Part 2: A SAFE LEARNING SUB-WORLD

If your child is to develop strong adult learning capacity it is important that it is not snapped while their learning string is young.

You can protect the bow of your child’s intelligence.

One of the biggest challenges to strengthening the bow is that children quickly develop an association of learning with the pain or pleasure they experience in school.

The increased pressures in today’s school environments make pain more likely.

Children may find school painful because of negatives in the environment or because they aren’t having success experiences (no sense of mastery).

If you want to know more about this read last week’s piece at https://www.powerfulmother.com/healing-homework1/

If school is stressful for a child then the child associates learning with pain.

Logically (being sane creatures), children will try to avoid more pain.

Thus they may avoid, shun or actively rebel against doing more work in the home.

It is Mothers who deal with these pressures.

It is Mothers who must deal with children’s school resistance, stress reactions such as eczema, hair pulling, sleep difficulty etc, and their child’s misery.

Thus, negative effects in school systems, (ie: education cutbacks, increased curriculum pressure, classroom overcrowding, bullying), backwash into the home.

In effect, system cutbacks re-route work onto the backs of individual Mothers!!

Mothers who don’t force their children to complete homework are seen as “bad Mothers,” (stress and shame for the individual Mother) and children who don’t complete homework are penalized.

Thus system stresses of cutbacks and changes end up creating stress in the private space of home.

It is easy for Mothers to attribute the problem to their own parenting and get into a power struggle with their child over homework.

Instead, it is critical that Mothers protect their own, and their child’s, sense of safety in the home.

Homework can become a battle ground that damages the relational web that Mothers build and the peace they create for children.

Homework needs to be a gentle, unpressured experience with a lot of positive feedback, interest and affirmation for what children are doing.

TO DO THIS MOTHERS NEED TO HAVE A CLEAR FOCUS:

Mothers need to be 100% clear that the family life, the good relationships, the safety and the peace they create in the home are THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS.

These things are the powerhouses of their child’s psyche which set up structures for the child’s future life.

They must not be compromised by external pressures.

Home needs to be a refuge.

BUT WHAT TO DO?

Mothers can mitigate the stress of the increased demands on their child by creating an alternate learning experience in the home.

This learning experience can be nested within the nourishment, protection, love, safety and peace that are already the bedrock of the home.

It is unfair that Mothers have the extra work of creating a pleasure association with learning for their child.

This work is however, less than the work of ongoing power struggles and stress backwash in the home.

You can build in relational and sensory reward and enjoyment with homework which can teach your child to UNCONSCIOUSLY associate learning with pleasure, relaxation and reward.

Part 3 of HEALING HOMEWORK gives you 12 strategies for doing this.

No matter what is happening in schools Mothers can use their power to create a positive learning space in your home.

This is your right. Exercise it.

Photocredits (in order): c. Depositphotos/ginosphotos1; Shalamov; Mactrunk; wildnerpix; FocuspocusLtd; Monkeybusiness; Captainblack76.