Parenting

Sarah’s Mom Tips: What to Do with Mom Guilt

/ Sarah Janisse Brown / Leave a comment

A mom asked the question, “How do you deal with the fear of missing out and mom guilt? The feeling that it’s just never enough, and you’re never enough and can never be good enough or do good enough?”

Let me tell you why you are so afraid of getting it wrong. You were probably educated under a system that searched for your mistakes, and you were constantly being judged by what you did wrong. You would complete your work, and your teacher would take it and grade it. And how are papers usually graded? By finding all the mistakes and pointing them all out to the child. That’s very likely what we grew up with. So now we have become adults, and we’ve become parents and homeschool moms who are still afraid of making mistakes. A lot of us have a fear of ruining our kids.

Please don’t raise kids who are afraid of making mistakes. Mistakes are fine. It’s through making mistakes and trying things that we learn how to overcome, and we learn to be okay with not being perfect. We learn about grace, and we learn about mercy. We learn about trying again. You are not the sum of your mistakes and your imperfections.

Let me give you an example about how to change your perspective. If you’re a mom who grades her child’s papers, here’s what you need to do. Let’s say your child did a creative writing project. And they fill an entire page with a story. The traditional educator in you is going to look at their creative writing and you are going to put a line under every mistake. Then you’ll tell the child that they spelled 20 words wrong, and made 10 grammar mistakes.

Here’s what the Fun-Schooling mom will do.

You will look at the creative writing page, and you will circle every single thing they did right.

Then you are going to say, “Wow, you just wrote a 400-word paper, and you got 350 words correct!”

That is so much more encouraging than saying, “You got 50 things wrong.”  

Focus on what they did right, especially if it is a creative project. If your child is being creative, focus on the story, on the heart, and on character. Stop focusing on their mistakes. We are ruining kids by obsessing over mistakes and judging them by everything they are doing wrong instead of what they are doing right. Of course, kids are going to make mistakes. Of course, they’re going to be horrible spellers. Of course, they’re not going to know anything about grammar no matter how hard you try to teach them, except what they learn playing Mad Libs. Of course, they’re not going to get phonics. Of course, they are not going to memorize their multiplication tables. Most every mom I know has a kid who struggles to memorize their multiplication facts and is bad at spelling. You know why these kids can’t do it? Because they are 8 or 9.

Learning happens at its worst when it’s all about just memorizing information. Kids will learn when they are motivated by their passions, hobbies, joys, collaborating, exploring, bonding. You might have a kid with symptoms of ADD who can’t focus on anything and can’t follow instructions. You tell kids like that to do something and they do something opposite. Or they get started doing some type of school thing and twenty seconds later they get distracted and go from one thing to another. You think this child doesn’t have the ability to follow directions or focus until you give them the Lego set of their dreams. Then this same kid sits down for two hours straight and goes through that instruction book, reads every little bit of instruction, finds every little Lego piece and builds the thing. That child has you tricked. If they can build that $50 Lego set with 2,000 pieces, they do not have a problem with attention span. The problem is with how boring their education is. Fun-Schooling–and the themes we offer–are a wonderful answer to that problem!

“Failing” at 8 Years Old

/ Sarah Janisse Brown / 3 Comments

You have no idea how many people talk to me about how worried they are about their 8-year-old.

Eight-year-olds are the most harshly-judged kids in the entire world because there is such a vast diversity of ability among them. For some, their brains turned on early and their academic skills are great. These kids can read, and write, and win a spelling bee. And then you have the 8-year-old who still can’t read the word “dad”. That was my daughter Anna. We all think we want the super smart kind of 8-year-old who is good at spelling, and most of them are not. Especially the boys. And a lot of the girls are not even ready yet to begin reading two-syllable words. So if you have an 8-year-old who is reading two-syllable words, that’s amazing. It’s actually kind of rare to have a child that age who is naturally really good at that. They have to learn to spell and understand 45,000 different words on their way to adulthood, so don’t expect that child to be able to spell much more than words like farm, dog, cat, pig, and house.

Give grace to your 8-year-olds and let them play games, color, draw, watch educational videos and listen to audio books, and don’t limit them by their abilities, disabilities, or challenges. Just let them be 8 years old. If you let them be that, they are never going to lose their curiosity and wonder and personality and humor and energy and joy. We ruin our 8-year-olds by making them feel like failures. No child that age needs to be considered a failure that young in life, so quit. I was a “failure”…I failed third grade. Do you know how embarrassing, humiliating and heartbreaking it is to fail third grade? Little kids don’t fail. We fail them by having expectations that are completely unreasonable for the individual child.

We worry that our kids’ struggles and mistakes and lack of abilities are going to destroy them for their whole lives. I just want to tell you that failing third grade was part of my story. It was a really important part of my story that I needed to struggle through. I needed that pain and difficulty in my life, because it was a very important part of what made me who I am today. If my education in public school had been easy, and people had respected me as being an intelligent and creative child, and if I had been able to understand the materials and everything and hadn’t failed, I would have no motivation to be helping all of you and creating curriculum for struggling learners.

It’s from my experience as a struggling learner, as a child who was hurt by the system, that I give you Fun-Schooling. I give you Fun-Schooling because as a little child I had a dream of what it would be like if it was always summer vacation. My mom and dad did summer vacation like nobody else. We had the best summers. We would travel all over the country. We had a giant map in our RV on the table. We were always doing geography, following the map, and figuring out where we were going. We did business. We went to art shows. We made art. They let me make art and sell it. I used money. We had a cabinet full of board games—Monopoly and Clue and Mad Libs. It was like the grandest unschooling adventure ever. My mom would read the Chronicles of Narnia books to us and all kinds of other amazing books. We were Fun-Schooling. That was my dream—that education could always be like that.

Fun-Schooling is the dream of a child that was failed. I saw my kids really struggling with trying to do Classical education because I was feeling pressured to do a really structured kind of thing. I’ve seen that the more freedom and tools I give my kids, the more skills I encourage, the more hobbies that they have–the more they become real learners.

Sarah’s Mom Tips: Strategies for Different Learning Styles

/ Sarah Janisse Brown / 6 Comments

Recently a mom asked this question:

How should I handle a child who doesn’t put forth much effort on the Fun-Schooling pages?

The truth is, he was just hacking his homeschooling and doing the minimum, which is what kids do when they want to move on to doing something they feel is more important. The problem is that kids all have a different learning style. We make Fun-Schooling journals for all the different styles. Let’s start off by talking about these, and what I call the Five Learning Languages.

There are some kids who are Creators. The kids who are Creators learn everything for one purpose: to create something. All their education has to revolve around creativity. That’s what they are motivated by. These kids will not do normal workbooks. They need things that are open-ended, that revolve around their passions and interests.

Then you have the kids who are Detectives, who get really deep into the one thing they are passionate about. They love research and are not interested in anything that you want to teach them. They are only interested in what they want to learn. They are very difficult to give a standard education to because they aren’t going to remember anything or make any effort to retain anything that doesn’t revolve around their interests.

Then we have the kids who are Explorers. These kids will not sit still. They can’t. They want to be going from place to place. They can give maybe 5-15 minutes of focused attention to some sort of lesson, or activity and then they need to switch. They won’t sit at a desk, doing workbooks, textbooks, or even online school that makes them sit for very long. I developed a lot of materials for this kind of kid. We call them the “active kids”.

Then, the next kind of learner is the Friend Learner. These are kids who are motivated to learn through social experiences. They do not want to sit by themselves and do anything. They want to be with somebody collaborating, bonding, talking, or doing a project or reading with someone. If you ask this kind of kid to do something alone, they are going to get bored and distracted and wander off to find somebody to play with. Sometimes pets help.

Finally, we have the classic students, the little scholars, and we call them the Followers because these kids just want to please the teacher, the boss, the authority, the leader, the parent. They will do everything you ask them to do really well, step by step. They don’t put their heart into it for the sake of learning, but more for the sake of making somebody proud. They really like grades and scores and tests and multiple choice and ways to just prove that they are good at something and worthy. They are really good at “in the box” type of schooling, but a lot of times they don’t tap into their own creativity and curiosity. (click Page 2 to continue reading)

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“Ruined” Kids or Thriving Kids?

/ Sarah Janisse Brown / 1 Comment

When you have kids who have symptoms of Dyslexia, ADHD, Autism, all kinds of Dyscalculia or neuro-divergent kids, they are not going to thrive in the box. We can’t put them in the box. You are all Fun-Schooling either because you didn’t want to put your kid in the box, or maybe your kid was in the box, and you were the awesome mom who pulled them out of it and took responsibility for their education.

Now, it’s really scary to be in charge of the education of another human being. We can think, “What if I ruin my kids?”  My well-meaning relatives were right there, encouraging me to think those thoughts. They had me thinking, “I am probably destroying my kids”. Let me tell you where my 4 homeschool graduates are right now.

Isaac is currently going to school in Pennsylvania, while continuing to work in music, film and publishing with his wife, Rita. Together they published several bestselling Thinking Tree books with us. They are enjoying a passive income from their work. The titles include: All About Money, which is one of our most popular books, American History, Camera Quest, Gardening and almost all of the Minecraft books.He and his wife are living the life that they want to live, and have been traveling a lot and doing adventures and look forward to raising children someday.

I have a daughter who is going to New York City because she wrote a musical which is being produced by a Broadway team. They are workshopping her musical on Time Square this spring. It’s pretty exciting stuff! She and our daughter Rachel are a team and they’ve been working together with the director who produced Newsies, Grease, High School Musical, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers on Broadway. Pretty cool stuff my girls are doing.  Also Rachel works at a macaron shop in Texas and paints paintings that are pretty amazing.

Our daughter Esther lives in Honolulu, supporting herself, and she has a booming photography business. She’ll work 4-5 months, save up money, and then go traveling. And then repeat!

Our daughter Naomi has a dog accessories business and she keeps buying horses. She’s living the dream. The cool thing about our kids and how we Fun-School is they are already living the dream right now. Life isn’t something that happens when they graduate. Life is going on right now and they are planning their days, what they want to do, what they are going to be, what they want to pursue. Our kids have businesses and incomes and are making all the money they need to do all the stuff kids want to do. I’ve had 5 kids turn 18 or 19 and move out, and I don’t support them anymore. They support themselves.

I’d say they are thriving.

Are You Raising Clever Kids?

/ Sarah Janisse Brown / 2 Comments

The whole point of Fun-Schooling is learning how to raise clever children. So, let’s talk about the meaning of the word “clever”. When we hear people talk about education, and what parents are supposed to do to raise kids that are going to be successful and get good educations, we don’t usually hear the word “clever”.

This is the essential meaning of “clever”:

“Intelligent, able to learn things quickly, intelligent thinking, funny in a way that shows intelligence, skillful, mentally quick, resourceful, marked by wit and ingenuity”. 

Webster’s Dictionary

How do we do raise clever kids? By encouraging curiosity, exploration, and wonder–and throwing out all that curriculum that puts your kid in a box where he or she does not belong.

Raising clever kids, especially clever kids with character and curiosity, doesn’t happen in the same way that you raise kids who make good grades. It’s different. I’m not talking about raising kids that are good at taking tests.  I’m talking about raising kids that know how to be creative in life, how to find solutions, and how to love learning.

Let’s talk about what Fun-Schooling is. If you already read my previous backstory on Fun-Schooling, then you know a little about my story and how I started homeschooling when I was 14 by pulling myself out of public school (and all its drama) with the help of my mom and dad. We went a totally different way with our homeschooling. Nobody was telling anybody how to homeschool back 21 years ago. We went to the library and got a whole bunch of books about everything I was curious about.

Do you know that true learning is fueled by curiosity? I want you to think for a minute about all the materials and things you are using with your kids. Do they inspire curiosity? Do they answer the questions that your child has about life? Kids naturally want to figure out how to grow up and do things. Some people a long time ago got an idea that there’s a whole bunch of content that you have to put in a child’s brain and make them memorize so that they can be successful. You aren’t raising kids to be clever that way. You are raising kids who try really hard to memorize things, and then forget it.  I want to raise kids who have skills. I want to raise kids who never lose the wonder and curiosity they had when they were five.

Think about your kids when they were five. They were like, “Why is the sky blue? Why does a cat have fur?” Kids don’t have to lose that curiosity and wonder. Traditional schooling methods take that away, and destroy it. Typical schooling methods tell the child what to learn and to stop asking questions. Memorize the facts If a child is good at memorizing things, then he or she is considered to be a good student by the system.

So many kids cannot memorize…and most of the they are being made to memorize doesn’t matter. Kids will ask, “When am I going to use these things in real life, Mom? Why do I have to learn this? It means nothing to me.”

Guess what? They’re right. Most of it they are never going to use, and a lot of it isn’t really even a building block for their future learning. It’s just a way to move on to the next grade.

Let’s fuel curiosity and raise a generation of clever kids.

Get Out of Survival Mode

/ Sarah Janisse Brown / Leave a comment

My husband says we are almost “empty nesters” because five of our adult children have moved out… and we only have TEN left at home!

I was asked a couple of times to share my ideas on how to get out of survival mode and thrive. I quickly wrote down five steps. I hope this helps someone.

First things first:

Number 1: Throw out everyone else’s opinion about what you should be doing with your family, home, body, homeschool, kitchen, job, budget and life style. If they don’t live in your house, their opinion should not drive you, shame you, or be your source of motivation. Sometimes we operate from a place of guilt because we are trying to satisfy someone who can’t be satisfied. This person is usually a family member who is an empty nester, or maybe was a teacher in the past, who knows what’s “best” for your family. Or you could be motivated by an image from Instagram that is totally unrealistic. Who are you following? Who are you trying to please? Are you driven by fear of failure or by a desire to fulfill your purpose and bring joy into your world?

Number 2: What is your purpose? What’s the end goal in raising your children? What’s your vision for your marriage? What are your personal and realistic health goals? Write down your answers and check your life to see if your daily life is in alignment with your goals. Does your husband share these primary goals? Get on the same page. If you are in agreement move on to step 3.

Number 3: Let go of anything you are doing for the wrong reason. Let go of anything that isn’t working. Let go of the unhealthy things that you may have lost control of… like things that waste time, wear you out, and compromise your health.

Number 4: After taking time to clean out your life of anything that keeps you from meeting your goals and living your purpose, you will be ready to add in some good stuff. But you CANNOT ADD until you subtract. So now that you dumped the time wasters and gave up a couple unhealthy habits, and stopped listening to the control freaks who love you… you are ready for your purpose. Start by planning just two hours a week to focus on your purpose: that meaningful something that matters so much to you.

Number 5: Get total control of your daily accomplishments. Start choosing to focus daily on what is important, instead of being in survival mode, where we scramble to do what is absolutely necessary. Once you get control of your daily life you can start making room for bigger dreams, bigger projects, a bigger mission. But remember there is nothing more important than nurturing a family. Nurture your family with a vision for the future and let one of your greatest goals for each member of the family be to help each one discover and pursue their life’s purpose. This includes your purpose along with your husband’s. You are more than parents, you are a team to raise a family and make a difference in this world, in your community or whatever.

When you are in survival mode, it’s impossible to think much about the rest of the world because your own world is barely hanging in there. So why are we in survival mode? Because we have unrealistic expectations of ourselves and our children. Because we are being shamed by Instagram and “people who care”? Because we are wasting too much time? Because we have no energy as a result of eating junk food, and we don’t sleep? Because we take on homeschooling methods that sap the life out of us and make our kids miserable? Because we are too tired to bless our husbands? Because we have preschoolers and babies?

I’m just writing what popped into my head. I hope it helped someone.

One last thing–turn off the noise. Turn on peaceful music and light a candle. It only takes a moment but can totally change the mood in your home to help everyone settle down and refocus.

I created these little Pocket Planners to help you get out of Survival Mode.

This planner is very simple. It is very cute and not very fancy. Small and sweet so you can carry it with you wherever you go. This planner is for spontaneous and busy people who need to organize their top priorities each day. The book is designed to help you create a habit of focusing on 4 important things one day, and 4 necessary things the next day. If you have trouble keeping up with your life, and you feel like you can’t add one more thing to your day, this little planner, might be a wonderful solution!

Fun-Schooling Lifestyle, Practical Tips & Reality (Part 1 of 3)

/ Sarah Janisse Brown / 2 Comments

(Transcribed from a Q & A Facebook Live video with Sarah, dated 2/2/22)

My homeschooling adventure began when I was 14 years old, and really struggling in the public school that I was going to, back in 1991. And we didn’t know anybody else who was homeschooling and hadn’t really heard of anybody else who was homeschooling. My parents actually looked into homeschooling because of some health issues my little sister had.  I wonder how many of you started homeschooling because of sickness going around and you weren’t even planning on it? Let me know in the comments!

So, my sister had health problems that couldn’t be handled well in school, and so my mom brought her home, and I was then going to school all alone. It was boring. There was a lot of bullying. I was kind of small for my age and kind of awkward. I only wanted to do art and hated math. So many things I didn’t like about school.

I saw my sister staying home and getting her work done so fast and then getting to do all the things that kids like to do. She got to be with my mom and dad all day. I’d come home from being at school all day long and have to do all the super boring homework that took me as long to get done as my sister’s entire school day.  So I started asking my parents to please let me homeschool. They said we’d have to wait until we got our tax return because they had spent a lot of money on my sister’s curriculum. My reply to that was, “Who needs a tax return and who needs curriculum? Aren’t there enough books at the library?”

We had a library just a couple blocks away and what I said made sense to my parents, so after Christmas I got a library card and didn’t go back to school. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.  My mom got me 5 or 6 composition journals from the store, and I wrote on the cover of every one of those the subjects I was interested in, and took them to the library with me. I asked the librarian to help me find books on each subject. I had my journals, colored pencils and a giant stack of library books—it looked nothing like a standardized education. 

I actually thought I was kind of a dumb, hopeless kid.  I failed third grade, I often got Cs and Ds in school. I was so proud of my A in art, and that’s what mattered to me.  That first year I got to study what I wanted to study, and that’s the heart of Fun-Schooling. That is what inspired me to create journals specifically for our kids to study their passions.

That first year I studied Ancient Egypt for History and designed my own mummy cases. My parents took me to a couple museums that had displays on Ancient Egypt and I got books on hieroglyphics—I was a super happy kid! But I discovered that I wanted to do much more. I was really interested in the history of fashion and I loved fashion design. So I got a big pile of books on that topic. All of that also qualified for Geography because I was interested in fashion around the world. There was a lot of Social Studies involved in fashion and fashion design as well. I also joined 4H and learned about photography and sewing. I had an interest in genetics. I wanted to learn about what makes us who we are. As part of that I got a bunch of mice from the pet store and started breeding them for my 4H project, and that was my Science. At that point I also fell in love with poetry and I started writing my own poems and copying poetry into my journals, and that was my Language Arts.

The only thing my parents ended up buying curriculum for was some Math stuff, and it was super boring and they didn’t really notice that I didn’t do it that year. My little sister needed a lot of attention, and they’d see me sitting there with my big pile of books and journals.  There was a different way I was going to learn Math. (click Page 2 to continue reading)

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Raising Kids Who Are Thinkers

/ Sarah Janisse Brown / Leave a comment

I’m the girl who could not handle structured schooling, it’s because I’m too much of a leader. In the 1980s, when I was in school, it was common for girls to be more easily manipulated by an authoritative system. It was expected of girls to give in, and learn in silence.

Traditional school works so hard to create submissive students. It crushes leaders.

Many boys are also natural leaders and don’t submit quickly to a authoritative system. It’s actually a good quality! Many kids, like me, resist submission, more and more these days. But schools tend to squelch individuality.

Schools don’t raise up leaders. We often are trying to push our kids into submissive learning, and that’s the main idea of socialized public schools. Get all kids to conform, make them good employees and obedient citizens. What are they trying to REALLY do? Create a population that doesn’t ask hard questions.

THINKING moms want to nurture THINKERS and LEADERS. May your homeschooling style reflect the truest of your values and the most precious of your goals.

What does it mean to raise a THINKER?

  • You may raise a child who will question the religion they grew up with.
  • You may raise a child who will question what they hear on the news.
  • They may question the information in their college textbooks.
  • They may question your morality.
  • They may question their future boss.
  • They may question pop culture.
  • They may question family stereotypes.
  • They may question popular political policies.
  • They may question the motives of loved ones.
  • They may question traditional values.
  • They may question law enforcement.
  • They may question the traditional historic narrative.
  • The may question their identity.
  • They may question their heritage.
  • They may question the main stream thought cycle.
  • They may question the wisdom of debt.

Can we all agree we want to raise THINKING children who are brave enough to question everything? Even traditional values and popular reasoning.
If you say you want to raise a THINKER but will shun your child if they ask uncomfortable questions, you are not really raising a thinker.

My teens all went through a stage of deeply questioning my faith, values and political perspective. For example some of them came through this period of intense questioning with a decision to be part of a church that is not like the one they grew up in.

Are you okay with raising thinkers? It’s risky! You may try to say “Be a thinker… but never question…”
And don’t forget kindness, compassion, understanding and personal liberty in the process!