Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy Earle
Hey, it's Andy from talking to teens, it would mean the world to us. If you could leave us a five star review. reviews on Apple and Spotify help other parents find the show. And that helps us keep the lights on. Thanks for being a listener. And here's the show. You're listening to talking to teens, where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers. I'm your host, Andy Earle. We're here today with Catherine Read, talking about what parents can learn from the Waldorf curriculum. Catherine holds a PhD in developmental psychology from UCLA. And she is a visiting scientist at Rutgers University and an associate at Ithaca College, she homeschools her two daughters from kindergarten through the 11th grade using the Waldorf curriculum. And she wrote a book about it called the genius of home, teaching your children at home with the Waldorf curriculum, really excited to speak with Catherine today about what parents everywhere can learn from the Waldorf curriculum and how we can all apply some of this to our own families, we'll get into the challenges she faced in homeschooling her two daughters from kindergarten through the 11th grade and the challenges in then reintegrating them back into the school system. And we'll get into lots of practical advice that parents can use to be more involved in your kids education and get conversations going about what they're learning what they're thinking about and what they're working on at school. All that more is coming up on the show today. Catherine, thank you so much for being here.

Catherine Read
Thank you for having me.

Andy Earle
Talk to me about this, this book that you've written the genius of home, you're incorporating ideas from Waldorf curriculum, and there's talking about kind of your family's journey with homeschooling. And really a lot of interesting stuff in here. What What inspired you to write it into a book? Oh,

Catherine Read
well, somebody from the publisher called me and asked me to write a book on homeschooling. So this book is called The genius of home, teaching your children at home with the Waldorf curriculum, and it's about our experience doing that from kindergarten through grade 11. Okay, so I have two daughters, they're three years apart. I taught both of them from their kindergarten through grade 11, at home with the Waldorf curriculum. And when I started that this was obviously a while ago, there were not very many people teaching at home with the Waldorf curriculum. And I had gotten to, I don't know, the older one was maybe sixth or seventh grade. And some people at the publishers knew that I was doing this that I was homeschooling, the publisher is in upstate New York, and I'm in Pennsylvania, just you know, I don't know, a couple 100 miles south of them. And they called and said, they wanted to publish a book on homeschooling. And it was, you know, it was relatively new. And but they just decided that they thought that that topic was important. They wanted to do something. And I said, Okay, I had been writing articles. They have some articles on specific topics there on the website for the book. And so I had been writing some articles for, you know, parents, parenting publications that had to do with Waldorf schools, the Waldorf schools. And so they said, you know, we need a book on that topic. Would you do it? I said, Yes. And then it was like 10 years later, at least 10 years later, I got the book done. Quite a bit more than that. But so that's why I wrote the book. But I want there to be a book and I want people to find out about it, just because I think it might give some people some ideas. That's that's the basic I found out about Waldorf schools. Before I had children. I met someone who had gone to a Waldorf school in Edinburgh a long time ago, when it was first starting. These schools started in Germany around the turn of the 20th century. And they were mostly in Europe, just a few of them in Europe. Then they started, you know, branching out, the first one in the United States was in New York City. It's called the Rudolf Steiner School. And I think, Gosh, I don't know. I'm not sure when that started. I should look that up. Could have started in the 50s. I'm not sure. And, and then from there, it's just really branched out there. There are hundreds, maybe 1000s in the world now everywhere, including in Mexico, a lot a lot in the US. There's quite a few in Australia. There's some in China, they're starting in China. So I found out about the schools Before I even had children, and I just was very impressed with their focus on nature and experience with nature and beauty, beauty in the surroundings, you know, out in nature also in the, in the, in your buildings, whatever you're around everything and the focus on children themselves but not children as setting the direction of where everything goes. But the level of the child's consciousness at any particular point in their development and how the teacher tries to meet that level of consciousness. That's what was that that's what impressed me. And so I thought, yes, the Waldorf schools would be good if we have children. When we have children. Yeah, we'll just find a Waldorf school, you know, seems like straightforward. Then we have our daughter and we moved to Connecticut and there is no Waldorf school. There aren't that many Waldorf schools, you know, I used to think, okay, there'll be one in the neighborhood somewhere. No, so I started in a playgroup, a Waldorf playgroup in somebody's home, which was good, a good, you know, fun and, and really a good education for me that my daughter was two and three, then and then we moved to California, and there was a lot of school but it was 45 minutes away on the freeway. So we went to the playgroup, I had to by that time, we went to the playgroup, and then when it came time for kindergarten, I just, I just my husband, and I had to have a meeting, you know, we had a meeting that summer, and just can we do this? I said, I can teach kindergarten because I had had all this playgroup experience, I knew I could teach kindergarten, but it had to be a joint discussion and a joint decision, because I knew he would have to spend more time with them, so that I could prepare for the next day or class. And he thought about it. And he made a decision and said, Yes, he would. So we said, just this year, we're just going to do it this year, then we'll figure out what what for next year. Okay, so

Andy Earle
yeah, last words.

Catherine Read
And that year, when she was in kindergarten, I started into teacher training, there's training for Waldorf teachers specific training for that method and that approach and the whole child development that's behind it. So I started into that training, and then it became, okay, it's going to be first grade. Well, you know, it's the same situation, it's still 45 minutes on the freeway, and I still have a toddler, you know, so Okay. And then I think, well, kindergarten is, you know, first grade is definitely different than kindergarten. It's definitely school. It's more structured, it's, you know, it's a big moment. But I thought, what I can do kindergarten, I mean, I can do first grade, it's, it's, it builds on kindergarten, you know, so Okay, so we do first grade. And it just went by like, like that, year by year,

Andy Earle
I get the second grade, I get a third grade, I guess I get a fourth grade. And here we are grade 11.

Catherine Read
But by grade nine, high school? Well, first of all, they were having a lot more teachers than than me. I mean, I was teaching the main academics at home, and some of the art at home, but they were having other specialized teachers more in high school. But the other thing is, of course, they start to wake up more, this is the thing about teenagers, they're waking up more. And they become involved in the decisions at a certain point, they become involved in the decisions. And both of them decided in their 11th grade that they wanted to go into an institutional court school for their 12th grade, they each went to a different school. But they did that. So they ended up graduating from an institutional school. And that's why I didn't teach 12th grade.

Andy Earle
So what is the differences between a Waldorf curriculum and a more traditional curriculum that's taught in a lot of schools and in the US, or Australia, or the UK or something like that,

Catherine Read
there are a lot of differences. But the obvious one of the obvious differences is that academic topics are taught in blocks. So an academic work only happens in the morning and the first part of the day. So thinking is in the morning, working with the hands, making things doing art, working outside, anything like that is in the afternoon. So there's a kind of form to the day where, you know, you do movement and singing first and then you sit at the desk where you can, you know, you can concentrate after you've had some a little bit of movement and waking up, then you can sit and concentrate for a while. And the topics are taught in blocks. So for three or four weeks, they're only working on one topic. They're not mixing up. So if we want to talk about teens, are we talking more like seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade 10th grade, these are the grades right? Yeah. Uh, so in seventh grade, there's a history block. And sometimes that would be taught twice during the year or even three times. There's English grammar, there's, I'm trying to remember what the math is for seventh grade, I think it's algebra, and you would teach each of those blocks more than once. So you would do you know, English grammar three or four weeks. Now there's, there's gotta be there's geometry

Andy Earle
some kind of geometry. Yeah, science. Oh,

Catherine Read
yeah. And then the science, seventh grade, the science, there's physics, the auditory, you know, sound physics. So you have to work in three or four weeks of each of these topics in the year. And as those three or four weeks ago, the teacher is presenting more in the beginning, and the children are listening. But they're always involved. They're always involved. It's never a lecture. It's always so they have reading to do outside of class. But mostly, they're working in class with the teacher on certain topics. And the other big difference is, they're writing their own books, we don't use any textbooks, I never used a textbook, they never saw a textbook. So I would use primary sources, where I would read to them, or I would assign some reading, they make their own what's called a main lesson book up for each one of their academic topics. And that's a large format, blank paper book that they do all their art and writing in, that has to do with the topic of that block. So those are main differences.

Andy Earle
I always did feel that it is so much research on the task switching costs, and how how we lose so much kind of momentum, when we're kind of jumping from one thing to another. And that's one thing that I feel like, I try to do better in my days as an adult is things you know, my calendar gets. So like I'm jumping from kind of like one thing to the other all the time. And the best days always feel like when I can really block things, or can I do all of this type of stuff in like one block on on this day or at this time? And it just makes such a big difference in terms of like productivity and feeling like I can just focus on this, get in the zone and go really deep on it, as opposed to kind of like, jumping or flittering between different things so often. Yeah.

Catherine Read
So so you can see that the structure of the day? I mean, the day is structured, let's put it that way. Yeah, you know, the Class Day, the school day is structured. So in that sense, it's not just turning the children loose, you know, it's not, oh, do whatever you want to do. And I'll help you do it. It's not that I mean, that there is a version of homeschool that does that. But that's not what Waldorf does, it is structured. And the teacher structures it, you know, the teacher says, Okay, this is the beginning of the school day. I mean, the whole rhythm question is big in Waldorf. And you know, and I can talk about that more, if you want to, but basically, the teacher knows there's a structure to the day and they say, this is what we're doing now. You know, and then the children have to do it. I mean, you know, they, they're working as you're, as you're studying, they are working. And when it gets later in the block, they're doing much more, because the teacher has already presented a lot of material. And now the teacher can say, Well, what about this, think about this aspect of it, what do you think, and they, especially the teenagers, I think they really respect, let's put it this way. They recognize when people respect them, they know what it means that an adult respects them. And that is what happens when you see the lesson as something that you're both working on. The teacher and the student, are both working on the lesson, the teacher has done a lot of preparation, and obviously knows more, but they don't have the attitude that they know all the answers. They just don't have that attitude, they have the attitude, we can find some answers, you know, we can find some answers together. And there's a lot of this is just another element to the to the curriculum and the method, there's a lot of emphasis on imagination that the students try to imagine. Whatever it is they're studying. If it's physics, it's something that they can directly experience. You know, when I when I did electricity and magnetism, this is later this is like 11th grade, electricity and magnetism with any topic. But this is an example you start out with try to remember when you have experienced this yourself. And so my two said, well, one time we were all jumping on the trampoline, and we sat down and held hands and there were big sparks. And you know, yeah, that's electricity. You know, this was their experience with electricity. And this is also showing respect to them. that you ask, what is your experience and the person thinks about it, they think about it, they remember it, they imagine it, whatever, what they say, is listened to is taken seriously.

Andy Earle
Because also learning is so much more profound if we can actually create connections between existing neural networks that are already in there. And now let's take the new knowledge and not just dump it and say, hey, you know, here it all is memorize it. But we actually find ways to connect that to existing knowledge structures in the brain. And then it just then now all kinds of things could open up from that kind of conversation of walls. Yeah. So as we kind of talked about electricity, and grounding and insulation, and all these kinds of things, we could keep coming back to talking about well, what was happening on that trampoline? Or what might be happening with that? Yeah,

Catherine Read
definitely. And then you work into electricity, again, straight with direct experience, but now it's experiments. You know, you set up experiments in the classroom, and you hope as the teacher that they work, you know, you hope that it does what it's supposed to do. And and so you start out and basically what you're doing with all the sciences, you're starting out with direct experience, and then you're going to how was it studied has historically, when did they start thinking about electricity? Okay, the Greeks, the ancient Greeks, the word comes from the Greek word for Amber. Because they knew that if you rub Amber against certain materials, electricity comes about, and then you get to the point where you're talking about Faraday, and, you know, his direct observations of materials and the effect on materials of electricity. And, and then you can get to however far you get with it field theory, but it's all building from basic, direct experience, and staying with that in steps. And this has a very important effect for teenagers. And that is not only that they see themselves respected by the adult. But secondly, they begin to respect their own observations, they trust their own observations. And that means that they can eventually take responsibility for themselves, and not just believe what anybody says.

Andy Earle
What do you think about how any of these ideas apply to people who are in a traditional school system, it strikes me that a lot of this, the school system is not set up in this way, or that you're doing a lot of the things that we're not advocating in the Waldorf method in terms of, especially once you get to middle school in high school, each class is 45 minutes, and then you're on to another subject, you there's kind of not really any of this sort of structure to the day in terms of thinking tasks in the morning, and then more physical things you have to do, which makes a lot of sense to me. That's how I like to structure my day. Now I try to wake up and get a little bit of, you know, meditate, kind of get the day started, and then jump into my most intense thinking activities first, and then in the afternoon, that's when it's good to go do some errands or things that need to get me up and moving. And everything you're saying makes a lot of sense to me. And is kind of just how the best way to really structure a day. But it strikes me that this could be a little difficult for people who are stuck in a more traditional school. Wow,

Catherine Read
it is. I mean, my other daughter, when she left our homeschool after 11th grade, she went into a small private school, a prep school, it wasn't very far away. It was like a 20 minute drive. It was out in the country. It's beautiful campus, blah, blah, blah. But it's exactly what you're talking about a hectic schedule, they didn't even keep the same daily schedule for a semester, they switched up the daily schedule almost every week. So you couldn't even say every Wednesday, it's you know, it's algebra first thing in the morning, you couldn't even say that. I don't understand what their thinking was. They had very small classes, you know, 12 or 13 people in a class. That was not just a seminar class, that was their class. And but but these topics were slotted into various times of the day changing even during the semester. And of course, there was a lot of homework and then there was pressure to be in sports and, and drama. And you know, basically she had a very difficult time very difficult time that first semester. And I don't think after that, she recovered until she got out of there in terms of sleep. She didn't get enough sleep. You know, she couldn't get enough sleep whereas our schedule, I mean, I have to say their whole time they were with me through grade 11 I never woke them up in the morning. They woke up on their own every morning. There was no alarm clock there was no get up. We have to you know we have to follow the clock. We have Oh, come on,

Andy Earle
let's go. We're live a good 15 minutes,

Catherine Read
we never followed the clock. I mean, we had a rhythm. But we never followed up and never had to be by when the hands are at a certain place on the on the clock face. And so then all of a sudden, she had to deal with that. And she did it. I mean, she graduated with honors, and she had friends. And you know, she got through it, but there was a cost. And I actually think that's true. For most school, there's a cost, you know, and so all you can do is try to mitigate that, all you can do is try to mitigate that, which is on the weekends, try to have the days the best you can try to spend as much time outdoors as you can try to get as much sleep as you can, you know, sometime where you're not pressured. And yeah, I mean, time outdoors is incredibly important. We, we had as a school day, the first school day of the week, Monday was nature exploring the every week, every week from the time they were in kindergarten through grade 10. So we would be out in nature all morning, me not talking to them, I wasn't teaching them, I wasn't telling them a thing. I turn them loose, and they do what they want to do until they're done with it. And when they're done with it, we have a little lunch. And then we go to the library that was Monday's for years and years and years. And what that did is it let us make a transition into the school week where we aren't at the desk. We aren't, you know, under this kind of pressure in a way. But it is school. And we're out there, and we're taking things in. And it gave me time to think about my lessons. And often, often something would happen on that day that actually had to do with school, my academic lesson. So

Andy Earle
that's how I can do something to connect and a nice way to segue into actually what we're learning about today.

Catherine Read
Exactly, yeah, the geometry of flowers. You know, flowers are incredibly geometric, the blooms. So I mean, teenagers need a lot of sleep, they need time to themselves. I think time and nature, that's what I would prescribe.

Andy Earle
What were some of the challenges that you faced personally, or as a family in trying to do something like this? And obviously, one of the things you mentioned already that your husband was gonna have to doing more spending time with the kids to help support but obviously, then you too, are having to create lesson plans and do get this Waldorf certification and so much time and energy and everything like that. How did that sort of factor into your life are the plans that you've had for for your life?

Catherine Read
Yeah, that's a good question. That's a very good, what were the challenges? Well, yeah, the challenges were us dividing our work. He was a research scientist in pharmacology, large drug companies, he went to work early in the morning, so he could come home by four o'clock in the afternoon, and take them so that I could work on school and then make dinner and then after dinner, he took them to bed, you know, he read to them and took them to bed when I worked on the lesson for the next day, so we're kind of like switching off, but also having time together, all of us. And, you know, we just did that for years. We did that for years, the teacher training was mostly in the summertime. And then I would, you know, have relatives come and help or he would take them on a trip or something while I was doing this training, and, you know, I don't know, I mean, people were he worked. They were PhD scientists, you know, mostly men. They're saying to him, how do you do it? How do you work all day and then go home and take care of the children? You know, and I'm thinking, well, that's what women do all the time. That out if you have a family, think about it. So, you know, that's what we did. And the challenges, there's some challenges came from people who just thought homeschooling was wrong. Oh, from

Andy Earle
kind of get other people that you tell this to looking at you with the stain or reacting in sort of antagonistic ways or something?

Catherine Read
Yes, because, you know, we were in the wild or playgroup. And so we were the only ones who had school at home afterwards, the rest of them at school in the Waldorf school, or they went into a public school. Some of them were supportive, but not all of them. I mean, it was people think homeschool, something weird about that. Yeah.

Andy Earle
Anything that is like considered non traditional, is just not what the majority of other people do tends to just get get people's attention. And

Catherine Read
what I should say at that point is we were always working with other families who were homeschooling too. So there was always a group, you know, and we did group together we did plays together. We did festivals together. The parents studied together. We didn't teach each other's children, but we studied together and then sometimes We were getting together in big groups to have them have classes with, you know, specialty classes with other people, things like that. I mean, there was always a group, it wasn't just our family. And those people, obviously, we were all very supporting each other. And I think the attitudes towards homeschool are much different now than they used to be definitely much different now than they used to be. I don't think there's as much I don't think that's as much of a challenge.

Andy Earle
We're here with Catherine Read, talking about how parents can be more involved in children's academic lives. And we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show. So often, parents tell me they have a really hard time with conversations as the kids come home from school. And it's like, how was your day? What'd you learn about what you do, and the kids are like, it was fine.

Catherine Read
When you've done something for a day, you don't want to talk about, I mean, nobody wants to talk about it, you want to let it sink in. So what you talk about would not be what you did that day, it would have to be something from earlier from three or four days before that, go back to that, and ask about that. If you can find something to do together, where you're coordinating with each other, each of you doing a part of something so that you're working together, not just that you're watching them do something or they're watching you do something, if this is the attitude for the welder, if also that the teacher and the student are kind of standing side by side looking at something outside of them. And that way, it's not evaluation, it's attention. It's a joint attention to say, tell me what you did today. It's like they're kind of in a spotlight. Trusting your own judgment, trusting your own observation is a very, very important quality for young people. And they'll get that from the people around them. They don't get that by themselves, trusting your own observation and judgment is going to be supported by the people around you or not. And I think this is where the whole media thing comes in more now. You have to make your own decisions. And that is a huge challenge, taking you out into nature and just letting you experience what's there and trust the experience. It's not just the teacher going, Okay, now, did you see that? Okay, now that's important. And let me tell you the answer to this. It's the teacher saying, Okay, you set up a situation, you let it happen. This is chemistry, you know, you're going to put two substances together, and something's gonna happen. And then you say, what happened?

Andy Earle
Want to hear the full episode, head over to talking to teens.com/register. For a free trial of our premium podcast, you get exclusive access to loads of great content with no obligation and your membership supports the work we do here at talking to teens get started today with a free trial over at talking to teens.com/registered Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.