Change is supposed to be good for us. It helps us grow and maximize our potential. You know – ‘That which does not kill us…’. As a parent and homeschooler, embracing change is vital. And yet, even knowing we’ll emerge stronger, we often balk at change.
Change and Growth
For all parents, there’s the undeniable truth that each child will grow from a totally dependent infant to someone capable of driving a car on the interstate. While you won’t go through such a marked metamorphosis, it’s important to realize that you grow as a person right along with them. This combination of growth requires constant adaptation in communication and expectations.
As a homeschooler, you have the added challenge of figuring out how they learn best. Which can change over the years. And is almost always different for their siblings. Even if you get things figured out for your oldest, it’s no guarantee those same strategies will work for successive children.
Along the way, you deal with life – changes in jobs, income, housing, relatives, friends, and more. Some of those changes are exciting and fun, while others can be disheartening and extremely challenging. Take Covid, for example…
The Biggest Challenge
Without a doubt, Covid is the biggest challenge that many of us face right now. It has permeated nearly every facet of our lives. Every time I think, okay we’ve figured out a way to get around this or we know how to modify that, something new crops up.
You get to the point where you’re saying, “Okay, I’m tired of these opportunities for growth. I’ve grown enough. Can we just go back to ‘normal’?”
Apparently, not.
So, how can you truly embrace change? Here’s the basic two step strategy:
- Allow yourself time to process.
- Try to find the opportunity to grow around and beyond the change.
Simplistic. But it works.
Processing Time
You and your children do need to acknowledge what you’ve lost. It may simply be the loss of what’s familiar and routine. Or it may be more significant – a large and important part of your lives. With Covid, it’s often the loss of activities and freedoms that we’ve enjoyed in the past.
Give yourself and your children some time to process things. Talk to them about how it’s okay to be sad and angry. And then…
Consider Your Options
It often feels that we don’t have other options. That the loss or change can’t be ‘fixed’. And it’s true that sometimes it can’t. But look at what you can do. Any small step forward you take will set you up for a new journey. The beginning may be slow and arduous, but it will get easier with time.
In the spring of 2020, in-person activities for our homeschool group came to a screeching halt. All our field trips, park days, and small group meetings were cancelled. This had a huge impact on my personal approach to homechooling. In addition to being fun, our group outings and projects are often related to what we do at home for school, from reading to writing to public speaking. I was hard pressed to replace these experiences.
But in the spring of 2020, there was this new thing called Zoom. Yes, our early efforts with Zoom were awkward and laughable. But we got better. And we stayed connected.
While we’re not as reliant on Zoom as we were that first year of Covid, it’s opened up all sorts of new ways for us to connect and learn. It’s become an important supplement to several of our ongoing activities, including our Roots and Shoots service-learning projects, ASL Practice Group, National History Day Performance, and Green Mountain Youth Speakers.
The Ultimate Lesson about Change
Here’s the thing. Your kids are watching what you do. How you react to change. How you process it and come out on the other side. It doesn’t matter if you fail. It’s the fact that you keep going.
Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.
Special Olympics athlete oath
Be brave in your repeated attempts. You won’t win every time. But you can always be brave.
One final note. You can’t give change that guarded hug you give a weird relative. Instead, you have to give it a big old bear hug. It might be difficult. But embracing changes means you’ll grow, adapt, and become stronger. And so will your kids.
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