EP18 Importance of Daily Habits in Homeschool – Transcript

[00:00:00] Amy: Today I wanna share with you the importance of turning from self and looking upward and making those conscious decisions that help both our children keep on track, but also in grace help us to cultivate a home that honors God.

[00:00:20] Hi friends, and welcome. I’m your host AmyElizSmith. I’m a homeschool mom of three and have homeschooled each from the start. While I have a master’s in elementary ed, I want to teach other mamas that you don’t need a fancy degree to have the passion and knowledge to successfully educate your children from home.

[00:00:37] I hope to bring you encouragement to jump in and start your homeschool journey and provide my absolute best recommendations to help you begin your homeschool journey. Thanks for joining us along for this crazy, messy, grace filled homeschool ride.

[00:00:55] Welcome back friends. I am so excited to talk to you today about the importance of daily habits in your homeschool. Author Justin Whitmer Early wrote, “God’s Love inspires our actions, but our actions do not inspire God’s love.” Our family habits will not change God’s love for us, but God’s love for us should change our family habits.

[00:01:17] Today I wanna share with you the importance of turning from self and looking upward and making those conscious decisions that help both our children keep on track, but also in grace help us to cultivate a home that honors God in everything we do. Now, this is hard work. I am in the trenches with you. It is messy and every day presents a challenge, but I do wanna share with you some things God is revealing to me on how I can change my own habits, and also incorporating new family habits together, or existing family habits and in the best way. What are habits? These are things that we can either do that are good or bad, or they can be neutral. Some unconscious habits that are neutral are things like, we wake up, we brush our teeth, we might turn on the coffee.

[00:02:08] Author James Clear of the bestselling book, Atomic Habits, wrote that habits shape our identity. About 40 to 50% of all the actions we take are actually based on habit, and they are not necessarily conscious decisions. Changing the smallest part of a habit can really do big things in our lives. For example, I could say, okay, a change I wanna make is to read the first paragraph of one book to all of my children on the couch, because I’ve been having difficulty with that because they fight over who gets to sit next to mom or who gets the blanket, or I don’t have enough blanket.

[00:02:47] Sometimes I have done away with some of that routine with reading all three of them on the couch together. Instead of saying, we’re gonna do the whole thing, we’re gonna read all three or four passages today out of the three or four different books. I can instead make it a very small goal and the small goal would be, I’m gonna read one paragraph out of one book with my kids on the couch, no questions asked.

[00:03:11] I’m gonna do it. And then once we’ve started it then goes into reading even more. James Clear calls, this the Two Minute Rule and it’s the first two minutes that counts in any habit, or even really it could be two seconds. And his argument in his entire book, is that tiny changes can make a big difference in our lives.

[00:03:34] This book it’s called Atomic Habits. So those small atom sized habits truly can change your life. Small actions build over time and a 1% change every week can be a 52% change in our lives. How we do this, he has a great formula. It’s a four step formula. We should make good habits. Obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying.

[00:04:02] When we make a good habit, obvious, we are giving it a cue. We will do the thing that is most obvious to us. A great example for this is if you have the intention to work out in the morning, but you often miss that opportunity and something else comes up. A cue for that could be that your workout clothes are laid out and you’re just gonna put on your workout clothes, and that is the only thing you’re gonna accomplish.

[00:04:28] That’s that atomic sized habit that you can start is these days or every day I’m gonna just put on those workout clothes, or put on those running shoes that are right by my door.

[00:04:40] That habit can look attracted because you’re craving something. I am choosing who I wanna be. I’m a healthy person and I am going to own this, and I am going to do that workout. You need to also make that happen easy. So it’s easy to put on your workout clothes. These are the clothes you’re going to wear for the day, and that’s your response to that cue and that craving, and finally making it satisfying is that there’s a reward.

[00:05:06] You could tell yourself, I’m gonna have a snack after this, or I get to have breakfast after this. I get to have my coffee, or I get to have 10 minutes chatting with a friend on the phone. Anything you want to give yourself a reward after you’re trying to build a new habit. In the same way you can break bad habits by using those same four steps.

[00:05:29] Making something visible means it now becomes invisible, and you make something that you’ve been doing less likely to happen if it’s invisible. Let’s say that bad habit you wanna break is when you pick up your phone just to scroll with no purpose, you could keep your phone upstairs in a drawer for certain hours of the day so that it’s completely invisible and it’s not possible. You can make it unattractive by turning off your notifications then further making bad habits, unattractive and difficult and unsatisfying. His whole book goes into this in great detail, and I highly recommend it. It’s Atomic Habits by James Clear, and there’s a little trick here. The whole book is so good because he goes into many stories about his life and a lot of illustrations, but there is a cheat sheet, so to speak, and it is available for free on Libby.

[00:06:21] I love the Libby app. I love the Hoopla app too. That’s free with your local library if they’re partnered with Libby or Hoopla. But on Libby, there is an Atomic Habits cheat sheet that’s like less than an hour long that you could listen to and get just a taste of what Atomic Habits is all about.

[00:06:40] Now, how do we bring these habits into our lives and into our homeschool? And why is this important? Galatians 6:9 says, “Let’s not get tired of doing good because in time we’ll have a harvest if we don’t give up.” My hope and prayer for my family home is that I don’t tire of doing good. I don’t tire of trying to better myself for my children, and also in turn, I want them to create those habits that help them be upstanding citizens and help them in their lives to come. Charlotte Mason expressed the principle of habits this way to parents. She said in her volume two, “What you would have the man become that you must train the child to be.” We are training our children in their habits.

[00:07:25] We also are training ourselves. Often we are building up new habits for ourselves, and this means we must eliminate those bad habits until we’re not thinking about them or doing them without thinking. We can look to Charlotte Mason when we think about implementing these new habits or new routines.

[00:07:41] She talks extensively about how important it is to cultivate good habits with our children. Just like she said in that first quote that our children will become who we’ve trained them up to be. We realize that our children will not simply grow out of faults. They may have. She wrote, “Let’s face it. Our little ones are often cute when they do things wrong, but parents cannot afford to laugh at ugly tempers or disobedience. They say the child is so young, he does not know any better, but all that will come as he grows up. Now a fault of character left to itself can do no other than strengthen.” There she’s illustrating that if we don’t cultivate for our children and explain right from wrong and all these little habits, and the habits can include obedience or cleanliness or attentiveness.

[00:08:34] We must be consistent in helping our children create good and positive habits. Cuz like I said earlier, James Clear through his research has found that 40 to 50% of our actions are actually done through habit. And we are doing a lot of things unconsciously, and that is due to who we have been raised to be and who we’ve grown to be.

[00:08:59] Repetition is so important in consistency. Here is an example from the habit of obedience that Charlotte Mason talks about in her second volume. It’s important to insist on cheerful obedience. I always tell my children, you must do it the first time, every time, and with a happy heart. But here is Charlotte Mason.

[00:09:21] “This is a sort of thing which is fatal. The children are in their drawing room and a caller is announced. You must go upstairs now. Oh, mother, dear. Do let us stay in the window corner. We will be as quiet as mice. The mother is rather proud of her children’s pretty manners, and they stay. But they are not quiet, of course, but that is the least of the evils.

[00:09:39] They have succeeded in doing as they chose and not as they were bid. They will not put their necks under the yolk again without a struggle. Now it is in little matters that the mother has worsened. Bedtime Willie, oh mama, just let us finish this, and the mother will yield forgetting that the case in point is of no consequence.

[00:09:57] The thing that matters is that the child should be daily confirming a habit of obedience. By the unbroken repetition of acts of obedience, it is astonishing how clever the child is in finding ways of evading the spirit while he observes the letter. Mary come in, yes, mother, but her mother calls her four times before mother comes. Put away the bricks and the bricks are put away slowly with reluctant fingers.

[00:10:23] You must always wash your hands when you hear the bell. The child obeys for that once, but no more. To avoid these displays of un willfulness, the mother will insist from the first an obedience which is prompt, cheerful, and lasting save for lapses of memory on the child’s part. Tardiness, unwillingness, occasional obedience is hardly worth the having, and it is greatly easier to give the child the habit of perfect obedience by never allowing him in anything else.

[00:10:54] Then it is to obtain this mere formal obedience by a constant exercise of authority.” Wow, that is. So important for me to even read aloud again, and I read it earlier. How many times have I said It’s time for bed and the kids are not listening? And then bedtime becomes a battle of the wills, so to speak, rather than just a peaceful time.

[00:11:18] This is what we do every day. What is the vision for my home? How do I want it to look? Proverbs 29:18 says, “Where there is no vision that people perish.” When we are looking at our days and our homes, we wanna ensure that we are building our children up with their habits and their attitudes and cultivating their little hearts.

[00:11:39] Fred Rogers said “From the time you were very little, you’ve had people who have smiled you into smiling, people you have talked you into talking, sung you into singing, love you into loving.” Do we want to raise our children in this light to teach them and grow with them and love them and show them how to love? In his book, The Habits of the Household, Justin Whittell Early who I referenced at the very beginning. He describes how our ordinary daily routines show our children the love of God day in and day out. So I’ll definitely link his book and James Clear’s book Atomic Habits to the show notes so you can take a look. But I highly recommend the habits of the household to all families.

[00:12:22] He brings the reader through parts of the day in a parent’s life. In his earlier book, the common rule is also very good, and it sums up basic routines that any person should have as you frame your day around God and his kingdom. I just wanna look at just a few of his suggestions and give you ideas.

[00:12:43] Actually the habits of the household is available as the time of this recording is available for free on Libby. Then his book, the Common Rule, is available for free on Audible. Definitely take a look at those and take advantage of those apps that you could use with your local library. But let’s take a look at some of those habits. Waking. We wake up and how are we doing that? Are we waking up and jumping right into our phones and our screens and letting those dictate the rhythm of our days? Justin, he recommends kneeling in prayer before doing anything and turning your eyes to Jesus and embracing scriptures, reading, even if it’s the smallest passage. Maybe it’s a Psalm to frame our day and our children can see this as an example, and we can teach them also to do the same. He also describes having a day or a time of prayer before the day even begins. Now, his family doesn’t homeschool, but I love this context where the family comes together, maybe at the meal, and a simple prayer such as Father, son, and Holy Spirit, thank you for this day.

[00:13:51] Bless our day and help us to honor you in it. That habit of turning our hearts to God in the day can really help cultivate our hearts as well as our children’s hearts. Another habit is that of mealtimes. Mealtimes are so important. Having that community, building relationships with our children, having a time of conversation is so, so important and vital.

[00:14:17] He has a lot of great tips in there and he’s very, very honest. He has four boys and it is not all roses. I love his honesty in his words and in his book. Another habit he mentions and he goes at length in talking about his screen time. Now he approaches this and really all of his other topics with an attitude of grace.

[00:14:38] I love that he encourages us to just not look back or scorn behaviors that we’ve have or haven’t had, but instead, move forward and shape your habits towards wise and strong character. This screen time can include our own personal screen time that we are modeling for our kids, or also the screen time that our children will have with individual devices or the movies in the television shows that we’re able to watch.

[00:15:04] I love his de-emphasis of individual screen usage during times of car rides or maybe as an afternoon crutch during that kind of hour before dinner. Instead turning to, again, conversation and being together. But he does emphasize. The movie nights as a family are a great thing. Not only that can they be entertaining, but when you’re sharing in a story together, how important that can be because you’re carrying those moments together, but you’re also experiencing something in the world because we live here in the world.

[00:15:37] I love how he framed this, that if our children don’t see experiences and talk to us about things, good or bad, that they see in movies, and then they will eventually see in life then where else are they gonna be taught, how our response should be. He used the example of the movie The Sandlot, which is a fun family movie, but there’s some inappropriate attitude towards women in there.

[00:16:00] Again, it’s how you can talk in the safety of your own home, talking to your children about, what is right and wrong. I absolutely also wanna mention how important it is to frame our habits around screen time and to be just really intentional in our homes, ensuring that our screens are censored and that we have high parental controls on those.

[00:16:25] We use the Firewalla. We’ve also had success with the Circle, that was pretty good. I will attach to this episode in the show notes, a list of recommendations I have for how you can help your screen time at home and make sure that you’re protecting your kids from those terrible things like predators or pornography that is rampant on the internet.

[00:16:48] It truly is our job to protect our children and to be really proactive. Oh, be careful little eyes, what you see. In his other book, the Common Rule, which I mentioned is available on Audible for free for this time being, he talks about some other great habits, daily prayer, three times a day, the family meals, an hour off from phone a day, scripture before phone.

[00:17:14] Having conversations with friends intentionally one hour a week. Having time of media and of screens. Four hours perhaps a movie or two, but really making those choices intentionally rather than embracing the habit of just falling onto the couch and turning on whatever Netflix has available at that moment.

[00:17:35] I love the intentionality behind his recommendations in both of his books. Daily we can pray and remember that scripture before phone and really honor our family together with those daily prayers at the beginning of the day and those mealtimes. Then weekly those conversations with friends.

[00:17:55] This can be so important as homeschool moms. That we are encouraging one another, not complaining to each other, but really digging deep and seeking out a mentor, maybe an older woman who has been there before. That can really sometimes be the best way you can get encouragement. Then he also encourages weekly Sabbath rest.

[00:18:15] Colossians 3:23 & 24 says, “Whatever you do, do it from the heart for the Lord and not for people. You know that you’ll receive an inheritance as a reward. You serve the Lord Jesus Christ.” Thank you so much for coming along with me today to talk about how habits shape our lives and how we can best frame our homeschool thinking about that importance of habits.

[00:18:39] My prayer and my hope for you today is that this has encouraged you in your days to come, and we can honor God and raise children up for the Lord for their best futures.