Of course, she’s ridiculously fluffy and cute–so I stepped outside to give her a treat for no reason at all. But as I realized my approach probably completely baffles family and friends. After all, I do give my kids small treats or time to do something fun for each school assignment completed.

So do I care about my dogs more than my children? Not at all, my dogs, large livestock guardian’s lives literally depend on being under my authority. They can do their best to keep all risks at bay, but when I call them back from scaring off a delivery driver or attacking a visiting friend or neighbor’s dog they need to respect my authority immediately and without question.

But with my children, it’s different. Yes, they are under my authority now. Especially when they are young and need to be kept physically safe. I don’t offer bribes to keep them from running out into a busy traffic-filled street. But, as they get older, I want them to learn how to respectfully negotiate with the authority figures in their lives.

I want them to have the skills to become competent employees, successful business owners, and good citizens who can deal appropriately with the people they encounter. There is a difficult balance to strike here in order to be successful.

It’s incredibly important that we don’t focus on raising “good” compliant children that impress our family and friends and the expense of their future happiness. Honestly, I’m less worried about somewhat sassy children than I am those desiring to please others at any price.

Giving them regular opportunities to get negotiate, get “paid,” and think about their own value in various contexts gives me insight into their personalities and characters. It also allows me to see things we need to work on, have realistic conversations about the world adults navigate, and gives them opportunities to learn while the stakes are low.

What do you do that might look crazy to the outside world, but makes all the difference for your family? I’d love to hear about it!

This post may contain affiliate links. Read my disclosure policy here.

As a homeschooling mom of five young children, I often hear “I don’t know how you do it.” The truth? I don’t do nearly as much as anyone expects—and that’s by design.

As I discussed in-depth in Dying to Win, inspiring our children to become driven independent learners is the single best way we can set them up for success.

But how do we pull that off? The key is to have the right set of expectations and an arsenal of tools that work well for you and your children.

Perhaps the most important thing to know is that your homeschool does not—and in fact should not—resemble a traditional school. Instead, focus on the growth of each child.

You can spend a lifetime spinning your wheels trying to make your children perform as other people expect.

Or you can choose to focus on your child’s strengths and identify key weaknesses that are essential for them to lead fulfilling lives.

It’s also important to make sure you are in a healthy mental and physical condition to be the parent your kids need. I know what this is like from personal experience as someone who struggles with autoimmune conditions—and I know I’m not alone.

As parents we need to know what we can do well, our limitations, and how we can best encourage our kids while cultivating a love of learning in them.

A common complaint I hear from parents is that homeschooling is destroying their relationship with their children because they are so busy being their child’s teach that they are no longer being a parent. My response? Fire the teacher. Seriously. And this doesn’t mean you need to send them to school.

Your children don’t need a teacher. They do need a coach and encourager.  And someone who loves them unconditionally—and yet will draw boundary lines.

My mother did this beautifully while homeschooling me during the 80s and 90s. My learning challenges never came down to a battle of wills between me and my mother. Instead, it was a struggle between me and that workbook. My mother came alongside as the keeper of the answer key.

You don’t need to stand up in front of your children lecturing for hours on end. You do need to provide them with tools for learning and encourage them to use them. You do need to limit their opportunities to do things that won’t help them learn and grow. And you need to show them why what they’re learning today will matter in the future.

My current homeschooling curriculum is not the least expensive option available but it’s well worth it for our family because I know my children are getting an excellent education without me spending hours on lesson planning, organizing materials, and stepping them through a laborious learning process.

We use a video-based curriculum with an instructor providing 180 video lessons for each subject, any necessary printable worksheets provided below each lesson, and links to online books so they can be printed out if we don’t already have a copy. It’s simple, straightforward, and—most importantly—cuts a lot of busy work out of my children’s educations.

Their teachers are video instructor just as mine were books. And I come alongside them as the coach making sure they’re not getting stuck.

Sometimes it’s simple. When my daughter is struggling with a math problem we consider all the possibilities. Is the instructor terrible? Or did she forget to watch the video where he taught her how to do this? Is she struggling with something foundational she didn’t grasp in an earlier lesson? Most of the time she’ll realize she needs to watch a video again and the problem is solved.

Sometimes it takes a lot more time, pain, and even money to get to the bottom of a child’s problem. One of my sons has wanted to read since he was a toddler. He even memorized the alphabet at 17 months old. But as the years went by, it didn’t matter how hard he worked, he continued to struggle with reading. When he was seven I found an eye specialist who was able to determine that his eyesight was consistently inconsistent. Poor kid. He’s start reading a sentence and suddenly everything would go blurry or the words would start dancing around. After several months of vision therapy his eyesight drasticall improved and now his reading ability is rapidly improving.

The best thing about looking at homeschooling as a coach coming alongside my kids is that it something I would be doing anyway as a parent. Even if I sent my kids to a regular school, I’d want to know what they were struggling with and provide a fresh perspective on how to deal a struggle. I would also have been the one to take my son to a specialist and, as the doctor told me, I would have been paying for it since he was technically reading at grade level (even if poorly). It’s likely he would have floundered for years before intervention would have been offered thorugh a school system—even if he had an amazing teacher who wanted to help him. 

Now, if my children did go to a regular school I can imagine they would have a few other amazing encouragers and coaches in their lives. As far as I know, our local school district has an excellent reputation. But our journey off the beaten track also provides them with a variety of other adults who step in to provide that encouragement and sense of community.

And I have peace of mind knowing that I’m giving my children an incredible opportunity to become the best possible versions of themselves by giving them an incredible freedom to learn.

If you would like more information about the specific video curriculum I use, The Ron Paul Curriculum, you can check it out here. If you have any questions feel free to ask in the comment section below or email me at teri@tericapshaw.com.

Are you one of the parents trying to cope with an unwelcome task of learning to help your kids complete school at home? Or are you a homeschool parent dealing with another parent now working from home? Maybe you are dealing with one of the scenarios above plus all the stress of lost jobs and a sick loved one.

No matter your situation I want you to keep in mind that this is a time your children will remember. And you may never have this much sheer time with them again. With that in mind, I have two simple approaches you can take to keep your sanity while helping your children cope–and even learn–during this time.

The first I call the Covid-19 Kid Care Protocol (please share the graphic below with anyone who needs this information right now). It’s essential to connect with your children, reassure them, and give them a place in this new strange reality.

Secondly, this is the perfect time to pause and change how you think about your child’s education. In fact, while thing situation brings on intense temporary stress, many of our children are suffering from a dangerous level of chronic pressure. This is the perfect time to adopt a new, healthy perspective on education I call the LEARN method.

1. Let go of unrealistic expectations.
2. Encourage independent learning
3. Acknowledge when you and your children need help.
4. Require your children to take themselves seriously.
5. Never say, “I’m not good enough.”

Would you like more support during this time and free resources? I’d love to have you join my email list to receive materials to help implement the concepts above and invite you to join an amazing group of parents and educators coming together to support one another during this challenging time. Click here to sign up.

Since I first became aware of evidence that school stress may actually be a driving force behind youth suicide, I’ve been haunted by why. Why does what we know matters most, our precious children’s health and well being, get ignored in favor of pushing them toward what the world defines as success?

I’m increasingly convinced the answer lies in a natural, and necessary, desire for security. Our children’s longterm well being does depend on a measure of financial security. Which begs another question, why are we hyper-focused on academic indicators in hopes that our children will achieve financial stability while ignoring financial literacy?

This is a topic I’m focusing on these days both in my home with my own children and as part of my larger mission to help families break free from the prison of anxiety so they can truly embrace all life has to offer. In fact, a few months back I accepted an advisory board position with the startup bringing the Lifehub Learning Center to market. Financial literacy is critical to help our kids live their best lives.

We need to be teaching our kids (and ourselves) how to truly manage money. And we need to prepare them for a role greater than that of a consumer. Yes, they should experience the exhilaration of setting a goal, saving up, and buying something they want–rather than having it handed to them. But they will benefit far more by building on that knowledge to transform from consumer to a creator.

As much as fear of a lack of money can give rise to toxic levels of stress and anxiety, learning to use money wisely in creating a better world can relieve suffering. And as I think of this, I’m reminded of entrepreneur Nathan Barry who lives in my local area. One of his mantra’s “create every day” helped build a multi-million dollar startup that not only provides financial security for his family and his employees’ families. It’s also allowing his company to give generously to people in need around the world.

In a world where our kids are literally dying to win, stories like his provide hope. They also convince me that we need to intentionally help our children learn the true power of money, rather than suffer from a lack of knowledge and skills.

Do you ever worry your kids are under too much pressure? Or worry they lack the internal drive necessary to succeed in life? Sign-up for my free discussion guide to start a critical conversation today.

It’s a question that seems too horrible to even contemplate: is school stress causing our kids to commit suicide? But the little evidence we have suggests that figuring out how school affects our kids’ mental health should be a top priority.

As I wrote in Dying to Win, one study found that for American high school students, the suicide rate is higher when school is in session. In their paper entitled, “Back to School Blues: Seasonality of youth suicide and the academic calendar,” researchers Benjamin Hansen and Matthew Lang set out to determine why the “suicide rate of 15-19-year olds tripled between 1950 and 1990” even as the rates for older people dropped.

In a study they believed to be the first of its kind, they looked at relationship between school and youth suicide. They found that “during the months that students tend to be on break from school (June, July, August, and December), youth suicide is significantly lower than the rest of the year.”

While the exact cause for this patter is difficult to determine, the researchers did notice the effect of education policies aimed at helping kids get ahead by spending more time in school. They observed, “The results above not only show a distinct drop in suicide during the summer months, coinciding with a break from the stress of secondary school, but may help explain the recent rise in youth suicide over the past half-century as the length of the school your increases and academic standards rise.”

That study showing that the youth suicide rate tripled over a period of 40 years was published in 2011. However, a recent study shows that in a period of only 10 years from 2007 to 2017 the youth suicide rate in the US increased by 56%.

So what’s behind these new numbers? It’s impossible to know exactly. But we need to be asking serious questions about the pressures our children face—including school stress.

Now I want you to think of your child’s mind as an instrument you are tuning. Stuffing it full of information won’t make it perform better. It will probably have the opposite effect.

Here’s another thing. Have you ever watch a musician tune a piano, or another string instrument? It can look like a mysterious process to someone like me. But does that mean the musician is doing anything wrong? Of course, not.

Now I want you to embrace this one thing more than anything else: you are an expert on your child. Nobody cares more than you do about this precious human’s mind, heart, and soul.

Do what you find necessary and helpful to spark your child’s imagination, create a drive to learn, and develop a solid character. When your child receives a finely tuned education he or she will absorb all the information necessary– no stuffing required. 

That moment makes every difficult day I’ve spent with this child so worth it. It also makes me thankful that my husband and I have chosen a path many people see as wrong in order to give him the freedom to learn.

He didn’t know to use the word “humble” in trying to describe this important character trait, but he’s grasped something far more important than any vocabulary test could measure.

In her amazing book “Consider This” Karen Glass makes a compelling argument that our kids really need to only develop three things: 1) a humble spirit (knowing that they don’t know everything), 2) a good character, and 3) a love for learning.

Those three concepts are core standards for my homeschool. 

Of course, my kids study all the subjects they need to function in life. But my children’s education isn’t measured by the number of worksheet pages they complete. Or the score they get on a test. Or the length of papers they can write at a certain age. Those things are all tools for learning and communicating (some more or less useful).

But filling in the blanks in a workbook perfectly is not big, bold, or beautiful enough to be considered the primary accomplishment for the precious years we share with our children. 

Instead, let’s learn alongside them as we explore beautiful books that show all the depth and richness of life– and illustrate how the characters of men and women shape history. Let’s allow them opportunities to discover a world so complex they know there are no simple answers. Let’s give them the time to ponder what it all means.

What our children need most is wisdom. And that can’t be discovered on a standardized test. But you might hear evidence of it coming from the back seat.  

When researching Dying to Win I spent hours agonizing over whether I was making a solid argument based on the data I could find. I questioned the accuracy of translated reports and tried to calculate the statistical significance of my findings.

And then I woke up to the reality of the situation: it doesn’t matter how many kids are pushed to the brink of suicide. The loss of one precious child is a tragedy–and we’ve lost many all over the world.

In several countries in Asia news agencies report on student suicides attributed to academic pressure. Researchers in America have found a frightening correlation between youth suicide rates and the academic calendar year. You, like I, may know the feeling of having your heart sink with unthinkable news about a young person in your own circle of friends and neighbors.

When I read and share statistics, I feel the weight of heartache they must represent. I also know that there is an element of mystery. We can’t know perfectly why someone committed suicide– or what could have been done to prevent it. But we can guess that life isn’t getting any easier for the kids in our world.

When I look at what kids are dealing with today I find a common theme: comparison. We compare test scores. We compare bodies. We compare athletic abilities. Everyone wants to be number one.

And when kids don’t fit in they get bullied.

You and I can’t change the world, but we can look in the mirror and start there.

I remember walking through my parent’s living room when I was in college. The Dr. Phil show was on and a little girl, maybe three years old, was talking about her fear of getting wrinkles. Her beautiful young mother’s insecurities about aging had warped that child’s body image. I walked into the bathroom and wiped the makeup off my face.

It wasn’t that I would never use makeup again. But, for the sake of every little girl around me– and the ones I might have someday– I needed to be able to recognize that my worth was deeper than the face I presented to the world.

Today I am a mother with two young daughters and three young sons. I’m thankful for the years I spent preparing for this role because it’s a big job and I am far from perfect every single day.

My hope is that I will be able to help my children learn to exercise sound judgment, embrace their gifts, and appreciate the people around them. I want them to know their own value as precious, irreplaceable individuals who will experience deep abiding joy in life. And that they will love others in a way that is life-giving in a difficult world.

I took a moment to start a blog post: “This morning I looked outside at the sun-kissed hills near our home and took a deep breath. I treasure these moments of peace knowing that anything may happen today. (I am the mother of five children.)”

Then my two-year-old stuck a sharp colored pencil in her four-year-old brother’s eye.

My day was suddenly “off schedule” to say the least.

I confiscated the pencil, called our doctor’s office, and scrambled to get kids in enough clothes, coats, and shoes to get out the door.

I was no longer “on schedule,” but I was still “on mission.” When we sit down to plan our days we don’t know what’s going to be most important. But we almost always know when the moment comes. Thankfully, it’s not always as obvious as an emergency trip to the eye doctor. But how often is it just as important?

When it’s your child’s heart that’s hurting, you might need to put a schoolbook aside and cuddle up in a chair together. When your child is testing the limits, you may need to take time to firmly work on the problem at the heart level. When your child needs time to rest and space to grow, you may need to excuse yourself from doing some good things to make space for the most important things.

The key to doing this is to determine that your life’s mission is important enough to make your schedule a tool rather than your master.

Most of us know instinctively that real life is the best classroom.

On Tuesday my kids (and I) learned a lot:

• The most adorable two-year-old in the world is dangerous if armed with a pencil.
• The cornea is the fastest healing tissue in the human body.
• An eight-year-old can (almost) make brownies from a mix by herself.
• Over time, some sort of mysterious gunk can make the hood of a Ford Expedition impossible to fully open or close.

Even more importantly we experienced kindness and growth:

• The Costco vision center receptionists offered to keep an eye on three kids while I pulled a pathetic little boy into the exam room.
• That same little boy informed me that I didn’t need to “talk at” his little sister for poking him in the eye. He already told her not to do it again.
• My oldest daughter realized, “It must be hard for you and dad to take us to the places we enjoy going.”
•  Friends gave us duct tape to keep that hood down.
• Our repair shop fixed the faulty hood latch for free.

“I will always love you, no matter what,” I said, holding out my arms. My baby girl melted into the hug, shedding guilty tears in relief. She didn’t need to be told that lashing out in frustration wasn’t fair. She also knew I wasn’t going to back down. She sighed, dried her tears, and crawled into bed for the unwanted nap.

I still consider myself a novice at this whole raising kids thing. But eight years in the parenting trenches has taught me that my job is to stand in the gap between what my children think they want— and what they really need. And, perhaps even harder, to stand in the gap between what the world thinks they need and what they actually require to grow and develop into the unique people they were born to become.

I’ll never forget my second day living in Taiwan. It was a beautiful day in mid-January. Back then I only had two children and the youngest– a chubby 17-month-old– was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. Two women swept down upon us, rubbing his bare arms and chattering vigorously in Mandarin. The only thing I could make out was a repeated phrase, “Bu Mama!”

I know their concern was genuine and, even without the communication barrier, it’s unlikely I could have ever convinced them that this warm-blooded child who flew out of Idaho when it was 14 degrees on Saturday couldn’t possibly need a coat when it was 75 degrees in Taiwan on Monday.

It’s never fun to be called a “bad mother.” But in a world that threatens to overwhelm our children, they desperately need someone to protect them. They don’t just need protection from horrors that make up today’s news headlines. But, as I would learn within months of that big move to Taiwan, our children need to be protected from toxic levels of expectations.

As I explored in-depth in Dying to Win, families everywhere are feeling the pressure of living in an overstressed world. In Asia school systems struggle to figure out how to reduce academic competition that’s pushing way too many students to the brink of suicide. In Nubian villages, many students are too busy memorizing the contents of textbooks to connect with their families and cultural heritage. In America, researchers found a disturbing correlation between the academic calendar year and youth suicide rates. It’s like academic anxiety is a contagious disease spreading across the globe.

As the dangers of obsessing over test scores become increasingly apparent, there’s a parallel drive to let our kids experience more in life. The lists of great classes and activities to help them become “well-rounded” is endless. It’s true that there’s so much more to life than just schoolwork, but it’s also easy for so many good activities to crowd out the best things in life. At any age, our children need time and space to process what’s happening in life, reflect on who they are, and discover what they’re meant to be in this world.

As parents, we have a responsibility to look at the big picture and make our absolute best guess as to exactly what our children do, and don’t, need. At times we have to look deeply into our children’s faces, strive to read their hearts, and see the two-year-old deep inside who needs a nap more than anything else in the world. Even if our choice to slow down at times clashes with worldly desires. Even when we know our child’s needs defy cultural expectations. Even if someone might call us a “bad mamas.”