try to teach them.”
“My teen refuses to learn math because she doesn’t see the point.”
“Kid: Could you help me with this math problem?…You: Sure! You just carry the two over to the hundreds place and then…Kid: that’s wrong! I hate you! Go away!”
Do you remember the time your child said their first word? When, as you held your outstretched hands, they took their first wobbly steps towards you into your open arms? Do you remember when you taught them that the white flashing sign meant walk, and when they remembered it on their own and reminded you to wait…
Think of a time you taught your child something. Maybe it was the meaning of a new word. Perhaps you explained something complex or more confusing to them, like why COVID-19 was making people sick, why George Floyd was shot, why the girl she thought was her best friend started ghosting her, why a boy called them a name that hurt. Maybe it was as simple as how to lick an ice cream cone in a circle so the drips didn’t fall all over his t-shirt.
Maybe you taught them how to read or learn their multiplication tables. Perhaps you taught them a skill you know well, like how to sing, make a budget for their business or how to code.
Do you remember how that felt in your heart? The joy, the pride, the excitement of sharing your wisdom with your child?
I remember distinctly, at age 14, sitting in my sun-filled living room in Ithaca, NY as my mom (a certified Montessori teacher) brought me a snack and a cup of tea as I began my geometry homework. I remember asking her for help and looking forward to the clarity she’d help bring to this complicated problem. I was two years ahead in math at the time. Geometry was not my strong suit, and I had not been doing well on the quizzes.
Within the first half sentence of her attempt to explain the homework to me, the calm sunny afternoon had morphed into a screaming fight, tears - and on my part, a sense of deep betrayal that my mother was not telling me how to the homework the way the teacher did.
I never asked her for help with homework again.
And just now, at age 42, I am opening up to begin to allow her to give feedback on my writing, to let her weigh in on my life’s dilemmas, on business questions. The trust is being restored, that allows us to be collaborators again in the way we were when I was a child.
So many parents lack the confidence to play a role in their child’s education because they’re afraid of the fight. And I say this for full-time homeschoolers, as well families with children in school.
Every human is a natural learner
I don’t believe that any child is fundamentally lazy and I will debate this point to the death with anyone who wants to challenge me on it.
Intrinsic motivation is an extraordinarily powerful force, hidden in some of us as we grow, but unstoppable once unleashed. It’s much like a river. Sometimes the water is blocked by dams, but when we remove them, the water has a natural force of it’s own.
When I was working as a test prep tutor in NYC, I helped many kids of all ages jump several deciles on their standardized exams from their SSAT to AP French Literature Exams. One student, whose mom consistently told me that he was inherently lazy, had the highest jump in the history of my tutoring agency surging from the 10th percentile to 99th percentile on the SSAT in only three months.
Some people didn’t like the way I worked. Another parent, who observed me with her son in the first lesson, asked for a new tutor, because she thought her son needed someone less kind and encouraging, a stricter tutor.
But ultimately, the results didn’t lie. And my methods were what got results.
I met my students where they were, focused on what was blocking them, and helped open doors for that natural force to do what it does, break through obstacles, solve problems, burst forth in fireworks of creativity and love for learning and building. I didn’t coddle them, and I didn’t focus on getting them to like me. I focused on the techniques that would best motivate them to learn and succeed at what was important to them. Sometimes this was as simple as helping them understand how this arbitrary test fit into the arc of their lives.
I should mention that most of my life, I’ve been a poor test taker, vastly underperforming relative to how I was doing in school. For me, this dissonance led to a slew of mental health problems and a deep sense of imposter syndrome, until a couple mentors in tech and education, helped me understand what was at work. My tendency towards creative ideation didn’t fit naturally into a standardized system. This is a common characteristic of 2E students.
Once I understood this, I had to train myself to focus in a particular way to beat the system at its own game. I also had to learn when to reign in my creativity to focus. As a 2E person, I am capable of almost scary laser focus which used to pop in and out at random. In order to do well on tests, but also to excel in the arts, and in general, how to learn how to get what I want in life, I have had to learn to turn on the creativity when it serves me, and turn on the laser focus when that’s what is called for. I am still learning. And while it was very hard studying so hard and doing so poorly on tests, I think this challenge helped me cultivate empathy for my students and understand what might be blocking them.
We all have intrinsic motivation
At Modulo, I train teachers to focus all their efforts on tapping into intrinsic motivation. We fundamentally believe that each child has an enormous drive to learn and grow, but sometimes that drive is blocked by a variety of factors (environmental or psychological). We see to uncover what’s blocking it so that intrinsic motivation can drive learning.
Intrinsic motivation is part of our biology. It’s what makes us evolve. It’s an incredibly powerful force to be reckoned with. And we all have it within us.
How to tap into intrinsic motivation
Maybe your child is highly motivated and successful. Many your child is motivated and underperforming. Maybe you suspect that they’re “lazy” and that’s ok to feel that way. Even if you suspect your child might be fundamentally unmotivated, there are a few key principles that will help you understand what’s blocking them and communicate better around learning.
It’s not the technique that needs to change so much as the vantage point.
Modular learning is different than helping with homework
In this newsletter, we primarily focus on modular learning (when parents are homeschooling or supplementing their child’s learning). It’s worthwhile to note that modular learning is very different than helping with homework.
During the pandemic, we ran schoolclosures.org, a hotline and website that supported over 100,000 families through the pandemic.
One of the major takeaways from this experience is that parents had a negative view of homeschooling because what they were used to was helping children with homework.
Helping with homework is very different than modular learning because 1) homework is focused on learning procedures vs concepts (problem-solving approaches you might not know) 2) you’re missing context about what’s being taught in school (you weren’t there) and 3) there are often no explanations for why assigned work is valuable for kids to learn (no point).
Procedural vs conceptual understanding
In most cases, homework in private and public schools is designed to help children memorize procedures (specific approaches to solving a problem). In contrast, the learning you do at home is designed to help children learn concepts and problem-solving skills (conceptual understanding)
No context
When you are helping with homework, you don’t have the full picture. You were not in class with the child, so you missed a lot of information, and particularly, the method in which the teacher asked the child to solve a certain problem (which may be very different than the way you learned it in school).
As a private tutor, I never gave my students’ homework to reinforce their learning. I did try to do that in the beginning, but no one every did it, so I just did all the learning and all the practice within each session. There were optional exercises they could do outside of class if they were motivated.
With homework, many cases, you are helping children with something that the learned in class that you missed. So they will naturally resent the fact that you’re trying to explain it wrong.
In modular learning, if a procedure is taught, you’ll be learning it together.
Procedural
Schools have specific ways they ask children to solve problems which are constantly changing as new standards are adopted by the school system. This may not have been the way you learned to solve a problem in school.
In school, students are often taught a specific strategy to solve problems that works for most students. With a strong home-based curricula (not one that imitates school) students are given a variety of different strategies and able to choose the approach that works best for them, or given space to discover nuanced, personal strategies to optimally learn new concepts. It will also have mechanisms in place to ensure that student’s don’t develop problem solving strategies or shortcuts that will hurt them later on.
I have a distinct memory of subbing for a second grade math class. The children had a long division worksheet the teacher wanted them to do in class, and I had no clue how they were supposed to solve the problems. It was some sort of weird box I had never seen before - and certainly not the way I learned long division. I ultimately resorted to my go-to strategy: I asked if any of the kids knew how to solve the problems. One girl was very confident, so I let her take over teaching the class.
There is some value to teaching procedures, but modular learning and the curriculum we recommend focuses more heavily in helping children develop their own problem solving skills to master conceptual understanding.
No point
Often children will not understand the point of being asked to do a homework assignment. They don’t feel like it’s fun and they don’t see how it contributes to their conceptual understanding. It might very well be something that prepares them for standardized tests - or just a filler (the teacher didn’t have anything else to send home that night so they gave a random activity). Maybe there is a point to the homework, but you don’t know what it is. Why? BECAUSE YOU WEREN’T THERE.
Sometimes sadly, there really isn’t a point at all.
In contrast to homework, when you are doing modular learning, you have an entirely different point of view. You’re not trying to figure out how to follow someone’s rules. You set the goals, you’re there for the entire experience, from choosing the curriculum, to studying the first lesson, to evaluating mastery. This is an entirely different experience from helping with homework - homework that is supposed to be completed in a certain way (not necessarily for understanding), homework that neither your child, you, or even the teacher might understand the point of doing.
Later in this post, we’ll talk about choosing a curriculum. You’ll see that the choice of the curriculum makes a big impact in motivation to learn, and the ease in which families can support their kids. Unlike school curricula, the best homeschool curricula are specifically designed for parent-led instruction or independent study - and focus on conceptual, rather than procedural understanding.
We need a new framework
Raising a child to thrive in the modern world is not a linear path.
The history of what academic standards we agreed to make a part of standardized curriculum is long and complex and highly contentious.
Teachers, parents, administrators, curriculum developers and companies are in an ongoing, heated debate about what skills kids need to have.
Is common core good or bad?
If a child wants to be a physicist, does it matter if they know their parts of speech?
Is there any value to children learning cursive in our digital age?
With read aloud options, and voice-to-text becoming every more prevalent, I’ve even seen some education influencers argue that children shouldn’t be required to learn to read. If a student is on a path to a trade like welding, is there any merit in them learning the classics too? I happen to believe that cursive has a lot of benefits and reading is a critical skill, but I certainly respect the other side enough to engage in a thoughtful debate about the topic.
A lot of efforts in educational reform are focused on preparing kids for skills that will be irrelevant by the time that curriculum actually gets into schools.
In the last twenty years, there’s been a big push to teach coding in skills, driven largely by big tech companies that need more engineers (and would like to pay them less money). Certainly it sounds like a good idea to prepare kids for high-paying jobs in tech, but it’s just as likely that all the jobs in coding that are currently vacant could be replaced by jobs in AI or some other advanced technology that’s yet to be invented or widely integrated into modern companies.
Maybe, the most important skill in the future is knowing how to farm sustainably in an new climate. Or maybe it’s knowing how to learn anything.
As micro-credentialing becomes more prevalent, the possibilities for entering a career without a college or even a high school degree widen.
Companies have a vested interest in preparing the future populace for jobs at their companies. The richest companies have the biggest say in what skills should be required in school.
Families may have more of a vested interest in cultivating lifelong learners and kids might want to just enjoy their daily lives.
Just because it’s standardized doesn’t mean it’s right for your kid
In order to change the way we talk about learning with our children, we have to understand why it’s important they’re learning what they’re learning. We can’t just assume that they people at the top who established this standardized curriculum guidelines know what’s best for our kids.
It’s hard to trick a kid.
Kids can have remarkable clarity about what they need. So, let’s give our kids a little credit when they resist us. They could be right.
A smart, independent younger thinker will immediately recognize when learning something is irrelevant to them. If we want to get our kids to learn, we first have to understand why it’s important to us that they learn what they learn. Is it so they’ll be well-rounded? And if so, why is that important to us? Is it so they can keep their career options open? And will learning this particular skill now help ensure that?
Or is it simply so they’ll move ahead in school at their grade level? That’s a value in and of itself, and there are very good reasons to want that to be true.
Sometimes your kid knows best. And sometimes you do.
Most kids have a pretty strong intuition about what they need to succeed in life (as long as the ways they could fail are not hidden from them).
If we are very clear with ourselves, and know why we want them to learn what we want them to learn (while acknowledging we have our own prejudices due to our personal psychology and cultural conditioning), our children will take us more seriously, and we have a much higher chance of being satisfied with their education overall.
We do not live in an era where we can sit back, relax and trust that our kids are learning what they need to know. We must be proactive.
So you want to stop fighting about learning?
With that background, now let’s dig into the actionable steps you can take to stop the fights, and have productive conversations with your kids around learning.
This is a lot of advice, so I recommend you browse through it all, see if any particular strategy gives you that gut sense of goodness, and try that out. Don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to do it all at once, perfectly or by the book.
16 ways to be with kids so kids can learn
I don’t want to pretend these techniques are easy. They take practice and self-awareness. Every child is different - and many of you have come to Modulo because you’re struggling with very serious cognitive and behavioral diagnoses that have a huge impact on your daily life and your child’s learning. Likewise, the developmental stage of your child makes an impact on the way they’ll communicate with you.
However, I will say that I have seen each one of these strategies make an overnight 360 degree change in the lives of families in our community, many with children with severe emotional and learning challenges.
They might not be easy. But they are actionable and if you take them seriously, learning can become harmonious, fruitful and efficient. They can deepen your relationship with your child and open the door to the joy of raising a well educated child, the job you were born for.
If learning is not leading to a fight, and you are ready to dive straight into some teaching strategies, check out our guide to family involvement in education:
Laying a foundation for productive communication around learning
1. Believe your child
If you take away nothing else from this point, this is the most important point I want to convey to you. When your child resists learning, get curious, give them the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps they have a very good reason…
They might not be right, you may disagree with their reason, but they still need to be heard.
If your child refuses to go to school… maybe they’re not learning well in that framework, maybe they’re being bullied or harassed, maybe they’re craving more time with you.
If they don’t want to get up at 7am…maybe they are more of a night owl an focus better if they get extra sleep.
If they don’t “see the point” of learning handwriting…maybe it physically hurts when they write.
If they don’t see the point of math…maybe it’s true that some of what they’re being taught has no real world application, or they intuitively know that learning procedures is not as good as learning concepts.
If you take your child seriously and really try to understand and get to the bottom of things, perhaps you’ll change your perspective or come up with a better way to address the problem.
They may not be able to give you a clear-cut answer, but if you continue to gently probe from a place of humility, I think you’ll find what you’re looking for.
2. Start with you
Any time a parent expresses a challenge in communication with their child, I almost always asks them what’s going on in their own life. Children are so susceptible to how parents are feeling, and to their own relationship to learning. If you’re stressed or anxious about education because you’re worried about your child, or because of your own experience in school, it’s likely kids will pick up on this.
If you’re stressed or anxious about something unrelated to their education such as work or your relationship with your partner, this can also impact how you communicate. It might seem “woo woo, ” but taking care of yourself can have an extraordinary impact on your child’s well-being.
Instead of focusing on how to change them first, start by adding in one minute of meditation a day, taking a 15 minute walk every day, or looking at your work/life balance. I’m sure you know what to do to make that small improvement in your own quality of life, so put on your own oxygen mask first! Better communication will follow.
3. Consider the role of external stressors
While parents are traveling, when kids aren’t getting enough sleep, when a family moves to a new house, when grandparents are sick, this can all impact a child’s behavior and focus. If a child isn’t cooperating the way they usually do, take a look around and see if there are any major temporary or permanent changes in their environment?
One time, there was a little girl in our online preschool class who was always perfectly attentive and engaged. She started rebelling frequently and leaving her room at random in the middle of class. We did a little digging and found out her mom was on a 2-week work trip fighting for voter rights. We were all happy her mom was doing this important work, her daughter more than anyone. However, once we understood what was disrupting her routine, it allowed us to have more empathy and get her back on track.
Environment, nutrition and sleep can also impact willingness to learn (we’ll discuss this further down).
Have some patience as children adjust to a new reality.
4. Get clear on goals
“The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.” -Jean Piaget
Part of starting with you is getting clear on WHY you want to learn what you want your child to learn, why you want them to be successful.
The goals of most schools and even homeschooling curriculum, is helping kids meet or exceed grade level.
But, As many successful people will say agree, doing well in school does not necessarily equate to doing well in life.
Skills required to thrive are different
Theres much less room for the failure…
Creative ideation
Grit
Discovering what you love
What you’re good at
What skills you could develop
And where you’ll never be strong
Skills that are vital to success in the real word
…are not necessarily what help us succeed at school.
When I graduated from college, I was exceptionally good at school. I knew how to find out what the teacher wanted, deliver that without looking like I was, and, if necessary, negotiate my grades, or draw on the support of my mom or the university dean to assist in those efforts.
In contrast, in the beginning of my adult life, I was not very successful in life…meaning I wasn’t happy with what I was going, and I had a lot of difficulty achieving any of my goals, whether it was making friends, making money, finding romance or getting work.
I needed to learn to fail, to take risks, to experiment
To be ugly, to be wrong, to try things that might not work.
Most parents are terrified of failing their child.
Their goal is
And that’s very natural, as there’s no real roadmap to parenting beyond reading “what to expect when you’re expecting” and outsourcing it to school (naturally assuming the forces that be at school must know something you don’t know about what it takes to raise your child well). And this fear is compounded by the fact that most parents are constantly being judged by well-intentioned friends, family members, teachers, school administrators and society at large.
But despite this fear of failure, few parents really do a deep dive on what success means to them, why, and make a roadmap of how to get there.
Let’s say, as a simple goal, you want to prepare your child to get a job that will enable them to support a family or comfortably retire.
Maybe you’re even more ambitious and want them to have a career they’re passionate about.
Or to get fabulously wealthy changing the world through their tech startup.
Maybe you just want them to be happy and healthy, and don’t care about the rest.
Maybe you want them to be a good person and help their community.
Maybe you just want them to be able to keep their options open.
Maybe you’re not even thinking that far ahead and you just want them to have friends and enjoy learning.
Maybe you “just want them to be happy.”
Doing this type of deep dive can be a little scary because as you start to really think deeply about the kind of goals you have for your child’s life, and the responsibility you hold for getting them there, you might realize that the skills they need to get there might not be aligned with the standards in a traditional K12 school system - or even most private schools.
Maybe you want to take it a step further and collaborate with your child on these goals. Maybe, for instance, you want to prepare them for a career in medicine, but they want to be an actress. These conversations can be hard, but they’re worthwhile.
The world is changing so fast, but are school curriculum is standardized, and in many ways archaic. Ideally, you don’t want your child to just survive, but to thrive in this rapidly changing world. Hopefully, you want them to also enjoy their childhood and teen years, right now in the present, during these wonderful years (ah to be young again).
So get clear. What are your goals for their education? Do they make sense?
Once you are clear, it will be a whole lot easier to explain to your child why you’re asking them to learn what they’re learning.
For example, if your goal is to help them learn anything and cultivate a lifelong love of learning, you’ll have a deeper sense of why you want them to learn to make mistakes and encourage them to push past them, not just easily get a bunch of A’s.
If you want them to have skills for the future work force no matter what they choose, you might incorporate classes like entrepreneurship, machine learning and data science into their curriculum.
If you want them to have friends, you might soon discover that the most important way to help a child develop healthy social skills is to have a healthy bond with their parents, and that good social skills will naturally flow from that place.
If you want a simple goal, I’d start with raising a happy, healthy, lifelong learner who helps their community. Knowing how to learn will take them very far in every aspect of their life.
For a deeper dive on creating goals, check out our post
These goals can be a framework for all your choices and conversations around learning. And then can also change as you and your child grows, and the world changes around us.
And getting clear on will make it a lot easier to answer the favorite question of young learners everywhere…
5. Embrace the “why” and the “I don’t see the point”
Some children express resistance when they’re asked to study, do homework or learn a new skill.
“I don’t see the point in learning this math”
“Why do I have to do my homework?
“Why do I have to go to school?”
“Why do I have to learn cursive when I can type?”
This is most frequently viewed as a negative behavior. But what if it were seen as a positive? What if these moments of resistance or questioning were met with equal to greater curiosity? What if rather than saying, “because I said so,” we used this as an opportunity to explore the question together.
Honor your child with infinite explanations
If a child ever asks you to explain the point of something, then do it! Don’t they deserve that respect? We so often expect children to do things, just because, without explaining to them why a skill is important.
If they’re asking why because they’re genuinely curious, then you’re off to a great start already.
If they’re more frustrated or trying to wear you down, try to see the underlying need, start off by acknowledging how frustrating it is to have to learn something that doesn’t seem to have a purpose, and invite them to explore that together.
If your child understands why math is important, how it can become a joy, how understanding symbolic/spatial relationships is fascinating, how specific math principles will help them get jobs as software engineers or doctors, learn to make a budget for their future dance company, help them make revolutionary paintings like Picasso, then learning math will start to make sense to them. And then they’re motivation to push past obstacles to learn something hard for them will be all that much stronger.
Honoring your child’s questions will not make them “demanding” or “entitled”
People who demand an explanation for every single thing their boss asks them do not keep their jobs very long. We all know them and they’re not very pleasant to be around. But having true empathy, and genuinely honoring your child’s impulse to understand the “why” behind their task will not make them turn into “that person.” Quite the opposite is true. Your empathy will help cultivate empathy in them.
Sometimes the explanation isn’t what we’d like it to be
And as you know all too well, we live in a world of compromises. Sometimes we have to learn something we’ll never apply in our real lives because it helps us on a test or fit in at a company, or develop a good relationship with our manager, demonstrating we respect their advice and the requirements they have to meet. Bosses who do explain every task they ask their employees to do are often well-loved, and employees who question politely are often highly valued and companies that want to evolve and grow.
Even if the skill is just to do well on a standardized exam, maybe that standardized exam is important for getting them into a college they’ll enjoy, which can help connect them to friends they like and can provide future job connections for them.
Your kids will need to learn that we have to make compromises - but explaining the reasons behind a particular requirement won’t make them entitled, it will help them make sense of the world and learn to question when they need to, or trust and follow when it’s not as important to debate.
This is why I think I ended up being such an effective SAT tutor. I started out every session with a new student talking about the various reasons I didn’t think the test was a good measure of intelligence or potential. I tried to learn about their own goals and equate why doing well on this test could help them get to those. Sometimes the goal was related to a career or college, but it could also be related to honoring their parents who cared about their performance on the exam. We even explored how learning a system like how to perform well on a standardized exams could help them understand how society worked, and better shape and transform it through that awareness. Often, they were highly motivated to succeed and push past obstacles after this first lesson.
All I did was emphasize and give them the benefit of the doubt. I honored their doubt and won their trust. And awoke their natural drive to learn.
Explain. Explain. Explain. The “Why” is your superpower”
The more specifics the better
The more detailed your explanation, the more your child is likely to respond.
This works well with children and teens, but it can even work with toddlers. This may sound crazy, but I’ve even tried it effectively with cats and dogs, no reptiles yet... While it’s possible, my long, boring explanations simply put people and animals to sleep eventually, there is something very soothing about your frustration of not understanding being heard and honored, and someone’s effort to explain in a detailed, specific way that respects your intelligence - that feels great! This is the opposite of “mansplaining” where someone explains something to you unprompted in a way that devalues your intelligence. Even better, you can open yourself to the possibility that your explanation doesn’t hold - and be proven wrong!
One time my friend was babysitting for a few hours with her friend’s pre-verbal toddler while her friend celebrated her birthday. After she put her child in the crib and closed the door, the toddler started crying for her mom. At first, my friend was going to let her cry it out, but after about 30 minutes, she couldn’t take it anymore. The young child was so distressed that by the time my friend went to check in on her, she had somehow managed to crawl outside of the crib and was sitting on the floor sobbing.
My friend changed tactics. She sat down next to the child and began to explain to her why her mother had left her for a few hours. She explained what a birthday was, the whole story of the earth traveling around the sun, and why we had come to celebrate this tradition in our society, and how it would make her mother feel to do so. She explained how her mother having time alone with her father would improve their relationship and help them be better parents to her. She explained how long it would be until her mother came home. She went on and on and on. Soon the child calmed down, began to smile, and after about 20 minutes went right to sleep.
The key here is that my friend released all expectation of the child stopping her tantrum. She simply honored her desire to move from confusion into clarity. Whether it was the cadence of my friend’s voice, her empathy or her ability to understand her logic, it worked.
Give your child the benefit of a doubt.
If you don’t know why a child needs to be learning something, you and your child can google it together. You can also be honest, and and say that you think it’s important because important people you respect said so. Or that you have reasons, but are too tired to explain now, but promise to later. And then see where the conversation goes from there…
In the process, you might even discover that what you’re asking them to do, is, in the grand scheme of things, indeed, pointless.
Other times you might decide it’s not be worth the pain they’re putting in, given the outcome.
Life is short, they don’t want to waste their time unpleasantly studying useless stuff. And neither would you.
Don’t make this too hard
This is an invitation to take on a new attitude, to simply trust that your child actually wants an explanation and is not trying to annoy you.
It’s a way you can make things easier for yourself, by simply explaining, rather than trying to convince.
We’re not suggesting you dive into a dissertation defense every time your child asks “why” :)
Some days you don’t have the energy to explain everything to your child. Sometimes you are too tired or have other stuff to do. This is about flexing a muscle. You can start by trying it once, and see how you feel. Does it energize or exhaust you to explore the deep reasons behind why a child has to do something with them? Or you can start by being a little more empathetic, make your explanations a little more detailed when your child asks the point of learning, and ask them why they don’t think it matters. You could probe a little deeper into their resistance, asking them to be the one to explain. Or you could simple say that you see that they’re frustrated, and sorry they feel that way. Being heard works wonder.
I understand that this might feel like a lot of work, but once you start approaching why’s and resistance to learning with real inquiry, it will be like developing a muscle that will get stronger and stronger. As your child sees the importance and logic behind what you’re asking them to do, their desire to do these tasks will grow. And they’ll start building an inquiry muscle as well, trying to understand the reasons before just defying you. Or begin to be more curious about why they learned what they learned.
You can also ask “why?” and be genuinely curious
It’s always better, if possible, to let people arrive at their own conclusions than to give them an answer. If you child asks why, so too can you! If your child asks what’s the point of learning math, or what’s the point of learning handwriting and you don’t know, there are two things you can do.
Get curious
It’s quite possible you don’t fully understand the underlying reasons behind why a child doesn’t want to do a learning task. If they say they’re not going to learn handwriting, instead of getting strict, why not get curious?
If a child says, “I don’t see the value in math,” instead of explaining the value, why not ask them “why?” Ask as many questions as you need. Reflect what they say. Try genuinely to get them to convince you that learning math has no value. Come from a view point of utterly believing that they have in their means to convince you of their point of view. Listen as much as you can and speak as little as possible. You can say “tell me more about that” and keep asking clarifying questions until you could convince the Stanford admissions committee to admit your child who can’t do algebra - or the CTO of a software company that your child doesn’t need to have math skills, using their own arguments. You could even google their arguments and see how experts respond. It’s more than probably that your child will ultimately convince themselves that math has value, or reveal that they actually don’t think they’re capable of learning math, or really dislike the math curriculum they’re using. But that shouldn’t be your expectation. Your goal here is to understand, not be understood.
And the change might not happen immediately. You could walk away not understanding or agreeing with their point of view, and the next day, one of you might change your mind.
Don’t be aggressive, just be gentle. Come from a spirit of curiosity with a real desire not to make them do anything that’s a waste of their time.
One of our community members was very distressed because their very bright, usually motivated seven year old refused to take a handwriting class. I happened to be friends with the family and taught their son through the pandemic so we were quite close. He explained that he knew how to type, so why did he have to learn handwriting? Plus, he already knew how to write (albeit VERY messily) Deeply troubled (and somewhat scared) by his refusal to learn handwriting, his parents asked me to intervene, thinking that an outsider would be more likely to convince him. I had several somewhat awkward conversations with him while I tried to impress upon him the value of handwriting and propose different approaches to “make it fun”
I tried everything we could think of to convince him to learn handwriting, to no avail.
I felt in my gut that it was important for him to learn how to do handwriting, but I had to admit that my explanations did fall short. I did a whole deep dive into researching the necessity of handwriting in a digital age, how Maria Montessori valued physical writing as a means to developing fine motor skills, processing thoughts, retention and retrieval. I consulted my mother, a Montessori teacher, and my mentor, a professor at Bank Street College of Education on effective strategies for dealing with children at this developmental phase resisting handwriting. We went through the whole spectrum of defiant behavior unique to seven-year-old boys and possible learning diagnoses.
My explanations and tactics were totally unhelpful. Once I’d exhausted all of my holistic approaches, I got lazy and started resorting to see what we could do to bribe him to learn. I even asked him how much we could pay him to learn handwriting, but he didn’t really appreciate the value of money, and I couldn’t get his parents to agree to start making him pay for his own stuff. No luck.
Ultimately his mother discovered that the problem was not that he didn’t see the value of handwriting. The problem was that he was embarrassed about his handwriting, and only wanted his mother to teach him.
After we went through all this, he was glad to learn handwriting with his mother, and she was glad to invest the time. He and his mother came to a place of understanding and were both the better for it.
In the end, all my efforts as an education mentor and trusted teacher were useless (though I learned a lot in the process). I didn’t help at all. He could only be that vulnerable with his mom, and his mom, who knew him best, was the one who came to understand what was needed.
Find out why together
It’s perfectly all right to acknowledge that you’re unsure and research this together. You can use google. You can ask chatGPT. Reflect on what you learn together and see if your child thinks it holds up.
Look both at arguments in favor, and arguments against learning a skill set. Look at the sources of each blog, book or article you find and see if they are trustworthy.
For instance, if a Stanford math education professor who didn’t learn how to do long division in school wrote a paper dissuading teaching long division in schools, this might be more trustworthy than a lobbyist sponsored by a corporation that creates long division tests writing a blog in support of long division being taught in schools.
You should highlight areas where you feel your argument doesn’t hold up, and encourage your child to question their reasoning as well.
In general, learning with your child is one the best ways to teach any topic including, but not limited to why they’re learning a new skill.
And learning why they’re learning a new skill is one of the most effective strategies for tapping into intrinsic motivation.
What does this look like?
After you go through this process with your child, you may find there’s a great explanation for why they need to learn a skill.
It could be extremely short or more eloquent….
You: “Didn’t you tell me you want to be a dancer and start your own company…You’ll need to learn math to build a financial model and raise money.”
You: “Didn’t you say you want to be a software engineer? They have to know math.”
You: “Acquiring a foundational understanding of mathematics equips artists with a powerful toolset, enabling them to unlock new realms of creative possibilities, explore intricate patterns and proportions, and harness the harmonious balance that enhances their artistic vision.
Kid: “Oh! OK dad!”
Or this period of philosophic inquiry might be a little longer
Kid: Well, what kind of math skills does a software engineer have to have?
You might know because you are a software engineer, or you might be unclear…
It’s ok to be wrong
A genuine process of inquiry is not meant to convince your child. It opens us up to the possibility of being proven wrong.
After researching for a while, you might start to feel like there isn’t a strong reason for your child to learn a specific skill. You might lose your own conviction. You might acknowledge they may be right. This is different than not finding a satisfying explanation, you might still feel in your gut it’s important, and decide that you and your child are going to continue to explore together until you’re satisfied.
If you have lost your conviction, it’s totally all right to change your mind!
Simply admit to your child that after doing this research, you’ve changed your mind. You are sorry that you were wrong and glad you had this chance to dig deeper.
You didn’t lose and you aren’t losing your child’s trust. If anything, that will make their trust stronger. If they are unhappy you were wrong, you can say hey, you’re human. Sometimes you’re right, sometimes you’re wrong, but you’re still right a lot of the time, and you are still their parent making the best decisions you can for them with the information you have at the time. And most importantly, you are a parent who listens and cares about your child’s point of view.
There is more space to fail and admit you’re wrong in homeschooling. I’m not recommending it, but, for example, there are perfectly valid arguments to be made for choosing to not teach long division, Jane Eyre, chemistry (my least favorite subject) or even French (my favorite subject) all together if you choose and still raise a wildly successful, happy, lifelong learner with lots of friends who makes a meaningful contribution to society. And conversely, you can decide it’s indispensable to add Mandarin, climate science, coding and Black history to your core curriculum.
It’s harder to do this in traditional school.
As an aside, if you’re having trouble sifting through it all and determining what’s important and what’s not, if you do nothing else, I would highly recommend keeping Math and Language Arts.
Remember throughout this progress, you’re not collecting arguments to win your side of the debate. You are exploring together and seeking deeper understanding together.
It’s possible you may be more open and willing to change than your child, who may be more on the collecting arguments to win a debate side of things. That’s still good! You are modeling a behavior for your child that they will learn. You are taking the higher road. You are teaching them openness, receptivity, dialogue and logical reasoning through modeling.
5. Allow natural consequences to unfold
To be lifelong learners, we must cultivate grit. We cultivate grit by failing, figuring our way around obstacles and trying again. Grit is potentially one of the most critical skills we can develop to become lifelong learners and succeed in life. Entrepreneurs have it in spades. Traditional schools leave very little room to fail, and cultivate shame around anything less than perfection.
I know this all too well having spent most of my college years learning on how to more effectively negotiate my grades, and very little time on experiments and bold thinking. Only in my adult life did I learn that things were going to have to get really ugly if they were going to get great. My breakthrough as an entrepreneur is when I started to get excited each time I failed because I knew that a possibility had opened up for me to solve a micro-problem that few others, if any had learned to solve before - or that I had shed light on a new area where I needed to improve in order to achieve my dreams. I stopped shaming myself for being human and learned to love the darkness as much as the light in me. We can always celebrate the light - but we can only cast new light on darkness. And that’s a gift.
An innovative solution is only innovative because it’s never worked before. So naturally, to arrive at that, a lot of experimentation has to happen.
What are natural consequences?
Natural consequences in the adult world are pretty straightforward. If you spend too much money on restaurants, you might not have enough money to pay the doctor. If you undercharge your customers, your business will go out of business. If you are rude to your friends, they’ll stop being your friends.
With children, it’s a bit tricky because there are many ways we do make sure they don’t experience natural consequences that make sense. We support our children financially. Even making a teen pay for rent and their own food feels extreme and unloving.
And there are areas where we must protect them and keep them safe, and not allow them to experience natural consequences (like crossing the road when a car is coming). And even if they’re super rude to us (as I was to my mother throughout my teens), they will always love us, and that’s vital to our health and well being.
However, there are also areas where we need to let them feel the weight of their actions.
Here are some examples of letting your children accept natural consequences
Some of us have more of a stomach for risk than others, and that’s OK. I know some parents who are willing to wait until their child is 10 years old and finally gets desperate to learn how to read. Personally, I wouldn’t be able to take that level of uncertainty.
So, do what you can.
Let’s say your child needs to do 30 minutes of piano practice a day to prepare for a piano competition that they’re very excited about.
If your child isn’t in the mood to practice, you might gently remind them that practicing will help them play the piece well in the competition (I always suggest using positives like saying “play well” rather than “not play poorly” or “not make mistakes” . I
If they consistently choose a different activity than practicing piano, make mistakes and are embarrassed about how they perform, don’t try to make them feel better and pretend how great they were. If they played poorly and are upset, it’s always good to empathize with how they’re feeling. I’m so sorry you missed those notes. That stinks. Don’t say, “you were amazing!” “You were the best!” as many parents will do. That’s a lie.
You can tell them what you liked or disliked about their performance. You can say you know they have a lot of potentially to play beautifully in piano if they spend more time practicing in the future - if that’s important to them. (Make this about what’s next, not what happened before). If instead they do fantastically without any practice, go ahead and share how much you loved their performance. You can even share your surprise that they were able to get there with little practice and ask them how that happened (what their methods were). This helps reinforce procedures that work for them.
DO NOT SHAME THEM.
Shame is an emotion that freezes people in their tracks and makes it very difficult to take concrete action to change a behavior. Shame, like any emotion, has its place. But most often, it is best used for freezing people with too much power who are abusing that power to hurt others. It is not a good strategy to encourage your vulnerable child to learn and grow.
Letting your child experience natural consequences, and the emotions that go along with that is healthy for their growth and development. It teaches them, through experience, how they need to adapt to avoid those negative feelings in the future and get what they want in life.
Sometimes the natural consequences you expect don’t happen
As a child, I was gifted at piano, but loathed practicing. My mom was not very pushy about making me practice. And it drove my piano teacher crazy. When I had a big competition to prepare for, I would cram it all in in 1-2 weeks before the event. And the outcome was that I won the county-wide piano competition and got a scholarship to attend Interlochen Arts Camp. Interestingly, once I got there, I had a piano teacher I loved and began practicing regularly. Somehow that method worked better for me. My piano audition for Brandeis was a significant factor in getting a full scholarship to the school. Eventually my poor practice habits and the cost of paying for pianos and piano lessons without my mom as my personal arts patron caught up to me and I quit altogether. Draw the moral that you will…
I was also pretty advanced in ballet and got put in classes 5-6 times a week and a special intermediate pointe class. After a year, I started getting bored in ballet class, dreaded lessons and took every opportunity to skip. Eventually, all my peers who were attending class got better than me and I was the worst in the class. It was a little upsetting, but ultimately it didn’t bother me enough to change my behavior. And I quit ballet, which clearly I never really liked doing in the first place, I just liked being good at it. The only natural consequence is that my mom continues to this day to remind me that my posture was best in my ballet days, still not painful enough to make me go through a ballet class.
Here’s another example of natural consequences
Let’s say that your child is struggling in math and has asked for a math tutor. Imagine you’ve hired a math tutor once a week that requires your child to practice on their own 20 minutes a day. Your tutor continually expresses frustration that your child doesn’t prepare the homework and it’s exceedingly challenging to make progress since they forget lessons from one class to the next. Likewise, rather than engaging in inquiry with the tutor, they simply say I don’t know and wait for the tutor to explain.
Sometimes the way the tutor is doing things isn’t developmentally appropriate or they’re not in touch with what motivates your child. But sometimes, the problem is that your child simply expects them to entertain them (it’s a one-sided relationships). In this case, it’s normal to say that you will no longer pay for the tutor unless they start doing the prep work and engaging. They might then share reasons why it’s hard for them to self-motivate, or reveal why the teacher isn’t a good fit.
If they continue to stop doing the prep work and treating the tutor like an entertainer, you can pause tutoring lessons until that work starts to happen or encourage your child to get a babysitting job to pay for lessons. If they continue to be stressed about their math skills, you can explain that the tutoring option remains open to them once they are willing to put in the work. For teaching to be effective, teachers should not be treated as entertainers but collaborators in learning. It won’t work unless the student is also motivated to learn from them.
Yet one more example of natural consequences
Maybe your child loves making videos, but refuses to edit any of them to make them better, and you keep having to pay for extra storage space on their iCloud.
I like this one because it’s so straightforward and applicable to the adult world.
As with any natural consequence, give fair warning. Tell them that their iCloud is filling up and that you are not willing to pay for additional storage. Their options are to either start editing their videos or get some type fo work to pay for additional storage.
Natural incentives
Natural incentives can also be very powerful. Let’s say, for instance, that you’re having difficulty motivating your child to learn to type. Rather than making them do typing practice for 20 minutes a day, consider focusing on “levels.” Once they’ve mastered a level, they’re free to play. In this way, they’re motivated to be more focused and efficient moving towards mastery. Instead of doing this at the end fo the day, they might start with this activity.
Bribery and Punishment are not natural consequences
In general, I think giving unrelated rewards for what you see as desirable behavior (like ice cream) and punishments for undesirable behavior (like spanking) is not that conducive to helping children learn how to function in the world.
Natural consequences are much more powerful. I also think that part of how we learn to feel loved is having things given to us freely and known they are always available to us (a home, a healthy meal, clothes we like an occasional treat) However, I am not opposed to giving kids an allowance for some of their spending (such as extracurricular activities, tutors, toys they want to buy).
Jobs are also great learning opportunities: encouraging young kids to get jobs like mother’s helping and teens to work in a book shop. This can help them learn the value of money and that resources are finite. With the rising cost of childcare, teenagers babysitting for an affordable rate can really make a difference in the life of a family with fewer resources to pay for extra support.
Always give fair warning
Do be as clear on the possible consequences and repeat them regularly and kindly, so it doesn’t feel like a shock and a betrayal when they fail. Be clear that you’re allowing them the space to make this choice. You are deliberately not forcing. And that things might not work out as they hoped. If you’ve behaved differently in the past (not enforcing consequences or ‘saving their butt' so to speak, make sure that you establish that things are about to change, and that the behavior they expected from you in the past will be different.
Many families struggled taking screen time away from their kids after the pandemic. It became easier when they acknowledged to their children that rules around screen time were changing due to circumstances in the world changing and that what you allowed them to do before was going to be different.
When you give this warning and let children experience consequences, they will likely be upset at first, but their trust in you will continue to grow, because you are true to your word. Each time you allow them to experience a natural consequence, they will be more motivated to change their behavior in the future .
Don’t be a negative naysayer, but give them a cushion, and an option to change, rather than just letting them slam headfirst into a brick wall.
This doesn’t mean that you never bail them out or never help. Or let them have more pain they need to when they’re already feeling broken. It’s just giving them more chances to learn by failing.
We are an interdependent species and it’s good and fair to help.
We also have to be able to allow our children the chance to fail.
That is kind and generous too.
As your child gets older, it’s valuable to give them more and more responsibility over their own education, and allow them to experience natural consequences (within reason).
Always be as clear as you can on what could go wrong for them- without being a naysayer, of course. And also being clear that they do have a choice, and what they choose is all right with you.
Sometimes you do know better. But sometimes what’s important to you just isn’t all that important to them. And that’s ok too.
“Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the make upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness.
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable.”-Khalil Ghibran
Communication strategies
6. Remember the deep impact of your impression
When teaching your child, keep in mind how closely they watch what you do, as well as how deeply they care about your opinion. You have a huge influence on them, whether they can see it or not
Modeling
Children learn by modeling, and the person they are most likely to model will be you.
If you lack confidence in your ability to learn, if you’re unmotivated in your work, if you’re a perfectionist who stops a new activity when you fail on the first try, if you think you’re “not a math person,” your child will pick up on this behavior and copy it.
Conversely, if you share a problem you had at work and how you passionately persevered until you came to a solution, and how good you felt in the end, your child will reflect that perseverance in their learning. If you try a new hobby and fail utterly and try again and again until you do it right, your child will feel more comfortable pushing past their own failures. If you are feeling depressed and seek therapy or start meditation, your child will learn that if they feel unwell, they can get help too.
Almost any problem you see in your child’s learning, any behavior you want to change, you can start to mold by quietly modeling that behavior for your child. Even if they think your efforts to model behavior are cheesy, awkward or obvious, they will still be infectious.
Your impact
One of the quotes I love in Ted Lasso. A mother learns that her grown daughter has been furious with her for twenty years and breathes a sigh of relief. With the deepest calm and love in her voice she says:
“I'm actually glad to hear that you hate me. All these years, I've thought you didn't feel anything for me. I'll take your anger over your indifference any day.”
As we support our children with their learning, remember that what we say and how we react will make an infinitely bigger impression on them than almost anyone else.
Therefore, tread lightly.
Even if you think your teen doesn’t respect you or thinks you’re an old fogy, they’re watching more closely than you think. When you celebrate their efforts and show empathy for their struggles, they hear you. Remember the impact you have and choose your words carefully.
Imagine you are on a big movie screen with . This is a bit how your child experiences your feedback, whether they’re conscious fo that or not.
When you offer advice, it might appear that your child rejects it today. You might be surprised when they adopt it tomorrow. Gentle repetition without pushing can also be a very compelling strategy to evoke change. They did hear you, and if you don’t push, the words very well make sink in. If you rush them, your words can backfire.
7. Helping can be offensive
“Children should be able to do their own experimenting and their own research. Teachers, of course, can guide them by providing appropriate materials, but the essential thing is that in order for a child to understand something, he must construct it himself, he must re-invent it. Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly for the rest of his life.” - Jean Piaget
One of the most annoying things a parent can do is offer help. I know, the impulse to jump in and tell them how to solve a problem can feel irresistible. I mean, who wants to see their precious child struggle? Not me!
However when you help a child without their permission, you are often sending an implicit message that you don’t think they are capable of figuring it out themselves.
This is as true for academic work as it is for relational challenges.
Cultivate grit by reinforcing your believe that they can solve the problem
Phrases like “you’ve got this,” “I know you can figure it out” Or, “I’m not sure. Want to try to figure it out together?” are so much better than trying to give answers.
One of my best friends, when I express doubt in myself, always says “I believe in you!” with great zeal and enthusiasm. It’s kind of his catch phrase and he knows it. But something about his authenticity and earnestness makes be believe it’s true and inspires me to find solutions where I felt defeated before.
Not everybody will feel that way about you, but it’s good to surround yourself with people who do believe in your potential.
You can be that person for your child is you stop giving unsolicited advice, and start focusing on helping them believe in their own potential.
Give help when it’s asked for and display confidence that you’re child’s natural problem solving skills will lead them to the best solution.
And when this does indeed happen, celebrate!
If your child seems very frustrated or sad, the first step is to acknowledge their feelings, not to try to fix it.
Ideally, wait to give help until help is asked for.
The first best step is to acknowledge how they’re feeling. “You seem upset. Do you want to talk about it.”
“That stinks.”
Then, and only when they feel heard, you can offer your help and invite them to explore with you.
I once dated an alcoholic. When the disease progressed so far that I had to hire an interventionist, the interventionist pointed out something which changed my perspective forever. My boyfriend was surrounded by women trying to save him, treating him like a helpless child. While our efforts came from a place of love, through our actions, we were constantly sending him the message that he was incapable of helping himself. That he was weak. Not strong. We were blocking his intrinsic motivation by trying to give him CPR when he needed to discover how to breathe again.
It was terrifying to let go and offer him the possibility to fail when failure could mean loss of a job, loss of custody of his child, loss of his house, bankruptcy, or even death.
When I finally stopped helping and reinforced that I knew he knew what he needed to do to get better, that’s when he went to rehab and started the process of recovery.
Help is complex. The idea that people are an island and that you should only help yourself is flawed. We live in a network ecology. We survive off of being part of an interdependent ecosystem. Helping is important, but one of the best ways he can help is by giving space to others to find their inner strength.
Teaching Strategies for parents and caregivers
8. Be a learner, not a teacher
If I could give one sure-fire teaching strategy to all parents, caregivers and tutors it would be :
Don’t teach. Learn Together.
One of the most common reasons I hear that parents get a tutor, or are afraid to homeschool is that they don’t know how to teach since they are not a trained teacher.
However, if instead of seeing yourself as someone instructing your child, you see yourself as learning with your child, this process gets a lot easier. You are able to probably teach yourself new skills needed for work, or for your favorite hobby. You can certainly learn double digit multiplication tables or even AP physics.
The more you can draw attention to your process for learning, all the strategies you draw upon to learn, all the experimentation, and engage your child with those strategies (whether it’s searching google or calling a friend), the more your child will learn how to learn. It’s so healthy for them to see your growth mindset, to see when you have trouble and observe your motivation, the grit you draw upon to push past obstacles and uncover new strategies.
Seeing you fail and push ahead is a gift to your child, particularly if they struggle with perfectionism or feel shame around learning differences.
When I struggled learning things in high school, I almost never went to my teacher, I asked another student in the class. I found that I could learn much better from others who were struggling and had mastered a concept I hadn’t, than from the teacher. We were learning together. They were one step ahead of me and had just struggled with what I was struggling now.
This takes us back to conceptual vs procedural understanding….
Sounds great, but what if I’m not a subject expert?
Even if they feel confident with K-2nd grade materials, they might be more wary of high school chemistry.
With enough practice and time, you could probably learn organic chemistry. If you do that process with your child, they will feel better about times they are frustrated because they see your frustration and how you overcome it. You will laugh and connect around challenges, and celebrate understanding.
Also, you’ll learn some new stuff - which is pretty cool!
The best teachers are lifelong learners with infinite humility about what they do not know. Learning to teach as a learner is much like learning a foreign language. Each subject is easier to teach after you’ve mastered the first. I started out tutoring French, then added on the SSAT, SAT, AP biology, history and even Spanish which I did not speak (I learned with the child). After six years, I was tutoring 18 subjects to children with a wide range of developmental needs.
9. Student as teacher
Even better than learning with your child, let your child teach you!
It’s been said that the final stage of mastery is teaching.
Even if your child is performing well, it’s great to occasionally ask them to pause and explain a concept to you.
This helps them understand their own procedure, uncover mistakes and deepens conceptual understanding and retention.
It also boosts their confidence to see that they can teach.
It’s hands-down one of my favorite practices in all my own tutoring sessions.
10. Let your child educate you on their learning modalities
Along with teaching you concepts, your child will also educate you on how they learn best. As you start to be involved in their learning by learning with them, you’ll discover that certain learning strategies that work for you work well for them - and others do not. You’ll make big discoveries - for example - that they respond really well to educational podcasts, or that they learn best when they’re physically making a project. You’ll make more nuanced observations, like that if they can doodle while you’re talking to them, they’re more likely to stay focused and retain information. You’ll discover that they learn best after a nap, or first thing when they wake up. There is so much to learn about how they learn and you can constantly adapt your methods. You can also invite them to tell you what methods work best for them.
Also, recognize that your child is always changing. What worked for them in second grade might not work in high school, or even next month. Be open to this change, and don’t jump to conclusions. Try to switch things up every now and again. And always be on the alert to see if your communication strategy is working right now or not. If it isn’t, try something new!
Conditions for learning
Teaching your child doesn’t have to be hard, but there are definitely ways to make it easier. With the right time, environment and tools much else will fall into place.
“After forty years of intensive research on school learning in the United States as well as abroad, my major conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn if provided with appropriate prior and current conditions of learning” - Benjamin Bloom
11. Trust the pace, fast or slow
One of the best parts of 1-1 instruction is that children can learn at their own pace. They can take as much time as they need to deeply understand a concept before moving on to the next. Even when the number of children jumps to 2, children have to slow down or speed up to accommodate others, and therefore learning happens more slowly overall.
Many of us don’t remember anything from our elementary, middle or high school education because we missed vital concepts or broke momentum when we had to wait for others to catch up on what we already understood.
Every child has their own pace. Sometimes it will be slow. Sometimes it will be fast. Sometimes it will be in between. But they have a lot of time to learn, and rushing will only hurt things.
There’s a considerable amount of evidence that holding children back a year in kindergarten impacts their learning positively in the long run.
I’m really shocked by how often accelerated learning is misunderstood. People think that learning how to read or do math early makes their child know how to do math or reading better later on. Learning itself is positive, but the time at which a child masters a concept is not as important, and learning too soon might even be harmful if it gives a child a distaste for learning. Often very young children aren’t capable of mastering abstract concepts because their brains haven’t developed to that stage yet.
It’s the learning, and learning deeply that matters, not how fast you learned that concept deeply.
On the flip-side, children who are learning much faster than their peers in class often get bored and then are misdiagnosed as having cognitive delays, or develop low self-esteem and anxiety when they simply aren’t adequately stimulated.
I often like to ask students a question and wait what might feel like an interminable amount of time to answer, perhaps a few minutes, or not at all. I’m never surprised when the next day they come back with a clear answer to my question.
Learning doesn’t happen on a straight diagonal line, or a hockey stick. It is actually a lot more like the stock market, going up and down in big or smaller increments, but when you step back, it’s movement is up.
My junior year, I participated in a year-long study abroad program in Paris. The first month my French improved dramatically. What ensued was a period of three months where I felt like I learned no French at all. By the end of the year, people in Paris thought I was from the South of France and now I speak like a native.
Many of us have heard stories of children who did not speak at all until they were five or later, and then jumped right into long, complex phrases and have been chatterboxes ever since.
The key is consistent learning, not consistent growth. Learning will ebb and flow in a general upward direction. So we need to be patient and trust this will happen. Expecting progress every day or even every week isn’t reasonable and puts undue pressure on children.
The tutors I work with know that I have a special pet peeve. I ask a student a question, wait for their response - and then while I’m still waiting and the student’s wheels are turning - the parent chimes in and repeats my questions, tries to give them a hint or says “come on! you know this!”
If I know the family a little better, I tell them to get lost:) Otherwise, I awkwardly feel my blood boil while suggesting to the parent that we give the child a little more time to think. (On a side note, it’s usually not a great idea for two adults to try to give a child a lesson at the same time, as it puts an enormous amount of pressure on the child to perform. )
It’s not reasonable for me to get upset. It’s reasonable that a parent would be anxious that their child doesn’t answer and eager for them to show their understanding. The amount of responsibility a parent feels for their child’s learning can be overwhelming.
But I think that ultimately, if you can tune into the trust that your children will learn what they need to know in their own time, and stop fretting about the micro-moments, it will greatly support your child’s growth and development.
One more story
In middle school, I was not great at finishing assignments or paying attention in class. I was two years ahead in math taking class with high school students. I failed most of the quizzes and didn’t do any homework. My school encouraged my mother to stay behind a year, but I insisted in staying in the class. I spent most of the class staring at the ceiling completely spaced out.
When the final exam came around, I realized I better study if I wanted to pass the class. I spent two weeks intensively studying everything I had missed that year. We were given unlimited time to take the test. Most students finished it in an hour or two.
My teacher gave us unlimited time, and I pushed this to the limit.
I stayed in the testing room for six hours straight after all the other students had gone home until I finished the test and felt confident about all my responses. Much to his credit, my teacher did not push me to hurry or gently suggest he might like to go home long after his paid teaching hours were over.
I got a perfect score.
The teacher was pretty astonished that a girl who never payed attention in class, never did homework and failed most of the quizzes mastered all the material in two weeks, and to his credit, I think this incident may have changed his attitude about learning for good.
He ended up being a wonderful mentor to me in the years ahead.
I still have so much affection for this teacher because he was true to his word. He based my perfect grade in the course on my understanding on true mastery not on the requirements he’d imposed along the way. He didn’t care about his own ego. He cared that I learned.
Was this good to learn this way? Was it bad to learn this way?
You be the judge.
If you can find it in yourself to give your child the time they need to learn, to go as fast or as slow as they need, I think you’ll be very happy with the outcomes.
12. Optimize the environment for learning
In the Reggio Emilia tradition, they say a child has three teachers: their teacher, their parent, and the physical environment.
Setting up a space and creating conditions that are conducive to learning will take you a long way.
Here are the main factors I’ve seen that have a huge impact on children’s learning.
*A clean dedicated space for study
Set up a space that is solely devoted to your child’s study without outside distractions.
*Time of day
For mastery hours and subjects that require concentrated table work, choose a time when your child is most fresh and alert. This is often right after breakfast, but could be in the afternoon or evening for other kids. This is why after school is one of the worst possible times for kids to be doing homework (when they are most exhausted, hungry and need a break). Everyone has peak times and its different for every person.
At Modulo, we recommend parents choose 1-2 hours a day where kids are highly focused and alert to do mastery hours (math and ELA).
*Nutrition
Green vegetables, healthy fats and lean proteins will keep your child energized and learning well. It’s worthwhile to get as much information as you can about what foods your child’s are allergic to, which foods energize them, and which ones deplete them.
I’ve put a lot of thought, and done a huge amount of experimentation around what I eat - and found what I eat makes a huge impact in my own mental clarity. I stick mostly to matcha, green vegetables, tahini and dark chocolate because that’s what works for me.
I once had a child in my 30 person third grade music class who was constantly disturbing the class and getting everyone off track.
Out of the blue, he became a different person. He was calm, attentive and eager to learn. After a few days of this, I asked his mother what was up?!! She beamed with pride and told him she’d been focusing on healthy eating, and started giving him a veggie/fruit pack instead of his usual unhealthy snack. I’ll never forget the look on her face and the joy we both experienced in that moment. Once again it reinforced for me that parents know best how to support their children’s learning.
Nutrition is a hugely complex field, but understanding your child’s body can make a night and day difference. As an example, gluten sensitivities can result in depression, defiant behavior and anxiety in some children. Many a parent has been shocked to learn that behavioral issues stemmed from a food allergy. It’s always worth checking it out.
*Sleep
“As important as sleep is for the physical body, it may even be more so for the brain. Good sleep—in terms of both amount and quality—is critical to our cognitive function, our memory, and even our emotional equilibrium.” -Peter Attia
In modern-industrial society, we’ve been trained to believe that working as hard as possible as many hours as possible is somehow better. When people want to sleep in, they’re seen as lazy. Luckily, the tables have turned and more professions and doctors are singing the praises of sleep. When your child is well rested they will think better, faster and more efficiently. This might mean sleeping until 10am, or getting up at 6am. Everybody’s body works differently, so find out the sleep that your kids need, or let them get the sleep they want when they want it.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that pre-teens get 9-12 hours of sleep a night. 73% of teens don’t get the sleep they need to learn well and be healthy. Find out how much sleep your child needs and what kind of sleeper they are in our post on pros and cons to homeschooling.
1 student + 1 Parent/caregiver teacher
When Benjamin Bloom measured the impact of 1-1 tutoring vs group instruction, he found that 1-1 tutoring was 2 standard deviations above the norm. Students with 1-1 instruction (regardless of the teacher) performed 90% better than the rest of the class. Even if you only have 30 minutes a day to spend helping your child learn every day, the results will be dramatically better than learning that happens in a group. 1-1 learning is what truly allows students to move forward at their own pace. We’ve even found at modulo that the quality of learning declines dramatically when its one tutor with two students vs one tutor with one student.
If you’ve read our piece on mastery learning, you’ll see that this 1-1 time can easily be completed in 1-2 hours a day, resulting in far better outcomes than six hours a day of classroom instruction.
On the other side, if two adults are trying to teach a child at the same time, it can become stressful and they may shut down.
Learning with your child, as you may have experienced reading them a story at night, can be a lovely way to bond and spend time together.
Tools (physical and digital)
Set your student up with the right materials to succeed - whether that be books, podcast, art supplies, cleaning up supplies or chemistry sets. Kids can go very far with a room full of tools to support independent study.
In our blog, Sparking Independent Learning with Strewing, Lesley Grossblatt explains how families can encourage independent learning by intentionally putting tools in the child’s space that fuel educational activity.
If your child is learning online, make sure that the hardware and software you use helps them learn without interruption or micro-agressions (like poor sound quality and blurry screen).
This piece on the best hardware and software for virtual school can help you figure out the best way to optimize their online learning.
If you’re using an online tutor, you can send them our best practices for online teaching to ensure they’re prepared to teach well in an online environment.
13. Curriculum matters
At Modulo, we spend a lot of time talking about curriculum. As homeschooling has grown, new tools and technologies have emerged to support it. And not all curriculum is created alike. To adequately support learning, we recommending finding a curriculum that your child loves doing, that’s mastery-based, that fits their learning modalities, that values conceptual understanding over procedural memorization - and is designed for out-of-system learning (parents helping kids learn).
A lot of parents make the mistake of choosing their friend’s favorite curriculum even if their friend’s child is completely different than their own - or choosing a curriculum that is structured around helping kids excel in school (but not necessarily learn). If you’re not sure where to start, we built a free curriculum planner that helps families choose from our directory of highly vetted curriculum, the best options for their unique learner.
14. Two toughies: Handwriting and Math
The two subjects where I’ve observed the most resistance in my twenty years of teaching is handwriting and math. Interestingly, gender seems to have an influence. it’s most often 5-7 year old boys who resist handwriting and teenage girls who resist math.
Handwriting
With handwriting, a huge variety of issues may be related. For some children, handwriting may be actually be physically painful even if they’re not able to articulate this. Sometimes getting them a stress ball to develop hand strength can be helpful. If your child is resisting handwriting, it’s a good idea to talk to your pediatrician and see if this could be related to a learning difference. Alternately, don’t rush handwriting. It’s likely your child will express an interest to learn when they’re ready and resist even more if pushed.
Math
The way math is taught in most schools does not make a lot of sense for most learners. Plus, we face centuries of cultural conditioning suggesting men are better at math and science and women are better at arts. Many parents may feel they’re “not a math person,” so it’s good to address this misconception first before spreading this false belief to your progeny.
Leading data scientist Rachel Thomas, PhD did a great talk with me last year addressing the myth about “not being a math person.” Spoiler alert: there’s no such thing as not a math person.
1-1 mastery learning makes a big impact in how children learn math because they can learn at their own pace and master concepts before moving on to the next. And their belief in themselves as mathematicians doesn’t get sidelined by a bad test score. I’ve found that finding the right math curriculum for each child for math can change a child’s confidence in math overnight. Here are some of our favorites.
15. Developmental stages matter
“Children are not small adults who can be treated as though they were, and neither are they uniformly vulnerable beings who need protection; rather they are individuals in transition whose growth into adulthood should be supported, encouraged, and facilitated.” -Vic Larcher
Your child will respond differently at different ages depending on what developmental phase they’re going through. Two-year-olds start to “misbehave” as they learn about boundaries. Five-year-olds can be very egotistical as they start to develop a sense of self separate from their parents. Six-year-olds can have a heightened sense of injustice, right and wrong. Being incorrect can shatter them emotionally.
In a nut shell, families should keep in mind that their child is not reacting to the world in the same way they are. Both cognitively and physically, they are going through changes that result in different responses to situations then we would have.
Understanding your child’s developmental stage can help you build empathy and communicate with them better.
There’s a lot of conflicting information about how to impact children’s behavior at different developmental stages and much is irrelevant to children not attending a traditional school.
This is a massive topic, but well worth exploring and simply googling your child’s age and “developmental stage” can bring great insights.
To learn more about communicating with their child with an awareness of developmental stages, we highly recommend the “How to Talk” series.
We also like the Montessori approach to understanding developmental stages.
And Jean Piaget, whose research was instrumental in making the idea that kids are not little adults more mainstream, has many wonderful books on the topic including the Psychology of the Child and Moral Judgement of the Child.
16. Get help
This is not about being a puritan who doesn’t rely on outside mentors and teachers. Ideally, your child will be exposed to many mentors besides you.
A mentor does not have to be a high-end tutor. It can be a friend, another parent, a peer, a teen or older child (sometimes a younger one!), or a supervisor at their volunteer job at the aquarium.
If your child is expressing resistance to learning with you, or if you don’t have all the time you’d like to help, by all means enlist other adults to support you!
Our guide gives advice on finding teachers and caregivers no matter your budget, including free resources.
You do you!
As any of my posts, what I’m preaching here is what I think you already know. Don’t follow my advice by the letter, just take the things that confirm your gut impulse or inspire you.
Sometimes it can be helpful to pay attention to ideas that particularly insult you:) or make you mad.
I often do this in my own life. For example, you might think it’s impossible to find time to meditate for 1 minute a day - or ask your friend to watch your child while you go for a 15 minute walk. if you If you feel resistance to any idea, consider trying it out once and going from there.
One of the fundamental problems with education today is that people are striving to build a perfect (or an adequate model) for every learner. That’s not what we’re trying to do at Modulo. At Modulo, we’re building a system that can evolve and flex for every learner. We’re here to inspire you and introduce fresh ideas, not to write a how-to pamphlet. So please take what you like, and leave the rest.
As always, the comments section is open to your advice for other families, questions and arguments!
We’d particularly love to hear success stories of moving from fights to harmony in learning relationships.
And if you tried any of the strategies here, and they worked, or didn’t, please do let us know!