Flexibility in Curriculum

There were so many things that were scary about the pandemic to most of us. We saw news images of body bags and people in hazmat suits taking them to storage units because the morgue couldn't handle the sheer number of dead. We lost people we loved to COVID. We may have worried that we might leave our children too soon. These were all huge and very real stressors. We not only lived through these events as parents, but our children grew up with these stressors. We all have experienced possible trauma.

Some children who are homeschooling have experienced not only COVID, but also the pain of divorce, entering a family through adoption, exiting a family and entering foster care, living in an unsafe neighborhood, witnessing violence, or going to an unsafe school before homeschooling. There are other scary things I could list, but you get the drift.

Seeking a well-qualified professional to help the child heal from traumatic experiences is a given. However, if our children have experienced significant stress, we can also be compassionate in their education. We can be flexible and adapt lesson plans to eliminate unnecessary stress.

Here are a few quick, simple ways one could consider in order to be flexible in eliminating unnecessary stressors:

1. For a child who was adopted into the family: leave out family tree assignments

2. For a young child who witnessed someone being arrested and was very bothered by that: don't read stories that include police officers for a while

3. For a child who lost a close family member to cancer: eliminate a novel in which a character has cancer or has died from cancer

4. For a child who experienced a serious car wreck: check in to make sure the child is ready to learn to drive before beginning to teach him

5. For a child who experienced scary medical interventions: refrain from sharing graphic details of injuries to a historical figure

Notice I say that we should avoid unnecessary stressors. I am not saying avoid all stressors. Stressors are a part of life. Our job as parents is to prepare our children for the stressors, to be there with them, and to be a good role model of how to handle stressors. Avoiding stressors would mean avoiding real life.

However, the reality is that for children who are still growing and healing from significant adverse childhood experiences, memories of those stressors can be very hurtful. Having to do assignments that bring up a difficult memory can cause the body to get into a place where learning is difficult. The brain must be alert, but not overstimulated to learn complex material. To learn academically, the body must not be in a state of fight/flight/freeze.

If the body is in fight/flight/freeze, the brain is only interested in keeping the body alive.

Survival is what matters, not the multiplication tables, to a brain in fight/flight/freeze.

In homeschooling, we have the flexibility to think ahead about how some content might affect our kids and adapt where appropriate and wise.

May we all have the wisdom to use this precious flexibility to help our amazing children to learn, grow and thrive.