Can there really be a problem with telling your child, “Do your best? Maybe, maybe not. I know that it was a terrible thing done to me by my dad, probably innocently. Dad was big on ‘do your best’, and he added that this should be applied to whatever you pursue. He used to say if I wanted to be a ditch-digger, then great; just do my best at it. Of course, this is where it get’s a little confusing. When I did my best dad would also challenge me with, “Why didn’t you do better?”

I remember after graduating with honors from a difficult master’s program (I had a 3.62 GPA out of 4.0) dad asked me, “Why didn’t you make a 4.0?” Inadvertently he had set up a standard for perfection that could never be reached. I’ve always felt it would have been much more helpful if he had simply said, “Just be better than everyone else in whatever you do.” That kind of challenge is at least possible. Do your best + you can always do better is a recipe for misery.

What about you and your parenting advice for your kids? Hopefully you are teaching them to be independent, but are you making the standard too high? On the other hand, are you a parent that offers no real standard, allowing your child to drift? Kid’s definitely need standards modeled to them, and they need challenges to grow themselves. Giving them no standards or giving them impossible ones are both off the target and into the dirt. By the way, can we really ever know if we’ve really done our best (maybe dad’s point).

Here’s an alternate way to think about it when you challenge your kids--- Do what it takes. Of course, they need to figure out what they want (or have it given to them during the growing years), but then the question of doing what it takes makes sense. Need to learn math? Do what it takes. Want to compete in a sport? Do what it takes. Want to go to youth camp with your church and need to raise some money? Do what it takes.

May I close with a question or two? Are you doing your best at parenting and homeschooling? Could you do better? Now, dump those questions. Instead, ask yourself how you want your kids to turn out as individuals and students? Do you want them to be in a position to choose their life; whether it includes college or not? Do you want them to read well, write well, do math well? Then, it seem simple:

One of the major issues with homeschooling is the question of qualification. Are you good enough? Are you certified? What makes you think you can homeschool?

While some people should definitely not homeschool, most people are massively qualified. The reason is pretty simple, but the question is a little tricky.

"Am I qualified," can be a difficult question, especially as we consider the fact that public school teachers can also show up as unqualified. Maybe it's a question of being qualified, but maybe it's a question of growing yourself. In this video we try to think this through while underscoring the viewpoint that kids are their own best teachers.

So, are you qualified to help your kids learn how to learn? That's the crux question, true? If you can help them learn how to learn, you are probably in a good place and plenty qualified. If you can learn yourself while helping them along, then you are probably golden!

Blessings,

Fred Ray Lybrand

P.S. Since children are learning machines, it's really about maintenance and good fuel 🙂

So, how do you balance homeschool, parenting, and marriage? What a great question. It's part of our 100+ questions on homeschooling. I'll tell you, this is not as difficult as it sounds. The problem is when we don't understand two simple things. One is balance and the other is hierarchy. Okay, so balance. Balance is the right amount of the right thing.

My name is Dr. Fred Ray Lybrand and my wife, Jody and I mentor families in how to raise independent thinkers, independent homeschoolers. Well, there's nothing more valuable in all of this than a mom and dad getting their mind and trying to produce an outcome how this stuff balances, homeschool, parenting, and marriage.

So first, balance. What is balance? A lot of times we tend to think balance is 50/50. We do this for a certain amount of time. We should balance it with something else. You've read this long, you should go outside and play this long, you might say. That's not exactly the nature of balance. Balance is the right amount of the right thing. So, soup, you don't want it to be 50% salt, but some salt or flavor in the soup really helps dramatically rather than if you have unsalted V-8 Juice or something like that. So, it's the right amount. So, the right amount of attention to homeschool, the right amount of attention to parenting, the right amount of attention to marriage, that would be the nature of the game.

Now, circumstances can affect us. When people are deployed, for example, overseas, it's hard to spend that much time on the marriage, as it were. But that notwithstanding, in the normal day to day nature of things, what we want to understand is first, it's balance, the right amount of the right thing. You get to sort of figure that out, how much attention to homeschool, how much attention to parenting, how much attention to marriage, how those things overlap. But the second is hierarchy, and that is what you value first, second, third, and how you put that together is going to affect everything. If you have a family system where the homeschool is ahead of the marriage, it's going to take a certain look. If you have a homeschool in which a parenting, whatever you understand that to be, is the dominant thing over the marriage and homeschool, it's going to have a certain look.

I'm going to argue with you that from a leveraging viewpoint, the small-but-powerful thing is that the marriage is the priority. I know this comes as difficult information, because I know marriages have struggles. Jody and I coach couples and have done that for decades: and we have worked through our own challenges in marriage as well. No one's saying it's easy. And I know in particular the readers I'm talking to right now, are predominantly women. You moms are the ones who predominantly homeschool. That's just a fact. You may not know this, but in the divorce world 70% of the divorces statistically are initiated by the women. So, that kind of tells me something is amiss or strugglesome (and the women are often the more stressed) This may or may not be the case your marriage. The question is how do you get your marriage to be as good as it can be? When the marriage works, the parenting starts to work too; and that gives you room for the homeschooling to work. That would be the sequence.

You have a (1) good marriage and (2) good parenting, so you're a (3) great fit for homeschooling. If you're using homeschooling to make up for the parenting and the marriage, you're going to have struggles.

So, the reason it works this way, as you can imagine when you were a kid, if your mom and dad actually were secure in their love and creating an environment which you didn't ever think, “Are they going to get divorced?”--- that world gave you a context for growth as a child. I know both Jody and I had those struggles growing up, worries when our parents were conflicting. My parents did finally divorce though Jody's didn't. But those kinds of insecurities on the child will drive some acting out, some struggles, or some distractions and stress of various kinds. So that kind of marriage, just from a safety viewpoint, creates a context of something awesome in the family.

The challenge here, I think, is that when we come around to parenting and homeschooling, we tend to think 50/50. So, dads should be 50% involved. Moms should be 50% involved or something like that. It's never going to work that way. Somebody is going to be better at certain things than the other. Somebody is going to be available for more of the full-time context. It's not uncommon for the dads to work and the moms to have that great gift of nurture. So, I would say that's probably very traditional in homeschools, but not unique. In our context, I did a lot with homeschool but Jody certainly did that greater portion, especially in the early years. She was home with them and focused on growing the kids; that was OUR game plan.

So, how about you and your marriage and your homeschool and your parenting? I'd argue it needs to work as follows. Work on the marriage. You do that largely by what you model and focus upon. Is the marriage the priority? How do you show that to the kids? Do you two ever go out without the kids or spend any time alone without the kids? Is it a family room and a family bed and a family everything? If you do that, you're making no distinction to marriage. And in my experience, you're not modeling to the kids to go out and to be independent, to find themselves a spouse, to build their family. That's really what you want to do. Of course, I realize you might be a single parent homeschooling, but doesn’t the principle hold? If your ex is in the kid’s lives, then the better that relationship, the better for the kids. Aim for peace and cooperation always, even if you can’t have it.

Jody and I would model it this way: Our bedroom is not for the kids. That was our place. Our focus was to let that be our place, and they can wonder what went on or not; and hopefully, we came out happy from being in there. It was a refuge. It was our place. At the kitchen table, we didn't sit across from each other because that's oppositional. We sat beside each other. In church, we would sit by each other and put the kids around us on either side, not corralling the kids between us. It was just our understanding. But in doing that, we were saying to the kids, our marriage is central to this thing. And so, figuring out how to make sure we spend time together, to learn how to resolve things together, to learn how to be like-minded about homeschooling and parenting together. That's the key. It's the centerpiece of the marriage. And if you don't have kids aren’t you still have a family? Marriage is family and kids are added for a time. That's the game.

So, what I would challenge you to understand is that whatever you need to do, you began by making the marriage the priority. And then inside of that, you're like-minded about how you approach parenting, what are you modeling to the kids, what are your standards of what you're trying to do. And then, inside of that, the homeschool game can begin to make sense. I hope that helps.

Fred Ray Lybrand

P.S. This topic of parenting and marriage is fully covered in our book, The Absolute Quickest Way to Help Your Child Change.

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I want to a comment a little bit on Jordan Peterson’s principle from his book about the 12 Rules for Life concerning children. His thought on rule Number 5 is “You don’t want to allow your kids to do anything that will cause you to dislike them (I think ‘hate’ for emphasis from my experience as a counselor)”. 

He could soften it or stretch it or whatever he’d like to do, but he said it the way he did perhaps for a really good reason. I’m not only inclined to agree with him, but I've kind of been saying that for about 22 years or more. Here’s the point; he understands, as I understand, that you’re not a saint and when you allow your children to do things which you don’t like, you’re going to come around to being frustrated with them. I think he would say you ‘take revenge’. He also observed, and he’s right, that other people are not going to like what your child does either. But we live in a world where we think we can’t do anything as parents. We’re kind of into fads and trends and we think these little crazy creatures that have been given to us are just ‘how they are’ and there’s nothing you can do. Well back 22 years ago I wrote a little book called “The Absolute Quickest Way to Help Your Child Change” and in there I basically say, “Hey! You can help your child change. It’s based on principles that we can find in the universe and amazingly and wonderfully you actually have a creature that is desiring this guidance!” What we tend to do is not understand that these babies want us, whether they realize it or not, to guide them. They’re not qualified, they’re not adults yet, they don’t know anything. That’s what we’re doing here; we’re wanting to guide and shape and develop their behavior. We don’t take away freedom that way, we actually empower them.

In my 2014 release I put four questions together that let you look at behavior in a fresh way:

1. What do I see?
2. What do I want to see?
3. How am I encouraging what I see?
4. How can I encourage what I want to see and discourage everything else?

I’ll walk others through these questions and Peterson does the same kind of thing because it’s profoundly ‘common-sensical’ --based on one fundamental thing he and I share in common; we think this universe is designed, that there’s design for maleness, there’s design for femaleness, and there’s a design for things like personality and the way things function. Because of those designs we can actually anticipate and work with principles. That is where the secret is if you are inclined to awaken and continue to add momentum to life. In parenting, you’re going to see the opportunity to structure things around your child so they really learn.

You already use this principle innocently and perfectly with language. If you’re from Alabama like I am (I now live in Texas and I don’t think it sounds much different) or if you’re Jordan Peterson and you’re from Canada, you can see they say cool things up there or down under or in the UK or who cares, true? What you need to know is language has been a subtle reward-and-discourage training that you do with your children. When they say something in a proper way you give them what they want. When they say it in an improper way you correct them or you don’t know what they’re talking about. In this way they learn to pronounce and communicate properly in that context, in that dialect, and so they can master language in the region they’re in… so that they actually can circumnavigate life well. That’s what training is and it works with language, so why not do it with [other] behaviors? You have a great future out there, but please equip your child with some self-discipline. It comes from the outside first and then they internalize it. Look at Peterson’s book. Look at my book. Think for yourself. Grow a kid who can do the same. Bless you.