1. The teen mental health crisis may be less severe than headlines (and The Anxious Generation) suggest. Much of the scary data shows better screening and diagnosis rather than new cases caused by social media. The changes are not as widespread as the book makes them appear. They are at least partly explained by changes in how we diagnose and label mental health conditions.
2. Social media’s impact on youth mental health is surprisingly small. Research shows social media explains less than 1% of teen wellbeing. It’s about the same as whether or not the teen eats potatoes. While statistically significant in large studies, this effect on an individual child is tiny compared to factors like family relationships and academic pressure.
3. The most vulnerable teens aren’t the ones that The Anxious Generation focuses on. While The Anxious Generation prioritizes (assumed: White middle class) teenage girls, suicide rates and signs of youth depression remain much higher for boys and men. LGBTQ+ teens and some Native American communities face the biggest mental health risks. These problems often have nothing to do with social media. Helping these groups would make a much bigger difference than just keeping white middle-class girls off social media.
4. Family relationships, friendships, and school stress matter way more than screen time for youth mental health. When teens go to emergency rooms for self-harm, 64% say family problems are their biggest worry. School stress, friend drama, money troubles, and school problems matter way more than technology for Gen Z mental health.
5. Phone bans address symptoms while ignoring underlying needs. Kids use phones because they meet needs for independence and connection. School often doesn’t provide these. Banning devices without addressing why kids want them is like taking away a crutch without healing the broken leg.
6. Control-based parenting approaches often backfire with technology. Just like the failed “Just Say No” drug campaigns, strict phone rules can damage trust and push teens away when they need guidance most. Kids who fear punishment can’t come to parents when they encounter problems online.
7. Building connection works better than imposing restrictions for mental health for teenagers. The best protection for teen mental health isn’t limiting screen time. It’s creating relationships where kids feel seen and supported. Working together on technology rules works better than forcing blanket rules.

Note: This blog post is based on a four-part podcast series, where we took a deep dive into Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. 

• The Anxious Generation Review (Part 1): Is There Really a Mental Health Crisis in the U.S.?

• The Anxious Generation Review (Part 2): Does Social Media Actually Cause Kids’ Depression and Anxiety?

• The Anxious Generation Review (Part 3): Should we ban cell phones in school?

• The Anxious Generation Review (Part 4): Should we ban cell phones at home? 

Find a collection of resources related to The Anxious Generation on this page.

If you’re a parent, you might worry when you see your child on their phone all the time. You might feel upset when they pick their screen over talking at dinner. Or maybe you’re scared that their phone is somehow changing their brain in bad ways. You might wonder: Is this normal teen stuff, or is something different happening to kids today?

Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling book The Anxious Generation seems to confirm our worst fears. The book shows scary charts of teen depression and anxiety going way up. Haidt says this is clear proof that smartphones and social media are causing a mental health crisis in our kids like never before.

The book’s central claim is compelling in its simplicity.  Between 2010 and 2015, Haidt says kids stopped having a “play-based childhood” and started having a “phone-based childhood.” He thinks this change rewired kids’ growing brains and caused more suffering than any kids before them had experienced.

For worried parents, The Anxious Generation offers both validation and a clear villain. Those endless battles over screen time? The way your once-chatty teen now grunts responses while staring at their phone? The anxiety you see in their eyes that wasn’t there a few years ago? According to Haidt, these changes are not just connected to but caused by their phone.

But before we panic and ban our kids’ phones (at school or at home), we should look more closely at what the research actually shows. Our parental worries about technology might feel urgent. But the scientific picture is far more complex than Haidt’s compelling narrative suggests.

What if the crisis isn’t as big as those graphs make it look? What if the jump in reported mental health problems just shows changes in how we find and track these conditions? Not new cases caused by social media? What if focusing only on screens makes us miss the real things causing our teens’ problems?

Parents everywhere are asking: Is social media really destroying our kids’ mental health? The answer isn’t as simple as The Anxious Generation makes us believe.

What Is The Anxious Generation About?

Haidt’s book presents a clear narrative. Between 2010 and 2015, we saw the decline of what he calls the “play-based childhood” and the rise of the “phone-based childhood.” This shift, he argues, is responsible for dramatic changes in Gen Z mental health. The evidence seems compelling at first glance. The seemingly endless graphs show rising rates of teen depression, anxiety in teenagers, and self-harm episodes.

He also points to the front-facing camera on the iPhone 4 as a key driver of the shift in 2010, as well as Instagram reaching mass usage in 2012. This means that Haidt sometimes points to 2010 as the beginning of a key shift, and sometimes to 2012. His collaborator Dr. Jean Twenge was raising the alarm as early as 2007, when the first iPhone came out. This raises the question of whether the data have been picked to confirm a theory, rather than the theory coming from the data.

And when we dig deeper into this data, some troubling patterns emerge. Many of these dramatic-looking increases might not be what they seem. 

The Hockey Stick Graphs: Crisis or Perception?

The Anxious Generation review of data includes dozens of alarming statistics, many on graphs that are shaped similarly to the ‘hockey stick’ graph responsible for convincing many people that climate change is real:

In the first of my detailed podcast episodes on The Anxious Generation, I focused heavily on suicide data. I figured it would be easier to understand than the many different measures of whether someone is experiencing mental health challenges.

Here’s the data I found on the suicide rate for girls age 10-14:

Data Source: https://wonder.cdc.gov/mortsql.html  (Note: Haidt’s graph continues with data from 2017-2020, which I couldn’t independently verify from CDC sources)

According to Haidt’s data, the suicide rate for girls is up 167% from 2010 to 2020.  Haidt also says that the rate for girls age 15-19 doubled from 2010-2020, which may be true, but 2009 was a historic low point and overall the rate isn’t a lot higher than it was in the late 1980s:

Data source: https://wonder.cdc.gov/mortsql.html

But the Pew Research Center found that older teens are much more likely to be online ‘constantly,’ with half of 15-17 year olds saying they were online ‘constantly’ in 2024, compared to 38% of those aged 13-14 (and we can assume that kids younger than 13 are spending less time than this online).  So if being online is driving girls to suicide, why aren’t the girls spending most time on social media committing suicide at higher rates?

What this means for you: Those scary numbers you see in The Anxious Generation aren’t happening everywhere like the book makes it seem. The author picks one number from one place and another number from somewhere else to make his point. Some teens really are struggling, but the problem is not universal across all teens.

Here are some other explanations I discovered when we examined the data more carefully:

Changes in mental health screening and diagnosis affect reported rates

Between 2009 and 2015, we made big changes in the U.S. in how we identify and track youth mental health issues:

• 2009: The US Preventive Task Force recommended depression screening for teens aged 12-18.
• 2011: The Affordable Care Act required coverage for evidence-based mental health services.
• 2012: Health insurance plans were required to cover annual depression screenings for girls aged 12 and older.
• 2015: Mandatory new diagnostic codes made it easier to identify intentional self-harm in hospital records.
• 2016: CDC guidance changes ICD-10 coding guidelines to include symptoms and signs codes (R40-R46) as an Exclusion 2 note for mental disorder codes (F01-F99) implies that SI should be coded as a secondary disorder when other mental health disorders are primary.

Figure source: https://jhr.uwpress.org/content/59/S/S14

Author’s notes: These figures plot trends in suicide-related hospital visits, suicide deaths, and suicidal ideation hospital visits in New Jersey. The vertical lines at 2011 and 2016 help to visualize the changes related to the implementation of the Women’s Preventive Services Guidelines in 2012, as well the difference between 2015 and 2016 (implementation of ICD-10) and between 2016 and 2017 (implementation of the “include SI” [Jen’s note: as a secondary diagnosis when other mental health conditions are present] guidance).

The authors conclude: “These results suggest that underlying suicide-related behaviors among children, while alarmingly high, may not have risen as sharply as reported rates suggest.”

What this means for you: The dramatic increases in reported teen depression might say more about our healthcare system getting better at identifying, treating, and classifying problems. They aren’t about phones making things worse. Before panicking about your teen’s screen time, consider other changes in their life. These may be academic pressure, family stress, or friendship issues, might be more important to address.

The scale of the increases look worse than they really are

Haidt also visually manipulates data on the graphs in the book. When he describes “dramatic increases” in school alienation worldwide, he’s actually talking about changes of about 0.2 points on a 4-point scale (Figure 1.12, Alienation in School, Worldwide) but the graph is zoomed in to the scale between 1.6 and 2.2 so those 0.2 points look like a huge increase. 

Figure 1.8 shows Excellent or Very Good Mental Health, Canadian Women; those aged 15-30 visually appear to have reported near-perfect mental health in 2003 and are now close to the baseline.  But the baseline is 50%, and the top of the scale is at 80%, so the decline appears far more dramatic than it really is.

In a collaborative Google doc that Haidt maintains, Haidt observes two ‘big’ jumps in suicides of 10-14-year-old females in the U.S., from 66 to 88 in 2009, and from 85 to 141 in 2013. He says that the rate for the last five years of data is nearly triple the rate for the first five years. Dr. Chris Ferguson’s counter-argument in the document is that the raw increase in the number of suicides among 45-49-year-old men is 1000 deaths, which is a 900% increase, among comparably-sized populations of about 10 million each. 

I want to be clear that I believe that any suicide death is one too many for the families who are left behind. I can’t even imagine the pain and suffering of each of the families who have lost a child in this way, and I’m so sorry they have to experience that. But if you’re looking at raw numbers rather than an increase in rates, you’d do a lot more to prevent deaths by focusing on older men than on teenage girls.  Ferguson would fail a senior student research project for trying to make the inferential leaps that Haidt is trying to reach. 

The language we use matters. When we talk about a “mental health emergency” or “surge of suffering”, it shapes how we think about solutions. If we believe there’s a tsunami, we reach for emergency measures like blanket phone bans. If we recognize it’s a modest tide, we might consider more thoughtful responses.

The International Data Doesn’t Add Up

Haidt often points to similar trends across multiple countries as evidence for his theory. But when you look closely at the data from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the patterns aren’t as consistent as they first appear.

Haidt says that “we see similar trends in the other major Anglosphere nations, including Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia” (p.40-41).  Again, while you can see an overall increase from 2009 to 2015 in New Zealand, the suicide rates for girls and young women are within historical averages, and have declined for boys and young men.

Data Source: https://www.health.govt.nz/publications/suicide-facts-data-tables-1996-2015

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare did the hard work of the graphing for me (although I couldn’t find data by gender), and yes, there was a substantial increase in suicides among 15-17 year-olds from around 2010 to 2018, and among 18-24 year olds from around 2009-2020. But the preliminary data shows that the rate has dropped pretty sharply for both groups since 2022, and I don’t think social media has been banned in Australia.

Data Source: https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/population-groups/young-people/suicide-self-harm-young-people 

In the U.K., the suicide rate for girls has doubled from 1.4 per 100,000 in 2007 to 3.1 per 100,000 in 2023. But, the rate for boys is a third less than it was at its peak in 1990.

Data Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2023

Haidt’s graphs describing mental health crisis symptoms do seem dramatic when the graphs are shown one right after another.  When he shows suicide rates for young teens in the U.S., self-harm for U.K. teens, and mental health hospital visits for Australian teens, The Anxious Generation gives the impression that the changes are happening consistently across all the different types of data, across the entire Anglosphere.  But this isn’t always the case.

What this means for you: If smartphones were really the main cause of teen mental health problems, we’d see the same patterns in all countries where lots of kids use phones. Since we don’t, it means the real causes are more complicated. This means the solutions need to fit your specific child’s situation.

Only Looking at Gender Camouflages Other Trends

Haidt fails to analyze risk factors other than gender in The Anxious Generation.  Among Australian First Nations people aged 0–24, suicide rates were 3.1 times as high compared to non-Indigenous Australians. 

Inuit females age 15-24 had a suicide rate that was 33 times higher than non-Indigenous females between 2011-2016.  

I have yet to find suicide data that breaks out transgender youth statistics, but in 2021, more than a quarter (26.3%) of high school students identifying as lesbian, gay, or bisexual reported attempting suicide in the prior 12 months. This was five times higher than the prevalence among heterosexual students (5.2%).

The photo of the slim, blonde, straight, and White-presenting girl looking at her phone on the front of The Anxious Generation isn’t really representative of the actual suicide risk that teens face.

Depression Doesn’t Always Lead to Self-Harm

Studies of people who have considered suicide reveal that different communities experience distress very differently:

• Latinx Americans are more likely to see suicide as escape from poverty, discrimination, and social problems rather than internal mental health issues
• Asian Americans showed higher suicide risk related to interpersonal problems and academic pressure
• LGBTQ+ people aged 18-44 had lifetime suicide attempt rates of 38-44%, often driven by rejection and discrimination

School problems are more than twice as likely to contribute to suicide for Asian and Pacific Islander-Americans compared to white teens. This might be because many Asian-Americans and their parents put a lot of pressure on them to do well in school. But this pressure isn’t only an Asian-American problem. A study of Latina teens who had attempted suicide included one girl named Lola who said:

“I guess I started thinking about, like, my life, like about school. I’m not doing so good. I’m like, “What am I doing with my future?” And I guess it made me kind of sad. [My mom] screams at me. She’s like, “Why don’t you do better? Why don’t you try?” I do try.” 

Lola’s mom said: 

“I don’t remember these issues growing up. You just did what you had to do, and that was pretty much the end of it. You just do it. You don’t get a gold star.” 

Sofia described frequent arguments with her mother about chores. When Sofia did her chores, she believed her mother didn’t notice. 

Sofia’s mom told her during a fight: “I don’t care what you do no more. I don’t care!” 

Sofia thought her participation in the family was inconsequential, and concluded: “So you don’t care if I die,” and then she took pills. 

Her mother interpreted Sofia’s behavior in terms of resistance: “She just doesn’t want to listen. I hope it’s a phase, I just don’t think it’s a phase. I wanna know what it is with her. Because what happens is her anger comes to, ‘I don’t have to do this’. That attitude, it’s like, it’s disrespectful. I’m not your child. I’m your mother.”

A Scottish meta-analysis of ethnographic studies found that teens who self-harmed were often deeply frustrated by adult efforts to link their behavior to social media. Many felt frustrated by attempts to blame social media for their behavior. They saw the narrative that social media was driving their self-harm as wrong and unhelpful. In fact, trying to pin their struggles to one cause often increased their sense of shame and isolation.

These young people talked about self-harm in complicated ways. They said it helped them cope, process big feelings, or they couldn’t explain why they did it at all. If we try to make their pain sound simple, we might miss what they really need for help.

This matters because Haidt thinks that measuring depression and suicide rates shows us what’s wrong with teens. But if different communities understand and feel distress in different ways, we might be missing huge pieces of what’s really going on.

Most research on social media focuses on similar groups of college students. So we might not fully understand how screen time, mental health problems, and suicide connect.

So if the crisis isn’t as bad as claimed, what about the other half of Haidt’s argument? Does social media really cause the mental health problems that teens do face?

Does Social Media Actually Cause Teen Depression?

Jonathan Haidt is adamant that social media causes teen depression. In The Anxious Generation, he writes: “Taken as a whole, the dozens of experiments that Jean Twenge, Zach Rausch, and I have collected confirm and extend the patterns found in the correlational studies: Social media use is a cause of anxiety, depression, and other ailments, not just a correlate.”

That’s a bold claim. But when we dig into those “dozens of experiments,” we find research that’s far less convincing than it first appears.

The Problem with Social Media Research

When students know what you’re studying

Let’s start with one of the studies supporting Haidt’s position: Melissa Hunt’s “No More FOMO” experiment. Researchers told 143 psychology students they were studying social media use, then asked some to limit Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat to 10 minutes per platform per day for three weeks.

Here’s the problem: the students knew exactly what the study was about. They’d heard countless times that social media is bad for mental health. When researchers then asked them to report on their wellbeing, is there any chance they didn’t know the “right” answer?

Here’s the problem: when you tell college students you’re studying whether social media is bad for them, and they’ve heard this message their whole lives, what do you think they’re going to report?  Dr. Peter Gray, who has extensively critiqued this research, points out that despite this built-in bias toward finding negative effects, the study still found:

• No significant effect on overall psychological wellbeing
• No effect on anxiety
• No effect on self-esteem
• No effect on autonomy
• No effect on self-acceptance

Even with this built-in bias toward finding problems, the study barely found anything. No effects on anxiety, self-esteem, or overall wellbeing. Just small changes in loneliness and depression, and only for students who were already struggling.

The Instagram “beauty filter” study

Another study Haidt cites (Kleemans et al. 2018) randomly assigned teen girls to view Instagram selfies, some original, some digitally enhanced to look “extra attractive.” The researchers found that viewing the enhanced photos led to lower body satisfaction.

But again, every teenage girl has heard that perfect Instagram images harm body image. When you tell participants you’re studying “facial preferences” and then show them obviously manipulated photos before asking about body satisfaction, you’re practically telegraphing what you want them to say.

The study also had other limitations:

• Participants viewed 10 selfies in a row (not typical Instagram use)
• Only Dutch girls from similar backgrounds participated
• Effects were measured immediately, not over time
• No control for participants’ mood or baseline body satisfaction

When researchers make it obvious to the study participants that they’re studying whether social media is bad for you, it isn’t surprising when they find that social media is bad for you.

What this means for you: The research claiming to prove that social media harms teens is far weaker than headlines suggest. Studies with serious flaws shouldn’t drive major family decisions. Your energy might be better spent on building a strong relationship with your teen rather than battling over their phone.

The “Natural Experiment” Problem

Given the obvious issues with controlled experiments, researchers have turned to “natural experiments”, studying what happens when broadband internet rolls out to different regions at different times. The logic: if social media really harms mental health, we should see clear declines in mental health as internet speed improves.

Haidt cites studies from England, Spain, and Italy. But the results don’t support his thesis as cleanly as he suggests:

Spain: Effects for men only (or men and women?)

Researchers in Spain tried to look at the connection between the timing of negative mental health effects and the rise of Instagram and TikTok. 

They did find a link between broadband and depression, but only for men born between 1985 and 1995, not women. Yet the study’s abstract claims effects for “both males and females.” This kind of inconsistency between results and reporting undermines confidence in the findings.  

Italy: Mental health impacts likely aren’t only caused by social media

The Italian study mostly covers a period before widespread social media use, yet still found mental health effects. This suggests that mental health impacts aren’t uniquely tied to social media. They could come from other online activities like gambling or pornography.

England: Confusing results

The English study was the most rigorous, tracking 6,000 children across 3,765 neighborhoods as broadband speeds improved. But the results were puzzling:

• Broadband was associated with better exam performance at age 10-11
• But worse performance at age 16
• The largest effect was a 0.6% decrease in how children felt about their appearance
• No statistically significant relationship between the use of social media and girls’ satisfaction with their friends or family relationships
• Spending 5+ hours on social media per day had an effect size comparable to bullying or family conflict found in other research

One challenge with both the English and Spanish studies is that the researchers split their data by factors like gender, age, and urban/rural areas.  But they didn’t state up-front that they were planning to do this analysis.  This is a red flag in research when you keep slicing data different ways until you find something that looks significant, you might just be finding statistical noise.

Dr. Jean Twenge’s Work: A Clear Finding of Harm

I looked at all of the papers Dr. Twenge lists on her website that are related to screen time, and I can see why she would be alarmed!

She looks at multiple large datasets, often of over 100,000 people that represent the U.S. population. She finds that teens who use a lot of digital media, especially social media, are twice as likely to report low well-being, depressive symptoms, and suicide risk factors compared to light users.

She finds that this pattern happens in the U.K. as well and is especially strong for girls. The relationship isn’t straight. Teens who use social media for up to an hour a day often have slightly higher well-being than teens who don’t use it. But well-being goes down steadily as you go beyond 1-2 hours per day.

Most of Twenge’s findings are correlational. This means she can say that screen time and wellbeing are linked, but can’t prove that one causes the other. She does cite studies that follow people over time. She does cite longitudinal studies suggesting that more social media use can predict later declines in well-being, rather than a decline in well-being preceding social media use. 

She proposes that sleep disruption, displacement of in-person interactions and exercise, social comparison, and cyberbullying create the negative effects.

The Potato Problem: When Big Data Misleads

This brings us to one of the most revealing critiques in this entire debate. Dr. Amy Orben, a leading researcher at Cambridge University, looked at teens’ digital technology use and their wellbeing to see if there was a relationship.  She found that there was an association: one approximately the same size as the one between teen wellbeing and eating potatoes.

Both correlations were statistically significant in a dataset of over 60,000 people. Both explained similar tiny amounts of variance in teen wellbeing (less than 1%).

We don’t blame potatoes for teen depression. So why do we blame social media?

This illustrates a crucial problem with big datasets. When you have enough participants, you can find statistically significant correlations between almost anything. The question isn’t whether the correlation exists. It’s whether it matters in the real world.

What the Research on the So-Called Harms of Social Media Actually Shows

When we look at the full body of research on social media and teen mental health, here’s what emerges:

The effects are tiny: Even studies that find bad effects usually explain less than 1% of how teens feel. That’s like saying a teen feels sad because they didn’t eat breakfast while ignoring their family problems, money stress, school pressure, and sleep. Dr. Twenge says 1% matters when you’re talking about millions of people. But other things are still way more important.

The effects aren’t consistent: Dr. Orben’s research shows that scientists can get very different results from the same information depending on how they look at it. Some studies (including Dr. Twenge’s) that show social media is bad pick “the most negative possible” way to look at the data.

Within-person effects are even smaller: Studies that track how changes in one person’s social media use affect their own wellbeing over time show even smaller effects than studies comparing different people at one point in time.  This is important because when we think about banning social media or screen time, we’re trying to create a change in a specific person which may not happen.

What this means for you: If social media affects your teen’s mood less than 1%, trying to control their phone all the time might not help much. You should address things like your relationship with them, their sleep, their stress, and how supported they feel at home and school.

What Affects Teen Mental Health More Than Social Media

If social media explains less than 1% of teen wellbeing, what explains the other 99%? Research consistently points to several factors:

What affects teen mental health #1: Family relationships 

In the UK study of teens who showed up at emergency rooms for self-harm, 64% cited family relationships as their primary problem. Mental health issues – supposedly driven by social media – ranked fifth.

There’s a significant association between positive supportive relationships with parents and young people’s wellbeing and life satisfaction.

What affects teen mental health #2: Social connections

This isn’t just about having friends, but the quality of those friendships. Strong friendships can be especially protective when teens aren’t getting support from family.

What affects teen mental health #3: Economic security

The stress of poverty affects everything from where families live to whether parents are home or working multiple jobs. Financial instability has massive impacts on teen mental health that dwarf any effects from screen time. 

Children’s suicide rates are higher in counties with a higher concentration of poverty than counties with less poverty. Having money is protective for the people who have it, but not having money can be incredibly difficult for those who don’t.

What affects teen mental health #4: Sleep and physical health

Poor sleep is both a cause and effect of mental health struggles. While screens can interfere with sleep, other factors can too. This may include family stress, feeling unsafe in your neighborhood, and early school start times.

What affects teen mental health #5: Academic pressure

A meta-analysis of 52 studies found evidence linking academic pressure to mental health problems in 48 of them. 

In research on communities like Palo Alto, CA and the anonymized ‘Poplar Grove’ in the book Life Under Pressure where suicide rates are many times national averages, kids don’t describe social media as being an important component of their distress.  

These case studies are important because the Palo Alto and ‘Poplar Grove’ teens had everything Haidt says should protect them from social media’s harms. They have tiight community bonds, involved parents, shared values. Yet they experienced suicide rates four to five times the national average.  These are the statistically significant risk factors for past year suicidal ideation among the six school districts in Santa Clara County (in which Palo Alto sits):

1. Drank alcohol, ever in lifetime
2. Use illicit drugs (marijuana, ecstasy, cocaine), ever in lifetime
3. Used pain medication, ever in lifetime
4. Smoked a cigarette, ever in lifetime
5. Female gender
6. Self-identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual
7. Feeling sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more, past 12-months
8. Experienced violent victimization at school, past 12-months
9. Experienced psychological bullying at school, past 12-months
10. Experienced cyberbullying on internet, past 12-months > The only item related to phones/social media
11. Ever skipped school, past 12-months

In addition to these factors, students perceived academic pressure or distress, general life challenges, depression, feeling disconnected and socially isolated, family or cultural pressure, lack of access to mental health care, poor coping skills, sleep deprivation/disorders, and family economic distress as important risk factors for suicide.

What affects teen mental health #6: School environment

Beyond academic pressure, factors like bullying, feeling unsafe, lack of belonging, and unsupportive teachers all contribute to mental health challenges.

We’ve seen recent increases in the percentage of students who were threatened or injured with a weapon at school, and in the percentage of students who were bullied at school.  There has also been a jump in the percentage of students who missed school because of safety concerns either at school or on the way to school.

What this means for you: Focus on being a parent your teen feels safe talking to rather than a parent who monitors their every online move. Ask about their friendships. Notice if they seem overwhelmed by school, and pay attention to how your family dynamics might be affecting them. These factors have far more impact than their Instagram usage.

Blanket Phone Bans Won’t Help All Teens

The Anxious Generation glosses over the idea that smartphone and social media bans may not be beneficial for all teens:

• LGBTQ+ youth often use social media as a lifeline when their families and communities don’t accept them.
• Black teens are more likely than white teens to use social media to get information about mental health.
• Native American girls aged 15-19, who have suicide rates five times higher than white girls, might rely on social media to connect with other Native youth in geographically isolated communities or access mental health resources.

When we create blanket policies for young teens based on research conducted predominantly on advantaged young adults at university, we risk harming the very teens who most need support.

Why This Matters for Your Family

You might be thinking: “Studies have limitations, so what? Shouldn’t we err on the side of caution?”

Here’s why the research quality matters: when studies are this flawed, we can’t tell the difference between correlation and causation. And if we can’t tell what’s actually causing the problems our teens face, we might be fighting the wrong battle.

Imagine if doctors treated every fever by putting patients in ice baths, without checking whether the fever was caused by infection, heat exhaustion, or medication side effects. That’s essentially what happens when we assume screens are the problem without solid evidence.

Haidt points to what he says is a clear decline in children’s mental health and the ‘obvious’ smoking gun of screen time as the single cause. But in our incredibly complicated world with so many things affecting us, what’s more likely? That there’s one single issue creating such a big impact and that screen time is it? Or is it more likely that it’s a complex interplay of issues, of which screen time makes up a fairly small part? Based on the evidence we’ve reviewed, I argue for the latter.  

School Phone Bans: Are We Solving the Wrong Problem?

Given the mixed evidence on social media’s harms, you might wonder: what about the practical solutions being implemented?  Twenty-one states are now studying or have already enforced school phone bans. Florida led the charge, banning cell phones during instructional time and restricting social media access on school Wi-Fi. Louisiana, Virginia, and Indiana just finished their first year of implementation, while Oklahoma, North Dakota, and New York have bans coming next school year.

The logic seems simple: if phones are distracting students and harming their mental health, removing them should help. But what if we’re missing something crucial about why kids turn to their phones in the first place?

The Myth of the Golden Age of Childhood

Before diving into phone bans, we need to examine the premise behind them. Jonathan Haidt argues we should return to a “golden age” of childhood when children played freely without adult supervision. He describes his own 1960s childhood in suburban Scarsdale, riding bikes and going on neighborhood adventures. Dr. Peter Gray similarly recalls the 1950s, playing pickup baseball and basketball with no adults in sight.

But this “golden age” narrative has some serious blind spots.

Who actually had this freedom?

This idealized childhood was primarily available to White, middle-class boys. Here’s what the research shows about who was actually free to play:

Girls had far less freedom due to cultural expectations that kept them closer to home. Even today, young men and boys spend 85% more time outdoors than young women and girls. In interviews with English girls, many report feeling unwelcome or unsafe in parks when boys are using the spaces.

Black and immigrant children faced segregation and discrimination that made many public spaces unsafe. In 1945, Washington D.C. officially segregated public recreation spaces. Four Black boys were arrested when their ball hit a street lamp outside a park they were barred from entering.

Working-class children often had jobs from young ages. Child labor wasn’t federally regulated until 1938, and many children worked in dangerous conditions in factories and mines.

The “golden age” was golden for some, but it wasn’t universal. And even for those who experienced it, the complete absence of adult guidance had its own problems.

What Actually Happens During Unsupervised Play

While Haidt and Gray celebrate adult-free childhood environments, research shows this freedom came with costs. During recess, one of the few times kids still play with minimal supervision, we see:

• Boys taking over sports fields while girls (and boys who don’t play football) are marginalized
• Racial hierarchies being established and reinforced.  Dr. Debra Van Ausdale’s ethnography of preschool classrooms found white children “trying on” the use of power over non-White classmates, seeing if adults would notice or intervene. By and large, nobody did
• Bullying and exclusion of children with less social capital, neurodivergence, etc.
• Boys’ sexual harassment of girls is normalized

These findings suggest that completely unsupervised play doesn’t automatically create the inclusive, character-building environment that phone ban advocates envision.

The Academic Performance Argument Falls Apart

Haidt claims that declining test scores since 2012 prove phones are destroying education. He points to National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data showing drops in reading and math scores coinciding with smartphone adoption.

But when we look closely at the numbers, the story changes:

The “decline” in test scores is tiny

For 9-year-olds, reading scores dropped by one point from 2012 to 2020 on a scale of 0 to 500. Math scores dropped by three points.  (Declines in 2020 and beyond point to COVID as a factor, rather than screens.)

Figure Source: National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/?age=9

For 13-year-olds, reading dropped three points and math dropped five points over eight years – again on a scale of 0 to 500.

Figure Source: National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/?age=13

These aren’t “substantial” declines – they’re barely measurable changes on a massive scale.

International data doesn’t support the theory

If smartphones were driving academic decline, we’d expect to see them in countries with high smartphone adoption. But when we compare data on smartphone penetration in 2013 and PISA (an international test of student achievement) scores, we find:

• Singapore and Norway maintained or improved their high scores despite high phone penetration.
• The UK, Hong Kong, and Israel had flat or improving trends.
• Sweden hit a low point in 2012, then rebounded (pre-COVID), with a smart phone penetration 8 points higher than the U.S.
• The United Arab Emirates, with the highest phone penetration in 2012, held steady in reading (pre-COVID) and improved in math.
• Australia’s scores have declined linearly, a trend which began well before 2010 (first smart phones) / 2012 (front-facing camera/Instagram) / 2013 (first smartphone penetration data available).

While we have to assume that smartphone penetration was similar for adults and teens (as separate data on teens isn’t available), there’s no consistent pattern linking high smartphone penetration to academic decline.

Other factors driving school outcomes were ignored

Haidt ignores that both Common Core standards and the Race to the Top program were implemented in 2010, exactly when he claims phone-related decline began. These programs cost $10-20 billion federally plus billions more at state level, fundamentally changing how teachers taught and students learned.  Research indicates that these programs (especially Common Core) have not improved students’ learning outcomes, and may have done harm.

It’s unlikely that disengagement with school, or test score performance, is driven solely, or even mostly, by kids’ mobile phone use.  So is banning phones in school the right answer?

What Research on School Phone Bans Actually Show

The research on phone bans in schools reveals mixed results at best:

Denmark: Mixed results on physical activity from a not-real ban

A four-week ban on smartphones during recess found increased moderate physical activity but decreased vigorous activity. However:

• Only 68% of students actually complied with the “ban” (so was the study even a real test of smartphone bans?)
• There were no control schools that didn’t ban phones for comparison
• The study occurred during COVID with various outdoor recess mandates, which could have affected the results
• Four weeks isn’t long enough to determine lasting effects

England: No significant differences (probably driven by study design)

Researchers compared 30 schools with restrictive versus permissive phone policies and found no significant differences in:

• Student mental wellbeing
• Anxiety or depression
• Academic achievement
• Disruptive behavior
• Sleep or physical activity

The “restrictive” schools often still allowed phones in bags or lockers, and while in-school phone use decreased, overall daily usage didn’t change – suggesting kids just used phones more outside school.

Industry-supported study: Miraculous results!

Yondr, the company that makes locking pouches for phones commissioned a study showing dramatic improvements in academic success and behavior. But this “research” had:

• No control group
• No accounting for other variables that might affect outcomes
• Marketing-style displays of data rather than rigorous analysis
• A clear financial conflict of interest

What this means for you: If your child’s school bans phones, don’t expect it to dramatically improve their mental health or grades. Research suggests these bans treat symptoms rather than causes. Stay focused on what actually helps your child do well: feeling connected, having some control over their life, and dealing with real stress they face.

A Teacher’s Story Reveals the Real Problem

The most revealing insight for me came from physical education teacher Gilbert Schuerch, whose account of his school’s phone ban was featured on Haidt’s blog. Schuerch describes the elaborate lengths students went to circumvent phone restrictions:

• Stabbing through the Yondr pouches with pens
• Bringing two phones (one decoy to put in the Yondr pouch; one real to keep in their pocket)
• One enterprising student bought the Yondr unlock magnet on Amazon and charged classmates $1 per unlock

But the most telling part is Schuerch’s typical interaction with a disengaged student. When a student doesn’t want to participate in gym class, Schuerch tells them:

“You have to learn how to do the things you don’t want to do… Here’s what I actually want right now. I want to be home, on my couch, watching Netflix, with a girl on my left arm, and a girl on my right… But here I am, because we have to do the things we don’t want to do.”

Setting aside the teacher’s sexist dream that he’s holding up as a model to his student, and also that the teacher’s own dream involves zoning out in front of a screen even as he’s telling his student to engage in the class.  

What’s most important to me is that Schuerch sees the main purpose of school is to train kids to do things they don’t want to do, so they can spend the rest of their lives doing things they don’t want to do.

Is this really the purpose of school?  Is this what we hope our kids will aspire to in life?

The Missing Piece: Why Kids Want Phones

This exchange reveals what phone ban advocates miss: kids turn to phones because phones meet needs that school doesn’t. Kids turn to their phones to meet needs like:

• Autonomy: Choice over what to engage with and when
• Connection: Real relationships with peers on their terms
• Relevance: Content that feels meaningful to their lives
• Agency: The ability to shape their own experience

School, by contrast, often provides:

• Forced compliance with predetermined curricula
• Limited choice in activities or pace of learning
• Minimal opportunity for authentic peer connection
• Content disconnected from students’ interests and experiences

When we ban phones without addressing these underlying needs, we’re treating symptoms while ignoring the underlying disease.

What Students Actually Say About School Engagement

When researchers ask teens directly about school engagement (instead of just studying numerical data), students report that engagement is fostered by:

• Supportive relationships with teachers and staff
• Opportunities for real choice and voice
• Relevant, hands-on learning experiences
• Classroom environments focused on growth rather than just grades
• Respect and fair treatment from adults

School disengagement is associated with:

• Strict, punitive rules and policies (perhaps including phone bans?)
• Irrelevant or boring curriculum
• Limited autonomy and voice (perhaps on policies like phone bans?)
• Lack of respect from adults
• Peer exclusion and social problems

Some researchers in Spain worked with middle schoolers in several different schools to co-design ethnographic research on the middle school experience. One student said: 

“I learn little in school. I spend most of my time looking for information … I look for things not explained at school in Internet … [ … ] In the class, I listen, but not too much, because just being attentive you get the picture. I know too much…I learned to produce videos, movies, songs … The camera … I know a lot about videos: effects, how to assemble a video, and so on.”

An adult researcher on the project observed: 

“What the students learn in school somehow helps them to understand the outside world, but what they learn outside is not usually incorporated and taken into account at school. Only in a very few classes teachers pay attention to their experience, knowledge and understandings. At school they learn things to pass exams, but once passed they find difficult to remember them. They tend to remember what they learn outside, because for them this learning is more meaningful, is more related to their experiences, interests, and social and emotional relationships. Although digital technology is increasingly incorporated in classes, it is used differently inside and outside school. Within often its use places them as spectators and recipients of information, outside its use increases their responsibility, agency, ability to scan information, to communicate and express.”

Phone access might be related to school disengagement, but it’s only a small part of what drives disengagement. Relationships, relevance, and respect are what matter.  Where teachers and schools can build real relationships with kids, kids thrive.  When kids know that their voice doesn’t matter, and that the adults are trying to get kids to do things that don’t matter, kids disengage.  

Phone bans are unlikely to lead to a huge improvement in kids’ mental health (since they may just use their phones more outside of school) or test scores.  Fortunately this will be relatively easy to test: in a year or two, we’ll expect to see kids’ mental health and test scores increasing in the states where bans have been implemented.

What this means for you: If your teen seems checked out from school, their phone probably isn’t the main problem. Look for signs they feel unheard, overwhelmed, or disconnected from learning. The solution likely means pushing for better school experiences, not just taking away their device.

Now we’ve looked at schools, what should we do about our kids’ use of smartphones and social media at home?

Should We Ban Our Kids from Using Smartphones at Home?

Dr. Jean Twenge, Jonathan Haidt’s frequent collaborator, will release a book in September 2025 offering what seems like the perfect solution: 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World: How Parents Can Stop Smartphones, Social Media, and Gaming from Taking Over Their Children’s Lives. 

Her rules include “You’re in charge,” “No social media until 16,” and “Give the first smartphone with the driver’s license.”

These rules are appealing to parents. They’re clear, easy to communicate, and give us something concrete to do. But what if this approach, built on control and restriction, actually pushes our kids further away from us when they need our guidance most?

The Problem with “You’re in Charge”

Twenge’s Rule #1 is “You’re in charge.” While I understand the appeal of parental authority, especially when dealing with apps designed to capture our kids’ attention, this approach has a fundamental flaw: it’s really hard to change someone else’s behavior.

Nobody likes it when others try to control their behavior, and kids are no exception. When we make ourselves “in charge” of our teen’s technology use, we’re essentially trying to control their behavior rather than helping them develop their own internal compass.

Here’s a personal example: My husband loves mountain biking and has been encouraging our daughter to ride with him for years. Despite his enthusiasm and constant invitations, she increasingly resists. The more she’s asked to ride, the less she wants to do it because she wants it to be her own decision.

Contrast this with hiking, something I love but stopped pushing her to do. Once I gave up asking, she started occasionally suggesting hikes herself. She wants to make choices about her own activities, just like she chooses to walk dogs for her pet-sitting business.  She doesn’t love walking, but she does it because she chose the goal of building her business.

What this means for you: Rules and restrictions might seem like the obvious solution. But, they often backfire by damaging the trust and communication you need most. Before implementing strict limits, ask yourself: Am I trying to control my teen’s behavior, or am I trying to help them develop their own healthy relationship with technology?

Why Control-Based Approaches Backfire

The sneaking problem

When we ban technology, kids don’t just comply. They get creative. They already know how to:

• Create secret social media accounts
• Hide social media app icons behind calculator logos
• Access devices at friends’ houses

The real danger isn’t that they’ll only reduce their screen time slightly when we take their phone away (which Twenge says is still beneficial). The danger is that they’ll lose the ability to come to us when they encounter disturbing content, inappropriate contact, or confusing situations online.

Imagine two scenarios:

Scenario 1: A teen with open dialogue about technology encounters disturbing content on their device and thinks: “I saw something online that made me uncomfortable. I’m going to tell my parent so I can understand this better and make a plan so I don’t see that kind of content again.”

Scenario 2: A teen who’s banned from smartphones sees the same content on a friend’s device but thinks: “That’s really disturbing.  But my friend says it’s normal, so I guess it must be normal.  I can’t tell my parent about this because I’m not supposed to be on a phone at all and they’ll kill me if they find out.”

Which teen is safer?

The historical failure of “Just say no”

We’ve tried control-based approaches before. The Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program in the 1980s and 1990s taught kids to “just say no” to drugs through willpower alone. Not only did DARE fail to reduce drug use, in some cases, it actually increased it.

Why did it fail?

• It promoted abstinence without addressing underlying reasons kids use drugs (stress, trauma, curiosity, social pressure)
• Zero-tolerance messaging discouraged honest conversations
• Kids knew they’d be punished if caught, so they couldn’t seek help

Sound familiar? Kids use social media for many of the same reasons they might use drugs. They use it to cope with stress, connect with others, escape boredom, or explore identity.  When they thought about using drugs or actually tried them, they didn’t talk with caring adults because they knew they’d be in trouble.

The Relationship Cost of Control

When we focus primarily on controlling our teen’s behavior, we risk damaging the very relationship that could help them navigate technology healthily. Consider this story from the book Hold On To Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté:

Melanie was thirteen years old.  Her father could barely contain his anger when he talked about his daughter.  Life with her changed after Melanie’s grandmother had died when the child was in the sixth grade.  Until that time, Melanie had been cooperative at home, a good student at school, and a loving sister to her brother…Now she was missing classes and couldn’t care less about homework.  She was sneaking out of the house on a regular basis.  She refused to talk to her parents, declaring that she hated them and that she just wanted to be left alone…

The mother felt traumatized.  She spent much of her time pleading with her daughter to be “nice,” to be home on time, and to stop sneaking out.  

The father could not abide Melanie’s insolent attitude.  He believed that the solution was somehow to lay down the law, to teach the adolescent ‘a lesson she would never forget.’  As far as he was concerned, anything less than a hard-line approach was only indulging Melanie’s unacceptable behavior and made matters worse.  He was all the more enraged since, until this abrupt change in her personality, Melanie had been ‘daddy’s girl,’ sweet and compliant.

Everyone wants Melanie to be ‘nice’ and ‘sweet’ and ‘compliant’ again.  Perhaps she was short with them at times in her grief after her grandmother’s death, and they responded by pushing her away.  

She withdrew further, so they punished her more. They created a cycle where her friends became more accepting than her parents, and she no longer wants to be with her family.

If the book had been written more recently than 2004, Melanie’s Dad would have shouted at her for always being on her phone, and then taken it away.  But would this have improved their relationship?  The “solution” of imposing stricter rules doesn’t address why Melanie pulled away in the first place. It just continues the pattern that created the problem.

What this means for you: The relationship you have with your teen matters more for their mental health than any rule you could make about their phone. If screen time restrictions are causing constant fights and pushing your child away from you, the cure might be worse than the problem.

What Kids Are Really Moving Away From

Here’s something crucial to understand: when kids spend excessive time on screens, they’re not just moving toward technology. They’re often moving away from something, and sometimes that thing is us.

Many teens become what Neufeld and Maté call “peer-oriented”. They are more attached to their friends than to their parents. While cutting off screen time might seem like it would bring them back to us, it won’t work if we haven’t addressed why they moved away in the first place.

If your relationship with your teen has become primarily about rules, consequences, and compliance, removing their phone won’t suddenly create the warm, connected relationship you want. It might just leave them feeling more alone and powerless.

Make Offline Life Compelling

Instead of restricting online activities, we need to make offline experiences genuinely interesting:

• Support kids in taking on real responsibility: My daughter loves her pet-sitting business partly because clients trust her with important things like their pets’ safety and their house keys. (It’s not like we hadn’t tried to get her to take on more responsibility around the house but again, it being self-chosen is key!)
• Acknowledge their contributions: Even for routine chores, acknowledgment matters. Just like adults appreciate being thanked for cooking dinner, kids appreciate recognition for their efforts.  I now thank Carys each day for unloading the dishwasher and putting her plates in the kitchen after dinner.
• Support their goals: When Carys wanted to expand her business, she needed pet first aid certification. The online course was miserable. The written content was hard for her dyslexic brain to process. I supported her by showing her how to use a screen reader (which read in a boring monotone).  But she persevered because it served her goal, not something imposed on her.
• Create opportunities for autonomy: Let them make meaningful decisions about their classes, schedules, and activities.  When we push them into doing things they don’t want to do they might learn a skill, but it might come at the cost of our relationship with them.

What this means for you: If your teen seems “addicted” to their phone, look at what they might be avoiding in real life. Are they stressed about school? Feeling disconnected from family? Bored with their daily routine? Address the underlying issue, not just the symptom.

Moving Forward: 6 Strategies Better Than Just Banning Phones

I’m not directly facing challenges with phones or social media yet, because Carys doesn’t use either of them by her choice.  I still use the following strategies around discussions about iPad time.

Instead of focusing solely on restriction, I hope you’ll consider involving your kids in any rules around phone usage, model healthy device use yourselves, and address broader sources of stress and disconnection in your family.

Here are strategies that work better than simply banning phones:

Screen time strategy #1: Look at the whole picture, not just the screen

Teen mental health comes from many different places. It can be from school stress, family problems, being excluded by friends. For example, if your teen seems ‘addicted’ to their phone, ask yourself: Are they avoiding homework they find overwhelming? Using social media to stay connected with friends when they feel left out at school? Scrolling to decompress after a stressful day of advanced classes? The phone might be their coping mechanism, not the actual problem.

Social media is just one small piece of this puzzle. When we only focus on phones, we might miss the bigger problems that are really causing our teens to struggle. While the exact mechanisms will be different, kids will face these issues regardless of whether they’re online.

Screen time strategy #2: Build strong connections through listening

The best protection for our teens is having close relationships with parents and other caring adults. Set aside time for real conversations about what’s happening in your child’s life, both online and offline. Listen more than you talk. 

Instead of ‘How was school?’, try ‘What was the best part of your day?’. Or ask about something specific that you know your child was looking forward to or was feeling worried about. When they share something from their phone, resist saying ‘You’re always on that thing’. Instead try: ‘That’s interesting, tell me more about that’ or ‘How did you feel about that?’.

Don’t jump in with quick fixes. Instead, help your kids figure out their own solutions to the problems they face.

Screen time strategy #3: Work together instead of just setting rules

Instead of making strict rules or banning things completely, include your child in deciding what healthy limits look like. Help them think about how different activities make them feel. Support them in learning to make good choices about technology on their own. When kids help create the rules, they’re much more likely to follow them.

Here’s what this looks like in practice: Sit down with your teen and say, ‘I’ve been reading about screen time and I’m curious about your perspective. How do you feel after spending time on different apps? Are there times when your phone feels helpful versus stressful? What would healthy phone use look like for our family?’ Then actually listen to their answers and build agreements together.

If you start by threatening to take away their phones, your kids will never tell you when phones are actually causing problems for them.

Screen time strategy #4: Focus on the bigger sources of stress for the most stressed people

Pay attention to the pressure you might be putting on your child about grades, activities, or being “successful”. Sometimes the kids who look like they have everything figured out are actually carrying the heaviest loads. Talk with your kids about what success means to them and what kind of support they need. 

Look for signs your child is overwhelmed: Are they staying up late doing homework? Stressed about college applications? Feeling pressure to get perfect grades? Having friendship drama? 

Ask what support your child would like to receive from you. Maybe that means talking to teachers about workload, helping them develop better study habits, or simply acknowledging that things are hard for them right now.

Look for ways to make the biggest difference. It can be making sure your child supports LGBTQ teens at school or helping young men access resources when they’re struggling. Both of these are likely to reduce the rate of harm more than keeping middle class White girls off social media.

Screen time strategy #5: Create phone-free connection opportunities that don’t feel like rules

Instead of declaring ‘no phones at dinner’, try ‘I miss talking with you. Do you want to cook together tonight?’ 

If your teen loves a particular game, TV show, or YouTube creator, engage with their interests. Ask genuine questions about what they’re watching or playing. 

You might be able to find a shared project to work on, like learning to make sourdough bread, planning a family trip, or working on a room makeover. When you’re both invested in the outcome, phones naturally take a backseat. 

When I’m helping my daughter with her business to help other kids start their own businesses we are often using screens. But, there’s a big difference between social media scrolling and recording videos, updating her website, and managing her retirement savings account.

Timing matters: Don’t try to create connection when your teen is stressed, tired, or in the middle of something important to them. Pay attention to when they seem most open. They may need time alone to decompress after school. Dinner might have become a battleground. A quiet late evening or weekend may be a better opportunity.

Make it low-pressure: The goal isn’t deep emotional conversations every time. Sometimes connection can happen by just being in the same room doing different things. It can also happen by sharing a funny meme or having them help you figure out why the printer isn’t working. These small moments build trust that makes the bigger conversations possible.

Follow their lead: If your teen starts telling you about something, put down whatever you’re doing and listen, even if it’s not a convenient time. 

The magic happens when your teen starts thinking: ‘I want to tell my parents about this’. Not ‘I have to talk to my parents because they’re making me put my phone away’.

Screen time strategy #6: Remember that every child is different

What helps one child might not help another. For some kids, social media causes stress. For others, it’s where they find important support. For many kids, social media can be supportive in one moment and a stressor in the next.

Think about your child’s personality and what they’re dealing with when making decisions (with them!) about screen time. If your child seems really affected by social media, talk with them about what you’re seeing and ask what help they want. And if your teen is using social media to cope with real-life problems, you’ll need different strategies to support them.

Final Thoughts

The Anxious Generation has received a lot of publicity. A lot of parents are worried about the ideas in the book. This matters because if we believe smartphones and social media cause our children’s problems when they really don’t, we’ll take actions that might not work. They might even be harmful.

The research shows us that social media does influence our kids’ mental health.  But a far bigger influence on kids’ mental health is the relationships, pressures, and experiences in their real lives. This doesn’t mean phones are harmless or that we should ignore concerning behaviors. But it does mean that banning devices without addressing the deeper issues is like taking away a teenager’s diary because they’re writing sad entries in it.

Instead of asking “How do I get my kid off their phone?” we might ask:

• “What is my child getting from their phone that they’re not getting elsewhere?”
• “What pressures are they facing that I might not fully understand?”
• “How can I create more opportunities for real connection and meaningful conversation?”
• “What kind of support does my child actually want from me?”

The teens who are struggling most need us to be curious, not controlling. They need us to listen without immediately jumping to solutions. They need to know they can tell us when something online bothers them without worrying we’ll take their devices away.

I know this approach can feel more difficult than simple rules. It would be so much easier if we could just ban smartphones and solve our kids’ problems. But the evidence tells us that the issues our teens face are more complex than any single solution can address.

Our kids are growing up in a world we didn’t experience. Whether we like it or not, technology will be a part of their lives. The question isn’t how to protect them from that reality. It’s how to help them develop the skills and judgment to handle it well.

That happens not through control, but through connection. Not through fear, but through trust. Not by solving their problems for them, but by supporting them as they figure out their own solutions.

Your relationship with your teen is the most powerful tool you have for supporting their mental health. It’s worth protecting, even if it means taking a more nuanced approach to the phone in their pocket.

Frequently Asked Questions About The Anxious Generation

1. What is the summary of The Anxious Generation?

Jonathan Haidt’s book says that between 2010-2015, smartphones and social media created a mental health crisis among teens. He says phones replaced “play-based childhood” with “phone-based childhood.” He presents dramatic statistics showing increases in depression, anxiety, and self-harm. But when you look closely, these increases may come from cherry picked research, better mental health screening, and changes in how mental health problems are reported. They may not be new cases caused by technology.

2. How do you define a mental health crisis?

A true mental health crisis would show big, consistent increases in problems across different groups and countries. What we actually see are changes that happen inconsistently both within and across countries. For example, suicide rates among kids aged 10-14 increased from 0.8 to 2.2 per 100,000. That rate is still far below middle aged men. It’s also much lower than teens aged 15-19, who tend to spend more time on smartphones and social media than the 10-14 year-olds.

3. Why are today’s youth so anxious?

Research shows the biggest factors aren’t social media. These are family relationship problems (cited by 64% of teens seeking help), school pressure, money stress, sleep problems, and school environment issues. Different communities experience stress differently. This is often related to discrimination, poverty, or cultural pressures that have nothing to do with phones.

4. Does social media cause depression in teens?

The evidence for causation is much weaker than headlines suggest. Studies claiming to prove this have major flaws: participants know what researchers are studying, effects are measured immediately rather than over time, and many recruit only from middle class, predominantly White communities. The correlation exists but is extremely small. Some researchers argue that the practical significance in real life is much less than for factors like family relationships, friendships, and school stress.

5. Should parents allow their child to use social media?

Rather than blanket bans, focus on building strong relationships and open communication. When we ban technology, kids often find ways around restrictions but lose the ability to come to us when they encounter problems online. The real protection comes from having teens who feel safe discussing their online experiences with parents.

6. How do you set social media limits with your teen?

Work together rather than imposing strict rules. Include your teen in deciding what healthy limits look like. Help them think about how different activities make them feel. When kids help create the rules, they’re much more likely to follow them and come to you when problems arise.

7. Should parents control their child’s phone?

Control-based approaches often backfire. Kids get creative with secret accounts, hidden apps, and borrowed devices. More importantly, they lose the ability to come to you when they encounter disturbing content or inappropriate contact. Focus on connection over control. The relationship is your most powerful tool.

8. What’s the best way to support teens’ mental health

Look at the whole picture, not just screens. Build strong connections through listening more than talking. Address bigger sources of stress like academic pressure or family problems. Make offline activities genuinely interesting and support kids in taking on real responsibility and autonomy when they’re ready for it. Remember that every child is different in what they need, and try to meet your child where they are.

9. How do I manage my teen’s phone?

Instead of trying to manage the phone, focus on the relationship. Ask what they’re getting from their phone that they’re not getting elsewhere. Listen to their perspective without immediately jumping to solutions. Address any bigger stressors in their life. Create opportunities for meaningful offline connection and real responsibility.

10. Should parents have the right to monitor teens’ activity on social media?

Monitoring can damage trust and push teens away when they need guidance most. Instead of surveillance, focus on creating an environment where teens feel safe discussing their online experiences. When they encounter problems, you want them thinking “I can talk to my parents about this” rather than “I have to hide this so I don’t get in trouble.”

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References

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Many families are facing incredible challenges. Most of us don’t have the supplies, knowledge, time, or know-how to jump into this endeavor and be immediately successful. Much like your child, you’re going to have a steep learning curve.

What’s the alternative?

Experienced homeschooling parents rarely educate their children in a vacuum. They have strong communities and tap into many resources. But even if you’re not ready to formally withdraw your child from school now, you can take advantage of some of the benefits of homeschooling in a community.

Enter Pandemic Pods.

Pandemic pods can take a number of forms, including:

1. Parents swapping care for each other’s children, most likely rotating the children between houses, with less of a specific focus on learning (perhaps for younger children)
2. Hiring an online tutor to coach a group of students primarily online
3. Hiring a caregiver to work with the children in-person to make sure they stay on track with school-provided curriculum
4. Either swapping care or hire a caregiver to focus on aspects of learning that aren’t traditionally covered in school (e.g. interest-led learning, explicitly anti-racist, anti-patriarchal learning, etc.)

Whether you plan for this arrangement to be temporary or permanent, you are taking the toughest job a person can have – being a parent – and combining it with another famously difficult job – teaching. It can seem like an insurmountable task, but I’m here to make it manageable for you!

Before I get into the rationale for a Pandemic Pod, a quick word about public schools. If you plan to send your children back to school at some point, please do consider staying enrolled in school. Different states are approaching funding in different ways (some are freezing funding for this year based on last year’s enrollment), but for the most part funding for next year is determined by this year’s enrollment. Due to the unique situation created by COVID, you can probably maintain enrollment even if your child doesn’t attend in-person, and even if you decide that you’re too busy to submit assignments online at the moment.

Why form a Pandemic Pod?

1. Spread the load of meeting your children’s needs

The volume of work involved in effectively teaching children can be enormous. In public schools, although teachers have more work than any one person should have, they are also supported by a district and teams of teachers. They don’t have to choose their curriculum. They don’t have to worry about a budget for their teaching (although we know many dip into their personal bank accounts regularly). They get ideas from other teachers, they share tasks like assessment design and daily planning, and they usually aren’t responsible for art, music, and PE.

Even if you’re planning to use the curriculum that school is sending home, and you aren’t responsible for 25 children, it can still feel like there’s a tremendous amount of mental work that goes into keeping on top of it all.  A Pod can reduce this workload, especially if you decide to work with a teacher who can coordinate these activities.  Even if you’re just sharing care between parents, if you’re working with other children in your own child’s class, you can split the load of making sure work gets submitted on-time.

And, of course, if you decide not to follow the school curriculum then a Pod gives you opportunities to share that workload too – whether or not you choose to follow a formal curriculum.  Rather than taking on everything yourself, you can tap into the strengths and interests of other parents. Maybe you can find someone to take on the tasks that really drain you in exchange for sharing your work in an area that you actually enjoy.

A Pod reduces the pressure on each set of parents to do EVERYTHING for their child. You and your child will be better off for it.

2. Reduce the financial burden

Supporting young children’s learning at home can be a significant financial burden. Investments in books, activities, subscriptions, and basic supplies can be a real drain.

Maybe you want to do a project that involves using a material that is typically sold in bulk, but you know you won’t need all of it. Rather than buying a large supply yourself letting most of it end up in a landfill, you can pool your money with a few parents and share the materials.   By sharing resources, you can ease your financial burden and even help the environment.

Even if you’re participating in a school-based curriculum, if you’re working then you probably don’t have time to make sure they’re on the required video calls (and paying attention!), as well as submitting work on-time.  Yet hiring a teacher/tutor just for your children can be cost-prohibitive.

This is where a Pod can really help.  By Podding with another family you can share this expense in a way that makes it much more affordable.  If you Pod with other children who are in your child’s class then it could almost be like a continuation of the school experience.

Or if you choose to Pod with families who aren’t in your school, then it might be easier to choose a different curriculum that you all follow together – or perhaps decide that it’s time to give interest-led learning a try.

3. Have more time for your own needs!

In my post about how COVID-19 is revealing the weaknesses in our social systems, I discussed how a quarantine constellation could be used to share the burden of childcare and allow adults some focused time for work. A Pod could function in a similar way. No matter what type of learning you’re doing—even participating in a virtual program through public school, there will be demands on parents’ time.

Young children struggle to operate laptops and stay focused. They also don’t have the executive function skills to move from one activity to another independently, and you don’t need me to tell you that just having children in the house – even relatively quiet ones – is a distraction.

By moving children from one house to another within your constellation (or perhaps having a parent work elsewhere while the Pod runs out of one house), parents will get some time when they can attend to tasks that require concentration without wondering why the water in the bathroom has been running for so long, what made that strange noise, or why it suddenly got very quiet in the other room.

Maybe you’d even get the opportunity to read or go for a walk at a normal pace.

4. Children gain social experience

There is quite a bit of anxiety in the US about how children are missing out on the social aspects of being in (pre)school.  There’s no ‘one size fits all’ advice on this front, because the impacts on each child will vary based on their circumstances.  Children who crave social interaction, who don’t have siblings, and have stressed-out parents may very much need to spend time with others.  Children who don’t get their energy from being around others, who have relaxed and engaged parents are probably doing just fine.

Your child’s behavior is your biggest clue as to how things are going for them: if they are generally happy and interested in activities then they are probably doing well.  If they seem anxious (remember that children’s ‘difficult’ behavior can be an indicator of anxiety) then it’s time to assess some ways to help them.

I remember visiting a friend’s house as a child and being surprised by some of the manners that were expected that were different from my home. At her house we had to pray before we ate and ask to be excused from the dinner table. When we were playing outside, we could pick grapes and blueberries from the garden if we wanted a snack. These minor differences showed me that not all families operated the same way that my family did – and that was okay. I learned how to adapt my behavior. We can talk to our children and show them movies and books where families operate differently, but it isn’t the same as experiencing differences first-hand.

It’s also good for children to hear important messages from other adults. As frustrating as it may be, sometimes children absorb ideas better from people other than their parents. You may have told your child a thousand times that they should clean up their toys when they are done using them, but for some reason when Kayla’s dad tells them they should clean up their toys when they are finished using them it sinks in and they come home and inform you of this incredibly helpful tip they learned at Kayla’s house.

Sometimes children learn academics better from each other as well. Partner reading is one example of a research-based strategy that is frequently used in early childhood to build reading fluency. One advantage of a classroom full of students is that teachers can create opportunities for students to solve problems together. This simultaneously builds higher-order thinking skills and social skills.

When children engage with one another, they learn skills like negotiation and they can develop leadership skills that can be more difficult to learn with adults, unless the adults are willing to let the child ‘lead’ some of the time. They learn the art of compromise and how to hold each other accountable. Children may also be more willing to put forth effort and try new things when they are around other children who are working on a similar task.

5. Fill in curriculum gaps

Whether we’re Podding or not, we can use this time to educate our children about social responsibility and how to be anti-racist. I’ve published a number of blog posts and podcast episodes discussing white privilege and how we can talk to our preschool-aged children about Black Lives Matter.

I’d also like to share an Instagram channel I recently discovered called savewithstories. What I like about this is that they have an extremely diverse collection of readers and there are quite a few books that focus on topics related to race and gender. It’s an easy way to introduce your child to people with skin tones, genders, and ages–especially if you happen to live in a very homogeneous area.

When you’re ready to move on from that, consider taking some of the steps in my 39 Actions Parents Can Take on Racial Justice post.  Talk with the children about what actions you’re taking and why you’re taking them, and involve them in decision making to the extent it’s possible.  It’s pretty rare to get this depth of learning on social justice issues in school, so this is the perfect opportunity to supplement school-based learning.

This is also a good time to include some social and emotional learning skills to learn and practice coping skills related to current events.  Social and emotional learning is likely to be most effective when it’s woven into literature, science, and social studies by asking extension questions and making comparisons that make unfamiliar topics relatable.

For example, a book about the changing seasons could be a springboard into a discussion of changes within our lives and how sometimes in our life are very exciting and we’re learning new things, that’s like spring. Other times in our lives, we feel lonely like the tree that has lost all its leaves, but that just like the tree’s leaves will grow back, our times of sadness and loneliness won’t last forever.

You can also introduce mindfulness tools through activities like blowing bubbles or a pinwheel (observing how taking deep breaths makes you feel more relaxed), taking a ‘noticing walk,’ or count all the things they can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste right now.  These activities help them to get in touch with their physical sensations, which can be calming when they are feeling destabilized.  My daughter specifically requests the ‘counting what we can sense’ activity when she’s having a hard time.

6. Reduce social inequality created by school closings

As we form Pods,  there’s a very real problem of continuing the ‘opportunity hoarding’ that often happens in schools.  This is when affluent (often white) families share access to information and resources with each other and members of non-dominant cultures are left out. If we don’t intentionally work to dismantle all forms of racism, then we are perpetuating racism and teaching it to our children.

The pandemic is clearly hitting some groups harder than others. Generally speaking, children and families from non-dominant cultures are hit harder by every aspect of the pandemic. Those of us who are members of the dominant culture are probably at a lower risk both with regard to our physical health and our employment status. We can use this privilege to further widen inequalities or work toward finding a solution.

What are some effective ways to form Pods in a way that reduce social inequality?  It starts by asking yourself questions like ‘Who will we invite to our Pod?’ If your Pod of families all look like you, you will be sending a strong message to your child. If you are genuinely interested in promoting social justice, use those principles in the formation of your Pod.

If you are thinking you should invite a Latinx family to be in your pod so your child can learn Spanish, you’re missing the point. Diversity is invaluable for all of us; it shouldn’t be something we sprinkle on at the end as a finishing touch.  For many of us, this is the first time that our social support systems have truly failed us.  But families of non-dominant cultures have been developing underground networks all along and we might find that rather than us needing to ‘rescue’ them, that they can instead teach us things we need to know.

The best approach is to involve a diverse group of families from the start with the goal of learning from and supporting one another. Ideally, you’ll be able to connect with a diverse group of families you already know (e.g. your child’s classmates), but if that isn’t possible, you could reach out to community groups to ask about the best way to connect with families to find out if they’re interested in working with you. You can learn more about this important topic in my recent podcast Socialization and Pandemic Pods.

How to build Pandemic Pods that work for you and your community.

Once you’ve decided you want to move forward with creating a Pandemic Pod that is safe, effective and socially just, there’s the enormous question: How am I going to actually do this (while also working and parenting full time!)

Pandemic Pods are great, but they are also brand new which means they’re simultaneously an exciting opportunity and a daunting challenge. I’ve heard from many parents who are interested in the benefits of a Pod but concerned about the implications they have for social justice. I firmly believe that we can create socially just Pods.

The Pandemic Pods ‘in a box’ course gives you the essential information to make the best decision for your family while keeping in mind the needs of our broader community. Through this course, you’ll learn how to create a plan that fits your family’s unique needs and how to put your plan into action, including finding a group of families to work with, hiring a teacher/caregiver, finding balance, and promoting positive social change.

As you make decisions about your child’s education this fall, remember that you know your family’s situation the best. If making the decision to go back to school, withdraw from school entirely, or form a Pod seems overwhelming, my new FREE School Decision Tool can help.  Just click here to use it right now to get past all the fear and uncertainty to a decision that’s right for your family.

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Hyenas that save their loudest screams for the most important conference calls.

And these hyenas don’t ever seem to want to play by themselves.

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Why don’t all those lists of free activities keep my child busy?

I’ve seen so many blog posts online recently containing some variation of “300 Amazing Activities For Your Child!”

Probably some of them were a hit, and some took 10 times as long to set up as they kept your kids busy. Why is this?

It’s because they didn’t engage your child’s current schema.

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​What’s a Schema?

Schemas are patterns of repeated behavior that allow children to explore and develop their play through their thoughts and ideas. It’s sort of like an innate urge to do a certain kind of activity or movement over and over again. These can show up in children’s play just before or around their first birthday.

Some of the most common schemas are: connecting, enclosing, enveloping, orientation, positioning, rotation, trajectory, and transporting.

​Take a look at a list and short description of the schemas here.​

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How schemas are going to help you free up time

The key to using schemas right now is that if we can match the activity we offer our child with the schema they’re currently exploring, they will naturally be drawn to do it. We’re not just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks (doodles with Mo Willems! Cosmic Kids Yoga! Math worksheets!). We’re observing our children and offering activities that they will probably really like.

Which means they’ll play longer.

By themselves.

So review the list of schemas, and ask yourself which you’ve seen in your child’s play. They may have only one, or perhaps several – either is fine!

Once you’ve identified your child’s current schema, choose an activity or two. I put together a set of really small, tightly curated Pinterest boards, organized by schema, so you don’t have to wade through thousands of activities to find one that will work. Just click on your child’s schema below and go right there:

• ​Connecting​
• ​Enclosing​
• ​Enveloping​
• ​Orientation​
• ​Positioning​
• ​Rotation​
• ​Trajectory​
• ​Transporting​

If none of those catch your eye, there’s a longer list of potential activities here. Any activity that seems like it will connect with your child’s schema is worth offering.

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How to present the activity to your child

It’s possible that when you present an activity that matches their current schema exploration, your child will JUMP right on it with no encouragement.

​Here’s my 5.5YO, Carys, reenacting her reaction when I asked if she would like to sort out her crayons and markers. (She’s deep into a positioning schema right now.)

Bingo: I just bought myself an hour of of work time.

You can bet that sorting approximately 5,000 fuse beads is going to be something she returns to over and over again in the coming days; here they are in-progress:

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​If your child doesn’t immediately latch onto the idea and you’re sure you’ve accurately identified their schema, sit down with them for a few minutes and start the activity. Once your child is engaged, gently withdraw yourself.”I’m just going to check on dinner in the oven,” or “I’m going to be sitting [unstated: working on my laptop] right here next to you.” Gently withdraw yourself, and start on your own tasks.

Whatever you do, do NOT interrupt your child. Don’t ask them how it’s going. Don’t ask them if they need help. Don’t engage them at all until they engage you. If they get stuck, return them gently to the task, offer the smallest amount of help you can, and withdraw again. Rinse and repeat until it’s lunch time or you’ve finished your task or you can see they’re REALLY ready to move on.

Yes, this is supporting their learning (your child’s daycare/preschool teachers are trained in using this methodology).

Yes, it’s going to help you get stuff done.

Win:win.

Learning Membership

Do you want to turn your child’s interests into learning opportunities? The Learning Membership is here to help you. Make learning a fun adventure that not only strengthens your bond, but also nurtures your child’s intrinsic love of learning—an essential foundation for success in an AI-driven world.

Get tools and strategies to support your child’s love of learning and future-proof their success in navigating whatever comes their way. No special skills needed—just a willingness to explore alongside them.

All the usual stuff applies – sliding scale pricing, money back guarantee.

Click the banner to learn more!

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For parents of preschoolers, this news may be surprising.  After all, our young children have an incredible thirst for knowledge – so much so that it can drive us nuts:

Mommy, why is your water bottle green?

Because I picked a green one at the store.

Why?

I liked that color better than red, and I needed a new water bottle.

Why?

Because it’s good to have water with you whenever you go somewhere.

Why?

Because water keeps your body healthy.

Why?

Because water helps carry nutrients and oxygen all around your body.

Why?

Because we’re alive, so we need oxygen and nutrients.

Why?

Because all living things need food, air, and water.

Why?

That’s just how living things are.

Why?

[Silent mental parental scream…]

But I often find that when I understand a bit more about why my child is doing something, it doesn’t drive me nuts in quite the same way as it did before.

First, rule out a simple need for your attention and engagement

There are times when a preschooler asks ‘why’ because they want to want to continue to have your attention and converse with you, and aren’t sure how to do it.  If you think this is the case, you can say “It sounds like you really want to keep talking with me about [topic], is that right?”  If they say “yes,” you can then ask them what they want to know, and scaffold their ability to have an actual conversation about it.

Curiosity

But there are other times when the child really does want to know about something and once you get the limit of your ability (or willingness) to answer, you can write the question down and say “Let’s try to figure that out when we have more time!”  This is the spark that leads to learning and if you have a goal of raising an adult who has an intrinsic motivation to learn then these questions are the beginning of that process.

Curiosity is the critical jumping-off point of learning. We retain information better when we are curious – which is why schools try to manufacture curiosity. When we read to try to answer our questions, we comprehend better, so teachers have students brainstorm questions they want to answer before reading a text as a way to try to ‘activate interest’ in a topic that otherwise holds no interest for them (because they didn’t choose it, and who really enjoys learning things that don’t interest them?).

Psychologists also advise that teachers frame tasks in ways that are artificially, not authentically, interesting or ‘flashy.’ For example, they may try to drum-up interest in the Pythagorean Theorem by having students calculate the distance Captain James T. Kirk needs to set on the transponder beam on the Federation Starship Enterprise to pick up dilithium crystals directly below on the planet’s surface, given that Kirk only knows the distances of the ship and the crystals from a third point where his scouting party is stopped.  Unfortunately, manufactured curiosity doesn’t endure the way genuine interest does.  It might get the student to the answer on this particular occasion, but the underlying method is much less likely to be retained.

Interest

Sometimes children just ask ‘why’ out of habit (or because what they actually seek is a connection to you, not the answer to their question), but if you do decide to record their questions to investigate later, you may start to notice some trends – perhaps an interest in in animals, the human body, the way people act, motion, food, or something else.

Many times the ‘why’ questions show what is called situational interest, which is when people display interest in something because of the situation where they happen to be in.  Book authors might use the structure of a mystery to create suspense, and then add details that are engaging to the reader which attract and hold your child’s attention. Teachers often set up artificial mysteries to entice children to learn about a topic they must cover in the curriculum, but children will be most engaged by authentic mysteries – things they really wonder about and want to understand better.

Over time, situational interest may lead to personal interest. These are the interests that endure because the child enjoys learning about them. Researchers don’t yet understand why some situations spark personal interest and others don’t, but tailoring learning to your child’s personality may help.

Learning and basic understanding

When students pursue their interests, learning follows, which leads to a basic understanding. You may have heard the saying, “you don’t know what you don’t know:” without a basic understanding, you don’t even realize how much more there is to understand.

When students lack basic understanding on a topic, their interest doesn’t develop any further and they’re never able to get to a point where they become intrinsically motivated to learn more about it. Researchers found that students who decided not to major in science did not understand basic scientific principles even though they had received several years of instruction in science.

People who lack basic understanding on a topic also can’t ask the kinds of questions that lead to deeper learning. Two major elements of successful learning are expectancy and value. Before learning a new task, children think about how well they expect to do at a task and how much they value the outcome.  One study showed that the hypotheses students form about the level of success they will have predicts their actual level of success even better than their prior grades in that subject!

More learning

In the ‘more learning’ phase of the motivation and learning model, the environment and guidance are important.  Meaningful projects and collaboration help maintain interest. Students in this phase are asking themselves:

“How am I doing?”

“Why do I enjoy this?”

Students determine how much effort they want to put into learning based on their answers to these questions – although they are most likely asking and answering them subconsciously. When students believe they are succeeding because of their own efforts, that they have the ability to continue succeeding, and that they’re enjoying either what they are learning or how they are learning it – or both! –  they are more likely to progress to the next phase of learning and motivation.

To encourage learning and motivation, parents need to know when to intervene and when to let go using a process called scaffolding. If a child is left to struggle too much, they may determine they are not capable of success, but intervening too early may cause children to attribute success to the outside assistance of their parent rather than to their own efforts.  It’s a fine balance, and one that requires the parent to be attuned to their child’s personality and signals.

Your child may choose to revisit specific experiences (books, museum visits, films…); with our grown-up linearly organized brains, this can seem like a waste of time.  But actually this ‘spiral learning’ is an effective way to integrate learning and extend understanding of a topic – at any age.

Competence

Competence – along with autonomy (the child has chosen what they’re learning about) and relatedness (they’re learning along with people with whom they have an emotional connection) – is a key element of something called self-determination theory.  When competence, plus autonomy and relatedness are high, the child becomes intrinsically motivated to learn: they want to learn for learning’s own sake.  They aren’t trying to get good grades or win a competition (although these may end up being handy fringe benefits); they are just really enjoying the process of learning itself.

Of course, our whole lives aren’t – and can’t be – organized around situations that provide competence, autonomy and relatedness.  There are times when we’ve just got to learn something because we have an end goal in mind – which can provide its own source of motivation.  I’m reminded of an anecdote from Ben Hewitt’s fabulous book Home Grown, in which his wife Penny observes their sons Finn and Rye – who have never attended school or taken a test – spending hours studying for their hunting licenses.  Hewitt notes: “Much of the information in the [state-supplied] books was fairly useless, at least for two boys who already knew they should dress in layers and never look down the barrel of a loaded gun.”

Penny whispers “Look at them!  They’re learning how to memorize useless information in order to pass a test, just like in school!”

In this case, the children’s desire to achieve a goal – the hunting license – provided ample motivation to study in a situation where autonomy to choose the material studied was absent.  In this case Finn and Rye had selected a subject where they already possessed competence – but it is also possible that their interests could one day lead them to a topic (canoeing, maybe?  advanced wilderness medicine?) where their existing competence is low but their autonomy (they chose the topic) is high.  It’s really only in school where children regularly encounter situations where competence and autonomy may both be low – and their relatedness will depend on their relationship with their teacher’s skill and personality.

Flow

Flow is when everything seems to come together to “create a special state of absorption and enjoyment in what one is doing.”

In a state of ‘flow’ an individual has a high level of intrinsic motivation and enjoyment.  What does flow look like?  It has several components; the ones most relevant to us are:

• Challenge-Skill Balance: the challenge is appropriate for the individual’s level of skill and their level of confidence;
• Clear Goals: The individual in a flow state knows exactly what they need to do. They set their own goals and act accordingly;
• Unambiguous Feedback: As they work, they get ongoing feedback from the task itself (not the teacher) that gives them clear information they can use to assess their progress and adjust their approach if needed;
• Loss of Self-Consciousness: Individuals in a state of flow aren’t concerned about how they appear to others. They are completely absorbed in the task at hand. They are not concerned with how their performance ranks in relation to other students;
• Time Transformation: Some people experience flow as slowing or stopping time; for others, time seems to pass more quickly.  Flow brings the individual fully into the present.

Flow is considered the optimal state for learning – and the best way to promote it is to maximize competence, autonomy, and relatedness.  So let your child choose what they learn, and support them in developing their own competence rather than trying to teach them what you think is important (the best part about this is that it’s actually really fun!)

Need some help in supporting your child’s intrinsic motivation to learn?

Parents have an important and challenging role in guiding their child’s learning and motivation. We need to introduce them to information and experiences they wouldn’t discover on their own. We need to notice our children’s interests and support their exploration. Simultaneously, we need to allow them to have autonomy in making decisions about their learning.

Once you have some practice it’s not necessarily difficult but it can be a new skill set for parents who may be used to a more instructional teaching method where you already have relevant knowledge – or a sense of being completely lost where you don’t know much about the topic of your child’s latest fascination.  That’s why I’ve created a learning community for parents who are interested in inspiring their children to pursue their passions and become life-long learners.

It turns out that despite our strong desire to encourage our children to learn and be successful, parents may be unintentionally starting the gradual decline of motivation to learn. When our children ask those endless ‘why’ questions that can drive us nuts, many of us find ourselves shutting it down in exasperation. And when we do respond with a “well, photosynthesis works like this…” kind of answer, your child may learn that it’s not worth the hassle of asking in the first place.

This process continues in school, where children quickly learn that it’s the teacher’s job to ask questions, and students are rewarded for supplying the (correct) answer.  Unfortunately, this leads to what researchers Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman have called The Creativity Crisis – while IQ scores are consistently inching up, we are becoming less and less creative.

And what underlies creativity?  The ability to ask questions.

So what can we do?

We need to start early.

We need to listen to our children, and follow their lead.

We need to be the “guide on the side, not the sage on the stage.”

But how do we guide our children to a place where they find the joy and motivation to learn and succeed?

This is what we’ll explore in the Your Child’s Learning Membership.

In the first three months of the membership you’ll learn how to effectively support your child through each stage of the learning process.  You’ll be able to:

• Identify your child’s true interests (harder than it sounds!)
• Help you guide your child as they develop their interests.
• Facilitate your child’s learning by connecting them with resources they need to answer their questions.
• Document your child’s learning.
• Support your child in deepening their understanding.
• Communicate what they have learned to communities who care.
• Support your child in learning to solve real problems that have meaning to real people.

You’ll receive a Guide to read at the beginning of each month, and we’ll have a group call each month where you can ask questions and get live coaching from me.

Throughout the membership you’ll join other parents who are learning these skills alongside you in a private Facebook group, and after the first three months of core content we’ll continue to support each other in the group as you practice your new skills, and ask questions to get you unstuck as you’re working with your child.

The group will reopen to new members 6-12 months after the original members join, and I will rerun the initial intensive study – possibly varying the topics based on group interest, and you’ll be welcome to work through this material again. With every exposure to the ideas, your understanding will deepen – mirroring the process of the learning you’re supporting in your child.

I am really excited to begin this journey with you!

This membership is designed to support all parents of children old enough to ask questions. Whether you are committed to homeschool, public school, private school, or still deciding, this membership will help you to become your child’s ‘guide on the side’ in learning – and in life.

Get tools and strategies to support your child’s love of learning and future-proof their success in navigating whatever comes their way. No special skills needed—just a willingness to explore alongside them.

All the usual stuff applies – sliding scale pricing, money back guarantee.

Click the banner to learn more!

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When we read articles about children who achieve so much so early, it’s tempting to try to figure out what her parents had done to help her rise to success at such a young age. Gitanjali mentions loving science and recalls playing with science kits at age three. At nine she and her parents published a book together. She plays three instruments and three sports. She’s also attending a STEM school.

Is this what I should be doing for my daughter? Should I be buying her science kits? Signing her up for music and sports activities? Should we be writing books together? Even if my child doesn’t achieve this much this young, will what I’m doing prepare her for acceptance into elite universities if she decides she wants to do this?

Dr. Roberta Golinkoff and Dr. Kathy Hirsch-Pasek, co-authors of the widely respected books Becoming Brilliant and Einstein Never Used Flashcards, argues that traditional school curriculum neglects to prepare kids for the future. It doesn’t sound like the learning Gitanjali did was traditional, though. Will it prepare her for the future? Is the path her parents chose one that would work for others? What do children really need to succeed in life – and how should we even define ‘success’?

The Six Skills Children Need (And Four Levels of Mastery)

Golinkoff and her co-author, Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, identified six core skills that kids will need to succeed in the 21st Century. These “6Cs” will help kids become scientists, entrepreneurs, and people who lead change-making organizations. These are the skills they’ll need to thrive in their rapidly changing world. These are the areas where we should focus our energy in supporting our children’s learning.

There are four levels of mastery within each of the six “C” categories pictured in the table below; many (most?) people never make it to the final level of these areas. It’s a bit like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – even though many people never arrive at self-actualization, the top of Maslow’s hierarchy, the model is still useful because the hierarchy is a tool to use to prioritize needs. The 6Cs are a tool to use to help identify strengths and growth areas, so we can see where we’re doing well and where our skills still need development. And I say ‘our’ skills because we may identify some areas that we need to improve on these skills as well.

Learning is a journey! I’m still on my journey. You are still on your learning journey, and so is everyone else. Our job is not to ‘teach’ our children, but to provide guidance – and we don’t need any fancy tools – or even a lot of specialized knowledge to do this.  Let’s look at how you can incorporate every one of the 6Cs into a basic household chore that may currently seem like an activity that should be rushed through so you can get to the real learning activities: and that’s laundry.  (Yes: laundry!)

How to Create Learning Experiences at Home

I’m confident that you have plenty of opportunities to work on laundry-related tasks with your child. Probably far more opportunities than you’d like! Toddlers and preschoolers can do quite a bit when it comes to laundry, and it is a great opportunity to incorporate all of the 6Cs.

1. Collaboration: Showing Children How to Work Together

The first skill area is collaboration. The scale of collaboration goes from working alone to building together. Simply by including your child in this chore, you are teaching collaboration. The two of you are working side-by-side on a task. Your child can help you put clothes into the washing machine, take clothes out of the dryer, give you pieces of laundry to fold, and open drawers for you to put things away.

Self control falls under the umbrella of collaboration. Natural consequences will demonstrate the importance of self-control when working on laundry. For example, if your child is jumping on the bed where you are folding laundry and knocks a pile of folded laundry over, the chore is going to take longer to complete. They need to maintain control over their bodies to get this job done! As they continue to participate in this household chore, they will recognize that this is part of running a household. Everyone has to contribute, and in time you will move beyond a “back and forth” level of collaboration to working alongside each other and building projects together.

2. Communication: Teaching Children to Give, Receive, and Share Information

By the time a child can do anything with laundry, they are probably able to do more than just express “raw emotion,” but the next level, “show and tell” is just getting started. You can model this for them if they are still in the early stages of learning to talk. Children are learning about the give and take of a conversation. If you say, “Look, this is your red shirt,” and they make a noise of some sort, respond to them as though they have made an interesting point. “Yes, you did wear this shirt yesterday in the park. “You’re right, there are some yellow letters on it, too.” When you respond to them, you are demonstrating that their voice matters. You are introducing the basics of a back-and-forth conversation.

To be able to communicate at a more advanced level, they need to have lots of words. Clothing is a nice concrete way to introduce lots of vocabulary. Children are usually fascinated by clothing. Adult clothing is so big! Clothing is so colorful! It’s so warm when it comes out of the dryer! Any kind of back-and-forth conversation you can engage in is moving your child toward the “dialogue” level of communication so you can begin to tell stories where you both fill in relevant details.

3. Content: Giving Children a Strong Knowledge-Base

When I think of teaching content, I think of traditional school skills, facts, and general knowledge. When it comes to laundry, there are lots of opportunities to discuss these in conjunction with the other skills. Content for preschoolers would include labeling objects, colors, directional words, letter identification, and counting. Directional words and phrases come out naturally while working on laundry—at the bottom, on top of, inside, underneath, next to, and the very complicated—inside-out. You can name the articles of clothing, the colors on them, and practice counting as you sort, fold, and distribute laundry.

Pre-reading skills are also part of content. Phonemic awareness is the technical term for wordplay, like rhyming, alliteration, and counting syllables, that will eventually help them read new words. Noticing things like the blue shirt has a picture of a ball will help your child start recognizing beginning sounds. You can also get very silly and makeup rhyming words for different articles of clothing to start working on phonemic awareness.

There is less opportunity to get really deep on content with laundry than there is on other topics where your child has a real interest in diving deeply into their passions, make connections across them, and then demonstrate their expertise to others (often even to adults!).

4. Critical Thinking: Asking and Answering Questions With Your Children

Believe it or not, the laundry provides lots of opportunities for critical thinking! For starters, do you sort your laundry? Deciding whether to put the laundry into piles of light and dark is a great way to start teaching critical thinking. Next, there’s the question: is there too much in the washing machine? By talking through how you make this decision, you are showing your child how you think critically.

If your child is asking “why” questions, working through these with them is a great way to encourage critical thinking. Curiosity is a wonderful trait! You want to nourish their curiosity; that’s what’s going to drive them forward on their learning journey! When they ask why you are putting the clothes into the drawer, you can ask them why they think we do this. The next why-question is where you have to start thinking. Why do we keep the clothes in the drawer? So many parents stop these conversations with their kids, and that’s really tragic. It’s such a wonderful opportunity to engage with kids. Golinkoff says that the continued desire to find out more is more important than what they learn. Try to answer as many why questions as you can if your children are asking and listening – and don’t just answer by providing The Answer, but instead challenge them to share their opinions and ask what evidence they have to support their opinions (“Why do you think that?”). Before you know it, you’re at the highest mastery level for critical thinking.

5. Creativity: Inspiring Children to Problem Solve in New Ways

Speaking of creativity, you can find ways to be creative and innovative about laundry; you probably already do this. For example, if you want to get your favorite shirt into the washing machine, but it’s full, you have a problem to solve. You have options.

By talking through your thinking process, you are modeling the creative problem-solving process. Maybe it would sound something like this, “Drat! The washing machine is full! I really want to wear this shirt tomorrow, but it needs to be washed. I could do another load of laundry after this, but I don’t want to. I guess I could wear a different shirt, but I really want to wear that one because [whatever your reason is]. I wonder if I can make room in the washing machine? Oh look, I won’t need to wear these pants for a long time. I only wear them on special occasions. I’m going to take these pants out. Now there’s room for my shirt!” In that short little monologue, you just modeled identifying the problem, identifying and evaluating multiple solutions, and choosing the one that worked best for you. This is already going on inside your mind, you just have to slow down enough to verbalize your thoughts.

You can also ask what ideas your child has for solving the problem, and if you accept their idea they learn that they have a voice, and that their voice will be respected when they share ideas – a critical step toward developing and sharing visionary ideas with others.

6. Confidence: Building Independence and Bravery in Children

The final C is confidence. Collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, and creativity have all been building up to confidence. By engaging in this very useful task with your child, carrying on conversation, learning colors or counting, asking questions, and demonstrating creative problem-solving in action, they have already learned so much!

Confidence is most easily taught by us stepping back, rather than teaching.  Yes, the first time your child folds a t-shirt it probably won’t be folded the way you like it done.  Early on, simply “barrelling on” and making a contribution that’s seen as valuable is enough.  Over time, your child will see how you fold t-shirts and copy you, or may ask you to teach them how to do it.  They may take a calculated risk that you won’t care much if they mess it up and the payoff for rushing through the job (cartoon time?!) is worth the risk of getting caught.  Or perhaps they might decide it’s not worth the risk…  Either way, they’re on their way toward being willing to try something that might work or might not, and being OK with failure, and using failures as a springboard to success.

As you may have guessed, these same principles can be applied to many household tasks—making beds, organizing toys, cooking, and grocery shopping. You don’t need to buy expensive toys or programs to give your child a great education.

Your Child’s Learning Mojo

The research on the skills children need to be successful is so clear – and is in such direct opposition to conventional wisdom. We are always so worried about our children being ‘behind;’ we think they need workbooks, special toys, and flashcards (even though Einstein didn’t use them!). The skill of content is covered extensively in school even though children can essentially look up any fact that interests them rather than needing to memorize it, but where will they learn the other skills?

I’m creating the Your Child’s Learning Mojo membership and community to help parents support their child’s learning in ways that work and are based on sound research. We’ll begin by identifying your child’s interests (sounds so simple, but if you ask them they’re liable to throw out random topics rather than a topic of true interest) and discussing ways to develop that interest.

We’ll help you to stop being the “sage on the stage” who has to provide all the answers to your child’s questions and become the “guide on the side” who connects them with resources to answer their own questions. We’ll learn ways to document and communicate your child’s learning in authentic ways so they can remember both what they learned and how they learned it. The most effective learning occurs in a spiral rather than a straight line, and revisiting what we’ve learned in the past is foundational to deepening our learning in the future.

We’ll accomplish this by forming a learning community ourselves. Each month for the first three months, I’ll send you a Guide that will provide a deep dive into these topics and more. We’ll have a group call each month, so you can ask me about anything you want to know. You will also have access to a private Facebook group where our community of learners can ask questions, connect to resources, and be inspired by our children’s work.

We know that learning lasts when there is ongoing support. After the group study period of the membership, we’ll continue to support one another in the Facebook Group as we work with our children, and new cohorts of learners will be added to the group. Each time a new cohort joins, I’ll repeat the core content and add new material to it each time, and you’d be welcome to deepen your own learning as often as you like.

Want to learn more about how you can support your child’s intrinsic love of learning?

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Also, check out the recently released podcast episode that explains more on how researchers judge preschool quality (and its links to child outcomes)

It seems easy enough, right? It’s just preschool after all; does it really matter whether the child attends a Reggio Emilia, Montessori, or Waldorf-based program? But as I’ve learned since becoming a parent, seemingly small decisions seem to carry with them the weight of deciding what our values are as a family, and how both large and small decisions convey and pursue those family values. Preschool and childcare are certainly one of these crossroads. It’s where our children have their first relationships and experiences away from the cocoon of family and home.

I have a couple of favorite quotes that act as my North Star to guide my way when choosing a program:

“Let the child be the scriptwriter, the director and the actor in his own play” – Magda Gerber, founder of Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE)

“Our image of the child is rich in potential, strong, powerful, competent and most of all connected to adults and other children” – Loris Malaguzzi, one of the founders of the Reggio Emilia approach

In my extensive studies and practice in the classroom (I’ve been an educator for 12 years, have run my own preschool and have also been a preschool director), I have found that learning takes place:

1. when children feel secure and grounded in caring, respectful relationships with their teachers and peers;
2. when they have a predictable routines and consistent expectations; and
3. when the environment invites curiosity and guides their attention and behavior acting as a ‘third teacher.’

1. Respectful, responsive caregiving

Firm, loving limits, predictable and realistic expectations: young children thrive with predictability and firm boundaries, but lots of freedom and agency within those limits. Even newborns/young infants should be spoken to as whole competent people, and invited to participate and help themselves. Children really flourish when they feel known by their caregivers/teachers and when their teachers focus on what they CAN do, above what they can’t yet do.

Questions to ask:

• Do teachers tell children what they will do to them before or during caregiving routines, transitions and during play?
• What do teacher do and say when a child is struggling to get a play object out of reach of an infant?
• What do teachers do and say when two children want the same toy?
• What do teachers do and say when one child is having a long turn and doesn’t want to share?
• What do teachers do and say when a child has hurt another child or property?

What to look for on a tour and ask yourself after the tour:

• Look for “floor time” – when caregivers are on the floor with children observing or playing. Look for eye contact at or below child’s level when speaking. Look for caregivers talking to children as another human, announcing what will happen, giving children time to respond, and involving children.
• What are your impressions of the caregiver’s attitude, communication skills, management of difficult situations, etc.?
• Are the children treated with respect?
• What interventions did you see when children: cried, separated from family, were aggressive, got frustrated, and struggled during transitions?

2. Program Philosophy & Free Play

I think this is where families have to do some soul searching. There are many pedagogical philosophies that all have their merits, and at the end of the day much of the decision about which school to send your child to will come down to availability and logistics (cost, proximity to work and home, ages served, etc.) So I advise touring and “feeling” out preschools on a gut level; you have to choose a preschool that you can fit into your life without making yourself so stressed out with the commute or cost.

However, as you have heard on the Your Parenting Mojo podcast there is a lot of research that indicates that play in the early childhood settings is the best way for young children to learn – so my preference is always a program that has a healthy dose of free, uninterrupted play.

Many parents want to see teachers engaging, entertaining, and interacting constantly, but giving children time and space to explore, experiment, negotiate with peers, and lead their own play required teachers taking a more observational and quiet role that parents necessarily know to appreciate. Some things I personally look for are when teachers refrains from telling children to be careful or deliver quick, neat and tidy verdicts or solutions for children who are struggling. I would prefer to see teachers bring their calm attention and allow children freedom of movement, real choices, and time to learn how to negotiate social, physical and cognitive challenges mostly on their own so they can have their own sense of accomplishment, learn to assess risks, and appreciate that mistakes are a healthy part of learning.

Questions to ask:

• What is the curriculum/philosophy of the program?
• What chunks of time are children able to play uninterrupted? How do teachers engage children during play? Are there opportunities for observation/intentional selective (reduced) interventions?
• What is the stance on clean up, sharing, and discipline?

What to look for on a tour and ask yourself after the tour:

• What opportunities for real choice do children have?
• Are children allowed to select their own play objects and can they play as long as they like with those objects?
• How many transitions and adult-directed activities are there?

3. Rhythm of the Day

As most parents can understand, transitions are some of the most conflict-ridden and difficult times to navigate. Simplicity, having a child-paced (slow) rhythm, and lots of predictability in routines help to smooth out the day. Many parents wonder how teachers can get a room full of kids to participate cooperatively in clean up, setting tables, bussing their own meals, and go willingly to the toilet at school. It almost never looks like a well-choreographed ballet in the classroom, but quality programs have spent time building classroom rhythms, routines and rituals so that children know what is expected and that they are valued, needed members of the community.

Their schedule may seem boring to adults, but I can tell you the children in my program felt great comfort, excitement, and confidence the more routine our days and weeks were. For example, we always gardened on Tuesday in preparation for the children cooking soup on Wednesday morning, to have soup and bread for lunch. We sang the same songs at clean up and focused on it as not just a time to rush through, but a meaningful time full of learning and community building.

Questions to ask:

• What is the schedule/rhythm of the day? What rituals are there for greeting, clean up, eating, sleeping, etc?
• What happens when a child is not done with something they are working on but it is time for a transition?
• How much time do they get to spend outside? How many children are outside at once? What do they do outside?

What to look for on a tour and ask yourself after the tour:

• Do the children seem engaged in play independently and cooperatively?

4. Environment as a Third Teacher

The environment of an early childhood program can help or hinder children’s and teachers’ experiences. Well-designed environments invite and direct children’s attention, reduce conflict, and “tell” children how many people can be in a given area at one time. Environments should be filled with passive (not battery operated), open-ended play objects, materials accessible to children without adult help, limit overstimulation (neutral colors, sound reducing, clutter free), and be developmentally appropriate. Program environments for toddlers and preschoolers typically have defined areas such as dramatic play, library, quiet area, sensory/art/science, gross motor, construction, group/open space. Classrooms and outdoor areas should be safe, yet challenging.

Questions to ask:

• Tell me about how children interact in each of the classroom areas? How many kids tend to play there? How do they interact with the materials, each other and the teachers?
• What ways do teachers encourage play?

What to look for on a tour and ask yourself after the tour:

• If you were your child over the next two to three years would you want to spend large amounts of time in this environment?
• Is it safe, yet challenging?
• Does it focus children’s attention and invite them to explore?

5. Continuity of Care

Two structural mechanism that helps teachers/caregivers deeply know children in the program is a commitment to continuity of care and primary care assignments. Even if they don’t use these terms, continuity of care means having the same caregivers/teacher and children together for as long as possibly, ideally 3 years. And primary caregiving means that caregivers/teachers are assigned a cohort of children that they develop a deeper bond with and they have primary responsibility over doing routine caregiving such as meal times, potty/diapering, sleep, and separation. My preference is to have my kids in programs that are mixed-age or where a teacher loops and moves with them from room to room with the same cohort of kids. Many schools have children move to a new classroom and teacher when they reach certain ages, but for young children learning is optimal in a setting when children feel securely attached to significant adults.

Questions to ask:

• How long have your teachers been in your center/childcare?
• How long will children stay with each caregiver/teacher?
• When will they switch rooms? When they do, do the children and teachers stay together?

What to look for on a tour and ask yourself after the tour:

• Does this setting (teacher + environment) seem to meet the needs of my child for 2 to 3 years?
• Does this setting meet our family’s logistical needs/situation for 2-3 years – price, location, commute?

6. Relationship-building care

When programs use primary caregiving a natural result is a focus on each child as a unique individual. It takes observation and time for a teacher to know a child and develop a trusting relationship. Following children’s unique rhythms and styles promotes well-being and a healthy sense of self. When a child feels understood they experience less stress, remain self-regulated, and use cues that are subtle rather than exaggerated to get the caregivers attention. When they feel secure in the relationships they can now go onto tackle larger cognitive, social, and physical challenges. When caregivers focus on an individual child they often feel more connected and rewarded in their work.

Questions to ask:

• Do the teachers/caregivers have assigned children that they care for during routine caregiving (eating/feeding, sleeping, diapering, toileting, getting dressed, greeting/separation, soothing)?
• How many caregivers are assigned to each child?

What to look for on a tour and ask yourself after the tour:

• How many adults interact with the child to perform routine caregiving?
• Do the children know which teacher to go to for help? Do they get passed around from adult to adult?

7. Small Groups and low ratios

Small group size and good child:teacher ratios tend key components of quality care (although the other factors in this article may be at least as important). The Program for Infant/Toddler Care recommends primary care ratios of one teacher to every three or four children, in groups of 6-12 children, depending on the age. The guiding principle is: the younger the child, the smaller the group. Small groups facilitate the provision of personalized care that infants and toddlers need, supporting peaceful exchanges, freedom and safety to move and explore, and the development of intimate relationships. For older children (3-6 years old), a group of four to eight children per teacher can work well. The total group size that works for your child will depend largely on your child’s temperament, their (over)stimulation in a large, noisy, busy environment and the design of the environment. For example, most co-ops have a large groups with many adults and children. This may work well for some children (and adults) and not so well for others.

Personally, I chose a smaller home-based 12-child Waldorf preschool for my daughter who I felt thrived in a smaller, less noisy, more intimate and predictable setting. She cares deeply about forming relationships, telling stories, being heard and has some sensitivities to loud noises and being “too close” to too many people. For my son, who loves loud noises, hustle and bustle, and prefers anyone who will play with him while digging holes and playing trucks, we’re starting him in a large co-op soon with around 35 children, 5 teachers and 5 parents in the room at one time.

Questions to ask:

• How many children and adults are in the room at one time? What ages are enrolled and how are they grouped by primary care group or room?
• How do the teachers communicate about their charges in between shifts?

What to look for on a tour and ask yourself after the tour:

• If many children and adults are in one room, what efforts (physical environment, time usage, or are taken to reduce overstimulation and create a sense of intimacy and small groups?
• Do teachers spend a lot of time talking to each other? Or do they spend more time observing children and interacting/responding to children?

8. Family-Focused Care

A strong, collaborative, respectful relationship between caregivers and parents is extremely important for children, especially in their earliest years. Parents should generally be seen as the experts on their child. Parents and caregivers can share insights and observations, struggles and exciting developments. It’s important to choose a caregiver that you can trust to be honest, communicate with about the good and bad, and work together with to problem solve. Caregivers and parents should see each other as partners!

Questions to ask:

• Are you welcome to drop in at any time?
• How and when do they communicate with parents?
• What do they do when a child is injured (large or small) at school?

What to look for on a tour and ask yourself after the tour:

• Do caregivers respect the language, culture and values of families in the program?

Some advice about getting into childcare in places where there are more children than childcare spaces
It is much easier to get children into childcare / preschool after 24 months of age, due to licensing rules about ratios based on age. In general, it is easiest to get into childcare around August because that is when children graduate on to preschool or if you are flexible and can take immediate openings mid-year.

And lastly, don’t give in to the total panic all around you among parents making this decision. Most children adapt well to preschool within a month, and if the transition is difficult most teachers and administrators will be happy to work with you. Ultimately this doesn’t have to be a one-and-done decision: some parents do end up moving their child to another setting and find a better fit – and the child is no worse for wear.

About Evelyn

Evelyn has a Masters in Education, several teaching credentials, served as the director of a large alternative private school, ran her own family childcare at her home in San Francisco, and has mentored many new childcare directors through Wonderschool.

She lives with her family in San Francisco, teaches parent-child classes, and trains nannies and teachers virtually and in person in groups and individually.

As a reminder, you can download the checklist to take with you on preschool tours that summarizes this blog post by entering your name and email address at the bottom of the page.

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She’s in with the fours, fives, and some sixes now and relational aggression is rearing its ugly head.  Almost every day we’re hearing some version of “[Friend] said she didn’t want to play with me today,” or “I’m never going to play with [Friend] again!” or “I’m not going to be [Friend’s] friend any more.”

Typically these issues seem to be forgotten about by the next day and they’re back to playing together again but boy, am I sick of hearing about it already!

What the research says

I was reminded of the episode on social exclusion that we did almost a year ago with Dr. Jamie Ostrov of the State University of New York at Buffalo, who is an expert on childhood aggression and bullying.  He let us know that aggression is actually very, very common in preschoolers, and that relational aggression is especially common amongst girls who seem drawn to a dyadic relationship (or does our society push them toward these by our constant questions about “who is your best friend?”) so one of the most efficient and effective ways to hurt a girl are to harm the relationship she has with you, or that she has with others.

Boys are typically more interested in showing their strength and dominance, which may be why we see more physical aggression from them.

Dr. Ostrov explained that children may engage in aggressive behavior to obtain a goal (e.g. “I won’t be your friend if you don’t give me that toy”) or in a reactive way (“You said something that hurt me so I won’t be your friend any more”).  Children who engaging in reactive behavior may benefit from support in developing empathy, whereas if we teach children about empathy when they are using aggressive behavior to obtain a goal, then they may learn that their behavior is actually having the desired effect.  Children who use relational aggression extensively often have the most positive relationships with teachers and are skilled at manipulation.

Further, teachers and parents may tacitly encourage relational aggression by reprimanding the child who hits but not the child who says “I won’t be friends with you any more if you throw blocks.”  Perhaps teachers and parents do this because the child who is engaging in relational aggression is doing it in a way that works within the school’s or home’s rules (“we shouldn’t throw things”).

Dr. Ostrov developed an intervention, in the form of classroom visits from puppets who would bring a new “friend” puppet who would act out prosocial scenarios together, and then a researcher would walk around the classroom with the puppet during free play and praise them for prosocial behavior and the effect it had on the other person at the moment it happened.  The children all wanted to be praised by the puppet and the only way to do that was to engage in friendship formation and inclusive behavior.  Dr. Ostrov said that the eight-week program was effective at reducing aggressive behavior and increasing prosocial behavior even after the intervention had finished.  Key to the success of the program was praising specific behavior in the moment, rather than offering general praise (“good job!”) or praise a long time after the fact (which causes some students to manufacture prosocial behavior to get a reward).

Honestly, I was rather uncomfortable during the interview about the use of praise to increase prosocial behavior given that this flies in the face of decades of research on the ineffectiveness of praise to motivate people in general and children in particular.  I’d be curious to find out whether the positive effects of the intervention held in the longer-term, although funding to study this kind of outcome is rarely available.

Strategies to help parents 

For our part, parents tend to view relational aggression as a normal part of childhood, but this is really problematic because relational aggression is associated with a host of negative outcomes for both the aggressor and the receiving child.  Both parents and teachers should convey that these behaviors are not OK, should talk about how the receiving child might feel, and help the child to learn and use strategies to deal with it, including reporting it to parents and teachers (which keeps friends safe; not tattling, which is not done for the purpose of keeping friends safe).  One preschool teacher had a useful strategy to help children resolve conflicts by themselves: the first is for one child to say to the other “Please stop.”  The next step is to say “Stop, or else I’ll tell the teacher.”  Only if this is ignored should the children involve the teacher.

I’ve already emailed my daughter’s school to describe some of the stories I’m hearing at home and ask them about their planned approach.  This really helpful (research-based) article from the National Association for the Education of Young Children contains some good pointers to discuss with the school, including the need to understand why the aggression is occurring, which can provide new clues about reducing its incidence.

One strategy that may be especially helpful at home that also reiterates something Alfie Kohn mentions in his book Unconditional Parenting is to view behavior in its best possible light: when one child knocks another child’s block tower over, the parent/teacher can say “Oh, it looks like he wants to play blocks with you.”  Even “Uh oh; the blocks fell over” would be better than “[Friend] knocked over the blocks” as the former avoids the need to blame anyone for the incident.

You can play games that encourage cooperation rather than winning.  We enjoy playing Granny’s House, a cooperative version of Chutes and Ladders.  Encourage natural leaders to lead by helping others, rather than by ordering them around.  And consider characters’ feelings as you read children’s books – you can do this while you read any book, although here is a list of books specifically about friendship issues, organized by age-appropriateness.

If your child is in a classroom with children who look a lot different from them, you might also be interested in my episode on how social groups form, since looking different can become the basis for prejudiced behavior toward people in other groups (unfortunately we don’t really have that issue in my daughter’s preschool because pretty much all the children look a lot alike, although we’re addressing this issue in other ways).

Being in a classroom with children who don’t look like them provides enormous opportunities for children to see the person behind the skin color/disability/whatever makes the other child different, which can be really important in helping the child see that all different kinds of people are really individuals just like them, not just “members of a group who look different from me.”

We’re at the beginning of a looong phase for girls (parents of boys may get a reprieve in the beginning, although Dr. Ostrov says they often catch on to tools of relational aggression eventually – and they are often taught these tools by girls).

Hopefully if enough of us give our children the message that relational aggression is not OK, we’ll start to see less of it…here’s hoping, eh?

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On the first day of school, did your child give you a sweet hug and run off cheerfully to play with their friends?

Or were they stuck to you like a limpet, screaming “Don’t go!  Don’t go!” as you tried to extricate yourself, highly ambivalent yourself about whether this transition was the right one to make?

And on the second day, did they happily get into the car and strap themselves in, or skip along beside you as you walked to school?

Or did they dig in their heels and refuse to get into the car seat, and then refuse to get out of the car at the other end, and give you the “Don’t go!  Don’t go!” treatment again?

~sigh~

Transitions are tough, right?  And the transitions to preschool/kindergarten/school are among the toughest, because they’re some of the first ones that your child essentially needs to learn to navigate by themselves.

How can we make this easier on our children, and on ourselves?

I have a couple of episodes queued up in the next few weeks that are going to help with this, but I know a lot of you are in the thick of it right now so wanted to offer some ideas based on those interviews.  One interview was with Dr. Arietta Slade, an internationally-recognized attachment theorist, and the other was with Dr. Jonathan Dalton, who leads the Center for Anxiety and Behavioral Change in Rockville, Maryland, and who specializes in helping children with what is known as “school refusal.”

Firstly, know that it’s normal for children to have some trouble with the school transition.  It’s normal for them to want to spend time with you: you’re who they know and trust.  Think about it from their perspective: they don’t know the teachers or the other students or the environment; they don’t know you spent months agonizing over the decision about where to send them and that it’s as safe as anywhere can be.  All they know is that you’ve said they have to go to this place where they don’t know anyone or any of the systems and routines that make the place work, and they have to try to figure it out by themselves.  And they’re still so small!  No wonder they have a hard time with it.

Hopefully, your school allows you to be with your child in the classroom for a period of time for the first few days.  Making transitions longer than usual (for example, by reading a book or playing a game) is a great way to start to get your child comfortable with the environment.  The school may have a process they like parents to follow when it’s time to go – perhaps a hug, a goodbye, and a high-five through the window.

Some crying during the first week of this transition is very normal.  If your school (and you, and your child) are of the especially gentle variety they may allow you to stay in the classroom for an extended period of time during the first week.  But most schools want parents to be mostly out of the way so the teachers can take care of the work of integrating the children, which is likely to result in more crying.  The school may ask you to bring in a set of photos of your family to put in an album that they can direct the child toward when they are struggling during the day.

Dr. Slade will remind us to not make it harder on yourselves by making our ‘goodbye’ quick and clean: a hug, a “goodbye,” and out the door.  (And don’t sneak out without saying goodbye – it might be easier in the short term, but it can lead to trust issues when your child realizes you left without them knowing).  Don’t say “I’m leaving now…OK, I’m going to go…are you SURE you’re going to be OK?…” which can lead to tears that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.

How do I know if this is a transition my child will work through, or if it’s a real problem?

The key to understanding whether there is really a problem is to be sure to ask the teacher at the end of each day how the day went.  You’re looking for a general improvement over time – there may be days where things back-slide after they’ve been going well for a while, which is also normal.  But the one reliable indicator you can look out for is what your child is like fifteen minutes after you’ve left the building.  If your child is happily engaged with others and is playing as they might at home by then, then no great harm is being done.  If the child spends periods of time throughout the day – especially substantial periods of time – upset, then the situation is one you might want to reevaluate.

If your child is having substantial difficulties, you can try asking them why they don’t want to go to school – which might give you a useful answer that you can address, although Dr. Dalton reminds us that children might not always know (or be able to articulate) their reasons.  (I was reminded of this this morning when my four-year-old had a tantrum ostensibly because I drew some lines next to the dinosaur toy we had drawn around so we could measure it more easily, but was probably actually because I was away for several hours yesterday on a long bike ride and she missed me.)

If you don’t get a useful answer, you can try to ask the teacher what seems to be triggering the upset – perhaps your child hasn’t yet made friends, or perhaps they are struggling with adapting to the systems and routines of the school.

Your options about what to do about your child’s feelings are defined both by your approach to parenting, as well as by your reasons for putting them in school in the first place.

If the child is in school because you are going to work and your family needs your income, and family care or other avenues are not an option, then it doesn’t seem like your child has much of a choice: they need to be in school.  The reality is that children are highly adaptable and the majority of them will end up making friends and fitting in at school, even if they struggle in the beginning.

But some parents don’t want their child to experience the discomfort that will occur during this process, or the cause of the discomfort is not something that’s likely to go away (e.g. a personality mismatch with a teacher, and there is no opportunity to move to a different class), and you have the financial option to not have your child in school, then you may choose to pull them out.

This is unlikely to be a big deal at the preschool level, although at the school level the choice becomes more difficult.  The statistics on school refusal indicate that children who refuse school have worse academic outcomes than those who attend routinely, so if you intend for your child to attend school, this is an issue that needs to be addressed.

A visit to your pediatrician can rule out any illness of physical origin (your child might complain of headache or stomachache, although this could just be a delaying tactic…); if the anxiety persists then ask for a referral to a child psychologist or a psychologist who specializes in treating anxiety, like Dr. Dalton.

Regular listeners might recall that I spent a year researching the decision to homeschool my daughter, and based on that I really wouldn’t advocate for choosing homeschooling because of school refusal unless it’s due to a situation that really cannot be changed or addressed (which does sometimes happen).

Or perhaps you’re settling into the school year a bit and you’re starting to recognize some of the limitations of the school system, like large class sizes, over-worked teachers, a focus on using rote memorization to prepare for standardized tests, and the fact that by third grade, our curious toddlers who essentially would never stop asking questions no longer ask any questions except “HOW do I do this thing you’ve asked me to do” and “will this be on the test?”.

If you’re thinking about homeschooling but you can’t get your head around the legalities of it, or whether your child would be able to get into college, or how they would be socialized, or how you could afford to homeschool, or if you’re under the impression that only “certain kinds” of people homeschool, then you might be interested in a course that I developed to help parents figure out if homeschooling is right for them (and you might also be reassured to learn that secular homeschoolers are the fastest-growing group right now).

If you’re even vaguely interested in learning more about homeschooling, you might want to head over to yourhomeschoolingmojo.com and take the free quiz on that page that emails you *personalized* results about your readiness for homeschooling right now.  Click the image to take the quiz and learn more about the course:

And if you already know that homeschooling isn’t right for you, for whatever reason, I actually have another course that might be a better fit for you called Supporting Your Child’s Learning in School.  Parental participation in children’s learning has been shown time and time again in research studies to be crucial to a child’s academic success, but there are so many different ways to participate that you might wonder which ones are most effective in your specific circumstance.  The course can help you to understand this, as well as understand how your child’s brain processes knowledge related to reading and math, so you can help to get them ready for success in school in a low-pressure way (no flash cards!)

Click the image to learn more about this course (as well as to grab a free infographic on 11 things you can do to help your child learn key math concepts using simple, everyday activities):

Both courses are designed for parents of children aged between about three and eight; you could take them on the earlier side if you really like to prepare in advance, like I do, or if you think you will need extra time to put systems in place like shifting careers to prepare for homeschooling.

Or if you want to do them in the year before your child starts Kindergarten then that would be a good time, or if your child is already in school but you see signs of problems, either in your own perception of school or in how your child interacts with the school system, then they could work for you at that point too.

As always, let me know if you have questions by dropping me an email through the contact form here.

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I saw a lot of articles in the weeks immediately after the Florida school shooting discussing how parents were considering homeschooling because they were afraid; another recent spate of articles note that there have been more than 20 school shootings so far this year (and it’s only May!) where someone was either hurt or killed.

Kathy Lowers of Collier County, FL had a son who was one month old when the Columbine shootings happened, and decided that schools were no longer safe.  Her perspective is underscored by a statement in the same article by Michelle Estes, the secretary of the Children’s Home Educators Association of Collier County, who said that “the only way too guarantee your kids are safe is to have them by your side.”

And it’s not just in Florida – parents as far-flung as Arkansas, Pennsylvania, and Missouri report thinking about or actually pulling their children out of school because of concerns about safety.

We shouldn’t need bulletproof backpacks to protect our children at school, but we cannot harden all schools against all forms of attack.  As long as there are guns essentially freely available to pretty much anyone who wants to buy one, we will continue to see attacks on schools, movie theaters and workplaces.

It’s natural to want to avoid things that scare us and things that might hurt us.  And at the same time, we want the best for our child.

Don’t homeschool because you’re afraid of school shootings

But being afraid of gun violence is not a good reason to pull your child out of school – because you or your child could just as easily get shot at the mall, at a concert, or at work – or (if you own a gun) in your own home.

Indeed, if there is a gun in your home it seems possible that your child might be less safe there than in school, given that living in a home with guns present increases the risk of homicide by 40-170%.

But even if safety is the wrong reason to homeschool, there are many great reasons to consider it.  In fact, homeschooling may be one of the hottest trends in education, since more children are now homeschooled than attend charter schools.

And believe me, this is not your mother’s homeschooling – when I first learned about homeschooling I thought they were a particular type of the population but actually secular homeschoolers may be the fastest-growing group.

These parents are worried about budget cuts; about class sizes; about standardized testing; about what their children are learning in school; about how school might be one of the more effective ways of squashing curiosity and a love of learning out of a child.

People just like you are thinking “could homeschooling actually work for me?”

(By and large, teachers are NOT among the “reasons to consider homeschooling.”  I’ve interviewed teachers across the country and am continually impressed by their talent and dedication.  On more than one occasion they’ve been moved to tears when they talk about how much they care about their students.  Teachers are not the problem: the system they are forced to work within is the problem.)

Five reasons to consider homeschooling – besides safety

1. I was shocked to learn that compulsory schooling was not developed to help children reach their potential, or even to teach basic skills (there was no need: literacy rates – admittedly primarily among White males – in New England reached 90% between 1787 and 1795), but was actually developed by states to control what students learned and shape them into compliant citizens. The first countries to enact compulsory education laws were those that were less reliant upon child labor.  We need a school system that actually supports children’s learning (but reformers have been agitating for this for over a century now so it seems unlikely to happen anytime soon).

2. We created factories to manufacture standardized components in an assembly line, and the school system segregates students according to ability and uses standardized curricula to teach in standardized ways to ensure good results on standardized tests, which allows us to measure the performance of students and teachers and reward or punish them accordingly. Meaningful assessment of children’s learning is not the enemy, but testing that does not tell a child anything useful about his learning is.

3. Despite this focus on test scores, test results are abysmal. Between 30 and 40% of students score at above a proficient level in reading and math in both fourth and eighth grades; the rest score at a basic or below basic level with a 25-30-point difference in scores between black and white children.  Results are only “improving” in that they are better than the 13-30% of students scoring at or above proficient level in 1992, when we started the standardized testing push.  It is very difficult to obtain data to empirically test this, but studies indicate that homeschooled children perform at least as well on standardized tests as children who attend school.

4. Schools aren’t preparing our children for success in the real world: they’re actually really good at preparing our children for the kinds of jobs that existed in the 1950s (the height of the factory assembly-line era). Schools treat content (i.e. facts) as if it was the most important thing in education, when actually students leave education with few of the skills they need in the working world.  Instead, content is perhaps the least important (because we have Google now, after all) of six critical skills they should be learning – the others are Collaboration, Communication, Critical Thinking, Creative Innovation, and Confidence.  Ironically, one of the reasons the students at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas school seem so poised when they argue for gun control is because they attend school in an affluent neighborhood which enables programs like school newspapers, debate, and drama programs – these are not kids sitting around memorizing content all day.

5. Homeschooling might actually be better preparation for both college and life than being in school. I did well in school because I learned how to understand and follow rules.  The words “will this be on the test?” strike fear into the hearts of educators because they know that our children – like I did – are learning only as much as they need to pass the test.  The only cure for that kind of thinking is to learn about things that interest you.  Which you can do, if you’re not beholden to a curriculum.

Some of the most common reasons given keeping children in schools are that they allow children to learn life skills and social norms, and that they expose children to diversity in people and in ideas.  Plus there’s always the concern: how will they ever get into college?

Learning social norms by being separated from society

But isn’t it ironic that we expect children to learn how to behave in society by separating them from society and putting them in a group of individuals exactly their age, where they learn things (as we have already seen) that don’t prepare them for life outside school?

Think of the last training you did for your work.  Now, did you ever apply what you learned to your work?  If not, chances are it’s because you learned it in isolation and never practiced integrating the new knowledge into what you actually do all day.  Maybe the things you spend most of the day thinking about aren’t even remotely related to the training.

Students don’t learn to manage money, manage their mental health, how to buy, sell, repair, manage, or maintain a car or house, how to be a good spouse or take care of and raise a child, how to communicate professionally, and how to cope with failure in school.  They don’t learn skills like self-control, motivation, focus, and resilience.  They don’t learn how to learn beyond rote memorization.  (If you prefer to hear this in the form of a rap, click here.)

This article summarizes five critical social skills, and concludes by asking “What can happen when kids don’t follow social rules?” The response given is that your child may find himself being bullied by other children – as roughly 35% of children in school are.  But should we lay this blame on the children being bullied – or does some of the fault lie with the bullies?  And is it possible that these lessons about social skills could be more effectively learned in environments outside of school?

Exposing children to diversity…but not too much

Parents say that they value diversity in schools (one national survey found that 73% of parents say that having a racially diverse student body is “very” or “somewhat” important for their children to attend a diverse school), but their actions show that their support for diversity is actually rather limited.  One mother involved in a research study on the importance of student body diversity was asked whether racial or ethnic makeup was an important factor in her school choice decision, and responded “It is ideally, but I didn’t have a lot of choices so I went with a school that I felt had the best educational program even though I would like a school to be more diverse.”

White parents want diversity in schools, but they also want to make sure there’s a critical mass of other white students in their children’s schools and classrooms: one white mother in the same study said “I don’t want to be the minority.  I want a comfortable place for my children.”

Privileged families move to different houses in the attendance zones of desirable schools, use information they get from the directors of their expensive preschools, and use their extensive networks to navigate the application system and get their children into “good” schools, defining those schools more by the racial makeup of the school than by what is taught.  They opt in to “Gifted and Talented” programs which effectively segregate otherwise diverse schools.

It’s true that where diversity exists in schools, it tends to benefit students (although the picture may be more nuanced than is often reported).  But our schools are actually highly segregated: 52% of white students attend schools with less than 25% minority enrollment, while 57% of black and 60% of Hispanic students attend schools with 75% or more minority enrollment.

Diversity is great for your kids…when they can get it.  It’s possible they might be exposed to more diversity just by living life in society than by being in school.

How can a homeschooled child get into college?

Three of Grant and Micki Colfax’s four children got into Harvard.

In the late 1960s the couple protested the Vietnam War and worked for the civil rights movement.  One night in 1968 they received a phone call threatening their son’s life – and the police called David a “goddamned draft dodger” and refused to help.  David was later denied tenure at two different universities, and he received a settlement from one of them for violation of his academic freedom due to his political activities.

After that, the couple bought a plot of land in remote Northern California – one the real estate agent told them was “no place to raise children.”  They carved out a homestead and began homeschooling.  When their oldest son, Grant, won a full scholarship to Harvard the family made the national news.  The next two sons followed Grant to Harvard, and the fourth works in the software industry.  (Read all about it in their book Hard Times in Paradise.)

Homeschooling is no impediment to college acceptance and later success, and it may even be an advantage as their self-directed accomplishments distinguish your child from all the other suburban children with straight As and seven extracurricular activities.  Stanford even tags homeschooled applicants with a special code so they can be found more easily among other applicants.  Why?  Because of their intellectual vitatility.

So why should you consider homeschooling?

Well, we’ve implicitly covered a number of these reasons by now.

Your child wouldn’t have to learn the same thing that every other child in the country is learning.  She could follow whatever curriculum you wanted: heavier on science, or math, or writing, or whatever is most important to your family.  Or you could do away with the curriculum entirely and just follow your child’s interest.  (Remember the part about Content being the least important of the six Cs?  If you spend less time on that, it frees up a whole host of time for the other five Cs.)

If you don’t believe that standardized testing is an accurate representation of what children know, you could opt out of testing in school but then your child would still have to go through the test-based teaching geared toward the rest of the class.  (Keep in mind that civil rights groups oppose opting out of testing because it demonstrates the achievement gap between children of dominant and non-dominant cultures.)

But if you aren’t wasting time on standardized testing, you can assess children’s learning in meaningful ways – through formative assessments (used to monitor learning) and authentic assessments (used to provide rich, meaningful assessments of a final work product).  You know, the kinds of assessments teachers would do if they didn’t have to teach to the standardized tests.

Alternatively, you could do away with assessments entirely and just encourage your child to share his knowledge with others who are interested in the same topic – both peers and adults.  They will offer critiques for him, suggest different strategies, and provide the guidance he needs.

She can socialize with children and adults of all ages, doing away with the notion that only socialization with children of exactly her age is valuable.  Indeed, she may get far more out of relationships with both younger and older children, as well as with adults of all ages – based on their shared interests rather than their age.

Most importantly, he can learn – about himself, about the world, and about his place in it.  From actually living in it, rather than memorizing facts about it in school.

Don’t homeschool because you’re afraid of school shootings.  Do it because it facilitates the best kind of learning there is – learning how to learn, in a way that inspires her to love learning.  Don’t we all want that for our children?

Jen Lumanlan (M.S., M.Ed.) hosts the Your Parenting Mojo podcast (www.YourParentingMojo.com), which examines scientific research related to child development through the lens of respectful parenting.  She also launched the most comprehensive course available to help parents decide whether homeschooling could be right for their family.  Find out more about it – and take a free seven-question quiz to get a personalized assessment of your own homeschooling readiness at www.YourHomeschoolingMojo.com

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