thousands of stories; most likely the reason you have this book in your hands right now is because you’re facing your own very real, crazy, insane, inane and highly stupid situation. Homework Sanity was conceived and written to provide you with viable solutions to reduce your stress levels.
Partnering with vs. Parenting Your Child covers why this is an important energy shift. One definition of insanity made popular through twelve-step programs is the concept of doing the same thing over and expecting different results.
The parent sees behavior, begins categorizing it as right/wrong, then either rewards/punishes the behavior. This process is automatic. I promise you, the minute you become a partner with your child, all of the old troubles begin to vanish. They vanish because you are no longer coming from your head. When we move away from rigid mindsets into open partnership, the gift of gaining time and space to think before taking action emerges.
Are we going to get it right 100%? Nope.
Are we going to get it wrong 100%? Nope.
Is that even what we’re trying to achieve? Hell no!
The more time we get to think about an action prior to taking it, the less the likelihood of receiving a negative outcome. This approach also makes communication easier for your children by encouraging more honesty and details about what is really going on within their classes and how they view schoolwork.
Another gift from this filter is the generation of both long-term and immediate benefits. Your child is only in second grade once. There are lessons every second grader must learn, or they become an adult making second-grade decisions. As a parent, do you want your adult child making second-grade decisions on your health care issues when you are in your eighties? Do you want second-grade choices on life support questions? Moving away from being a parent and towards being a partner has both long term benefits to you and immediate results for your children.
Priorities vs. Goals is really the key to moving from insane to sane thinking on homework and school in general. Priorities allow fluidity, and that is critical for success; otherwise we become mired in the stupid decisions, choices and approaches thrown at us by the school system or by teachers in general. This rings especially true when the school tells you something is wrong with your child when, in fact, your special one is simply a child who might negatively impact the institution’s test scores. The approach you can develop allows you not to react to insane emails, comments or notes returned home cloaked as “feedback.”
Homework vs. Busywork opens your mind to a new way of thinking. Right now, when you look at your child’s homework, the first thoughts are likely: Do I know how to do this work myself? Did they teach me this in school? Do I remember how to do this math? Why do I have to do this crap again? Clarity must be achieved to see that some work is simply busywork designed to prep children for a test. Those thoughts can be replaced with one clear, laser-sharp concept: Does my child really need to do this work?
Making these intellectual and emotional leaps are how you realize you are moving from parent to partner. A parent mindset is focused on ensuring a task gets done not only for the child, but also for you. This guarantees that you do not look bad to the teacher, either. It is a mindset that puts you in a defensive mode and divides you from your child. The partner mindset asks the question on the front end: Is this task even necessary?
The Homework Sanity approach allows for transforming from running defensive plays to being on offense and scoring frequently. I am consistently amazed that when I question a teacher who is over-prescribing homework, “Other than hoping that this will increase the test score of the children, why are they being assigned this extra work?” I have yet to receive an answer. I often follow with, “Was this your idea, or was it a demand from your bosses?” which is no more successful at eliciting an answer.
A workable resolution for that form of uber-homework is to send the assigned pages back to the teacher with a note: “My children say this was not taught in class. If it was taught in class, could you please go over it again before they do this as homework? If it wasn’t taught in class, then could you please explain why it was assigned as homework? Thank you.”
Applying this tool to help your children organizes their work. They become grateful and will tell you much more of the truth. You may be surprised at how often, when your child says, “They did not teach us this in class,” it is true.
Time and again I will return to the theme of partnership. Successful partners get to share profits. That’s the new path we are paving together.
Partnering with Your Child
Every journey needs a north destination. We need a compass. Knowing where true north is allows us to move in any direction with confidence. If we feel lost, all we have to do is pull out the compass. The compass for this journey is within this chapter. True north for success, using this system, is to remember that partnering with your children within their education environment versus parenting them creates positive results for everyone, 100% of the time.
This is no easy task. Parents fall into the trap of feeling like they are the bad guys. It is a natural response. More importantly, it is a lie.
Negative choices create negative results.
Positive choices generate positive outcomes.
Neutral choices allows us to see all possibilities before we take action. Neutral choices provide a calm place to make changes in attitude. Changes in attitude create different choices. These evolved choices create positive situations because they are grounded in purpose, clarity and harmony.
Change comes with practice. Practice starts with trying. Trying new things brings new information. This is the process needed to defeat feelings of doubt, despair and hopelessness, to remove us from the analytical and to trap the lies our heads like to sell us during the day. Change allows us to no longer feel trapped. If you read this book, you will come to realize there is no such thing as being trapped. When our back is against the wall, at the very least we have found a wall. That wall will either allow us to move around it, or we will find the way to break it down just like they did in Berlin in the last century.
Learning to hear our own lies is where change begins. Here are just a few of the lies I’ve seen parents sell themselves over the years:
If I had money, then none of these problems would be happening to my child in school.
If i didn’t have to do this all by myself, my child would be a better student.
If I had done better in school, they would be doing better. This is all my fault.
If I had married a smarter person, none of this would be happening.
There are a million more lies, and I’m sure you get my point. The only ones who turn these lies into facts are ourselves. The lies are just voices of doubt in our heads, sometimes soft, other times loud. Why do we listen to them How do we allow them to get so loud? What is the solution?
The solution is to get out of our heads and into our hearts, to move away from the limits of our minds and enjoy the expansiveness of our emotions. The energy of love solves every problem. The sooner we find love, the sooner we move out of distress.
The reason I’m above average at what I do is because I love it. If I simply liked doing my job, then this
