Hiya,

Some days it can feel like you spend more time trying to get your child interested in doing things than they spend…well, you know, actually doing those things.

You suggest something new, but they’d rather keep playing. You encourage them to try something a bit harder, but they’re happy doing it the way they already know. You offer to help with something they said they wanted to do, but not today, maybe tomorrow. They’re quite happy just mostly doing what they did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. They’re…content.

Which is nice and all, but you can’t help feeling like they’re probably capable of SO MUCH in life and maybe you’re not going to be able to help them realise all that potential.

Maybe…maybe school would get more out of them…

I know this is a really confronting and uncomfortable thought, because it’s one I had a number of times early in our home educating journey. I knew we were giving our children a nice life. But were we getting the best out of them? Were we actually the right people to do that?

Because, surely, if they were sitting in a classroom they’d be getting on with things. There’d be no choice! They’d be writing stories, learning maths, doing science experiments, exploring history, preparing presentations, working on group projects, reading books they’d never pick up themselves, answering questions, finishing assignments. There would be expectations, accountability, other children around them doing the work too, and a teacher who is trained in how to make it all happen and keep these kids moving forward forward forward.

Meanwhile, at home, you’ve spent half the morning trying to generate some enthusiasm for...anything, please, just anything other than what we already do every day 😅

The thing is that the honest answer is...yeah, they probably would get more out of your child. But we need to be careful that we don’t assume that more would be better.

Because all that ‘more’ tends to come at a cost. All that ‘more’ can and often does replace other things, or dull them, or squeeze them out. So we need to be clear on what that trade-off is, and whether or not all that ‘more’ is worth it to us.

See, it’s very easy to picture the life our child has now, with everything we DO like about it, and - when we picture them suddenly sitting in a classroom doing all that work and making all that progress - adding all that extra stuff on top. Combining all that to create a much better thing.

But, for a lot of children, that’s not what happens.

Because we know that young children ask far fewer questions at school than they do at home. We know that interest in learning for its own sake tends to decline through the school years. We know that when children are constantly told what to do without much say they become more passive and less willing to take initiative. We know that grades can improve performance while simultaneously reducing motivation and drive. We know that making children focus on proving their ability can make them avoid hard things. We know that academic pressure causes anxiety. We know that young people hide interests their classmates look down on, that many avoid joining in or asking for help because they don’t want to look ‘dumb’, that trying to fit in can have a negative impact on their identity and sense of self.

And so all that slightly more ‘fluffy’ stuff they get at home - that involvement in how they spend their time, the questions they can ask and follow as far as they want, happily being into things without worrying whether they’re cool, not waking up dreading the bully they’ll bump into in the playground, trying things without being graded, asking for help without feeling embarrassed about not knowing in front of a big group, getting better at something without comparing themselves to everyone else, doing things because, well, they enjoy them…

All that can fundamentally change. It’s often not this AND that, it’s this OR that. Not in all these ways for all children, of course, but we have a vast body of developmental science that shows us that…well, actually, yeah, for many children this is how it goes.

So when we think about whether our children would get MORE of something at school, we also have to think about what they would get LESS of.

All of life is a trade-off. It’s up to us to decide what trades we’re happy to make. Sometimes that genuinely will be school, maybe for a season and maybe longer. We’ve done that ourselves (a story you can hear in this episode). If you’re happy with the trade, it’s not a fail. It’s just important to be intentional about decisions like this, not reactive.

Think about being offered a job that pays you more. You’d be interested, obviously. Cool, more money. Let’s go. Lock it in. Right?

Well, no, probably not. Before accepting it you’d probably want to know a few things. Like whether you’d be working longer hours, whether you’d have to travel, whether you could still take time off when your family needed you, whether you’d actually enjoy the work, whether you’d like the people you’d be working with, whether your boss would trust you or micromanage you, whether you’d be expected to answer emails at night…and so on, and so on.

Because you would understand that just knowing it pays MORE wouldn’t be enough to make the decision. You’d want to know what your life would look like while you got all that more.

That’s the clear-minded thinking we need to bring into play when we worry about the MORE of school.

Of course, I’m not suggesting your child is currently making wonderful use of every bit of the time and freedom they have. There might be more you believe they could and should be doing. But what you need to balance is the challenge of getting that happening yourself, in your way, within your family culture, and the potential cost of asking someone else to take over and do that for you.

So, yeah, school might get more out of your child. Just make sure you think about what you’d be happy to give up in return.

Talk soon,
Issy.