Young People Often Do Know What They Don’t Know
Episode 55: Young People Often Do Know What They Don’t Know
We Discuss:
How when kids have the time and space to self-direct their learning, they develop good skills and trust their intuition
The mass influx of courses for parents aimed at managing children and problems rather than imagining consensual, mutually respectful parent-child relationships
Whether parents can trust themselves and their children to figure things out as they go rather than learning a set parenting formula or technique
Kids seeing through parenting “techniques” and “scripts” rather than genuine trust and relationship
Keeping the idea of parenting or homeschooling experts in perspective
The explosion and potential overwhelm of parenting and homeschooling information
Parents letting go of a step by step learning path in order to support kids in making their own decisions and self-directing their learning
The changes to the home education landscape since the pandemic
The degree of life wisdom that kids develop when they have the freedom to do so
That it’s okay to fail and it’s okay not to know
School’s focus on knowing things and having the right answer as the acceptable way
The fear of failure and not knowing following us far into adulthood
The joyful, confident energy of young people
How the ability to slow down and notice what there might be to learn is a skill that happens gradually
Complaints about young people needing a lot of direction in the workplace and peeling back where that dependency on being told what to do comes from
Genuinely wanting to learn something and get better at it versus having to do it
That self-directed learning isn’t performative, but rather time is spent discovering oneself
The focus and energy that’s taken up in school performance and trying not to get noticed for the wrong reasons
Different, outside-of-the-box ways of looking at things like job interviews
Being confident enough to be authentic and humble
A young person not determining their worth by their performance or success
The paradox of telling people to be themselves when most people have spent chunks of their childhood learning to suppress their voice and energy
How the trepidation young children have in making transition and the trust they place in adults reflects that they actually do know what they don’t know (or at least that there’s something they don’t know or aren’t yet ready for)
Whether the line, “Kids don’t know what they don’t know” is code for “Kids aren’t doing what we want them to do?”
The assumption that adults know all the things that kids need to know and also know how to get the kids to learn
The assumed lack of capacity of children to know what’s good for them and the assumption that adults do
How observant and present parents become parents who are in tune with their child
Letting go of the sense that we can control their development
That self-directed doesn’t mean unsupported
How we trust adults to understand their readiness and sense of what they need in a given time but tend not to extend that trust to children
The difference in experience when a book or piece of learning is compulsory versus chosen from general interest
Working as a team with kids when they know they want to explore something and trust that the adult might have ideas and insight
The way that as adults, we get to complain about the things we have to do but don’t want to
The distinction between having to sit through a natural event in life versus content that’s forced on children out of the context of real life
The huge amount of linguistic and mathematical learning that children are doing all the time and that a lack of direct instruction does not equal “nothingness”
Introducing history (or any subject matter) versus trying to force learning
That just because something has value doesn’t mean we can dictate the timeline of learning or even whether it gets deeply learned
That the time used to push learning about something could be time for a child to get into deep learning about something of their own interest
Sharing ideas and bringing things in to them and just seeing what lands for them
That our children will naturally be exposed to many of the things we are interested in and find important simply by being around us
That when kids are feeling invested, joyful and relaxed is when skills are most likely to develop and information most likely to be absorbed and integrated
How different “subjects” like history are baked into almost any of the things that our kids are interested in
Having the humility as a parent to sit back and allow our child to unfold in their interests and development and how amazed we might be at what deep and confident learners they are
Noticing an enthusiasm that some children have to learn something that might actually be an eagerness to please
How hard humans ultimately work to “self-preserve”
The difficulty in distinguishing between what is information and what is a sales pitch in a homeschool world that has become very business-oriented and yet the beauty that there is value now being connected to the skills and wisdom of homeschool parents
That homeschool families pre-social media didn’t have nearly the window into the lives of other families and that having that now is both a challenge and a positive
Resources:
Episode 54: Parents Can’t Teach Their Children Everything and That’s Okay
Episode 16: Lists or Not: How Do We and Those We Love Keep Organized?