Charlotte Mason’s 7 Keys to Developing Self-Motivated Children [Show]

[music]

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:04.840
Welcome, everyone, to The Demme Learning Show. My name is Gretchen Roe, and it’s my very, very great pleasure to have the opportunity to speak today with Jeannie Fulbright. I’m going to let Jeannie introduce herself in just a moment, but just a couple of housekeeping details for you all. I am monitoring the Q&A, so if you have questions as we go along, please remember that we’re here because you asked us to be here, so we want to make sure that we make this relevant for you. And so many of you were so interested in what Jeannie is going to talk about today. I’m anxious for us to get started. So, Jeannie, how about I let you introduce yourself?

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:00:42.718
OK. Well, I am a veteran homeschool mom like Gretchen, and all four of my children went to– they were all homeschooled. They all went to the University of Georgia on scholarship, and they all graduated, which is the most wonderful part about going to college: that you actually finish. [laughter] And three of my children graduated with computer science degrees. I have two boys and one– my youngest daughter are computer– they’re software engineers is, I guess, the terminology they use. And one of them graduated with a journalism degree specializing in photojournalism, and she was the youngest photo editor hired by CNN when she was, I think, 23. So she worked for CNN until she had her baby, and now she’s a stay-at-home mom, and I’m a grandma. She was living in DC at the time when she had her baby, and she basically told me one day, after two months of being a mom, she said, “We’re moving back to Atlanta.” So it was probably a week later, they arrived on our doorstep, and we found them a place to live, and they’ve been thriving ever since, so it’s been really wonderful.

Gretchen Roe: 00:02:00.817
Yeah, is that the cute, adorable little one that you get to interact with in some of our conversations?

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:02:06.220
Yes, yeah, yeah, he’s adorable, so it’s so fun. And so that’s my family and who I am. I also am the author of Apologia’s Elementary Science Curriculum, which I started writing because there was nothing available to teach my children the way they learned. And I have four children, and they all learn differently, so I had to combine a methodology of education, which was the Charlotte Mason methodology, which I had been trained in. I went through a four-day seminar and just basically got Charlotte Mason by fire hose and started implementing it in my homeschool. And then I had to write my own science curriculum, which then Apologia found, and they’ve been publishing my books ever since. Also, when my last child graduated from high school, I decided to start my own publishing company to start– I could start focusing on creating more things that I wish I would have had as a homeschool mom, and so at my website, jeanniefulbright.com, you can find the curriculum and tools that I’m creating for you because they’re things that I needed when I was homeschooling.

Gretchen Roe: 00:03:19.441
All right, so we decided that we were going to talk about seven things that Charlotte Mason teaches that allow us to create independence in our students. And I loved the conversation we had about this last week, and so now I’m looking for what kind of awesome information can you share? Where do you want to begin?

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:03:40.893
Well, I think it’s important to understand that independent learning requires self-motivation. And so really, one of our primary roles as educators of our children is to help them begin to take over the reins and be self-motivated to educate themselves. And so it’s about self-education, but it’s also about self-motivation. And really, to define what self-motivation is, it’s really the force that basically keeps us pushing forward, and it’s like an internal drive that helps us to move forward, to achieve, to produce, to develop skills, to grow in knowledge, and to keep moving forward even when maybe it’s not so fun.

Gretchen Roe: 00:04:33.062
And I really like that, that to keep moving when it’s really not so fun. That’s a very adult concept. But if we can–

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:04:39.754
Yes.

Gretchen Roe: 00:04:39.947
–instill that in our kids, then it makes that transition to adulthood all the more easy as it comes along. And sometimes I think it’s as hard for us as moms as it is for them because the roles change. And we didn’t get full disclosure, did we, how different–

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:04:58.586
No.

Gretchen Roe: 00:04:59.206
–[crosstalk] parent to adult kids?

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:05:01.197
Completely. Completely. And I just have done– I’ve read a lot of research and there has been– what’s interesting is the way that our education system works and the way that a lot of homeschool moms come into the homeschool world is they’re modeling that a lot of the way the education system works. They’re trying to sort of create their own environment but really based on that model, and the problem is is that model doesn’t work. It actually does the opposite of helping children to become self-motivated, and this has been shown over and over again through the research and neurological studies on children and motivation.

Gretchen Roe: 00:05:50.259
I thought it was interesting when we spoke last week that you said that children are born with an internal drive, but that is often driven out of them by the age of seven. Can you talk a little more about that?

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:06:03.037
Yeah. So this research comes from an author and researcher William Strixrud, and he wrote a book called The Self-Driven Child. He speaks around the country on helping parents allow their get their teen motivated. And he’s not speaking to homeschoolers, so we actually as homeschoolers have a better opportunity to help our children meet this need, this need to continue their innate desire for motivation. But the research shows that all children– well, not all, but most all children have a innate natural curiosity. And you see this when you see your four year old asking questions why, why is this. When they’re asking why the lights change at the intersection, they want to know because they care.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:06:51.568
And guess what? Children have a natural curiosity, a natural innate desire to know because they care. And they found through the research that this natural desire to learn, this natural self-motivation is what it is, it completely drops off after the age of seven. And what’s been happening since the age of seven, and William Strixrud believes that through the research, through a lot of neurological studies and data, that it’s because of children do not have autonomy. And autonomy, he says, is built– this is what he says. Autonomy is built into our wiring in the same way as hunger or thirst. When we lack this basic need, we experience decreased motivation, or the motivation that we have becomes fear-based where we say, “Oh, I’d better do this or else.” And William Strixrud maintains that you cannot become a self-driven person if you don’t have a sense that your life is your own, and the entire way that they have structured the education system– and it wasn’t always this way. This started in the early 1900s, 1910 around when the industrialists needed workers for their factories. They structured a school system which would train children to be good workers in their factories. And it was not designed to allow children to have autonomy in the gaining of knowledge. And essentially, when adults are fully in charge of a child’s life and their education and every aspect of their life and their schedule from morning till afternoon plus evening with all the homework they have, actually what happens is their internal motivation or innate natural internal motivation system is stymied.

Gretchen Roe: 00:08:42.380
And so I find that so interesting but it makes such logical sense. I have vivid memories of two of my daughters. The first full sentence that came flying out of their mouths were I do it myself. And they were probably two. And so instilling that or reconnecting with that in our children will be tremendously important.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:09:06.374
Yeah. And I think we have to become convinced. And some of the convincing evidence is that their neurological research shows why autonomy is important. They found that when a person has a healthy sense of control over their lives, over their schedule, over their decisions, over their choices, over what’s going on in their life, that their prefrontal cortex is in charge and the amygdala is subordinate. And the prefrontal cortex is where you have your wise thinking, your decision-making, essentially, correct thinking, logical thinking that’s in charge when you’re in control of your lives. And they found that when people lose control over their lives and their education and their decisions, that somebody else is in charge of everything, that what happens is the amygdala comes into control and the prefrontal cortex becomes subordinate. And when the amygdala, which is our threat detection system becomes in control, we begin to feel anxious, we begin to feel overwhelmed, we get discouraged, and we get unmotivated. And that’s what happens to children when we are totally in control of every aspect of their education. And Charlotte Mason taught this, and it’s such an important thing for us to embrace, to believe, to work on releasing that need to be in absolute control.

Gretchen Roe: 00:10:35.468
And in the list that you gave me, you referred to that as being able to engage in, let me see that I get this right, wise passiveness.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:10:47.749
Yes.

Gretchen Roe: 00:10:50.163
Because that was fascinating to me. I probably has to put German girl was not too passive, Parker vibes. But how does a parent do that actively?

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:11:03.700
Well, we talk about how much our children need to learn discipline and we would like them to be more disciplined. But the fact is, we need to discipline ourselves. We need to train ourselves in wise parenting. And one of those aspects is choosing to cultivate this wise passiveness. And Charlotte Mason says, wise passiveness is the ability and the desire to intervene but choosing to refrain from interference, even if it would help fix a problem or make our children’s lives easier, or get things done, or cause less – what’s the word? – less consequences for our children. We don’t want our children to experience consequences. And so we tap this sense of absolute. It’s a lie. We are not in control. God is in control of our children’s education. But what happens when we believe that it’s all up to us, then we become what Charlotte Mason calls the fussy parent. Now, the fussy parent is opposed to the serene parent. And here are some of the things that a fussy parent will be found doing on a regular basis. They’ll constantly be redirecting their children’s attention, constantly reminding them, reminding, reminding, lecturing them, moralizing over everything that’s going on, hovering over everything they’re supposed to be doing, mediating in every situation, overexplaining, telling, telling, telling, telling, telling, and worrying, worrying, worrying. And that’s the fussy parent. And Charlotte Mason believes we should be the serene parent. She calls it like the Madonna, wisely passive, believing God’s in control, knowing God has a plan and purpose for our children’s lives. And that enables us to not have to fix everything, not have to be constantly hovering over them, to not be fussy, to be more serene and faith-filled in their homeschooling, in their lives.

Gretchen Roe: 00:13:22.986
Rhonda asks an interesting question that is a part of what you are saying here. She says, “So if you’re not directing their education, how do you get them to do the important work?” I think that’s a really interesting question.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:13:37.922
So it’s not that you have not given them– one of the things I do recommend is that you allow children to have some choices in curriculum and what they’re learning, in some aspects of it, because that’s really important for autonomy and that’s really important for education. And when we allow children to have that autonomy, we give them a list of things that they must do. My children all had their list of things of what they needed to accomplish each day. Some of the stuff we would be doing together like artist study or composer study, or we would do read-alouds, or maybe I was reading a history. They were all learning from the same history book. Then they would have their different levels of personal reading, historical fiction or some sort of thing like that. But my children were in charge of their schedule. I did not want my children– I had to learn– I learned this really early on because I couldn’t have my children coming to me every 20 minutes and saying, “Okay. I finished my spelling. What do I do now? Okay. I finished my copy work. Okay. I finished reading the science. What do I do now?” I wanted them to decide. They knew what they needed to do. They knew. And they could do it in any order. They could do it however they wanted to do it, in whatever room they wanted to do it in. They were in charge of their education. And I’ll talk later–

Gretchen Roe: 00:15:12.189
So it seems a little bit more proactive on your part in setting up. “Here’s what I want you to do.” How you make that happen is up to you.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:15:22.175
And they had some input on it. But overall, these are the things that we want to accomplish, that you need to accomplish, and you have control over– you had some say in what you were choosing to learn, some say in the books you chose, and some say in the read-alouds. But you are in charge. You are autonomous in this. And I gave them autonomy. And I did it early, which is great. And I’ll talk about starting late at the end here because that was one of the questions I got, or actually that came from several of your listeners they asked about starting late, but I did. I had my children in– see, the thing is, is that we have to understand that they really want to learn. Children are naturally curious at young ages. And therefore, our job is to fan the flames of that rather than stifling it with total control and just this fussy parenthood that can actually cause their amygdala to come into forefront and begin causing them anxious and overwhelmed and unmotivated. That happens because of us being too much in control of what’s going on with our children.

Gretchen Roe: 00:16:43.195
So here’s another question that kind of lines up with that. And she says, “I understand the concept of preventing that loss of motivation. But is there a fix for kids who may have already lost their drive?”

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:16:58.604
Yes, I think that that’s a really great question. And I think the most important thing– okay, there’s several factors for helping this situation. The first one is we’ve already controlled and they already hate school. They already hate it. They don’t want to do it. And they just feel like, “Oh, I have no control over my life. I have to do all this stuff.” And we need to employ some important Charlotte Mason principles. The first one is short lessons. If you do the research on how long a child’s attention span is– they actually did a study. They took a medical school, and these are students who are 24, 25 years old, and they divided it into two groups. They had one group, which is the control group doing everything that the medical school students do, which is they attend an hour-long lecture, and then they have an hour break to do whatever studying or reading they need to do in that hour before they do another hour lecture. The second group, they actually divided it up into 30 minute lectures and 30-minute breaks. So they got the same content throughout the day, but it was broken up into 30 minute segments. The kids who had– at the end of the year, the kids who had 30-minute lectures, they outperformed statistically significantly the kids who had the hour lecture. And these are medical students. And if 30 minutes improves their performance, think how much, as Charlotte Mason says, 10, 15, 20-minute lessons will improve our children’s performance. You cannot expect somebody to have an attention span beyond what their physical capability is. They physically cannot pay attention longer than their attention span.

Gretchen Roe: 00:18:52.635
So I know there’s going to be those parents in the audience who are thinking, “Yes, Jeannie, but I have a lesson here that requires an hour to complete.” What is your advice? Because I know what it’s going to be, but I’m [crosstalk].

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:19:06.594
You know what it’s going to be. You are the master of the curriculum. The curriculum company who wrote that may not have really taken into consideration how long it would take to complete a lesson. And they make that mistake a lot. A lot of curriculum writers make the mistake of making their lessons too long or not taking into consideration that you need to break this up into several days. And you’re the master of the curriculum. I would say number one, drop anything that your children don’t enjoy. If they don’t like doing this activity or this part of it, and it looks like busy work to you, or it doesn’t look like it’s going to really benefit or profit your child and make learning a joy. You don’t have to do it. The person who wrote that curriculum may have just felt like they needed to add something in there, and then they did because maybe the publisher was requiring it or maybe they just thought, “Yeah, this would be a good idea,” but they don’t know you. They don’t know your family. And you are the master. You are not the– you are not the slave to the curriculum. So you knew I was going to say that.

Gretchen Roe: 00:20:17.786
And one of things that we often say to parents here is, particularly there are homeschool curricula that were designed to be in that one-on-one tutorial environment in a table. But there are also other curricula that were designed in a classroom, and a classroom experience is not what you’re doing when you’re homeschooling your children.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:20:39.644
Right. So true. That is very true. So as far as the older student, another thing that I think is really important is in empowering them with ownership of their education. And we do that through discussions, through helping them to understand that this isn’t my education. This is your education. I’m not doing this for me. I mean, what does it profit me that you understand the presidents of the United States? It doesn’t profit me a bit. This is your education for you, and it’s for your profit for your future, for the person that you are going to be in the future, and just handing over the reins to them. This is your education. God has a plan and purpose. There’s a scripture that talks about, “Without a vision, My people cast off restraint.” And the restraint that they’re casting off is that restraint to do the hard thing, to do the right thing, to complete a task. That’s restraining. If you don’t have a vision– and we want to impart our children with the knowledge that God already has a plan and purpose for them, He created them in Christ Jesus for good works which they will walk in. And he has pre-purposed and preplanned that they should walk in these paths that he has created for them. He has a vocation for them. He has a significant reason for their existence.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:22:04.793
And if we can impart that, empower our children with this vision, with the knowledge and ownership of their education, and have discussions with them, not as an authority, but as a co – what is it? – journeyman on this this life– we’re all in this together. We’re learning. I’m new at this homeschooling thing. This is a career I didn’t necessarily plan. And here I am. I’m learning along with you how to help you become the best that you can be. And just having that conversation. And I just want you to love it. I want you to want to want to do it. And so how can I help you to take ownership of your education, to be motivated to complete your tasks? What can I do? Do we need to change the curriculum? Do we need to change the the methodology that we’re using? Do we need to make this? Do we need to start focusing on the things that are more interesting to you?

Gretchen Roe: 00:23:05.358
This particular mom is speaking for many of us. She says, “I have a teenager who questions many topics and items by saying, ‘Why would I need this? What do I need this for?'” And she says, “If I allowed her to do what interests her, it would be arts all day, every day.” And I understand, I had that child too. That was one of mine. But what is your advice to that mom? I know what my advice would have been, but I know it’s different, given your background with Charlotte Mason. What would be your advice to her?

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:23:40.877
Well, I would say that you can, especially if she’s a teenager, tailor her curriculum to to grow and strengthen her strengths and interests because those were God given. That is God given. Her history should include the arts. The the way she expresses her history lessons should be artistic. She should be allowed to be artistic in science. She should be allowed to be artistic in every single subject that she– and even in language arts. “Draw a picture of what this– make a painting of what this novel meant to you.” There’s so many ways that you can build– one of the problems we do – and I did this too, made these mistakes – is that when we see a child’s weakness, we tend to focus on that weakness. We talk about that weakness. We try to find curriculum to fix that weakness. And we focus so much on their weaknesses that we forget to focus that not every child’s designed to be great at everything. Not every child’s designed to even be good at everything. They are designed to be good at what God has given for them to do.

Gretchen Roe: 00:24:59.278
Right. And I think it makes a tremendous amount of difference in all of this that you’re talking about. I have a colleague who has given a great comment. She refers to it as being the guide on the side. So you’re not leading the journey, but you are the cheerleader coming alongside your children to be that wise guide.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:25:24.420
Exactly. We’re cooperating with God and his plan for our children’s lives. And sometimes the number one thing we need to do to cooperate with the Holy Spirit is get out of the way and stop fussing, fussing, talking, talking, worrying, worrying, moralizing, lecturing, reminding, reminding, redirecting. We need to get out of the way and let the Holy Spirit. And since we’re on that topic, I just read this, and I want to read this from the Amplified Bible. And I thought, “This has to do with what I want to talk about today.” And this is Proverbs 1:4. This talks about why we’re writing this proverb. It says that, “Prudence may be given to the simple and knowledge, discretion, and discernment to the youth. The wise also will hear and increase in learning, and the person of understanding will acquire skill and attain to sound counsel so that he may be able to steer his course rightly.” And what I love about this– and it refers to Proverbs 9:9 in my notes there. But what I love about this is that we need to understand that our children are capable of being led by God to do the right thing if we will stop being so controlling over their lives. And the same Holy Spirit that led us to the Lord, that led us to homeschool is the same guy who speaks to our children’s hearts, who leads and guides them. And we need to trust that God will do it, that God will accomplish his purposes for our children as he promises that he will.

Gretchen Roe: 00:27:01.908
And I think I often have said from stage that this is the longest journey you’ll take without being able to see the fruit of the journey while you’re taking it. And I think as parents, if we can just believe in the absence of result knowing the result will come eventually, it would give us a lot of latitude to relax in the process as well. And I was thinking about when you were talking about being in the prefrontal cortex as opposed to the amygdala. So many of our children are coming out of school environments now where anxiety is the single most prevalent thing, and anxiety and learning are completely incompatible. So it’s up to us to create that environment that doesn’t contain that anxiety. Okay. So faith is where we start and then–

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:27:56.060
Wise passiveness using

Gretchen Roe: 00:27:57.297
–using wise passiveness.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:27:58.659
Which is we are the authority. We are the authority. We are the master of children activity. We have authority over our children and they know we’re there as the authority, but we are choosing to be passive. So it’s that wise passiveness. Number two, Charlotte Mason talks about, and she calls it an attitude of good humor. But essentially, I would describe that as having– it really all goes back to faith, believing God that we can not take things so seriously that we are not operating in the amygdala. We’re not operating in that place of anxiety and overwhelm and stress. And that is where we tend to– when we feel that way, we tend to want to control more and we worry so much. And so this attitude of good humor is really essential. When I think about the Proverbs, yes, the Proverbs 31 woman where she laughs at the days to come. And how can you laugh at the days to come? Just like you were saying, we have to believe that everything’s going to– that this process is going to work and we don’t see the results, but we have faith so much that we can laugh at the days to come. That’s the Proverbs 31 woman. And that’s where we– again, and it’s cultivating faith. It’s really believing that God has a plan.

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:30.082
Well, you know what’s interesting here, Jeannie, is one ties into two that ties into three.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:29:36.037
Does it is?

Gretchen Roe: 00:29:37.040
Because without the first one, you’re not going to get to the third one. So what comes after that attitude of good humor? And I am the first to confess that maybe that is not always present with me.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:29:51.258
So after the attitude of good humor, and again, this all ties in. And this is all extracted from the Charlotte Mason original homeschooling series. But that is that we develop in ourselves self-confidence, that we’re not constantly questioning, constantly fearful that we remember that God chose us to be our children’s parent and teacher. He, before the foundations of the earth, every day of your life was written in the book before one of them came to be. So before the foundations of the earth, God chose you for this role. And so we need to not entertain fears and doubts. Fear is the enemy of faith, and we must have faith that God’s purposes for our children will prevail.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:30:40.767
The Bible says every day– I mentioned every day was written in the book before one of them came to be, God already knows your children’s paths and their future. We need to not let our mind go into that fear and sliding off that slippery slope of– much I remember this happened to me when my son who has a lot of learning disabilities and he’s brilliant and has an incredible job now as a software engineer. I mean, he’s incredible. He’s always on the dean’s list in the University of Georgia and not always, but mostly usually. And he was struggling so much. He couldn’t read until he was, I would say, maybe 11. He couldn’t spell for the life of him. And I remember getting really worked up with his weaknesses and forgetting that God has a reason and a plan that he created his brain the way he did and having faith that God was going to do all his will in his life. And truly handing him over to the Lord and just believing that God’s in control and I have been given this job and remembering that God is going to empower me. He is going to work through me. I can have confidence in that because His grace is sufficient. His power is made perfect in weakness. And this is something we need as homeschool moms to remember. God’s power is made perfect in our weakness. And guess what? We’re all weak. We all have one weakness or another or 20 or 30. But that’s great because God’s power works in our weaknesses. When we’re strong and we’re totally in control, guess what? We limit God’s power in our lives. So rejoice in your weaknesses, rejoice because God is able to work through them and help and cause your children to walk the paths that he wants them to walk because we are weak and dependent on him.

Gretchen Roe: 00:32:39.918
So when we were talking about this last week, talking about that active passivity and you were talking about a child struggling with an answer to something, can you walk through what that scenario looks like again? Because as a parent, it’s more work for us to figure out how not to provide the answer than just out of expediency or exasperation to say, “Well, here’s your answer to that.”

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:33:06.765
So I’m just going to– I’m going to give–

Gretchen Roe: 00:33:08.650
Because what you said last week is to be able to ask the student some pertinent questions without revealing the answer.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:33:17.890
Yeah, just to lead them and guide them in the direction they should take and ask questions. And this is kind of a coaching model, a life coaching model is that you are asking them questions rather than providing the answer. So why do you think that works the way–? where can you find the answer to that? What would you do? What would you search to find the answer? Who would know this information? Who could you talk to that has this information? I remember. So here’s the problem with us parents is we just want our children to be successful. And a lot of times their success is not their success. It’s our success. We’ve done it for them. So I’ll give an example of when my son, the first science fair he entered, I was totally in charge. I was in charge of everything. I was showing him, I was giving him, I was explaining to him. We were doing the experiments together and I was writing down the data and the lab results and all of these things. I was doing it kind of for him.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:34:23.307
He was in second grade now and this is the child that couldn’t read. But he had the ability to get knowledge for himself. Yet I was not allowing him to do that because I was so excited about the science fair and I helped him create the poster and I printed up everything. I just basically did the whole thing for him and he got silver medal and he wasn’t proud of it. Do you know why? Because he didn’t do it himself. And after that, I realized, like, “Aren’t you so happy?” He’s like, “Yeah, I don’t really care.” It wasn’t his work. We want our children to develop self-confidence in themselves. And that is actually number five is have confidence in your children and allow your children to develop self-confidence. And the way we do that is by allowing them to make mistakes, to problem solve, to have failures, and to help them if we realize there’s something they could do to fix it, but instead of fixing it, asking questions, to guiding them and leading them. “Where could you find the answer to that? What do you think? Do you think maybe the internet has pictures of what other people’s posters look like? Why don’t you create your own poster? And you know what? It’s not going to be as beautiful as your poster. But that’s okay.” It’s something that they will have confidence in. They will have developed self-confidence in doing things for themselves.

Gretchen Roe: 00:35:49.118
Here’s an observation from a mom that I think is something that’s important for us to address. She says the conundrum is that, “When I allowed them to pursue their interests fully, they have come back to me saying they’re embarrassed They didn’t know something like how to calculate or spell something and blamed me for not making them learn those things and prepare them. So that’s where my fear entered. And that made me become more in control. And I can see this from both sides– from mom’s perspective of, well, you’re not going to say I didn’t do my job. But by the same token, that job is really your child’s job. So how would you answer this, Mom? Because I think it’s a really good observation.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:36:35.856
Yeah, I think the the problem is– one of the bigger problems here is that we don’t want to fail our children. And the fact is, is that your child, when they realize they didn’t know how to calculate something, suddenly they want to learn math and they didn’t want to learn math before. So that’s a hard lesson. And yeah, maybe they’re mad at you, or they’re blaming you for it. But the fact is, is that they were the ones that were not pursuing their math education with a fervor, and were not moving forward in math. And now guess what? They want to learn math. This is a hard lesson that children need to learn in order to become self-driven. And the self-drivenness is something that is where it’s a long process to train a child. But through these failures and mistakes, they actually learn important lessons that they’re going to take into adulthood and life. And it’s more important that they have these hard experiences as children than it is for them to have everything taken care of, and then they have those hard experiences as adults.

Gretchen Roe: 00:37:46.727
Right. And I think as well, I often have said this to my teenagers, you don’t have to attend every argument you’re invited to. [laughter] So when your children say, well, I didn’t know how to do this and you didn’t teach me, well–

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:38:04.408
I apologize. I’m sorry.

Gretchen Roe: 00:38:05.506
Capacity, I’m so sorry that we missed that lesson. How are you going to resolve it? Might be a great way to address that.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:38:14.519
This is your education. I’m just doing the best that I can. Can you take some leadership in this education? Can you maybe make some choices on extra reading you want to do or extra learning you want to do? Watch some videos on YouTube on how to do these calculations. Just take some power and power.

Gretchen Roe: 00:38:38.897
Take a little ownership. Yes.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:38:40.533
[laughter] Exactly. Empowering them with ownership of that education is such a hard thing to do, but it is vital for the adults they will become. And I’m telling you from a mother with young adults and all of them graduated from college and how important it is for them in pursuing their careers, in getting jobs, and keeping their jobs in everything that they do in life is part of– it comes out of the hard less. We don’t learn as much when we’re successful. We actually learn a lot more when we’ve made some mistakes.

Gretchen Roe: 00:39:17.698
Well, that’s what we tell everyone here about math work. It’s the learning happens in what you get wrong and correct, not in what you get right, right off the bat.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:39:27.323
And I’m just going to confess that I was not always great at this. I’m telling you what I know to be true based on the research and what I’ve seen in my own children. But there were times when I failed at this completely and utterly and got totally in control and became crazy mama and and yelling and doing all the stuff. I did all the stuff. But I learned how not to do it. I saw the results of being in control. And it was never a happy time in our homeschool years when I was totally in control. It was always so much better when my children had autonomy and I was not stressed and I had self-confidence and I had confidence in them that they were going to do the work. And that’s another thing is really believing in your children. And that’s number five is confidence in your children. And one of the things that we need to remember is that when you’re constantly correcting your children, you’re conveying a lack of faith in them. You’re showing them that you don’t believe them, that you don’t think that they’re going to– that they can do it. And we need to be speaking positive, faith-filled words to and about our children. And we don’t need to be constantly checking up on their veracity, whether they’re telling the truth or not. We need to show them that we believe they are telling the truth. If your child says, “I brushed my teeth,” we don’t need to say, “Okay, come here. Let me smell your breath,” because that’s showing a lack of confidence in your child. You believe they’re a liar. And children live up to the labels you give them. If you believe they’re a liar, they will be a liar. That’s just how we live life. We live up to what people expect of us. And if you expect your children to be truthful in checking their work, checking the teacher’s manual or the answer key, making sure that they got all the problems correct, and circling the ones they didn’t and they’re going to figure out why they got it wrong on their own, then you are you’re giving, you’re showing your child you believe in your child.

Gretchen Roe: 00:41:27.059
So we have talked about five of Charlotte Mason’s principles. And I can’t believe we’re almost to the top of the hour. What are we missing here? What are principles six and seven?

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:41:36.597
So this is principle number six. Really important but often neglected is Charlotte Mason tells us that we must practice self-care. She also calls this mother culture. And self-care is essentially nurturing your own needs and really finding new interests, things that you are– You are an individual. You are a whole person, and your children are only going to be in your house– Unless you have 15 kids, your children are only going to be in the house for a very short period of your life. It feels like a long period. But if you live to be what most people do, 80 years old, your children are going to leave and you’re going to have another 30, could be 40, depending on how early you had children, but you’re going to have a whole lifetime ahead of you. You need to be nurturing yourself, nurturing your interests, nurturing your friendships, going to Bible study, doing things for yourself, taking care of yourself, and not being a slave to perfectionism, which is fear, not being a slave to fear. We need to make sure we’re not over– out of fear, we do this out of fear, over-scheduling our kids’ activities and involvement in different outside classes or co-ops. We need to not over-schedule. We need to pull back from scheduling things. We need to assign chores and duties to our children. That should be on the list, the things they must complete. Because guess what? Chores are just as important as math. And that should be part of the things you need to complete in your day is the things that are assigned to you. These are part of developing the whole person. And this part that we call the academics, that’s not the most important part. And so we need to make sure that our children are helping with the household, doing things that a lot of people don’t have their children do, cooking dinner. My daughter was seven years old, she was cooking the entire family dinner. And all my children did their own laundry. I will say I never did laundry for a child after the age of seven. And so we need to make sure that we are scheduling self-care activities that bring us joy and taking care of ourselves. So that’s mother culture. And if we are doing that, then we’re going to be– then it all goes back to we will be the serene mom. We will be calmer. We will not walk in this over-fearful mode. We’ll have just a better perspective on life if we’re taking care of ourselves.

Gretchen Roe: 00:44:18.241
Well, you can’t pour out of an empty cup.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:44:20.317
That’s right. Exactly. Yeah. [crosstalk].

Gretchen Roe: 00:44:22.949
So I have a mom who made this observation and I think it’s cogent. So she says, what about an only child with no competition or peer pressure as a consequence? Also ADHD, so being aware of consequence is nonexistence. She said, “If I left her to her own devices, my kiddo will take an hour to brush her teeth. Schoolwork would never get completed. If I don’t constantly remind her to stay focused, then she’d be absolutely lost in 100 other activities with a mouthful of cavities. I feel like I’m being held hostage if I don’t assure things are being done in a timely manner.” And I know she’s speaking for a lot of moms. So I know this also lines up with the last part of number seven on our list, at least from our conversation the other day, so how do you deal with this kid?

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:45:13.225
Yeah. So I would say we could do a whole podcast on ADHD and how to– ADHD is a dopamine deficiency. Children who have ADHD, they have– normal– whatever it’s called, neural, normal children. Essentially, when they complete small tasks, they get a surge of dopamine, and children with ADHD do not get that surge of dopamine, and so we need to figure out a way to help them get that surge of dopamine, whether it be a list that that they check off each moment and then there’s a reward for each thing. And there’s a lot of people who speak on the topic of ADHD, and I think there are ways to help children with ADHD stay on task and stay motivated without medication. It’s hard. It definitely is hard, but it’s part of who they are going to become as adults. And both of my boys were ADHD, and they actually did start taking medication in late high school and early college, and it was helpful for them, but it’s so important for them to learn how to keep themselves motivated through the lack of dopamine, understanding it and working through it.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:46:47.624
And so as far as competition– and I don’t even think that’s necessary, and Charlotte Mason would not believe that that was necessary in a child’s education is that sense of competition. And I would tell you that I knew a lot of homeschoolers that homeschooled their only children in my area, and all of those kids, even one of them, they were both– the two that I’m thinking of right now, they were both girls and they were really– had their own interests. But one of them was super interested in birds, and actually, she was so obsessed with birds that that’s really all she wanted to learn about, and so her parents really tapered back a lot of her other education to allow her to go deep into birds. She actually has a zoology degree. She helped me edit the second edition for my Zoology 1 book, and she is just a brilliant girl who was allowed to focus on what she wanted to focus on as an only child homeschooler. Her whole curriculum was surrounding her most important interest. All her writing assignments were about birds. Her math was about birds. Everything was about birds. And I just think every family’s different, and so you just– that’s where we come back to faith, and just–

Gretchen Roe: 00:48:05.526
One of the things here, Jeannie, that parents can take away from this is this is not something that you can do overnight. Say, “Here’s your list. Good luck.” You have to be able to– particularly if you’re in the process now of working with students, particularly if you’re working with ADHD students. If you gave me a whole list and said, “Here–” because I’m ADHD. So if you gave me a list and said, “Okay, Gretchen, I want you to do all these things.” I, as an adult, I can certainly do all these things. But as a child, that would have been overwhelming to me. But if you say, “This is the list of things we’re going to accomplish today, now let’s talk about what you would like to do first. Choose two off the list, so we can talk about those, and then you tell me which one you’re going to do.” Because I will also tell you that for years, ADHD researchers said do the most difficult thing on your list first. And parents would say, why do I have kids who are always resistant? Well, if you’re already starting with something you don’t like, it’s more painful. So if you can choose something that you like, then it’s easier to do the things that you don’t like. And [crosstalk] to do.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:49:16.675
You know what’s interesting? That’s true. And you know what’s interesting is that now that I’m thinking about it – this is just putting pieces together – is that I think having the list is helpful. And whether you have a separate list for your morning chores and a separate list for your academics and a separate list for whatever else, I think the list is one step towards helping an ADHD child feel more in control of their lives because they can do the list in any order. And also, they’ve got a list there. They’re not going to forget. Because I just remember sending my son up to grab something, and then I didn’t see him again for three hours. He was gone. He forgot what he was doing, and he started doing something else. So these things did happen. But yeah, I do think ADHD, I think it’s more of a epidemic than it ever was. And I do also have ADHD. And I think that it’s helped me in many ways to accomplish a lot of things. But I’ve had to train myself. “Ann, don’t start another task until you finish this. Because if you start another task, you are never going back to this.” And this is true for books I’m writing or whatever it is. If I don’t finish this thing and I start this other thing that I have this great idea about, then I’m not going to have what it takes to finish the drudgery part of the other– there’s a lot that goes into that.

Gretchen Roe: 00:50:49.455
So Jeannie, I’ve got two parents who want to know what’s the seventh thing?

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:50:53.331
Okay. The seventh thing is– Charlotte Mason says that we should allow children– wait, this all ties together. We’ve already talked about this, but this was actually listed in the original homeschooling series. Allow children to stand or fall by their own efforts. She says we prod them continually and do not let them stand or fall by their own efforts. Prodding is actually really a part of making children unmotivated. We’re constantly prodding: “Go do this,” and “You need to do this,” and “Have you done this?” That prodding, prodding: “You got to do this, or you can’t do that.” It’s just constant prodding. She says it would be better for boys and girls to suffer the consequences of not doing their work now and then. She says, “Then to do it because they are so urged and prodded on all hands that they have no volition in the matter. And so not prodding them. If we think, but they won’t do it. Well, that’s because you’re in the habit of prodding, and they’re in the habit of being prodded. And you’ve got to break the cycle. You’ve got to break the habit before your children will start doing things without being prodded. I remember my children, there was one point in our lives was just this little pocket of time when I realized that my husband and I were yelling at the kids. We were yelling at them all the time. And I did not. I mean, when I had kids, I was like, “I’m not going to yell.” I grew up in a yelling family. So I’m like, “I’m not going to yell at my children. I’m not going to be a yeller. We’re not going to be.” And we found out that we were yellers. And I thought, “Okay, we got to figure out a solution to this. I do not want to be a yeller.” And I realized that the reason that we were yellers is because our children wouldn’t do what we said and so then we would say it loudly, more sternly, and they would do it. And then after a while, saying it more sternly didn’t work. So we had to start yelling. And so it was like it was a method of prodding., and it was a habit that we had to break. And so the way we broke the habit was very unusual. I came up with this idea. I said, “Okay, here’s, here’s the deal. We have to suffer consequences if we yell.” And the way that we suffer consequences is if we have a consequence when we yell. And so we came up with a consequence that anytime we yelled at a child, we had to pay that child a dollar. I’ve had people say, “What about a quarter? They’d be happy with a quarter.” It’s not about what they would be happy with. It’s about what hurts me the most and hurting me by paying a dollar. And not only did I have to pay that child a dollar, any child that was in the room and could hear me yelling at that child also got a dollar. Everybody got a dollar if they heard me yelling. This was very painful. I mean, within the first few hours, I was down 20 bucks and my husband too. And it was not long before we stopped yelling. It was within a week we stopped yelling because we were out hundreds of dollars. And my kids loved it when another child got yelled at because they’re like, “I get a dollar. I just yelled at my brother and I get a dollar.” I mean, it was going on and on the money just flying out of our hands.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:53:59.773
But it was the consequences that we experienced that caused us to stop yelling. But it is a habit. It became a habit. My kids would not do anything unless they were yelled at because we had developed this habit of yelling at them for them to take their dishes to the sink, whatever it was. So it’s a habitual thing that you have to you have to get out of the prodding. And you have to also remember that children learn like as far as letting them stand or fall by their own efforts, children learn more as I said from their mistakes than they do their successes. And it’s always better for them to learn their lessons early while they’re still a child in our house so that we can teach them when they make a mistake that’s embarrassing, like the mom whose child didn’t know the calculations, how to do the calculations and was embarrassed or there’s many times I’ve had my own children experiencing such things. And what we do is we teach them when they fail under our roof, we teach them to be overcomers. We teach them to forgive themselves, to forgive others, and we point them to God, to our loving, forgiving God in their hour of consequences, in their hour of sin or failure, they chose not to do something and the science fair is tomorrow and they still haven’t done it, and they have to either not go or show up with half-finished work. We teach them to go to God and learn how to get back up and keep going because that’s an important lesson for children to learn under our roof because they’re going to have failures in adult life. And if they haven’t learned how to buck up and get back up and pull bootstraps on and I’m going to get back on the horse and all the all cliches, then they’re going to have a really hard time when they do fail in their adult life. And it makes it harder when you’re always fixing everything and making everything go smoothly for them and making sure that they turn in the work in a class they’re taking outside of the home, that we’re making sure, then we’re not letting them experience the consequences of failure, which robs them of autonomy, robs them of self-motivation, robs them of independence. And I believe that your children will become self-motivated if you begin practicing these seven steps. And it’s actually harder for us to do these things than it is for us to do what we’ve always been doing, which is do everything.

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:40.689
Right. Absolutely. We will have the seven steps. I’ll make sure that I connect up with Jeannie to make sure that I have them in the right order and the right and the right paragraphs, and they will be in the show notes for you all. Jeannie, we’re past time, and I just hate that this conversation has to end because it’s been amazing. What would be your parting words for our parents today who’ve joined us?

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:57:05.779
I would say that we think, as parents, that our job is to make sure our children get all this knowledge from all these books and all these subjects, but really our job is to help our children become human beings that can learn for themselves, that can follow their interests, follow their passions, follow their dreams, dig in deep, learn hard things, do things in their own way, but become the person that God created them to be, because God has a plan and purposes, and He promises to fulfill His purposes for us. And so we can trust God that He’s going to do it. And that our primary job is leading our children into a relationship with God to be dependent on Him and to help them to learn how to learn for themselves. It’s not the acquisition of all this knowledge. It’s not checkboxes on getting everything done, but it’s teaching them how to learn for themselves and to become the people that God created them to be.

Gretchen Roe: 00:58:10.615
Absolutely. Absolutely. Jeannie, thank you so much for taking an hour out of your very busy schedule. I’ve had several moms say here that they would like us to continue the discussion sometime. So you and I will have to collaborate on where we might go with that. Thank you all for joining us today for The Demme Learning Show. This is Gretchen Roe, and I’m just speechless. Jeannie has shared with us information that I think is so important and effective for you as a parent. That letting go process should start when they’re very small, but sometimes it’s really hard to do because we want the best for our children.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:58:50.004
Yep.

Gretchen Roe: 00:58:50.362
You can find the show notes and watch a recording of The Demme Learning Show at demme-learning.com/show or on our YouTube channel. Be sure to rate, review, follow or subscribe wherever you’re seeing this, especially if you really enjoyed it. Jeannie, thanks again for your time and we wish you all the joy of the journey of creating independent learners. Take care, everyone. Have a great afternoon.

Jeannie Fulbright: 00:59:12.323
Thank you. God bless.

[music]