Washer and Dryer Dilemma

by P J Caposey, Guest Blogger

I often use this question when speaking to educators, but it applies (perhaps even more directly) to parents as well.

At what age should children start doing their own laundry?

I would argue that the earliest a child could start doing their own laundry is as soon as they can read and safely reach all of the appropriate buttons, soaps, and other necessary components to running a washer and dryer. I assert that a child should start doing their own laundry commensurate with the skills and lessons you are intending to teach them. Context matters.

I usually make this argument after giving the audience a minute to ponder the question and interact with their neighbors. While I think my persuasive skills are above average it does not take a lot of persuading to have people agree with my opinion. To be clear, my opinion is basically that most kids could be doing their own laundry somewhere in the neighborhood of seven-years-old based on reading, reaching, and lifting responsibilities.

What About Age Seven?

The next question is one you might expect. “So, how many of you had your children start doing their own laundry at the age of seven or plan to have your future children start doing laundry at that age?” To this question, very few hands go up.

This is where my education presentation goes in one direction and this blog will go in another.

What About a Teenager?

Let’s fast forward to this laundry example of seven years and you are now living in a house with the scariest creature on earth: a teenager. The teenager has all the stereotypical tendencies of that age group. In particular, laundry piles up in their room and often does not make it to the laundry room (where you still do all the work) until the weekend when you forcefully remind them.

Then, over the weekend when you want to be spending time with your spouse, working on a hobby or side project, or just relaxing, you are doing load after load of your child’s laundry. This activity does not bring you joy. In fact, it does the opposite. It stresses you out. You place the frustration of your ‘ruined’ weekend back on to your teenager who is oblivious to your angst since they are glued to a device and have headphones in their ears.

This is simply a manifestation of the problem we, as parents, created years before. The problem is that if, as parents, we can cognitively know that our children are capable of completing a task that many of us complain about doing ourselves, but refuse to allow them the opportunity to try we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

Instead, what typically occurs is that we bemoan our children’s lack of responsibility, resilience, or ambition. Meanwhile, we do little to promote, encourage, or teach the very thing we criticize them for not having.

Give Kids More Ownership

Thus, as a parent I think we need to look in the mirror and take some responsibility. We need to give our kids more ownership if we want them to be more responsible. We need to give our kids more opportunities to fail if we want them to become more resilient. We need to give our kids more legitimate opportunities to find individual success if we want them to become more ambitious.

This extended example of cognitive dissonance is to me shockingly metaphorical for the entire experience of parenting.

The very things that make parenting so hard and children, at times, so frustrating are often rooted directly in what we are or are not doing as parents. We often lack the time, effort, and energy to provide authentic learning opportunities for our kids, but they exist all around us. The laundry example is just the tip of the iceberg. The problem is not just that we are not giving our kids these opportunities, but then we blame them for their lack of individual growth.

Life Is a Learning Experience

I know all of the arguments specifically about the washer and dryer and they tend to extend to any other opportunity we choose or do not choose to give to our children. The long and short of it is that any time we choose to use ‘life’ as a learning experience for our children there is a give and take.

We choose expediency over opportunity. Teaching takes time. It will undoubtedly take you longer to teach your children how to do the laundry than it would to just do it yourself. The question is whether you are going to pay that short term debt for the long-term gift of time and more importantly the responsibility you teach your children.

Let Go of Control

We choose money over moments. Your kid is going to ruin some clothes if they are doing their own laundry. It will cost you more money than if you did it yourself at first. Thus, the question is whether the cost of ensuring you do not waste any money is worth the time you could have spent laughing at their pink undershirts and helping them learn?

We choose control over (perceived) chaos. The truth is that very little of what we can allow students to have responsibility for is actually dangerous with the appropriate teaching. Instead, the uncertainty of what will happen when we are not the person in control of the idea, process, and outcome pushes us away from giving the very experiences which will teach the lessons we most want our kids to learn.

Parenting is the hardest job I have ever had, but it is also similar to every job I have ever had. If as a leader, which as parents we are, we expect performance we have to provide the training and support necessary to help our children have success. If we fail to provide the training and support during times of failure and success, we have nobody to blame but ourselves when their behaviors do not meet our expectations.

P J Caposey’s Biography

PJ Caposey is a dynamic speaker and a transformational leader and educator. PJ began his career as an award-winning teacher in the inner-city of Chicago and has subsequently led significant change in every administrative post he has held. PJ became a principal at the age of 28 and within three years was able to lead a small-town/rural school historically achieving near the bottom of its county to multiple national recognitions. After four years, PJ moved to his current district, Meridian CUSD 223, as superintendent and has led a similar turnaround leading to multiple national recognitions for multiple different efforts.

PJ is a best-selling author and has written eight books for various publishers. His work and commentary have been featured on sites such as the Washington Post, NPR, CBS This Morning, ASCD, Edutopia, the Huffington Post, and was featured in a Global Leaders Forum thinkpiece alongside the likes of General Petraeus and General McChrystal. He works in the Education Department of two universities and in a myriad of capacities with the Illinois Principal’s Association including Principal Coach and author of the first complete stack of MicroCredentials offered in Illinois.

You can find him on most social media platforms with the handle @MCUSDSupe or his name PJ Caposey. His website www.pjcaposey.com also archives many speeches, blogs, podcasts, and articles for your review.

Purposeful Parenting and Ovecoming Challenges

Purposeful Parenting and Overcoming Challenges

Guest blogger Erik Youngman’s blogs on purposeful parenting and learning from challenges embrace the following ten practical approaches to parenting:

Through positive, patient, and purposeful problem-solving, parents can model effective limit setting for their children. This includes clearly defined boundaries and goals for daily living.
Parents incorporate play in project-based learning activities at home. These may include messy art projects, science explorations, performing arts, creative writing, and sports.
Children are encouraged to ponder and creatively reflect on their various learning activities for continuous improvement and growth.
Kids learn to pivot and respond resiliently to life’s great adventures and challenges.
Parents encourage their children to embrace and learn from mistakes and challenges.
Children effectively manage daily challenges through time management and understanding their family’s clearly defined boundaries.
Parents help their children overcome difficulties by modeling effective problem-solving skills and encouraging new skill development.
When students own their learning challenges, they identify how they can overcome learning and skill development difficulties and ask for help for added guidance.
Children are inspired to do their best through resourceful goal setting and self-self-assessments.
When parents collaborate with their children’s teachers, they can help their children ask deliberate questions, model through example, and encourage classmate support.

Additional effective parenting approaches to learning are described in Student-Engaged Assessment: Strategies to Empower All Learners. When parents take the time to listen to their children’s needs, dreams, and desires, their children feel loved and validated.

May you embrace the incredible learning possibilities that your children can share with you throughout their developmental milestones and academic accomplishments.

Embrace and Learn from Mistakes and Challenges

by Erik Youngman, Guest Blogger

Regardless of your children’s age and where you live, there are daily opportunities to help children embrace and learn from mistakes and challenges. Teachers and parents have an important shared responsibility and opportunity to model and empower critical skills to children. Children make progress when teachers and parents model and empower learning from mistakes and challenges with a growth mindset. Progress and change are dependent upon specific skills that are required and improved while learning with a growth mindset and become even more important as expectations and rigor increase.

Embrace and Learn from Mistakes

Small and large, meaningful and meaningless, as well as impactless and impactful mistakes occur hourly, daily, and weekly. Reactions, support, feedback, and consequences impact the ownership, changes, and improvement. Rather than focusing on unrealistic perfection and the extremes associated with quitting and failure, help children expect and learn from mistakes.

Example mistakes that parents can help with include not being ready to leave the house on time for school, not completing chores, cleaning a spill in the kitchen, arriving late, or disagreements with others. Example mistakes that teachers can help children learn from include submitting late homework, inappropriate recess behavior, or not following rules.

Embrace and Learn from Challenges

Children encounter challenges while learning, competing, performing, and collaborating. Example challenges that parents can help children cope with include learning to tie shoes; learning a new skill such as budgeting money, riding a bike, or how to drive a car; or being anxious about being selected or rejected for a role in a play or a specific team they tried out for. Example challenges that teachers can help children with include overcoming frustration with a challenging math problem or not knowing where to start when creating a large project, misunderstanding a new concept they are learning about, or learning a new language or musical instrument. A common example challenge for everyone is learning new technology. Do you read directions, ask for guidance, or tinker to learn and unlearn new technology features and capabilities? Your children are listening, watching, emulating, or hopefully sometimes teaching you.

Children can learn how to embrace and learn from challenges by understanding benefits of:

Seeking challenges
Enhancing execution, specificity, quantity, and/or consistency
Strengthening connections with other topics
Being vulnerable and taking calculated risks
Increasing speed of progress
Taking ownership for independent and group growth
Asking the correct questions at the correct time to the correct people
Self-assessing, self-regulating, and self-advocating
Thinking like a beginner
Learning from and be inspired by feedback and models
Sharing with a larger or more authentic audience

Regardless if there are mistakes or challenges, parents and teachers can help children understand options to consider when they are not successful YET.

Reread information or directions
Identify a different strategy
Pause, take a deep breath, be kind to yourself, and try again
Explain your challenge to someone
Review the primary goal and/or an example
Make connections to similar information
View your challenge from a different perspective
Enhance your focus and/or effort
Research additional options to guide your planning
Learn from challenges, mistakes or misunderstandings

Skills That Help Children Embrace and Learn From Mistakes and Challenges

Rather than specific solutions, Let’s reflect about general skills and mindsets that enhance positive outcomes. Let’s also think about the amplified impact when parents and teachers

take ownership by admitting and apologizing and then move forward while learning. Growth mindset skills that enhance learning from mistakes and challenges can be categorized into four dimensions: solving problems, agency, collaborating, and communicating.

Solving Problems

Parents and teachers can empower children to solve problems effectively as they embrace and learn from mistakes and challenges rather than being afraid of feeling uncomfortable, self-conscious, or embarrassed. Problem-solving skills that should be learned and improved include strategizing, resourcefulness, reflection, adaptability, creativity, calculated risk-taking, and questioning. Parents and teachers can enhance these skills by providing support as children design, construct, experiment, investigate, examine, revise, solve, critique, and assess in different situations. Children should also be taught empathy and gratitude to help them make connections between the positive impacts of preparation on the success of themselves and others.

Agency

Parents and teachers can empower autonomy, agency, ownership, self-direction, and a growth mindset as they embrace and learn from mistakes and challenges. Topics to discuss include:

Passionately, responsibly, and inspirationally doing your best
Reflecting about continuous improvement and development
Courageously embracing challenges, resiliently learning from mistakes and feedback, and humbly celebrating incremental progress
Resourcefully, curiously, and creatively, problem-solving, adapting, and discovering
Reflecting, setting goals, and self-assessing
Self-regulating effort, motivation, ownership, and self-talk
Focusing on what you can control
Helping, teaching, supporting, motivating, empowering, and coaching others

Collaborating

Parents and teachers can empower children to effectively collaborate as they embrace and learn from mistakes and challenges. Helpful topics to model and discuss the benefits of include relationships, team contributions and success, inspiration from the progress of others, building and maintaining trust, or helping and receiving help from support networks.

Parents and teachers should empower collaboration, helping others, and shared ownership rather than competition by:

Providing opportunities to help, provide feedback, listen, compliment, and share
Making time for individual and team goal setting and monitoring
Modeling and empowering two-way communication
Establishing clear purpose and expectations
Modeling and empowering being coachable and teachable
Learning from mistakes and guidance of others
Leveraging technology collaboration tools
Creating engaging discussion opportunities
Rewarding effective teamwork

Parents and teachers should also empower others to learn with a growth mindset by:

Curiously asking deliberate questions
Discussing motivating topics with others
Modeling, demonstrating, or sharing an example
Empathetically cheering for others
Encouraging a teammate or classmate to learn from a mistake, challenge, or misunderstanding
Evaluating others and providing encouraging feedback
Helping others see a positive perspective
Listening to others and then helping motivate
Proudly sharing with a larger audience
Modeling and empowering reflective resilience

Communicating

Parents and teachers can empower children to communicate effectively as they embrace and learn from mistakes and challenges. Help children listen to and share feedback; explain difficulties and potential strategies; ask questions and for assistance; and effectively communicate, assist, and lead others.

Application

Connecting back to the example of teaching children the complex challenge of driving a car can be a closing example that applies growth mindset recommendations and the four dimensions of solving problems, agency, collaboration, and communicating. Teaching your children to drive (your car) can guide effective learning discussions at home and in the classroom.

Provide understandable directions in advance
Ask questions
Build confidence and resilience with positive compliments about effort, attitude, and focus
Share specific and constructive feedback during the learning process

You can start applying information from this blog by Identifying two mistakes or challenges that you will discuss with children to empower improvement. Guide your conversations with one or two of the dimensions discussed. What am I missing here? What would you add? How are you empowering students to learn from mistakes and challenges with a growth mindset? I would love to hear updates, feedback, and questions via Twitter (@Erik_Youngman) so we can continue reflective conversations. Please also share this blog with another parent or teacher so you can collaboratively discuss this topic to ultimately help children.

Dr. Erik Youngman’s Biography

Dr. Erik Youngman is an education leader who is passionate about topics such as homework, growth mindset, grading, and leadership. Published books he has written include, “The Magic of Growth Mindset,” and “12 Characteristics of Deliberate Homework,” as well as a chapter for, “100 No-Nonsense Things That All Teachers Should Stop Doing.” Erik has also written numerous blogs about growth mindset and grading.

This is his twenty-first year in educational leadership. Erik is the Assistant Superintendent for Libertyville District 70 in Libertyville, Illinois. Previous education experiences include being a principal in Libertyville as well as an assistant principal and teacher in Gurnee, Illinois.

Erik earned a Doctorate in Educational Leadership, Education Specialist Degree, and Master of Science in Education from Northern Illinois University and a Bachelor of Arts from Augustana College. Please follow and contact Erik via Twitter @Erik_Youngman or his website: ErikYoungman.com

Purposeful Parenting Pointers

by Erik Youngman, Guest Blogger

Purposeful parenting pointers provide potential parameters to ponder. Parenting could be considered the most difficult job because of the constantly changing variables. However, parenting is also extremely rewarding. Parents can support children success and healthy social-emotional growth in a variety of ways. While appreciating the monumental lifetime responsibilities of parenting, readers are encouraged to reflect about these potential parenting pointers to provide options to consider at different times for different children.

I frequently tell my three daughters and other students to be patient, polite, positive, and persistent. Enjoy reading additional words that begin with the letter “p” that will help parents empower children.

Patient

Model how to be patient while waiting or working for more positive outcomes. Focus on what you can control while deliberately thinking and behaving as efficiently or effectively as possible. Recognize when you and/or your children can have an impact on the short- or long-term disappointing outcomes as you continue to focus on your effort, attitude, and focus.

Positivity

Having an optimistic and positive mindset can shape initial reactions during challenging situations and will likely be replicated by children in future scenarios. Openly discuss emotions and empower hope as you ensure children understand that you are there to listen so that they are not alone. Be positive about experiences and potential frustrations with family, friends, teachers, and athletic experiences. Easier said than done at times, but recognize when it would be best to not sweat the small stuff.

Polite

Model and empower politeness by focusing on empathy, kindness, and gratitude (EKG). There are multiple ways to measure a person’s heart and how much they care. Modeling and empowering empathy, kindness, and gratitude creates a foundation for conversations and interactions. Discuss benefits of showing empathy for others during challenging situations; kindness for self and others; and gratitude for opportunities, support, experiences, and relationships.

Persistence

Regardless if you call it persistence, resilience, or grit, model and empower learning from mistakes, challenges, misunderstandings, and rejection. Keep trying different strategies and focusing on improvement when you have not accomplished something YET. Pause for a moment to analyze options, be courageous, and enhance your focus, effort, and attitude. Persistence will help children as they embrace and learn from mistakes, challenges, misunderstandings, and rejection that happen daily and weekly while participating in coding, science, math, writing, athletics, music, acting, and collaboration.

Peaceful

Help establish routines and structures that empower times of quiet and peace. Model self-care and how to relax. Examples include limiting electronics, creating quiet places to calm down, establishing bedtime routines to ensure appropriate sleep, and engaging in family meals or games.

Praised

Praise children’s effort, attitude, and growth. Provide feedback that is specific, forward-thinking and timely to inspire grit, growth, reflection, innovation, and tenacity. Provide feedback that targets the activity, thinking, and self-regulation to encourage correction of misconceptions, empower transfer of learning, and reflection about thinking (metacognition).

Proud

Tell your children that you love them and frequently specify why you are proud of them. Enhancing pride enhances calculated risk-taking and builds confidence, courage, poise, and a focus on continuous improvement by getting better on every attempt and iteration. Proudly make and keep promises to your children and empower them to do the same to empower ownership and finishing what was started or given your word to complete.

Passion

Seek to understand your children’s passions and insecurities. Curiously ask questions, listen to responses, and observe them in different situations to see topics and activities that result in smiles, engagement, wonder, and passion. Empower your children to discover potential interests they can be passionate about as a child, not necessarily what you were passionate about as a child.

Purposeful

Parents should model and empower purposeful actions to raise their children to become well-adjusted adults. Model how to reflectively learn from every interaction and to understand that they must responsibly and respectfully work to earn things in life.

Preparation

Parents should model and empower focusing on variables that can be controlled. Being organized and prepared to participate in activities allows children to engage in activities rather than being frustrated because they are late or not prepared with necessary resources. Example areas to target include healthy eating choices, empowering children to get dressed by themselves while also doing their daily hygiene routines and preparing teenagers to use an alarm clock so they are responsible for getting ready each day. Teaching your children how to prepare themselves a healthy breakfast and pack a lunch for school and having all of their school supplies ready when they leave for school also teaches responsibility that can continue to be enhanced as children grow older.

Productive Progress

Model how to recognize, appreciate, and empower incremental progress via reflection, goal setting, and self-assessment. Focus on progress and quality rather than perfection.

Process

Focus on choices, strategies, adaptability, and growth during the process rather than only the result. Reflect about your impact, effort, attitude, and interactions with others. Appreciate analysis of mistakes or growth, learning, progress, changes, or opportunities.

Parameters

Establish limits that also provide children with ownership. Give children opportunities to surprise you and themselves, and never underestimate them. Establish routines and traditions, spend time with them, introduce them to games and activities, and choose your battles based on safety, frequency, and impact.

Problem-solving

Rather than you solving every problem, help younger children learn how to solve problems and react while you can still give them pointers and support. Solving problems for them all of the time diminishes the learning opportunities that will be needed as they get older and take responsibility for amplified impacts. Empower autonomy, agency, ownership, strategizing, reflection, and communication skills to decrease disagreements while enhancing awareness of when to ask for help. Guide, teach, and explain options and impacts rather than making every decision for children. Help children understand the relationship between demonstrating more responsibility and earning more trust and autonomy.

Partnerships

Explain benefits of partnering with others to impact positive outcomes. Teach children collaboration, teamwork, leadership, and how to understand different perspectives while promoting others.

Play

One of the best parts of being a parent is playing with your children. Empower creativity, taking calculated risks, smiling, and having fun. Splash in puddles, dance in the rain, creatively make messy art projects, experiment with baking and cooking, play sports in the mud, daydream, draw, take funny pictures, and listen to music. You can wash the messes away, but the memories will stay.

Presence

Be present and teach your children critical, polite, and appropriate times to make eye contact and listen. Put your device down and give them your full attention. Enjoy family meals and help your children spend more energy and awareness in the moment rather than worrying about the future. Learn from your kids while also helping them learn. Children grow up fast so savor moments, hugs, smiles, and laughter.

Pivot

Model and empower pivoting or adapting to the changing times and circumstances. Expect the unexpected while being prepared to change strategies, directions, or perspectives. Benefits include enhancing confidence, courage, creativity, flexibility, and leadership.

Ponder

Curiously and creatively hypothesize and reflect about lessons learned from experiences. Reflect about continuous improvement, empathy, kindness, gratitude, and about feedback to empower your children to be teachable, coachable, and approachable.

Polished

Help children understand different times when their appearance or work should be polished. Help them recognize that their dress and hygiene is more important during particular situations. Similarly, there are times when feedback and experiences should lead to polished presentations, quality work, excellent performance, and best efforts.

Purposeful Parenting Pointers

Purposeful parenting pointers provide potential phenomenal parameters to ponder and practice. What are your reactions and success stories about these parenting pointers? I would love to hear feedback and questions via Twitter (@Erik_Youngman) so we can continue reflective conversations about purposeful parenting. Share this blog with a fellow parent and discuss what might be helpful for your children in the coming years to prepare them to be well-adjusted adults.

Dr. Erik Youngman’s Biography

Managing Daily Family Life

Once families become busy with work, school, outside enrichment activities, community service, and college and career planning activities, they can easily become overscheduled and stressed by the many demands for their time. Through weekly family meetings, families can sit down together and coordinate their daily schedules. They can determine how household chores will be completed, how to manage allowances, and how they will give back to their communities. Family members can discuss how they will address challenges and an emerging family crisis. They can celebrate successes as a family, discuss family activities, and plan for trips. Each family member can rotate responsibilities when serving as the meeting facilitator or a secretary to record family decisions.

Sample Family Meeting Agenda

A typical family meeting agenda may include the following topics:

A celebration and recognition of a family member’s successes
A review of each member’s household chores for the upcoming week
Clarification of allowances offered to various family members and weekly allowance payment
A discussion of the overall schedule for the coming week including parents’ driving schedules for school drop-offs, afterschool coordinated activities, the childcare schedule, and any special events for the family
A discussion on any community service or volunteer activities for coordination
Ongoing planning for family mini vacations and a longer summer vacation
A discussion and updates on family members or friends who are ill, need added support, or any emerging family need
Anything else that requires discussion, coordination, or support services

Brainstorming Solutions at Family Meetings

Once a family becomes comfortable with the family meeting format, families can actively discuss challenging and difficult topics in relation to the family’s values. If a family member is suffering from a debilitating illness, family members can brainstorm how they can support the family member per the following examples:

All family members can create a series of get-well cards as a family art activity and one member can make sure to mail the card with a message weekly.
Another family member can organize a dinner delivery plan with local neighbors, friends, the extended family, and a church group.
A parent can organize a driving schedule for doctors’ visits.
A family member can help with the financial management of bills and household chores.

As family members work together as a unit and model effective problem-solving skills, the parents and their children model how families can effectively work together to manage daily challenges and emerging critical needs. This model will help children become effective in the daily management of their lives as they become more independent and seek career and college opportunities and experiences beyond their family.

Overcoming Life’s Challenges

Over time, various family members will struggle with health crises, interpersonal growth, and academic challenges. It is vital for family members to support each other during their time of need. Through daily support, challenged families can effectively communicate their worries and concerns. They can problem-solve appropriate solutions that will meet the needs of the family. Effective problem-solving skills include:

Use effective listening skills for a family member who needs help.
Ask clarification questions for understanding.
Summarize what the other person has said to ensure comprehension and understanding.
Use empathy to guide the person when reflecting his or her feelings.
Support brainstorming solutions.
Have the problem-solver consider the positive and negative outcomes of each possible solution.
Assure the challenged family member that the proposed solution can be modified or changed if needed at a later date.

Building Resiliency Skills

As family members work through problems with supportive family and friends, they are able to build effective resiliency skills for future growth and development. By winning cooperation through effective problem-solving strategies, children learn responsible and disciplined consequences for their actions. Family stress can be managed by:

Ensuring children and family members feel loved and supported
Reducing conflict by overcoming power struggles through cooperative problem-solving strategies
Supporting the need for independence while providing intra-dependent coaching
Relying on extended family members and friends for added relief, respite, and support
Partnering with children’s teachers and schools for added coordinated resources
Receiving support for community-based organizations
Participating in family and parenting support groups
Cherishing each family member and valuing their participation in problem-solving and family meetings that reinforce their family’s values

Added support is required when dealing with a parent’s heath crisis, addiction, unemployment, homelessness, divorce, incarceration, community disaster, or death. Sometimes families may need to receive added support from a family therapist, medical doctor, or social worker. At these times, parents can talk with their children about how they are working very diligently to solve a problem. When families have the courage to share their challenges along with their successes with their family, they can effectively model and coach their children to become capable and resilient adults.

May your family grow and thrive during these most difficult times in your life.

Mary Ann