The big munchkins paint while the baby naps.

It seems overnight that our world has kind of turned upside down, and is actually still rapidly changing everyday. We’re all adjusting and adapting as best we can, our children too. This is a lot on all of us. We all respond to abrupt change differently. Many people seek out familiarity and assurance in times of uncertainty—things like structure, routine, and schedules— and are asking themselves “How can I create more structure in our day?” 

I will also start by saying that maintaining structure when it comes to our family learning lab has never been a priority—or a strong skillset—of mine. I do come across this question often and—contrary to what some people in my family will tell you—I am not entirely opposed to structure. It serves us at times, I get that. And especially now with so many parents navigating the unexpected reality of facilitating their children’s learning at home for the foreseeable future, this question around structure is on a lot of people’s minds.

Honestly, I have no simple answer to this. But I do think this conversation is an awesome opportunity for advancing discovery and building community as parents and caregivers who are ourselves facing a brand new world right now. So in the interest of learning and growing, I have thought up these 3 writing/dialogue/thinking activities to do when considering whether or not having (more) structure matters right now. Then I’m going to share some of the ways I apply these tools on days when the ideal structure isn’t attainable and I have to use my creativity to find a better way.

My hope is that these short activities will help you get super-present with what your family truly needs. Collaborative, family-centered learning is all about keeping everyone—parents, children, aunties, grandmothers (whoever lives at home with you and in your day-to-day reality)—in mind when exploring what is best. It takes time to learn what everyone in our family needs and to find our optimal flow. Be gentle with yourself and everyone else through the discovery process.

1. Assessing Relevance
First question—and it might seem like a silly question, but trust me, it’s not—Why do you need structure? Make a list of all the reasons you feel you need structure. After completing your list, do a truth-check by asking yourself: “Is it absolutely true, with all that’s going on in my life today, that I need to have/be responsible for ______ (insert item from your list) right now?” Be sure to ask yourself this for each thing you put on the list.

If the answer is YES, keep it on the list. If the answer is NO, scratch it off the list. After you have done a truth-check for everything on your list, rewrite the list on a new page with only the things you said YES to. Set your list aside, we’re going to revisit it later.

Knowing YOUR family’s answer to why structure is or isn’t needed will greatly impact how you go about creating and facilitating your family’s learning practice. In thinking about this, we need to be very honest with ourselves and with all we’re managing everyday. There is no right or wrong way to answer these questions. Everyone has different factors on their plates and values things according to their beliefs, culture, and circumstances. Beginning with clarity here will lead to making choices and finding solutions that really work and sustain us.

2. Assessing Meaning
Next area of exploration: What does it mean to learn? Answer this in your own words, without googling a definition. Just off the top of your head, what does learning mean to you? Write your meaning of learning down in a journal. Now beside it or underneath it, answer this too:  What does it mean to have structure? Again in your own words and without editing or censoring. 

Once you feel good about your answers, take some time to really reflect on what came up for you. Observe the natural moments of your family rhythms. Where do learning and structure already overlap? Where do they diverge? How can they coexist more peacefully? How, if at all, do they require different things? Give yourself permission to be transparent with your answers. Honesty leads to greater clarity and understanding, which in turn leads to more peace, joy, and positivity for our family’s learning practice. 

3. Assessing Possibility 
Now go and get your truth-checked list from the first activity. For everything that you are absolutely sure you need (when it comes to structure) in order to sustain your family’s wellness, you’re going to identify Places of Possibility—P.O.P.s—that align with your family’s learning practice. 

Start with the most important thing on your YES list. Write it down on its own sheet of paper and draw a circle around it. This is your P.O.P. circle. Then consider the following questions: 

How can my children collaborate with me to meet this need?
How does this need already relate to something my children are interested in/excited about learning?
How can I meet this need while being present with my children?

For now, just brainstorm your answers. You can write them down as a list, or draw a line extending outward from your circle for every answer you put down, so that each P.O.P. circle will look like a sun when you’ve accumulated all your answers. 

Just one of the reasons I am usually too scared to let my children paint when I am the only adult in the house.

Practicing A New Way Forward
One thing that determines whether or not my crew is going to have a good day is how much food—read: what kinds of snacks do I have on hand to incentive cooperation at any given moment!—we have in the house. This is determined primarily by how much money is in the bank and how/when we can get to the store.

I know that if we start our day without the optimal selections of food, that I am going to soften all plans. Hangry children are not feeling story time! I’m going to be gentle with myself as the mother who has to spend a whole day on my own with munchkins who are underwhelmed about having beans and rice, again. I’m going to honor the limitations of the moment and proactively look for other ways to create peace in our day, like more babywearing, more touch, more snuggling, more freedom to play and make noise, more tablet time. By softening the structure of what I wanted our day to be, I am able to be more responsive to the truth of the moment, which is that I don’t have enough food in the house to facilitate a smooth day.

When assessing whether or not a particular structure is really possible at any given moment, always check in to see if you’ve been honest about what is really going on for you and your family. Once I can accept the truth, I can more readily access the P.O.P.s that will get me through this moment. My kids love going for a walk. So maybe instead of feeling bad that we didn’t get our morning reading done, we’ll burn some energy by walking to the store to pick up a few things. My kids love baking, so if there’s no money to go to the store, I might center our day around making cookies with them instead of feeling frustrated that the laundry is still a mountain in front of the closet. My children love dancing, so instead of demanding my kids sit still at the table and eat this very nutritious, you-have-to-eat-this-because-I-don’t-have-anything-else-in-the-house-and-I-can’t-deal-with-you-crying-all-day-because-you’re-hungry meal, I might blast some of their favorite jams and dish out spoonfuls of food while they dance and run around until all bowls are empty and all bellies are full.

It’s not always easy to see and access the P.O.P. And even though I know my grandmother would disapprove, the truth is that it’s much easier to feed children who don’t want to eat what you have when you give them alternative ways to express their freedom. Also, the more opportunities for collaboration we embrace when navigating our family’s essential needs, the more learning moments and meaningful exchanges occur organically throughout the day.

And again, everything going on in our world right now is a lot to process. One day, one breath, at a time. It’s okay if you find it challenging—or even impossible—to find places of possibility with some of your family’s critical needs. For instance, if there is something you have to do that you cannot do with your children, give yourself permission to do that when they are sleeping, or when they are in someone else’s care, or when they’re having a screen time break, or any other creative pocket of time you can access. 

Surviving and thriving in times of uncertainty means that we might have to break a lot to the rules that were necessary to maintaining a structure that is no longer relevant or harmonious for our family’s well-being.

This can feel very uncomfortable or intimidating, and like extremely new, unchartered terrain—because it is!— but this in itself is also a powerful place of possibility and learning for us and our children. Something amazing, and beautiful, and magical might now emerge with the abandoning of structure and the embracing of more honesty, understanding, communication, and creativity.

Remember that nurturing a collaborative, family-centered learning process takes time, patience, experimentation, and practice. Begin where you can begin. Start with where you are today and with what you have in front of you right now. You might soon realize that your new flow is more possible, and feels better, than anything you had before.

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It makes a difference in our everyday moments how much love we feel from those around us. This is always true. And as mothers who are navigating the unchartered terrains of discovering what family-centered learning looks like for our children, this love is necessary to sustaining a vibrancy, a joy, a hope in our work.

When we feel loved, supported, celebrated, and seen we function differently. We greet the day with more energy. We face the challenges, we find more creative solutions, we hold onto dreams with a more expansive and lasting faith in ourselves and our process. Love matters, and feeling deeply loved matters the further we journey into these unknowns.

I come from a family of educators, engineers, and business owners. Academic achievement was always praised. Sometimes my great-aunt in New York would send us money for getting good grades. The Honor Roll and other merits were the expectation, period. Doing well in school was just what everyone did. Getting into college wasn’t so amazing, as I was a fifth generation college student—something that is phenomenal for a black family surviving generations of racism, violence, and economic oppressions in the United States of America.

For me to have had such a privileged start, for all the sacrifices that were made for me to have a “good education,” my choice to nurture my children outside of that system, and instead within in family-centered learning model rooted in love, experimentation, and passion, is baffling to many people who had a part in raising me. Most often this is expressed as bewilderment. Sometimes its more hostile. It takes a lot to be present with the process. I spend long stretches of time allowing for the slow revelations of truth to happen organically in our family process. Many days I am practicing how to really feel my way through to what and how our family learning lab will be. And on days when there is no clear and tangible love shown for our efforts, it can be frustrating, even heartbreaking.

In my family we communicate on a seven-person text group about all things related to the family. It’s my parents, my husband, my brothers, and my sister-in-law all on one thread. It’s how we stay connected across multiple households. Of all the grandkids, my children are the only ones who are not in a sit-down school. (Yes, I’m experimenting with moving away from words like “traditional” to refer to the dominant school culture.) When my nieces and nephews get rewarded at school, or accomplish something exciting, or do something interesting, there is an outpouring of positive messages from the family. Their goodness, and the value of that goodness, is easily identifiable in the system of standardized education. A report card with As and Bs, an award from a school contest, a certificate from the principal—all of this is familiar to the adults in the family and so the expression of encouragement and congratulations for the children who achieve these things flows effortlessly.

The story is different for my kids. Yes, they get there share of accolades too, but learning-based praise mostly comes when I share something simple and concrete like a picture from them at the library, or sitting with a book in their lap. When I share other types of moments from our unorthodox family learning lab—perhaps an experiment of some sort that got really, really messy, or some dance game that they invented all by themselves— sometimes there’s crickets on the line. I’ll check back all day, and there will be nothing, no acknowledgement of their growth, their discovery, their work to learn something new. They are too young to care about the responsiveness of the adults in their family, but as the mother who is laboring so passionately to cultivate this richly immersive world for them, it hurts to be so unseen in this way. I put so much into shaping this happy, free, creative life for them. And even though I know their happiness is what matters most, I am still grappling at times with the emotional consequences of choosing a path not fully accepted by our larger family.

After almost four years of intentionally growing into our family learning lab process, this is the first time I’m accessing language to articulate how the silence feels. There is a pang of doubt reverberating too: Will my children miss out on being celebrated—on being loved in a certain way—because they are not being educated in the way that is deemed normal and appropriate by their extended family? What risk am I taking in walking this unscripted path with my children, one that is not fully understood or appreciated by others in their family? Is the love and labor I’m seeding into their their brilliant black lives enough to carry them, to carry me, through?

This week the munchkins and I stumbled into a hilarious interpretation of some fun facts about the planet Venus. Reading a book about space that Wonder selected from the library, we came to a page with an image focused on a red-hot planet enveloped in the dense blackness of outer space. Wonder looked at it and said he wanted to know about the “fire rock.” I thought that was such a cool and accurate way to describe what he was seeing, and I told him so.

As I read to them about why Venus is the hottest planet, even though Mercury is the closest to the sun, we started having a conversation about how the clouds are able to trap so much heat. I spontaneously thought up a way to illustrate this concept to them with something that they would love—their favorite super hero blanket that makes a daily appearance in one munchkin adventure or another. I thought if they could feel how being wrapped up in the blanket made them get warmer, they might have a better grasp of the idea that the clouds surrounding Venus made the planet maintain such a high temperature. At first I wrapped them individually, and they took turns getting to be Venus. But then they wanted to be wrapped up together—great, I thought, more heat! This is where the laughter got really good. Every time I wrapped them up they would try to move together as one hot planet, and this was a very comical (and perhaps slightly dangerous, but only one collision with the floor, so yay!) feat for sure.

Watching them laugh so full-heartedly was a beautiful moment. I was like, I LOVE this moment! This right here, this is why I keep trusting the evolution of our family-centered learning practice, for moments like this! It came to me that whether or not they choose to become astronauts or engineers at NASA, they’ll always have this random nugget of knowledge about why Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system. And that little bit of knowing will be anchored in this delicious memory of laughter, of touch, of play, of warmth, of sweet brotherhood, in a bright, spacious, sun-filled room, with their mother and baby sister.

This is what is so sacred to me, the ability to cultivate these lasting moments with such care and tenderness, without any limitations on our time or subject or methodology, and with a lovely and deliberate proximity to my children.

This personal celebration is what I have to hold onto when after 24 hours no one on the family thread has commented on the picture I sent—with a full explanation—of the boys being the planet Venus. When I finally ask my mother, the engineer, if she saw my message, she says she’s concerned I’m introducing things that are too complicated for them to understand. So then I tell her that they wanted to learn about the planets, and the whole thing just happened on its own. But that is the full reach of her interest with this learning moment that is so wonderful for me as a mother.

For a second I am quiet, waiting, longing for her to say more, feeling like the little girlchild who wants her mommy to see she’s doing a good job and to say so out loud. The brief silence is just long enough for me to realize the extent of all I’m wanting from this exchange, of all I’m asking for from my mother, whose definite love for me and my children does not fully eclipse the uncertainty she feels about how her daughter is raising her grandchildren. But even as I can grasp the totality of all that is impossible and imperfect with this moment, I am still holding out for a slight miracle, for a hint of celebration in her tone, for a recognition, a validation of my creativity, my genius, my innovative, on-the-spot, really-amazingly-clever-bringing-joy-to-my-kids idea to facilitate an embodied understanding of the planets orbiting the sun in our very gigantic and multidimensional galaxy! Isn’t that something? I want to ask, but I don’t.

Remember the love! The mantra plays inside my head, even as my mother and I continue to talk for a while about all the other family news. I have to remind myself, again and again, of me and the munchkins’ special discovery, of our complete and fulfilling experience of shared joys and expanding understandings of the world around us. This is the love, this is the LOVE! This is us making our own bliss, even if no one else can see it, hear it, touch it, believe it. This is us, having a really, really, happy encounter with some scientific facts about the “planet of love” itself. This is us, moving through these moments on our own terms, and embracing our connection to all things in this magical universe we call home.