Worried about remote learning? You are not alone.
I can’t help but feel a little defeated as I start this article. I know I’m not alone in this. Every Victorian is feeling the effects of lockdown 2.0. Somehow its worse this time around, even before we recorded our worst case numbers since this whole thing began. The first burst of community comradery that we had in lockdown 1 isn’t here round 2. This time we’re all just feeling tired, frustrated and worried about where this whole thing is going. To top it off we’re entering back into remote learning. Every parent I’ve spoken too has been almost as afraid of remote learning as they have been of COVID19. I’m not trying to be glib. The stress and anxiety for parents caused by remote learning is real.
In this article I wanted to give voice to some of my observations as parents and teachers have battled their way through remote learning. My two key points are: a. You’re not crazy if you’re finding this hard and b. Let’s get the reality of remote learning out in the open so we don’t have to feel anxious or ashamed about it. I’m not an education professional so I can’t speak to the educational goals or strategies that schools are implementing through this period. I can however speak to how we as a community are coping with this incredibly strange new parental responsibility. I have said before that I do not have school aged children. As such my research into this area has taken a more academic route. I’ve reviewed several articles written by the Vic department of education on vulnerable children under remote learning, I’ve read articles by esteemed psychologists and reviews by international journalists writing for publications such as the New York Times. What this brief literature review has shown me is that across the board remote learning has been hard, with the types of difficulties as varied as the children who experience them. What I have seen in my clinical work is that our struggles with remote learning are being treated like our own dirty little secret, with parents feeling so ashamed of their struggles that they don’t want to share their stress with their parenting peers or with their schools. But you are not alone. And furthermore, your school already knows how hard it’s been, we’re just not saying to it to each other.
First of all, lets start with why remote learning has been so hard.
1. Children are struggling to engage with the technology.
Because children are epic users of technology (much of my work usually centres around getting kids off technology) we have falsely assumed that they are a. Good at using it and b. Keen to be on it all the time. What has become abundantly clear is that remote learning is not the same as passive consumption of media or intuitive games that have been developed over years. Children have struggled to understand and navigate the online platforms. Even when they have (or their parents have directed them) not all children want to stay online. Many children have found video conferencing difficult to engage in. This has placed the pressure of learning the online protocols on parents. Then parents are tasked with dragging their child kicking and screaming to the screen.
2. School structure can’t be replicated at home.
Every article I came across that gave tips on how to support your child through remote learning invariably suggested coming up with a clear routine at home. However, the reviews of remote learning version 1 found that children struggled to adopt to the structure of school in their usually unstructured (comparatively) home environments. Attempting to develop school like routines at home left parents trying to enforce a routine that their kids just weren’t buying into. What’s more, it left parents wondering why this strategy wasn’t working for them. In my clinical work I saw this tend to go one to two ways; parents either became negative about themselves or their kids. Either road led to a lot of stress that in turn soured everyone’s experience of learning from home.
3. Parental burden.
This was probably the biggest factor that I heard about from the parents with whom I work. Remote learning took so much work. Every tip sheet or review of remote learning started with reassurance that parents are not suppose to be teachers. This is trying to delineate the difference between remote learning and offical learn from home programs such as distance education. But while the curriculum burden does not lie with parents, everything else is. Young children (early primary school) have an attention span lasting around 20 to 30 minutes, with older children topping out at around 40minutes. They cannot be left to do the work themselves. Every tip sheet also had strategies such as “Ask your child interesting questions”, “scaffold their work so early success beget later successes”, “reward effort in a timely and consistent manner”, “set work that aligns with their interests”. This is incredibly time consuming and also an incredibly skill rich set of tasks. Almost inconceivably, many parents are trying to do this incredibly time consuming task within the hours of their regular paid work. But there’s more than just a ‘not enough hours in the day’ problem occurring here, this situation also creates problems with split attention and cognitive load. Split attention refers to the fact that out mind has limited attentional capacity. Try to listen to two pieces of auditory input in each ear. You’ll find that your mind task switches, ie it jumps from one piece of input to the other. It’s like every phone conversation I have with my five year old in the room, where I have to switch between his suddenly very urgent questions and the conversation with my phone partner. Parent’s are doing a huge amount of attention splitting as they try to hold in mind their children’s school needs and their work needs, while also trying to motivate their children, keep them on task, and enrich their learning. All of this juggling is causing intense cognitive load, making our minds work overtime and leading to exhaustion (cognitive burden).
4. The pandemic has caused a multitude of environmental stressors.
The pandemic itself has caused many families to experience a multitude of stressors that have negatively impacted their ability to engage in remote learning. While I don’t want to cover them in depth here I do want to honour the struggles many families have faced with things like; difficulty accessing technology, homes being overcrowded as extended family members join the household for lockdown, financial stress, juggling remote schooling on site due to essential worker duties to name a few.
5. We’re trying to stay positive, but sometimes this means we’re not naming the reality of how hard this is.
As parents we want this to work. But, frequently it isn’t working. Many of the parents I’ve spoken to have confessed that they’ve opted out of parts of remote learning because the battle has been too hard. Parents feel ashamed that they haven’t been unable to meet their perceived expectation from the school and feel incompetent because they think they’re the only ones not getting their kids on the camera. Schools are trying to remain infinitely supportive and positive, and are sending out messages of congratulations to their students and their parents. what I’m seeing is a great miscommunication, with parents feeling like they’re alone in their remote learning difficulties and that remote learning is working well for everyone else. In an attempt to stay positive parents and teachers aren’t naming the difficulties that lie between them here. This has created a certain sense of unreality. Feelings of confusion, hopelessness and anxiety, met with outward signs and expressions that everything is ok make us wonder at the feelings that we’re having. Suddenly our feelings don’t line up, and they have no where to go. This is called dissonance and it’s uncomfortable and stressful.
6. Remote learning is activating parental anxiety.
All of this is going on alongside our pandemic fears, but I’m not going to address them here as I’ve covered them in other articles. A different anxiety that is being activated is our parental anxiety about our children’s education. Our own values and beliefs about education and how our children should engage in it are being activated during this precess. So too are our fears of being judged and evaluated by the school or other parents if our child doesn’t show up, submit work or willingly engage in their education. We’re worried that our children will be behind, we’re worried we’re not doing or being enough. This anxiety is derived in part from our feelings of responsibility for our children’s ongoing educational development during this time and our concurrent feelings of powerlessness in actually achieving this. This feeling of responsibility without power is one of the most well known sources of anxiety and frequently leads to feelings of hopelessness. If these feelings are surrounding your and your child’s interaction with school work it could produce a negative atmosphere that increases your child’s desire to avoid all things school related.
The solution.
I don’t know if I have the answers to this one. The situation is inherently hard, and I don’t want to be so disrespectful to the experience of parents to assume that I can offer all the solutions. But I think if we allow ourselves to be vulnerable we can recognise remote learning for what it is and what it isn’t. Right now remote learning is absolutely necessary. But it’s not the same as school pre-COVID19, and you as a parent can’t make it the same. If we can connect with ourselves and our children authentically we can try to create a calmer and more realistic learning environment. If we can all drop the facade that this is all ok, we can meet our children where they are at and perhaps provide them with the best education that is possible right now.
Strategies
1. Check in with your household temperature and your emotions.
Pay attention to the emotional temperature of your household. This weekend we had a household emotional slump. The impact of lockdown seemed to hit us and we were tired, irritable and a bit sad. I was short tempered with my children, which made them short tempered with me. Check in with yourself and the vibe you’re getting off other family members and change your daily schedule or your approach accordingly. This doesn’t mean you can all shirk off work and school and just watch movies all day. But it might mean that you talk to your partner more about how you’re feeling, hug one another, slow your movements down to help slow your mind, shift your attention to the present rather than the worries of the future that are in your mind. There’s an activity I like to do with clients that I call The Power of a Minute. I make the client sit with me in total silence for one minute. Try it. A minute can be a really long time. Take powerful minutes where you can to give yourself some time and space. Similarly, a hug lasting around 20seconds can have positive hormonal changes in our children. Spare the 20 seconds where you can to help bring their nervous systems down too.
2. Understand what different behaviours in your children mean.
I’ve covered this more in my Return to School article, so please refer there for a more thorough description of how anxiety can manifest. Going back to remote learning is likely to make your child feel sad. They’ll miss their friends, their siblings might irritate them and they’re picking up on the general community anxiety. Understand that they might be a bit flat and parent them as though they are sad and worried, rather than oppositional. As parents you will receive the worst of your children’s emotions because you are safest person in the world for them to share those parts of themselves. So while its hard understand that they’re not really attacking you, they’re trying to tame their own inner turmoil.
3. Own it.
Be real with your school and similarly, schools, be real with your parents. This isn’t the time for blame or defensiveness. When we’re open and vulnerable without seeking someone to blame we tend to find our listener feels safe to be equally open and vulnerable. If you allow space for a real conversation about remote learning all parties can come to the table. Trying to maintain a professional distance from your parents (if you’re a teacher) will likely alienate them and leave them wondering what’s going on. Doing the same to your schools as a parent will leave your schools making assumptions about why you’ve disengaged from them. For whatever reason we as a species are very bad at making accurate assumptions. Experiment with real and open conversations without blame and without shame.
4. Play to your strengths.
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Sit down and have a think about what worked well last time, or perhaps you can more easily recall what didn’t work. Amp up what worked, and disregard what didn’t. Think about the natural flow of your household. My family are always better in the mornings because we’re all naturally early risers. We all have better focus in the mornings but our afternoons are complete write offs! Think about when you’re better resourced, have fewer work commitments etc and work remote learning around your families strengths.
Best of luck fellow Victorians. Mask up and stay connected.