Letting go of rules and “have to’s”
****I guess my question is are there other unschooling families out
there that did not unschool from birth and how did they de-parent
themselves? Any advice on how to let go of all the rules and ‘have
tos’? The things we read or are told by other families that we
‘supposed to do’. (ie diet, bedtime….)****
Personally, I’m really uncomfortable with the term “de-parenting”
because that’s not at all my goal. I’m still 100% my kids’ parent, I’m
just hopefully one of those warm, comforting, nurturing mamas that they
can always come to and feel safe and wrapped in love rather than one of
those enforcer mamas. (Anyone remember that ad line from 4 years ago or so?)
For me, I think questioning my own assumptions was probably my biggest
tool: asking “why?” or “why not?” or “is that really true?” Sometimes
I’d do the questioning all on my own, but other times, my kids were the
catalyst for the questions–when they pushed back, I’d need to step back
and start thinking more deeply.
Most things were as simple as just saying “yes” more and following their
lead, trying to clarify my own thoughts and needs in baby steps along
the way. This was certainly how we transitioned from being a tv-less
household to one with cable, letting go of the whole “have to”
surrounding screen time for kids.
Lots of times, too, it was finding ways to meet my needs as a parent in
ways that didn’t impose on my kids. That’s been a really big part of our
approach to food. I may not be comfortable with the kids having lots of
processed foods, but I can be very comfortable with them having lots of
homemade, whole wheat chocolate chip cookies, or ice cream without all
the chemical additives, that kind of thing. So, it wasn’t so much that I
just disregarded my need as a parent for the kids to have healthy, whole
foods, but that I worked to find a way to meet my own parental needs and
their needs at the same time.
I guess that brings me to another really important question in my
journey: the “would you be willing” question. That’s a big part of our
negotiations. One person needs x; one person needs y. Let’s think of as
many solutions as we can, and go through each one asking everyone
involved “would you be willing…” or “would this work for you?” If the
answer is no, well then, why not? One more bit of data to go on for
finding a solution that *will* work.
I think even when we begin deschooling ourselves when our kids are
really young that there’s still a lot of personal work that goes on
behind the scenes. If we do it really well, then maybe for our kids, it
will always appear seamless, and they can just take it for granted.
Starting young, means releasing old baggage and half truths and
practicing with new tools one step at a time. It starts off small
(though it always *feels* big in the moment), and builds as the kids get
older and the issues change and grow. Toothbrushing or bathing seem a
whole lot easier to deal with in retrospect than guns, for instance! lol
Never mind driving and dating. Whew–I hope I’ll be ready and
well-practiced by then!
***
Here’s how I took the term “de-parenting” (probably because of my own
highly controlled childhood): NOT as in how to de-parent one’s own
children … rather as in how to pull away from the values of the
culture and/or family of origin that are stifling to a happy thriving
unschooling environment. When I read that word with the word
themselves (de-parent themselves) in the context of the post, that’s
the meaning I come up with. The phrase in the sentence seems to have
“themselves” referring to “unschooling families” but I think the
intended meaning is something like “how do unschooling parents
de-parent themselves from cultural cues that are all about following
rules?”
***
It made me stop and think how “parent” is so very tightly connected with
the idea of rules and regulations and have to’s and control that someone
could think of “unparent” as letting go of those things. Kind of a sad
commentary on the state of parent-child relationships.
What a world it would be if “parent” was more connected to the idea of
support and nurture and provide and help and encourage and partnership.
My middle daughter said to me, today, that she didn’t know if she could
ever love someone who didn’t share her parent/child ideas and that
someone like that was pretty darn hard to find. She said that
differences in religion would be way easier to work through than
differences in parenting/views on education. I said maybe she needs to
work harder on meeting more unschooled guys – but she’s 21 and I’m not
sure there IS a real way for her to do that. Not back to school camp,
conferences, unschooling get-togethers – seldom include very many
20-somethings because, well, they have commitments and they’re really
busy people. I almost feel like they might benefit from a dating
service! (only half joking and picturing the speed dating episode on
Gilmore Girls).
***
Radical unschooling is indeed radical in that it upsets the “apple
cart” of parenting status quo and can present a new process for
learning how to parent from scratch. The idea gets at the basics, the
heart if you will, of what some people want to accomplish by parenting
in the first place though it uses an altogether different path to get
there.
***
I’ve often mentioned to DH that DS is going to have to look hard for a partner
in life because he’s very definite on some things, flexible on others, but
definitely not ‘mainstream’ by any means. He’s not quite 11 at this point but he
knows he won’t send his kids to school (unless there’s absolutely NO other
option, and there’s usually some option somehow). He’s also very used to eating
our homemade foods – hubby grinds the wheat (and rye and buckwheat) to make
bagels, for instance. I even mentioned to DS the other night that it might be
helpful for him, as he gets older, to learn some of the baking since it’s not
easy to find somebody like Daddy who can make bread and bagels and stuff. I
think that may have been after DH and I got a (surreptitious) chuckle out of DS
“hooraying” because we were having a veggie stir fry for dinner (or some other
similar, vegetable laden, “nutritious” thing that would generally elicit a “how
do you GET your kid to eat that?” type question). Oh, and DS is perfectly
willing to be the at home parent if his partner makes enough money for the
family to live on. No “male ego” type thing developed at this point (helps that
DH is the at home parent, has been since DS was 2).
Age is not a huge deal – I’m 8 yrs older than DH.
***
I wish I could just “convince” my husband that they
turn out great, but he is so worried that they will “miss out” on algebra and
such that they’ll “just cram” for their college entrance exams (if they even go
to college, he’s not pushing that, he just wants them to have the opportunity),
and then they won’t really “know” it and will have to do remedial college
classes and be embarassed. Or in the shorter term, if they “have” to go back to
school for some reason ( like part of this year I was in a clinical depression
and couldn’t handle our always homeschooled life), and he doesn’t want them to
be embarrassed that they aren’t “on par” with their classmates. I try to point
out to him that that is an individual thing, that there are public school
students who are not “on par” with their classmates.
Also, he will admit that it is not just the kids being embarrassed that he’s
worried about… it’s him. It seems that me being depressed for the time that
we unschooled, and just allowing the house to “go to pot”, including the kids
stagnating, being bored consistently, not getting out enough, etc.. has set us
back to square one. Square One being back when I first started homeschooling my
oldest for kindergarten 12 years ago. He wasn’t a fan of homeschooling for the
common reasons… “socialization… getting a good education…”
I’m a little frustrated. I’m a lot frustrated… but I am trying my hardest to
remain calm and in a partnership with him, not an adversarial position….
***
Here in California, lots of unschooled kids who decide to go to college
do take the remedial sequence of classes at a community college. That is
what my daughters have done. Rosie had an algebra test this morning and
she thinks she aced it. She’s always unschooled, never had one single
math lesson of any kind until she started taking college math courses
and she’s done really well – top of her class (compared to all those
other people who undoubtedly went to school for at least 12 or 13
years). Roxana, 21, who doesn’t have much interest in math – is an
actress/singer – is taking a probability and statistics course right now
and she’s doing just fine in that, too – getting an A in the class so
far. She’s taking it because she’s hoping to transfer to a university
next fall – majoring in drama, but college math is a requirement so
she’s wanting to get that out of the way now and focus on drama, music,
and dance after she’s transferred. (Send her some good vibes -
acceptance notices will go out in April. She only applied to one
university.)
I don’t think my kids have been at all embarrassed by taking the
remedial courses. Occasionally someone asks why they are taking those
lower-level courses (the implication being, “You’re so smart so why are
you in Math 20?”) and my kids just say, “Oh, well, you know we never did
any math so I just wanted to make sure I filled in any gaps.” Cool,
calm, casual, logical – they have no emotion attached to “remedial”
courses – and that word isn’t even used, anyway.
***
Yes, I think here in the US anyway that “parent” is so caught up with
“tough love” that it really can be hard to see one’s way out of that
paradigm. That’s part of what always made me crazy about the AP/ LLL
circles–here were all these moms who were so gentle and attached and
yet they turned soooo controlling!
I was on a bit of a mission when I started this list regarding
that–wanting to help parents see that unschooling was a way to continue
the gentle, attached, partnership part of AP/ LLL, that it didn’t all
have to end once the kids hit preschool age. The other name I was
considering for the list was AP2Unschool.
I do think it’s hard to make that paradigm shift. Control is sooo much
easier than problem solving all the time!
***
I love mothering.com but I have to be careful about which
forums I read because some of it is so upsetting. I mean, the
experiences that these kids are denied “for their own good” make me
sad. And these parents started out being so responsive and respectful
but as the child moves from helpless baby to curious toddler, the
restrictions start to tighten. And how. :(
Sometimes I sigh about all of the explaining I do. But in explaining
to my daughters “why” really helps clarify the real life reasons
behind what I’m doing. All that talking is exhausting, especially when
you have a strong willed child who questions everything. But we have
moved so far past just “because I said so” sort of reasons that
there’s no going back now.
In case I don’t sound happy about it, I am. My kids aren’t about to
make it easy for me, and that’s okay! It helps me continue to question
long held beliefs that may or may not have a basis in reality.
And the same people who were horrified (not too strong a word) that I
wasn’t going to send my older daughter to preschool at 2, and school
ever after that, are the same people who now can’t stop talking about
how amazing my kids are.
***
My opinion is that all kids are strong willed as soon as they have something
at stake that they care about. Some kids care about more things than
others. And when it’s not an issue, it isn’t. :)
With Karl, we have certainly done our share of explaining. The older he
gets, the less he wants (and often the less he needs) it. So while we
communicate way more than most “because I said so” parents, we are finding
that explanations are only part of it. The rest comes with observing what
Karl desires and needs, and providing for those things without tons of
talking. Which really helps with that exhaustion. I’m not much of a doer
by nature and I’m happy to report that being a mother has changed a lot of
that for me. :D
>>>> In case I don’t sound happy about it, I am. My kids aren’t about to
make it easy for me, and that’s okay! It helps me continue to question
long held beliefs that may or may not have a basis in reality. <<<<
Yes. And I’m finding that I’m able to do a lot of this talking within my
own mind to myself.. because a lot of times it *is* about me and my long
held beliefs. I listen to Karl’s “no” a lot sooner than I used to, and stop
in my tracks, go back to the drawing board, rethink what I want to do from
there, and then see if that meets well with Karl …. if need be, and if
there’s no need I just go from there. It’s still a lot more communication
than “because I said so” yet cutting out my usual thinking aloud thing keeps
the air clear for Karl who wants to hear it less and less these days. (His
dad is the same way.. so maybe it’s somewhat genetic/gender related.)
One of the ways I think aloud is here on the lists. A big big help to me.
>>>> And the same people who were horrified (not too strong a word) that I
wasn’t going to send my older daughter to preschool at 2, and school
ever after that, are the same people who now can’t stop talking about
how amazing my kids are. <<<<
Same here. :D I love it. Oh also. Any singing of praises I do about my
kids happens either on my blog or on the lists … to avoid putting those
things in the faces of people who probably wouldn’t always appreciate my
point of view. You know what I mean? I have very little if *anything* to
say about Karl that’s negative.
***
I think when parents first come to unschooling they only look at the “un”
part and then try to “un”-do everything. In some ways maybe that part is an
important part of the process. It helps with the deschooling of the parent.
However, it is important to come back to some balance, lest the children end
up being neglected.
***
That’s why sometimes, in some circumstance, with some people (that enough
disclaimers?lol) I’ll use a phrase like “family centered life learning” as being
somewhat more descriptive than “un”schooling so that people don’t get caught on
the “un” of everything.
***
It may not be an ideal word, but as someone who started out as a Much
more authoritarian parent, it has a lot of resonance for me. As much
as casting off the assumptions of schoolish thinking, I had to do a
lot of rethinking in the area of parenting and what kind of
relationship I wanted with my kids, plus learn a whole new set of
skills. There’s a description of deschooling that’s “getting school
out of your head” I had to get my mom out of my head!
> ****I guess my question is are there other unschooling families out
> there that did not unschool from birth and how did they de-parent
> themselves? Any advice on how to let go of all the rules and ‘have
> tos’? The things we read or are told by other families that we
> ‘supposed to do’. (ie diet, bedtime….)****
We didn’t start out unschooling Ray, so I had to do a good bit of “de-
parenting” in this sense. One of the things that helped me was
actually paying attention to the real results of my actions, not what
I’d been taught to believe about the results. Punishment is a good
example – the idea that punishment is effective became so obviously
untrue when I really looked at what was happening. Or the idea that
being firm about rules was “being consistent” – either the rules in
our home had so many conditions and modifiers that consistency was a
joke, or we held to them so dogmatically that there was no sense to
them. That was when I realized that the reasons behind the rules was
the important part – a biiiiiig step for me in terms of letting go of
rules entirely.
It also helped me to simple observe Ray – and later Mo – a whole lot
more carefully. Not just “supervise” but actually watch what they
were doing and how and when and be observant of time and place and
other details. There’s sooooooo much misinformation that floats
around the general parenting population on the basis of “everybody
knows” – a great deal of that, I found, fell by the wayside when I
really looked at my kids with skepticism towards what I thought I
knew about children.
***
We decided to homeschool, then unschool (once we found it had a name), by the
time DS was born. It was an ‘academic’ decision at the time – no classrooms,
lessons, etc. I stumbled onto the old unschooling.com message board (before
Yahoo groups). Boy did I wrestle with what I was reading there! About once a
month I’d get so ticked at something I read “That’s ridiculous!” that I’d stop
reading…for a week or two. Then I’d lurk for a bit and read other people’s
replies and the rest of the thread that had occurred since on that topic. I’d
pose the question or subject with DH and we’d hash it around with lots of ‘what
ifs’ and ‘how cans’ and so on. “if you don’t give him a smack on the diaper to
get his attention, how will he know that running in the parking lot is
dangerous?” type stuff.
Some things, like food, were easy – he nursed on demand so it made sense to let
him continue to eat when he was hungry, as long as he was hungry, and stop when
he was done. Short step from there to simply letting him choose the what as well
as the when and how much. We could see that he was healthy and growing and it
was kind of fun to watch other grownups’ reactions when our 3 yr old was elbow
deep in the ranch dip because he was chowing down on fresh broccoli, in the
midst of a table laden with all sorts of crackers, cookies, chips, etc :-) [for
the record, he's almost 11 and prefers lightly steamed broccoli to raw at this
point]. Us grown ups have learned, as well, how to eat in a more healthy manner
by watching and learning from him. Pretty cool!
Other stuff took longer – bedtime was a biggie for a while. It was a relaxed
range rather than a set time but it was still there, our schedule/convenience
not necessarily his choosing. Somewhere around when he was about 5, we decided
to just let go of it. *I* need to be in bed around a certain time to get up for
work. So, I just told him and DH that I was heading to bed, if either of them
wanted to snuggle before I fell asleep, they needed to be up there within about
half an hour, because I was going to read a little then go to sleep. That was
pretty much it – he spent a few nights staying downstairs “late” and falling
asleep on the couch (I’d go down and carry him to his room later on, for my own
comfort level – I didn’t trust the old beat up couch to not swallow him) [now,
he tends toward about a 25 hour cycle - some days he's up around 6 am and falls
asleep around 8 or 9, other times he wakes up around 7 pm and stays up all
night; we've also got a better couch now so he just sleeps wherever he chooses -
his room or the couch]
The single “smack” on the butt lasted until he was about 3. Then, he was being
resistant to getting his shoes on and I slapped his leg (the one that was busily
kicking me). He slapped me back. I had to take a big breath when I realized that
my first reaction (quashed) was to slap him again, which would then escalate.
Instead, still not my best moment, I just got mad and said something to the
effect of “Fine, if you won’t cooperate I’m going to just go to the other room
because I don’t want to be around someone who is kicking me and we just won’t go
<wherever>” whereupon he promptly threw a screaming hissy fit and followed me to
the other room. We eventually got sorted out that day. And, lots of learning has
occurred between then and now on how things “work” best – what kind of
information does he need, what tools does he need (he’s got way more tools now
than when he was 3), what tools did *I* need to develop, etc.
From about age 3 to about age 7 was the rockiest time – one ‘tool’ that helped
was reading “Raising Your Spirited Child”. It helped with understanding not only
DS’ behavior but why he and DH clashed so mightily so often – they are both
spirited personalities, but not exactly in the same ways. I didn’t totally agree
with it all, nor do I really think of DS as “spirited” so much these days, but
it was a way to get a handle on some useful ideas, concepts, tools that have
become second nature, like a carpenter swinging an old familiar hammer.
I think that covers pretty much our big 3…hmmm, we learned early on that lots
of rules didn’t work well. So, we boiled it all down to 2: respect others and be
safe. Pretty much covers everything we’ve met up with so far – interpersonal
relationships, nutrition, bouncing on the furniture, seatbelts, etc.
***
That was Roya – she’ll be speaking at the San Diego Good Vibrations
Conference in September. She has a lot more to say now that a few years
have gone by and she’s graduated from college, worked as an assistant
back-country forest ranger in Alaska, and now is director of a program
called “Access to Adventure” she plans and carries out excursions and
activities for adults with developmental disabilities. As part of her
job, she also runs a lot of big fund-raising events and is responsible
for an internship program. She absolutely loves her work.
I’ll have Rose with me this weekend at the HENA conference in Tempe,
Arizona. It is a one-day conference – morning to night on Saturday.
Rosie will be speaking with me and with Sandra Dodd and at least a
couple of her kids and the kids (young adults) will also be on a panel
moderated by Grace Llewelyn (The Teenage Liberation Handbook).
I am proud of them. But honestly the reason they are willing to get up
and speak about unschooling is that they have so many dear friends who
were NOT at all unschooled, who have pretty horrible things to say about
their parents, and who have lots of stuff to “get over” once they get
away from their parents. My kids want to help make it possible for more
teenagers to have good relationships with their parents and flow more
smoothly into adulthood without so much heavy baggage.
***
We have a kind of joke in this family…
My (22 yr old AU) son will say that we -his father and i- are the
*unschoolers* in the family, and that we always will be, since we have to
question everything we know from school, and then decide what needs to be
*un*learned and *un*done.
He <bwg> (on his face), on the other hand, is just *living life*.
***
linda’s son and his two cousins who were also unschooled at least part
of their lives gave an awesome roundtable talk at a Maryland
homeschooling conference a couple years back. It was really great to
hear from their perspective about learning and life and how they thought
about both their future and their past.
