How to Avoid Homeschool Burnout [Show]

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Gretchen Roe: 00:00:04.930
Welcome to The Demme Learning Show. Our mission here is to help families stay in the learning journey wherever it takes them. This bonus episode was previously recorded as a webinar and was not created with the audio listener in mind. We hope you will find value in today’s episode.

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:23.454
Hello, everyone. Welcome to this presentation about how to prevent homeschool burnout, how to avoid it. I don’t think you can. I don’t think you can avoid homeschool burnout. I think this time of year, it’s pretty ubiquitous. But my colleague, Amanda, and I are going to talk to you about some ways that you can meet it head on, address it, step around it, embrace it, all of those things. My name is Gretchen Roe, and I am the Community Relations Coordinator here at Demme Learning. I am delighted to have the opportunity to share with you all for the next little while about homeschooling, about your feelings, about what might not be working as well as you want it to, and what your plan B might be. I’m the homeschooling mom of six. My husband and I homeschooled our children for 21 years. Five of those kids are now college graduates. And the caboose in our train is a senior in high school. And I’ll let my colleague Amanda introduce herself.

Amanda Capps: 00:01:24.012
I am so thrilled to be here today with you, Gretchen. I’m a second generation homeschooler. I was homeschooled all the way through and a homeschool graduate myself. And I am currently in the trenches right alongside most of our families while homeschooling my own. I have eight children. My oldest has graduated in 2020, and then I have seven coming up behind her. Our caboose is two. [laughter] And we’re just so thrilled to be potty-trained. I cannot even tell you. [laughter] I’ve worked for Demme Learning for the past 13 years. I’ve worked in various roles, but my favorite has been customer service. I love to talk with the families and support moms and students and dads and our military families and our charter school families. I mean, we cover it all, and we try our best to support and come alongside you in your journey.

Gretchen Roe: 00:02:18.504
And we have so much to share with you today. We’ll have lots of resources for you as follow-up. So when you get this information at the conclusion of the webinar and the recording comes to you, please take some time with that content because I think you’ll find it really valuable. And we really do have a lot of things to talk about because we know where you’re coming from at this time of year. It’s January. You just probably came off a frenetic Christmas holiday break, and now you’re staring down a very long gun barrel to get to the end of your academic year. So Amanda and I have some tips to share with you, some suggestions, some things perhaps you might not have thought about. And some of those are going to be things from our personal experience. Some of them are going to be things that we have captured from colleagues as we’ve gone along. And we hope that this encourages you. The sum total of this conversation is so that at the other end of it, you feel like you have been encouraged. So Amanda, let’s get started with not everything has to get done every day. And I want you to be able to offer our attendees absolution for the ambitious schedules they created in the light of not seeing January on the horizon.

Amanda Capps: 00:03:44.719
Absolutely. So yes, I mean, I think that is a trap that any homeschool parent can fall into is just we have to do all the things. There’s just so much good curriculum. There are so many good extracurricular activities. There are co-ops. There are just all kinds of things that we can put our time and energy into. And yet, sometimes they’re not the best expenditure of our energy and our time. And so I think January is a fantastic time to just kind of pause and go, “Okay. What have we accomplished so far? Where have we gotten? And then where do we need to be in order to finish strong?” And so always, my encouragement is build around the basics. So math, reading, writing, those are your core subjects. Anything else subject-wise, your science, your history, creative writing, those types of things, those can all kind of fit around those main subjects. And so what I encourage parents a lot of times is it’s way more important about being consistent in small doses than it is maybe one stellar day in a week. So kind of get your mind kind of wrapped around like, “Let’s look at our daily schedule and at least try to get the basics consistently done and then do the others where we can kind of piece them in and they make sense to what’s going on in our lives.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:33.900
And Amanda, with that regard, I know we have talked about this several times and I do have homework assignments for you all because we have a theme going on, at least the first three weeks of the month. Amanda and I talked the first week in the month about establishing healthy habits. And if you didn’t have the opportunity to see that webinar, let me encourage you to go to domainlearning.com/blog and view that webinar because I think you’ll find that to be an encouragement. And then last week, I had the opportunity to collaborate with a colleague named Sarah Donovan. And we talked a little bit about goal setting. And we talked about how you could create goals and how you could teach your kids to begin to create goals. And sometimes we reach this point in the year and we feel like we don’t have the reins anymore. We sort of feel like the horses run off with us and I don’t have a handle on the reins. And so I’m sort of in a little bit of a panic. So I think in being able to review those two content pieces, that will all fit together with what we’re going to talk about today. Amanda, can you speak a little bit about not viewing other people’s highlight reels?

Amanda Capps: 00:06:48.139
Absolutely. I mean, let’s be real. Something our generation of homeschoolers is facing that really we haven’t dealt with in the past, or at least the generation where my mother was teaching is social media. And because of social media, we are seeing the field trips and the five-year-old that is taking Spanish and the amazing athletic performance of so-and-so’s kid. And all of these things, and yet we’re not in their homes, we’re not seeing the day-to-day and the behind-the-scenes and the fact that they are dealing with all of the same struggles, all of the same frustrations, and all of the same challenges that we are.

Gretchen Roe: 00:07:33.748
Absolutely. I often say to parents you’re sitting there looking at all these accomplishments of your homeschool friend and your kid couldn’t find his shoes for the trip to the grocery store. And you’re thinking, what’s wrong with me? And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. So we want to make sure that you recognize the fact that this is not about you. This is about the greater journey and the stress of the journey. And I’m grateful that I didn’t homeschool in the aid of a cellphone. Because I already have attention deficit disorder. And that little bing would’ve been enough to send me haring off in a crazy direction. So in that process, what might help you is to take a step back and evaluate, “Okay, what am I doing? What am I doing that I don’t have to do? What am I doing that I could rework? What am I doing that is not profitable for my part? Not profitable for my children’s heart?” And Amanda and I were just talking a few minutes ago as we prepared for the 12 o’clock bong of the clock. And if you’re feeling stressed, if you’re feeling burned out, your kids are too. And being the most ardent observer of your children will tell you where that stress is coming out. Amanda, can you talk a little bit about that? Because we talked about your eldest daughter in her senior year and how everything started closing in on her, so.

Amanda Capps: 00:09:05.955
Yeah. I think as kids are in the journey, a lot of it really just depends on the child themselves. We all probably have at least one child in the mix that maybe had some learning challenges. Or something that they really struggle with. And if they’re halfway through the year, and it’s not their favorite thing, they may be really feeling burnout and struggling as well. And we need to be aware and we need to be compassionate to that. And I think this is a really good opportunity to have a conversation with our students and say, “What’s working for you? What do you really like? What’s not? Is there something that you’re really struggling with, or that you’re frustrated about? Or are you getting enough of my time and my one-on-one? Or are you kind of feeling pushed to the back-burner right now with some other things going on?” The other thing too that I would stress is there’s so many different seasons in a homeschool family’s journey. Nothing prepared me for parenting young adults, teenagers, tweens, the middle kids, and toddlers all at the same time. And I thought that the baby years were the tough ones. The childbearing years, the adding the new baby to the family. But let me tell you, it’s exhausting because you’re up early with your littles. Typically my older children, and my young adults, and teens, they’re really hitting on all cylinders right about when I’m running out of steam at the end of the day. And they want to talk, and of course I want to be available and engaged with all of them. And so nothing really in the parenting books or even talking with other parents really prepared me for this season of, “Hey, you’ve got to do it all.” All the different age ranges.

Gretchen Roe: 00:11:08.342
Right. And you and I have often said in other presentations that we’ve done when you’re looking at where to invest your time, your time needs to be invested in the child with whom you have the least amount of time left. And that sometimes is a hard pill to swallow. Because it is exciting to teach someone to read, and to tie their shoe, and to learn to button their shirt all the way down all by themselves. But the truth of the matter is if you order your day so that your attention is first on the eldest child, the rest of them will fall in line there. Amanda you had also said in the beginning that there is an importance with consistency versus quantity. So with eight kids, how do you reach that consistency

Amanda Capps: 00:12:02.729
So I mean, it’s funny because there are certain personality types who look at a schedule and look at meal planning and they look at those things and they feel like they are overwhelming and restrictive. To me, in my life and with our family dynamic, they are liberating and freeing. They free up mental space. They free up just a lot of things that otherwise it’s always kicking around in the back of my head and I never really feel like I can fully focus on what I’m doing in the moment because I’m like, “Wait a minute, what are we doing for dinner? Where’s the laundry status? Did I pay the bills this month?” You as a mom, or dad, have so much on your plate. Keeping children alive is a really big part of that. And some days that’s all we accomplish. I mean, we might get a read-aloud done, we might get a lesson page done in math, or whatever that looks like. I think the importance here is, don’t beat yourself up over what doesn’t get done. Try to really focus on what we do. And again, having a little bit of structure to your day is not a death sentence. It’s not restrictive. It’s actually really probably going to help you model good time management skills and help you to stay on track. And it may really actually relieve some of the stress of the day-to-day of all the things you’re trying to keep up with.

Gretchen Roe: 00:13:31.141
And we’ve always encouraged parents to find someone to collaborate with in your homeschooling journey and homeschool with friends, if you will. But I’ll tell you, this is like a marriage. If one of you is a list maker and a planner, the other one is not going to be that way. So you have to learn how to learn from each other’s strengths and be content in that process when you’re working with someone who doesn’t see the world the way that you do. And that brings me to the next point I really wanted to talk to you about Amanda, because I think you mention this often in our conversations, and that is: guilt is a gift from the enemy. So how do we not feel guilty when we don’t get it all done?

Amanda Capps: 00:14:16.925
Well, I mean, my favorite, one of my favorite verses is “There is therefore now no condemnation.” So there is that. So you do have to– but as a parent, I mean, yes, you do feel the pressure. We’ve chosen a nontraditional educational route, and so I think that in and of itself adds additional pressure because usually we have either mildly supportive, or maybe unsupportive altogether, either spouses or family members or extended family, and so we do feel kind of like we’re under the microscope and being watched. And I have had that situation where the random family member is grilling my kids on facts or historical facts and trying to see if they can catch them in an error or something they don’t know, and that is a horrifying experience for the child, but it is also anxiety-producing for the parent. So again, like you said, really being careful about who your support group and who your support network is and building a good one, that is going to be invaluable to you. I feel like in a lot of ways I have an unfair advantage because I’m not coming from a traditional schooling background to begin with. And so a lot of times where I see parents really burning out and really struggling is, it’s because they’re trying to bring school home, the school experience that they have, or the picture they have in their mind of the way it should look and the way it should be with the row of neat desks and somebody at a whiteboard and teaching, and it having to be in a workbook and being know this thing that they create when the reality is so much of your day-to-day ins and outs can be geared to be learning and to be life skills and to be off a textbook page. And there’s great freedom in that as well.

Gretchen Roe: 00:16:20.913
I always find it fascinating because when we do these conversations, it’s amazing how the questions and answers just absolutely line up with what we’re talking about. And so I have two of them here. And when you have a spouse who’s not engaged, the observation here is I feel alone because my husband doesn’t really understand what’s involved. And boy, is that true? And then the same lovely friend here said, she doesn’t have any support. And I think we can both speak to the fact that my husband in most of the years that we homeschooled traveled 21 to 24 days a month, so I homeschooled by myself. And there was no support there. He would blow in and be the cool dad, and it would annoy me because I was the one trying to pick up all the pieces. And in your situation, that happens in your household, too, because your husband’s a first responder. So our advice is to find someone outside your nuclear family to support you in your journey. So can you talk a little bit more about that, Amanda?

Amanda Capps: 00:17:35.881
100%. So fortunately for me, I do have a lot of family support, but I also have close friends that are homeschooling or doing some combination of hybrid schooling. And I try to make a point at least once or twice a month to get out and have coffee and just decompress. Because I think sometimes we get isolated in our homes and in our schedules and with our kids and with everything that we need to get done. And we can start really second-guessing and questioning like, “Wait a minute, is this normal? Is this a problem? Is this something?” And so if you have that other mom and you’re going, “Hey, this is this thing that I’m dealing with with this kid and this subject, talk me down. Is this a problem? Am I overthinking this? What’s going on?” Getting someone else’s perspective, I have had more valuable insights and tidbits into my own kids sometimes from someone else that’s an outside observer that is not emotionally involved in the rearing and the day-to-day grunt work of raising kids. And those gems have been invaluable to me. The other thing, while social media can be a little bit of a problem, it can be an attention sucker, it can be one of those things that we compare and judge ourselves harshly against, it can also be a lifesaver in that it has opened up the ability to do online support groups. There are local groups of homeschoolers that create local Facebook groups and things like that that you can get in and be a part of. And while maybe you may not be able to meet face-to-face all the time or frequently, you can at least have some sort of an outlet or something you can scroll through and you can see what other parents are asking questions about, what they’re dealing with and the things that they’re encountering. And that can really be a blessing.

Gretchen Roe: 00:19:37.112
I think one of the things that is really important to recognize is know your own limits. And I’m a good chairman girl, I have no limits. I’m always beyond the limits. And in that process, yeah, that’s funny, but it really is. I created stress in my children because I had not the skill set to say, “No. I wanted you to like me. I wanted you to enjoy my company.” And it took me into my 50s to learn to say, “Thank you, no, I won’t be able to do that.” And that is a really difficult situation to find ourselves in, particularly if you don’t have an outlet. And I would encourage you, in fact, this coming year at homeschool conferences, a couple of conferences, I’m going to talk about having an exit strategy. Because right now, particularly in the middle of January, you’re sitting there feeling like school is interminable and it’s never going to end. But at some point, it does end. And I can tell you years ago, my husband fired my children. I had, in a very short period of time, been through a rather difficult diagnosis that was going to change my life. I had lost a baby, and my mother had passed away. And my husband said, that’s it. We’re sending the kids back to school. Now, the interesting part was, remember, this is the man who traveled most of the time.

Gretchen Roe: 00:21:09.531
So making that thing happen still fell to me. And I went kicking and screaming. I did not want them to go back to school. But I’m here to tell you, looking back on that period of time, that was an invaluable exercise in teaching them to value what I was doing for them. We sent two kids back to school. The idea was they were going to finish out the school year. That was my husband’s idea. I only lasted nine weeks. But in that nine weeks, it was a game changer. And maybe what you need to do is close the books, put them on the shelf, and give yourself 30 days to get back into the routine post-holiday. I know Amanda, you’ve talked about this before, and we’re actually going to share with our families a blog that you have written about how and when to take a math break. But let’s talk about take a break in a larger context. What does that look like? I know you’ve done that in your household because you school year round. So what does taking a break mean in the Capps household?

Amanda Capps: 00:22:18.499
So it really just depends again on the kid. So for some kids, I think if you pick up on some learning challenges, for example, I had a daughter at six and seven years old that we spent two years just trying to consistently recognize the alphabet. I cannot tell you how demoralizing and discouraging that is to not only myself, but that child. They know at six and seven years old that they should be able to recognize consistently the letters of their alphabet. So we did take a break and I started to research because I was like, okay, something major is going on that this is continuing to be such a challenge and a struggle. So that led to evaluation, which led to vision therapy, which made all the difference in the world. So I found out we had convergence and tracking issues that were contributing to the processing piece of her brain. And once we corrected that, and that’s the thing I think people get so they’re like, “Oh my gosh, you went two years.” Well, but here’s the deal. One, she wasn’t the only child I had. And two, you just keep thinking, “Well, if I just try this or we just do this, it’s going to click.” And so you kind of exhaust all the resources that you have, and then you kind of go, “Wait a minute, none of this is working. Okay, we’ve got to completely scrap and figure out a completely different trajectory.”

Amanda Capps: 00:23:56.836
And that can be incredibly helpful. But but what I will say is once we completed vision therapy, the leaps that that child made, we’re talking three to four grade levels. Literally, almost overnight once we had gotten that therapy under her belt. That’s invaluable. And so I hear a lot of times when customers call in and we discover that there are gaps or there are things missing in their foundation, that panic of, “Oh, no, they’re going to be behind.” But the reality is, as a homeschooler, one, I don’t believe you can ever be behind. And two, you are and you aren’t. I mean, you are for that moment in time maybe, but we can be so much more direct and efficient and consistent with our time and attention, that we can make a ground very, very quickly. And oftentimes, the kid you have on the back end of that, they can be a completely different student.

Gretchen Roe: 00:25:01.134
Right. And I think one of the things that is really important is to recognize you’re playing a very long game. And we live in a results-oriented society. I want to see– if a recipe takes longer than 30 minutes, I might not cook it because I don’t have more than 30 minutes. And so the truth of the matter is, in this recipe, you have a very long time to instill ingredients before you have a wonderful finished product. And so you have to recognize that just because it’s not working right now doesn’t mean it’s not going to work down the road. One thing that I will say as an aside is that it is extraordinarily difficult to educate a student who has an obstacle that you can’t see. And often, we will both have conversations with parents who will say, “Well, he’s just lazy,” or, “He does not like school.” And the truth is, most children are excited about learning. But if they have an obstacle to prevent them from learning, it’s up to us as the parent to figure out what that obstacle is. And I have to tell you, very often, it has to do with vision because we live in a society where we allow children to pick up digital devices at an ever earlier age. What happens is kids don’t develop peripheral vision. We don’t play the kinds of games that allow us to develop peripheral vision, pin the tail on the donkey, dropping a clothespin in the neck of a soda bottle.

Gretchen Roe: 00:26:40.153
Those kinds of things are games that aren’t played anymore and we don’t realize how they affected our kids. Kickball, you know? It used to be that I sent my kids out and said, “Come back when the street lights come on.” We don’t parent that way anymore. But do you know that playing kickball or even catching a ball with your hands requires an extraordinary amount of vision to be able to make that happen? So if you have a child who is really struggling, maybe it’s time for you to take a step back and look at that struggle because that could be adding to your burnout. Amanda, let’s talk a little bit about maybe doing something like declutter or rearrange or start over. I laughed because last week was National Clear Off Your Desk Day, and the only way my desk was going to get cleared off would be with a match. But if your homeschool has become out of kilter, that may inadvertently be adding to your stress. And so how would you be able to– what would be good advice that you would offer to a parent to be able to take a look at that and go, “Okay, I need to step back there and figure out how to make this happen”?

Amanda Capps: 00:27:57.505
Oh, yeah. So I mean, my personal oh, gosh, if you looked at my house and you saw the bookshelves and all the books, I mean, I’m a book collector. And so I have a really hard time saying no to books and always want a hard copy because that’s just how I roll. And so yes, I have to, at certain points declutter and go through things. That is a lot harder the more people you have in a given space. Before we moved into our current home, there were nine of us all living in 2,200 square feet. And it would get crazy. And it’s funny how even those small spaces look disastrous if there’s just one thing out of place. It looks like the whole house is a wreck. And those environments can be very stressful for both the parent and the student. So the children–

Gretchen Roe: 00:28:58.796
So I have to confess to you, we had seven of us– eight of us– yeah, I should count my husband. He was home now and again– in a 1,300 square feet.

Amanda Capps: 00:29:09.171
Oh yeah.

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:09.878
And that is not easy to do.

Amanda Capps: 00:29:12.691
No. No.

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:13.892
So whatever your environment is, you may be finding that you’re feeling burned out because you can’t see the forest for the trees. So it may be time to reevaluate that environment. You just got back from a fabulous field trip. You want to talk about nobody’s going to get to do your field trip four days in New York City and Phantom of the Opera to boot. But can you tell the benefits of just taking a day off, taking a field trip and going somewhere else?

Amanda Capps: 00:29:46.492
100%. Sometimes the reason that we’re feeling burnout is because we are trying to be so consistent and we’re slogging through things and sometimes we really just need a change of scenery. Picking up and going to the local library, cheap, easy, completely different environment. Finding a museum, finding a living history exhibit in your local area. I live in Northwest Arkansas, so we have a very good concentration of living history events that happen here. And so that is something that’s easy to plug into. There are theaters that offer group rates for homeschool along with traditional classrooms. And so if you can kind of have somebody that’s that point person or that point of contact in a group that can say, “Oh, well, organizing these things is my forte and it’s what I love and maybe she only has two kids” then put that on her and say, “Hey, set it up. Figure out the tickets.” And a lot of times it can be as cheap as $5 a student to go attend some of these great productions, either music or theater. There’s just so many opportunities out there. And again, I think sometimes we get the blinders on and we get very focused on what’s going on in our day-to-day and just what I like to call survival mode. I mean, we’re just all in survival mode. And yet, I think that’s been something that’s been the hardest to get back into post-pandemic because a lot of us got very isolated during that time. And I think a lot of us may be suffering from some burnout and some repercussions from that. And I don’t think that’s getting talked about very much.

Gretchen Roe: 00:31:36.731
Absolutely. And I think that really is true. And I think we have to recognize that if we’re feeling it, our children are feeling it as well. And so it would be really important for us to recognize maybe those goals we set back in September when the calendar was blank look different now. And maybe they need to be reoriented. I know I had this conversation just a week ago with a homeschool mom who was feeling absolutely overwhelmed because she had bitten off more than she could chew with a co-op and multiple extracurricular activities for her children. And in my household, I very quickly had to realize that if I was going to be the transport, my children had to be limited to one extracurricular activity. In fact, for years, I had a bumper sticker on my car that said, “If a mother’s place is in the home, why am I always in my car?” [laughter] And the truth of the matter is, that may be where you are. So it may be worthwhile to take an opportunity to reevaluate what are you doing extracurricular-wise that is preventing you from getting the academics done. Amanda, you mentioned early on reading, math–

Amanda Capps: 00:32:55.205
Writing.

Gretchen Roe: 00:32:56.348
–writing. Those things are all particularly important. And we have had conversations over the years with parents who have found a subject matter to be stressful, so they’ve avoided doing it. Let’s have a conversation about, “Avoidance is not going to make it better.” So how do you not avoid doing the thing that causes friction between you and your child?

Amanda Capps: 00:33:23.073
So I think that is another great opportunity for observation. So I think that, in that situation, we need to ask a few questions. So is it the approach? Is it the curriculum? Are we using the curriculum as it is designed to be used? I mean, I’m certainly guilty of pulling something off the shelf and just winging it and not doing my prep, and then wondering, “Why are we having such a hard time with this? This isn’t fun. I don’t enjoy it.” But I didn’t really do the work on the front end to make sure we were going to be successful on the back end. And that can be a hard pill to swallow for those of us who pride ourselves on being type A and perfectionists and having all of the answers and doing all the things and checking all the boxes. That’s in my nature. And so sometimes I have to fight against that, in my schooling experience. I don’t want to take those things and that perfectionism and that pressure into my teaching with my kids. One of the things that we talk about when we pull a subject out is, “Why are we here? Why are we doing this? What is our why?” And my kids have learned now, after repetition, that our why is, “We’re here to learn.” And sometimes learning means making mistakes and getting messy. And so as long as we are not ganging up on anyone and no one is being criticized for their lack of knowledge, we can all learn together and it can be a really fun experience. But it’s only as fun as the attitude you bring to it. And so I tell my kids very honestly there are certain things I don’t like to do. I personally cannot stand doing laundry. It is my least favorite chore and yet one of the most volumous chores we have in this household because of the number of people that live here.

Gretchen Roe: 00:35:25.044
I’ve said for years I would move to a nudist colony, except I’m always cold, so that won’t work. [laughter]

Amanda Capps: 00:35:30.640
Right? Right? Absolutely. But it’s funny. I have a daughter that really loves it. She really likes washing and drying and sorting clothes. And I’m like, “Amen, sister. If it’s all good with you, then–” She doesn’t like doing dishes. I would rather do dishes than laundry. So there are wonderfully brilliant opportunities for trade-off. Some of my children love to cook; some of my children prefer cleaning up. I mean, so look for ways that you can maximize eyes. That’s the other thing that I notice a lot with homeschool families today. There’s so much pressure on mom to do all and be all. And I’m like, “You can’t.” There is physically not enough of me to go around to do everything for everyone. And so if you want to foster independence, and creativity, and teach them good time management, and teach them life skills, I mean, those are all things where they’re going to have to take some responsibility and step up, and I can’t get in the way of that. And if I do, I’m doing my kids and myself a disservice, and I’m burning myself out.

Gretchen Roe: 00:36:45.031
Right. And you know what? We do need a place to download. We need a place to be able to say, “Man, today just did not go the way I planned.” But I have to tell you, in most instances, that is not the person with whom you are married. If you’re a homeschool dad, that is not your wife. If you are a homeschool mom, that is not your husband. And the reason that I say that is because as women, we’re mostly looking for someone to just listen and allow us to process. And our husbands are looking for, “How can I fix this?” And so we’re at cross purposes from the very beginning. If you’re a man, you’re trying to figure out what is the solution to this and your wife is trying to nurture you. And in neither instance is that a profitable situation. So let me encourage you to find someone with whom you can have a five-minute download if you need to have that in order to be able to get back in the game. My husband said his job during our homeschool years was to put me back in the game, but I very quickly learned when he was gone for days at a time, I could not tell him that we had had an abysmal homeschool day because in his mind, that meant it didn’t work.

Gretchen Roe: 00:38:08.794
And that isn’t the truth. It did work. It worked marvelously well. But I also want to say to you, sometimes you have to make a different decision. And if you are finding that you are in the– as my German father would say, The mittendrin.” In the middle of the middle and it’s not working, don’t feel guilty for making a different decision. There are many myriad of ways for us to educate our children in this day and age. Don’t be sucked into the story that you are the only way your kids are going to get educated. Because education happens and a lot of it has to do with the attitude you as the parent set in the household. Amanda, I can’t believe we’re 40 minutes into the conversation. We haven’t talked a single question that parents have asked. I loved this question, is, how do you keep a positive learning attitude when life itself is already so full of change and difficult? And I think that is really the definition of life in 2023. We have a 24/7 news cycle. It never stops. It never ends. And you need to be the gatekeeper of your heart. So when we talk a little bit about what do you do to keep positive in your household? Because it is always busy, so.

Amanda Capps: 00:39:41.739
Yeah. I think a lot of that, yeah, is where you’re going for your encouragement. Having that close-knit group of girls who you can commiserate over egg prices [laughter] or just how ridiculously fast your kid outgrew their last pair of shoes. I mean, can we just say boys are just, if they don’t destroy it, they grow out of it in five minutes. I mean, it just is a vicious cycle and something that I’m kind of right in the middle of having four boys myself. And I think a lot of it is I remember my mom would read poetry to us, and she would take the time to brew a pot of hot tea and get us all gathered around. And it was funny because I was telling her the other day about just how great those memories were and how much I enjoyed that. And she said, “Oh, I didn’t do that for y’all. I did not do that.” She said, “I did the tea because it would get you all still and quiet. But she said, “I did that poetry because it breathed life into me.” It gave me something out of the grind and out of the everyday. And it was beautiful and it was culture. And it created imagination and pictures.

Amanda Capps: 00:41:05.762
And I mean, and so sometimes the little ones were coloring or drawing what they thought the poem looked like. And we were learning good vocabulary and we were drinking tea and staying warm and being together. And yet that was really cultivating her development and her joy and her love of just kind of getting out of the everyday rut of the way life can be when you’re a homeschool family. And yes, life doesn’t stop. It really doesn’t. Things are always going to be coming at you from the outside, but I think they can really deflect well when we have a really well-centered and a well-balanced nucleus.

Gretchen Roe: 00:41:55.005
And one of the things that a lot of our registrants said, I think I should count because we had an inordinate number of grandparents raise their hand and say they’re homeschooling their grandchildren. And how on earth do we make that happen? And one of the things I think that is exceedingly frustrating is here’s your job to impart that academic experience, but they’re not your children. And so you may have conflict or miscommunication that arises from their parents wanting something from the student that you’re not delivering. And so one of the things to be able to do to avoid that homeschool burnout is to be very clear in your expectations. And I know Amanda, you have talked with parents about this. We’ve discussed this. Sometimes whomever the educator is has to set the educational parameter. And I think sometimes that’s really hard. So if you’re finding– it’s almost as though you’re saying to someone, you’re in a boat. The boat’s on the ocean. There are winds blowing but I don’t want you to pull any of the sail. And you have to have the ability to pull the sails, to trim the ship, and write the course.

Gretchen Roe: 00:43:19.534
So if you have some sort of collaborative academic experience going on where you’re the grandparent or you’re the parent who has a grandparent educating your children, let me encourage you to be very intentional about outlining those intentions so that you can be relieved of the stress of, “Qell, I’m responsible, but I don’t have the authority.” And that makes a tremendous amount of difference. Amanda, I wonder if you would also talk a little bit about what it’s like in an environment when we set our kids up not to finish what they start. As homeschoolers, sometimes it’s easy for us to move the goalpost. And one of the things that Sarah Donovan and I talked about frequently last week is not moving the goalposts, but reevaluating the goal. So can you talk about how that has worked a little bit in your homeschool environment?

Amanda Capps: 00:44:28.323
Absolutely. It’s interesting. A couple of my middle kids are a couple of years apart in age, but they’re really on the same level academically. And so part of my challenge with them has been my son is a little bit advanced and my daughter’s a little bit behind and kind of finding that happy medium for both of them and yet making it a little bit more robust for the older child so that she’s not feeling like she’s being held back. Those are all really an opportunity to just kind of look at, “Okay, what are our strengths? What are our weaknesses? What are our learning strengths? What are our weaknesses?” It’s interesting. She’s way more auditory and my son is completely visual. So that means if I’m teaching both of them at the same time, I have to take both of those things into consideration because she’s going to really hone in on what I’m saying and he’s going to really hone in on what I’m doing. And sometimes there can be miscommunication because he’s not really listening to me. He’s watching. And sometimes she’s not really watching. She’s just listening. And so I think recognizing those things and doing what we can.

Amanda Capps: 00:45:50.163
You were talking about earlier, I’m circling back around, we don’t always have a way of catering to exactly what they need. I mean, they can’t not do math because they don’t like math. They can’t not write because writing is fatiguing and arduous and their motor skills are behind or those types of things. It’s like you can’t just say, “Okay, well, you just don’t have to do that.” That would be a massive negligence on my part. Now, does that mean I can’t have my son write a sentence or two and then I can take over and he can be going with the ideas and I can keep up with how they’re coming out? 100%. So I think you just have to look for those ways to have them do enough to where they’re not getting frustrated and they’re checking out on you. But also you can’t just say, “Well, we’re just going to do all of this for you and I’m going to spoon feed you or hand hold the whole thing,” and then you’re not really getting the benefit or really doing any of the learning.

Gretchen Roe: 00:46:59.229
Particularly with your example about writing. I wish I’d had this in my life when I was teaching my kids creative writing because it’s the hardest thing we ask a child to do. If you think about it, you’d say, “Hey, here’s a pencil. I want you to give me six sentences on the tea party we had last week.” And then all of a sudden they’re thinking, “Ikay, what are the words that I need to use? How do I spell them? How do I punctuate it? I’m not even comfortable sitting on my chair.” So to be able to start with a draft that is, “I want you to tell me about the tea party we had last week,” and open up an email, use your phone as a recording device. Apple has become annoyingly efficient at recording. I forget sometimes to turn the mic off. And then it’s amazing the things I have said out loud. But being able to use that to create your first draft also helps you stay stay in the game. And then you have a draft that you can have as an editorial experience, and that makes all the difference in the world. Amanda, can you talk about not being continually in the process of Vivi? And I know that in your household, you could be going dawn to way after dusk. But there comes a point in time where you have to stop what you’re doing, stop doing the laundry, stop planning the next meal, and rest. And so can we talk a little bit intentionally about the act of rest?

Amanda Capps: 00:48:49.079
Yeah, I think that’s really– especially in our society and in our culture today, we kind of throw rest out with the, like, “I’ll do that when I retire, or I’ll do that when the kids are raised, or I’ll do that–” it’s at this far-off point. “At some point, I’m going to get to that.” [laughter] And I mean, if I have learned anything in my years mothering, one of the most incredible times in a child’s life is when they’re brand new. [laughter] You don’t know which end is up. No one is sleeping, but you just have this precious time where you’re maybe establishing maybe establishing breastfeeding and you’re learning to adjust to life with this new little person. And if I can encourage parents to do one thing and do it well, it’s to learn how to carve out moments of rest in your day. I had a great example in that my mom always– whether we were napping age or not, there was a quiet time. There was a certain period of time in every single day where everybody separated. Everybody had their own thing to do in their own space, and we didn’t disturb anyone else. And we learned the power of a recharge or a decompression or whatever that meant to that person or that child. And I think that is something in our society that is so often overlooked or lost or not given the value that it deserves.

Gretchen Roe: 00:50:27.611
Absolutely. And I think one of the things that I had to do, because as long as I homeschooled, almost– well, 15 out of the 21 years that I homeschooled, I ran a business out of my house as well. So I wasn’t always available to my children. I had to be able to manage my time. And sometimes, what happens is when we’re at home, we tend to let the process of homeschooling consume all the waking hours. And I had to become very intentional to say to my kids, “I’m available to you from 8:00 to 3:00. And after 3 o’clock, if you have fiddled around and haven’t managed your time, my time is devoted somewhere else. So I am no longer available to you.” And that’s a hard conversation. Particularly if you have let that happen for a period of time, reeling that back in is really tough. Another thing we see from homeschool moms is the desire to meet each child at their learning best, and sometimes that turns us into the pretzel version of mom. And I know Lisa Chimento, our colleague, has said, your child’s first employer will not be interested in how they learn. So can you talk a little bit about that, Amanda?

Amanda Capps: 00:51:53.793
100%. So interestingly enough, yes, my husband is a first responder. He’s also dyslexic and ADD, which I I find fascinating that that particular field tends to draw [laughter] those types of personalities, which is why they do so well in a high-pressured emergency situation. They handle them flawlessly because they are so focused when they have that adrenaline hit. It’s quite fascinating actually. But there’s also some very important backend things. They have to write reports and they have to include details I mean because these are all things that get documented and will come back on them should, heaven forbid, anything go wrong or a misdiagnosis or any type of that thing. And so it’s been interesting to have his input with our kids when somebody is like, “Oh, well, I won’t have to do that,” or, “I’ll figure out a way around.” And he’s like, “There is no way around it. You have to do–” and thankfully, there is the technology now. I mean he does a lot of voice-to-text in his reports and in his phone. And those tools help him.

Amanda Capps: 00:53:10.353
And we use tools in our educational process to prop up and to help our children sometimes. But they can’t become a crutch. They can’t become something that takes away the responsibility that they still have to do the work. And you’re 100% correct. I mean you can tell an employer, “Hey, this is something I really– it’s not my strength. It’s not my favorite thing to do. I have all these strengths.” But sometimes you’re going to have to use the areas that you’re not very strong in no matter what. And you need to be able to be prepared. And you need to be in a place mentally and emotionally where that doesn’t stress you out so bad that you can’t do it. You can’t perform the tasks that are needed. So the home environment is the best environment that you have to begin cultivating those skills and those resiliencies in your kids.

Gretchen Roe: 00:54:10.580
Absolutely. And I think one of the other things that happens in that process when we’re trying to cultivate those skills and resiliencies, particularly because I have attention deficit, because I married a man who has attention deficit, our kids did not get out of this equation without it. And I have a couple of kids who are just attention deficit and a couple of kids who are like a golf ball hit full swing in a tile bathroom. They are all over the place all the time. And interestingly enough, what we had to do is figure out how to get a balance between physicality and emotional engagement, substantive emotional engagement with what they had to do academically. Kids don’t get enough exercise in this day and age. So if you’ve got that golf ball in a tile bathroom kid who’s bouncing off the walls, you have a couple of those in your household, not ponytails – but do you send them outside and make them lap around the house three times because that was my solution? When I saw the fidget start to come off the rails– and by the way, I didn’t get my attention deficit diagnosis until I was 55. So I didn’t know that I had ADD. I was an only child of German stock and so, “You’ll do it because I said so.” But learning to be able to have that kid blow off some steam and then come back is hugely important. So, Amanda, can you just very briefly– because I know parents who’ve joined us before should know the answer to this question, but can you talk about how long attention span your child has because we might find parents who find themselves burned out because they’re trying to do too much with a child who is done.

Amanda Capps: 00:56:06.829
Yeah. And this is where I really get frustrated with the formal education system because they don’t acknowledge this. They don’t really work around this. And so I find so much in the homeschool arena that– so a child’s attention span, a normal child. This is not a child with attention deficit. This is not a child with ADD or attention issues. This is a child, a normal, healthy, regular kid. Their attention span is their age plus two to three minutes. That is not a lot of time, especially when they’re itty-bitty and they’re in those really formative years. And so when you have that awareness, which that is what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to bring awareness to parents because sometimes I think we get so focused on all the things that have to be done and all the boxes that have to be checked, we maybe lose that awareness or we aren’t even aware of an awareness that we need to be aware of. And so this is so important because if you’re trying to make a 10-year-old kid sit for 30 minutes or 45 minutes at a time on a subject, no wonder you’re frustrated and they’re frustrated. Nobody’s having fun. And so we need to look at ways, and that’s why I said consistency over quantity is so critically important in the homeschool demographic. We have to be really laser-focused. And so if we know that going into it, don’t sit there and expect them to have an attention span while you’re pulling stuff together. You need to be ready when they are sitting down, they’re focused, and all eyes are on you, you’re ready to go.

Amanda Capps: 00:57:59.585
And that is going to help you. It’s going to help them. Also, giving them the opportunity. I have seen people color clocks. They have different colors for different time sections. I have seen people do duplows to connect time. It is so important. Time management is not something that a kid is born with. It’s not something an adult is born with. This is something they learn, they pick up from their environment. And so if you can start doing some very basic things along those lines to give them that awareness of what time is ticking by– I mean, you would have been able to convince my kids that cleaning the kitchen takes an hour and a half every time. It is going to take an hour and a half and it is going to be the most boring and drudgerous and horrific hour and a half of their life. And the reality is we set a timer and when everybody was staying focused and we were doing the job, it took 15 minutes. It took 15 minutes to clear the table, put the food away, load the dishwasher, do the hand washing dishes and wipe down the counters and sweep the floor. 15 minutes. That was spread amongst four or five kids. But still, it took 15 minutes. And so when you see those things start to dawn on your kids of like, wait a minute, wow, they have so much more power and control over, okay, this doesn’t have to, they’ll be less likely to drag their feet or give you pushback or talk back in those situations. If it’s like, hey, come on, like if we just focus, and then we can move on to the next thing. It’s really, really important.

Gretchen Roe: 00:59:37.638
Amanda, I can’t believe we’ve come to the top of the hour, and now we’re at the end of time here as far as this conversation is concerned, because there’s so many more things that we could talk about. In closing, what would be your closing words for our families?

Amanda Capps: 00:59:56.182
I think if I could go back– I’m 41 now. And if I could go back to my 25-year-old self when I was beginning my homeschool journey with my first daughter, I think I would tell myself, “You’re putting way more on yourself than you need to. You need to breathe a lot more. You need to stop and smell the roses a lot more.” Learning is one of those things that it can either be their greatest asset or it can be the most dreaded part of their day. And the power of either of those experiences is in your hands. And my encouragement would be to pour into them, but also really make sure that you’re pouring into yourself. Pick up a book that is just a pleasure read and it isn’t something about education or marriage or something that you need to fix. Those all have their place and they’re valuable, but sometimes you just need a good story, something to spark your imagination and your creativity. Nature walks are a fantastic way to get a day that is going into the fiery dumpster fast back on track. Everybody put your shoes on, everybody grab a notebook, put the baby in the stroller, and go for a 10 or 15-minute walk. Everybody gets fresh air, everybody gets sunshine, and everybody gets to observe. And we are going to write down the things that we see. And then we’re going to come home and we may write a paper about it. We might talk about it. You can take those things. If there’s one thing that I feel like my experience has just been stellar about, it’s that I didn’t ever come into education with the preconceived notion it has to be found in a book or a worksheet. Learning is the environment. Learning is all around you. So look for the ways to be aware and tap into that, and you will be great.

Gretchen Roe: 01:02:06.837
Absolutely. It’s been our pleasure to spend this time with you for the last hour. We have a plethora of resources. Now I’m going to use a big fat vocabulary word for my homeschooling days. My kids were required to come to the dinner table every night with a word they encountered in their reading that they did not know. And we ended up with giant vocabularies from that. So what I want you to do is to understand that at Demme Learning, we have a huge amount of resources for you. One of those resources is our customer service team. If you have run up against challenges with math or reading or compositional writing, reach out to us. Give us a call. 888-854-6284. Live chat us. Send us an email to customerservice@demmelearning.com. We’re here to come along beside you in the journey for a period of time and help you move forward in your academic experience. We do these webinars every week. They’re all available in our blog and they’re there for you to be able to find them and access them. Again, go to demmelearning.com/blog and you can find all of those webinars. You can find an enormous amount of information in our blog itself. You’re going to get a couple of follow-up blogs that we wrote with regard to homeschool burnout. Lots of good information there. And we would hope that you would utilize those resources.

Gretchen Roe: 01:03:37.324
And let us say also in closing that if you’re having a challenge and if you’re feeling this way, you have a homeschool friend who feels this way as well. It’s okay. We will absolve you the guilt of feeling like you have to keep it inside. Disclose it to someone else because you’d be amazed at what power there is in being able to share your thoughts with someone who understands your journey. Thank you all so much for joining Amanda and I today. We’re looking forward to having you join us for conversations in the future. We have lots of great things on tap for you. So check out our upcoming events at demmelearning.com/events. And we hope you’ll join us again soon. Thanks, everyone, for being with us today. Take care. Bye-bye.

Gretchen Roe: 01:04:24.451
This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. Thanks for joining us. You can access the show notes and watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show, or go on our YouTube channel. Be sure to rate, review, follow, or subscribe wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it.

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