Kids In Charge!

There I was in September… a homeschool ninja in under 6 weeks… (jk!)… My boys were practicing their math and english language arts skills daily, and we began venturing out into San Diego for added knowledge. I was bookmarking webpages for visitor information, writing up detailed schedules of what we would do each day outside of our surfing and academic work. I had the BEST laid plans for the best field trips! Well, we all know what happens to the “best laid plans”… If you read my previous Field Trip Flops blog, you know that my fab plans died a quick death with each “Can we go home now!?” whine, “Why do we have to do this?!” plea, and “This is BORING!” wail. After a few weeks of nagging my boys to get through ‘just one more exhibit’ followed by drives home embroiled with supreme disappointment, I quit my job as educational cruise director and turned the planning over to my 4th and 7th grade boys. Here’s all about how that went in Oceanside and now New York City…

PARENTING BOOK INSPIRATION

At the same time my well-planned excursions melted down, I was reading a phenomenal parenting book called How To Raise An Adult by Julie Lithcott-Haims, (True confessions: I have an obsession with parenting books. This will not be the first or the last one I reference in my blogs! I somehow think that if I read enough of them and translate nuggets from each one, I just might reduce the overall cost my kids will have to pay for therapy in their adult years for all the random damage I do to their psyches in their current childhood. 😉 The overall theme of Julie Lithcott-Haims’ book centers on the importance of the development of life skills and self-efficacy, nurtured through unstructured play in the early years and agency and independence in the older years.

I felt so validated hearing Julie’s wise words permeate my brain through Audible; she reinforced that I was doing the right things for life skill development, particularly through the routines we developed for cooking and cleaning and more. Our days at the beach with endless digging and hunting of hermit crabs qualified for her recommended endless amount of outdoor, unstructured play. Following the ill-reception of my well-planned excursions, I realized it was time to get my boys more engaged with the agency and self-efficacy pieces Julie shared, so they could help me out, and I could be less stressed out. I knew my boys needed LESS planning, structuring, nagging, negotiating, and overall controlling on my part (because I just NEED this homeschool stuff to go super well?!) and MORE independence — more choice, voice, and utlimately more BUY-IN into our day to day activities, with the right amount of guidance and much more overall JOY. Earlier this summer, I attempted to let my boys make all the decisions about their days without enough support and guidance, and it backfired. Then, as we began homeschooling in the early fall, I swung the pendulum too far the other way and ended up micro-managing their schedules by the minute (interestingly, that’s not too different from what conventional schools do to keep students under their thumb…hmmm….). We needed to meet in the middle and work together to create day to day experiences we would all enjoy, from which we would all benefit, full of memories that would last a lifetime.

EARLY ATTEMPTS AT AGENCY

Upon this decision to put my boys in charge, we had two weeks before leaving Oceanside. To avoid spending those precious days nagging, negotiating, or arguing, we came up with a plan together that we all liked. For the 5 days in each school week, we’d each be responsible for leading the planning and executing of at least one day. Who was responsible for which weekdays would vary. We agreed that no one could argue, fuss, or complain about what someone plans for “their day”. The rule is that we do our best to be open-minded and enjoy the experience that person has planned. Maybe I don’t LOVE the idea of going to a trampoline park, but I will keep my mind open to having fun, and who knows what kind of learning will sneak in there? We’ll probably make great memories and have a lot of fun! Maybe they won’t love yet another museum, but they can learn to be respectful and enjoy that I am enjoying it. They can stay open-minded to learning and experiencing new experiences that are important to a loved one. Isn’t that an important skill for adult relationships after all? We were already collaborating on our ground rules and on our way to success, and that was a huge comfort.

We agreed that the boys would complete their skills practice at home before we would do anything else since we had all learned that it’s much harder to concentrate when exhausted in the afternoon. If they wanted to plan a day out, it didn’t necessarily have to be a place with amazing amounts of historical, scientific, or artistic learning; it simply had to be somewhere the person planning it WANTED to go, and that person would have to own all of the details around it. As part of their daily “reading” skills practice, the boys would spend time on the web figuring out what they want to do for “their days”. They needed to figure out details like: hours of operation, how to get there, ticket prices, whether or not outside food would be allowed, what we would do for lunch, and more. With this arrangement, I was satisfied that they would develop a unique and valuable type of research skills and the ability to read basic informational text via the internet. I was also satisfied that for at least one or two days each week, I’d have the chance to expose them to historical, scientific, artistic, and other learning opportunities that I felt were important, crossing my fingers that they just might actually like it or something would stick. 

FIRST DAYS OF KIDS IN CHARGE

Emotionally scarred from our educational outings, my boys insisted right off the bat that they wanted to JUST STAY HOME. Really?! We were far from our permanent home with so much opportunity surrounding us, and they just want to be home?! Well, honestly, that did sound quite relaxing – no driving 45 minutes to San Diego, ticket purchases, or fusses around parking and museum exhibits- so I agreed! We learned very quickly that planning to “just stay at home” would require as much detail as planning to go out, so that it didn’t turn into another one of those days when the homeschool work would drag on forever or the boys would start to negotiate for screen time. We overcame that pretty easily, thank goodness.

A favorite typical day at home consisted of completing work followed by a couple hours of surfing, grilling some lunch, playing cards, drawing, practicing magic tricks, or playing Craps.

After board games and such, we’d bike to the climbing gym for a couple hours, then head home to cook dinner and enjoy some family TV time. (We got really good at keeping to our commitment that screens for entertainment like the Xbox and YouTube would only be used on the weekends). Now that we are a few weeks past our time in Oceanside, these simple days “just at home” are some of the happiest memories of our time there!

FUN OUTINGS

On one occasion, Cole decided he wanted to see if there was a par cour place in Oceanside (think American Ninja Warrior if you don’t know what that is), so off to an internet search he went with my help. Sure enough, he found something nearby and so dictated to me the information required of the table in this document based on what he discovered. He had to call to find out some of the information, and I had him do the talking, which was a really valuable experience for him. Everyone had fun at the par cour place: the boys got a ton of exercise, I enjoyed listening to another parenting book on Audible while I watched them, and we had no tension for the entire day!

Cole and Tanner enjoyed setting up and following a schedule created solely by them. Instead of me always being the one to corral them and inform them about what to do next all the time, all I had to do was say to the leader of the day things like, “So, how are we doing with the schedule? Are we on time, or are you planning to make some adjustments? Do we need to move quicker to be on time, or does it not matter that much?” Harkening back to How To Raise An Adult, I knew that by having to answer questions like this, they would be developing important life habits and skills, ones they don’t necessarily teach explicitly in school. They would ask, “Hey, where’d the schedule on the clipboard go?” and proceed to consult what they had set out for their plan and ensure that everyone else was moving along as needed. Though Tanner wasn’t switching from class to class within the walls of a local middle school, he was learning the importance of having to honor the flow of a day in order to accomplish what is needed. It was really neat to watch both of the boys make game time decisions about how they would adjust their schedule based on how the day was flowing – a super important life skill, in my opinion. For example, if Cole had planned to surf in the afternoon, but the waves were awesome first thing in the morning, he’d go to his planned schedule on our clipboard and make the adjustments.

We went on for a couple weeks like this – the kids alternatiing between planning and executing the days, and me planning an outing or two that would be at least in part educational. Some days were more elaborate than others. Tanner planned one day for us to enjoy the San Diego Zoo, another where he wanted to explore the local RV dealership to see what all the latest models looked like, and another to the iFly indoor skydiving facility (which also doubled as a great celebration for their accomplishments in completing math units!). Cole planned for us to take a surprise family trip to Disneyland (with Dave’s encouragement, of course) after great success planning on another occasion to go to Legoland with his buddy who was in town for an extended weekend. Overall, I really wanted to see and do so much more that was more formally educational during our time in San Diego, but for the purposes of family and homeschool sanity, I had to let it go, and that was honestly a little hard for me. I rationalized to myself that we’d have so much educational stuff to do and explore in New York City, it would all balance out. Now looking back at all of our pictures, I’m thinking the family time was much more valuable than our museum time in San Diego’s Balboa Park or any other learning I could have shoved down their throat for that matter.

NEW YORK CITY; NEW DYNAMICS

Leaving Oceanside was hard for us, as you know from my last blog, but I was eager to be out and about in Manhattan and expose my boys to so many amazing things. The boys enjoyed planning “their days” during our first couple weeks living in Manhattan. I had organized all of the things we might want to do (based on a lot of online research) into a handy list arragned by area of town, but the boys just wanted to have fun and so picked things that they either found themselves on the internet or appealed to them from the list. Our first week was a blast! After completing their school skills in the morning, off we went, in reasonably warm and sunny weather (upper 40s to 50s) to have the fun the boys planned. One of our first days was Cole’s trip to the Lego store. Ice skating in Bryant Park planned by Cole was super memorable because we spent SO many hours skating (until it got dark!) after we checked out the main branch of the NY Public Library. Tanner planned a day going to Dylan’s Candy Bar, Petco, and the playground in Union Square, then getting snacks at Trader Joe’s. On another day they played basketball in the nearby park, then planned to go to Kmart to get holiday lights to put up around the windows of our Airbnb condo. A fourth day, they planned to go to the movies. Tanner was interested in cooking the type of blue crab that is available on the east coast, so he planned for us to head to Chinatown to get blue crabs from the seafood market and then come home and cook them based on a recipe he found online. Another time he explored cooking chestnuts he saw roasting on one of the street carts!

SOFT SKILLS

Anytime we leave our neighborhood for an outing, I leave it up to the boys to figure out ALL of the details for how to get where they want to go and how to get home. They need to figure out which subway station to go to, which subway to take, how to get the ticket from the vending machine if needed, whether or not we are waiting on the correct platform, and which way to walk once we get out of the station. Sometimes I lag way behind them, so they are essentially on their own. We had a pretty significant 30 minute detour when Cole chose the wrong way, but that’s what this journey is all about – taking the time to develop the life skills using their own agency with some guidance. I’m loving it!

Some folks get concerned about the “social skills” kids will have access to when homeschooling – when it comes to engaging with adults in all types of roles, we’ve had no shortage of practicing making requests, being kind, speaking audibly enough to be heard, making ourselves clear, and using manners; I leave it up to the boys to buy items they want and do all the talking to any cashiers and vendors we come across. There’s been no shortage of random strangers asking Cole about his hair on the subway – I guess it’s pretty obvious that we just came from surfing in CA. To provide opportunity for more social skills, we even connected with a local NYC Tweens & Teens Homeschool group and were able to attend an outing with them. The tour of the Cooper-Hewitt was a little long-winded for my boys’ preference, but they practiced that great skill called “patience” during the tour and then got to build with some of the other children after the museum tour.

FUN WITH VISITORS

During our second week, I chose for us to go to the Asia Society (after all, my boys are part Japanese, so I thought this might be important) with minimal whining. The experience was most certainly not their favorite, so I was proud of Tanner and Cole for tuffing it out. Cole’s best friend and his family came to visit later that week, so we had fun spending tourist time around midtown with them, and I got an awesome dose of much needed girl time. With visitors in town, we didn’t need to be so vigilant about “my day” or “your day”, and it was fun to merge into more collaboration together with our friends about our different activities around town.

JUST CHILLIN’

Each time following our visitors’ departure, the boys would need some downtime, and it was interesting to see them recognize that. They would again plan for a few days simply hanging out at home, doing school work at a leisurely pace and grabbing their favorite $0.99 pizza each day. Some days we enjoyed working from a local coffee shop, others in hotel lobbies (our favorite being the 14th floor lobby of the Hotel Indigo with fantastic views of the Lower East Side), and in our condo on other days.

It’s been fun engaging their preferences for “their days” as well as mine. We’ve evolved into almost co-planning the time to work for all of us, and I’m looking forward to more during our last few weeks in Manhattan. More to come soon about our “family time” in the big apple…

🙂 Carolyn