I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.
Neil Gaiman, The Sandman:
The Kindly Ones, Vol. 9
Preparing young people to thrive in a tricky world is not just the job of schools and teachers. Parents are educators too. The way we talk to our kids, the kinds of rituals we create for them around mealtimes and bedtimes, the activities we encourage, the role models we provide, the materials we place within their reach, the kinds of ‘fun’ we lay on for them: all of these carry messages that influence their growing minds – for good or ill. Before we try to think about how we can help to shape the education system itself – what we can all do to encourage the spread of the kinds of schools that our kids really need – we need to look closer to home (literally). What is the informal ‘domestic curriculum’ we are providing for our children, and could we do a tiny bit better?
We should say, of course, that, just as the earlier chapters were written for the purposes of stimulating debate, so this chapter on home learning is meant to do likewise. There are hundreds of excellent books on parenting and parental engagement in children’s learning and we certainly do not intend to duplicate them here.1 Instead, we offer this as a starter-for-ten to get parents and teachers thinking about the ‘how’ of learning at home. Remember Ruby and her seven Cs? We will use her description of the attributes she values as a way of organising our discussion. Naturally, you may not like our seven Cs and might prefer to come up with your own. We’d love you to do that!
The domestic curriculum, as we have implied, is like the one children learn at school; but it is conveyed more by the way things are done than the specific ‘lessons’ we might try to teach. You can play a family game of Scrabble, for example, in a way that models your total engagement in a good game; or as a coach, less interested in winning and more in making suggestions to your children as to how they can make good words, with all your letters visible to all so that everyone can think through their options out loud; or as a fiercely competitive test of your own verbal ability; or as an exercise in dutiful, half-hearted involvement with your family while you quietly check emails on your phone. It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it!
Confidence
Being confident involves developing and using a growth mindset, being a can-do person and being able to act independently. A growth mindset, as we saw in Chapter 2, is founded on self-belief. Children who believe they can get better at things, it turns out, normally can – with practice and determination. The fixed mindset makes you fatalistic, so you don’t think it is worth doing the very things – practising and struggling – that could help you to improve. The best ways in which you can encourage your child to develop this kind of self-belief is to avoid too much generalised praise (Well done, Guy) or ‘ability’ praise (Guy, you’re just a natural at this), and concentrate instead on giving really specific feedback to your child when he does things well (I really liked the way you spent extra time on your homework, Guy, and used the ideas your teacher had given you for writing interesting sentences). Guy, in this final example, is hearing that his effort paid off and, over time, he will see how valuable it is to go the extra mile. Another important job for parents and family members is to share things with which they are struggling. In this way, children learn that struggling and making mistakes are normal and healthy aspects of learning.
You can’t give a child a magic injection of confidence! For sure, you can make them feel loved and secure, but real inner can-do confidence comes from the experiences of planning and seeing difficult tasks through. A key part of such success involves the ability to set goals and then plan how you will achieve them. So, from an early age it is helpful if you can get into the habit of making plans as a family (What shall we do while we are on holiday? Who’d like to suggest what we do today?). Once children are at school, homework (not always a helpful activity if poorly set) provides a good opportunity to help your child break a task down into its smaller components, think through how long each part might take, make a plan, do it and then, whenever possible, talk about how it went.
When they are very young children want and need you to hold their hand. But as they grow you can help them to practise acting independently. To begin with you can be quietly there in the background – for example, while they cook a simple meal ‘on their own’. Then you can set them simple jobs to accomplish as they grow in confidence – walking the short distance to a local shop and buying you something, taking the dog for a walk (with you seeing them safely over the main road first), getting everything ready for school the night before.
A good read to help you understand more about developing confidence is Carol Dweck’s Mindset.
Curiosity
Curiosity is at the heart of all learning. Being curious involves noticing things, reading avidly and, obviously, asking good questions. Young children have curiosity in great abundance, constantly pestering those around them with questions (Where does dew come from? Why does it get dark? Who is God?). But it is all too easy to dampen children’s insatiable appetite to find out more. It can be wearying to answer yet another question, but if you can possibly manage to show genuine interest in the enquiry, such role modelling will be a powerful influence.
Being able to notice things is an essential component of curiosity. For some children (and adults) it seems to come naturally. For others it may need to be actively coaxed into life. If you have ever been to an art gallery you will have an idea of what we mean. Some visitors seem to be able to see things in pictures that others completely miss. It’s the same with children. On a walk to school, for example, some children chatter away naming things as they go. Others talk less but you can tell that they are noticing for they tell you about it later. A third category of child (and adult!) seems to walk through life without obviously noticing what is new or different or interesting. Parents and family members can help by playing games (the obvious one is I-Spy) and explicitly talking out loud as they go about any daily tasks. It can feel very odd, but it helps (Can you see the …? Isn’t it interesting the way that …? What do think that is?). Family walks and car journeys are great ways of practising noticing. And with a smartphone in your hand children can be motivated by taking photos which they can return to later and discuss.
Reading for pleasure is probably the most important habit you can instil in your child. Some children take to it and need little encouragement, just a ready supply of books from the library. Others need lots of patient encouragement. There is nothing more powerful than a whole family reading their books together. Children see their parents engrossed in a book and inwardly record the importance attached to the activity by the grown-ups. Routines help – for example, making uninterrupted time after lunch at weekends and in the holidays can work. Before they go to sleep is a good time to take the opportunity to practise reading together. If your child is reluctant then you will need all your skill to find topics of interest. One neat way of persuading reluctant children to read is to give them the chance to turn off their light really late occasionally at a weekend only if they are reading a book. Reading aloud to your children for as long as they will let you is vital. It helps if you can have lots of children’s books at a low height throughout your home.
Questions are the outward expression of our curiosity, and the home is the obvious place to give them full rein. Simple things that work include: watching a wildlife programme together and then talking about it; making sure you have a good supply of simple reference books around the place – dictionaries, atlases, guidebooks and so on; getting your children to create a treasure hunt around your house/garden and make up the clues; sitting beside your child and doing an internet search for something that one of you is curious about.
A good resource for encouraging curiosity is the BBC iWonder website or the Discovery Channel, and a wonderful book is Michael Rosen’s Good Ideas.2
Conviviality and collaboration
Conviviality and collaboration are core attributes of human beings. Conviviality is close to what Malcolm Gladwell helpfully calls ‘social savvy’, and it seems that the home is a really good place to develop it. Young children can be very sensitive about who their friends are, worrying that they are in the wrong crowd or that someone does not like them. In the home we can provide children with a safe environment to practise interacting with people of all ages. We can show them how we are all individual and different and how to value such differences. Whether it’s being part of a tribe, group, team or family, we need to be able to get on with people, even those we don’t like very much. Spotting an acquaintance across a room at a party, Abraham Lincoln famously remarked, “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.” That’s a good attitude to model to our children. Whether on Facebook or in the playground, children cannot help encountering hostility, prejudice and the rush to judge. Being convivial – a good collaborator – requires us to be able to listen empathically, show kindness to others and give and receive feedback well.
Empathy is the capacity of seeing the world from someone else’s perspective. For a parent, learning to listen to your child with empathy is one of the hardest things to do. It is all too easy either to jump in and give advice or to cut short a child’s distressed explanation because we want to reassure him or her. Much of what empathic listeners do is non-verbal. Short noises like ‘uh-huh’, ‘mmm’, ‘ahh’, with small nods of the head and an absolute focus on what the speaker is saying are important. A useful technique widely used in counselling is to try to paraphrase what you think you have heard and offer it back to your child: “So, it sounds like you’re pretty unhappy about …”, “I’m wondering if you might be feeling …” or “It sounds like you are thinking about …” With some careful listening you can keep narrowing the focus of your paraphrasing until you are pretty confident you have caught the nub of what they are saying. There are various games and activities that you can use to develop your child’s empathy. Examples include pinning names of famous characters on the back of a child with them having to guess who it is, games like What’s My Line? and role play between different real and imaginary people.
You can’t teach kindness. That’s a bold statement, but we believe it to be true in the sense that there is no simple training activity you can employ. Rather, it requires careful choice of language to select adjectives that are more generous than they are critical (“She must be going through a really tough time” rather than “Isn’t Aunty Helen being really cranky?”). As well as modelling it also invites us to correct our children by offering kinder versions of critical statements they may make, as well as looking for examples from your family or in the news of kind behaviour on which you can provide a commentary. And, of course, actions speak louder than words. The way you treat your partner/spouse, as well as your wider family and friends, will be a strong influence on your children. Some homes give reward systems, for example for chores. It is also possible to use the same system for acts of kindness.
Being convivial does not mean that you can never criticise others. On the contrary, as we have suggested, feedback is one of the most effective means by which we learn and grow. Rather, it’s a question of how you give and receive critical comments. In terms of giving it is helpful to find positive things to notice first, to focus on one or two specific things and to be sure that you suggest a way of doing things differently. When it comes to suggesting different courses of action a phrase we like is: “You might like to …” In terms of receiving feedback the most important gift you can give your child is not to act defensively. By means of both body language and words, show them how important it is just to listen and learn. That’s not to say that all feedback is accurate! You can help your child accept what she hears but also have the inner confidence to be critical of her actions in a different way from the feedback giver. Giving and receiving feedback has to be practised so that individuals find the words and body language which are most suited to them and therefore have the ring of authenticity.
A good book to read is Raising Caring, Capable Kids with Habits of Mind by Lauren Carner and Angela Ladavaia-Cox.3
Communication
Being communicative is very important. So much unhappiness stems from accidental misunderstandings or careless explanations. Top of many parents’ worry list is a perception that either their children can’t communicate with them or they can’t get through to their children. Teenagers have got a bad name (with some justification!) for the grunts and mumbling which they may offer their parents in response to questions. Sometimes this is partly the result of what parents do – for example, the parent who pounces on their child freshly home from school to demand what they did at school (a sure turn-off, sadly). Sometimes it is a deliberate tactic of children to keep their parents in blissful ignorance of their misdemeanours. “Yeah, whatever” is a current favourite push-back, but by the time you read this there will be new variants! It turns out that being able to communicate well with your children, especially during adolescence, is a strong influence on their performance at school.
At the most personal level, being able to name and talk about feelings is fundamentally important. There is no short cut to finding opportunities for your child to experience and then give a name to the full range of feelings. Without this they cannot express themselves effectively. In the early years the Roger Hargreaves characters are wonderful (Mr Happy, Mr Grumpy, etc.). Then you can speculate on what others might be feeling in stories, in the news and in your own family. Always you are trying to create a climate in which children feel able to express their feelings and be listened to as they do so. A harder and equally important lesson for children is the realisation that no one can make them feel something. Even if they are angry or sad, they have choices. They can lash out or be quiet or plan to do something different. Once children can recognise and name their feelings they are well on the way to recognising their own trigger points and ‘sore spots’, which tend to cause them to react in ways which are less helpful, and start to find better ways of dealing with them.
Communication is not a context-free zone! It involves learning how to offer opinions. Some children seem to find this easy (for them, not always offering their opinion is the challenge). Most children have opinions but do not always know how or when to share them. Around the kitchen table is the perfect location for children to practise. Or it can be done as a game: for example, playing Just a Minute (or Just a Half Minute if 60 seconds seems too long at first). At some point your child will be asked to prepare a speech or presentation at school, and it will be all the harder for them if they haven’t practised already in the safety of the home.
While the kitchen, bedroom, classroom and playground may be the main early environments for children, there are many other situations in which they will need to learn to match their language to their audience. This can easily be rehearsed, simulated and practised at home using role play and games. At the simplest level, when your child has a tricky situation (e.g. feeling they have been unfairly treated by a teacher or by a friend) you can get them to rehearse with you different ways in which they might have a conversation. You can show them how, through their choice of different forms of words, they may get very different responses. You can have lots of fun with this!
A really practically helpful book is Stick Up for Yourself by Gershen Kaufman.4
Creativity
Being creative is one of the ways in which your child will be able to distinguish himself or herself from their peers. It involves having good ideas, dealing with uncertainty and being able to make links between apparently unconnected things. A number of well-respected thinkers about education believe that creativity is being squeezed out of some schools because of an obsession with tests and exams (and we are inclined to agree).
Having a good idea when you need one is central to creativity, but it is not much taught in schools. All too often children are asked to write a story or paint a picture without the process of creativity itself being explored. We know, for example, that human beings are not good at having ideas if they are under stress. (Evolutionarily we are programmed to fight or flight, and not to debate or mull when we are under attack.) So children need to be given lots of practice time to have new ideas when they are feeling most relaxed – after a game, after listening to music, when they are being cuddled by us. We can also give them various tools and let them experiment. Into this category come brainstorming, using a mind map, making a list, closing your eyes and picturing and so on. Some children like to keep an ideas book/folder/file, either hard copy or on a tablet. The big barrier with creativity for most children/people is the fear of making mistakes or getting it wrong, and you will want to do all you can to help them learn how to ‘park’ this side of their brain sometimes.
Uncertainty is an inevitable part of life, and it demands creativity. If everything were straightforward and predictable, with no ifs and buts, then we would not need to be creative and think differently. Creativity isn’t just for filling up idle time by painting a picture! Being able to manage uncertainty creatively calls for resilience as well. It requires us to explore and tolerate feelings of, for example, confusion or inadequacy. Hopefully we will get set many problems at school to which there is no easy answer. We will have to wrestle with degrees of likelihood. Games of chance and risk are good ways of trying out these kinds of issues at home. Or you might like to take a tricky item of news for an older child and explore possible courses of action. These kinds of activities can be grouped together under the banner of ‘What if’ – what would you do if you found yourself in a position where …?
Making connections and seeing patterns is an important part of being creative. Every time we use a metaphor we link one thing with another. Creative people have made great discoveries through the process of seeing connections where others have not. For example, someone thought to stitch together the invention of steam engines, the development of steel and the growing need for travel between the north and south of the UK, and generate the seed of an idea that became the railways. Mind maps are a good way of seeing connections, as are many other graphic depictions of ideas such as concept maps. Free association games can encourage connected thinking. The game of Crazy Connections (where you try and connect two highly unlikely items together) can be fun over a meal.
An excellent resource is The Bright Stuff by C. J. Simister or you could try one of ours, The Creative Thinking Plan (aimed more at adults but with ideas that are transferable).5
Commitment
Commitment to learning is essential if your children are going to find their passion in life. For children to find their passion – the things that really turn them on – parents and grandparents need to give them every opportunity to try things out. If you went to university, the metaphor you might like to have here is of home life as an extended freshers’ fair, or think of a farmers’ market. We need to create lots of opportunities for tasters. Some children find their passion easily. A special teacher ignites their interest. A talented family member takes them to the ice rink and they decide to learn ice hockey. But for most of us it is a slower, more uncertain process. The trick here is to gradually narrow the frame and set mutually agreed goals with your children about how long they might stick at something before they decide it’s not for them. It’s a difficult thing to judge. Bill, for example, knows that if he had not been forced through the early painful days of practising the French horn he would not have ended up enjoying playing it. A really simple thing to do with young children on wet holiday or weekend days is to refuse to answer their complaints that they are bored and equip them with a supply of cardboard boxes, scissors, sticky tape and their imagination, and see what happens.
Home life is full of opportunities for children to learn taking responsibility. Keeping pets is a good example of this. So too are the many chores that you can share out. A child can be shopper, cook, gardener, map-reader, budget-holder, event-planner and so forth. Sometimes the trick is just to make it sound a bit grown-up (rather than a childish task) to enlist their imaginative engagement.
Sticking with difficulty – being persistent – is eminently learnable and coachable too. The Building Learning Power approach has a simple idea, the ‘stuck poster’, for teachers to develop with children in their classrooms. Children pool ideas as to what they can do when they are stuck and don’t know how to proceed, and they make a personal or class poster of these ideas as an aide-memoire. Art Costa and Bena Kallick’s Habits of Mind programme6 has a similar idea – the persistence toolbox. Either of these readily adapt themselves to the home. Think of homework time when your child is stuck and create a family version of this which your child could stick on the wall in their bedroom or maybe you could add it to the fridge door in the kitchen.
Craftsmanship
Sometimes we hear that being craftsmanlike is going out of fashion. In a 24/7 throwaway society it is all too easy to condone the slapdash. Being craftsmanlike requires us to show pride, learn from our mistakes, work on practising the hard bits and make something the best it can be.
Most of us are naturally proud of something when we know we have done a good job. Unfortunately, in some schools, it has become uncool to show pride in your achievements. This is a terrible thing and we have to fix it. First base is to be clear that showing pride is a feature of your child’s earliest memories. One ready way of recognising pride might be to create a family motto that somehow says, in a sentence, what your family is good at. Or you could go one stage further and create your own coat of arms (much fun as a family holiday activity!). Or how about creating an actual or virtual gallery of all the accomplished people in your family? Just the process of identifying who is good at what, or which of your ancestors was famous for something, can be very stimulating and enlightening.
We can all learn from our mistakes. Indeed, it is particularly helpful if this is regularly demonstrated by the whole family. Without suggesting for a moment that your conversations should be strewn with disasters and near-misses, it is really helpful when adults show that they too make mistakes; that making mistakes is normal and that the important thing is to bounce back and have a better go. Some children are fearful of blotting their page and of having to cross things out. A useful activity for a family is to look at a play, a painting, a building or an invention for which there are many prototypes or drafts and explore them together. That way it is crystal clear that making mistakes is another way of saying ‘work in progress’ and that most really good work goes through many versions. One person’s version is another’s mistake. Another fun thing to do as a family is to have a ‘mistake of the week’ award when different family members share gaffes or errors. Encourage them to say what they might do differently next time!
Practising and working on the hard bits is an essential feature of craftsmanship. If you are really going to be great at what you do, you have to be willing to do the grunt work as well as have fun. As an adult, stop and think about how you practise something that really matters to you – for example, if you have to give a speech at a wedding. Things that good practisers find useful include:
● Speeding it up.
● Slowing it down.
● Chunking a big task into lots of small ones.
● Doing it against the clock.
● Doing it blindfold.
● Doing it with notes.
● Doing it without notes.
● Getting feedback.
● Recording/filming and watching what you did.
● Doing the difficult things again and again.
Whether it is sport or music or irregular verbs or organising a school bag the night before, children need to practise, and you can help them by being a good role model and creating lots of opportunities for them.
If you want inspiration on craftmanship, google ‘Austin’s Butterfly’ and marvel at how small children can be turned into little crafts people and draw better and better butterflies.7 Children know only too well that mastery is born of effort, patience and a tolerance for frustration. It is only in school that you are told that you are ‘gifted and talented’ if you get things right, quickly, first time, always.
By trying things out in your own home it is much easier to appreciate the reality of what we have been discussing. Preparing children to face a lifetime of tricky stuff is, of course, tricky. But it is perfectly possible – you may remember the letter from Teresa, the mum who had been helped by her daughter’s school to find ways of overcoming her little girl’s fear of making mistakes. With a few tweaks to family life, and some persistence, you can see your children change and grow in their seven Cs.
1 Bill has written a couple of these – see Bill Lucas and Stephen Briers, Happy Families: How to Make One, How to Keep One (Harlow: BBC Active, 2006); Bill Lucas and Alistair Smith, Help Your Child to Succeed: The Essential Guide for Parents, 2nd rev. edn (London: Network Continuum Education, 2009).
2 Michael Rosen, Good Ideas: How To Be Your Child’s (and Your Own) Best Teacher (London: John Murray, 2014).
3 Lauren Carner and Angela Ladavaia-Cox, Raising Caring, Capable Kids with Habits of Mind (Mechanicsburg, PA: Institute for Habits of Mind, 2012).
4 Gershen Kaufman, Stick Up for Yourself: Every Kid’s Guide to Personal Power and Self-Esteem (Minneapolis, MN: Free Spirit Publishing, 1999).
5 C. J. Simister, The Bright Stuff: Playful Ways to Nurture Your Child’s Extraordinary Mind (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2009); Guy Claxton and Bill Lucas, The Creative Thinking Plan: How to Generate Ideas and Solve Problems in Your Work and Life (London: BBC Books, 2004).
6 See www.habitsofmind.co.uk/.