Q: We’ve decided to home school our children during the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, something is missing, and I am not too sure what it is. I am not finding the enthusiasm here that I expected. How do we go about instilling in our kids the excitement that only learning can bring?
A: OK, so let’s start at the beginning. No one can instill enthusiasm in another person. We cannot make our kids enthusiastic, we cannot make our spouses enthusiastic, and we cannot even enforce enthusiasm on ourselves.
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Enthusiasm is something that comes from away down inside of ourselves. As a parent, or even as a teacher, I can reinforce enthusiasm when I see it in one or all of my children and I can try to encourage some of that free-flowing energy. But I cannot make it happen.
The key is to understand that kids learn mostly from their parents by modelling themselves after their parents.
Sometimes that is not so great. A good many parents have had to quit using foul language in front of their children when they heard those same kids playing it back to them.
Surely this can be changed into a positive thing as well as a negative one. Kids can model as much enthusiasm about learning as they did about adopting the use of foul language. I don’t think that it is that hard.
There is simply not that much in life that has not made its way into our computers and if you have a problem, just call up Google and any number of articles or studies will flash before you on your electronic screen.
It is super exciting, and the more that you can let yourself be excited about it, the more likely it is that so will your children, especially if all of you are doing it together, with each other and for each other.
The good teacher does not know everything. The good teacher is a good learner who learns along with the children. It is so much fun, or at least it can be, and once you nurture that leaning tree inside of yourself, whatever it is that is missing from the structure that you and your husband have built to encourage your children to learn at home will no longer be missing.
You will have fun, your children will have fun, and all of you will be just a little bit wiser than you were before.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan. Contact: jandrews@producer.com.
