Child Led Learning & Homeschooling with Intention w/ Kelly Edwards

In this episode of Clear & On Purpose, Christina sits down with Kelly Edwards, homeschooling mama and business owner, to explore a more intentional and child-led approach to learning. Kelly shares her journey from 'accidental homeschooler' to creating a framework called the 90-Minute School Day, designed to help parents deschool themselves, support their children’s learning, and build confidence in their parenting.

We discuss:

• How to create a homeschool environment rooted in relationship, curiosity, and trust.
• Balancing homeschooling with running a business or pursuing personal passions.
• Supporting neurodivergent children while prioritizing emotional regulation for the whole family.
• Why following a child’s interests can cultivate independence, self-trust, and lifelong learning skills.
• Practical tips for integrating learning into everyday life, from reading aloud to experiential activities.

This episode is perfect for parents who are homeschooling, considering it, or looking for ways to foster confidence, curiosity, and self-directed learning in their children—while maintaining their own balance and well-being.

Kelly Edwards The 90-Minute School Day

Kelly Edwards is the founder of The 90-Minute School Day, a framework that helps parents transition from a school-based mindset to natural learning. She helps families create a thriving homeschool by prioritizing felt-safety, connection, self-awareness, while honoring biological rhythms and neurodivergence. Through her Day in the Life community, Guide Training program, and The 90-Minute School Day podcast, Kelly supports parents in unlearning school-based conditioning, trusting natural learning, and redefining success by focusing on strengths, not setbacks. A wife and long-time homeschooling parent of three girls, she is also a parent coach, educator, and trauma-informed foster care advocate. Learn more at 90minuteschoolday.com.

Podcast: https://90minuteschoolday.com/podcast/
DITL community: https://90minuteschoolday.com/day-in-the-life/

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Resources & Links

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• www.christinaslaback.com

Transcript

Kelly Edwards Int.

Christina: [00:00:00] We just need more information so that we can make an educated decision about what we're about to do. And then you take the jump, and then once you jump, then you have to recalibrate everything because it doesn't matter how you prepared with for anything in life, it's. Gonna change when you get there. And that recalibration is part of the process.

Welcome to Clear and On Purpose, the podcast design to help you cut through the noise and get back to what matters most. If you're feeling stuck, but needs to take intentional action, you are in the right place. I'm Christina Slayback, homeschooling mom of two, and life and business coach. Helping you drop in and align with your values three or space Each week I'll be sharing practical insights and simple actionable steps to help you find clarity, boost your energy, and design a life that balances ambition with.

Let's dive in and get clear on purpose.

[00:01:00] Today. I'm so excited to have Kelly Edwards from the 90 Minute School Day joining us. Kelly is a homeschooling mama, business owner and advocate for child-directed Intentional Learning. I first encountered Kelly's work a few years ago, and what really stood out to me was her perspective on homeschooling, not just as a way to teach academics, but as a way to cultivate confidence, independence, and self-trust in children and parents alike.

In this conversation, we dive into Kelly's journey as an accidental homeschooler, her approach to Deschooling and the framework she created called The 90 Minute School Day. We also talk about balancing homeschooling with running a business, supporting neurodivergent children, and prioritizing emotional regulation for both kids and parents.

Whether you're curious about homeschooling, looking to parent with more intentionality. Or just interested in learning from Kelly's Insights. This episode is packed with the actionable takeaways and perspective shifts. You won't wanna miss.

[00:02:00] All right. Welcome back to Clear and On Purpose. I'm really excited today we have Kelly Edwards here and she is a homeschooling mama. She is a business owner. She does all the things and I'm really excited because I encountered your work a few years ago. I think Kelly actually. And I just really like the perspective that you bring to.

Homeschooling to kind of carving your own path and doing your own thing and really being able to have the ability to bring all of that back into what your specific goals are and what your intentions are for your family, and kind of block out some of the noise, or at least be able to have that grounding point to be able to come back to.

I think for so many of my listeners like that ability to be able to find that inner. Still point and be able to ground back in to be able to kind of do their own thing. And really trust themselves is so core, whether they're homeschooling or they're not, or they're thinking about it. And I [00:03:00] would just love for you to share a little bit about your journey, how you got started homeschooling, what you're doing now, and how that evolved.

Sure. Well, well, oh, thank you for having me. And to kind of start at the beginning, I am an accidental homeschooler. Like a little bit about, my story is my oldest daughter, who at the time of this recording is about 17 and a half. She was in first grade and we were, we knew we were adopting her. She was our foster child and.

One of our goals was to build attachment and safety, and she was a great student, but the school wasn't able to meet her other needs that she had outside of academics. And so while she was a model student academically, she was really struggling in other areas. So I thought, well, we need to just bring her home.

And I did all the things that. Homeschooling parents do when they're considering [00:04:00] homeschooling. You listen to the podcasts, you read the books, you attend the conferences, you. Do all of this work preparing, and then you just have to jump. And that's one thing I, I use with my clients a lot is called the Transtheoretical Model of Change, which talks about like not being ready to make the change, than getting ready and getting ready is when we're doing all that research, right?

We just need more information so that we can make an educated decision about what we're about to do. And then you take the jump, and then once you jump, then you have to recalibrate everything because it doesn't matter how you prepared with for anything in life, it's. Gonna change when you get there. And that recalibration is part of the process.

And then we get into figuring that out, getting confident and kind of going into maintenance. And so for us, our first year of homeschooling certainly had its ups, but what I remember most clearly were the downs, the battles that we were having over things like. Language arts and math. We had a lot of fun things.

We have fun memories. I have pictures to prove it 'cause we don't take [00:05:00] pictures of the problems. But I just remember thinking like, this should not be this hard. What am I doing wrong? And that really kicked off my journey and our journey as a family into de-schooling, which is kind of detaching ourselves from the educational model that we're used to in schools.

And re-looking at how children learn and how. I can support my child's learning in a different way that is rooted in relationship and felt safety over kind of checking boxes and you know, making sure that she understands punctuation in second grade, which is so arbitrary, right? It went in the grand scope, scope of things.

She's a fantastic writer. She kind of is born that way. You're either gifted in some areas and strong in some areas and weak in others. Like I'm still kind of a weak speller myself, but that's not something that holds me back in my professional life. And so it's really kind of pulling back, taking that 30,000 mile.

Is it a mile or is it feet? 30,000 foot view? Yeah. That's like [00:06:00] what I saying, that seems kind of far and being able to kind of like re-ask yourselves, why am I doing this? Where are we going? What is my hope for my child? Does spelling matter that much to me? Does it matter that much to her? And so really that was the journey that made such a big difference for our family as we look at homeschooling and learning.

So that's a little bit about my story. Yeah. And what I think that I was drawn to with you and how you approach it is that I feel really similarly where I think that a lot of times when people think about or when, and I'm sure you get this a lot too, when people find out that you're a homeschoolers, like, oh my gosh, I could never do that.

Like to be able to do that and this image that was in my mind was like sitting at the table with all of these worksheets and like checking these boxes and going back and like red inking them and just like. It, it didn't feel fulfilling to me and it didn't feel like what I wanted. And so when we were looking at it and looking at what we [00:07:00] wanted to do, I think that being able to delineate what I knew that I wanted versus what I didn't and not coming back and replicating schooling at home.

Mm-hmm. Because I think that even in the homeschool groups and communities that I have, there is often still that pressure of like. Which curriculum are you using? Well, are you hitting all of these subjects? Well, how long are you taking? Oh, we're still having these battles over it. And the way that you homeschool is a little bit different, and I really resonated with the way that I, I homeschool too.

And the, the philosophy that I have for, and I'd love for you to share a little bit more about your approach to homeschooling and talk a little bit more because you, you consider yourself a little bit more of an unschooler as well. Mm-hmm. Right? Yes. So that's a really good question because where we, where we feel safe as adults and as parents is in the school lane, because that is what we know.

That is the paths that we traveled as adults mainly. And [00:08:00] even the adults who were homeschooled themselves, who are homeschooling now, we're homeschooled with that kind of more traditional school at home. We're gonna sit down at the table, we're gonna run through this curriculum, and so. That's what feels safe.

That is what society is signaling to us to do. Because they're asking us, when are you going back to school? And I'm like, well, we don't really do school. And they're like, well, no, but you homeschool, so when are you starting? Because it's this time of year right now. And I'm like, well, we learn every day.

And so we don't really have a start and stop. And you have to consider your audience. 'cause sometimes it's just not worth having this conversation. Right. What curriculum are you using? Mm-hmm. You know, when you teach your kid. And, and how I reframe all that is I'm not the teacher. That is one of the things that was early on in my journey is letting myself go, teaching my kids things that they're not wanting to learn right now.

That's, that's not gonna, that's me wearing a teacher hat and a parent hat, and it gets to an identity crisis. I'm a co-learner alongside my children. If [00:09:00] they are interested in things, then I have traveled the earth longer than them, and I have skills that they haven't developed yet, and so I can lend them my skills and my resources to help them with their own learning journey.

And so part of where I've moved to from who I was when I first started homeschooling to who I am today was figuring out a system to deschool myself that felt safe. 'cause I had a structure and I had a checklist, but it was just for me. And it wasn't something that I imposed on my children. And that's what the 90 Minute School Day is.

It's a framework for the parent to be. Able to be like, okay, I need a plan for me so that I can check boxes myself. And I know I'm not neglecting my kids educationally but I'm also allowing them the freedom to discover their passions and be able to translate the learning. For myself, and depending on where my [00:10:00] clients are, some of them have stringent reporting standards with their state or region, and then some people don't and they just want that translation for themselves.

So when the self-doubt arises, when they get a lot of those questions about like, so you're not using curriculum, how do you know if they're learning? What about college? And you're like, I have a first grader. I am good. Thank you. Yeah. So I'll pause there. Yeah. And I think that that's so true and I think that for me too, and one of the reasons why I had connected with you a little bit, and last year too was that as it was very easy for me to be able to be like play-based learning, child-directed learning, like all of these things for schooling, like we would get outside and I just knew that they were learning a whole bunch. Like children are inherently scientists, they're trying to constantly experiment, they're trying to constantly learn.

And then as we got further and further into it, and that was really, that was very widely accepted then. And as we got further and further into it, there was less and less. People in my homeschooling [00:11:00] community that were continuing and then it was, okay, well, well now we're sitting down and we're doing social studies.

Okay, well now we're looking at all these things. And I think as they get older, and you have a 17 and a half year old now, like how do you continue to bring that, sense of following the child, of having that trust with them and still be able to like, what are the goals at that point for your child and how did you come about that so that you can, you can do this still with confidence.

Yeah, that's a great question because we do see that a lot as they get older, sometimes kids choose to go back to school. So my 17-year-old chose to go back into an environment where school and, and she, like I said, she's very gifted academically, so that structure appeals to her. Um, but where we get a lot of the times is.

We lose trust in ourselves and really kind of understanding that bigger picture of how children develop and how they learn. Like you said, most people understand, young children learn through play, they [00:12:00] learn through experiences being hands-on. We really do understand that societally, but then we want them to buckle down in, gosh, I have a 9-year-old who doesn't know how to read like the, the world is on fire and it's like, okay.

The nine year olds read in school because they have to, because it's crowd management. The teacher C needs everyone to read by the end of second, end of third grade, so that they can now teach and say, read the instructions. Right. But really if we look at developmentally how. Old kids are, when they learn to read spontaneously without this extra pressure, it's anywhere between four and 12 and 14.

And so that's a really wide range. And then a lot of my clients have neuro divergent kiddos. So when you have a dyslexic kid, they learn differently and. There's so much stigma and self-esteem issues that come, the school is not doing this in any way intentionally, but it [00:13:00] just comes because now you're in a, a reading program or you need some sort of intervention and you're not able to do what the other kids are doing and you put that stuff on yourself.

And so I'm kind of getting us in the weeds, so I'm gonna pull us back. So to answer your question, what we need to do as parents is recognize, okay. Where, what is Arg child really good at? And I would point to Howard Glasser's eight, um, how does he phrase it? Multiple intelligence is theory is what he's the father of.

And really understand who your child is and what they're good at. I have a child with a DHD, both types and she's not ever probably gonna be someone who sits still at a desk and does a lot of desk work. She's gonna have a job that is extremely fulfilling for her, where she's able to move her body correct.

And so we want to get, and homeschooling provides you this really great window of time. Because you're with your children more to learn who they are, what they're interested in, support their needs. And then what [00:14:00] happens is somewhere in the range of nine to 12, these kids really hone in on some specific interests.

And then you start resourcing those interests, that light that child up and you watch them flourish. So for example, my 11-year-old right now is really interested in horses and horseback riding, and she's really interested. Did in her peers, and so we are making sure that she has lots of opportunities to be with friends, that she has lots of opportunities to horseback ride and out of those opportunities.

These are all the other subjects, right? Mm-hmm. Because there's so much science and technology, engineering, math, language arts history, just around horseback riding, just around hanging out with her friends. With my 17-year-old when she was about the same age, she was really involved with birding gardening.

We did a lot of like, visits to wildlife rehabilitation facilities or one-off events that you can do when you're homeschooling. You can curate this beautiful. [00:15:00] Uh, lifestyle with your kids where they get all of this immersion. She would, she learned how to tag, uh, monarch butterflies. She would go out on community science projects that we can find that she's with mixed ages.

There's retirees there, there's other homeschoolers. There's like the postgraduate person talking about the bat study that they're, you know, organizing in the inner city. There, there was just so much, and then that's real life and, and. Their way of sharing what they know with others is also a way of identifying how much that they know.

So through that process of following your child, empowering your child, creating experiences around your child's interests and the learning that they do themselves around that interest, all of the reading, the research, the YouTube videos, the conversations, et cetera, et cetera, you get a well-rounded, really packed education.

For those kids that's very robust and specific that they can take. 'cause now they know who they are. They're not just [00:16:00] like checking the arbitrary. I did English 1, 2, 3, and four in high school and I also had two years of Spanish and I also did, you know, US government, et cetera, et cetera. And I look just on paper just like the other kids, with the exception of I did soccer or I was in key club.

Like they have all of these other really specific interests and they know what they wanna do. Like my 17-year-old wants to go into wildlife rehabilitation and we saw that way back when she was nine, 10 years old. So it's really giving these kids like that time and freedom that they have to be able to really find themselves.

Yeah. Okay. There is so much about what you just said. So a lot of times when I'm working with, um. Women when I'm working with my clients and things too, like so much of the work that we're doing is trying to get them back to that finding themselves. And so that is one of my favorite things about it.

And something that like I continually remind myself about as well, is that. When you are giving the kids the opportunity to be [00:17:00] able to pursue that, then they are developing and learning more about themselves. And they don't have to necessarily then go back and be like, oh, well maybe, you know, I did all of these things.

I'm following this path that was set forth for me. And then coming back later and being like, well, that wasn't it. That doesn't feel right. And now I have to try to relearn now. Like giving them that really strong base. And the other thing that you talked about with the strengths and moving it in. And I think that that gives so much confidence as well.

Like to be able to. Be really competent, even if it's in like these special interest areas or whatever that is, to be able to develop that confidence and that independence to be able to pursue and the ability to know that you can. That the child can learn how to learn. You know, like they can be able to teach themselves and be able to, if they decide that they wanna do something else, like they have the skills and the trust within themselves at that point.

Or if they've been building that up, that they can then transfer [00:18:00] those skills to this other area that maybe we didn't necessarily cover when we were going through our school. Yes. Yeah. School really does because of how it's structured, it almost impedes. Learning. This is my personal opinion, but it, I feel like it, it has more impediments in front of us and that box kids in than it does allow them for self-discovery because they have to follow so many rules because there are so many different constraints because of just the, the logistics of school, right?

You have so many same aged kids that are there. Maybe don't wanna be there, or maybe they do wanna be there and you're, so much of the school day is structured for reasons outside of like academic learning and exposing kids to finding themselves and finding out what they're good at. That when you take them out of that environment and they recover from it.

There's so many kids with educational trauma. That then they're able to be like, oh, I actually really like [00:19:00] this. And I didn't even know that about it because I didn't even know it existed. But now that I've been out in the world and I've had these exposures to people or circumstances or YouTube, that has gotten me curious about something and I had the time to pursue.

I'm so much more engaged in my own life, my own strengths, and then I can drive the bus and I can just ask my parents to help resource me through information, finances, driving me around, that kind of thing. Yeah. So, Kelly, as you're doing some of this and knowing that the way that you go about this, you are also running a business.

You are? Mm-hmm. You know, you have your own podcast, you have all these things that you're doing too. How. Are you able to kind of structure that? You talked a little bit about your 90 minute school day and like your checklist that you go through. Can you give a little bit more information about what that looks like in terms of pursuing your own passions alongside homeschooling your children?

Sure. [00:20:00] So it looks, it has looked different for me in different seasons. Mm-hmm. Right at the time of this recording, my oldest is 17 and a half. My middle daughter is 11, and my youngest is seven. So I've got older kids now. Even my youngest is, you know, independent. That looks a lot different than when I had like a six month old or a toddler and a preschooler at the same time.

So I'm kind of acknowledging that. But for right now, in this current season, I'm, so, I've had different things. I've had, I've had sitters, I've had grandparents. We recently will spend six weeks of the year, the past couple years with my parents, and that gives us the additional. Support we need for like nervous system management for one of my children who has higher needs so that we can have more time.

My husband and I are both entrepreneurs, so we, it's, you can hear the flex, right? And that's what you have to do as an entrepreneur. You have to, okay, here are my constraints. Here's what I'm trying to achieve. How can I rework [00:21:00] this in a way that works for our family? And it might look different than anybody else in the world.

So we do a lot of that. But how it looks. For me now as far as managing my business is I have two and a half days a week that I have blocked that my husband and I talk. We tag team. And so my two and a half days are days where I'm in the office. He is the parent on duty, is what we call it. And then I'm the parent on duty the other days.

And then we just have days where no one's working, right? We have family days, so that's working really well for us. Now as, as far as me having that work life balance, now, it bleeds into my real life where I will have a day where I'm not in the office, but I will need to get things accomplished. And so that for me is.

Each day I have a conversation with my kids in the morning about like if I have a meeting, if I have some time that I need for myself, and we talk through it because it's kind of a way that we work, like on everyone's executive functioning, on what everyone wants to do, what they're planning. We have a family calendar, we do plan things out, [00:22:00] and it's just respecting the, the limits of one another with mutual respect, like you would your roommate, you know, my husband and I figure out our schedules by the week, depending on the kids.

Sometimes we do that, but for my little ones, as. Especially they're still in, I just wanna know what we're doing today and this is what I'd like to do. And I'm like, Hey, that's such a great idea. But like that is definitely something we have to plan for. We can't just do that today. This is why. So we have that kind of discussion around our family rhythms.

We also have kind of a period in the middle of the day where it's evolving. Right now we don't have as much as we used to, but it was. It was a game changer for me for years and years and years. And just only in the last year has it kind of started to dissolve. Is quiet time in the afternoon from lunch to the middle of the afternoon.

It's just quiet in the house. You can do whatever you want. It's time to pursue your own interests. I'm not available. I'm gonna be resting myself, or it might be a time for me to pick up some extra work. So that's kind of answering the work life. Mm-hmm. Question, did you have any questions on that before I talk about the 90 minute school day?

Why don't you talk about the 90 minute school day, and then I wanna [00:23:00] go and pivot a little bit, but I wanna kind of go back to that conversation. Okay. So the 90 Minute School day, again, is the framework that I developed to help me deschool myself and then be able to see the learning that's going on in my family.

So you can use it to plan. Or you can use, Hey, I'm just gonna watch my day. We're all gonna live our best lives, and then I'm gonna reverse plan what happened. So it can work either way. And how it's divided is into six pathways. So you can think of it like a pathway. I, most of my branding is mountains, because just as you cross over one mountain, there's another one.

Yeah. And so it, you know, life is not necessarily about balance, but like being on a teeter-totter. Mm-hmm. So Pathways through the woods or neuro pathways. I'm kind of like a brain science geek, and so there's six pathways to the 90 minute school day. They're broken into two categories. The first category is content, so that's, this is building libraries In our minds.

We are absorbing content [00:24:00] is if we're awake, we're absorbing content. So even if you have a kid that isn't able to access a whole lot beyond screens and it's driving you crazy, you can rest easy. That they're still learning and pulling in content. Content is building the libraries of the mind. It's just layered on learning and you don't even know what you've got stored in there.

If you think about that movie, inside out with all the little balls that are stored. Like we just are constantly storing knowledge. Our brain does prune things. A lot of what we learned in school was not relevant to us, and it gets pruned away. You know, we can't sit here and regurgitate our 12 or 13 years of grade school.

So content is one category. The other category is skill. And skills that we need to develop as human beings to be able to teach ourselves are the three Rs. Reading, writing, and arithmetic. So a child, at some point in their development, it would behoove them to be able to read and to write, and to be able to do basic math.

[00:25:00] That's really all, all of us use every day. You know, you and I are not using our complex geo geography, calculus, you know, that we had to pick up in high school. We're using. Consumer math. And so I'm not saying that we don't want to give the opportunity to our children for those advanced mathematics, but if you have a kid that's never gonna go into a field for that, then don't frustrate them, especially if that's not where their strengths are.

We do wanna have strong numeracy skills. We do wanna understand the meaning and relevance, but any child with five bucks to spin all of a sudden gets really interested in economics. And so the two categories are. Content. You're building the libraries of the mind skills. That's how you teach yourself. And they are, those two categories are broken into three each.

So the content pathways, the way that I've broken them up, is so that no matter what your family looks like, there's crossover between yours and mine. So every day you're spending some portion of your day in conversation and intentional time with your kids. It [00:26:00] might be running them to soccer practice. It might be for your family.

It might be sitting down at the table. It might be, uh, bath time and reading a book at night. Like all of us have time in our day. That's about 20 minutes. Where we are in, we are around our kids connecting with them. And if you're in a season where you don't have that, then it's time to get, build that back in just 20 minutes.

That's called morning time or family time. And that's where we build our family values and that's where we pass them down to our kids. And so much of this is more is caught than taught, right? It's just how we operate ourselves. It's how we speak to others. It's how our kids notice. And our civic duties or volunteer duties, but it's also about the media we consume, whether we're reading to our kids, we're watching YouTube with them, we are gaming with them.

This is all building. The family values and the personal character of our child. So that's morning time and character. And um, the next pathway in content. So libraries of the mind is reading aloud. And so this is where we read aloud, read [00:27:00] aloud to your kids until they leave home. Like it's so powerful and you don't have to be the person reading aloud, you can just listen aloud, get an audio book.

When we watch movies, it's the same idea. We're being exposed to great narratives. The comprehension skills. There's so much going on there. So reading aloud, that's kind of, everybody understands that. And then the third pathway in the content areas are activities. And so this is where we are doing things together as a family.

And so this week my younger two children have been busy. Catching butterflies, like it's nobody's business. We should have a tally board. This is a good idea of how many butterflies they're catching because it's just incredible right now how many they're catching, how many questions are coming up. I've been involved in some of it.

We are raising some monarch caterpillars right now, um, that we found earlier this week. So that's an example of an activity that kind of erupted out of normal everyday life. We didn't have it planned. But that is an activity pathway. Or you can have it planned. You're like, Hey, let's bake apple pie today.

Or Hey, let's go play [00:28:00] basketball. Or Hey, let's play sorry, or, Hey, let's whatever. And so in that activity pathway, that's that hands on. Connection based learning that you really are able to pack so much learning in because the kids are engaged with you. It's relationally based in like the sky's, the limits on what can be packed in there.

Mm-hmm. So all of those are 20 minutes. They happen every day. You can intentionally plan them or reverse plan them, like I said. And then the skill-based pathways are reading, writing, and math. So if you have a child that is like an independent reader, enjoys reading, a kid who likes moving through math workbooks perhaps, or some sort of math curriculum or just likes math, you know, you don't even need these because that skill is already under development.

But for our little guys, this is a really great time for you to partner and be alongside them. And so you're playing board games or you're playing video games, or you're using manipulatives, or you're baking and you're. Packing in those skills where [00:29:00] reading, writing, and math are 10 minutes each, and it can be something like with early readers, I just read with them and I'll assign them a word.

We'll track our fingers or they'll. Uh, volunteer a word that they wanna work on and we just may just sound out the title of that one. And learning the kids are constantly decoding from when they're really, really little, like reading skills happen from birth and it clicks one day. And as long as we don't force it and we don't give kids like some sort of hang up around it, reading is going to happen.

And if there's some kind of concern, then you can of course get a reading interventionist if you think there's. Like a, a vision situation or dyslexia or something going on. But by and large kids are gonna decode their timeline. Just might not be your timeline. Just like some kids are early potty trainers, some kids are not.

And, and that's not no one. I, I mean, when were you potty trained? We don't care. We just know that you are right. And so, um, just kind of like taking a step back, dropping the [00:30:00] school mentality and being able to use this framework is really helpful for parents because then they can be like, oh gosh, we went to out to eat with grandma today and my daughter and I worked on reading the menu together.

And then she was asking me questions about the receipt 'cause she wanted to hold the receipt on the way back. And then I read her a book tonight. Like, that's all, that's all you need. There's 20 hours. Uh, Josh Kaufman wrote a book about it called The 20, I forget what it's called, the title now, but it's basically his premise is you need 20 hours to become good at something.

It's kind of in contrast to Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours. That's to be an expert, but for you to just be good at something and to have like basic mastery around something, you only need 20 hours. Well, if you back that up and you think about what you need to be able to learn a skill like reading.

You can totally pull that 20 hours in a year, and I could break it down for you, but I, I'll, I won't digress into all the details. That's the gist. No, I think that that makes it really simple. It makes [00:31:00] it feel so much more attainable when you're looking at it that way. And I think also it's, it's just shifting the lens a little bit more so that you're viewing the things that you're probably already doing, the things that are already coming in, and you're just bringing a little bit more intention and noticing a little bit more.

Mm-hmm. So then your. You are grasping what's being learned. Mm-hmm. Because I think that, you know how we talked earlier about how, you know, children, young children are such like natural born learners. We don't necessarily lose that. No. It's just that we don't notice it in the same way that we do when they're younger or it's not following what we think that it might look like at that time.

Yeah, we're so conditioned for school to look like school. So when my kid is playing all day and they're 10 years old, like in summertime, we're fine with it because everybody's off school and hopefully, God, we're all done. And how much learning happens with kids over summer break before they go back into the school system?

But we don't recognize it because it doesn't look like book learning. [00:32:00] But it's the same skills their, their math might have bloomed over the summer because they don't have all this pressure around it. And it was around their interests. Yeah, and how much faster they might pick it up and how much more they retain because you can spend a whole semester on, I mean, I know that I spent semesters on things that I could not pull out any information on, probably now.

Going back to when you were talking about like that work-life balance, one of the things that I think can be really tough for homeschool moms, and you did talk a little bit about this too, in like reframing that teacher versus parent mentality and having that co-learner, but how do you handle, and in general, but also specifically with like neurodivergence and all these things that might come up, how do you handle the emotional regulation of the.

Your children and of yourself, because I feel like this can be something where, right. Everything will be going smoothly and all of a sudden somebody's dysregulated in the household. And I feel like the whole day is just like me trying to maintain [00:33:00] emotional regulation. Mm-hmm. For myself and everyone else.

And having that ability to recharge is super important and I wonder what that looks like for you and how you prioritize or if that's a priority for you. And being able to keep yourself so that you can show up and be that present co-learner with them. Yeah, you bring up a really good point because like your biggest challenge in homeschooling is keeping yourself regulated because your friends that you are living life alongside of various ages, they're gonna come in and out of regulation because they are growing up and it is hard to be human.

Mm-hmm. And they have really big feelings. And one of the most beautiful things about being at home with your kids, especially if you have neurodivergent. Kids is allowing them space to have those feelings without all the shoulds and shaming of society that our societal structures put on these kids when they are just like.

Really having a hard time. And so in my home we are certainly allowed to have a [00:34:00] hard time and we all have really hard times a lot of the time, and it's about modeling, giving space for that person's hard time. So if we might have someone having a full blown meltdown and it's getting super violent, my kids are now learning that it's not their job to manage that person, which is a huge life skill that most adults don't understand.

So. That is not their job. My job as the adult and the parent in this situation is to establish safety for everyone. And so I've empowered the other children who are not having the meltdown to remove themselves. Right? And for some reason, this meltdown is happening outside of my purview. Please come, let me know so I can step in.

So we work through procedures like this that are just basic human being, things that we need to learn to be able to thrive in this life. So they know that. That person's meltdown is not their problem to solve. They as a fellow human being, walking the earth can do what they can to help this person, but they need to keep themselves safe first.

So we kind of work through that. Then [00:35:00] my job is to go and attend to that person because it's my child. I know what this. Person needs. Sometimes they don't want you anywhere near them. So I'm just a safe presence nearby, removing objects that might be harmful. I am keeping myself regulated during that time, and, you know, as a parent, I can OI have a full executive functioning, my brain is fully developed.

I can override my nervous system. Right. In the, in the, the. Context of a escalated situation, I can decide I'm gonna compartmentalize me right now and I'm gonna do what needs to happen. And we all do this naturally because we get activated. As they get activated. And so in that situation, we kind of establish safety and then it's reconnection back with.

Everyone in the house, and if that's all I do that day and I was able to keep myself together, that's huge. That's such a win. And I have just reframed it that way that my job is felt safety first. So as long as everybody was able to return to their felt safety, their [00:36:00] emotional safety, and feeling safe, then that was a win.

And some days we don't have that. And that's okay too. It looks different. I have high needs kids and. Other people don't understand my family dynamic and I don't have the time and energy to explain it. And so that gets kind of lonely and that's one of the reasons I have a community. But, but that's felt safety first, then connection.

And so if, if something is happening in my home that is disrupting connection, disrupting felt safety, then we take it right back to that. And over time with reps and repetition, my children have more skills each and every day to. Help first see someone else in their dysregulation or notice it themselves, and then they have the skills to be able to deescalate the situation or keep themselves safe.

And man, isn't that like the biggest thing we all want for our kids is their wellbeing first. And the [00:37:00] academics bloom from the fertile soil of that regulation. And so often we try to do it the other way around and it doesn't work. Yeah. Well, and I think sometimes we can get into feeling that like, okay, well we have to get through this stuff.

Mm-hmm. Today. Like, this is our plan, this is what we're trying to get through. And then trying to like push through When that's not happening, I just like, we'll have to go back sometimes. Just be like, okay, like this, we are not learning right now. Like this is not a learning environment. We need to just be able to come to a position where.

We can be regulat and like that's the lesson that we're learning today. We're learning how to manage ourselves. We're learning how to notice what those triggers are for our own bodies and be able to be in concert like you're saying, like as a human being around other human beings, like how we're able to be able to.

What we can control and what we can't control. Yeah. And being able to give space for that has been like, one of the [00:38:00] things that I really love about homeschooling is that you are learning along with them. And I think that our children are our biggest teachers, like having my children and being able to see.

And noticing and being, and being able to notice the skills that I want to impart onto them, and noticing where I also may have those gaps in that. Mm-hmm. Maybe I wasn't always connected to it, or maybe, you know, I haven't been taking my time and prioritizing myself enough, like my own mental space that then I, I don't have the patience that I need to.

So like being able to have that ability to. See that in someone else and then be able to use that as like a mirror for what I need to learn and how mm-hmm. Can show up better. What do I need to do next time so I can prepare the environment a little bit more? Like making sure everybody eats is a big one in our household.

You know, like just little things that like when they get to a certain age, they're like, oh, they can manage, like, they're pretty self-sufficient. Mm-hmm. But then it's also like, okay, yeah, they can manage most of the time and sometimes they just can't. And sometimes I literally need to [00:39:00] just like get them food and get that over to them because they're, they're dysregulated and they're not able to communicate at that point, or they aren't even aware of what the issue is.

Yeah, you bring up a really good point. Just there in capacity, right? We have fluctuating capacity as human beings, and so I, like today, I'm having a day of larger capacity than I had yesterday. Yesterday I was fatigued. I was. Tired. I hadn't slept well. I was kind of overwhelmed with my to-do list and I just had to be gentle with myself.

I had to offer myself self-compassion and be like, you know what? It's a gorgeous day. Why not? Instead of all the housework you were planning on doing, that's overwhelm overwhelming you. Let's find something that feels achievable and go sit outside and do it on the front porch. And I was able to still be productive.

Not as productive as my morning plans were, but I was able to like. Rearrange my day. And this is one of the benefits of being an entrepreneur or being able to work at home or being in charge of, you know, if you are a stay at home parent and you're [00:40:00] homeschooling, you have the agency and the freedom to adapt and recognize, okay, I have limitations to my own capacity, so I also have to offer this to my children.

Like they have days where they have wild capacity and they do so much in a day, and then they have days where they need a mental health day and we should allow them to. Clock it. But society wants us all to be machines. It doesn't make any sense. And so for those type A parents that are listening, curriculum can be like a double-edged sword.

You like it because of the structure, but the, if you're not careful with it, it becomes the master. And you are now working for the curriculum instead of relationship with your kids. And it's okay. You can, you can. Do choose what works and then drop the rest. Like if it's not working and there's a pattern of that, like full permission to ditch everything.

And don't worry what Karen down the street says. Oh, I love that. And let Karen do Karen. Yes. Let them do themselves. I think that that is such a great reminder [00:41:00] because I do think that a lot of times there can be, feel like there's too much flexibility. And then I, I had heard her quote, quote recently and it was, um, flexibility without any structure is just chaos.

So having some boundaries, having some ideas of what you might wanna do, even if it's just that reverse planning and like looking through and seeing what it is. Or like looking ahead and saying, this is gonna be a bigger day for me. So knowing that maybe, you know, we aren't gonna have as much like one-on-one, like I'm available time.

So letting that be a little bit easier, but having a little bit of that structure, but then being able to not be so rigid. Mm-hmm. And what we think that we should be doing and what we need to be doing. And I think that that is one of the beauties of being able to have that like child-led approach and that co-learning approaches because you are.

Being able to follow that and following the energy level and being able to help them tune into that too, and what their energy level is so that they can use that as they grow and they become, you know. [00:42:00] Business owners or you know, employees or employers, like all of these things as they're older too, to be able to have that self-awareness.

Mm-hmm. And the ability to trust themselves and know that it is not always a hundred percent every day. My days are gonna look different. My energy levels and my product, my productivity and all of that really is fine and it's beautiful and I should be able to have that ability to have more of that balance that everybody is, you know, elusively looking for.

Yeah, and it, and really what we're looking for is wellbeing and being able to recognize whatever progress looks like, the benchmark that has been set, because whether you're a kid in school or you're an adult in the workplace, uh. You can question that and say, Hey, this benchmark doesn't actually work for me as an individual, but let's mark progress differently.

Like, what are the goals that we're trying to achieve? And I would like to meet these goals and it might look a little strange, but I promise you because I'm self-aware [00:43:00] and I know how to self-advocate that I can meet the goals. You let me have the freedom that I need to be able to flux with my capacity.

And that's such a powerful thing, especially as women. And when we're thinking about our, our menstrual cycles and how we need to work, we, it's different than if you are not. A cycling female, because those rhythms are really important. I move my calendar around depending on where I am to the extent that I can control it.

I mean, there's always gonna be every part of your day that's outside of your control, but I don't need to be putting a whole bunch of deliverables on the calendar when I don't have the hormones. To give me the capacity to move through it, but in two weeks I certainly do. Right? Or I could have done it two weeks earlier and be superwoman and knock it all out.

And so being aware of, uh, my biological rhythms and, and of course, you know, we have circadian rhythms, we have other rhythms that are going on we can consider too, and these are important to teach [00:44:00] our kids. And you can learn all of this in homeschooling what the school system doesn't necessarily teach you.

Absolutely, and I think that like even the ones that we don't have control over, we might be at a point where we don't have the control over our schedules as much as that or whatever, but having the awareness so that when you are feeling tired, when you are feeling like, oh my gosh, like why can't I get this done?

I was able to do this two weeks ago, that then you can bring a little bit more compassion to yourself that you can build in those, those. Recuperation and those relaxation days as well to be able to do that, whether it's your hormonal cycle or the circadian cycle or the seasonal cycle. Mm-hmm. And, and being able to just be able to go with that flow a little bit more and noticing and, and so you're not beating yourself up, it's just giving yourself more compassion and grace.

Right. Yeah, absolutely. Kelly, I have appreciated this conversation so much. I wanna thank you so much for coming and sharing all of your wisdom. If people want to get more of what you're offering, of what you're doing, if they want [00:45:00] to interact with you more, what are the best ways for them to be able to do that?

Well, thank you Christina, so much for having me. And if people wanna get in touch with me, you can go to my website, 90 minutes school day.com. It's the number 99 0 minutes school day.com. I'm also on Instagram 90 minute school day.com and I have a podcast 90 Minute School Day. And so, sorry, my Instagram is not 90 minute school day.com.

It's 90 minute school day. And so I would just love to be in connection with anybody who's interested in homeschooling, interested in self-directed learning, especially if you have neurodivergent kiddos. I do have an active community where one of the things about being able to implement change in our lives is to be able to do it inside community, where we're learning the information together, but we're also putting it into practice together so it doesn't get pruned off, so that we can have that like long-term shift that is so helpful to be able to be seen so that Karen doesn't get to us.

Absolutely. Thank you so much. We'll link all of those in the show notes [00:46:00] and thank you Kelly, once again. I really appreciate you, and taking the time and all that you have been able to share with us. Thank you.

Thank you for tuning in to clear and on purpose. If you're ready to take intentional steps toward a more fulfilling life and wanna customize the approach, I'd love to work with you. Visit www.christinaslayback.com to schedule a free consultation or explore current offers designed to help you gain clarity.

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