I hear you:-)

I hear you! I’m also working (more than) full-time, cook all of our meals and do at least half of the work around the household, and I’m the parent primarily responsible for supporting my daughter’s learning.

It’ll take about an hour a day of working with our children to do about as much as they would be learning in a whole day of school - but if they’re currently not in school, you’d be doing that anyway. And it doesn’t have to be a separate hour with each child - you can spend an hour with one child mostly engaged by themselves while you focus on another, and then switch the next day - or you may find that multiple children are interested in the same topic. This doesn’t have to be a hard-and-fast rule; it can be more on some days and less on others. And it can definitely be less if you’re also using other methods of learning that are more curriculum-driven (although you may find yourself wanting to spend less and less time on those moving forward;-)).

And it will take you a couple of hours a month to read and digest the content of the written Guides; perhaps half that if you choose the video/audio route instead or you’re a fast reader. Add on 30 minutes each week if you join a support group to help you keep taking tiny steps forward on this journey, and you’re looking at 3-4 hours of work for you each month, plus the time you spend directly with your child (which you’d be doing on some aspect of learning anyway).

But if you’re using a curriculum-based approach right now, what you’re probably finding (or will find within the first couple of weeks of using it) is that your child is going to resist some aspect of that work. They won’t want to memorize the words, or they won’t be interested in building an earthquake-resistant structure out of toothpicks and marshmallows with arbitrary rules about how high the ‘building’ must be, but instead they want to invent their own experiment about what it might feel like to be in an earthquake. When this happens, learning gets frustrating - both for you, and for your child. They disengage from a topic that once interested them, and you find you spend most of your time cajoling (or bribing) them to do whatever activity you spent so long setting up. That just creates more stress for both of you.

And what this membership really frees you from is the worry. Worry that your child is ‘falling behind.’ Worry that they’re missing out on some critical opportunity or some critical window during which a certain skill must be learned or the chance to do it is gone forever. Worry that you aren’t doing enough, and that you should be researching gymnastics or judo or French classes right now.

And once these distractions aren’t sucking your mental time and energy, you’ll find you have so much more of those to spend with your child, and on things that are actually meaningful to you.

Well for starters, this isn’t a curriculum :-) What we need to be sure to understand is that curriculum isn’t written for the child’s benefit; it’s written for the parent’s benefit. The child will learn what interests them, whether or not a curriculum tells them to do it. The curriculum really only exists so the parent can point to activities the child has done and say ‘yep; we learned that.’

The same goes for the boxed learning subscription kits, which show up each month with a new project that is completely unrelated to the child’s interests, and teaches them how to build something when all the parts are already pre-cut to the correct length and when precise step-by-step instructions are provided - a skill that’s of limited use in the real world, where we must navigate the limitations of the materials we’re working with and our own individual needs for the project’s outcome.

Other products take an approach that relies heavily on ‘provocations’ or ‘strewing,’ which usually involves setting up Pinterest-worthy activities in the hope that we somehow spark an idea. But as you’ll learn, this approach is highly unlikely to result in much meaningful learning, simply because the provocations aren’t connected to something that already interests the child. (Imagine waking up to a provocation completely unconnected to your own interests that your spouse had set up for you after you went to bed!)

Our child doesn’t need that process. When we can listen sensitively and help the child to form connections across ideas we’ve considered in the past, and help them to gauge the quality of resources they’re learning from, and know how to consider multiple perspectives, and see how failure is actually a good thing, they will learn the important “6 Cs” skills from your joint explorations of their own interests.

Simply put, there is no other resource available that’s based on such a deep knowledge and vision of children’s learning, and translates that into practical tools that real parents just like you are using to support their own children’s learning.

There’s actually very little high quality information available online on how children learn, and on what your role as a parent should be in that process if you’re not explicitly trying to teach them something.

Yes, you can learn how to do ‘strewing’ and set up ‘provocations’ in many places - they are pretty and Instagramable and most bloggers don’t know (or care) that when used in this way they don’t actually help a child to learn very much.

It would be extremely difficult and time-consuming to try to replicate the resources I’ve found here, and potentially impossible if you don’t have access to peer-reviewed journal articles.

Your time is already so precious - why waste it searching for the ingredients to make the triple chocolate double fudge layer cake when one that’s been made just how you like it is right here?

You’ll receive a new module of content at the beginning of each month (or join with an annual membership to receive immediate access to all content).  Read, watch, or listen - the same content is available in multiple formats to support you in how you learn best.

When you have questions, submit them in our private community of parents who are walking this path alongside you.  I’ll respond in one of three ways: with a quick clarification right on your post, with a video to explain something more in-depth, or with an offer to join a 1:1 consult to dig deeply into a multi-faceted issue (which is recorded to share with other members).

If you need more support and want regular direct interaction with me, you can choose to add the option of twice monthly calls for an additional fee.

I experimented with offering hardship discounts when I opened the group last year and the one thing that I have learned since then is that the people who pay a deeply discounted rate rarely participate in a way that allows them to really get the benefits that the group offers if you are fully engaged. I think you need some ‘skin in the game’ to see the value that doing this kind of work can bring.

That said, having studied inequality for a couple of years now, I would never want the group to be truly inaccessible to someone who feels it will really benefit them. If joining the group would strongly benefit you but the price would take meals out of your children’s mouths, then please email me at jen@yourparentingmojo.com to (briefly) explain your situation and I’ll do what I can to accommodate you.

The membership is geared toward parents of children who are old enough to ask questions, through the end of elementary school. If you like to be prepared (and want to be sure you won’t have to adjust your approach once your child is old enough to ask questions, feel free to join when they are a bit on the young side, but know that you’ll be preparing for the future rather than practicing today.

No! The monthly fee covers you and any other member of your family/caregiving team who regularly interacts with your child/ren. After you sign up, please send an email to support@yourparentingmojo.com with the names and email addresses of the additional individual(s) who will need access and I will set up user accounts for them, which will also get them access to the private community.

If you’ve read this far, it’s probably because something about this approach is calling to you, but you’re experiencing what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance,’ because of the difference between it and how you learned in school.  Many current members did very well in school, and have a hard time reconciling their desire for their children to also do well in school with new ideas about this interest-led learning approach.

If you were my coaching client, I’d advise you to use the following ideas to help you make your decision: 1.Ask your logical left brain: What was my experience like in school?  Why did I have the experience I had?  What qualities did this experience instill in me that make my life easier/more difficult now? 2.Ask your intuitive right brain and your body: When I bring to mind the idea of using my child’s learning to guide my interests, what comes up?  If you feel something like excited and maybe also nervous (because this approach is so different from what you know), those are good signs.  We are taught to ignore our intuition in favor of rational arguments, but our physical sensations can tell us a lot about our experience if we know how to listen. 3.Ask both your logical left brain and intuitive right brain/body: What’s holding me back?  Are you worried that you won’t fit into the community?  Do you wonder if your child really needs this?  Do you even have the time to spend on this?  You might consider doing some journaling on the questions that come up for you to understand what’s really behind your concerns.  

(And I will say that even the profound introverts have found a home here; your child doesn’t need this and will be fine without it, but their experience of life-long learning will be very different without it, and you do have the time - we have single parents and parents working full-time with several young children who make it happen.  Your left brain’s job is to bring up objections to keep you on the tried-and-true path, so be sure to give equal weight to what your gut says about whether this is right for your family.) 4.Consider your long-term goals for your child’s learning.  What about the way they’re learning now do you want to maintain/do more of?  What (if anything) do you want to put less emphasis on?  If your goal is to raise a child with an intrinsic love of learning, are the ways that your child is learning now likely to help you achieve this goal?  If not, do you have the knowledge and support to make this shift by yourself?