How to Work from Home with Kids

Coronavirus has turned many school parents into school-at-home parents, so I (Marlow) have been providing resources to families to help them navigate. Three blog posts on my personal website may be helpful, whether or not you are fortunate enough to be working from home during the pandemic. The ideas here may also be helpful if you as a parent just need to be able to get stuff done while your kids are in need of your time and you’re all shoe-horned into the same room in your house or flat.

How to Work from Home with Kids: Introduction

How to Work from Home with Kids, Part 2: Be Flexible

How to Work from Home with Kids, Part 3: Be Creative

You may note that I said “school-at-home” instead of “homeschooling.” During quarantines and shelter-in-place, and especially if your child’s normal school is providing curricula, lesson plans, and/or videoconference check-ins, you’re not really homeschooling in the normal sense, because most homeschooling is actually out-and-about-schooling, or as many homeschoolers call it, “carschooling.”

What does that mean? In the pre-covid world, most homeschooling is done out in our communities, in co-ops with other families, in field trips, park days, play-dates, museums, small (and big!) business tours, project-based learning, classes from various providers, on the road (travel-schooling!), and more. We really don’t have that luxury now.

If you’re in a school district that is providing little or no support, you have more flexibility. You’ll find articles online about learning at home during coronavirus, like this one in Dwell magazine. You can also learn about “unschooling,” “child-led learning,” and “eclectic” schooling. Providers like Outschool (full disclosure: I’m an advisor) offer myriad learning opportunities online, and regular homeschooling websites from before the pandemic offer many ideas. “Gifted homeschooling” or “homeschooling 2e” are also good search terms. And if you can’t find what you need, you can also just ask for guidance from specialists like me and others.

Lastly, remember that for generation upon generation, kids learned from the people around them, their families, and their communities, rather than factory-scale schools. They’ll learn; it may not look like what you think it should, but learning is all around us. Allowing them the leeway to learn more on their own may just be the leeway you need yourself to be able to work or be productive while they’re at home with you.

 

Resources on Giftedness

Have a kid like Alisa, or know one (or more)?

We have a few suggestions to help you meet their needs, and to help others better understand them.

A number of bloggers offer annual lists of their favorite posts on giftedness and twice exceptionality. In 2016, Gifted Challenges supplied one such list. Gail Post, Ph.D., assembles a list of her top blog choices for each year, currently covering 2016-2018. Your Rainforest Mind also gives a list of blogs examining giftedness and twice exceptionality here.

Maybe you didn’t know that a child can be gifted and also have learning differences, or perhaps you’re trying to bring a new healthcare provider or educator up to speed. On GHF’s website you can find brochures on each of these subjects. (Our founder and executive director, J. Marlow Schmauder, wrote the three of them for GHF.) The brochures are free to download and print, or you can read them directly on the website.

There are a number of other websites that have very, very helpful libraries of information and services. Take a look at our Helpful Resources in our right sidebar (scroll down to see the list). There are more, and we’d love to have your suggestions in the comments, as well.

 

Homeschooling: An Option for Twice-Exceptional Kids

Homeschool, you say? Yes, we say.

Families of twice-exceptional kids (gifted kids with learning disabilities, a.k.a. 2e kids) are often at a loss as to what to do if school doesn’t meet their kids’ needs, particularly after they have spent no small effort advocating on behalf of their kids with limited to no success. Twice-exceptional kids struggle mightily with school. The further along the gifted spectrum the child is, and the more serious the learning challenges the child has, the higher the likelihood that schools can’t or won’t meet their needs. Most strategies for accommodating learning differences are aimed at kids who are at or below average intelligence. But that’s not what this post is about.

Many families who don’t know other gifted or 2e homeschoolers don’t realize that homeschooling doesn’t have to be about religion, that it won’t necessarily drive parents crazy to have their kids at home during the day — that it might actually vastly improve their relationship — and that it’s even possible to work part-time (for some, even full-time!) and homeschool.

In fact, being able to custom-tailor a child’s education to let her work at her intellectual age-level, while being supported in her areas of weakness, can do powerfully positive things both for your relationship with her, and for her self-confidence, work skills, determination, and happiness. Think about this. Have a 2e kid who needs help with rote math calculation, needs to move while he learns, and who has gotten the message from school that he’s both bad and stupid, even though his IQ is actually in the highly gifted range or above, and even though he excels at advanced math concepts and elaborate literary analysis? Imagine the wonders that would transpire if he were allowed work on those math concepts and analyze books to his heart’s content, while learning at his pace and when his brain development is ready to do rote calculations instead of using a calculator. Now imagine that all those battles over rote homework won’t be part of your relationship.

You’re welcome.

For homeschooling to work, it needs to be approached flexibly. Have a child obsessed with horses? Allow him to do horse math (angles of legs during different paces! How much does a horse eat a day? What are the odds a particular horse might win a race? How do vets calculate medicine for a horse of one weight vs. another?); read about horses through history; read literature about horses; write stories or film videos or research presentations about horses. Is your ten-year-old obsessed instead with chemistry? Let her do chemistry in the kitchen, using online lesson plans and free experiment resources. Let her read The Story of Science by Joy Hakim, and write essays about it, or create science artwork, or start her own experiments to catalogue for a science fair.

For most families of 2e kids, child-led learning works best. Allow your child to set the pace. Allow him to choose what to study; you serve as facilitator, identifying online resources, finding classes, getting books from the public library. Does your child need to de-school for a while after a mismatched school situation? Let her deschool for as long as she needs — the general rule is one month off per year she was in school. Check your state’s homeschool laws, to make sure you’ve got your ducks in a row with paperwork or (in some states) curricula or testing required. But even within those frameworks, deschooling and child-led learning often work.

Working at home while homeschooling has to be approached creatively as well; while your child is doing a project that doesn’t require supervision, get 30 minutes of work done. Switch off with her other parent, so that one of you is working while the other is with the child. Get up before your child does, and work for a couple hours; or stay up after the kids are in bed. Take a laptop, tablet, smart phone or even pencil and paper to the classes your child takes, or to playdates, and sit on the sidelines working. Scheduling and multitasking are often critical to making work at home, well, work. But work it can.

Perhaps most of all, it is critical to find intellectual peers for your child. It doesn’t matter what age the peers are, although if you can find age peers who are also intellectual peers, that’s even better. Knowing others like them can be critical to 2e kids’ ability to cope with how different they are; finding true peers will help them deal with their challenges and celebrate their joys.

We’re proud to be participating in the GHF Blog Hop! Click on over to read more posts.

Educators’ Guide to Gifted Children

GHF is a wonderful all-volunteer organization working hard to serve some of the same population the Asynchronous Scholars’ Fund seeks to serve, by offering community and information resources both to gifted homeschoolers and to the broader population of families with gifted kids in general.

As an individual, I volunteer for GHF as part of their professional outreach team. They recently asked me to write another brochure for them following on the success of the Healthcare Professionals’ Guide to Gifted Children last year, and I was honored to help.

The Educators’ Guide to Gifted Children is now available on the GHF website free of charge. So many myths about gifted children and education exist. Unfortunately, even many educators buy into these myths (see link to Giftedness 101). Educators, like parents, want what’s best for kids.

This brochure aims to help provide accurate information about what gifted kids need in educational settings, whether in schools, at home, or out in communities. Please share it with the educators you know, and let GHF know how it helps. Better yet, support GHF in their work, and you’ll be helping thousands of kids and families worldwide.

– Marlow

Asynchrony and Giftedness Are Hard-Wired

A few weeks ago Seth Godin started a firestorm in the gifted education and parenting community by saying that people are not born gifted. He’s wrong. Giftedness is a neurological cognitive difference.

Are there gifted people who don’t ever learn to work hard, who never achieve eminence in their fields, or for that matter, accomplish much of anything? Yes.

Can a non-gifted person achieve amazing things by learning to work hard, persist, practice, and develop what talents they do have? Yes.

But it is not the same.

A great many bloggers responded to Godin’s post, but we particularly liked Lisa Rivero’s response at Psychology Today, and Jen Merrill’s response at Laughing at Chaos. The latter includes links to a number of other blog posts and responses.

Giftedness and achievement are not the same. People are born with neurocognitive differences. They can then choose to develop what talents they have. Please stop confusing the two, because doing so perpetuates the myths about giftedness that cause so much harm to kids and adults alike.

New Year, New Sustainability Strategy

First, a peaceful, satisfying and productive 2013 to all!

And then: We realize we have been remiss in posting to this blog in recent months, but we have a good reason. It’s rooted in sustainability.

Like many nonprofits, we struggle to raise the funds to continue our work. This is doubly difficult for the Asynchronous Scholars’ Fund because we are a startup organization, and we seek to raise substantial enough funds to permit us to extend our work beyond our PSA and online advocacy to include direct aid to asynchronous kids and their families, starting in California, but eventually a national model. Launching that part of our program requires substantial funds because we need to do outreach to school districts and homeschool groups alike to find the families most struggling to meet the intense needs of their kids, and to do so fairly and transparently.

Many nonprofits start with seed funding. Seed funding is the starting investment, usually from the founder or a single donor, that’s large enough to launch the program and keep it going for a few years until staff can begin development efforts, including ongoing fundraising. Our startup funds were extraordinarily modest, limiting the Fund’s initial program to advocacy alone. The funds our generous donors contributed allowed us to continue that advocacy work for almost two years, and we have reached thousands of people with that advocacy. We cannot thank our donors enough. (Thank you, again!)

But we are nothing if not divergent, like the kids we seek to aid. We started to pursue more serious seed funding, and realized that we would rather generate the source of our own core funding, launch our direct aid program to prove its impact, and then seek more substantial donations based on those successes.

This brings us back to sustainability. One of the most successful nonprofit sustainability strategies is to set aside funds to create an endowment, the income from which provides sufficient income to sustain the core program and operations of the organization. Another strategy includes for-profit endeavors that generate profit that is donated to the charitable arm, including earned income and social enterprises. The Asynchronous Scholars’ Fund holds as a goal the creation of an endowment, but the second strategy is more appealing because if done correctly, it holds the promise of generating enough funding to allow both full program development and the creation of an endowment.

Our target audience includes a great many homeschoolers, because many families with seriously asynchronous children turn to homeschooling out of desperation when they find that the school system really won’t fit their kids, or vice versa. Homeschoolers have long been viewed as a fringe group, but it’s becoming more common than ever (at least since the spread of compulsory education in the United States a century ago), especially among those with asynchronous children. Homeschoolers tend to excel at creating tools to serve their needs, like using Excel to track their kids’ educational progress, or creating templates that other homeschooling families can purchase to do the same. But with respect to those who have created tools this audience can use, many of the tools that exist are too limited. And we think that education-tracking tools that would truly meet the needs of asynchronous homeschoolers, would also have a natural audience in the population at large. We’d like to create those tools.

And thus, in honor of asynchronous homeschoolers, the Fund’s board of directors agreed that the Fund should continue our advocacy activities, but delay our other fundraising efforts while our founder builds a for-profit startup edtech company that creates just that set of tools. A portion of the profits from the startup will be dedicated to funding the Asynchronous Scholars’ Fund.

Building an edtech startup while maintaining a small (but ambitious) charitable organization is no easy task, and we hope you’ll forgive us for letting this blog languish in the process. We expect to return to more frequent, if briefer, posts in the new year. In the meantime, we hope you’re off to an excellent start to the year of the post-Mayan-apocolypse-that-wasn’t. We’d love to continue to hear from you with your own successes and challenges with asynchronous kids, and we promise in turn to continue our advocacy, helping people better understand how challenging it is to be a kid who is many ages at once.

National Parenting Gifted Children Week

It’s National Parenting Gifted Children Week this week, and SENG is hosting a blog tour. Parenting is hard enough as it is, and when you add the special needs of gifted/asynchronous kids, it’s even harder. We’ve heard such excellent things from our network about how wonderful SENG’s annual conference is for parents and asynchronous kids. The annual conference is over (but there’s always next year!), but we hope the resources on SENG’s site, and in the blogs posting for the blog tour, will be of some help.

Transforming Resistance into Support

Most families with kids who are unusually asynchronous or twice-exceptional (asynchronous/gifted with learning disabilities) don’t have a built-in network of support from the public educational system and related service providers. This is true in California, as well as much of the rest of the country, with isolated exceptions in four states that mandate (limited) services for gifted kids or the handful that specifically state in their laws that acceleration is allowed. Regardless of state mandates, however, society universally views support for asynchronous kids as unnecessary, or worse, elitist. Instead of supporting these children and their families, or at least being sympathetic, society — including extended family and friends of these families — seeks to deny their difference, to deny their need, and to cut them down as though the child’s own abilities or potential somehow threaten them.

But asynchrony is a special need, all by itself. Add any other disabilities like ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, or dyslexia, and you have extraordinary special needs. Imagine parenting a kid like this. Then imagine doing it when society doesn’t recognize that the kid needs support, resents the child’s potential, and simultaneously denies their differences.

Families with kids who have needs this extraordinary find themselves willing to do anything to meet their children’s needs. Because society doesn’t provide support, and the Internet does, parents these days usually find support in online forums like The TAG Project, GHF, and similar venues. If they are extraordinarily fortunate, they live in an area with a large concentration of similar families and can find in-person support groups. If they are a family in need, however, accessing the internet, getting computer time at libraries, or even learning about these resources can be impossible. The Asynchronous Scholars’ Fund aims to remedy that, but that’s the subject of another post.

So let’s assume you are the parent of an asynchronous child and have taken steps to find community and follow the model so many others like you are using to meet your children’s needs? How do you transform the reactions of your own parents, or your child’s teacher, or anyone else? Here are some suggestions we hope will help.

• Help them understand your child’s unique needs, but also that there is a community of other children like yours out there, and that you are consulting with that community in your efforts to meet your child’s needs.
• Share resources like this post, the Davidson Institute’s online database, Hoagies Gifted website, GHF, NAGC resources, SENG, and others.
• Join one of the online forums mentioned above, and ask other parents for what worked for them.
• Remember that your parents/family/friends/child’s educators are likely trying to do what they think will help. If you help them understand your child’s needs, they’ll be able to be in a better position to support you.
• If you can, have your child assessed by a professional who specializes in gifted and 2e children. The websites listed above have resources to help you find such a professional in your area.
• Even if you can’t afford or find support to have an assessment done, you can use Deborah Ruf’s estimates of levels of giftedness to get a general idea of where your child is.
• Consider sharing A Nation Deceived, or talking to your child’s educators about using the Iowa Acceleration Scale.
• Debunking myths is helpful. Hoagies has a good summary.
• Harm and the Gifted Student offers a valuable perspective on why asynchronous children need to have their educational needs met. And we love the perspective of What a Child Doesn’t Learn (pdf).
• Remember that you, too, probably didn’t understand your child’s needs at first, and had to come to grips with it. Be patient with your own family and friends as you help them understand your child, so that they can become part of your support team. Its’ challenging, but worth it!

Most of all, remember that you are not alone. Take advantage of communities of others like you. They’re out there, and they are willing to help.

A Proven Program Model

When we began as a nonprofit startup, we sought seed funding to launch our program. But even from the earliest days, we received requests from families with children whose needs are so acute that they aren’t being met by the school system.

These are families who don’t have the resources to do what wealthier families with extremely asynchronous children do, and either “afterschool” or homeschool their children. Their children are suffering immensely because their educational, social, and emotional needs are not being met. Their families are similarly suffering from the fallout. We wish we were already up and running, so that we could ask these families to apply formally for support, and so we could then provide that support.

The program model the Asynchronous Scholars’ Fund advocates for, is based on a support approach proven successful by thousands of families across the United States (and internationally, even more families) over the course of the past twenty-plus years, and indeed for decades before that.

What does it look like? The details may vary somewhat depending on whether a child is in school, or homeschooled. The basic approach is this: Let the child follow his or her interests. The parent(s) serve as facilitators, providing materials, books, videos, classes and workshops, outings, and projects to allow the child to study the topic in question with as much depth as he or she desires, for as long as desired. Typically the child will move on to the next topic when the first one has been exhausted. Some children, particularly the more exceptionally and profoundly asynchronous, may have multiple interests they explore in depth simultaneously.

How can any child cover a full curriculum this way, particularly if learning exclusively in a home setting? The answer is anchored in who these children are. Most will branch out to end up exploring the full range of what typical children would cover in school, out of sheer interest. Most do so on their own schedule; while some maintain their learning multiple, ever-increasing grade-levels ahead across the board, others will reach a point when they realize that to achieve something they want and need – perhaps community college early admission, for example – they have to meet state requirements for high school graduation or equivalency, and will cram the needed learning into a very short time period.

Other kids, especially those with twice exceptionalities like dyslexia or Asperger’s spectrum disorder, may require more parental guidance to support and strengthen their weak areas, while they soar ahead in their strengths. Some may require remediation using approaches that can be adopted by the facilitating parent, but others require additional outside support from occupational therapists and other professionals.

Additionally, children with narrow interests may need parents to weave that interest into everything they do. If the love is horses, for example, that provides the opportunity to do horse math: If you have three horses in the stable, but six stalls, what percentage of stalls are filled? Horse grammar: What part of speech is the word “horse”? What is the etymology of the various horse part names? Horse biology! The physics of horse motion! The possibilities are nearly endless.

For asynchronous kids who are in a school, the degree of after-school and weekend accommodation will depend deeply on the accommodation that is happening during school hours. Is the child accelerated to the level of his or her intellectual age? Is the curriculum compacted to meet his or her need for learning at a faster pace? Does the child have intellectual (not chronological age) peers? If these needs are met, the needs out of school will be less intense.

But an asynchronous child whose needs are not being met in school will have extremely intense needs after school and on weekends. Most families in this situation find they need to devote constant effort to feeding the “lion” that is the child’s ravenous intellect. Because the social and emotional well-being of these children is closely tied up in having their intellectual needs met, families trying to use afterschooling to meet all these needs have a much harder time. It can be done successfully, but most success results from a combination of advocacy to have the child’s needs met in school through acceleration to place the child with intellectual peers, curriculum compaction, and in-school enrichment, in addition to the intensive afterschooling efforts.

The Asynchronous Scholars’ Fund advocates for organizations, community groups and the education sector to provide direct aid to families in need to help their asynchronous and twice-exceptional children. Support should include provision of services like assessments and advocacy through service partners familiar both with the needs of gifted children, and the methods of school districts, schools and educators. It should include the provision of intensive educational resources specifically tailored to each child’s needs. Kids and families may require individual or family counseling from specialists experienced in working with this population. Families should have access free and low-cost online resources, including, when needed, through the provision of computer technology, training, and Internet access. And because community can be the greatest support network for anyone, the Fund aims to help families connect with existing communities of families with kids like theirs, both online and in person.

Stay tuned for our next blog post on the the reasons why parents meet resistance from their own families, communities and schools in seeking to meet their children’s needs by following this model, and how they can help resolve that challenge.

Helping Healthcare Providers Help Gifted Kids

I don’t usually write posts from my own point of view, but I recently helped GHF create a set of resources for parents and healthcare providers to help them better support asynchronous (gifted) children. Although I authored the brochure as an individual, I wanted to write a specific blog post here about it, because the result represents one type of support high-potential kids in need usually don’t have.

Children who are further along the spectrum of giftedness than the “garden variety” who may be served well by GATE programs (if such programs exist in their schools) are different enough from the norm that their healthcare is impacted. Families in need may lack the resources (internet access, time away from work and home responsibilities) to research effective ways to advocate for their children in education settings. And even families who aren’t in need may not understand just how much advocacy is required to help healthcare providers understand their children, too.

Perhaps “advocacy” is a misleading word, because here I don’t mean that parents need to advocate for systemic change. Instead, in many cases, healthcare providers don’t have experience with this population, strictly because of the size of the population itself. (See the chart near the bottom of the brochure.) As a result, even healthcare providers may believe the leading myths about giftedness, or simply may not understand how extraordinarily intense and different these children’s needs are.

As we build our program to serve these kids, the Asynchronous Scholars’ Fund intends to connect families with free resources like those provided by GHF. Such resources are critical to families’ abilities to understand their kids’ needs, and to help them start meeting those needs more effectively.

I’m a parent, and my own children have extraordinarily unusual needs as well. I wish I’d had resources like the GHF brochure years ago, but I’m also happy my own experience helped me contribute to the expanding landscape of resources available to help others. I hope it’s useful for you or someone you know.

– Marlow