The pressures of pandemic parenting, of parents needing to multitask between paid work, home duties, and ensuring that children are learning and meeting educational outcomes is a hot house for self-care issues and mayhem. Poor sleep habits, stress and anxiety issues and chronic fatigue are just a few issues that manifest from feeling overwhelmed.
Feeling as though you need to meet all three dimensions of this fallible system of expectation is unsurprisingly flawed, and instead of investing into what truly needs to be nurtured at this time, parents are instead succumbing to frustration, meltdowns, and sublimating self-destructive urges into behaviours that are more socially permissible: drinking, binge eating, even obsessive compulsive tendencies is something that is laughed at as being part of the Covid craze.
For most, this is a time of surviving – not thriving. If you are seriously feeling this stressed out trying to meet these expectations, it would be worthwhile truly considering what your big picture focus is, and whose expectations are truly worthwhile in you and your child’s worlds. Is all the stress going to help you and your child in the end? Are school-based grades more important than you and your child’s emotional wellbeing? Is modelling anxiety-driven behaviours and practices what you really want your kids to learn, so they can grow up to feel like pressured and anxiety-driven adults? What is important to note is that you are your child’s first teacher, and what you are modelling to them, you are teaching them, intentionally or not. Instead of modelling a fear-based approach to school and learning (how can I get through all of this content?! I don’t understand this assignment! How is this worthwhile?!) perhaps opt into approaching learning from a more liberated place – a place of love.
To learn from love means that you will want to learn. To learn from love means that life excites you, and there are no constraints to learning. To learn from love means that every opportunity to create, imagine, explore, study, explain, is in itself a connection to a higher plateau of thought that transcends a curricular model. What I’m saying is that if you are feeling overly, excessively stressed out about schooling your child, and it’s negatively affecting your household, I would seriously suggest that you speak with your child’s school, and take a pastoral care approach to homeschooling by going down the unschooling route, focusing on things that your child is intrinsically interested in, or things that are life-skills based. This could be an opportunity for you to release, and to surrender to a simpler life.
What is Pastoral Care?
Pastoral Care is something done primarily in religious schools, but its principles are based on supporting, guiding and nurturing the whole child, and not just driving them through on through their schooling with a more rigorous, one-dimensional attitude towards a child, as though they do not have emotional and spiritual needs. All human being have these needs amongst others.
The 5 basic principles include:
- Healing – a pastoral function that aims to overcome some impairment by restoring the person to wholeness, and by leading them to advance beyond their previous condition.
- Sustaining – Helping a hurting person to endure and to transcend a circumstance in which restoration to their former condition or recuperation from their malady is either impossible or so remote as to seem improbable.
- Guiding – assisting perplexed persons to make confident choices between alternative courses of thought and action, when such choices are viewed as affecting the present and the future state of human wholeness.
- Reconciling – seeking to re-establish broken relationships between man (sic) and fellow man and between man and God. Historically, reconciling has employed two modes – forgiveness and discipline.
- Nurturing – enable people to develop their potentialities, throughout the life journey with all its valleys, peaks, and plateaus.
A Pastoral Care Approach to Homeschooling: Unschooling
Unschooling is an informal approach to learning and schooling where the curriculum is flexible and influenced and led by the child’s interests over any strict outcomes-based agenda of learning. What unschooling excels at is allowing children to direct their own learning, and in this way, it is distinctly non-coercive: it relies on cooperation, enthusiasm and enjoyment in an array of subjects and matters. It also relies on adult presence: you are the light who needs to help illuminate. But the process is ultimately self-directed, thus enabling and empowering, for the child is constructing their own learning. It is also a fantastic way to encourage ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking – something that students in traditional schools struggle with greatly. (In fact, in my experience, less than 1% of students in traditional schools are able to formulate creative or abstract ideas when prompted, with many shutting down affectively. Students going down the conventional schooling route are, unfortunately, lured into a state of apathy due to the lack of control that they exercise over their own personal learning).
A good route to start is to simply enjoy reading. Let your child select books, or just explore a few different ones. Literacy is the foundation of learning, and by simply enjoying books, your child will soon express their interests, passions and with any luck, begin to communicate them with you.
Let your child throw themselves into simple yet sustainable practices: gardening, crafts, and project work based on their own interests. Connect with them in helping them to become more adept in the kitchen. Sadly, I just read someone describe baking in a marketed ad as an ‘old school hobby’. I found this a bit trite – I mean, maybe for her, they’re ‘old school hobbies’. But what were, and should still be, sustainable practices and life skills are now assigned an ‘old school hobby’ label, which simultaneously devalues these skills and highlights them as distinctly anachronistic in our highly technological, yet ironically disconnected times. Yes, how undervalued things like gardening and cooking have become, when once upon a time, these skills sustained and were the stuff of life. But this could be a good time to immerse yourself into things that are simpler. Because oftentimes, simplicity is good for the soul.
Going back to simple things, especially at this time of survival, is a naturally healthy alternative to swallowing the pandemic placebo of just gritting your teeth and ‘working through it’. Take this as an opportunity to practice presence and to nurture connection with your children in the way that, hundreds of years ago, Indigenous elders did with their children, and our own ancestors did with theirs. Nurture an appreciation of what it means to be human, to be able to cultivate better self-care practices that come from truly relaxing into being (and not just doing that which is deemed as more ‘worthy’). In the process you will better understand how connection and presence are the most valuable tools of any effective teacher. (And unfortunately, a child doing online remote learning will more than likely not retain that learning unless it is made authentic (see authentic pedagogy)).
Whatever you do decide to do during this crazy time, I hope that you don’t place any undue pressure on yourself, and that surrendering to circumstances, and not fighting against them, are key to your own mental wellbeing.
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