I could teach other people’s kids, but not my own

I am a former teacher, but I couldn’t have homeschooled our kids. Long ago, on those inevitable days when I questioned the education our kids were getting and wondered whether they would be better off if I just taught them myself, I would shake my crazy head and remind myself that it wouldn’t be pretty if I were in charge.

As a parent, I knew my limitations. I could parent them well enough when they were underfoot, but we needed time apart to keep the time together harmonious. They needed school, but also I needed them in school. I needed a break from parenting, and regularly. Even when my break from parenting was going off to teach other people’s kids.

Enter Covid-19. I think about my younger self when I am thinking about the current education crisis, and I imagine what those days would have been like with extreme stress and no parenting breaks. Real breaks, when kids were in other responsible people’s care and getting enriching experiences. Could I have gotten our three kids and myself organized enough so that one, and then the other, and then the third could sit in front of a screen every day, with a teacher on the other end? How would I have made sure that one wouldn’t be distracted by the other, or by my conference calls, or by the dog? Would they have had to look school-ready? Would the house in the background need to appear organized? I am sure I would have judged — and felt judged by — the whole experience. My 38-year old self would have longed for a restorative weekend, and that wouldn’t have been in the cards.

That’s why I’m struggling lately. As an educator, I know that kids need rigorous instruction every day. But as a mum, I would have had to have been a better version of myself to be parent and teacher every day of this quarantine period, and this self, the self that walks the rooms of this house today — filled with the angst of an upended economy and germs lurking in the grocery store and so much isolation? Nope, even a younger and more energetic version of me could not have possibly done a good job doing the everyday parenting and the formal teaching in this emotional state.

Historically, when we think about the role of parents in kids’ learning, we think of it as ongoing and intentional, but doable amidst a family’s busy life. There is good science on the types of at-home settings that contribute to a robust learning environment for young children, and if parents knew what the job descriptions looked like for that role, which we have never explained well and made clear, I think parents could do that job and do it well — especially after what they have been trying to do of late.

Then we could leave it to schools to do the teaching we need them to do: the more intensive and systematic instruction that children need in varying doses, according to developmental stages and decided upon by screenings and assessments at regular intervals. Kids would benefit greatly from this collective commitment between home and school learning — the formal and the informal, the intensive and the sporadic-but-regular, the comprehensive and the supplemental.

The problem is that this relatively high bar schools had for families before Covid-19 entered, to prepare kids for kindergarten and motivate and inspire them to be eager and diligent students all along the way, is not doable without emotional and economic stability, and the right kind of everyday support. And that parent role, the much smaller role than we are expecting them to do now, is only possible if all those vital-but-playful interactions are peppered throughout a day when parents walking through their kitchens aren’t feeling extraordinary stress, and when they see time in the near term when they will get a true, and long-enough, break.

That’s what we all need to have the strength to be some versions of our best parenting selves. And without that, I don’t think we can expect parents to be good parents, and good formal teachers, too.

But perhaps, just perhaps, this crisis could be a pivot point, an opportunity to use these forced communications between homes and schools to create the kind of authentic and productive family partnerships that would raise reading rates and child outcomes at scale. Maybe we could stop the parent/teacher blame game, put down our swords and pick up our shovels, because every adult in a child’s life has to work together to give that child the dosage of learning he or she needs. We each have our roles, and ongoing and honest communication is required. Perhaps there could be a truly communal effort that comes out of all this, and family/school partnerships will become the powerful engines they are meant to be, to fuel children’s successes.