It was a warm Friday evening at the end of June. Wang Man and I went out for a drink — a well-deserved one, after more than four months of juggling full-time jobs and homeschooling. In Beijing, schools had closed for Chinese New Year in January 2020 and never reopened for the rest of the school year.
Wang Man has been my management consultancy colleague and friend for over a decade. She is a passionate admirer of Elon Musk and, more broadly, anyone with the audacity to wear a wizard hat. Over the first round of cocktails, she made her position clear: Covid-19 was going to change everything.
I, being a fan of anything playful without veering into the truly silly, argued the opposite: everything would stay exactly the same. It was shaping up to be a good evening. I could tell.
We talked about homeschooling. For both of us, it had been the most disruptive thing to happen to family life since the birth of our children — and yet, all things considered, we felt we’d handled it reasonably well. Better, certainly, than the families living in a state of permanent crisis: panicking tiger mums, exhausted kids, screaming matches that stretched past 10pm. Or the ones who had quietly stopped opening the daily emails from school at some point, having decided that peace and harmony at home outranked keeping up with academic expectations.
These were the main challenges
Over drinks, we started sharing — and quickly realised we’d been wrestling with the same things:
- The school day had vanished, but the working day hadn’t. Fitting eight hours of work around children who needed care and attention all day was exhausting — to put it mildly. And for kindergarten and primary school kids, being at home with mum sent one very clear signal: holiday! Not “school, just at home.”
- Teaching is a profession. We are not teachers. As management consultants, “fake it till you make it” is practically in the job description — looking convincing while doing things you’ve never done before is a core skill. But unpacking the worksheets our daughters received daily was genuinely hard. How exactly does one explain expressive language in creative writing? My own experience at a German state primary school, four decades ago, had taught me mainly to avoid spelling mistakes.
- And then there was everything else. A mysterious disease. Closing borders. Quarantine. Regulations that shifted by the week. A pervasive sense of insecurity that seeped into every corner of life.
And these were the bonuses
But the picture wasn’t all dark. Over that second round of cocktails, we found ourselves listing the unexpected upsides too.
- Spending so much time together meant getting to know each other in ways that normal life rarely allows. My daughter disagrees with this assessment — when I put it to her, she pointed out that she had always known me perfectly well 😉 . But for me, many of the deepest conversations I’ve had with her — a girl quietly slipping from childhood into her pre-teen world — could only have happened under these circumstances.
- We both came to cherish the new, unhurried pace of everything. The more organic shape of our days dissolved most of the usual stress. Kids could sleep in. The morning rush disappeared. Schoolwork got done by early afternoon, leaving the rest of the day for playing with friends, spontaneous ice cream when a piece of creative writing had gone particularly well — or particularly badly. Less social pressure for the children.
- No competition in the classroom, no playground conflicts, no teacher losing their nerve at the front of the room.
- Better food, slower meals. With time to actually cook, we stopped ordering in and started celebrating the simple pleasure of a proper dinner together. The stomach problems my daughter had suffered for years quietly disappeared. Sitting down to eat as a family at the end of a long day of homeschooling and home office turned out to be one of the warmest parts of the whole experience.
Trust your daughters to get the job done
The upsides were real — but so was the pressure. We still had to make homeschooling work while continuing to deliver professionally. There was no alternative but to:
- Hand real responsibility for their own learning to our daughters. Daily micro-management simply wasn’t possible — and, as it turned out, wasn’t necessary.
- Step back from being the go-between with teachers. The girls communicated directly — by Zoom, by email — and managed it themselves.
- Give them full access to everything they needed. Devices, passwords, tools. They downloaded Zoom and MS Teams themselves, connected the new colour printer themselves, and got on with it.
Somewhere between the first drink and the second — at a bar that prided itself on ingredients rooted in traditional Chinese medicine — it hit us both at the same time…you know… this is like Agile…
What we were doing is Agile Parenting!
That same evening, we discovered we had quite different agile parenting styles.
Wang Man is a SCRUM parent at heart. During homeschooling, she had divided Sophie’s tasks into two categories: compulsory and optional. The rule was simple — compulsory tasks done by Friday, every week. Optional tasks, academic but enjoyable, were entirely at Sophie’s discretion.
The logic was elegant. The idea was that three days of consistent work would be enough to clear the compulsory tasks, leaving the rest of the week open — for playing, or for the optional pile if Sophie felt like it. At the start of each week, Wang Man and Sophie would go through the tasks together, align on the expected outcomes, and sketch a rough plan for the week ahead.
After that, Sophie was on her own. She could reschedule, reshuffle, and reorganise as she saw fit — as long as the Friday rule held. Wang Man had given her a recommendation and the freedom to ignore it. The decision was Sophie’s.
SCRUM and agile values
Looking back, my own starting point wasn’t SCRUM — it was the agile values themselves. Not a conscious choice; just the mindset I’d spent years helping companies adopt, quietly finding its way into how I managed homeschooling.
The Agile Manifesto was born out of frustration. In the 1990s, software projects ran on the waterfall model — rigid, sequential, and stretched over years. The result was often perfectly executed software that arrived too late, delivered into a world that had moved on since the project began. These are its core ideas:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
n practice, this meant treating the school’s materials as a guideline, not a rulebook. The point of homeschooling — and the freedom it unexpectedly offered — was to fill gaps, work at Antonia’s pace, and play to her strengths. Assignments we didn’t find valuable simply didn’t get done. Instead, we wove other things in — improving her German, for one, became part of the daily rhythm.
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Everything Antonia did, she did for herself — not for the school. “Learner of the week” competitions, designed more to signal effort than measure it, we ignored entirely. The only metric that mattered was whether she would meet the academic level expected at the end of Grade 4.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Homeschooling wasn’t just a upheaval for us — it was hard on the teachers too. Zoom calls instead of a room full of children, no real-time read on how anyone was feeling. I encouraged Antonia to make the most of the few touchpoints she had. Most of the time, she was the only student showing up to her Chinese class. Which made her all the more determined to be there every Friday at noon — to show her teacher she was appreciated, and to offer a small moment of human warmth at a time when everyone was quietly starving for it.
Responding to change over following a plan
- Sometimes you start the week full of ambition — only to discover that some tasks are harder and slower than expected, and the plan needs to shrink.
- Sometimes the weather is simply too good to ignore. Air quality below 50 PM2.5, sunshine, friends outside. That’s not a distraction — that’s childhood.
- And sometimes a small assignment unexpectedly becomes something worth following all the way — growing from a quick task into something that fills the entire day, right up until dinner.
Whenever changing the plan felt like the right call, we changed it. The plan existed to structure the day — nothing more.
In practice, every morning started with a realistic look at what could actually be achieved. When something needed to shift later on, we talked it through: skip the task entirely, scale it down, or move it? My aim was to give Antonia enough ownership to make some of those calls herself. I had a job to do and meetings to attend — I couldn’t watch her every minute. A strong sense of responsibility for her own learning wasn’t a nice-to-have. It was the whole point.
Wang Man and I left that bar feeling genuinely excited. We decided to explore how far agile and SCRUM could go, applied more deliberately and with more structure — and gave it a name: Agile Parenting.
That’s how it started.