Do Our Teens NEED to Work Independently?

Have you read this article? If You Want to Work From Home Full-Time, Your Teens Must Be Independent Learners I thought it worth checking out since I am trying to work more hours at home while homeschooling my 15-year old son. There's a section that stuck out at me:

Not only do your teens eventually grow up and move out, but long before that time, they should be learning independently with little input from you.

Having independent learners is critical for a work at home mom because you need time to devote to making money. This doesn’t make you a bad mom or a bad homeschool mom to encourage independent learning. Remember that if your children were in public school, they would be doing most of their work on their own anyway.

(Emphasis mine)

Uh, really? Last time I checked, kids in high school had teachers who were providing lessons, other students to work with in class or even during lunch hour or after school... There's a reason high school teachers are paid to be there and it's not to babysit!

This is not, however, an uncommon attitude in the homeschooling community. I once bought into this idea that at the high school level, my kids should just be working independently.

But then one thing hit me earlier this school year: I love teaching and working with kids. It's why I became a teacher. And in school, kids do have teachers to provide lessons, get kids thinking beyond just a textbook, guide them through things. So, my initial plans of setting things up for him to do everything pretty much independently got changed.

Then another thing hit me when it came to my son: He doesn't want to do it all on his own. He also doesn't enjoy doing some of the stuff at all, much less on his own. Which means that if I want to insist that he do all of his learning independently, he is going to hate it and dislike formal schoolwork even more than he already does. This is not what I want.

Yes, if you can't figure out how to get in full-time hours, and you need full-time hours, while homeschooling your teen, definitely, make sure they have an independent program they can follow or unschool them. But don't use this idea that they would be doing most of their work on their own anyway as some sort of support or justification for doing so. And drop the idea that they should be working independently. Don't we live with enough "homeschool Mom" guilt already?

My suggestion would be to figure out something that will work best for your family. Maybe it will be that you won't work full-time hours. (There is a lot out there suggesting that if we learned to really focus ourselves, we could cut our hours dramatically.) Or maybe you'll use part of your weekend and evenings. Or maybe you'll get up earlier than your teen and get a couple of hours in, work with your teen a couple hours, then leave him with independent work he is comfortable with for the rest of the afternoon. Or maybe you'll work your full-time hours during the day, they'll do what independent stuff they can then and an hour or so in the evening or late afternoon for one-on-one.

I've worked out that, when there aren't extra things to do like get groceries I forgot to get on the weekend, take care of things like house repairs and such, I have about 30 hours available to me--using my Saturday mornings--to work each week. This gives me about 10 hours a week to work with my son. I also have to be the chauffeur for my daughter who goes to school, which, if I didn't have to do that, would easily allow me to add another hour or two, so 5-10 hours, to my workweek. All while working with my son a couple of hours per school day.

I like learning with him. He likes learning with me--some things. So, those are the things we do together. He also likes to have lots of time to do the rest on his own schedule. So he does that.

If you want to have full-time hours, having a teen learn independently absolutely makes that easier. But please don't let yourself think you should be having your teen work independently all the time just because that's what they supposedly do in school (not) nor that you should make them learn independently if you want/have to work full-time hours from home. It doesn't have to be that way if you don't want it.

What Are Your Electronics Rules for Teens?

I'm curious to know what your electronics rules are--both for your teens (homeschooling or not) and parents.

We don't have any set rules--something that bugs my husband because he's more black-and-white in his thinking than I am--but that doesn't mean we don't go at one point, "Hey, you're spending an awful lot of time doing this on this device," or "Hey, you've already spent a ridiculous amount of hours doing this electronic stuff today, so no, you're not allowed to go on the Playstation." When they were younger and didn't really have devices, it was rather easy to set limits for screen time. With them being teenagers and having their own devices--and in their rooms--it's creating some challenges which might not be real issues, but definitely something my husband and I are thinking about. Are they spending too much time? What's a reasonable amount of time? What's a reasonable location?

My husband and I grew up differently, which creates some conflict there: he was in a house where there was a TV in his parents' room, a TV in the living room and a TV in the rec room in the basement--which was really his and his two brothers' area to watch TV and play video games. I grew up in a house where my mom had a TV, there was a TV in the living room (that I never had to ask to watch) and when I was in high school, I got my own TV for my room. I don't recall any rules being put on it, but I was the kind of kid who really needed my sleep, so I wasn't prone to staying up super late anyhow. Granted, we didn't have as many channels and such, so that difference is admitted by me.

So, my husband has his idea of how he grew up is how things should be; I have my idea of how I grew up isn't how things "should" be, but it's fine. My thinking, too, is what's not fine is if they watch things they know we won't approve of or if it gets to be too much. I have, for example, put a limit on our son's watching because it seems to affect his sleep more than his sister--he will literally watch something on his iPad until midnight and be awake at 8:30 or so and tired because he needs more sleep than that. His sister might watch something on her laptop, and until midnight or past, but it doesn't seem to affect her sleep the same way AND she tried on her own for a bit to follow some sleep recommendations and not watch anything for half an hour before she tried to fall asleep and it took her an hour or more longer to actually fall asleep. It's more for the background noise of familiar programs or lately, things like My Little Pony: silly, not too engaging, relaxing.

He didn't really say anything about our daughter watching stuff on her laptop until it had become something she'd been doing for a while. She's 17.5; doesn't seem like a time to be telling her to stop, something he realizes. He has concerns about what she might be watching; I check her browser and Netflix recently watched fairly often. There's never been anything of any concern to me, although he wonders about the horror movies she watches (except he and I both talk about horror movies we saw in junior high and high school). She pretty much watches stuff after everybody else is in bed, and given she has always been a night owl, since birth, she watches a bit before she's ready to fall asleep, usually around midnight or so. Is this a habit we should be discouraging is the question on my mind today.

Another issue in our house is our daughter's use of her phone after a certain hour. My husband said today he thinks she should have a curfew on it; I'm not opposed to that, but his idea of a curfew, I believe, is based on what his students have as curfews--but his students have to get up between 6-7am each day, whereas she can sleep in, and does, often until sometime between 8:30-9:30. If a school student has a phone curfew of 9 or 10, then is it unreasonable for her to be checking things at 10:30 or 11? So many questions to ask oneself as a parent! I do think that if she goes to school next year, as it looks like she will do, and she's on her phone at 11pm every night at that point, yes, it might be time to say something, although I would take more of a position of discuss it with her and work something out and I think my husband would like he and I to figure something out and tell her. (Is that a man vs woman thing? Or maybe it's just the Montessori in me: work with the child!)

My son spends HOURS AND HOURS on his iPad watching YouTube videos about games, mostly, although sometimes he does share cool stuff like Matthew Santoro's videos. (He's got awesome educational videos, btw!) I am starting to feel like it's really too much, but again, do I just determine the limit, or his dad and I determine the limit, or do I figure out a way for him to choose to cut back and regulate himself? Maria Montessori would say we need to set the limits when the kids can't set them themselves. I guess I'd like to see first if he and I can figure out a limit together.

Each teen has their own iPad (well, Mini), my son has an iPod Touch, my daughter has an iPhone (yes, she pays for the monthly bill), we have an iMac, I have my Asus laptop, my husband has an iPad from school, we have a TV in our bedroom, there's a TV in the family room and a TV in the basement, which we had designed to be the "teen cave" and it hasn't really turned out that way... (My husband puts the TV on and the sleep timer every night at bedtime. Every night. I know in high school, I often had to put something on--radio, TV, music, something--to get to sleep. As our daughter is finding is useful and our son thinks is useful, but it's typically just listening to music that gets him to sleep.)

That's just a little picture into what's going on around here. Homeschooling offers the possibility of much more openness and while the Sudbury Valley school might say, "Hey, let them do as they please!",  the Sudbury Valley school also has all kinds of kids and activity opportunities around that change the environment and influences. (I hear the "change the environment, change the child" quote. I suppose it applies to teens just as much to little ones or adults. I'll have to think about this more.)

A long way of giving you some info on my side of things to ask you: What are your electronics rules for your teens? Be it the amount of time, do they have to ask permission to use this or that, is there a curfew for certain things, restrictions on locations...?

And with that, I think I need to go upstairs and check if my son is actually getting ready for the day. He went upstairs about 10 minutes ago, but that's not a guarantee he isn't watching something else on his iPad instead of getting dressed.