Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis reveal home schooling hack: They get their friends to teach their kids

Celebrities are beginning to talk about what it’s like to home-school their children

Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis appeared on “The Tonight Show” with host Jimmy Fallon this week to talk about what it’s like to be home with their children during the coronavirus pandemic.

What’s the news:

• Kutcher and Kunis revealed that they are currently home schooling their children. But they have a unique hack that gives them a break from their teaching routine, according to Elle magazine.
• Kunis said: “Boy, do I appreciate teachers.”
• Kutcher said: “I like me some teaching. We set up like a curriculum for the week, and we plan it out and figure out what the kids are going to learn like throughout the week. And so we’ve done various weeks. We’ve done a week on — the first week was like energy and electricity. And then we did how to build things, architecture and building.”
• Kunis said: We have enlisted our friends to do like a 20-minute Zoom sessions with our kids, where they can teach anything from like making flower arrangements to architecture and that give us 20 minutes on not parenting and also allows our kids to have another type of interaction.”
• Kutcher said: “And it works really well with people who are like single and they’re at home, they’re alone. They don’t have kids that they’re chasing around all day. So they’ve got a free 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and the kids just engage in them. And so we did one architecture lesson, we did one energy lesson.”
• Kunis said: “We’ve abused all of our friends. We’re like who’s next? But we piggyback off of our kids’ curriculum. I don’t want to take away — their schools are amazing at helping the parents during the week.”

Other celebrities talk about home schooling

The coronavirus pandemic has forced parents — from those on Main Street to those in Hollywood — to adapt to home schooling. The results have been a little mixed.

Kristen Bell, for example, said on her show “#Momsplaining” that home schooling has been hard on her family, as I wrote about for the Deseret News.

• She said: “Of course, we’ve all come to know the two worst words in the human language: Home schooling. Doing schoolwork with them, it is absolutely miserable. When we started this quarantine, the first math worksheet I gave my daughter, in all the answer lines she wrote, ‘No. No. No. No. No.’”
• Bell said: “There are a few people that have come out victorious in this situation though. Germaphobes, stay-at-home moms, they’re all like, ‘I told you how (expletive) hard this is.’”

Similarly, Drew Barrymore said she had been brought to tears because of home schooling her children, according to the Deseret News.

Barrymore appeared on the “Today” show through video chat, where she said she had to help teach her daughters.

• Barrymore said: “I don’t know if there are good days and bad days. I think there are good hours and bad hours. I cried every day, all day long. It was like every church and state. It was the messiest plate I’ve ever held in my life to be the teacher, the parent, the disciplinarian, the caretaker.”
• “And I thought ... teachers have children (of their own). Do they survive it because they get to go away and work with other kids? Have they had their children in their classroom? How did this all work?’”
• “I didn’t think I needed to respect and appreciate teachers any more than I did,” she said. “Then you start to get some systems and you see people on social media making lists and you’re like, aaarghh. You find your way. You’re resilient.”