Coronavirus strikes. Panic ensues. Schools close. Just like that, you find yourself a homeschooling parent. Congratulations. Welcome to the party.

The efforts to contain COVID-19 are sweeping the nation and schools are a big point of concern for transmission, for obvious reasons. Kids are germy, and notoriously bad at the things we all need to be good at right now: Covering coughs, washing hands, and not picking our noses or licking other people’s lolly-pops.

Every sector seems to be taking a hit, from the economy to the travel industry, and the words “black swan” are being whispered around the margins as the movers and shakers worry about how far the stock market is going to fall this time. While there are plenty of things to worry about on the meta level this month, with the addition of school closings the boots on the ground question is:

What the heck are we going to do with the kids?

It’s not just about how we’re going to bridge the academic break and the possibility of kids getting “behind” in their studies. It’s also about how we’re going to fill the many long hours of “bored” time that kids who are used to a life on the go and the social construct of schools are sure to complain about.

And then there’s the adult impact. I mean, most of us have to WORK, right? What to do with the kids while we attend work is one thing, what to do with the kids if our work is sent home and we’re trying to work remotely AND school remotely is a whole ‘nother barrel of monkeys.

The panic is real, am I right parents? And I’m not just talking about coronavirus.

As a 23 year veteran worldschooler (it’s like homeschooling, only with a lot of traveling as an educational strategy), with a degree in education, four kids, and a remote career, the coronavirus school shut down scenario was basically our entire parenting journey. I’m here to assure you that it doesn’t have to be an utter nightmare. It can actually be… fun.

Since thousands of parents of school kids are likely to be pulling their hair out over how to manage the sudden school closings, I thought I’d cross the picket line and share some of the secrets of homeschooling and ideas for how you can get through this little hiccup in the educational establishment, make sure that your kids are still learning forward, manage the disruption to your work life, and expand the options available to your kids.

Stop Buying Toilet Paper: Buy This Instead

My friends, stocking up on toilet paper is the least of your worries. What you should be worrying about is what to do with those kids if a two week school closure sends them home. What you REALLY need is to start buying stuff to keep the kids busy.

At our house we called this the “Secret Weapon” and it was deployed on long road trips, sick days, snow or rain days, any time we were “trapped” together and I needed the kids to stay busy so I didn’t lose my sh*t. Not that I ever did that. *cough* (Not a corona cough, relax.)

Basically, a Secret Weapon is a stash of stuff your kid is going to love playing with and will keep them productively employed and out of your hair so that you can get some work done, or just get a damned break, as the case may be.

Things to consider including in your Secret Weapon:

• Workbooks (you know, those generic grade-leveled ones at Costco)
• Sticker books
• New reading books on a subject of high interest
• An app store gift card
• Wikki Stix
• Balloons
• Art supplies
• Scratch art posters (these take a WHILE to complete… win)
• Bead kits
• Action figures
• Cars, trucks, other small toys
• Puzzles
• Maze or dot to dot books
• Invisible ink books
• A beach ball
• Bouncy Balls
• Coupons for activities the kid loves
• Lego
• Bath toys
• Window art markers
• Playdoh
• Dot markers
• Origami paper
• Bubbles
• New colouring books
• Fridge magnets
• Paper airplanes
• Sculpey Clay
• Perler melting beads
• Nerf guns or marshmallow guns
• Sewing cards

You get the idea.

Buy a Mini-Trampoline

No really, hear me out. If you are trapped at home with kids, you NEED one of these.

This was, by far, the most useful piece of educational equipment I invested in when my kids were young. With two of the four being VERY active boys we used the tramp to bounce through math facts and spelling lessons. We bounced between reading and copy work, and just generally take the edge off once an hour or so, during all waking hours. On rainy days and snow days, this little gem kept me from killing little boys.

Seriously, this is the best $60–80 bucks you’ll spend prepping for quarantine.

Also: bouncing is good for your immune system. Yes, really. Adults should bounce too.

Tips for Managing the Marathon of COVID-109 School Closures

Create Co-ops

Homeschoolers know that the only way to manage the 24–7 parenting and education marathon is with back up. We create co-ops and we take turns. You could do the same thing.

There aren’t many parents who can just drop their work, for days to weeks on end because the schools have closed, without serious economic consequence. One way to mitigate that is through banding together with several families and working together.

If the schools are just closed and you’re not on full quarantine because of exposure, shift the kids from house to house throughout the week and minimize the days off that each parent has to take off from work to get through this. This will help with the kids’ need for socialization and make them feel less trapped, and while it’s not a total quarantine, a small group of kids hanging out at home (where hygiene and hand washing can be better policed) than in a classroom still lowers risks.

Another option: Go in with other families and hire a nanny, or a rental grandmother with serious kid chops who can help take up the slack.

Fighting Boredom With Hours to Fill

So, the problem you’re going to have is that accomplishing a full day’s worth of “school work” at home, only takes a couple of hours a day for elementary school kids; it never took my high schoolers more than four hours. So… then what?

You can expect to have a good 10–12 hours of TIME to fill while your kids are awake and not in school (because their after school stuff will be cancelled too, naturally). Most of us probably don’t want our kids’ screen time to increase that much while they are on sabbatical, so what else are we supposed to do?

Here are some ideas:

Teach Time Management

If your kids are ten or older, try handing THEM that time block and asking THEM to organize it. Brainstorm, together, all of the things that need to go into a healthy day: Some work (school, household chores), some play, some independent learning, some exercise, some creative time. Then let your kid decide how to get all of that in and present their plan for their time to you.

Brainstorm a List of Things to Do

Your kid is going to have to entertain themselves a bit, so stock up on what they need to do that and brainstorm a list of stuff they might do with a “bored” block of time. This is where Pinterest boards become your friend. Start here, with Rainy Day Activities for Kids.

Post this list on the fridge, or somewhere that everyone can see it. Make sure your Secret Weapon has all the supplies they need.

Create a Pattern to Your Days

At school, your kids are used to cycling through a rotation of activities that keep them engaged and moving. If life grinds to a halt at home when school is out, it’s gonna get messy. So, create some patterns for your days at home together.

For us, this looked like: Mornings for school work, afternoon for other adventures.

Get up, do chores, get the homework done, go out and play a while, or get up and moving with a Wii game, or some other form of aerobic exercise. Read for half an hour, make some lunch. After lunch, get into an art or science project. Work on something you’re interested in independently. Take a walk or a run together. Do some yoga. Play some music. Bake something together. Do an hour or so of screen time for fun.

Whether you’re the one home with the kids, you organize a co-op, or enlist a neighbour or grandparent, I highly recommend thinking proactively about how you order your days, support your support people in keeping the kids positively engaged through this sabbatical from school. We organized our days in 30 minute blocks, thinking about balancing sitting time with physical motion, brain dead time (screens for non educational purposes) with creative and inspired time (art, music, sports, physical motion), and “work” time (school, chores, life skills) with “play” time.

It really does take a village and during these sorts of emergencies, we have to work together!

Also: Plan to let them be bored and self maintain for a while. They’ll live.

Studies show that boredom is good for you.

Get OUT of the House

I’m not suggesting you go to the children’s museum or the indoor playground. That would kind of defeat the purpose of the school closures. But you can and should get out and take a walk in the park, ride bikes around the block, jump rope in the driveway, shoot hoops, scooter the cul-de-sac, run the stairs in your apartment building. Get out and get moving in ways that don’t take you into crowded environments.

Physical activity also helps boost our immune systems and keeping kids moving serves more than one purpose! Wear them out and reduce their risk of infection!

Picking up the Educational Slack: Tips for Teaching Your Kids at Home

Who knows what kind of support the schools are going to be able to provide for families while the buildings are closed. Presumably some districts will have some e-learning platforms in place. Whatever the teachers recommend for “home work,” do it, of course. But don’t limit yourself, or your kids.

The glass half empty way to look at school closures is that “kids are getting behind.” The glass half full way to look at it is, “we have time to get ahead!” Now is the time to dive into all of those interesting projects you normally don’t have time for.

If you’re at stuck at the point of WHAT DO I DO TODAY!! And, HOW DO I GET THROUGH THIS WEEK! Then go straight to Headstart Homeschooling and download a full week’s worth of plans to keep the kids moving and proactively busy. It’s designed specifically for people who do NOT want to be homeschooling right now and who don’t have the time, desire, or wherewithal to sort through the myriad of online free resources to “figure it out” right now. We’ve got you covered, immediately, for free. Join the Facebook page for more support and vetted resources.

Experiment With Child Led Learning

What if you had a week, or a month to learn anything you want? Do anything you want? Build something awesome? Solve a big problem? Get seriously creative.

Have you ever asked your kid what they want to learn? What they want to do? Whether there is a person or a project that they find interesting or inspiring?

There is a concept in the alternative education world called “Child-Led Learning.” It’s a tenet of democratic schools and the unschooling movement and it’s exactly what it sounds like. The child decides what they’re interested in learning. Parents, teachers, or facilitators then provide support and ideas to fuel the child’s interest.

While your kid is on sabbatical from school is a great time to play around with this concept and see what your child is interested in and capable of. There’s no downside, and you don’t have to worry about whether they’ll get into college, you’re not making a commitment to an educational philosophy, it’s just an experiment with another idea and another way to learn.

Maybe your 12 year old will come up with the next big thing in her area of interest.

Keep Going on the Core Subjects

School placement is determined, primarily, by math and language scores and ability. Yes, your kid is going to miss a lot of things while school is out, but the only two things you really need to worry about “getting behind” in, if you’re sending them back to school, are math and language arts.

Hopefully, the schools are providing work for your kids to do at home on those two subjects. If they’re not, or if you are worried that what’s provided is inadequate, then feel free to dive into some of the resources out there for homeschoolers.

For a deeper dive and some help with how to teach all kinds of subject matter in outside the box ways, have a look at my Worldschooling Primer for Petrified Parents. It’s a good start for all the things.

Here’s a massive list of educational companies and online options that are offering free subscriptions due to the school closings. It’s a Google spreadsheet that was shared with me… I don’t know who made it, but THANK YOU, whoever you are. (And if someone knows, leave a comment so that I can edit this and properly credit the author!)

Math

If you want to keep it super simple, those grade leveled math books from Costco are an adequate stop-gap so that your kid keeps flexing their math muscles and the grey matter doesn’t turn to mush.

Beyond that, here are some math resources that will keep the basic skills building.

IXL Learning

K-12 and very targeted to what your child needs, this is a comprehensive math learning site that will definitely slap a bandaid on whatever your kid is missing during the school closures. Who knows, you may even find it useful when they go back to school.

Mental Math Cards

This app will keep your kids on track learning their basic facts.

Splash Learn Math Games

Grade leveled and easy to use. For kids K-5th grade.

Language Arts

Hopefully your school is providing a reading list and some basic exercises to keep your child on track. If not, don’t worry too much. Building language skills for kids is easier than you think. It’s about two things: Reading and writing, a little bit every day.

If your child doesn’t read independently yet, that’s okay. Read aloud to them while they’re on sabbatical, every day. If you don’t have time to do that, use some of the great audio books for kids.

If your child does read independently, perfect. Set an amount of time that seems reasonable for them to read daily and enforce it. Thirty minutes was our baseline. Maybe this will become a habit that carries over after school is back in session!

Rather than dragging your kids through forced writing lessons when you don’t really feel like teaching writing, or even know how, borrow a page out of Charlotte Mason’s book and have your kid do a little copywork each day. Perhaps it’s as simple as a passage from the book they are reading. Or maybe you get fancier and pull a poem from a Shel Silverstein book for fun.

Copywork is one of the best ways to teach great writing by osmosis. Kids copy proper sentence structure, grammar, spelling, and more without it being an exercise in red pen and crying. If your kid can’t form simple words in print on their own yet, they’re too young for copywork. Under about fourth grade, start with just a few words to a few sentences copied, depending on the ability of the child. This shouldn’t feel unduly stressful. Some kids will want to do more, if so, let them.

If you want to take it to the next level, employ some narration. What’s narration? It’s where your kid tells you the story and then you write it down word for word. “Tell me about that world you built in Minecraft!” you transcribe their story, and then, they copy what you wrote into their notebooks. Authentically their work, their story, and written with far less frustration than traditional writing assignments. This works for kids of all learning styles.

Check out my Worldschooling Primer for Petrified Parents to learn more. In it, I dive deeper into the concepts of narration and copywork for teaching writing if that piques your interest.

Resources for Reading and Language Development:

All You Can Books

FREE unlimited downloads of audiobooks for kids for the first 30 days. Hopefully that’s long enough to get you through the school closings!

Grade Leveled Reading Lists for Kids

The easiest way to find recommended reading lists by grade level is to search “goodreads” followed by the grade level you’re interested in. Here’s the goodreads middle school list.

Mensa Kids

Mensa has these great downloadable reading lists by approximate grade level for kids. Give each book your own star rating and check it off the list.

General Educational Resources for Learning from Home

While we might be debating the heck out of screen time and phone usage for kids during normal circumstances, these are not normal circumstances, and right now, with the potential of mass school closings: technology is your friend.

If your only exposure has been traditional school, you might not know that there are tons of “classroom environments” out there on the web where kids meet face to face, enjoy the social interaction and the benefit of collaborative work, without risk of a single germ being passed.

Below are a list of educational resources available online that kids on sabbatical from “real school” can dive deep into while they are home and learn a bunch of awesome stuff.

Outschool

This is a treasure trove of classes taught by teachers and subject matter experts. We’ve used a number of their courses for high school electives (my youngest took Chemistry and Forensic Science this year) but there are whole bunch of great short courses and one time classes that kids on sabbatical might enjoy digging into. Literature, art, music, science, programming, meditation, test prep, and architecture, are a few. Or, create your own digital magazine, participate in a stock market and investing simulation, learn conflict management and listening skills, dig into digital photography or voice acting. ALL FOR KIDS. How awesome is that? You’re welcome.

Master Class

If your kids are ten or older, you might want to consider a subscription to this one. Jane Goodall teaches Conservation. Steph Curry teaches Sportsmanship and Ball Handling. Steve Martin teaches Comedy. Gordon Ramsey teaches Cooking (with less swearing than his TV show). Penn and Teller teach the Art of Magic. Those are just a few samples from our personal list of classes taken. There are so many interesting people to hang out with and learn from on Master Class.

ABC Mouse

This one is a full curriculum online learning program for kids 2–8. It’s free for 30 days, which will probably get you through the school closure and make sure your kid is still moving forward.

Khan Academy

If Khan Academy feels so 2017 to you, you haven’t checked them out lately. There is so much interesting stuff to dive into. AND you could use their material to fill in what your kid is missing at school.

TED Talks

Are your kids watching TED talks yet? Why not? This platform is one of the best ways to put them in the same room with some of the most brilliant minds on the planet. Check out their talks by brilliant kids and teens to get your child’s juices flowing. Or, this list of talks to watch with kids.

Active for Life

Active for Life is about raising physically literate kids. Moving is important. If you’ve got an active kid, and you’re trapped at home for a while, finding ways to get that energy out is imperative. Here are a bunch of ideas for physical games to play with your kids to encourage physically literacy and get them up and moving.

YouTube

Your kid is likely already wasting hours on blooper reels and animal videos on YouTube, why not harness some of that time for educational purposes and mandate a percentage of screen time going to brain growth. Here are a few channels that are worth it:

Crash Course

From AI to the History of Science, Sociology, Theater, Statistics and more, these are short videos… about ten minutes each, that give a quick overview of the topic. These are great for sparking interests that might be worth a deeper dive.

The Smithsonian Channel

If you have a kid remotely interested in animal life, this is a great one. They also have series on history, viral videos, women in STEM and more.

How to Debate Effectively

Just kidding. You definitely don’t want to encourage this channel until you’re NOT all trapped together in the house 24–7.

Encyclopedia Britannica

If you have a kid who chronically asks, “Why?” plug him into this one. LOADS of interesting explanations to how all kinds of things work. They even have an Activities Corner with all sorts of simple science experiments for kids to watch, and maybe even do at home.

Kids Activities

Youtube has THOUSANDS of videos with simple “how tos” of activities your kids can do at home. These serve two purposes: keeping them busy now (watching the videos) providing inspiration for later (when screen time is over and you have to figure out WHAT to do with them next!

No one knows where this Coronavirus scare is going to take us. This morning the entire country of Italy is on lockdown. Korea, it seems, is not far behind. What we do know is that the threat of COVID-19 is changing the way people live life and it could have a massive impact on the school systems, and potentially the education of our kids.

Odds are, you’re prepping in other ways, don’t neglect to plan for school closures and the continuation of your child’s education. If you’re struggling to figure out how tocover the bases, or figure out how to manage this unexpected and mandatory shift to homeschooling at the district (and perhaps national) level, shoot me an email, I’ll do my best to help.

Want more?

Every week I send out the Monday Love Letter. It’s free. It’s encouraging. It’s for you.

Sign up for the Monday Love Letter with Jenn.Lately!

The question they reach out to ask is, “How did you do it… and… do you think I can do it too?”

The “it” they are referring to is educating my own four children, birth through university, without the benefit of unlimited funding or infrastructure, while traveling full time for a decade, building a business, and, you know, getting laundry done most days.

When I embarked on this journey with little people, mostly, I only knew what I didn’t want. That was gleaned from my short time on the teacher side of the desk in public school. However, “not that” isn’t a particularly productive educational philosophy, so Mama had to dig a little deeper, read voraciously, and find the path forward, tweaking it, of course, for each individual learner.

Twenty years in, having watched “homeschooling” morph from a suspect and somewhat fringe community, into the worldwide vibrant mosaic that it is blossoming into, I have a confidence in parents and children that, at the beginning, I only hoped hard that I might one day have.

Of course it’s also blossomed into an “industry.” Anyone who has been to a homeschool conference knows that there are a panoply of voices shouting over one another in competition for your time and money. Often, they’re preying on your insecurities, offering to solve the problems you don’t even know you have yet.

I’m here to reassure you that it’s not that complicated.

In one medium length read, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about “How I did it,” from babies to university entrance. And I hope very much that the take away will be a deep sense of, “Yes, I can do this too.”

Kelly, Sarah, Jess, Paula, and the hundreds of others who ask, this is for you…

Beginning with Babies

First: relax.

Second: ignore anyone who tells you there’s a right way to parent little people.

Third: acknowledge your limitations and honor the personalities and factors in your family.

Fourth: know that those things are going to change, and that’s okay.

This year’s formula won’t be next year’s.

If you’re inclined to read parenting books, I recommend The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz.

It doesn’t say a damned thing about kids, but if you get your head around the core messages, you’ll be a much better parent for it.

In my experience and observation, the best thing you can do for the tiny people is to communicate clearly to them that they are loved and are welcome members of the family, but not the center of it.

Help them discover that there is order to the world and order to our days. Spend more time on developing good habits than you do on making sure they are doing “all the right things,” whatever all the right things might be in your community. Less busy, more playing, plenty of naps. For the parent, that is.

Do your best not to look at the neighbor kids and congratulate yourself, or worry too much, as the case may be with the neighbor kid.

Definitely don’t compare siblings.

I thought my second kid was seriously developmentally delayed. Went to the pediatrician, worried second time mama…

“This one’s fine,” he told me, pointing at the drooling black haired 18 month old. “That one? I don’t know what to tell you. She’s the weird one.” He assured me with a smile. Right. They’re all different. Ahead isn’t ahead. Behind isn’t behind. There’s not a finish line. Keep going.

Don’t freak out. Just keep going.

Another useful bit of wisdom with small children, handed to me by a mentor mama years ago: “If you aren’t shooting for “normal,” then quit worrying about whether they’re normal.”

For the trolls who are already preparing their lengthy commentary for the end of this piece (not trying to dissuade you, fire away, I’m used to it, and I’m equipped to reply, I assure you) understand that at no point in my experience with my children, from before they were born to now, with three adults and only one minor child remaining, have I EVER been aiming for normal. So bear that in mind in your criticism, won’t you?

With that… here’s how to do it:

The Basics: Reading and Math

Once you decide that you’re ready to begin “schooling” in some format, or when “concerned” harping from well meaning friends, family, or grocery store ladies becomes too much to bear, start with the basics.

Anyone who is paying attention knows that I’m not an unschooler. That means I do believe that sitting at the table with a pencil and notebook is something worth “forcing” a kid to do, as a fun and mutually gratifying growth proposition, of course.

Will they cry sometimes? Yes.

Will you cry sometimes? Yes.

This is okay. You’ll both grow through and live. The habit of self discipline and perseverance is what we work on those days. It’s far more important than the times tables.

If you’re wondering where to start, start with Language Arts and Math.

There are about a billion resources out there, across the spectrum of budgetary possibility. I’d never venture to guess what will work best for your kids. Pick something you think might, in each category. Do a little bit, every day.

(Every day meant four days a week at our house. We sat at the table Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. I’ve never believed kids of any age need a 5 day per week job. Plus, we have to do laundry in there somewhere.)

If your kids are under ten, you will not spend more than about thirty minutes on each “subject” per day. Repeat after me: We will not spend more than a half an hour on each of the “basics.” We will stop, and we will play.

Okay. You may continue.

So, once you decide they are ready: Math and Language Arts. Four days a week. Not more than 30 min each per day. It can be less.

That’s easy. You can do that.

PLEASE NOTE: That thirty minutes need not be thirty. If they can accomplish a reasonable chunk in 15 minutes, great, let ’em off the hook and reward efficiency in work, that’s more important than dipthongs. If they are squirrelly, like two of mine were, then it’s totally fine to work in five to ten minute chunks with calisthenics in between. I swear my sons did not learn one single basic fact without the aid of… a mini-trampoline. You thought I was going to say flashcards didn’t you? WRONG. Get a mini-trampoline. Bounce them through everything they don’t actually HAVE to be sitting to do. That’s my actual best tip. You’re welcome.

VERY rare is the child under ten who should be sitting for a full hour working on “the basics.” That kind of attention span will come. It will. Start where you are and stretch ’em in thirty second and one minute chunks with enthusiastic celebration of successes. Don’t push ’em for an attention span that makes them hate life and feel like a failure.

We’re not aiming for normal, remember? Repeat that mantra.

Teaching Writing to Young Children

Okay, before we go any further or get into any of the fun stuff. Let’s take this one right off the table to begin with, shall we? I hear you freaking out about teaching kids to write. Because you “can’t” write. Or you hate writing. Or you just know your kid will. Or you hated it in school. Or some ridiculousness that has nothing to do with just how really fecking simple it is to teach almost any kid to write as long as you aren’t some freak who thinks its fun to bully ten year olds with circles of red pen. (Breathe through it teacher friends, I’m kidding. Mostly.)

I’m going to teach you, in three paragraphs, how to teach any developmentally normal child (and most of the struggling ones too) to write. Any child. Are you ready. This formula will always work, if you are patient. Always. Are you ready? Here we go.

1. Read

You must read to the child. Good books, not just Captain Underpants. Books that have the kind of writing that is interesting to children, of some nutritional value, and that you would be happy if they emulated in their own writing one day. The Burgess books were fan favorites at our house. Harry Potter works in a pinch. Aesop’s Fables, fairytales of all sorts, the Rudyard Kipling books, are all perfect.

Read. Every day. This is the first and most important building block for writing. DON’T make them read. YOU read to them. That’s step one.

2. Narration

There are two pieces to “writing.” There is the telling of a story, which any four year old can do with the kind of perfection that makes anyone with in hearing distance need a drink.

You know what I mean.

Little people can TELL ad nauseum, and they will hold forth of the discovery of the breathing pore on the side of a snail face with delight and enthusiasm for longer than we wish they would.

Then there is the mechanics, the shaping of letters, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing and semi-colon navigation that leads most children to the weeping and gnashing of teeth that causes mere mothers to cower with dread.

Pour the kid a glass of almond milk and send him out to hug a tree while I break this down for you and solve the problem forever.

Narration is another Charlotte Mason-ism that just means, “telling something.” Here’s how it works.

• You read something SHORT and INTERESTING. (How the Elephant Got His Trunk, for example).
• You close the book.
• You ask the child to TELL YOU back what they heard.

You sit up, you look interested and encouraging, not critical and miserly. You enthusiastically WRITE DOWN in very neat and nice printing, double spaced, and easy to read, every single word your brilliant child tells you, while nodding, smiling, and “wow” ing.

If you have done your job properly you now hold in your hands your child’s “paper” on the subject at hand, written with perfect mechanics (assuming you can spell and use a semi-colon yourself). This is your child’s authentic “writing” because every word is his.

3. Copy Work

Now, hand the paper to your child and get them to copy this into their own notebook. This won’t be too hard to do if you haven’t beaten the love of writing out of them already by forcing some craziness on them too early. If you have accidentally already goofed this up, no worries. Apologize. Tell the kid you didn’t know better, but now you do so you won’t be a jerk about writing any more, and ask, kindly, for not more than two sentences. Less if the child is under seven or seriously traumatized by your previous efforts.

Presto! Your child has just produced a quality piece of writing.

“Yes,” you say, “But I did the spelling and punctuation, that’s not their work… how are they learning that?”

By osmosis, obviously.

Which is the easier way to learn sentence structure: by trying and failing, knowing all the while you’re failing (children know what they don’t know) only to have your best effort returned marked all to hell with red pen and being forced to re do it, maybe several times, with stress and disapproval being the associated emotions, OR by copying your own brilliant words perfectly at the first pass and noticing that every sentence ends with a little dot. Those who hated writing growing up, go to the head of the class.

Once your child is successfully copying, it’s an easy matter to point out how GREAT it is that they started every sentence with a capital letter, most people do that. (Not e.e. cummings, but we can get to that later.) Then play hide and seek in their own work with nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. They’ll gradually learn what “looks right” and they’ll learn to name the conventionalities in ways that will eventually shut your sister-in-law, the fourth grade teacher, up. Eventually. Be patient with her too. She can’t help it.

You can add to this by having them copy interesting science or history bits they find into a notebook, right out of actual books. Or a poem they like. Or whatever. Copy work. Learn to love it.

How to start: SMALL. Don’t ask a child who can’t form all the letters yet to copy more than five words at a time. And only include letters that they’re already friends with. Then, around six or seven let them copy the first sentence or two of their narration. When that is painless, go for a third sentence. Work up to a paragraph.

Here’s what happens eventually: You’ll catch them writing for fun. With one of my kids, this happened at about five; but remember, the pediatrician told me that one was weird. Another kid was pushing 11 before there was any writing for fun observed from afar (with great relief, I’m not gonna lie, I was wondering if this really would work with any child, cuz that one… whew, he was a tough nut).

After they write for fun, THEN you can say things like, “Why don’t you write me a paragraph on…” pick a thing. THEN you can start teaching the editorial process and three paragraph formation, and the three part essay (my friend Nancy, an expert teacher and worldschooler, says this is the single most important thing we teach our kids, I agree with her, but then I usually do.)

So there it is. Teaching writing to any child. Rather more than three paragraphs, I confess, but three segments, so let’s not quibble.

Onward:

The Non-Linear Subjects

Okay, so there’s math and language arts, done and dusted. Now what about everything else? What about the non-linear things (stuff that doesn’t have to be taught in order) What, exactly, is everything else? Well, that’s up to you to decide. For us it included:

• History
• Geography
• Writing
• Literature
• French
• Spanish
• Latin & Greek (yes, really, and before they were ten, not after)
• Science
• Art Appreciation
• Art Experience (Hands on making art)
• Music (History and experience)
• Health and Nutrition
• Physical Education

“But how do you get it all in?!” my almost hysterically worried friend asks.

Let me pour you a glass of wine. Breathe. Your kid is four. You have time. Keep reading. I’m going to make this so easy for you. You won’t believe how “not hard” it is. I promise.

There are two secrets to “getting it all in”

• Make a plan
• Read your ass off

1. Make a Plan

So, every August I sit down and make a plan for our year. With the kids, we decide what will be learned. We’ve found it simplest to break world history into a four year rotation, and we study one segment in a given year (three times over before they’re done). This is borrowed from the Classical Education model.

• Ancient History
• Medieval History
• Renaissance History
• Modern History

We then choose a region to study for Geography for the year.

The history and geography choices inform our Literature selections.

The languages are learned in four year chunks too. Four years of French was followed by four years of Spanish, then it got a little messy. Because, Thai, Malay, Bahasa, Arabic, German, Czech, and Italian happened, because we were traveling. But that’s okay, right? Because the result was bi-plus-lingual kids. Which is what I call it when you can communicate well in two languages but can get the job done in a handful of others.

Latin and Greek I taught for word roots, not so they could show off at frat parties. Although reading the monuments has been a fun party trick at various stages. Ez was picking the words we knew out of the Vulgate Bible on display at the Library of Congress years ago. That gobsmacked the guards. The kid in question was balanced on my bent knee so he was tall enough to look through the glass.

I don’t care about that. I care about above average literacy, which we also managed over the long haul. If you think teaching Latin and Greek to seven year olds is dumb, that’s cool. You don’t have to. It was just my thing. You know your kids best, teach what they need. You’ll figure it out for them.

Health and nutrition are easy: cook together, eat together, talk about food. Stick the food pyramid, or whatever they’ve updated it with on the fridge and point at it sometimes. Don’t buy junk food too much. Give them part of the grocery budget and let them make some choices. (Wait, that’s math too… but that’s real world education, nothing fits too neatly into boxes… I’m okay with that, neither does real world life.)

Phys. Ed.: Don’t over think this, mmmkay? Get them moving. Put them in little league if you want, personally I’d rather jump off something high than sit through little league practices and games, but I’m weird that way. Put them in gymnastics when they are driving you mad in February. Teach them to SCUBA dive maybe. Climb stuff. Run.

Kick them out of the house and use that voice you remember your mom using that went something like, “Don’t come back in this door unless you are bleeding or hungry! And take care of each other!”

Have the “condoms are your friend” talk with enough regularity that they don’t freak out when you say the words in front of their friends. Yeah, start when they are small, when it’s still funny, and not at all serious, and doesn’t matter even a little yet. Trust me on that one. Even if the rest of this stuff doesn’t resonate at all. That one matters. A lot.

So yeah… make a plan for that stuff. Pick your history segment. Pick your geography segment. Pick a LOT OF BOOKS that look interesting.

Not textbooks.

Please don’t buy a kid under high school age a textbook for anything but math. Please don’t.

Living books. You want living books. Go have a chat with Charlotte Mason about that, because she’s genius on this point.

What are living books? Books written by one person, who is passionate about her subject, and who is, as a result, INTERESTING. Pick a whole gob of books to cover the basics of your history and geography segments with literature. Non-fiction and fiction too. Factoid books and literature, poetry and gorgeous sweeping stories that capture the imagination.

Picking these books, finding these books, is work. I’m not going to lie about that. Start with the Database of Award Winning Children’s Literature if you need help. I love that you can search by country. Super helpful for us as we were traveling and wanted age appropriate books pertinent to our current “classroom.”

Don’t miss the Holling C. Holling books. These babies are gold for North American geography and history rolled into one gorgeous packaged decorated in every margin with detailed and interesting drawings. My kidults still call hermit crabs “Pagoos.”

2. Read Your Ass Off

This is, like, the whole secret to educating your kids if you want to know the truth. Read aloud. All the damned time. Every time they aren’t running, read to them. Why? Because they want to know stuff, and reading is still hard and frustrating to them, so cut out the middle man. And for heaven’s sake learn to do voices.

Here’s what that looked like for us, for about a decade and a half:

Breakfast: Read poetry

Lunch: Read history

Dinner: Read literature

Bedtime: Read “fun” book

If you read only 15 minutes in each block, you’ve just added another full HOUR of content input to your day without making them sit for “school.”

Did you notice the really sneaky thing: Mealtimes. Captive audience. And they’re reasonably quiet because they are chewing. This is such a no brainer. Read at mealtimes and you’re pretty much done.

Now, what will happen, of course, is that they’ll get into the book and you won’t be allowed to stop at 15 minutes. Our meals averaged 30 min of reading each… two hours per day. Easy peasy.

And yes, if you’re reading between the lines you’ll see that I didn’t eat a meal without interruption for a decade and a half. So what? It got the job done painlessly. Small price to pay in my book.

In the age of iPods and phones, my kids have all had access to our entire Audible library (which I assure you is extensive) and so other people read to them a lot when I’m doing other things.

For the kids who are more of an auditory learning style, this has been key to getting through the “classics” which would have taught them to hate reading and hate literature (like it did their dad).

Instead, Moby Dick is a laugh out loud fan favourite at our house. We skip the whale biology bit every time… he does bang on a bit about whale anatomy in that section. Dickens was a favourite by 11 years old.

Reading aloud. Secret weapon. Wield it like the bad ass parent you are.

The Arts

You know, if I could hug Charlotte Mason in person for this one, I’d hug the woman. When you see how easy it is to have high level classical arts and music literacy, you’re going to cry with relief. Particularly because we all know how important the arts are to life and mental and emotional health, and yet they’re the first thing cut from school curriculum as “non-essential,” every damned time. Any parent can fix this at home with almost zero effort (okay nothing is zero effort, but this is stupid easy.)

Divide your school plan up into 8 week chunks. We had four, because I need a third of every year to do other stuff. Like beach days and blueberry picking. That’s important education too.

Music

For eight weeks play one hour of music by one composer. The same composer, every day, for eight weeks. I did this during arsenic hour… you know that hour of the day where everyone is losing it and you’d either give some, or take some… arsenic that is. Classical music calmed everyone down, particularly me.

Play Chopin every damned day for 8 weeks. Then, without warning, switch to Beethoven and watch what happens. The four year old will say something, I promise.

If you really want to up your game, say the name of the composer once or twice during the hour. Ask a kid what he likes in the music and what he hates. Ask him what it makes him feel like. Dance around like that thing for a while. This can be a lot of fun, as well as arsenic hour detox.

Art

On the first day of the first week, stick a piece of art by your chosen artist on the fridge or wall, on day three of the week, put up another piece, same artist. Two pieces a week, 8 weeks, same artist. Start with Monet if you want. Then on the first day of week nine, throw them a curve ball by putting a Dali next to Waterlilies. “WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED TO MONET?!”

“Meet, Dali, children…”

Ask the questions about color, form, feeling, light, dark, emotional response. Heck, get crazy and MAKE ART in the form of the artist in question. Leave them up if you have the space for the whole school year and see what happens.

Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s truly that easy.

I had a certain six year old that held forth on the intricacies of Monet in L’Orangerie, in Paris, to an amazed group of other museum patrons because, “It was his favourite.” Proud mama moment right there.

How could he possibly have a favourite and articulate intelligent things about it by six? He was paying attention to what was happening on the fridge in the four preceding years, for the benefit of his older siblings. Little genius. You’ve got at least one too. Stop wasting fridge space.

Dover Publications offers affordable, postcard sized art prints. Buy them.

In this way you’ll get through at least four composers and four artists per year, if you’re lazy about it like I was. And over the course of even an abbreviated decade of an education, that’s FORTY composers and FORTY artists that your kid will become seriously friends with. Can YOU name forty composers and artists? Or recognize the difference by sound and sight? Don’t worry, that’s the best thing about worldschooling, you’ll “fix” your education too.

The Magic of a Learning Journal

Herein lies the magic, friends.

So, you’re doing some basic stuff every day. And you’re reading. And a couple of times a week you’re writing down what your kid says, verbatim. And you’re playing some music and pointing at what’s on the fridge a lot. Good for you. You’ll cover a lot of ground that way. But you’re doing far more, and we can prove it, even if by Friday you can’t remember what happened on Tuesday. That’s life with kids; I get it.

Get a journal. Every evening, write down what the kid learned that was not one of the above. Maybe you went to a museum or a performance. Maybe you were at a collective class, or a drum circle. Perhaps you spent three hours on Youtube watching endangered animal videos, or diving deep into the ocean of plastic, or watching that video on planned obsolescence.

Maybe you did art or built a trebuchet in the back yard, or hiked half of the Freedom Trail. Write that stuff down!

Label it under subject headings: Science, Art, History, Music, etc.

On the last pages of the journal keep a running book list of every book you read and every book the kid reads.

This will take you less than five minutes of an evening. Less than two minutes once you get good at it. Super simple record keeping that will shut down naysayers and give you a leg up when it comes time to make it all count.

(Not) Lost in Translation

The second most popular question (after, “What about socialization?!”) is “What do you do about college?” As if this is some sort of giant obstacle, instead of just one of the panoply of opportunities afforded children who have had a world class (literally) education.

What do you mean what do I do about college? If they want to go, I send them. And I remind them that at “contrived school,” (because what we do is “real school”) they have to remember to sit in their seats and raise their hands. What does everyone else do? Probably less on the reminders.

Getting alternatively educated kids into college (or back into mainstream school, or a specialty school that’s particularly awesome) is not hard. There are a number of options.

Go the usual route

One is to go the usual route, take the appropriate tests, prepare a transcript, and enter as with a freshman class where the scholarship opportunities are more likely to abound. If you’re sending kids in the USA this can seriously matter. There are reasons NOT to send them in the USA (price being only one) but that’s for another article.

Skip straight to college (yes, really)

Another option is to let the kid start taking classes, online or at a local college, as soon as they are capable. Once a student has passed a few university level courses, as a “non-degree seeking” student, they have a college level transcript and anything they did in high school no longer matters that much. No kidding. At that point they can enroll full time, or transfer into another university on the strength of their credits.

Note that there is no guarantee that transfer credits will be accepted by another institution, but they DO circumvent the high school transcript and freshman entry rodeo.

Take a Gap Year

A third option is to take a Gap Year program that offers university credit and then follow the recommendation above. This works too.

Getting them in looks like this:
We’ve gotten three out of four kids into college this way. The fourth is just 15, so stay tuned. (2022 Update – He’s in commercial flight school… it went fine!)  Here is how I do it.

• Identify the college the kid wants to attend
• Research to see if they have special policies for home ed students
• Identify the persons who have power in admissions (by name and email)
• If at all possible, make an IN PERSON appointment

To that appointment, take:

• The child
• The high school transcript (which you have created from your excellent records
• The college transcript (if you have one)
• An exhaustive book list of every book read by the child since they turned 14, and every book read TO the child or on audio
• An exhaustive list of museums and educational opportunities availed
• An exhaustive list of extra curricular activities and volunteer work
• Shut up and let the kid do the talking

If you cannot make an in person appointment, file all of that (except the child, of course) electronically directly to the decision maker at the admissions office.

Both times we’ve gone in person (once to a top tier school and once to a solidly average school) we’ve been in and out of the office in under twenty minutes with a guarantee of admission in hand. When we did it electronically, it took about three weeks of back and forth with little stuff. In the age of the virtual, there’s still something to be said for the face to face meeting.

The secret sauce here is your learning journal. Just keep tossing stuff in there and you’ll be amazed when you put it all together, how much you’ve covered.

What’s next?

What to do with questions & an invitation.

There you have it. The essence of what two decades on this subject has taught me in fewer than 5000 words. Easy right? You can do this. You really can.

I know the next round of questions are going to be about specific methods, curriculum recommendations and “What to do about high school.” All fair, and all impossible to answer on the macro level. I’m happy to help on the individual level.

If you’re ready for more help, shoot me an email to jennsutherlandmiller(AT)gmail(DOT)com. I’ll write back, I promise.

There are sailboats moored in the bay. The sun has fallen beneath the fringe of the oak trees who are stretching their long grey fingers over the grey blue of the lapping water. Other Tuesdays have found me climbing volcanoes and camping out beneath the jungle canopy with an intrepid friend, or diving the Great Barrier Reef with my kids, or collecting pink shells along the ruffled fringe of the Andaman Sea. Tuesday afternoons are perfect for quiet adventures; particularly since I don’t have to show up for a job.

I’m one of the early adopters to the burgeoning digital nomad crowd.

We read The 4 Hour Work Week and found it, largely, snake oil. We work 20 instead. We watched the rise of the World Domination movement, and quietly went about the business of dominating our world without making a big deal of it. By the time lifestyle design was a thing, ours was a well oiled machine. For pushing a decade we’ve traveled for a lifestyle, worked from every continent, and adventured on Tuesday afternoons.

It sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? And sometimes it is. But, like any work, it’s also, well, work. And it’s a choice. And it’s often a lot more complicated than just showing up at the office, pounding out a solid eight, then clocking out, leaving it all behind. Especially when you throw in the details of two adults juggling similar schedules while traveling full time and, oh yes, did I mention? We have four children, who travel with us, and who we school as we go. Four.

For a long time I struggled with the idea of work life balance.

All of the “professionals,” who “had it all together,” waxed poetic about personal time, partitioning mental and emotional space, quality time with kids, blocked work hours, productivity hacks, investing in primary relationships, and the sanctity of the holy of holies: self care.

Clearly these people did not live in my world. Or they didn’t have four kids. Or they didn’t travel full time. Or they didn’t have editorial deadlines. Or something.

I got up earlier and did yoga. I stayed up later to get quiet space to write. I locked myself behind a door and insisted that all children stay OUT unless there was blood, or fire. I hired an assistant (that actually helped). I set office hours and “off” hours. I set “school time” and “me time.” And I continued to juggle laundry, dishes, travel planning, tween tantrums, and stomach illnesses like a circus clown at the end of her act when all of the dishes are shattering around her and she’s running in circles with her hair on fire. You’ve seen that act, right? Maybe you starred in it too.

And then, one day, on a green mountainside dotted with sheep on the South Island of New Zealand, as I huffed my way up a steep path toward the summit I came to an important realization:

Fuck work-life balance.

There is no such thing.

At least not for those of us who do more than one thing at a time. Those of us who live robust and messy lives knee deep in personal fulfillment and creativity, alongside the necessities of self-supporting adult life with more dependents than sense. Four kids seemed like a good idea at the time.

Work-life balance doesn’t exist in a world where sippy cups, Algebra lessons, Swedish massage class, yoga, conference calls, editorial deadlines and living in a third language all co-habitate in the same mental space. It just doesn’t. And, it’s asinine to pretend that it does.

Saddling one another with the idea that we can somehow perfectly balance it all and make a Pinterest beautiful life out of the intersections of the crazy is unkind. And it’s the biggest lie we tell ourselves. I let go of the kite string of that impossible dream and kept walking, thinking as I went.

Before I reached the top of Purple Peak, I’d come to a new commitment:

Building a passion driven life.

I would only work on things that I was passionate about, and, instead of trying to balance it all, the solution, for me, is to throw myself into the moment, headlong.

Whatever I’m doing, I’m fully invested in that thing as I’m doing it. From making sourdough bread, to hiking Borneo, to riding the ferris wheel on the wharf in Seattle. Kids can interfere with work. Work can interfere with kids. Work and kids can hold hands and skip around the park some days.

Many days, yoga doesn’t happen and self care is an after thought because airplanes wait for no one and editorial deadlines don’t flex. But, then, I don’t feel guilty about taking six weeks to walk across Spain alone, or three weeks off the grid in Peru with my mother.

Whatever a day brings me, I’m all in.

I gave myself permission to say, “Yes,” to the things that inspire me and, “No,” to the things that no longer serve me.

I gave myself permission to work insane hours if I wanted to, and not to care if my kids, who primarily eat organic, homeade, non-box type things, lived on Chinese takeout for three days while Mommy made the impossible happen on a big project. They love Chinese take out.

I gave myself permission to cancel conference calls, pre-schedule the non-essential, and spend two days deeply investing in relationships that matter to me, instead of splitting my attention.

The reality, of course, is that my attention is almost always split, and I like it that way. I work at the table where my teenage sons study most mornings. We discuss my work, and their reading. I punctuate intense hours of writing with detox time in the kitchen. I sit on the dock and sip my beer, while answering email on my phone. I take conference calls from the roof top terrace of my hotel in Cuzco. I edit on the train.

My friend Sean puts it well:

He lives in this same world of more kids than sense, big dreams, and endless ambition. He shares my commitment to a deep love of self and a relentless desire to change the world. We were standing, calf deep, in the Hood River, on the Oregon side last summer. He had a twin on each hip. My teenagers were playing crocodile with his little son. We were talking hard and fast about a passion project we share.

“I’ve decided it’s not about work-life balance,” he mused, “It’s about work life integration.”

The world stopped for a moment as he put words to the ephemeral thought I’d been brewing for the previous seven months. That’s it exactly.

This whole new movement away from traditional work environments into remote, time-zone flexible, results driven, career paths comes down to that.

Work life integration.

We’re moving away from a style of living and working that fits into neat boxes: literally, the buildings we moved between to accomplish life’s tasks: Home. Office. School. Church. Community center. Shopping center. Vacation spot.

Increasingly, life, and all of it’s activities, happens all around us, all the time.

We work at home. We school our kids online or outside. We shop and have it delivered. Our community exists as much in the virtual world as it does in the physical. Our phones tether us to everything, all the time. We can’t escape work, and we are constantly connected to home, and to community. It’s all become integrated.

So, here I sit on my dock, watching the sky and the river melt into exactly the same shade of shimmering grey. A bass just passed beneath my toes, which are dangling over the water. My beer is getting warm, and I’m writing. Working in the only place in the world I want to be at this moment. A kid crashed the party, asking what was for dinner. I told him, and sent him to start the grill. My husband is beneath a red umbrella, having a conference call about the launch of his latest invention. A teenager is finishing an Algebra 2 lesson.

This is work life integration in action.

Give me passion over balance any day.

Originally published in On Your Terms.

I didn’t set out to be a digital nomad. In fact, when necessity became the mother of invention, there wasn’t a word for it yet. Facebook was in it’s infancy. Connective and community building technology hadn’t yet birthed the tools that would provide the foundation stones for remote work. Skype was a thing, kind of, but holding a video call from North Africa to anywhere else was sketchy business indeed. Not the kind of service one would rely on for a “real job.” No one I knew was working remotely.

And yet, when one wakes in a tent on the top of the highest sea cliff in Italy on an October morning in 2008 to find that the markets have crashed and one’s stock has magically sunk below the waterline overnight, well, like I said, necessity is the mother of invention.

I don’t get the kind of credit someone who spends two years setting up to make the leap from traditional to remote work does. I didn’t “do it right” and I had the benefit of a partner (also drowning in the wake of the financial crash and swimming hard to break the surface).

I didn’t sit back, weigh my options as a woman, a mother, and a traveler with a tidy pros and cons list. I wasn’t proactive or particularly intentional in my first forays into remote work. I simply took stock of my skill set and started reaching out in every direction to start building a client base. My husband did the same. It took time. Eventually we figured things out, without the benefit of online courses, masters groups, or books about how many hours we should work. We simply kept at it until we felt comfortable in our process and had grown our businesses past the point of our original income and were satisfied with having “enough.”

Define “Enough”

“Enough” for me is only partially about money. The thing I’m most interested in is a life lived on my terms, with a healthy work-life integration that results in a life I love enough that I don’t constantly feel like I need a vacation.

In the interests of full disclosure moving forward, for me, that means:

• Working about 20–25 hours a week in a focused and intentional way
• Working those hours when I want to (I choose to wake very early and knock out my work before noon most days)
• Making more money than the average man in my age bracket
• While creating flexibility to allow room for the things that matter most in life

Including:

• World schooling two teenage boys
• Creating space for two kidults that come and go
• Building community
• Cooking for the soul, not just nutrition
• Long walks
• Afternoons of yoga or aerial silks
• Sunset drinks by the water with friends and family
• Tea with my mom when she stops by unannounced
• And enough travel to keep life interesting

Also, I need to be able to work from just about anywhere. That’s a big deal, and that’s what makes me a digital nomad.

Women as Digital Nomads

This spring Tortuga launched a survey digging into the self reported data around digital nomadism. We’ll be talking a lot about what we’ve learned in the coming weeks. But upon a very cursory look at the data surrounding women a few interesting things emerge.

• Only 37% of respondents were female
• There is still a wage gap between men and women as digital nomads
• 57% of digital nomad women are making more than the average income for their age bracket and gender as compared to the Bureau of Labor statistics numbers
• 46% of digital nomad women are working more than 40 hours a week

As a longterm digital nomad and a woman unpacking this is fascinating. The percentage gender split isn’t a surprise, but I think we’ll find it closing (keep reading).

Digital Nomadism & Developing Financial Opportunity for Women

That the wage gap still exists is unfortunate but not a surprise. This is a multifaceted problem and it would be an oversimplification to put it down to equal work for equal pay. My friend Taylor writes about this in her piece on the compromises around flexible hours and salary tradeoffs that many women are forced to make. However, that over half of the women who identify as digital nomads are making more than the average income for an American woman of the same age in the traditional workforce is encouraging.

That there is financial opportunity in the digital nomad arena for women is something I’ve known, personally and anecdotally, for some time. I’m excited to see the numbers bearing that out.

While just a hunch, but I have a suspicion that part of this is that the jobs available within the remote work sphere tend to be in progressive industries and companies where there are just more opportunities (and more equal ones) available to women, period.

As the workforce, in general, moves away from a “one long career” mindset and the reality of regular reinvention and career shift becomes normalized, gaps in resumes due to childbirth and care, eldercare, or community responsibilities (which have traditionally fallen to women), are less noticed and less of a liability than they have been in the past. Skill sets that have been honed through otherwise than traditional educational means are also gaining traction and employers in the digital realm seem to be leaning towards performance based metrics and efficiency over a more traditional “ass in the chair” measurement of whether a person is working.

That shift is favorable to women, allowing us to leverage our wide, while perhaps not traditionally developed, skill set in our own time, in our own way, adding a great deal of value to the companies they work with. I belong to a beautiful diverse community of women who make good money on their own terms, through remote work. Some are digital nomads, some are location based.

There may be even greater opportunity for women working remotely, whether or not they choose to travel. This piece on how remote work can save small towns, by my friend Fred, breaks that down.

Women in Full Time Remote Work

That 46% of digital nomad women are working more than 40 hours a week surprised me. Most of the women I know cite work-life balance as a primary reason for choosing to work remotely. We want more control of our time and many of us believe that our best work can actually be done in less time; the Pareto Principle in action. And yet almost half of us are still working 40 hours a week or more in income generating occupations.

One explanation might me the shift away from a 4 Hour Work Week mentality entering digital nomadism, and towards the construction of a serious career. Are women viewing remote work as a way to build a serious career, something they want to put full time effort into over the long haul, instead of a stop gap while they have a baby, or as short break to allow for a semi-paid sabbatical? If so, this is a good thing, from my perspective. Work isn’t a bad thing, in fact it can be as much fun as recreation when you’re building your own stuff or love what you’re doing.

Five Thoughts on Remote Work for Women

Assess the Benefits, Whether You Travel or Not

You don’t have to be a digital nomad to benefit from remote work. The term digital nomad assumes a good deal of travel, and for very many of us, that’s important. But there is an assumption that if one identifies as a digital nomad she’s always on the road. This isn’t true. Many of us are remote workers with part time travel as a priority.

Travel is not required, you don’t even have to own a passport to reap the benefits of remote work as a woman.

Working remotely allows you to:

• Live and work anywhere, even if that’s in the same town you grew up in
• Set your own hours, even around a baby’s sleep schedule
• Name your own price, and raise it at will; value your work highly
• Take a yoga class at two in the afternoon, work on your MBA, learn to fly, or code
• Accommodate the schedules of your kids, parter, parents, and community without sacrificing your paycheck
• Travel if you want to, stay home if you want to, go to an office if you want to
• Control your own destiny; stop asking people for permission to live your life

Think Big Picture

Yes, the ability to work remotely for six months after you have a baby is great, and generous of your company, compared to a six week maternity leave. But is that the best you can do?

If you can work remotely for six months, do you really need to return to the office at all? If you can work that six months at home, could you, perhaps, work it from Thailand?

What are your long term career goals? Is there a way to meet those with greater control over your life through remote work? In some industries, jobs are necessarily location and office based, but technology is loosening those requirements in others.

Become the Mistress of Productivity

The Pareto Principle is a real thing. Get your head around that and think hard about your 80–20 split and leverage the shit out of what you learn. If you’re working 40 hours a week and apply that principle then the best of your work is happening in 8 of those hours.

• Which 8?
• When are you most productive?
• Where are you most productive?
• Which tools facilitate efficiency and productivity?
• Track stuff and take notes
• Set goals
• Take breaks, real ones

Step Back

Every now and then, quit doing the next damned thing and step back to assess what it is that you actually want to be doing. In work. In life. In the balance. How’s that going? Adjust course as necessary.

F*ck That Wage Gap

I don’t know about you, but this part of being female seriously pisses me off. And I’m in the educated and white segment of the female population that is at the top of the heap in regards to that gap and living from a point of very deep privilege. This is one arena where I see real possibility for women, and particularly women of minority populations, to level the playing field. As with every other damned thing where patriarchy is concerned, it’s an uphill battle, but in this case, it’s one where the tools and rules of the game can be leveraged to our advantage.

Value yourself: And I’m not talking about loving your curves here, I’m talking about valuing your brain, your experience, your ability, and valuing the privilege of your presence. That is to say: Charge more for being in the room, virtually or physically. Take no shit on this point, ladies.

Build your own empire: Yes it’s harder. Yes it’s worth it. Work on building multiple income streams. Weed out the people and companies who perpetuate the patriarchy. Seek out and intentionally build forward with people and companies who are actively cultivating equality and diversity. You don’t fit into a box, your career doesn’t need to either.

Here’s What I Know:

Men might still be ahead in almost everything, but women are catching up. One way technology is working in our favor is in creating greater potential around flexible work, location independence, and longer term career building.

For women, especially women in caregiving roles, remote work provides an opportunity build an independent career that is hedged against downsizing, or economic downturn, allows for freedom of movement and the realities of the rest of life, as well as properly, equally, valuing her contribution in the labor market.

I didn’t plot my way carefully into this kind of career at the beginning. I just leveraged every tool I could lay my hands on when the shit hit the fan. That I ended up on the cutting edge of what would become a movement was a happy accident. In retrospect, that crash of 2008 was one of the best things that could have happened to me. It forced creativity and determination down avenues I might not have walked without a kick through the door.

I didn’t choose the digital nomad life, the digital nomad life chose me.

Originally published in On Your Terms.