Question: “Kids self motivation/executive functioning/need for control- how do you do the schedule for the week? Do you personally just make it up in your head and dole it out? Talk about it as a family? Once a week? Every morning? How do the kids get input? How to you decide what’s happening? How is it communicated to the kids in an ongoing way?”

We have, of course, tried a whole bunch of different ways of setting up their task list. We all have a lot of resentment over having worked with the charter school because both kids sat down and gamed out a whole year of curriculum for themselves (long-term planning around projects, how subjects would be evaluated after study, and what books/methods they would utilize to pursue different educational goals) and the Educational Specialist said “Wow you are my only family who actually did all the required work.” We are really bitter. The kids super struggle with “What is the point” after that experience.

For a while post-charter school I insisted on continuing to follow a long-term planning method and the kids just dug in their feet with a big “Fuck it.” No matter how much they had scheduled they did less and less of the work they were supposed to do. Not because it was too hard, not because they couldn’t… they would rather stare at a wall and get punished because “What is the point”.

So over the course of this year we have gotten less and less structured because they are really bitter and long-term planning was truly killing their love of learning. This is tricky on a variety of levels because my kids previously had a really deep love of learning and trying to jump over hoops for the sake of jumping over hoops made them burned out and bitter.

What we are doing now is sitting down on Monday with a day planner and talking through “What would you like to learn this week?” They still have a variety of learning methods and subjects they cover. It is not consistent from week to week. Some weeks they do a lot of math and some weeks basically none. Some weeks they work on other languages a lot and some weeks they barely touch it. Some weeks they study a lot of history stuff. Some weeks they ask for a lot of science documentaries. Some weeks it is tons of art history and drawing practice.

I have been trying really hard to let them set their goals. I don’t decide how much work they have to do. But once we spend an hour sitting together and planning they need to do it. I am really rigorous about follow through. It’s ok to set a few small goals. It’s ok to set big goals. You will do the work you lay out for yourself. Some weeks their work takes them an hour a day and some weeks it takes closer to four hours a day. I think this practice is important because they are learning what amount of time things take them. They are learning how to take into consideration “We have x plans and we will be tired after them so what do we want to do the next day?”

They track what chores they do and their homework in day planners. We have tried a bunch of other methods and this is the way they can be most consistent. Doing it online did not work out at all.

“Let’s talk about some systems that would give him more control over his time right now, there isn’t a need to wait for a house. With both of the older children you are in the throws of the transition from parenting young children to parenting teenagers. It’s not an easy time. So much managing, so much letting go, so many balances to get right.”

They control most of their time. They decide when they are going to get their stuff done. I am available to help with academics until around 1/2 in the afternoon and if you haven’t gotten your stuff done at that time you need to do

I ask questions like “Are you sure you can get all that done in two hours?” (Our purported goal for academic work in a day.) I will say things like “You haven’t done any (subject) in a while. Do you think maybe adding some this week would be good so you don’t forget?” Sometimes they agree and add some and sometimes they say they say they really don’t want to and I let it go.

I am big on project based learning. I am really into things like them drawing a comic book about a historical topic which means they have to do a bunch of research so they can explain what was going on. They’ve done different programming projects (EC made a really neat animated music video… that was taken down because she picked a song with a swear word. *smack forehead*)

We have a bunch of different approaches to math and they kind of move around and through them. They are not linear in their approach and this is going pretty well at this point. Text books were killing them.

House chores are renegotiated every so often (sometimes weekly, sometimes every few months, sometimes when we move). I list of what chores have to be done and they volunteer to do what they want to do. At this point they are getting paid for their chores and that is a mixed incentive. They are more prone to get up and do their chores without asking (which is great!) because they get a monetary penalty for me having to nag. But there are days when they just don’t care and say “I don’t care about earning any money today.” Last night I told MC that it was great that he didn’t want to get paid for his chores, he still got to do them and I just wouldn’t have to pay him. He said that sucked. I grinned. (It was about 10 minutes of basic tidying after dinner. He had been out of the house for about 28 hours. It was a good plan for him to do a chore even though he didn’t want to. He drops habits easily and doesn’t like picking them up.)

(Fuck. I lost a chunk of text here and recreating it is hard. Or it moved around and now this is repetitive? I don’t know. I need to get off the computer and I don’t have enough brain to fix it.)

I wait around in the mornings to help them. If they haven’t done it by 1/2 in the afternoon I say you must do it on your own because I have moved on to doing my own work and you don’t get to interrupt me to help you at that point. I kind of hang out doing interruptible stuff in the mornings so that they can have academic support at need. They pick what academics they do. They pick when they do chores. They pick which chores they are responsible. But once they say “X is my responsibility for the week” I hold them to it even if they kind of change their mind by Thursday. You can entirely renegotiate on Monday.

“They also need to be allowed to develop long term planning skills. Like multi step projects, using to calendar, lots of ways to encourage it if you’re afraid they are having trouble.”

They absolutely can do this. But the charter school made them bitter. The ES put together their portfolio to hand in to the state before they were done with their projects and she said she didn’t care about seeing the end results. They were completely fucking crushed. It hurt them so much. They worked so hard and she acted like the end result was pointless. They internalized that in damaging ways. But they know how to break a project down over months. They know how to plan it out on a calendar and they can do that like 80% independently. My job is mostly to say “I think you need to build in buffer time here, here, and here because projects always run over.”

“I’m going to caution you about your use of the term “self esteem”. Doing work for other people and thinking that makes it ok to take resources is a transactional relationship. “Self esteem” is valuing yourself because you are an individual who deserves to be valued, regardless of her productivity. You don’t have to pay for your existence. If you and Noah used to scorekeep, that’s just an additional layer of transactional. You’re still scorekeeping, it’s just more about yourself. That needs to be let go.”

I am super duper achingly transactional. I had to earn my keep in foster homes or I was kicked out. This is absolutely bone deep. I know it is a problem and I do not know how to let it go. I really struggle with my growing disability. I have bought my friendships over many years and I don’t know how to trust that they will continue if I don’t do work.

I don’t know how to let that go.

You are right that EC needs to learn how to come and ask for help with stuff instead of me volunteering the help. That’s going to be hard on both of us. But we are definitely to the point where I am enabling her not having to learn how to ask for help. MC does get more practice with deciding which of his emotions to share and he is better about speaking up when he is distressed as a result.

“Exercise, rest, your projects and things you want to get done in this life- I want to hear more about how you guys plan your time so I can help with that.”

We have different seasons. Sometimes a season lasts weeks and sometimes months or a whole year. I’m definitely in the multipotentialite realm. We have some goals as a family and we sit down and game them out (like travel. We have long conversations about where to go and why) and we each have our separate goals. Exercise comes and goes for a lot of reasons. When I am pregnant… my body decides that the parasite is the only thing I can support and as the pregnancy progresses I spend more and more time in a chair and everyone else struggles to cope with that. When I overdo and my body decides it is time for a long rest period whether I like it or not, everyone else slows down too.

We like going for long walks as a family. We tend to split into pairs and have intense chats. It’s really nice. We all come home from walks happy and feeling connected. (Which pairs changes sometimes by the week or month or day. We rotate a lot.) When one person is injured (like MC twisting her knee on the way into Japan) everyone else tends to slow to a stop. We are not good at leaving someone behind.

The PT exercises I am supposed to do take time, space, and focus. I often struggle to find all three at a time. I have not been consistent about doing them since we left California and I can tell that my body is degrading again from the strength I had built up.

We alternate between planning things out on paper or sending emails back and forth to track planning conversations for longer term stuff. The kids really like email planning conversations because they give the kids a feeling of importance.

My projects are kind of dumped on the family every so often. I found my old pictures! I cried with joy. Proof of all the huge house art projects, the gardening progression, the marathon training, all the places we travel to…

Sometimes I sort of ditch folks for a few weeks and expect them to just keep going without me. Like when I was laying out tile for the bathroom. I… didn’t do much directing or helping with homework for a bit. Get your chores done. I’m busy. The kids still did the vast majority of their stuff but some things fell through the cracks and I had to just accept that.

I read a book when I was first preparing for teaching. It explained that the very best teachers don’t have to be present in their classroom every single day and their students keep on learning without them. This was how I handled teaching and this is how I try to handle parenting. I teach a lot of structure, rhythm, and routine. Now you keep it up whether I am standing over you glaring or whether I am busy, ok? But pretty much everyone in my family has ADD. (MC was not diagnosed but the evaluator spent 15 minutes talking to him in his favorite “You are giving me all of your attention” environment and that was not very useful as an evaluation.) Look a squirrel is a big problem. But we all form new systems and follow them for a while really easily. We just want to change the system frequently or we get bored. Thus planning every Monday because longer than that gets boring.

We have layers of systems. There are hygiene/sleep layers. We have exercise patterns (morning/afternoon or what kind we are doing for a while). We have food preparation/planning/eating/cleaning up systems. We have academic/learning goals and methods. There are chore patterns.

The trouble is triage. How do you keep the same priority system over a truly long period of time? We do various shuffling based on why something becomes more or less important for a while. Consistency is not our strongest suit but we aren’t that bad either.

I worked with a lot of families as a teacher. We truly aren’t that bad. But getting us back on track isn’t my easiest work and I struggle with resenting it.

Our sleep cycles drift a lot with light patterns. We stay up much later (more like 9) in the summer and in the winter I am often in bed around 7pm. Breakfast is usually around 8am except when it isn’t. I struggle with feeling like flexibility is good and feeling like flexibility is bad.

So tl;dr the kids do their own planning in many parts of their lives. They buy their own clothes with a set budget. They figure out how to spend their money for school supplies and books. (Previously these were just set parts of the budget and now they are trying to earn how much money they get so they can decide how to spend a larger chunk of money at a time.) They set a lot of their socializing schedule with other people but sometimes they get dragged to what I want to do.

They have more control over their lives than I ever had until I was basically an adult. I struggle with this not being enough.