A-Grade Days; What do you do when the children don’t need you?; and Smartphone Free Childhoods

If you read Tuesday’s post, you’ll know we had a pretty good day. If I was a school teacher, I’d give Tuesday an A. Multiplication, fractions, pronouns, history, Greek, French, spelling, reading, even an actual pen being put to actual paper for an extended period!

Of course, it couldn’t last. On Wednesday morning I had booked a session at the swimming pool. I knew we’d be giving up the best part of our day to swim, and I was happy with the trade-off. But I was not happy to spend an hour getting to the pool only to be told it was closed at short notice, and nor were the children. There were some Big Feelings. And although I told the children that we didn’t need to let it ruin our whole day, I absolutely let it ruin mine. I know, where’s my stoicism? Usually I’m pretty good at letting it all wash over me, but on Wednesday I just couldn’t. By the time we got home again, with all our swimming stuff bone dry, nobody was in the mood for any work. All we managed was a rereading of Sir Cumference and the Fracton Faire. (And I wrote a grumpy letter to the local council about the lack of swimming provision for children in our part of London, which didn’t make me feel any better.)

Thursday was better, but the energy somehow wasn’t quite right. In our blackboard time we revised Tuesday’s Greek words, reminded ourselves what a pronoun is, looked at two new spellings, and had a session looking at different methods to do subtractions like 73-45. We read together on the sofa, about Space, the human body, and sea lampreys. It was good, but it was no Tuesday.

But that’s ok. Not every day is an A-grade day. We sometimes feel a certain pressure for every day to be brilliant, but simple mathematics tells us that most days will be pretty average, some will be great, and a few will be unmitigated hell from start to finish (no, it’s not just you). Good enough, as I am fond of saying, is good enough.

In the afternoons, the children are doing a lot of playing together contentedly with no input required from me. What bliss, you say! But I find it something of a mixed blessing. Of course, it’s great when they do this. But… what am I meant to do?

What do you do when your children don’t need you?

Whether you home educate or not, when you’re with your child, it can be hard to do anything else. Not that you should be doing anything else—sometimes it’s great just to ‘be’ with your child, and of course the children love it when we do that. But I’m often aware of other things that need to be done, and also it can be really boring to be with small children for long periods of time. Yes, they are interesting, and funny, and you’re learning alongside them and so on and so forth. But an adult needs more mental stimulation than a child alone can provide, and I firmly believe that children should sometimes be left alone—benign neglect is a good thing.

And yet, when they do finally go off by themselves, whether into the garden or just into their own little world, it can be very hard to know what to do with yourself.

There is, of course, Always Housework. And I do a bit when it’s clear the children are happily engaged, but I don’t want to spend all my spare moments cleaning and tidying. I especially don’t want my children growing up thinking that what mothers do with their spare time is clear up after everyone else.

The next two options that spring to mind are reading a book or going for a walk. My husband is often at home, so a walk is possible, but guilt (mothers’ guilt?) definitely creeps in. I feel bad leaving him in charge when he’s trying to work. 90% of the time the children play happily and don’t bother him at all, but on a bad day they’ll do nothing but squabble. Out on my walk I don’t know which it is, so I always feel the need to hurry home.

Putting my feet up and reading a book in the middle of the day feels lazy. Do I tell my children they’re lazy when they read? Would I tell anyone else that? Of course not! But during the day I feel I should be working, and reading isn’t work. My work, for now, is my children, but sometimes my children don’t need me. I also find reading difficult because even when the children don’t need me, they do still need me every now and then. I find it maddening trying to read—or do anything else—when I’m frequently interrupted.

It’s not that I don’t know what to do with myself. When the children spend a few days with their grandparents, I have no problem keeping myself happily busy and entertained. What’s hard is switching between modes. I enjoy poetry, for example, but it feels weird to watch the children disappear outside, leaving a trail of Duplo in their wake, and instantly pluck a book off the shelf and immerse myself in a good poem, only for someone to reappear needing minor first aid three minutes later.

Is it just me? Are the rest of you managing to micro-dose poetry in scant minutes throughout your days?

But will it soothe a grazed knee?

In the past this conundrum has sometimes led to me scrolling the never-ending internet on my phone, because at least I don’t care when my scrolling gets interrupted. But that’s not a solution, and it’s a terrible example to set for the children.

One better option is gardening, because you can pull up a weed in a matter of seconds and it represents progress even if you get interrupted and do no more. Is gardening just housework al fresco? I try not to think about that question too much.

I would love to give you a list of other ideas, but I don’t have that list. If you do, please share in the comments.

A smartphone-free childhood

Speaking of scrolling, if you’re in the UK and disquieted by the fact that 90% of 11 year olds now own a smartphone¹, have you joined the Smartphone Free Childhood movement? I have.

Photo by Bruce Mars on Unsplash

Articles about kids and smartphones are everywhere now.

New Statesman: The wisest investment in your child is not giving them a smartphone

A child who spends up to one hour a day using digital devices “for leisure” (ie, not for learning) was found to be 49 points – equivalent to more than two years of education – ahead of a child who spends five to seven hours a day on screens, even after accounting for socio-economic factors. That is a gap no private school or tutor can bridge.

Unheard: Big Tech has stolen our children: Fear of the smartphone isn’t a moral panic

My wife Juliet and I […] held off on getting our daughters phones until the end of their American middle school years. At this point they were both 14, the only kids their age they knew who didn’t have phones. During those last phone-free years, their avid reading was beginning to grow in sophistication. […] They were diving into longer, more difficult fiction, serious, award-winning novels written for adults. Then, after we gave them the phones they’d long been clamouring for, their recreational reading of books basically ended.

My own children don’t have phones and don’t currently want them. At 6 and 8 I realise this is the easy bit. They don’t even know social media exists. I am fully committed to holding off on smartphones for as long as possible. I liked

Katherine Johnson Martinko

’s recent post I’ve Finally Figured Out When My Kids Can Get Smartphones—when they get their driving licence.

I’m not anti-tech. There’s incredible stuff on the internet. But there’s also an untold quantity of rubbish, even before you get to the truly dangerous stuff. At best it does no good to anyone, and at worst it drives people to despair. A child addicted to their smartphone is a child who isn’t reading books, climbing trees, giggling with their friends, chatting to their dad as they do the washing up. Have you seen how many billions of make-up tutorial videos there are online? Why would I want my daughter to discover that there are 50 things wrong with her face and hundreds of products she can use to fix them?

Many parents insist that video games are educational, and I can’t argue—I know nothing about video games. But I do know that the games are as addictive as everything else online. And I know that nothing is so educational that it’s enough all by itself—a dictionary is educational, but on its own it wouldn’t provide a very good education. Again, hours spent on a video game are hours not spent on other things. The average Roblox user spends 2.6 hours a day on the platform, and two-fifths of Roblox players are aged 12 and under². I’m certain my son would love it if he knew about it. But right now he’s reading a book about dramatic survival stories to himself, and if a smartphone with a video game on it was available I can guarantee he wouldn’t be reading the book.

So I’m fully on-board with keeping smartphones out of our children’s hands for as long as possible. But I also think that’s not enough. If you look around you in public places, almost every adult is staring at their phone. My husband says maybe these people are reading Shakespeare or learning advanced mathematics, but I can tell you, because I’m nosy, that every single phone screen I see is on TikTok, with the user scrolling onto the next video after about 2 seconds.

There’s no point keeping our children away from smartphones if the example we set is that once you do get a phone, you’ll be glued to it all day long (and half the night). Just like we model nice manners, good habits and lots of other things we want our children to adopt, we need to be modelling healthy phone use too. Oxford University have a Reduce Digital Distraction project with lots of ideas for cutting down your phone use. Yesterday I changed my phone to grayscale in an attempt to make it less appealing.

A couple of other posts on this topic that might interest you:

Charting the Course for Family Tech Use from

Ruth Gaskovski

(Ruth has kindly lifted the paywall on this post so you can read the whole thing—thank you, Ruth!.):

Parents may feel that their teen will be intolerably unhappy if they are the only ones without a phone. I have yet to meet a parent who did not profoundly regret giving their child a smartphone before high school, and even then it is rarely smooth sailing. The assumption is that the device will appease the pestering and provide a certain amount of contentment. The reality is often that the door was instead opened to a legion of overpowering and unpredictable digital demons, resulting in addictive tendencies, loneliness, and far greater unhappiness.

We’ve gone iPad free, and all hell hasn’t broken loose! From

Surviving, Not Thriving!

:

However, I think when one really reflects on what the iPad does, it’s more obvious than ever that it is doing more harm than good—it shrinks a child's attention span, completely rids them of any comfort with boredom, and zaps any creativity they had, which ultimately makes our lives as parents harder. If our child can’t be bored and creative without a device, then life will be very challenging.

And one of mine, Some thoughts on screens, reading, and childhood:

The battle between books and screens isn’t a fair fight. The lure of the screen is just too powerful. I often choose to put my phone completely out of sight if I’m reading a book—otherwise, the mere sight of it is enough to induce me to pick it up and instantly lose 20 minutes that I could have spent reading. We need only look around in a public place to see how powerless adults are to resist the pull of the screen—how can we expect our children to fare any better?

Do take a look at the Smartphone Free Childhood website, and have some conversations with friends and family about your own thoughts on this important topic.

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Educating Otherwise UnConference, London, 27th April

If you’re a new subscriber, you might not know about the Educating Otherwise UnConference, taking place in London on 27th April and organised by

Benjamin Yeoh

. It’s free (but places must be booked in advance), entirely not for profit, and essentially an opportunity for people interested in education outside the mainstream to get together and talk about the issues that matter to them. An unConference is like an unschooling version of a conference—attendees set the agenda on the day according to what they want to talk about.

You don’t have to be a home educator to attend. Young people are welcome, and there are prizes for those who want to contribute an essay (or blog, presentation etc) on an education-related topic of their choice. Travel grants are available for those who wouldn’t otherwise be able to come. It would be great to see lots of you there, and we hope to share summaries of what we talk about online via the Substack so those who can’t attend can still be part of the conversation.

Book your free tickets here, and have a look at the Substack for the event here.

(For the avoidance of doubt, it’s got nothing to do with the excellent home ed charity Education Otherwise.)

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1. The Guardian

2. Statista