Camp Stuck-at-Home: Get To Know Their Story

This is part 5 of as many installments as I can write while I try to navigate my business and family life during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Home schooling is no joke. I believe that wholeheartedly, just from watching my friends try to tackle it with their school-age children. Last week was total chaos on the home-schooling front. Resources were flying back and forth on social media, every virtual learning company and some that hadn’t existed before last week were hustling to provide platforms and services to schools and families, and teachers were convening online to try to transfer curriculum to the digital space.

It’s settling down a little bit this week, maybe. What has struck me is how hard so many parents are trying to be the teacher to their child or children. In the process, many are finding a new appreciation for how hard teaching can be and a newfound appreciation for those that teach.

I think its time to give yourself a huge high five, take a long, slow breath, and shift gears. A great article came out a couple of days ago: Now Is The Perfect Time To Lower The Parenting Bar. In it, the author challenges us to stop performing parenting. There are so many roles we play as a parent, many of them highly orchestrated and scripted, from soccer mom, to classroom helper, to queen of bedtime or king of story time. And now, many parents are feeling this intense pressure to add teacher to their roles. This is part of parenting, for sure, but there is another kind of parenting that can get lost in the performance. 

Alison Gopnik, calls it gardener parenting. It’s providing a safe and secure base from which your child can explore the world, get dirty, make mistakes, and come back to you for a bit more nurturing. And then go back out to do it again.

Yes, structure matters. I wrote about it a few days ago. Keeping pace with classroom studies is important. But, what we have in front of us during this unprecedented time period, is an incredible amount of informal time. This is magic time for relationship building.

The breaks you plan into your child’s day are a kind of informal time. However, what I’m talking about is the kind of time that you and your children can spend together that is unstructured, not timebound, and connecting.  I’m an activities guy, so I salute the incredible creative events, experiences and interactions that are happening all over the world.

What I’m championing here is carving out some bigger blocks of time to truly hang out, on equal terms. 

Soon after I published Vital Connections, two years ago this week, I read a review by an old and dear friend from college. He was an engineer by training and admitted in the review that he was not by nature drawn to a book about the power of relationship to impact young people. What he wrote was “I know my story of my kid’s lives, but I don’t know their stories.”

This forced time that we are experiencing offers a unique opportunity to explore family member stories in ways that rarely happen. So:

• As you’re prepping lesson plans and activity instructions, consider what it would be like to carve out big blocks of time to get to know each other better through playful and engaging mediums such as music. Take turns picking a song to listen to and explaining why you like that song so much. 
• Consider asking your children: What is your favorite thing to do with me? – and then just doing it with them for as long as they want.
• Pick a board game or card game and make time to play it every day for at least an hour. 
• Look at photos together of your lives and take turns asking and answering curious questions about what you see in them.
• Create a photo album of your life together, inviting each family member to select their 10 favorite photos. Then, ask your children why they selected certain photos and let them ask the same of you.
• Ask them how they are experiencing everything that is going on right now. Then, just listen.

We need each other to navigate this terrible road we are on right now. The most powerful protective factor we can provide for each other is relationship. 

I hope that when we emerge from this surreal experience of social distancing and quarantines, that we may be able to say that, not only did we help our children keep pace with their academics, but that we truly know their stories better- not just our story about them, but their story about themselves.