What We Can Do Now for Our Kids:
Within and Without School as We’ve Known It.
A personal reflection.
The New York Times recently published “In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both.” It’s a sobering write-up that broaches the following questions: Can schools open fully? What if they don’t and we can’t work? How can we sustain what we’ve been doing since March with our kids at home? The author concludes with, “It’s outrageous, and I fear if we don’t make the loudest amount of noise possible over this, we (women) will be erased from the economy.”
In parallel to this narrative, Ms Suzanne Grant Lewis, Director of the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning, recently shared that “there is a broad consensus that the absolute priority is to safeguard the life and well-being of populations.” School stakeholders are putting pressure on school systems like never before, even in the midst of educational equity and reopening questions, to show how they plan to protect their entire community population. Is this fair to put on the schools?
In this pressure cooker we are now collectively in, we can find solutions for this ridiculousness. Learning does not just happen within school walls — we now have an opportunity to rethink and redesign everything. For those of us willing and able, we have social permission to be more creative and share our learnings for the betterment of our children and our community’s children. But first, we must frame the problems we are looking to solve for ourselves and our society before we can find solutions. We can talk all day about data points we have to prove problems are true, but how can we frame the problems today for great outcomes and solutions tomorrow?
For example, here is a problem frame and potential ideas for outcomes:
Problem:
The kids are home all day and they need at least four hours of activity outside my home.
Ideas:
Understand who in your community is free to help provide activities. Perhaps it’s recent graduates or teenagers who can help. What other families can you work with to provide activities or share time with? Are you willing to offer activities for one day per week for four hours? Perhaps you can find four other families who are willing to do the same and build a new solution.
Problem:
I don’t want to keep working with my current employer. I want to make money while spending time with my kids.
Ideas:
Find models that might support a new work-from-home lifestyle based on who you are and what you’re good at. The Mom Project, an innovative recruiting platform, places women in roles that empathize with the need for work life balance. Wonderschool encourages child care and preschool entrepreneurship by empowering founders to start their own in-home care businesses.
I’ll share a story of how this applied to my own life. When our son was born, I needed to work part-time and I also wanted to spend time with him. So, we came up with a nanny share plan with our best friends for three days per week and I watched both our son and our best friend’s daughter two days per week. I’d never trade these years. I got to spend time with our son, partner with our best friends, and I continued my work as a designer three days a week to plant seeds that turned into the business I run today.
If we don’t frame a problem in order to solve it, it’s easy to get lost inside so many lingering questions that may not be relevant to the problem we are working to solve. We’ve never had a greater moment in history to frame problems well in order to come up with great ideas for outcomes. What can you come up with for your own family that might also work for others? If parents are designing their own solutions, I believe that our children will see this and ultimately be more capable of designing their own learning and their own futures.
About the author: Erin Huizenga designs transformative learning experiences as Co-Founder and Chief Designer at Desklight. She has partnered with global organizations to design learning programs for entrepreneur and diversity initiatives, and designed tools for higher education and public schools. She’s been a national speaker at CreativeMornings and created curriculum and taught at the IIT Institute of Design and Northwestern University.
Originally written for submission to Diplomatic Courier for publication.
