Plan Their Happiness
not only their academics...
So you’ve got your homeschool planner in front of you. You’re looking at the stack of materials you bought for the coming school year. You’ve got a calculator on the table so you can figure out what pace you must work through all those pages to wind up at the end of the year with completed programs.
Homeschool planning: calendar and program are merged into a sequence of allotted materials for 180 days for each child.
Is that what you envision?
Before you go to the trouble, let me ask you a question:
In all your planning, have you also planned for your child’s happiness?
The biggest problem I see in homeschool families is that the parent has a clear idea of what must get done while the child has a clear idea of what they love to do. When those two don’t match, a power struggle follows.
We’re tempted to lead with power over energy—requiring our kids to fall in line.
“This is the plan! Get with the program. Sometimes you have to do what you don’t want to do.”
Or we can lead with power with energy—giving our kids the chance to fall in love.
Putting in the effort to make sure the child cares about what they’re learning.
A “power with” approach means that the needs of both people in the relationship matter. It means that you partner with your child to ensure both aspects of the homeschooling life are happening:
Your child’s interests and learning style get prioritized
Your academic agenda is implemented
What we’ve learned in both scientific research and through experience is that kids who care, learn. Kids who don’t care may plow through the material dutifully, but they may also not retain as much. When they feel especially put upon, they become cranky. I bet you’ve seen that. <wink>
Why does my child’s happiness matter?
We may as well ask why happiness matters to anyone!
The experience of well being is essential to life on planet earth. Go too long without feeling good about your life and you will slide into a depression.
Sometimes we forget that our children are made of the same stuff as we are. They need to feel good about their day-to-day lives, just like we do.
I remember one mom saying to me that she told her child when he grew up, he’d have to do all the things he won’t like—working for a living, driving to work in traffic, paying taxes, putting a roof over the head of his family. He needed to do what he didn’t like now to prepare for that adult life.
The son replied: “Well then maybe I shouldn’t grow up!”
GREAT POINT!
If your adult life is devoid of joy and pleasure and only models dreary responsibility, you’re sending the wrong message. You’re telling your kids that the hard work starts now and never ends—in fact, only gets worse! Kids, at that point, just want to Peter Pan their days away, staving off that life sentence of weariness as long as they possibly can!
Happiness is…
Even if you’re giving me the side eye right now and saying that happiness is unreliable, I want to remind you of the power of happiness when you feel it. Think back to the last time you felt truly well. What were you doing?
Were you at a concert?
Were you having sex?
Were you making a delicious meal?
Were you solving a 1000 piece puzzle?
Were you running a marathon (working hard but feeling proud of yourself)?
Being happy isn’t the same as running amok or indulging useless activities. Sometimes happiness is accompanied by profound effort and commitment. In all cases, happiness is personally felt—a welling up of a good feeling about your life.
I’ve watched kids work all day to beat a level in a video game, even fighting through frustration, because of the happiness gaming gives them. We feel like our efforts are worthwhile when we feel happy.
Happiness is the experience of well being—that life makes sense and is worth living.
Do it for the kids
This year, before you plan the activities that you value in your homeschool, pick at least one humdinger of a joy-producer for each child.
Book it (like tickets to a play or a trip to the zoo or a night at the observatory). Put it on the calendar. If it’s something ongoing like horseback riding lessons or playing cards at the local card shop or skiing with the homeschool group every week in February, put that recurring event on the calendar, too.
You might plan for their happiness in another way—purchasing the LEGO Death Star kit to work on with you each day until it’s built, or procuring an easel and oil paints for your daughter, or building a library of comic books for the two kids who love to read and discuss them.
These happiness-producers are sacred times that you will not skip if the math homework isn’t done or the baby gets the flu (you’ll find a caregiver).
These are lanterns of joy waiting in the distance as an offering of happiness to your children.
When you talk about what you will do together in the coming year, lead with the plans you have made that match their best desires. Show them where you have already booked the activities and then, stick to them.
Before you go over which math book they will follow, talk about how you developed their happiness plan. Ask them if there is anything they want to add that you didn’t think of. Put that on the calendar as well.
Happiness helps them trust you
Imagine one day when math is getting hard and tedious being able to say, “In just two weeks, we’re going to the zoo!” or “I’m so glad we got to build LEGO this morning. We’ll get to again tomorrow. Sorry math feels hard right now.”
When you invest in your child’s happiness, you build trust. They believe you when you say, “I think you’ll like this writing idea” or “How about we play this grammar game?”
They know that how they feel matters to you and is not inconvenient to your goals.
Value their happiness and build a reciprocal relationship. Check in regularly to be sure they don’t hate their life. They deserve to have a great childhood! And your years as a parent go better with happy people in your care.
I have a tool called the Intuitive Homeschool Planning Tool that helps you plan your homeschool for the coming year with these principles in mind.
It’s different than anything you’ve ever used. Trust me!
You can purchase it for only $25.00.
Intuitive Homeschool Planning Tool
Hard yes on this! One thing that I've been exploring (and should really get around to writing about at some point) is the practice of a "checklist for flourishing" for my teens: what are the activities that bring them flow, relationship, achievement, meaning, and just plain fun? (This is a modified version of psychologist Martin Seligman's "PERMA" model of well-being.) I'd like to experiment with planning our homeschooling weeks around these items, and seeing how their academic activity can even play a role in helping them experience some of this.
Love this! My daughter wasn’t super excited about the history curriculum we worked through this past year, so I asked her what aspect of history she’d like to learn about this coming year and she said, “Theater History!” I’ve been piecing together resources for the last couple of months and just booked tickets to a bilingual play at a Hispanic Theater for mid-October, with close friends of ours. We are both looking forward to our upcoming studies!