The teenage years can be quite a challenge, however you decide to educate your child. If your child has been home educated for at least a few years before reaching adolescence, then they will probably be accustomed to the lifestyle. If you are lucky, your teenager will also have learnt how to educate themselves with support from you and others and will be reasonably self-motivated and confident in their abilities. But what if that doesn’t happen or if, for whatever reason, you decide to withdraw your child from school once they reach their teenage years? Many parents who approach me when they are in this situation feel they are in crisis and that there are many obstacles to their ensuring a suitable education for their child. This article identifies some of those challenges and explores how to move from crisis to opportunity.

What are the challenges and opportunities?

Changing responsibilities

Deciding to home educate your teenager changes the way you handle your responsibility to ensure that they receive a suitable education. Rather than delegating a large part of that responsibility to a school, you are now directly in control of all of it. Or are you? How do you do that when your teenager knows exactly what they do or don’t want to learn and it bears no resemblance to your ideas of what constitutes “an education”? What about if your teenager doesn’t appear to want to engage with anything? Parents in the latter situation have told me that this seems to be a normal reaction to stress. Many teenagers go through this when they are first removed from school as they need time to de-stress and find themselves again. A few may react in the opposite way and study manically, because they feel they “ought to”. Theywill need additional encouragement to take a break for a while.

If you find your teenager happily occupied but in activities that you do not consider to be “educational” then I believe this is another one of those opportunities for us to reassess our perspectives as parents. What is “education?” What constitutes a “suitable education” for our child? If you question your own assumptions on this then you may well find that your beliefs stem from how you yourself were educated. Many parents equate gaining an education with gaining qualifications and exam success. Do you still want to hold those beliefs now? How have your ideas changed with the benefit of your experiences as an adult?

From my experience with working with many parents, the key here is to reassess your role as parent/educator/facilitator and keep the communication between the two of you going. Educate yourselves on learning styles and methods and broaden your horizons beyond what was expected by the schooling system. Above all, remember this is team work. Between the two of you, you will find a way to proceed which suits you both.

Battle of wills

One of the challenges of living with a teenager can be that they seem to be programmed to rebel! It’s at this point in their childhood when just about all our values and beliefs as parents can be put in the spotlight and questioned by them. Discussions can become heated and personal and may lead to large amounts of stress for all concerned. This can be tough enough to deal with when our teenagers are attending school and being supervised by others for a large part of the week. Once we are home educating them, however, the thought of spending much more time around them can seem very daunting to say the least!

The opportunities that can arise from these situations are many. Perhaps we ourselves haven’t examined our behaviour traits, beliefs and values for a while and having them highlighted is proving painful! Reassessing how we lead our lives can be a very enlightening and fruitful endeavour and may well lead to some positive and useful changes.

Whilst many teenagers may not be adept at communicating with compassion and respect, these are qualities we can model for them, once we let go of our immediate reactions to being challenged. When we are consistent in this approach, our children will learn these more acceptable and wholesome behaviours from us and they are much more likely to do so by interacting with someone who models the behaviour than just by being told that’s how they should conduct themselves.

We can use these time to develop our listening skills.  When teenagers feel they are being heard, they are more likely to feel loved and respected. We can view this as an opportunity to strengthen or re-establish a bond of trust with our child and encourage their self-confidence.

Emotional and Physical Growth

Of course, at the same time as your teenager is engaged in learning and studying, they are experiencing marked growth both physically and emotionally. Just about any book on the psychology of learning will emphasise that your emotional state is critical for you to learn effectively. This is something many of us will have experienced as adults. Our teenagers may not be sufficiently self-aware to acknowledge or understand all of their feelings and physical strengths and weaknesses. This is another opportunity for us to aid them with their self-awareness and to model it ourselves. By cultivating self-awareness and self-motivation in yourself and in them, you will help them to empower themselves.

Conclusion

The prospect of home educating a teenager can seem daunting and indeed there may be many challenges we are asked to face.

The opportunities are the learning experiences embedded in those challenges. For those who choose to embrace those challenges, the rewards will be the emergence of a happy, self-confident and well-adjusted teenager, whatever!

Further Reading

Unqualified Education. A Guide to Learning at Home for 11-18 year olds.Gareth Lewis
The Teenage Liberation Handbook. Grace Llewellyn
Parent-Teen Breakthrough. The Relationship Approach. Mira Kirshenbaum and Charles Foster
Non-violent Communication. Marshall Rosenburg
Listening to our Children. Sally Lever
Free-Range Education and it’s Lessons for the Adults. Sally Lever

We’re going to get courageous and face the darker emotions that you are likely to experience when negotiating any major life transition such as downshifting. The most prominent and potentially overwhelming emotion is fear. This is what I mean by the darkness of downshifting and I didn’t want to pass this by. Rather than do that, let’s shine some light on it and banish the gremlins that lurk at the backs of our minds, threatening to block our path.

What do I mean by gremlins? Gremlins are the negative thoughts we hear inside our heads that get in the way of our making headway.

What do those gremlins tell us?

That we can’t possibly live on less…

That everyone will think we’re mad…

That we’re being lazy and unambitious..

According to Susan Jeffers in her book “Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway”, there are 5 truths about fear:

1. Fear will never go away as long as I continue to grow. In other words, working with fear is a natural and essential part of our personal development.

2. The only way to get rid of the fear of doing something is to go out…and do it! And by that we mean that it’s not good waiting for the fear to go away first. It won’t. But doing something about it will dispel the fear!

3. The only way to feel better about myself is to go out…and do it! Doing something about it dispels the fear and makes you feel great! Finding the courage to face your fears is a great achievement and very satisfying.

4. Not only am I going to experience fear whenever I’m on unfamiliar territory, but so is everyone else. In other words, it’s not just you who feels like this. Everyone experiences fear. Those who you see succeeding are not those who don’t experience fear, they’re just he ones’ who carry on regardless, who have found ways of saying to themselves “whatever happens, I can handle it!”

5. Pushing through fear is less frightening than living with the underlying fear that comes from a feeling of helplessness. So, although it might not seem like it at first sight, pushing through fear or facing up to it is an easier option than sitting around worrying.

What are the main fears that face those who downshift?

In my experience, they are the fear of:
financial ruin
the effect on relationships
a crisis of identity.
taking a one-way ticket

What kind of techniques can we use to empower ourselves in these situations?

They come under three main categories:

Acceptance and knowing you can handle it.
Using love (love is an antidote to fear).
Working through it.

Fear of Financial ruin – lets take a look at the “acceptance and knowing you can handle it” approach first. The first step to doing anything with managing the financial side of downshifting is knowing exactly what your financial situation is. That means writing down everything you spend and everything you earn and keeping an ongoing record of it, usually on a month by month basis. If you are not already doing this then do this first!

I would suggest as a second step that you check to see whether you have enough in savings to act as an emergency buffer. A sensible amount might be the equivalent of 6 months income. If you don’t already have this, then one of your goals might be to establish a plan to do this.

If you have significant debt or need investment or insurance advice, then you might want to consider approaching an Independent Financial Advisor. If you do this, then I would strongly recommend having accurate records prepared and clear objectives written down before your meeting with them. This reduces the cost of using their services as it minimises the time they need to spend helping you.  It’s also a good idea to ask them beforehand whether they will charge you an hourly rate or whether they get paid commission on any policies you subsequently take out through them.

Once you have a handle on your current financial situation then you can start to calculate how much you will need to live in your downshifted lifestyle. Examine carefully those areas in your life now where the expenditure doesn’t justify the rewards or where there are obvious, less expensive alternatives. Cost cutting can begin now!

Relationships – what effects will your change of lifestyle have on your significant other, your children, your parents, other extended family members? What about your friends? Which of these people supports what you are doing or planning, who doesn’t?

The key to success with relationships is using love to overcome fear. There are three parts to this, the three C’s – communication, consent and common preferences.

Communication – make sure everyone in immediate family is given the opportunity to voice opinions. Have regular discussions, keep everyone informed of progress. This is especially important with children otherwise the whole situation can seem very unsettling for them.

Common preferences – find out what each person in your immediate family wants to happen. Really listen carefully and acknowledge what they say. Is it a want or a need? ( e.g. I want to live in Wales. What does that give you? Beautiful countryside, peace and quiet – that’s the underlying need.) Explore options that achieve the same result. This is the key to finding a result that suits everyone.

Consent – make sure you have everyone’s consent at each stage. Pay special attention at times when plans change and evolve.

Finally, do take your time over talking through plans with the rest of the family. Maybe downshifting is something you’ve all been discussing hypothetically for years, but if it isn’t, your ideas may seem completely radical to everyone else. This is a good time to explain you views from a position of love and compassion. You may need to accept that others may not see the situation from your point of view.

Crisis of Identity –  Here’s another example of “working through the fear.”You might be thinking “Who am I if I leave this job?”. How much of your self-image, your identity, your purpose in life, is tied up in your “professional role”? What other roles do you play in life?

Write down all the roles you play in life. Next to each of these, write downs the skills you have and use in order to fulfil each role. Then write down which parts of the “essential you”, the very core and essence of who you are, come into play in each of these roles.

Interesting exercise, isn’t it?

Think of how much of what you’ve said is tied up in externals e.g. I am a company director, I am a parent, I am a BMW driver, I am a gardener, I am a partner/spouse, I am a Man.Utd. supporter…

You can shed the externals, or decide to change them, but the “essential you” lives on and you take it with you. The “essential you” might well change too with your own personal and spiritual growth, but you’ll still take that with you into whatever role you choose to do next.

Fear of the one-way ticket – This is fundamentally a fear of making the wrong decision and of stepping outside our comfort zone.  There is another, less painful way of looking at this. We can decide that there are no “good” or “bad” decisions, just different decisions! This then leaves us freer to choose what we feel most suits us at the time, rather than what would appear “right” to anyone outside of our decision making process. Once a decision has been made to “go for it”, then I think the key to minimising feelings of regret or remorse is firstly to accept total responsibility for the decision and then to keep an open mind. It can be very tempting to try to protect one’s decision, whatever happens. You may feel that you have invested a great deal of time and effort in researching your decision and that, once taken, you have to stay on that path, come what may. Yet, it is likely that the path may not be easy or straightforward to navigate. Or, it might be very easy to navigate, but start heading off in a completely different direction to the one you expected to take! Now is a good time to remain flexible, to correct and learn from any mistakes, to forgive yourself and to carry on moving forward.

I love trees and feel blessed to live in a house that is surrounded by them. Some are huge, majestic and noisy in wild, wintery weather. Some, like my recently planted crab apples, seem perilously fragile by comparison and very dependent on the wooden stakes that support them. It is autumn (fall) here in the UK and the native deciduous trees are quickly being stripped of their leaves by high winds and heavy rain, leaving their stretching forms silhouetted against the cool, grey skies.

Trees play such a large part in our lives. On a practical level, they are the lungs of the earth and they are each self sustaining eco-systems in their own right. On a more subtle level, they can be symbolic of many aspects of human life. I’ve used this idea to map out some ideas on maintaining sound sustainable business relationships.

Roots

Groundedness – Ensure that you feel centred before any business meeting. Take time out to breathe, stretch, be in your body before conversations that require you to contribute or make decisions. Work on methods to keep your cool and build these into your daily routine.

Trunk

Support – Keep a list of people in your mutual support network and maintain regular contact with them. Make it part of your routine to give to these people. You can give referrals, tips, a lift in your car, pointers to useful resources, etc.

Strength – Make maintaining your health and wellbeing a business priority as well as a personal one. You cannot function at your best with others when you are feeling under the weather.

Uprightness (integrity) – Know your personal and business values (qualities such as honesty, fairness, compassion, simplicity etc). Have these written down where you can refer to them often and where you can use them to make decisions.

Branches

Vehicles of communication – Review how you communicate with clients, colleagues, employees and associates. Decide what needs to change, what needs freshening up, what needs to be stopped.

Flexibility – Make a point of asking for and listening to new ideas. Respond to complaints with curiosity and an open mind. Recognise the gift in the opinions of others. In particular, think of objections as opportunities to improve your service to others.

Growth – Look at your business relationships as a reflection on where you need to develop. Particularly think of the relationships you’re finding challenging. Make a note of what these tell you about yourself.

Reaching out – Make a note of what you currently do to “meet people where they are”. Check up on your clients’, suppliers’ and colleagues’ understanding of your business purpose. Aim to improve your methods for educating them on your offering and the benefits it will give them.

Leaves

Relationship with (sun)light – Ponder on how you relate to your spiritual nature. Notice how that shows up in your business life, if it does at all. Make a point of using your intuition in your communication with others as well as your knowledge.

Nourishment – Ensure that you nourish your business relationships. You can do this by providing encouragement, practical support for others and inspiration. Remember also to provide yourself with regular doses of inspirational material.

Flowers

Beauty – Take some time to notice what is beautiful about your business and the people who are involved with it. Work on those elements that attract most clients to your business. Notice what keeps them hovering around. Use those strengths to under promise and over deliver.

Gratitude – Make space each day for expressing your gratitude to those with whom you work. This focuses people’s attention on their strengths and their successes and helps them to empower themselves to achieve even more.

Fruit and Seeds

New life – Get together with others to start a new project or joint venture or rejuvenate an old one. When dealing with others in your profession or trade, focus on cooperation rather than competition, co-creation rather than power struggles.

Congratulations! – Celebrate your successes with those who helped you.

Those of you, who, like me, run your own business, will probably be familiar with the sometimes unpredictable nature of one’s work routine and income. Somehow, even the best of plans can suddenly go seriously astray, seemingly without warning.

Personally, I know I’m veering off course and not coping with it when I start to plan My Big Escape! My Big Escape fantasy involves packing a small suitcase with just enough possessions to survive for the rest of my life (monk/nun style) and walking out of the house and into the sunset, thumbing a lift as I go! No responsibilities, no worries and hardly any baggage, Samsonite or otherwise!

Since making this enlightening discovery, I’ve decided to catch myself at the point in the internal movie where I’m choosing the contents of my suitcase, rather than waiting until that beautiful sunset beckons. Running away from our predicaments doesn’t work. It simply buries the painful feelings deeply inside, only to emerge later as anger, resentment or even illness.

Acceptance is the first step to handling these difficult situations. It is about fully embracing life as it is; disagreements, computer breakdowns, illness, accidents, delays, disappointments and all. This might sound like resignation or apathy, but actually there is a fundamental difference. Acceptance simply means refusing to be consumed by how we would like things to be and instead actively engaging with the reality that confronts us. Once we have accepted a situation, then, yes we may find that some things are unacceptable and need to be changed. Then we take action. This is the difference between apathy and acceptance. Someone experiencing apathy will not take action, whereas someone who is accepting of the situation will recognise the need to change and will act upon it.

From a rational perspective, it is the way we manage our expectations that can get us into trouble. Non- acceptance means there is a gap between the demands or rigid expectations of our minds and the reality of what is. This is what causes us pain and what drains our energy.

In a spiritual sense, acceptance means not judging events as “good” or “bad”. What is important is how we respond to those events rather than how we judge them. Eckhart Tolle, in his book “The Power of Now”, calls this response to events “Positive Action” which he says is about “Accepting that you are stuck in the mud without deceiving yourself that it’s ok to be stuck in the mud. Then take action to get yourself out. This is then positive action – much more effective than that which arises out of anger, despair, or frustration.”

It is pointless to judge events as being “good” or “bad” when either may have positive or negative consequences. A “bad event” can result in a challenge for us from which we learn something. A “good event” brings joy, but then sadness because it passes away.

In spiritual terms, acceptance is often referred to as “surrender”, where surrender means giving up our attachment to the outcome of a situation or event. This can be particularly challenging when we encounter change.

It’s a fact of life – change is inevitable, and accepting that fact frees us to surrender to life’s ups and downs. Welcoming change helps us to grow as it encourages us to step outside our comfort zones. Losing something potentially makes room for something better. So, acceptance is perfectly compatible with taking action, initiating change or achieving goals.

In a state of acceptance, we gain access to a more positive sort of energy that flows like a surge of life force into our actions.

Perhaps I’ll just put that suitcase back up in the loft…

Many years ago I spent some time working in a steel works as a metallurgist. A steel works can be a fascinating and quite frightening place to be and, alongside the powerful images of huge furnaces and rolling mills, one of the more beautiful visions that I remember is that of the sand casting process. Rather less brutal and more bespoke than other forming methods, sand casting involved creating an individual mould out of sand, filling it with molten alloy and waiting for the metal to cool and solidify. Once cooled, the only way the shiny new metal component could be retrieved was by breaking the mould. This, for me, is a wonderful metaphor for cultivating a new habit by letting go of the old and breaking through something that constrains us.

Story of My Life

How often do we hear ourselves saying or thinking “That’s the story of my life”? What are we telling ourselves when we say this? Usually it’s something along the lines of “I always do it that way” or “people always treat me that way” or “that’s just the way I am.” This is fine as long as we’re happy with the way things are. But what if the story of our lives is one of constraint, tolerance, repression, or anger? When we convince ourselves that this is the way our life is, then our energy is drained and we become held back from leading our best lives.

In order to cultivate new habits that serve us and boost our energy, we need to re-write those old stories in a much more positive vein. For example, if we are telling ourselves “other people always take me for granted – that’s the story of my life” then our new story might be “I value myself. I know when to say no and how to be assertive.” The kind of stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how we are, are underpinned by our beliefs about ourselves. The key to changing those stories from negative ones to positive versions that serve us well is to change our beliefs.

Attitudes

Some people talk about belief systems in terms of attitude. I can remember being introduced to this idea when I started a new job selling high tech equipment into scientific laboratories. There were some aspects of the job I was really looking forward to – meeting lots of interesting people, mixing with those who were at the forefront of materials science and listening to their hopes and aspirations. There was one aspect I was dreading – attempting to persuade these same people that they wanted to buy our equipment over and above an equivalent from another company. Why was I dreading it? I imagined that those who were involved in selling had to learn a script parrot fashion, regardless of what they truly believed about the product or the customer’s real need, and manipulate their way through to a successful sale.

Then my very wise and wonderful boss introduced me to the idea of adopting a successful attitude. He convinced me that it was ok for me to just be myself, build relationships of trust with my customers and do my best to understand and meet their needs. He understood the benefits of cultivating a healthy belief system and that this would then support the positive stories I told myself about how successful I was at my job. In this way, I broke through the constraints of my negative beliefs around selling and freed myself me to establish new, authentic, empowering habits in my job and then to train others to do the same.

Be compassionate and forgiving towards yourself

In forming new habits, we need to understand that there is a process involved. Some habits have been so long established that making any changes can feel extremely uncomfortable. Sometimes, we need to make the changes one small step at a time. In contrast, sometimes it’s like standing on the edge of a cliff and just deciding to jump! We may experience failure many times before the new habit starts to feel easy. We know we’ve made it when doing something the new way starts to feel easier than doing it the old way.

During this time, we need to forgive ourselves our transgressions and show ourselves some compassion. It’s easy to beat ourselves up over our failures. It takes fortitude to forgive ourselves and move on.