The Sequoia Breeze

Rebecca: Welcome, listeners, to the Sequoia Breeze Podcast, a breath of fresh air for your homeschool. I am your host, Rebecca LaSavio. Thank you for joining us today. I think that you are going to feel enriched because of it. I am here with Melissa Griffin, also known as the HR Mom, and I've really been looking forward to this episode for a while. Melissa has worked in human resources for almost 20 years, recruiting and hiring talent in corporate America. As skills of entry level workers have been declining, she's seen how parenting styles can impact kids'success. She created the HR Mom online community, where she helps parents build these skills and independence at home. She employs proven leadership concepts and lots of humor to help parents raise and launch real world ready Kids. And we will unpack that phrase later on. Melissa leads from the parenting trenches. She's got a son who is a sophomore at Yale, a son in high school and a daughter in third grade. She's determined to raise adults with skills to pay the bills. She aims to make you laugh while inspiring you to stop parenting and start leading. So much good stuff there, Melissa, to unpack. And the first time I ever got on your Facebook page, I learned something that really, really helped me in my parenting journey. So I just have been so excited to be able to talk to you. So thank you for being here.

Melissa: I am thrilled to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Rebecca: Let's go back to the beginning of sort of your intro where we are talking about noticing a decline in what, entry level kids as they're entering the workforce, what they know how to do, their basic skills. What kinds of things are you talking about?

Melissa: So, Rebecca, when we hired back in, let's say, the late 90s, we would just assume that new hires in a professional role would come in and they would know how to answer the phone. They would be fine with face to face interaction. They could make some decisions. You didn't have to train them on everything. Just putting people on hold, for example. And we are finding year after year, a decline in some of these basic relational skills. So real time conversations, problem solving, knowing how to handle the unknown or gray areas, and also just a reduction in their tolerance for doing tasks that aren't desirable.

Rebecca: Right.

Melissa: So sticking with the more yucky parts of the job, and I'm speaking because we're calling them kids, but these are young adults entering professional, even a call center environment. And we used to consider these things built in. And our companies are having to adjust our training programs to teach some of these basic skills they're required, they're needed, and they're just not coming in with them.

Rebecca: It's so interesting to me that they're adults that still think everything should be comfortable or everything should be enjoyable all the time. I heard somebody say a long time ago that we put too much focus on fun in our culture, that every time somebody leaves the house, you're like, have fun. Not everything is fun, right?

Melissa: You get to adult and you get to adulthood and you say, gosh, there's not a lot of fun. This seems like a lot of work with a teeny pockets of fun built in. And when we don't gradually ease them into that, a bulk of your day will be doing things you may not like. We do them an incredible disservice.

Rebecca: And I would even go a step further in that we haven't set them up to find joy in a job well done, regardless of how the process felt.

Melissa: That's right.

Rebecca: Like you said, so much of life is not fun, but it doesn't have to be. And you can still have purpose in what you're doing, regardless of whether scrubbing the toilet is fun. You stick with it till it's done, and you do it when it needs doing. But we're obviously not even I mean, we could be talking about scrubbing toilets.

Melissa: But I have a whole class for that.

Rebecca: So why do you think this is? Why do you think that? I mean, the 90s wasn't that long ago. I was an adult in the 90s. Talk to me about what happened in I mean, what are we talking, 20 years?

Melissa: The quick knee jerk reaction is always, it's the phones, it's the phones. But it's more than just our kids having a phone. Our kids have been raised by parents who've had phones. So what we used to learn, we learned from our parents by observing and by listening. So if my mom had to do a return, she took me with her. I walked up. I didn't have any distractions. I listened to her have this return exchange conversation at the counter of customer service. When she had to make a phone call or make an appointment, I listened to her. She was on the phone call, and I heard it all. I saw what she was doing. I really learned by osmosis a lot of conversations, conflict resolution, et cetera. Our kids don't see that because we do our returns quietly on our phones. We have all kinds of interactions. We schedule things, we make reservations, and they're not observing any of that. So when they are then asked to have these interactions in person, they don't have examples to pull from, and they haven't done them themselves. So the phone yes, our kids are distracted and they're not learning lessons in the real world. But a lot of it is it's very difficult for us to just naturally, effortlessly model these things like our parents did. And then we also feel this sense of the world being so unsafe. So I remember as a kid being in many, many situations where I was alone. And the way my brother and I were raised in today's standard, we were like the box car children. Right. We just went around the society and figured things out and had conversations and drank out of people's hoses. Right. So it's not the good old days. Those are just natural skill building exercises. That my kids living in a Jampacked subdivision. They didn't have that experience. And then we just have a hard time letting our kids be in these independent spaces where they're being kind of raised and kept safe by the community and they get to fumble through and learn things. I've had to be much more intentional to teach these things to my kids that my parents could rely on the community to teach me.

Rebecca: I have distinct memories of falling off my bike and I wasn't at home and I didn't have a phone. I had to figure it out. Like one time my bike got all twisted around me, I was stuck and I just had to holler for help. But I survived. I'm alive.

Melissa: That's right. We learn to be scrappy, right? We learn to use our resources. And that's what we're kind of talking about here. We may call them life skills and we formalize it, but really we want our kids to be scrappy and to be able to gather up their resources and use them when they need them.

Rebecca: So you're not talking about like, we should stop parenting, you're talking about in some ways the 80s have become a little bit idealized.

Melissa: Sure.

Rebecca: I don't know about that, but so how do we start to be more intentional about giving our kids a little bit of space?

Melissa: I use the words like trying to get our kids to be real world ready. And that means for them to launch whatever that looks like. It's not college ready, it's not job ready. It's just real world ready to navigate it as an adult. And I talk a lot about there's a graph. Let's get the graph. And the vertical y axis is skills or things they need to do to be independent. So this is making your own appointments, this is scheduling things with your friends, but also making your own lunch and keeping track of your assignments, whatever that's on the left hand side and then across the bottom is years one through 18. So when you think about right at 18, there's this goal, this target up in the far right corner that says by 18 I should have gone up the independence and skills and there's a target there. And this should be a gradual line that spreads out evenly for 18 years. But what tends to happen is we don't build these skills when they're younger. And around ten, 1112, we start going, you don't know how to make your own phone calls. You don't even know how to order your own food. You're not even doing your own laundry. How come you don't clean your room? How come I'm doing everything around here? And there will be this sharp incline of we got to get you more independent because you're going to be driving soon. What we want to do is want to say, let's avoid this big, steep teenage now I'm trying to get you to do all of these things that you've never done. You feel inadequate, you feel nervous about it. And let's start when they're as young as we can, saying little by little, we're going to increase their independence and increase their skills and autonomy so that when they become 18, they're ready to launch, whatever that looks like for them. What we're finding in the workplace is when it's time to launch, there's a big gap from that target of everything they need to launch and where they actually are when they hit 18. And that gap I've kind of termed it myself, called the real world readiness gap. That gap of what they need to be a successful independent adult. And what they have is what results in things like delayed milestones. Kids who just aren't doing things that adults should be capable of doing. Lots and lots of anxiety, depression, thinking, how come people my age can do these things and I can't? What's wrong with me? Or I don't want to leave my house because I don't know what I'm going to encounter and I feel nervous. I don't know how to navigate the world out there. It's depression and hopelessness. We're seeing suicidal thoughts right around that age, 18 to 24, when they get out in the real world and feel like they don't have the skills they need to navigate it, it's a pretty serious issue. More than just it would make my life easier if my kids could do more for themselves.

Rebecca: I heard you talk about that on another podcast I listened to quite a while ago and it really struck me as making sense. I feel like I've heard a lot of people saying, oh, these young adults are stressed out and they're anxious and people don't really seem to know why. You're the first person I've heard give it a really practical reason. And I think those reasons make a lot of sense. And it also strikes me that they're remarkably fixable.

Melissa: They're remarkably fixable. And of course, this is a very complex nuance. There's more to it for each and every kiddo. But as a whole, if we're painting with a broad brush, especially if you've been grown up. And if you've grown up in a world where your world is online so you can text and you can wait and you can think about what you want to say and you can respond when you're ready, you can craft the perfect response. When you've done everything behind a screen with that protection of you're in control and then all of a sudden you're being placed in the world where conversations are real time and you have to think on your feet. You don't have time to type of a response. You can't ask your friends. Their advice. You can't crowdsource or poll, right? You can't Google. And you are in this environment where all of these on the spot moments are happening. There's just a fear and a helplessness that says, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to navigate this space without my parent with me. That's a highly anxiety inducing scenario, and so many kids are facing that right at 1819, and it's been debilitating. The numbers are through the roof of kids with anxiety. And in my recent company, and I was the HR director, we had rooms in HR for employees having anxiety attacks. Just multiple conference rooms where people were having to take short term disability because of anxiety, because they're so worried about the next call and what the customer might say that might catch them off guard or a mistake that they might make or feedback they might get. We want our kids to have tolerance and endurance for that.

Rebecca: It's really interesting because as you're talking, I'm thinking maybe homeschool kids aren't as much behind a screen and it's a little bit a lot of homeschool families want their kids to not be on screens as much. And yet I'm also thinking, wait a minute, the vast majority of these numbers are referring to kids that are at school all day with kids to talk to. So it feels like an interesting why can't they then handle somebody talking to them on the phone when they've interacted with teachers all day? And they've had students sitting around them all day, and it feels a little incongruous.

Melissa: That's right, because you and your community know that homeschooling and a co op model, it provides so much opportunity for this type of practice. If families who have a homeschooling environment, it is ideal to almost organically provide these opportunities if we take advantage of it. When they're in these, there are fewer interactions than you would think of strangers like Cashiers DPS employee. Right. There's fewer opportunities where they don't know what's expected. They have the same six teachers. They've got everything outlined on a syllabus. They do their very best not to interact with certain teachers or they say, hey, I'm just going to send an email.

Rebecca: Right.

Melissa: There's lots of control that they still have. But I feel like in homeschooling, you have so much opportunity to be exposed to the world out there on a daily basis, monday through Friday, that other kids may not have.

Rebecca: Do you think parents aren't parenting or do you think parents don't realize that these skills are missing and so they aren't intentional about it?

Melissa: I think parents don't realize how important these skills are and that they are not picked up organically.

Rebecca: Okay.

Melissa: I think kids who are over parented even have more risk of not developing.

Rebecca: These skills because mom's done it all.

Melissa: Absolutely. And really, how do we start? We've got to start early with identifying that you are on your own path so we've got to position our kids for independence. So let's visualize I'm on a path and each of my kids are on his or her own path. Instead, what a lot of us do is we say we're on a path and we've got three little kids on this path with us, and we're either forging ahead, making sure the path is clear, or we're scooting behind them and we're cleaning up their message and we're making sure that they don't get hurt too much or that they're viewed positively. Right? So we're ordering their food for them. We're packing their bags for them. We're making plans for them. We're texting the neighbor to see if she can come out to play. We are doing things for them that if we would separate them and place them on their own paths, they would have to do for themselves. So what I have to say is if we're going to talk about practical, take out a notepad and pen. Here's some tips for how to start is to start early. And don't take on problems or scenarios or skill building activities that belong to.

Rebecca: Them, which I'm going to interrupt you for just a second, because as you're describing the mom who's cleaning up after them or forging the path ahead or doing all that, that sounds like a pretty high stress environment for mom. Yes, that's a lot of work.

Melissa: It's a lot of work. But what we think is in the short term, sometimes it's a lot less work. It is a lot less work. I know exactly what my kids want. I know that this one doesn't like ketchup and I know that this one doesn't. It's easier for me just to place the family order than to let each child order. So at the beginning it's less work to over parent. But then as they get older, all of a sudden you are wiped and you're exhausted because the parenting work just keeps growing as the kids get older. And now you're also doing things they're capable of doing for themselves. It's like when my kids hit 10, 12, 14, that preteen tween age. That's when I realized, whoa, I've got these people on my team that have a lot of bandwidth and capacity and they are not doing certain things that they could do. I would not be this overburdened if I would delegate some of these things. That's really when the HR mom kind of brand was built was when I said, oh my gosh, I've got human resources in my own family and I'm the bottleneck, right? I'm the bottleneck. I'm supposed to be the manager and I'm checking the mail and answering the phones.

Rebecca: That's an excellent way to think about it. I love it.

Melissa: We parents need to promote ourselves. We're the managers and we don't answer the phones anymore because we have people on our team that can do it. And management and project management isn't doing the tasks. It's managing, overseeing, training, equipping, giving feedback, and sharing the tasks so that we don't become the bottleneck.

Rebecca: All right, so let's go back to the nitty gritty of how to do that. Okay? You said start early.

Melissa: So let's picture our kids on their own path, and we say, what does my child need right now? Is this a skill they can do on their own, or they can almost do on their own? Because that's when we don't want to step in. If they can do it or they can almost do it, this is the perfect time for you to step back. So for an example, I have an eight year old girl, and she wants a refill on her milk. That's a problem that she has. Let's say she's four. She wants a refill of her milk. She's at a restaurant. That's her problem on her path. Can she ask for a refill? I think she can, or she almost can. So let's teach her. In this moment, you just have to raise your hand, and when they come by, say, may I please have some milk? May I please have some milk? You did it. You did it. And right there is the first seed of, I can use my voice to get what I want. I don't have to go through this middleman anymore. That's my mom, who might say no or who might forget or who might, hey, I can get my own refill. Okay? I can get up and get my own. Okay. This independence and this autonomy of who I have some control in my life starts as early as we start letting them do things that are solving their own problems.

Rebecca: And if they've gone to get the milk out of the fridge and refill it and spill it, instead of, well, I'm going to do it for them next time. Now, do I clean it up? No.

Melissa: We say, hey, she's got a problem. She has spilled milk. So within her ability, she's three. She can use paper towels. She's going to clean it up. Might I go mop it later so it's not sticky? Sure. But she can realize, oh, I made a mistake. I have problems. I can solve my own problems. I'm a problem solver, and I have autonomy. Right? Or maybe we problem solve together. If it's this full or above, Mommy needs to help me. If it's halfway or below, I can get it myself. That's what we had to do. If it's below the handle, you can do it by yourself.

Rebecca: Which, again, just helps them realize there is a degree of ability here. Because the milk jug is big doesn't mean that's right.

Melissa: Let's extrapolate that out onto we're going on a trip. We each have a bag to pack. So there's four of us, and there's four separate paths, and there's four different people at different ages, different abilities, different neurologies, different wiring with different levels that they can complete this task on their own. So one might need a colorful checklist with drawings. One might need you to sit and do it with them. One might need to say, hey, pack your bag. You're in fifth grade now, so you know what you need, and I'll check it at the end, as opposed to, I'm a mom who has four people to pack for.

Rebecca: That example hits our family because we used to live internationally, and so there was a lot of travel, and it was exhausting. It was so much mental load for me to carry when all the people were little, right. And as they got bigger, though, I could write out one list, and the kids, it cracked me up. They'll make their own column for a check off, but I can make one list. You need four pairs of pants, three shirts, five pairs of underwear, one warm thing. Every once in a while, for the most part, they've done fine. Every once in a while, somebody like, whoops? I never did grab that sweatshirt. Well, I'm sorry you're chilly.

Melissa: And that's how we learn, right? We get to the swimming pool, and we have to swim in our regular shorts, and they don't stay up. And next time we remember our swim trunks, right? And that's okay. I should have brought playing cards or I forgot my charger. That's okay. That's how we learn. And then they realize if I pack well, things go well for me. If I pack sloppily, I don't enjoy my trip as much. But the only way they learn that is if we let them do it. We let them do it and let them consequences. That's right. Now, obviously, am I going to let my son forget his EpiPen? No. Am I going to let my daughter leave without her glasses? No. But here's what I say. My kids are five years apart and then four years apart, so we have a pretty big gap. And until she was five, we only had the two kiddos, so we adopted her. She was in kindergarten, and all of a sudden, it was a whole rescrambling of, oh, gosh, I'm used to two kids who can do almost everything on their own, to someone who has really not developed any of these skills in her past life. So let's say she can do tasks to 30% completion, and I'm going to have to just do the next 70, and my high schooler can do 80%. I have to do 20, and my senior can do 90%. I only have to do ten. That's where we need to stay is we're only going to step in at the ten to 15% that they just cannot do. But we tend to do is we tend to say they can't do it, so I'll do it for them.

Rebecca: An interesting way to think about it.

Melissa: No, I don't have to do it. They can only do it 80%. Correct. And someone said, well, then he can't do it. I'll say, well, he can't do the last 20%, and the only way he's going to get there is if you let him feel successful at 80 and then he feels successful at 85 the next time. And that's how they're going to build up to 100% readiness. Right?

Rebecca: Yeah. Or, I mean, in the case of, like, I make them the list, it's maybe they do the last 80%, I need to do the first 20. Sure. Give them a footstool to finish the job.

Melissa: That's right. And we say, all right. And what we do in our family, when we're learning to pack bags and we're using this as just one particular skill, there's 100 of them, right. Is you'll lay everything out, and then we're going to check it together. We're going to point at it and check it together, and then I'll pack it in in an organized way. By the time you're going on vacation and they're in high school, you're going, Is everybody packed? And you're leaving. You're not having to check anymore. So age appropriate, gradual pace, increasing these building blocks, but it starts with placing them on their own path and letting them do it their way. Right. The next thing I think we have to do is we have to help them create a personal vision for their lives. And this sounds like, whoa, that's out of left field. But why do our kids want to learn these skills? It's not a homeschooling assignment. It's not to please my mom. Why does this matter to me? Why should I be working on these skills? We have to build that in for them to keep them intrinsically motivated to learning these things. So here's what that can look like in my family. I'll ask the kids, when you get older, what kind of freedoms do you want to enjoy? Do you want me to be able to drop you off at a movie theater knowing that you can reserve your seats, purchase your tickets, get your concessions, get your change, go sit down, find the restrooms, meet up with your friends? What do you want your days and weekends to look like when you're in the future? What do you want to do for work? What kind of things do you want to be able to buy? And then what do you need to learn or practice or what do you need to know to get there? And when they can attach learning these skills to, oh, my mom's going to drop me off places, or oh. If I can learn these skills that are valuable, I can buy the big screen TV, I can buy the first generation Michael Jordan shoes. Right. Attaching something that they value, and then these tasks and these skills won't feel like chores. And that's important. That when you're giving them these independent skills challenges, that they don't see it as a chore. They see it as, oh, I'm growing toward this thing. That I care about this independence, this freedom. And that's an important vision to really cast for them.

Rebecca: So it's not like you're asking them to know what they want the rest of their life to look like, but you want them to think about maybe quality of life or level of freedom that they would like to have. And it seems to me maybe this is too much of a tangent, but in my mind, there's two things simultaneously that are happening that maybe overlap some. That one is you're building skills. They can do these things, but also there's a level of trust being established as well. I know I can drop you off at the movie theater because I've seen you demonstrate an ability to care for yourself and problem solve if something doesn't go the right way.

Melissa: That's right. When I can trust that you can safely and confidently handle yourself, the doors are much wider open for you. I mean, I'm not going to put keys to a car in your hand if you don't know how to handle yourself when you get there, when you get places. Right. So if you can show me that you can research Driver's Ed, you can print out all the forms, you can handle yourself at the DPS, those are the first signs that you're ready to drive. But if I know if you get in an accident, if you get a flat tire that you can handle yourself and you can confidently navigate those situations, it'll be so much easier for me to just let you go.

Rebecca: That's not something you magically build at 16. No, that's something you build with communication and practice and trial and error leading up to that.

Melissa: That's right. So I have these it was boys, and my boys love a challenge or an adventure, and if I could create something that was called a challenge, they would be more interested in learning it. Right. So I created this term called an independence challenge, and now it's kind of become a building block in the HR. Mom community is they're just age appropriate activities that are meant for and designed for teaching a new skill for them to complete almost all on their own, stretch out their comfort zone and build some of this autonomy. And this is a safe opportunity to learn and make mistakes while I'm here and while I'm with you. Because the time you don't want them having to learn all of this is when they're living on their own for the first time and they're having to navigate these things and you're not with them. And maybe it's not as socially acceptable to ask the wrong question and make a mistake, but when you're a ten year old and you're asking a question, no one expects you to get it right. So the more we can practice when they're younger, the more they will learn and they'll become confident in these things.

Rebecca: Can you give an example. Of an independence challenge.

Melissa: Yes. Let's do it. Okay, remember, it's not a test or a quiz or an assignment, right? We're not trying to embarrass them or give them undue pressure. We're just trying to create a manageable level of anxiety or challenge. So here's an example. My son has a pair of pants that we bought, and they're too short, and he's eight nine. Okay, I have an independence challenge for you. Do you think you can go up to the register and with this receipt and say, these pants were too big? And she's going to say, okay, which card did you pay with? Do you have a receipt? And we role play, and I'll stand right behind you, and I'll pretend that I'm invisible. And so he goes up with his little pants and his little receipt, and he says, These are too small, or these are too big. And she says, do you have a receipt? And he hands it to her because we've practiced this very short in the car. And she says, okay, I put the money back on your mom's card. And he looks in her eyes and says, thank you, and I go, you did it. You did it. Right? That confidence that builds. And he's like, I'm the only eight year old I know that does my own returns. And there's a pride in that. Like, okay, I can handle that. And guess what? Adults are kind of okay with me. They're not mad if I say the wrong thing. I'm worthy of taking up space. I'm worthy of the people behind me having to wait. It's okay if I fumble through. And now I can do one more thing, and it just gradually builds a tolerance for stress and social anxiety when it's safe. We had a situation where I said, okay, I have a coupon. Go up in a gas station. I'm going to stand in the corner, and you're going to purchase two pints of ice cream with a coupon. And they do it, and they froze. And so my son froze. He grabbed his brother's arm, they froze. And I just stepped in and I said, it's okay. And I finished the transaction. We talked in the car. So you froze. What could you do when you freeze? Step out of line, right? Just step out of the line. Give yourself space. Take a deep breath, remember what you're talking about, or start over. And so now they've learned how to step out of line, right? So there's so many pressure off that's, right? Okay, we can create space. I sent my son into the grocery store. He was 16, so about to have his driver's license, and I sent him in and said, here's a list of 15 items in the grocery store. Can you get those 15? I'm going to go run a quick errand and come back. And when he did, he got to the register, and he didn't have enough money in his checking account, because I didn't even think of that when I assigned this challenge. And so because he has done this so many times, he knew to say, I'm going to need to step out of line, and she put the transaction on hold. And he happens to know people can do that because we've done this so many times. He knows they can put the transaction on hold, or they can start over, and it's okay to inconvenience the cashier while you're learning. That's what society is doing. We're helping kids learn. And so he stepped out, and he called me and said, I don't have any my card's not working. And I said, okay. Showed him transferred money, and he went back in, and he learned that that was anxious, but it was also okay. It's totally fine for these challenges to go sideways. And the more they go sideways, the more they learn that it's okay if things don't go well. And anxiety is based in fear. Fear of not knowing what to say, fear of not knowing what to do, fear of all of these unknowns that could come up and your systems panic. We can build their tolerance for that and go, It's okay, it's okay. If something goes wrong, I know that I can handle it.

Rebecca: It strikes me, too, that often fear manifests itself first in anger. You can get really angry. Like, he could have gone angry at you because you forgot. Or sometimes it could be a really misplaced, I'm angry at the cashier because this isn't working. But these opportunities to practice can help. It's just a thing to be solved. There's nothing to be mad about here.

Melissa: That's right.

Rebecca: And help our kids be able to be more peaceful people.

Melissa: That's right. It's a flexibility and an agility. Right? We need them to be able to flex as life happens. And I just remember I had my middle son, and he's given me permission to talk about this in the past, is every time life gets hard, he's like, what's going on? Why is this happening to me? Life is happening at me. This traffic is happening to me. And I'd say, hey, buddy, you're on a roller coaster, and it's going to have ups and downs. But you seem to think you're on a train, and every time it goes up and down, you're like, what? This is a train. This is supposed to be smooth. But if I can just tell you you're on a roller coaster, and all of a sudden, you're not so offended by the ups or surprised by the downs, you're just like, okay, I forgot. I keep thinking I'm on a train, but this is a roller coaster, so we can just change your expectations that it's not that life happens between ups and downs. Like, life is the ups and downs. Life is the fun and the chores. It is the tasks and the fun, right? That is life. All of it is. And I think our teens sometimes think life will happen when our mom stops asking us to do these things that interrupt life.

Rebecca: Right? Well, I confess sometimes I think that way. Like, I don't want to ask her to do something because I want her to be able to have more free time or she's already doing so much school. I don't want to add on chores. And yet I have to remember, you know what? It's life. And we have all of these things that we have to learn and do.

Melissa: Yeah. And we so what we're learning is that we have to learn how to have fun while doing the tasks that life demands. So I've got to find fun in the shopping. I have to find fun when I'm doing chores. I have to go, this is when I'm going to listen to my podcast. Or if I can knock this out, I'm going to give myself some ice cream. I have to find ways to go. If I try to wait until all of my checklist is done to have joy and to have fun, I'm going to be a very depressed adult. And if we can tell our kids, hey, when you're little, your whole life is play and a teeny bit of responsibility, like put your diaper in the pail and right, put your little napkin in the trash, that's your responsibility. It should be a gradual inverse right, where as a teenager, more of your day is responsibilities than is fun because you've got homework and you've got practice for band and you've got chores, and you have to keep up with your dentist appointment. And as they almost graduate, it's a lot of responsibility and not so much leisure. I call it free time, and it's a gift to our kids to help them gradually feel this, okay? The older I get, the less leisure time I have and the more responsibility time I have. That's life. So if your kids have 8 hours of free time and no chores, like 8 hours of the evening, 4 hours of the evening themselves, they can stand to do 20 to 30 minutes of chores. And you shouldn't feel guilty about it.

Rebecca: I think too, sometimes. We talked a while ago about how it can feel like it's easier for mom to just do it until they've learned that skill in the teaching process. And yet that's the job. It's the job for all parents. But as a homeschooling family, we have the advantage of having a little extra time to put into that. But sometimes I can think, this is getting in the way of school, trying to help you follow through on your laundry. Chore is getting in the way of school. And I sometimes have to stop and think, this is school.

Melissa: This is what we're learning, right? This is the school of life. And I'll tell you, I have a son who through a lot of hard work and a whole lot of good fortune. Got a scholarship to Yale. And he is in school with a lot of kids who have all of the brains and no smarts. And they are struggling because now, not only do I have to handle Ivy League classes with these professors that expect so much of me, I also have to learn how to make a phone call, and I have to learn how to make my own doctor's appointment, and I have to learn what to do with my vehicle registration. And I don't know how to get my own Immunizations. And if we release them with all of the book smarts and they don't know how to interact with the outside world, they are crippled with anxiety and none of that other stuff will matter. So I think when we can think of this as just as important as their academic learning, it is easier to make room for it.

Rebecca: And we were talking about that. The point of their academic learning is usually to have a job that allows them to contribute to society, take care of themselves and their families. And yet if we haven't equipped them we started this whole conversation talking about these are entry level basic. They shouldn't even really be considered job skills. They're life skills that you should have. But now companies have to spend time, money and resources on parenting your children.

Melissa: Sure. And if you get into the workplace and your computer is not working over and over and over, but you don't have the confidence to say, hey, supervisor, I don't have the equipment I need to do my job, or you're too nervous to ask questions about your benefits, to ask questions about needing leave, it can really harm you in the workplace. It leaves you vulnerable. It leaves you vulnerable to mistreatment by others because you don't know how to speak up for yourself. And so we don't want them to get to their dream job and really be unable to handle the soft skills, the stress, the unknowns, all of that. That's not spoken in the job description.

Rebecca: One thing we've run into with one of my kids is the ability to tell me something's not going well with school, speak up to say I need help. And that's hard because it's not even just about something as benign as I need some different equipment. It's vulnerable because there's a problem with how that child is working. But they need help either with the content itself or usually with managing how things are getting done. And I can step in and help get us back on the right track but unless that child speaks up and tells me I don't know, there's a problem. And so being able to say that to mom is one thing but being able to say it to a boss like hey, I don't actually know what I'm doing here or I'm struggling with workload.

Melissa: Yeah. And so the more. We can get them to say, I don't know if I'm standing in the right line to a stranger to is this where I place my order? Or is this where I pick up orders for them to just say, I hear my own voice. I've developed my own voice, and I know that I can use my voice to get what I need. It makes them safer, it makes them more effective. It gets them what they want in life if they can just discover that voice and realize they can use it to get what they need.

Rebecca: Have you noticed a tendency to oldest children are often maybe of this bent more anyway, they may be more independent. It might be easier with your oldest to say, your sister's crying, please go and say this to that person. But then the ones that follow can follow the oldest. They can do the talking and talk a little about being maybe more intentional with it's not just one child that has these skills.

Melissa: That's right. So in my case, it's even more amplified because my first born is neurotypical. And so he learns things on the first try, and then he remembers from past experience. Right. And then all of the rest of us have ADHD, and so we don't remember from the last time it happened. We keep learning the same lessons over and over. So it's very easy for us to allow our first born to do the executive functioning for his siblings to say, hey, buddy, time to get up. Are you late? Don't you know today's PE? Do you have your shoes on? He can do a lot of the executive functioning for his brother if we're not careful, or he'll pack for both of them, or he'll do the majority of the chores because he's faster and he ends up carrying the load for his brother. So I have found it much harder with my middle son and my daughter because it's very easy to just let the older do it, or A, it's not his responsibility, but B, it is really robbing the other two of their own voice and their own autonomy. So I would say my high schooler, my second one, now that his brother's at college and he's away, he's really been able to come into his own. Now he has to do his own communicating with the administration at school. He has to find his own way. He has to remember to add things to the family calendar that his brother used to always do. Yes, I think it's much harder.

Rebecca: Yeah. And I found, too, at least with mine, the youngers aren't as interested. So it requires a little more effort for me. Whereas the older wants to do it, hey, can I go up and do that? Hey, can I say this? Hey, can I the youngers would just as soon let me or the oldest child take care of business.

Melissa: Sure. And that's when we say, if you don't want the dessert, if you don't want to ask, then you're not getting it. We want to take advantage of their intrinsic motivation. So for my kids, if they want to go to a birthday party, they have to call an RSVP. So my daughter was nonverbal at four years old and at six years old, she calls in RSVPs. I mean, these are skills that can be taught pretty quickly with not very many instances of practice. And so we practice. Ring, ring. Hi, my name is and I am in so and so's class. I'm coming to his party. Okay, thank you. You did it. Now you can go to the birthday party now, Rebecca. Am I really going to keep her from the party? No, but I will say it says that if you want her to have a seat for you and some cake for you and some ice cream for you, that you have to RSVP. Here's what that means. And once she did it the first time and of course the adults are like, you're so great, you were so great on the phone and I'm so proud of you for it. Builds her confidence. Now when she gets an invitation, she just she's nine now. She's RSVP'd for three years and so those things don't give her anxiety anymore. Can you call this person and ask if you're supposed to bring your own socks to this party or ask if you're supposed to bring a sleeping bag? I could easily text the other mother, but that's not a problem on my path. That's a problem on her path. She needs to know if she needs a sleeping bag, not me. I'm going to make her solve her own problems.

Rebecca: The phone is something I've worked hard on with my kids in a lot of ways. We've got a house phone so they can actually call their own friends and things. But what it means is I have to give them the numbers. They can't look them up in a phone book anymore. They're all in my phone. So we have a little sheet of paper next to the phone, just like in the old days. It was inside one of the cupboards. That's why the local phone numbers and they have a list and when there's a new friend added to the list, then there's a new and it's fascinating to me because for the most part, they have to call the other mom because most of the other people don't necessarily have phones for the kids to call. A couple do, or the kids might be starting to get their own phones, which I sort of push off. But we have a house phone so they can make those phone calls and I don't know if you can play with them. Go call them yourself. My brain is busy.

Melissa: That's right. When you're giving an independence challenge, like self checkout, like, I'm going to give you your school supply list. And I want you to get the items on the list and I'm going to stand nearby to answer questions. I'm just trying to think of you're going to put your books on hold at the library and then you're going to go up and give them your name and you're going to get your books. The red box, ordering your food at a drive through. I mean, there's so many examples of weighing produce, filling out your own forms of the dentist's office, anything that the child needs. We first ask, can they do this themselves or can they almost do this themselves? But during the challenge, you're saying you're staying close. You pretend to be invisible, but you're close. Mistakes are expected. My son was calling the bank to get his bank balance, and she said, this is your balance. And he said, I don't know why the app isn't working on my phone. She walked him through it and then he said, okay, love you, bye. And he just looked up to me and you could tell he just died inside. And I said, well, you just told the cashier you love her. You just told the operator you love her. What happened? And he goes nothing. And I was like, that's right? Nothing. That's like worst case scenario and it's fine. She probably made her day. That's right. She probably told her coworkers. And so this is like, hey, you're allowed to take up time and space. You're supposed to make mistakes. You're a ten year old paying a bill online, right? You're supposed to make mistakes. So you can sign in for your haircut and say the wrong thing. That's fine. Smile, encourage. We're not rushing them. We're giving them time. And before long, these things will be second nature, absolute second nature.

Rebecca: And once you can do all those things, when you encounter something completely unknown, it's not going to be nearly as stressful because you know you are capable. You know, you are able to figure out a situation.

Melissa: That's right. So these are the skills that will not the knowledge, not the brain smarts, not the books, not the grades. What will differentiate them from their colleagues when they enter workforce and they enter adulthood is how can they interact with others? Can they use their resources? Can they look it up? Can they read the signs? Can they ask people around them? Can they use context clues? Can they problem solve if they're given a gray area or some kind of unknown situation? Can we make on the fly independent decisions, knowing that you could guess wrong and that's okay? And then can you take coaching? Can you take feedback? All of these kind of examples are these are the skills that will differentiate them and that will give them the confidence to say, hey, I don't know what I'm going to encounter, but I do know how to step out of line and create space. I do know how to say, oh, I'm sorry. I do know how to say, I don't know where I'm going. Can you help me? And that opens the world up to them. It helps you to release them. I mean, I had to drop off my brand new 18 year old in Connecticut and fly home 2000 miles. He has an EpiPen and food allergies, and I just had to drop him off. And I thought, you know what, whatever he comes across, he can figure it out. He really can. And he has.

Rebecca: You actually posted on your Facebook page one day. Didn't he have an allergic reaction?

Melissa: He did his third day in college, and he was out on a camping trip off the grid. So he had to administer the EpiPen himself. He had to monitor his heart rate on an Apple Watch, which I never would have thought of. He had to walk a mile and a half, an hour and a half to an emergency, to an ambulance, go to the hospital, give them his medical history. I mean, he did it. He called me at the very end and said, it's all taken care of. I just wanted you to know what happened. I'm on my way back to the campsite.

Rebecca: He went back camping.

Melissa: He's 18 now. So I'm like, are you sure you shouldn't be resting for 48 hours? But these are life saving skills. And now he has had to learn so much more. Any of our kids who take medication, who are diabetic, who have all of these added challenges, these skills are even more important for them.

Rebecca: Did that almost mean as much to you as graduating from high school?

Melissa: Oh, absolutely. I said, he is going to make it. He's going to make it. Yeah, it absolutely did.

Rebecca: And if he can take care of himself that well, you also know he can take care of others. It sort of blows open this world around him of there's so much he's capable of.

Melissa: There's so much he's capable of. And as long as he knows I can make mistakes and I can learn from them, we give immediate feedback after every one of these challenges. So if I say, you did great, but next time, I would say my name first, like, you forgot to tell them who you are, or you did a great job, but I probably would have said this instead of that. And that gives them practice getting feedback. Like, oh, okay, I'm not defensive. If we can give them practice getting feedback, that's something in the workplace that kids are. You know, new hires are breaking down when they're given feedback, or they're quitting at lunch because they got coached in the morning. And so, hey, I can take coaching and feedback. This is how I learn. No big deal.

Rebecca: And sometimes getting feedback is awkward and it's uncomfortable, and the relationship can sometimes need to be rebuilt or strengthened, not because anything's wrong, but because it's uncomfortable to confront somebody and say, hey, this was a problem. We need to change this going forward. And if our kids can't live in that discomfort for a day or two while it sorts itself out, that's a hard skill. I don't enjoy it.

Melissa: Nobody does. And that's what we tell our kids. Nobody likes it.

Rebecca: Nobody.

Melissa: But if you can sit in the hard space, let the wave hit over you, let those waves wash over you. Waves of first, embarrassment, second, defensiveness, wanting to explain yourself and anger and wanting to quit and all of it rejection, whatever, and those waves hit you, and you're still standing. You're still standing. And when we can let our kids give us feedback and show them or say, hey, I got coached at work today. Someone at work told me that I interrupt too much, and that's an ADHD feedback. I've gotten on every job that I interrupt. And as she was giving me the feedback, I wanted to interrupt her. I told my high school son that. I said, you're going to get feedback. And sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong.

Rebecca: But you got to be able to.

Melissa: Sit in it, take it, learn from it, and move on. And that will be why you get promoted. That will be why you get better. That will be why your colleagues trust you. So I just encourage if we were going to wrap up, I want to encourage parents to say, what opportunities just around us organically. I mean, if I had a dollar for every time a parent has asked me, please give me a list of the things my kid needs to know before they graduate, and they think, I'm going to write back with this list, sew on a button, register to vote. We don't need our kids to know all of these skills. We need them to know how to figure things out. We need them to know how to fail forward and make mistakes, know how to take up space and use their voice, and then we can rest saying, there's no way I can teach my kid everything, but I can teach them how to figure things out and that they have a right to figure things out.

Rebecca: You're not creating kids who know everything. You're creating kids who are confident.

Melissa: That's right. And one of the things you and I talked about, like, with homeschooling in general, is we want to teach them to love, to learn, or to know that they don't have to stop learning, that they never stop learning. So when you've got a kid who's going into a situation where I said, our propane tank is out, my son's like, what do you do? I'm like, I don't know. I'm a single mom. I don't know. Can you help me figure it out? And he has this, like, I want to learn something new. I can figure it can. And then come to find out, you switch them out at CVS. Like, who in the world knew that I didn't need to know how to switch out propane tanks to be a successful adult? I just need to know how to figure things out, and that takes the pressure off parents.

Rebecca: Yeah, I was just thinking that.

Melissa: Take the pressure off.

Rebecca: Yeah. Okay. I have to help them know how to ask questions and deal with something confidently. I don't have to have a really long list of all the things they know how to do.

Melissa: Right. And we got to Connecticut from Texas. We're like, we don't know how to use a parking meter. We don't know how to use a bus. We didn't know how to do all kinds of things. We've never been on a train before, and I'm 45 years old, and we figured it out together on our first visit. So the pressure is off parents. We don't have to teach them all of these things. We just have to say, give them lots and lots of opportunities to interact with the outside world. And we want them right at the edge of their ability level, right. Just one step further than they already know how to do. Keep them there.

Rebecca: Well, Melissa, this has been like digging through a treasure box of all kinds of fabulous information, and I really think that our listeners are going to feel a lot more confident, and I hope that you listeners have some great ideas and feel inspired to step back and let your kids do more. Some of your kids are really timid, and it's going to look like tiny baby steps for a little bit till they get their toe in the water. But I think you can model it, start to let them enter the world instead of walking around in your own shadow. Clearly, if you've listened at all to this conversation, you can hear the immense benefits to doing that. So, Melissa, we're going to do this again next.

Melissa: Yes, there's too much to cram into 1 hour.

Rebecca: There's so much more to talk about. Give us just a quick little teaser of the topics that we are going to cover next week.

Melissa: So next week we're going to talk about really the basics of managing tasks in your daily life. So we call it executive functioning. But how do we get kids to manage their own time, their own appointments, their own assignments and homework, the nitty gritty of time management, task management, and why that's so important for successful launch into adulthood.

Rebecca: I'm super excited for that episode. I get to listen to it multiple times as I get it ready to publish, so I know I will be taking lots of notes from that one. So thank you so much for being here with us today, and I'm really excited to talk to you next week.

Melissa: Talk to you then. Thanks, Rebecca. Bye bye.

Rebecca: Listeners, thank you for joining us today on the Sequoia Breeze podcast. I've been your host, Rebecca Lasavio. I hope this has been a breath of fresh air for your homeschool and that you have a fresh excitement and enthusiasm about helping your kids learn the problem solving skills that they need as they enter into adulthood. Please give us some feedback on how you felt about this episode. You can rate or review it wherever you listen to Podcasts. You can send me an email at podcasts@sequoiagrove.org. Or you can go to your school's website, find the Podcast page, and push the button to leave me a message.