How Parents Should ‘Manage’ Their Kids Now
Get out of the way.
Everybody’s kids are home now, and this website has been chock-full of suggestions for what to do with them.
But in the craze to schedule, color-code, and ‘gamify’ every aspect of kids’ lives, parents have missed something.
I’m 16 now, still a kid myself, and here’s what my 3 and a half weeks of solitude have looked like so far:
- Worry about the virus more than is healthy. Read Medium. Play video games.
- Reach the point where playing video games is no longer fun. Start planning some projects. Worry a little less about the virus.
- Start actually working on those projects (a second draft of a novel, some Medium work, and start online school, though that takes nowhere near as much of my time as regular school did.
- Keep going. I’ve settled into enough of a routine by now that I usually have time for a few hours of leisure every day, but that may change as work ramps up. We’ll see.
See what happened here?
If my parents had been listening to all those frantic ‘schedule your kid’ articles that are going up on here left and right, I’d have been bound to a schedule by the end of my (admittedly basically work-free) week 1, and then I’d never have had the opportunity to start my own projects, which (no offense, parents) are way more interesting to me than anything they could’ve come up with.
My four weeks so far have been completely self-directed, and loosely modeled on the principles of unschooling, and so far, I think it’s been really successful.
Unschooling, for those unfamiliar, is a term coined by educator John Holt to describe a form of homeschooling where the child is given a great degree of freedom to explore the topics they want to. The philosophy is that the best way to learn about the world is by participating in it.
Now, obviously, what we’re doing now isn’t quite unschooling. I still have a school, and there’s not much of a world to participate in right now thanks to the virus.
But there are some interesting parallels, and I think this offers a great opportunity for kids to bring a few of the best aspects of unschooling into their quarantined lives.
Slowing down a little
I can understand how a parent might be concerned about this idea. If they’re not managing things, how will their child ever start working? Won’t they fall behind and—
Okay, listen. We just need to slow down a little.
No, literally. Part of the appeal of unschooling is getting away from the frantic pace of schools.
You’re not learning less—you’re just learning about one or two subjects a day, not seven. There’s been all this talk of ‘deep focus’ lately in the self-help articles—why do you think you need that, but your kids will do fine without it?
But that’s a huge shift. And that change takes some time to get used to, something that unschoolers refer to as ‘deschooling’—the process of going from being schooled to, well, not.
One unschooling thinker, Grace Llewellyn, recommends at least a week of nothing academic—which is about what I took for myself, when allowed to do it naturally without nagging from parents.
So parents, when I tell you to slow down a little, please, listen.
Because it’ll help your kids develop time and project management skills, because it’ll let them realize what they really want to be doing, and because—
Video games are not interesting forever
I mean, it can seem that way if your kid spends 2 hours a day on them, taking up all their free time besides school. But when they’re in this lockdown space, playing 8 hours a day for a week, the realization does come: this isn’t what I want to do with my entire life. (Yes, really—it happened to me.)
If parents let their kids realize that, their interest in video games (and any other distraction of that sort, like social media, YouTube, etc) will naturally diminish.
If parents instead pull them away from it, interfering with that process, they won’t be able to have that realization, and rather than being motivated to do something more productive, they’ll be motivated to get back to whatever distraction you pulled them away from.
So far, this may not sound too great. Letting your kids play video games all day? But it’s what happens after kids get bored of video games that’s amazing.
Kids get to explore their passions
This, for me, is one of the great things about this form of unschooling. Your academic requirements are already being met by your school, but it’s suddenly taking half as much time, if not even less, out of your days!
We have it even better than regular unschoolers right now; we don’t have to worry about doing anything academic at all with our self-directed education, since our schools have that part covered. Instead, we can pursue our interests.
What are those? I don’t know.
I don’t know you, or your kids, and there’s certainly not one project that’ll fit everyone. For me, it’s writing—a novel, Medium posts, whatever. For somebody else it might be painting, or carpentry, or computer programming. Who knows?
There’s one key thing, though, that parents NEED to remember.
It’s not your project. It’s their project.
What does that mean? It means that you stay out of the way. You don’t force them to work on it for however many hours a day, you don’t do any of that. If they’re looking for something to do, maybe suggest that they start a project, and give them some ideas, but don’t force anything upon them.
Because the idea behind unschooling is trusting your kids. Micromanagement is the exact opposite of that.
And even if they don’t get a ton done—what’s the worst that can happen? Their academic needs are being met, this project, whatever it is, is just extra. This can be a time for exploring self-directedness—but you have to let it be that.
If you, as a parent, can’t stop getting in the way, it won’t be self-directed, and your child won’t be able to potentially reap the rewards.
The likely scenario is that your kid could discover an internal drive to do something, not because somebody else wants them to, but because they enjoy doing it.
They can keep those passions going and then, now that they’ve realized that they are actually bored of video games/social media/YouTube, they might turn to something more productive rather than passively sitting and consuming content during every available break.
Plus, learning to manage your own time has its benefits too. When your kid leaves the house—for college, for the workplace, for whatever—you’re not going to be there to manage their time for them.
Making mistakes is a part of learning. If they make those mistakes now, rather than when it could cost them a job, that’s all the better.
So rather than getting caught up in the drive to ‘manage’ your children, try letting them manage themselves for a change. It worked for me.
