I have this working hypothesis that Covid is going to end mommy wars. I’m working on a whole episode about this, but basically, my theory is that when moms from all socioeconomic levels and different cultures experience a crisis together, we come together. We empathize. We realize that we’re all doing our best. We realize it doesn’t always look pretty. We give each other grace. 

One of many skirmishes of the mommy wars has been education, specifically home school vs. public school, with side skirmishes about charter schools and private schools. We moms typically plant our stakes in the ground and defend our decision.

Well, doesn’t that all seem silly now! Spring of 2020 threw us all in the homeschool arena, even those of us like me, who swore we would never homeschool. Granted, this was not real home school. For most of us it was a weird zoomy, remote-school patchwork of homeschool and public school. And yet—even though we struggled mightily through the end of the school year—I got glimpses of some of the perks of home school that made me realize those home-schooling moms weren’t so crazy after all. 

This summer, I struggled along with so many other moms in America, first figuring out what our options even were in our specific districts–up to the last possible moment–and then deciding among those options. Some of us, especially moms who have to go in to work and cannot work from home, but who do not have the option to send kids to school, really had no good choices. 

 Although it took a while for our school district and our individual schools to decide what our options were, I am privileged to have had the full spectrum of choices, because the incidence of Covid-19 is still low in our town. I could find my own curriculum and homeschool my kids. I could send my four youngest to school five days a week, wearing masks and following strict safety protocols. I could send them to a neighborhood school to do hybrid school two days a week and remote school the other three days. They could all attend their same schools fully remote. I felt overwhelmed by all the options. 

Then I had a mind-blowing realization. These weren’t new options at all. At least in my school district, they’ve all been here all along—I just chose to ignore them. 

Ultimately, we decided to send four of my kids to their charter school full-time with masks and cohorts, while my high school freshman is on a hybrid schedule. So this is our situation—for now. We are fully aware that the situation could change at any moment. I was nervous about this hybrid thing, especially since this particular son did not adjust well to remote school this Spring at all. But it turns out that it’s been amazing–so much so that it might even be the ideal arrangement for all of my kids.

Most importantly, mixing things up a bit has opened me up to all the other options. I used to utterly dismiss any thought of homeschooling my kids. That might work for some families, but I had too many strong personalities, too much other stuff to do, and just too many kids to homeschool. 

But now that I’ve gotten a little taste of some of the benefits of homeschooling, talked to many moms who choose to homeschool for different reasons, met their decidedly not-weird kids, and learned just how many different ways there are to homeschool these days, with so many amazing resources, I’ve taken my stake out of the ground and opened my mind. I might even choose to do it in some form in the future.

And the best part is, I see other moms opening their minds as well. For a while, my Instagram was full of memes about supporting moms who made every different school decision. I saw very little criticism, a lot of encouragement, and compassion and understanding for individual circumstances. I saw veteran homeschool moms come out of the woodwork to offer support and help to new homeschool moms. I saw families, rich and poor, banding together in co-ops to support each other so they could both work and teach their kids. More than ever, we are all in this together. 

It’s a beautiful thing. 

This is not an article about the nitty gritty of homeschooling, though I do plan to do a more comprehensive episode or maybe even a multi-part series about that in the future. This is an article for first-time homeschoolers and remote schoolers. I’m going to split it into two parts: help and hope. 

We’ll start by troubleshooting some of the challenges of teaching your kids at home—including how to get your own work done while the kids are all home. Then we’ll play Pollyanna and talk about some of the positive things about teaching your kids at home. The goal here is to focus on what you’re gaining this year rather than what you’re missing out on—to replace some of your fear and dread with hope and maybe even excitement. I am not trying to minimize that fear and dread at all. Those are very understandable emotions to be having right now. This is hard! But after interviewing the moms I talked to for this episode, I felt so much more hopeful and optimistic, and I wanted to bottle that feeling up for you as well.   

Help

So first, the help part. Since I’m obviously not an expert on home school or remote school, I called three moms with experience to help me: my childhood friend, Jackie Johnson, who homeschools her daughter; Jodi Chaffee, a homeschooling mom of four; and Ceri Payne, who has a unique perspective on remote school. Not only did Ceri help her three daughters with remote school this spring, but before Covid, she was a pioneer in remote teaching, in a program for kids with special needs. Plus, she’s one of the most organized people I know. Ceri is now a life coach for moms, with both individual and group coaching. You can find her at organizedlife.coach on the web and on Instagram.

She started our conversation with some great advice: 

“To set yourself up for the most success, determine first what you want to accomplish, and what you hope to help your child accomplish this year. Is it to help her do every assignment, or just to do her best and not give up? Is it to learn one grade level of material, or fostering independence? There are so many things that go into an academic year. Figure out the outcomes for your family.

To do that, you could consider such question as ‘What do I want to focus on for this school year? What do I want to make important for me and my child this year? What do I want to feel this year? That’s a big one. We get to choose our feelings and many of us aren’t feeling the way we would hope to feel this year. What can you do to help this year be less stressful for everyone?

Once you decide what you want to foster this year, keep that in mind when you’re working on school with your kids and helping them. You might just be helping them to feel more safe and more successful and have less anxiety—more so than learning—and that is totally ok.”

Your objectives don’t have to be ambitious here. If survival is your goal, focus on survival. Make it through every day. And remember that choosing one priority means another one has to give. For us this spring it was the housekeeping. The kids were all home messing it up all day, and I was busy helping them with their work. I knew I could mobilize them, come up with a good system and we could get it done, but I deliberately chose to make learning the priority and just live in a mess for a while. I also prioritized on a micro level with each kid. One cried every time she had to do a video conference with her class. So I talked to the teacher and we checked in in other ways. One absolutely refused to do his spelling work. I did a little research and came to the conclusion that some people (read: this child) are just not natural spellers. And he’ll do just fine in this world without it. So I eliminated the battle of spelling from our relationship and suddenly he was getting the rest of his work done without a fuss.

In this vein, Dana, whom I follow on Instagram @dana_dailyinspiration, is focusing this year on helping her kids love learning. She wrote, “I’m in charge here! I create and maintain the enthusiasm, curiosity, and magic around here.” I love the idea that although academics are obviously important, we could choose to prioritize other important things like building relationships with our kids, fostering curiosity, or even learning life skills.

So obviously one of the biggest challenges to teaching your kids at home is finding time for your own work. And there’s more work than ever. This spring, I couldn’t figure out how people were finding time to do puzzles and organize their houses, and sharing ideas about how to fight boredom during quarantine. I had never been busier! I did not need ideas to fill my time.  

Ceri has been focusing on helping working moms figure out how to work and manage their kids learning. Here’s one of her suggestions about how to get some work done. 

“Create a time in your house for independent learning. This is the time when you would have the opportunity to get work done for your job as well. So set aside a few times during the day where you will be available to the child if they have questions for you, but then the other part of the time, they’re independent learning. Then honor that time you set for your child to really build trust and confidence in your child. They know they can count on you, they know you’ll be there to answer those questions, and that really will diffuse some of that anxiety.”

Jodi Chafee has always homeschooled her four children, who currently range in age from six to eleven. Jodi’s daily schedule includes independent time for her kids every afternoon, but she gives them specific guidelines for that time—what they call the four Ps:

1. Practice. They pick something to practice, whether it’s a language, skill, instrument or something else, like cooking.

2. Personal Study. This is usually when they do things like worksheets or independent reading.

3. Projects. This can be pretty loose, and sometimes overlaps with practice. Jodi likes to encourage the kids to do something that really allows them to focus and get lost in the activity.

4. Play. After they’ve checked off the other three things, they have free play.

Jodi is a big advocate of downtime. She recommends the book, “The Self-Driven Child,” by William Stixrud. He talks about the importance of downtime to allow kids to daydream and meditate and process what they’re learning.

Jodi says, “When kids are allowed to choose what they do and then they become engrossed in it, they learn how to enter that state of flow where it’s just challenging enough to inspire them and not so hard they shut down. My kids could build LEGOS or play in the sand box all day. And sometimes I let them. They’re learning to build and problem solve and create.”

Jodi hosts a podcast called the Family Culture Movement and has created some great resources, including a family success toolkit, on her web site. she empowers families to live more intentionally, cultivate their vision and values, and prepare their children to grow into their life’s purpose and mission.

You can sign up for a free membership and access to the toolkit at homeandfamilyculture.com.

As you’re figuring out what your home learning schedule will look like, you’ll have to figure out your own comfort level with flexibility and structure. Here’s Ceri again. 

“While a flexible schedule is a perk of at-home learning for sure, I think it’s really wise to consider creating a school schedule to help you stay on a schedule in your home. And it doesn’t have to be rigorous or planned every 20 minutes, but setting a block of time, or a couple of blocks, with starting and ending times for school could be your baseline. Of course do whatever works for your family, but what ever you decide, make sure you honor that commitment.”

This is great advice—if this kind of structure works for you. Meagan Cheney prefers thinking of her homeschool day in terms of rhythms. They set goals that they want to accomplish each day, but they don’t stick to a strict timetable. Each activity flow into the next so they don’t feel rushed or anxious.  

Jackie Johnson also follows a more relaxed schedule with her eleven-year-old daughter. They do an hour and a half to two hours of sit-down school work, on the computer or with pen to paper. But they do more hands-on learning throughout the whole day.

She says, “Every hour is a learning experience, whether you’re at a museum, the store, or even watching tv.”

 Jodi starts her homeschool day with breakfast and a few morning chores and then three to four hours of family learning time. Then lunch and down time. The last part of her schedule solves another problem: the mess that kids create when they’re home all day.

After a full day of learning and playing, the house can get pretty crazy. So every evening before dinner she calls the family together to “restore balance.” They clean up all the messes they’ve made throughout the day. Jodi started this because in the past, she followed them around the house trying to get them to clean everything up as they went.

Now she lets them make messes during they day, but they know they have to clean up by the end. She says, “I found that when I was wandering around looking at all the messes and feeling anxious that made them anxious too.” 

I love that she calls it restoring balance instead of cleanup time. It makes that job more about achieving a feeling instead of completing a task. If you can’t let it go for the whole day, you could have another pickup time at lunchtime. 

Another challenge to teaching at home is figuring out where to do it. I’ve seen some pretty creative spaces that families have created on Instagram, but your school space doesn’t have to be fancy or pretty to work.

Ceri suggests that you create a designated learning area, even if it’s just a corner of your living room, so everyone will take learning more seriously. She suggests you minimize as many distractions as you can, and even ask your kids what is distracting them to help you make the space as conducive to learning as possible.

That said, don’t beat yourself up over distractions in your home. Last week, Family Looking Up released a fabulous podcast episode called “Combating Homeschool Overwhelm with Jen Bradley.” It had so much fantastic advice—definitely worth a listen—but one of the best things Jen said in the whole episode is that school has distractions too, just different distractions. In fact, school probably has even more distractions than a home with little siblings. So don’t stress yourself out trying to create the perfect learning environment. 

And your learning environment doesn’t have to be inside at all. One of the best parts about my family’s remote school experience this spring is when I decided that we’d take Charlotte’s Web for a hike. Almost every day we’d hit the trails behind our house and stop to read at benches along the way. It was lovely. 

That leads us to one of my very favorite tips from Jackie—adapt to your children’s unique learning styles. Had she not started homeschooling, for example, she never would have known that her daughter learns math by singing and dancing:

“My first instinct was to tell her to stop doing it, but then I realized she was doing what I asked, she was just singing and dancing while doing it. She wouldn’t be able to do that in a classroom with 24 kids. She really wouldn’t. A teacher would tell her to stop being disruptive and sit down, and I would get it. I almost did the same thing in our own kitchen.”

 But Jackie soon realized that she had to teach her daughter, Claire, as her own person and not just like “little Jackie.” Jackie didn’t get up and dance around as a kid. She sat down and got her work done. Claire loves fantasy, Jackie loves reading the classics. She’s learned to love their differences and loves figuring out how to help Claire learn in her own way.

When Ceri’s girls started remote school this spring, Ceri quickly noticed that her youngest daughter wanted to get it over as quickly as possible. That made for a stressful day or two, but then she had free time for the rest of the work, and even more importantly, she was free from anxiety.

My second grader got very overwhelmed when she saw her weekly to do list, so I quickly learned to make it off limits. I would access the to do list and click on assignments for her so she could only see the task at hand, not the whole list. Then when she was done, I’d show her the whole list so she could see how much she had accomplished. 

Meagan Cheney, who Instagrams @athomewithmeagan, finds that letting kids go at their own pace is the best part of homeschool. She says, “Struggling with a subject? Slow down so that they can really take it in. It might take longer than the four weeks the school would have given, that’s ok! They will catch up eventually. Likewise, if they are really clicking with a subject I let them zoom through. I’ve found that making them stay at the slower pace of the curriculum will only lead to a bored child that is more likely to rebel against doing schoolwork at all.” 

Another great piece of advice from Jodi is to model a love for learning—by learning in front of your kids. For example, she loves to reads books and write in her journal about what she reads. “I’m learning that by doing those things I’m able to enjoy my life more because I’m doing something I’m passionate about and I’m not feeling guilty that I’m taking time away from teaching my kids. This is part of it!”

And here’s another breath of fresh air: you don’t have to do it all alone. You can ask for help. Especially if you’re doing remote school, this should be a partnership between parents and teachers. The teachers want your child to succeed too. If something just isn’t working for your child, they’ll probably be willing to work with you to find a solution.

You can also look to friends and family for help. My friend Whitney Thomas, who is one of my main advisors for this podcast, is really good at asking for help. During the first round of distance learning, she enlisted the help of her in-laws to read with her kids, even though she lives in Hawaii and they live on the mainland. They’d buy the books their grandkids were reading and take turns reading pages over video chat. This year she has hired a teenage babysitter to help her with home school. This is a great resource for moms with young kids—teenagers who are learning from home have more time on their hands and would love to make a buck.

I knew my one hybrid learner would struggle with independent learning, so I organized a small study group with two friends. They trade off whose house they study at on their at-home days. Now he looks forward to remote school because he gets to hang out with his friends. And they’re surprisingly efficient at getting everything done. 

Hope

So now let’s talk about some of the reasons you may end up really loving this at-home learning experiment. I’ll have Jackie start it off, because, like many of you, she was a reluctant homeschooler. I’ve known Jackie since we were teeny tiny. We actually went to the same public elementary school, a grade apart. She loved public school and assumed her daughter would do the same. When her husband suggested they home school their daughter, she was not on board. She was intimidated at the idea of being responsible for Claire’s education, and it sounded like a whole lot of work. Plus, she really enjoyed public school herself.

Jackie initially started her daughter in public kindergarten, but she hated it. Jackie went into the classroom for a couple of weeks to try and help her adjust, but every day was a battle. So she decided to give homeschool a try, and to her surprise, she loved it.

“I loved teaching kindergarten. I loved first grade and teaching her how to read. Whenever I feel bad about how I’m doing as a homeschooling mom, I think, ‘She reads because of me!”

Ceri and Jackie agree that the biggest advantages of homeschool are flexibility and customization. Another advantage Ceri sees is the ability to develop other talents, since kids have so much more time to take other lessons like music or athletics.

My friend Sharolyn Lindsay initially started homeschooling her kids because she hated the rushed mornings getting her kids to the bus stop on time. Their mornings were frantic. There was always a diaper explosion or missing shoe right as they were trying to get out the door. She’d find herself yelling at them all morning, and then drop them off at school and say “I love you!” She wondered which message they were really getting.

Then the bus wouldn’t bring them home until 4:45 (it wasn’t much faster if I picked them up), and by the time they did homework and ate dinner it was time for bed. By the time her oldest two were about to start third and second grade, she needed a change. She really missed her kids and she was tired of sending them away for the happiest part of the day. 

Jodi started homeschooling primarily because of an experience before she even had kids, watching her sister homeschool during another national crisis—9-11. While so many kids were locked down in their schools, she was teaching her kids what was happening and helping them know they were safe. When Jodi saw that, she knew she wanted that for her family too—not just in moments of crisis, but all the time. She also loves being able to choose what curriculum and values to teach her children.  

That ability to choose what to teach your kids—untethered by traditional grade levels—is next level homeschooling. Talking to Jodi made me realize I need to do more research and then do a multi-episode series about this new world that is opening up to me—it’s so fascinating. So I’ll start working on that. 

Another thing Jodi loves about homeschool is letting the kids’ curiosity lead their learning. They’ve explored birds and gardening and all sorts of wonderful subjects together.

And finally, the biggest advantage, for Jackie is the gift of time with her daughter. This time she gets to spend with Claire has really come into focus in this past year. Last fall, Jackie got pneumonia and ended up in the hospital for two weeks on a ventilator. This was especially scary because Jackie has muscular dystrophy so she is at higher risk for things like pneumonia and, of course, Covid. They are being especially careful and safe during this pandemic.

Listening to Jackie and Jodi and other homeschool veterans makes homeschooling sound so great. But don’t beat yourself up if it’s just not going great for you. Even these veterans have challenges. It’s hard! Don’t feel bad if you plan on this being a one and done year of homeschooling, and then you do a happy dance as you send them back to public school. Homeschooling is not the right choice for everyone!

But before you give up on the idea entirely, remember that Covid homeschool is not real homeschool. Even for moms who have always homeschooled, this is a hard time to do it, with so many public places closed and all the other restrictions.

And after this crazy pandemic, after we’ve all walked a mile or two, uphill both ways, in each other’s shiny new school sneakers, let’s just agree to drop judgements about the educational decisions other families make. Let’s remember the great reasons to home school and the great reasons to send our kids to school. Then when we have all of our options back, let’s celebrate the fact that we have options and support each other–however we choose to educate our kids.