I was asked a question recently that got me thinking about something I suspect a LOT of home educating parents have experienced. And stay with me here, because I’m going to ramble my way through a few ideas in this email that I think will connect together and help explain it.
"My son seems happy to learn from other people, but the second I try to teach him something he gets frustrated with me. He’s so resistant to it. What am I doing wrong?"
The easy answer here is ‘just don’t re-create school at home, don’t act like a teacher at the front of a classroom, and everything will be fine’. But actually, that probably won’t be enough.
I want you to think about learning to drive. Specifically, learning to drive with one of your parents sitting beside you.
Maybe your experience was wonderfully calm and your mum or dad possessed unusually high levels of patience. But for an awful lot of people, learning to drive with a parent can be...tense 😂
You're approaching a roundabout. They're gripping the door handle.
You're changing lanes. They're watching your hands, then your eyes, then your hands again, then the other lane, then back to your eyes.
You brake slightly later than they would have and they say "Watch your speed."
"I AM watching my speed."
"I'm just saying..."
"I KNOW."
But swap the parent out in that scenario, and replace them with a driving instructor, and that interaction almost certainly never happens. Why?
Same car. Same road. Same person learning to drive. Same small mistake. Totally different environment between the two people.
Your child might happily take swimming instruction from a coach, learn piano from a teacher, or watch some random person on YouTube show them how to do something. Then you sit down beside them and say, "Ok, let me show you how this thing you’re interested in works..." and you can feel them tense up.
It's really easy to read that as disrespect. Or stubbornness. Or even as you not being very good at teaching or explaining things, so they just don’t want it from you.
But it’s probably because it’s a very different experience for them, psychologically.
A swimming coach is only judging one narrow thing: how well they’re swimming. If your child struggles with freestyle, the coach might think they need more practice. That’s it. That’s the extent of the judgement the child feels. Then the lesson ends.
But you’re their parent. Your opinion matters to them across almost every part of their life. So struggling with something in front of you can feel much more exposing than struggling with the same thing in front of a coach.
Which means that when a teaching situation comes up, particularly one where your child isn't sure they'll be good at the thing, the person whose opinion matters most to them is now sitting right there while they probably make some mistakes and get some things wrong. And that person will still be near them, in the same home, for the rest of the day, and then tomorrow, and then the next day...
The stakes are a whole lot higher.
And I don't mean that your child is consciously sitting there thinking, "My parent's approval is psychologically important to me, therefore I am experiencing discomfort around this maths problem."
Obviously 😂
They probably won’t know why they’re feeling resistant, and it will probably come out as something that looks like irritation or frustration or defensiveness.
“Yes, I KNOW.”
"I was ABOUT to do that."
"I don't need any help!"
Think back to that driving lesson. Your instructor saying "you came into that corner a little fast" is useful information. Ok, good to know. I better not do that again. I’m glad I have this experienced driver here with me to give me tips as I learn.
Then your dad says exactly the same thing, in exactly the same situation, and somehow it feels like he’s saying you’re terrible at driving and you’re never ever going to be good at it and wow you suck.
Because he's your dad. And your dad’s opinion is really, really important to you.
(plus, the driving instructor probably isn’t going to be sitting around your breakfast table the next day, silently judging your terrible performance going into that corner)
So I think we should keep this in mind whenever we’re trying to ‘teach’ our children in some way. Because what is the thing the child is really not wanting from you? Is it the learning, the information, the upskilling that they don’t want?
No. Often it’s the evaluation. They don’t want your judgement.
There’s a well-established psychological idea behind this called social-evaluative threat, which is essentially the stress we feel when something important about us is being judged by somebody else. There have been some really interesting laboratory studies showing that difficult tasks were more likely to produce a strong cortisol stress response when people knew their performance could be negatively evaluated. Not would be, just could be.
There’s also similar research directly relating to the parent relationship, showing that children who hear critical feedback from a mother figure show more negative emotion and evaluate themselves more negatively than children who hear neutral feedback.
Put these layers together, and you can see how feedback from a parent can affect more than how a child feels about the task. It can affect how they feel about themselves while they’re doing it.
And that gives us something useful to work with, because the answer isn’t to stop teaching our children anything or be put off ever correcting them. Children can and do learn wonderful things from their parents. The thing to pay attention to is whether our help has overt judgement attached to it. Whether that’s from having that as our default approach, so that’s what they learn they’ll get from us, or just from our tone, posture, questions, whatever.
Maybe we’re explaining too much, correcting too quickly, or sounding impatient when they don’t understand.
Not sure what might be wrong with your approach? Easy. Just ask your child.
“Hey, when I helped you with that thing earlier, did you feel like I was kinda testing you on it, or judging anything about what you were doing? Because it’s important to me that you don’t feel that, so I want to make sure it’s not coming across that way when I help you with stuff.”
That one simple thing will probably take a whole lot of the pressure off your child, and - aside from giving them an opening to tell you any time it feels like you’re crossing that line, so you can keep calibrating yourself - will probably make them far more open to you helping them.
And just to be really clear, none of this means that parents whose children LOVE learning from them have weaker relationships, or that their children care less about what they think. Some children are much less sensitive to being watched or evaluated, some parents are naturally really, really good at keeping teaching light and low-pressure, and some parent-child combinations just don’t seem to develop this dynamic.
But in my experience those situations are the exceptions, not the rule, and I think the more common state is for a child to resist learning from their parent.
So, yes, take the very commonly given advice that the starting point to all this is not to recreate school at home. Don’t start out with that power imbalance of student and teacher. But the next layer to this - one that seems to be talked about a lot less, but is equally as important - is to build a culture of connection with your child where your help doesn’t come with evaluation.
Learning to drive with your dad can be a pretty special thing. The solution isn’t for him to get out of the car and never drive with you again. It’s just understanding that getting something wrong won’t change what dad thinks of you.
If we can show our children that, really help them know and understand that it’s true, I'm positive they’ll be more open to our guidance.
See, I told you I was going to ramble 🫠 😂