In a pride-filled moment, I mentally adjusted my homeschooling mom’s teacher hat. After seven years in this game, I know how to play. My kids are the students, I’m the teacher, and my job is to teach them, correct their mistakes, and show them how to do things right the first time.
If they balk or complain, my job is to crack down and let them know who the teacher is and who the student is.
I’d already learned that script years ago, when we studied phonics. Their phonics manual had a set daily script with flashcards, hands-on games, oral exercises, written practice, and spelling practice. All I had to do was pull out that day’s materials and work our way through the lesson. If the lesson didn’t click the first time, we just repeated it or relied upon the daily review to help the concept click. The weekly test helped me gauge what the kids knew and didn’t know.
Suddenly, we’re in middle school. The textbooks no longer have scripts. With preteens, the parenting no longer has a script, either. The mom who can change a diaper on the seat of any car, so discreetly nurse a baby in a sling while shopping that even her husband doesn’t observe it, and manage 15 high-energy kids on a field trip, is suddenly at a loss. Sometimes it feels as though parenting older kids causes my I.Q. to drop 5 points per month. On bad days, it can feel like I’m losing 10 I.Q. points in a single hour.
Fashion emergencies can explode into family wars. If the skirt’s not too high, then the neckline’s too low. Then there are the t-shirts. Or rather the t-shirt sayings. One saying I didn’t even “get” until I Googled the phrase and discovered what it meant. And what about the t-shirt length? A girl’s t-shirt can be 6 inches shorter than a boy’s shirt in the exact same size in the same department store. My definition of dress-up clothes for a nice event does not include camouflage anything. Don’t ask to borrow someone’s thongs because they are now called flip-flops, and thongs go places we don’t discuss.
I go exhausted from the fashion war into the essay war. The kids’ language books listed the steps to writing a good essay. Math problems have steps, so I figured the kids would follow the steps, and the essay would magically appear like the sum at the end of an equation. First step: an outline and thesis.
But one thing was missing from my essay equation: my daughter’s cooperation. I sat down with her, just as I sat with those phonics lessons years ago, put on my teacher’s hat and was ready to begin, but my every attempt to work with her, to show her the “right” way to write, failed. It didn’t just fail, but exploded into a clash of wills. She wanted to write her essay her way — not my way. The harder I pushed, the harder she pushed back.
Finally in frustration, I called a mentor mom, one whose daughters are older than mine and who has traveled this undiscovered country before me. “What do I do?”
“Back off. Let her do it her way. See what she puts together and take it from there.”
So I did. The next week, she asked for my help: How could her essay be better organized?
Out of desperation, I changed tactics. Our kitchen table writing exercises had become a battle with ground gained and lost. The problem with that battleground is sometimes the child’s work or the child’s heart is the real loser.
Maybe we needed neutral ground on which to tackle this essay. So we went, just the two of us, to a bakery/coffee shop. I always enjoyed writing in restaurants, and maybe she would too. First we enjoyed scones and fancy coffee and then pulled out the instrument of torment: her essay.
For an hour, between bites of scones and sips of Earl Grey tea and mocha latte, I helped her reorganize her essay. Some stuff was thrown by the wayside, and we added more details here and there. We worked on that dreaded thesis statement and outline to make sure it made sense.
The best part was we didn’t have a single fight. I suddenly discovered she had some good ideas to put in her essay and just needed to polish them a little. When we had argued at home, I had been so intent on winning the argument and putting her in her place that I didn’t listen to her good ideas.
We can’t afford to go out to eat whenever she has a writing assignment. However, I learned from our breakfast-out writing that I need a new teacher’s hat. The old script needed changing. For the older kids, I need to transition more into the role of a guide. Instead of sitting across from each other, we need to sit beside each other and work together.
When we parent, the kids aren’t the only ones who grow. And when we school them, we often learn far more than we teach.
Mary Biever is a homeschooling mother of two who publishes encouragement articles and runs Encouragement Workshops For Today's Families.
This article was adapted from one of her columns.
