Woman #1: Hi. My name is Maggie. My kids are the three in red shirts — helps me keep track of them.
Woman #2: (Smiles) I’m Terri. Mine are in the pink and yellow shirts. Do you come here a lot?
W1: Usually two or three times a week, after we go to the library.
W2: Wow. Where do you find the time?
W1:: We home school, so we do it during the day most of the time.
W2: Some of my neighbors home school, but I send my kids to public school.
W1:: Wow – how do you do it?
W2: It’s not easy. I go to all the PTO meetings and work with the kids every day after school and stay real involved.
W1: But what about socialization? Aren’t you worried about them being cooped up all day with kids their own ages, never getting the opportunity for natural relationships?
W2: Well, yes. But I work hard to balance that. They have some friends who’re home schooled, and we visit their grandparents almost every month.
W1: Sounds like you’re a very dedicated mom. But don’t you worry about all the opportunities they’re missing out on? I mean they’re so isolated from real life — how will they know what the world is like — what people do to make a living — how to get along with all different kinds of people?
W2: Oh, we discussed that at PTO, and we started a fund to bring real people into the classrooms. Last month, we had a policeman and a doctor come in to talk to every class. And next month, we’re having a woman from Japan and a man from Kenya come to speak.
W1: Oh, we met a man from Japan in the grocery store the other week, and he got to talking about his childhood in Tokyo. My kids were absolutely fascinated. We invited him to dinner and got to meet his wife and their three children.
W2: That’s nice. Hmm. Maybe we should plan some Japanese food for the lunchroom on Multicultural Day.
W1: Maybe your Japanese guest could eat with the children.
W2: Oh, no. She’s on a very tight schedule. She has two other schools to visit that day. It’s a system-wide thing we’re doing.
W1: Oh, I’m sorry. Well, maybe you’ll meet someone interesting in the grocery store sometime and you’ll end up having them over for dinner.
W2: I don’t think so. I never talk to people in the store – certainly not people who might not even speak my language. What if that Japanese man hadn’t spoken English?
W1: To tell you the truth, I never had time to think about it. Before I even saw him, my six-year-old had asked him what he was going to do with all the oranges he was buying.
W2: Your child talks to strangers?
W1: I was right there with him. He knows that as long as he’s with me, he can talk to anyone he wishes.
W2: My children never talk to strangers.
W1: Not even when they’re with you?
W2: They’re never with me, except at home after school. So you see why it’s so important for them to understand that talking to strangers is a big no-no.
W1: Yes, I do. But if they were with you, they could get to meet interesting people and still be safe. They’d get a taste of the real world, in real settings. They’d also get a real feel for how to tell when a situation is dangerous or suspicious.
W2: They’ll get that in the third and fifth grades in their health courses.
W1: Well, I can tell you’re a very caring mom. Let me give you my number — if you ever want to talk, give me call. It was good to meet you.

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• Unschooling Math (7)
• How Unschooling Is Changing How We Think Of Learning (7)
• Deschooling For Parents (13)
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We’ve had so much going on recently that I thought it would be nice to show a week in my unschoolers lives, instead of just one day. Enjoy!

Making pillows they received for Christmas:

Playing basketball:

Going to Girl Scouts:

LOL….getting tickled:

Going to the Museum of Natural History, for the Amazon Voyage exhibit, with friends:

Helping dad make yummy sauce:

Making Gummi Bears (more in another post):

In between these pictures was a lot of playing Guitar Hero on PS2, reading the Twilight series, writing stories about fairies, playing Golden Compass on wii, phone calls from friends, internet surfing, day dreaming, playing Scattegories, going to the park with friends and much, much more.

Related posts

• Unschooling Math (7)
• Post Tribune Unschooling Article (0)
• Deschooling For Parents (13)
• Unschooling In The News (3)
• U-N-S-C-H-O-O-L (2)

When my daughter Jacqueline was seven years old, she asked if I could buy some stories that explained math. She was becoming more and more interested in how math fit into her world and had started to take notice of it in movies, TV shows and by watching my husband & I. She had a basic understanding of addition and telling time but she was more interested in math as a whole, not broken down into subjects.

After a few online searches, we bought Sir Cumference and the First Round Table, Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi and The Grapes Of Math. All three books are visually appealing, creative and fun.

It wasn’t until I started to understand how unschooling works that I saw math in a different light. School has a way of making so many children think they’re failures in math, when in fact, they’re not. They’re just not learning it the way school is teaching it.

Now, at nine years old, she has no fear of math. She wants to learn calculus after watching Apollo 13. She invests in the stock market and has her own Ameritrade account. She found out that the calculator on our PC has a scientific mode and loves to play around with it. She wants to understand E=mc2. This, from a child that has never been forced to learn math. She just thinks it’s fun to learn this stuff. It’s interesting to her.

Collection of Thoughts on Unschooling Math:

I’d like to share something that I had saved when I first began unschooling. It’s an exchange (from the old message boards at unschooling.com) between a member who was having some concerns (whose posts are in italics) and Joyce Fetteroll. Be warned…..it’s very long, but for those who are interested it has lots of great info.

**I have a degree in computer engineering from MIT and there are definitely prereqs. in math that I think my son would need for most math, science, engineering, or computer majors.**

Joyce: I have a degree in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. I certainly agreed with your assumptions about math when I first started reading about unschooling. I, too, was a victim of contextless, rote-learned math. It really seemed the only way. There were specific ways to do addition, multiplication, division, and on up the math scale that just had to be explained step by step and sat down and practiced ad nauseum. And what child was going to put in all those necessary hours on her own?

It took me several years of reading what other unschoolers had to say but it really wasn’t until I saw my daughter actually manipulating numbers without being specifically shown how that I understood how unschooling could work with math.

The problem with school math, and as far as I’ve seen all math curriculums, is they start kids off immediately with the abstract. A child may be able to see they have one brother and one sister and therefore have two siblings, or one gray cat and one yellow cat to make two cats, but put 1+1 on paper it becomes incredibly abstract. Why would anyone want to add 73+48? The process is meaningless. The answer is meaningless. It has no context.

Many math programs do have kids adding sorting bears or manipulating rods or any number of other hands-on things, but they’re still basically meaningless. The teacher has created the problem and dumped it on the child. Why does anyone want to know how many blue bears there are? Why are the red and blue bears being added together?

Now, on the other hand, my daughter is quite intrigued to find out how many Jurassic dinos she has versus Triassic. How many plant eaters versus meat eaters. (And whatever other classifications she can come up with, limited only by her imagination — versus the 2 or 3 categories of the sorting bears.) How many years separated the various ages of the dinos. The heights and weights of them.

And though counting and graphing M&M’s by number and color seems the same as doing these same things with the counting bears, it’s not. She’s gaining information in the form of patterns and relationships (that are often expressed as numbers) about her own world, things she cares about.

Obviously there’s only so far counting will get you in life but we manipulate all sorts of numbers in her life and I make sure she’s immersed in patterns and relationships between various things in her life for her to examine (or not). Like fractions in cooking and time: “Since the cup is dirty, how can I make 1 1/2 cups?” “The recipe calls for 1 Tablespoon but we’re cutting it in half. And a Tablespoon is 3 teaspoons. So what would that be?” “It’s an hour and a half or 3 Bill Nyes until Daddy comes home.” “It’s 20 minutes or a third of an hour until Xena comes on.” Though learning to take 1/3 of 60 is more universally applicable, she can *feel* the 20 minutes wait out of 60 minutes and she can get the feel that fractions are ways of relating one thing to another. Decimals come up with money. Percentages come up with sales, tax, food labels, possibility of winning a contest, shrinking an image in a paint program.

She’s gaining a feel for the contexts the various concepts are used in, she sees me manipulating them and helping her manipulate them. And in the course she’s adding pieces to the puzzle of her world, making new patterns and relationships clearer.

Up until recently we’ve done zero in the way of formal math. Only a few months ago she wasn’t totally consistent on her addition but I asked her if she knew what 8×5 was. She said that was 16 +16 + 8. Not 8+8+8+8+8, which would have been a good answer showing she understood the concept of multiplication, but she manipulated the numbers properly into something she could feel more intuitively.

Recently she has been doing paper and pencil math under protest. Sort of.

She wants to earn money for Pokemon cards. I buy the packs at any where from $4-$6 a piece, pull out the trainer cards and then calculate how much she needs to pay for each Pokemon card. (Or have her do it for a whole card, though that’s still a bit beyond her true understanding even if she does get the answer right.) I suggested all sorts of household tasks for her to earn 25 cents or a dollar or whatever which were met with groans. (She even turned down $2 to clean out the floor of my car! I suggested she do pages in the Miquon math workbooks that have been gathering dust on the shelf at 10 cents per page. Being a low energy child (like her mother she usually opts for the math.

She’s getting much better at the pages, but I can still see a huge difference between what she does on paper versus what she does with the real meaningful numbers in her life. She quickly calculates in her head how much she’s earned and how much she needs and how much she’ll have left over after buying a card, tells me how many 36 cent cards she can get with her $2 allowance versus how many 41 cent ones. (And she does this without drills and without pages of workbook practice, just from messing around with the numbers in her life in a very low key way — the stuff she’s doing in the workbooks is actually much simpler.) She told me the way she figured out 16+16 was it was just 10+10 then 6+6 which is 12 which is 10+2, so that was 10+10+10+2 or 32. She’s discovering for herself how to break numbers apart and play around with them. And she knows why someone would want to do that. If it were taught in a book, it would take weeks and most kids would still be baffled about what the purpose of it was.

Pencil and paper math and head math are different. The pencil and paper math are a new language she’s learning. And yet, I’m quite confident if we had gone on without much pencil and paper stuff (other than the normal things that come up in life) she would have caught onto it way quicker in a couple of years without the agony she was putting herself through.

But that’s obviously a far way from algebra and trig and calc.

Someone pointed out that algebra is just figuring out what you don’t know from what you do know. Now how did I get all the way through engineering school without realizing that insight? Maybe because I enjoyed identifying the problem types and figuring out which methodology to apply to them. It didn’t make any difference whether I truly understood why I was doing what I was doing. The fun was it worked. Because that’s how algebra is taught. It’s all about practicing manipulating different types of equations. It’s not about what those equations mean. Or why anyone would want to write a quadratic equation let alone solve it. It’s all just preparation for potential contexts. But the equations themselves have no context. They’re meaningless. (Unless you’re one of the “good” ones who rise to the surface through this bizarre math-teaching process just because you happen to like to manipulate equations for the sake of manipulating equations.)

Quadratic equations don’t come up in real life often, but I can help my daughter to think algebraically when we tackle real life problems. (I may be doing it already unconsciously, but you’ll have to wait a few years for me to be conscious enough of it to provide real life examples of her using it.

Of course that isn’t enough to get her into CMU. Or into MIT either

Now, given the choice, I’m quite certain I wouldn’t have gotten in enough math on my own to get into CMU. So what makes me certain my daughter will?

Well, I’m not certain, but what leads me to believe that my daughter’s outlook will be different is, for one thing, I was the victim of force-fed learning. I needed to be force fed math because I’d always been force fed learning. I needed to be force fed school math because it had no relationship to my own world. I didn’t need it. I can’t imagine learning what I learned on my own because the only thing I have to base my imaginings on are the process I went through.

What I can imagine, though, is being so intrigued by something that the math gets learned because it makes what I’m interested in make sense. I can imagine forcing myself to learn something in order to achieve something else. (HTML comes to mind Though that was more a combination of both of them.)

What my daughter has going for her is a different experience with math. Other than the workbook pages , she’s used to seeing math as a tool. She’s used to using math because she wants the information it can give her. So when she gets to high school, she won’t have the memory of 8 previous years of drudgework associated with math.

She’ll also have a better foundation of understanding what she’s doing. Though she might be behind her PS counterparts in calculation speed, she’ll be ahead in understanding what the processes mean. (But the speed will depend on her. If she feels working around gaps in her multiplication tables is more annoying than learning the tables — and if she knows that drilling them or doing other things will help her (and it’s my job to help her learn to identify when a problem exists and to seek out solutions) — then she’ll learn them. If not, she won’t. (I still have gaps in my tables.)

So she’ll hit her high school years with a different attitude towards math and learning math. (And this really applies to all subjects.)

But will she be able to pick up all the math she needs to get into college just by living? Well, yes and no. This is where it gets hard to explain because our thinking is based on oodles more assumptions.

It’s so easy to project a schooled teen (which includes most of us) as a normal teen and assume all kids given the chance will watch TV and eat concoctions centering on sugar, fat and salt all day and want nothing more in life than 256 channels and a clicker in the hand That behavior is caused by the stress of school (and a lot of other factors. I have another rant about being forced to spend 12 years working towards a vague goal that someone else has chosen for you. But in an environment where the adults and everyone else in the family are curious about life, where everyone’s interests are taken seriously (even the so-called non-educational ones), the kids are actively curious too. There’s no reason for them to want to shut their brains down as a life’s goal. (Which doesn’t mean my daughter doesn’t watch TV. At times she even watches a lot of TV. But she chooses it for other reason than shutting off the world. (Though that’s a legitimate use too. It’s just that she doesn’t have to spend a goodly portion of her free time recovering from 6 hours of force fed learning in a high-stress environment everyday.)

Had unschooling been thrust upon me as a teen, I imagine I would have spent as much time as possible doing nothing. It’s hard to imagine a teen learning on their own something that we ourselves would avoid. It seems obvious that given the choice most teens would avoid Shakespeare or American History or Algebra or whatever school made us hate because we know we’d avoid it. But, given a choice, would we have avoided it because it’s inherently dull or because school made it dull? It isn’t fair to assume the behavior of a schooled teen is normal behavior. The only experience schooled kids have had with most subjects is dull textbooks. The life has been sucked out of all subjects for them. Why would they pursue them on their own? Especially if they assume the only way to learn them in a worthwhile way is the way schools teach them?

There’s no reason for my daughter to avoid learning because she’s never been forced to do it. To her learning is something you do to find out more about what you’re interested in and to become better at it. It’s not something someone makes you do because they tell you you need it.

She will avoid learning in ways that aren’t natural for her or don’t suit her needs. Some kids like workbooks. That doesn’t make them better learners than those kids who don’t. It just means they learn differently. She will avoid learning anything that isn’t relevant to what she wants to do or is interested in. Which makes parents nervous for two reasons:

1) What if she never gets interested? It’s possible she won’t on her own. But it’s my job/pleasure to run as much of the world in front of her as possible. The broader her experiences, the more likely something will connect to something else in her life and be relevant. (Though I can’t depend on when.) Everything is connected to everything else. And everything relevant is inherently interesting.

But it’s also possible she won’t get interested in something “important”. Math? Writing? Chemistry? If she has absolutely no interest in it, then it’s unlikely she’ll be drawn to a profession that needs it to an extent greater than she can pick up by living. Though she won’t leave the house without being able to figure out sales tax or write a letter to a friend or know that baking powder is important in cookies because she’ll have used those. She’ll have enough to get by. But it’s possible she’ll need higher math than she has. Or better writing skills. Or an entire chemistry course. Well, if it’s just chemistry standing in her way, wouldn’t it make sense for her to go down to the community college and take it rather than deciding on a different career just because of one course? And if that’s too much trouble, how much did she want that career anyway?

But math and writing? Well, I hope something I’m saying here helps you see why I believe there’s a middle ground between “no math” and 4 years of high school math from textbooks. And writing I talk about below.

2) And the second reason it makes parents nervous is supposedly there are things kids need to learn that they won’t need until college. And supposedly it takes 12 years to learn them.

But does it? Does it take 12 years to learn math? Or does it take 12 years for schools to force feed a child math (and writing and history, et al) by the methods they need to use to force feed 30 kids at a time? Methods which are also limited to ways that can result in outcomes that can be tested to demonstrate progress. Also limited only to methods that must be progressive along a specific track so the next year’s teacher can pick up where the previous teacher left off. Does math need taught that way? Or do schools need to teach it that way to satisfy the needs of schools as assembly lines?

In a way, school math is rather like learning to spell thousands of words and decline hundreds of verbs of a foreign language without hearing that foreign language spoken. The rationale being that once all the parts are learned, the whole can be built from that. But how many kids survive the rote process? How many kids conclude not before long that the language is useless because the parts have no meaning? My daughter is hearing the language and using it, without formally declining the verbs and learning the spellings. Even if she’d never been exposed to reading it (but already had the decoding skills from reading English) how long would it take her to learn to read that foreign language after having learned it from using it?

Once my daughter has a thorough understanding of what it means to do division, she won’t need umpty gajillion problems to practice. Once she has a thorough understanding of problems with a range of potential solutions (programming and robotics come right to mind), and has encountered and understood powers and negative numbers she won’t need years of practice to grasp algebra.

My job is to make sure there are reasons in my daughter’s environment to need the skills and see them being used. (Just as I talked to her well before she could talk.) Though she finds a lot of uses for the skills on her own, given the freedom to do so. There’s no reason for her to avoid writing or reading or math (until the workbooks) on her own because she’s never been forced to do them. The hard part is waiting for her timescale. I need to wait until these things are internally important to her. I can’t worry, well, she’s 8 now and should be doing … because natural learning doesn’t have anything to do with calendars and time schedules. It has to do with needs.

If she has a goal in mind, she won’t have anything except natural barriers between her and it. She won’t have what someone thinks she needs to get there and someone else’s way she needs to get it standing in her way. If she decides to become a vet, she’ll know what colleges require for her to get there. If her desire is strong enough, she’ll learn what she needs to learn because she wants what the learning can get for her. (Desire is an incredible motivator.) And most importantly she’ll have better resources to achieve it than sitting down with a textbook and slogging through it. (Though that’s an option too. Fortunately she won’t have the history of slogging through textbooks putting up a psychological barrier for her.) She’ll have a good foundation of understanding math concepts and will see it and other math being used (and use it herself) as she explores what it takes to be a vet: taking care of animals, working in a vet office or a horse stable.

**So, if your kids aren’t prepared enough to go to a university, then you assume that they will be motivated to study once they get rejected?**

Joyce: The answer to this one is probably obvious from the above. No, I don’t expect rejection to spur her. I expect wanting to do something will spur her to do something. And perhaps that something won’t even be college. I too had visions of my daughter going onto CMU or MIT. But now my vision has shifted from preparing her to be anything she wants to be to helping her be the best her she can be. Yet I’m not sitting around waiting to pounce on her interests to nurture them. I’m also directing things through her world that I think are important or I think will interest her. When (if ever) she picks up on them is up to her. The more important I think something is, the more likely I’ll keep directing it in her path in a way that will interest her, or connect it to something she is interested in.

** We do provide a very stimulating environment. We have books and materials everywhere. Lots of interesting folks float in and out of our home and office. While my 9 yo son likes to read and mess around with the computer, he wouldn’t ever just open up a math book.**

Joyce: Nor would most kids. For a child to choose the more formal learning in a book requires an interest and need that the book can fulfill. The environment may be there, but he’s not ready to ask the questions that the books will answer for him. Or he may be discovering the answers on his own through self-discovery or talking to people. Unfortunately for nervous parents, you can’t put unschooling on a time schedule. You can’t set up the environment and expect there to be a specific outcome at a specific time. (Though I can just about guarantee that if the innate talent or desire is in him for what the computers and people and books can provide, by the time he’s 14 he’ll have sucked the environment for all it’s worth 9 is way too soon for most kids to be doing more than playing around with things and exploring broadly. They may be delving deeply into some things, but the cognitive development necessary to make them open a math book for information just isn’t there until the teen years. (Of course there’re always exceptions. But do the exceptions mean that the nonexceptions are falling behind? Or are the nonexceptions just learning other perhaps less obvious things? A HS’d friend of my daughter’s has at 8 read all the Little House books and all their sequels and is well into other historical novels. Am I jealous? Well, yeah, of course Yet my daughter is, less obviously, picking up bits and pieces of world and American history. She’s gaining a broad overview of it all, expanding some bits here and there as she finds out more about someone or something she’s heard interesting things about. Is one learner better than the other or are they just different?)

**My son also wouldn’t write anything on paper, which I understand is fairly typical for boys. Writing skills don’t progress overnight.**

Joyce: Who says? Okay, not overnight, but does it take years of practice? Or does it take years of using the skills in ways that are meaningful for the learner?

**Are you saying that I should encourage, but not demand? I am still missing something in terms of how this unschooling plays out.**

Joyce: How well would you learn Hindi if someone decided it would be important for your future because they used Hindi in their lives and so made you practice for the next 10 years? Wouldn’t your goal be to learn as little as possible to satisfy them? But if you were moving to India, then wouldn’t learning Hindi take way less time?

What your son needs is being immersed in an environment where it’s important to communicate his ideas. He also needs to see others using communication in a meaningful way and to read and hear others communicating in various ways. When he needs to communicate using the written word, he will.

In the meantime, you can make sure he has access to the skills. Listen to a variety of things: conversation, books and books on tape, comic books, movies (reading the scripts of favorites is really cool), plays, puppet shows, poetry, folk tales, nonfiction, cereal boxes, TV Guide, political talk shows, lyrics, ministers, magazine articles, Nintendo magazine, science shows, letters to the editor. Anything as long as he’s interested. He needs to hear good (and bad) literature so his ear can learn the rhythms of language. I’ve pointed out to my daughter why it’s tough for me to read the Magic Tree House books outloud to her and she can now pick up on parts that sound awkward. (It wasn’t a lesson, just an outgrowth of a natural discussion. Which is probably the heart of unschooling: just talking naturally about things that happen along. Despite the fact that I’m not a great talker, some amazing things have come up in conversation.) It has probably inadvertently sowed the seed of her being more conscious of there being a range of how well written things are. She would have learned that anyway though perhaps unconsciously.

(That “happen along” part of unschooling is misleading. It’s not that I’m leaving things to chance, nor am I deliberately bringing something in as a lesson. I direct a lot of things her way and just from experience know that from the wealth of things, there will be unexpected learning. Nothing I can plan though. She learned more than anyone would imagine from a few weeks watching Gilligan’s Island.

Writing is just talking on paper. You’re trying to see where someone mentally is relative to where you intend your words to take them and then you plan out a course to get them there. Talk to your son. Ask him to explain what he’s doing and ask questions to help him learn to order his thoughts and learn to see from the point of view of who he’s communicating with rather than from his own position. (But only ask if you’re interested. Kids have good radar for lessons masked as conversation

Unless someone has gotten the idea that writing is hard by being forced to write before they are ready or need to, or being forced to write in ways that aren’t natural to them, once they realize it’s just talking on paper, that little extra step is hardly any step at all. There’s additional skills they can learn, like how to organize their thoughts for something longer, but it’s not a skill that needs 12 years of practice. (A schooled friend of my daughter’s came over to play with my daughter and they decided to make books together. The schooled girl told her there were all these things you had to do: title page, a plan, and some other things. My daughter said “Oh,” and just made books. The schooled girl never did finish. Merely an anecdote that may mean nothing, but it is a piece of data.)

I think it only takes years to learn to write when people are forced to write things they don’t care about. Where does most writing practice end up? In the trash, right? Real writing should make a difference in people’s lives. Sure there’s project reports and documentation to write, but do we need to force kids to write boring stuff so they’ll be prepared to write boring stuff?

High school is when it’s more common for kids to feel the need to put words on paper. But, again, they need real reasons. Perhaps letters of complaint about a product, letters to the editor, a family newsletter, a pen pal, email, message boards, an article for the local paper, or one of the websites out there that kids can submit their writing to.

But many of these things can be “laying around” for him right now, suggested when it’s possible he’d be interested. And dropped when he’s not or carried as far as his interest carries him. As long as he sees writing as purposeful, then there won’t be anything other than natural barriers between him and putting words to paper.

**Studies I have read show that certain windows open for certain math concepts at specific times. There seems to be accumulating evidence for a certain scope and sequence for math too. I am talking primarily about getting skills so you can do higher level math.**

Joyce: The studies, of course, are based on kids whose basically only exposure to math is in school. Math to them is artificial, irrelevant to their own world. How many parents are helping their kids use the math that’s all around them? Math, to most kids (and adults!) is just the stuff in math books.

But, my daughter *is* being exposed to math right now, using it in ways that are meaningful to her. She’s using the skills she needs right now. I’m not sitting around waiting for her to pick up a math text.

So, yes, there probably is a window of opportunity for math knowledge. But there’s no way to miss it if a child’s curiosity is being fed and she is immersed in the language of math. There’s a window for learning to speak too, but the only way to miss that is by not speaking to the child. As long as we speak math to our kids, they’ll learn the parts they are developmentally ready for.

**What if she chooses no math? How do you handle that?**

Joyce: Obviously she hasn’t yet. It is possible she’ll decide to be a painter and won’t need math beyond consumer math and what’s relevant to the science of color. But she’ll have been exposed to fun stuff like Fibonacci numbers and probabilities and algebraic thought. But, honestly, how many people need algebra? Why torment a child with “what if” when it’s more likely to cause them to dislike the subject than to learn it?

**If I tell my wife that I want to try this unschooling approach starting tomorrow, then what we would do at 8 AM?**

Joyce: Sleep? Eat? Watch TV? Go outside and enjoy the sun shining through the trees? Read a book?

**Would my son choose when he gets up?**

Joyce: Unless he stops breathing, he’s always weighing his options and making choices. They may not be the choices you’d want him to make. But, what if you knew your wife had an agenda for you and there were “right” choices in her eyes and “wrong” choices and you knew she was weighing the choices you were making against her idea of “right” and “wrong” and judging the quality of your choices? How would that affect your relationship? I assume there are some things you each do to please the other, but they are *still* choices. The more pressure someone feels from the other to make the choices the other wants them to make, the more strain there is in the relationship.

**Would he choose what he wants to learn? Should we let him mess with the Star Wars games on the computer all day? I am going to go out on a limb and guess you would say that he would eventually get bored and look for something else to do or that I should keep offering interesting tidbits he couldn’t resist?**

Joyce: Yup. If he’s interested, he’s learning. It may be hard to see how what he’s learning relates to what is “important” in life. In fact, it may only be relevant to his life right now. But it is relevant. It’s nurturing the person he is now. I think we concentrate too much on moving kids along to what they should become and preparing them for that.

**What if he says he never wants to do writing ever?**

Joyce: Well, what if? There’s plenty of professions where people don’t need to write. But do you really think that if he loves something that he will choose something else just because he doesn’t want to write?

**We just wait him out until he thinks he needs it?**

Joyce: And why shouldn’t it be important that he write when he thinks he needs it? Why should it be more important that he write when you think he needs it? Wouldn’t that mean when all kids hit 12 months we should make them walk because that’s when kids need to walk, and we all know how important walking is so they should get started when we think it’s important? Unless there’s something physically wrong with them, or their environment discourages it, all kids do eventually learn to walk just because they feel the need to.

If someone made me write an essay on math and kids, it would be as short as possible to make them go away. But since I’m writing this “essay” to satisfy my own need to get all these thoughts in order, it’s as long as it needs to be for me.

**Is it my role to lecture the benefits of the things I have to offer, but to back off if he doesn’t want them?**

Joyce: Lecture? Ick. How important would you feel something was if your wife decided to lecture you about it’s importance? What would come across is her needing to make you feel the same way she does about something. And personally, when someone’s trying to make me feel some way about something, I tend to work up the opposite feelings.

**So sorry. I should have read the whole post more carefully. My wife preached to me about that. OK. That is what you would do. I have a hard time with that one. I don’t think you can play catch up in math and science all that fast. My opinion only.**

Joyce: But I do have the advantage of seeing the same math being learned naturally way easier than it’s being taught and learned in school. I have the advantage of reading other people’s kids’ experiences with unschooling math.

As for science, ah, I have a rant about that too The short version is, I think way too much emphasis is placed on memorizing the answers to questions kids haven’t asked and way too little time on fostering scientific thinking and fostering a wonder about how the universe works. Once kids are curious, they’ll want the facts. Once they want the facts, they go in so easily.

**I need to read a book about the day and the life of an unschooler in my spare time.**

Joyce: Actually a day in the life of an unschooler looks a lot like summer days and weekends for other people. Unschooling isn’t so much in what unschoolers do as in their attitude towards life and learning and how they’re intertwined. Our conversations are our lessons without being lessons. Everytime my daughter spontaneously asks a question or tells me about an observation, that’s a “test” that shows me unschooling is working. She may not be learning a set group of facts that others think are important and can test, but her questions and observations show she’s thinking about what she’s learning. For example, it’s not so important that she learn that sound waves bounce off things because that can go in as a factoid without any real meaning or understanding behind it, but it is important that she bounced a ball off a wall and said that was like a sound wave. She’s making connections.

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Let me tell you about a ten year old child that had freedom of choice. That child is my daughter Jacqueline.

I hear all the time…”If I let my kids have freedom over their food, they’ll eat chips all day” or “If I let my child have freedom over video games, they’ll play 24 hours a day”. Sure….if all they know is control and someone else making their choices for them, OF COURSE they’re going to choose to eat chips all day because they think they’ll never get the chance to eat what they want again.

Back to Jacqueline…..

A child that has freedom of choosing her own bedtime, chooses to go to be around 9:30 and gets up on her own about 7:30. There are times she stays up later or wakes up later, but she found her own bodies sleep pattern and she listens to it. When I first gave her the freedom of choosing her own bedtime, she chose to stay up really late for a while, because it was new…but that wore off and she got herself into a pattern.

A child that has freedom to eat what she wants, when she wants and how much she wants, chose today to buy a Granny Smith apple, with her money, while we were out shopping. She enjoys ice cream and candy, but she enjoys grapes and celery just as much. She is learning to listen to her body. She is able to choose healthy foods because she is able to make that choice. She wouldn’t be able to do that if I made her choices for her.

A child that has freedom to choose when she plays video games, chooses to also read, play on our trampoline and go bike riding. Video games don’t hold a special power over her because to her, they’re treated the same as other fun activities.

A child that has freedom over what she watches on TV, chooses to watch documentaries and shows about how volcanoes form. She also enjoys The Price Is Right, Hannah Montana and America’s Funniest Home Videos. She’s not a zombie, sitting in front of the screen. She’s actively listening and learning.

Start small. Say “yes” more. Play video games with your child. Model the behavior you want. A child that has freedom of choice…is a free child. Freedom! What a great gift to give a child.

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John Holt was a teacher when he wrote How Children Fail and How Children Learn. He eventually quit teaching and became a speaker and supporter of education reform and went on to write several more books. Deciding that schools could not be reformed, he focused his energies on alternatives to conventional schooling. He founded Growing Without Schooling, America’s first homeschooling magazine and continued writing until his death in 1985.

A Conversation with John Holt (1980)
Interviewer: Marlene Bumgarner

In 1980, Marlene Bumgarner, a homeschooling parent, hosted author John Holt in her home while he was in California for a lecture tour. While he played in the garden with her two children, John and Dona Ana, she interviewed him for the bimonthly magazine Mothering.

What is your philosophy of learning?
Basically that the human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we need to learn; we are good at it; we don’t need to be shown how or made to do it. made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it.

Why homeschooling?
That’s a big question. The great advantage is intimacy, control of your time, flexibility of schedule, and the ability to respond to the needs of the child, and to the inclinations. If the child is feeling kind of tired or out of sorts, or a little bit sick, or kind of droopy in spirits, okay, we take it easy, and things go along very calmly and easily. When the child is full of energy and rambunctious, then we tackle big projects, we try tough stuff, we look at hard books. And I think schools could do much more than they do in this kind of flexibility, but in fact they don’t. I want to make it clear that I don’t see homeschooling as some kind of answer to badness of schools. I think that the home is the proper base for the exploration of the world which we call learning or education. Home would be the best base no matter how good the schools were. The proper relationship of the schools to home is the relationship of the library to home, or the skating rink to home. It is a supplementary resource.But the school is a kind of artificial institution, and the home is a very natural one. There are lots of societies without schools, but never any without homes. Home is the center of the circle from which you move out in all directions, so there is no conceivable improvement in schools that would change my mind about that.

What does one do at a homeschool?
That’s what Growing Without Schooling is about, of course. What one can do depends a lot on what one’s own life is. A lot of families have small businesses or subsistence farms or crafts, or various kinds of activities that the parents are involved in, which the children are also very involved in. The children just partake in the life of the adults wherever they are,and then questions are answered as they come up. Other people may live at home and work somewhere else; they may have a more conventional kind of existence.I don’t believe in formal fixed curriculums, but it may very well be that when parents and children start off, they’re both a little nervous. They’re both wondering what they should be doing. If it makes people feel happier to have a little schedule, and to work with a correspondence school for a year or so, kind of as a security blanket, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a starting place.My advice is always to let the interests and the inclinations of the children determine what happens and to give children access to as much of the parents’ lives and the world around them as possible, given your own circumstances, so that children have the widest possible range of things to look at and think about. See which things interest them most, and help them to go down that particular road.How that’s done depends very much on the family’s circumstances and their interests, and the particular interests of the children. Some kids are bookish, some children like to build things, some are more mathematical or computerish, or artistic, or musical, or whatever.The mix is never going to be exactly the same.

Does homeschooling require that the parents spend a great deal of structured time with their children in a formal learning situation?
Homeschooling doesn’t require that parents spend a great deal of structured time. I think as parents get into this they tend to spend less time. How much time they spend with their kids depends a little on the circumstances in their own lives. Sometimes they spend a lot of time in company together just because it’s fun. Other times that’s harder for them to do. The children, though they may enjoy a lot of their parents’ company during the day,don’t need it once they get past 7 or 8.

Is the parent without background in education or experience as a teacher at a disadvantage in a homeschooling situation?
I’d say they have a very great advantage. I wouldn’t say that a person was disqualified from doing it because they had had training in education, but I would have to say that practically everything they taught you at that school of education is just plain wrong. You have to unlearn it all. I never had any of that educational training. The most exclusive, selective, demanding private schools in this country do not hire people who have education degrees. If you look through their faculties – degrees in history, mathematics, English, French, whatever – you will not see degrees in education. I think for the most prestigious private schools you could almost set it down as a fact that to have a teacher’s certificate, to have had that kind of training, would disqualify you.

Are parents talented or knowledgeable enough to teach physics or math?
Oh, well, the children don’t have to learn physics or math from you. There are plenty of people to learn from; there are plenty of books; there are plenty of extension courses. GWS will have information on that. There are plenty of other people to answer your questions. And the children don’t have to get it all from Mom and Pop. There are people who have only high schooling, or may not even have finished that, who are now teaching their children at home and doing a very good job of it.

What about the child’s social life?
As for friends – you’re not going to lock your kids in the house. I think the socializing aspects of school are ten times as likely to be harmful as helpful. The human virtues – kindness, patience, generosity, etc. are learned by children in intimate relationships, maybe groups of two or three. By and large, human beings tend to behave worse in large groups, like you find in school. There they learn something quite different – popularity, conformity, bullying, teasing, things like that. They can make friends after school hours, during vacations, at the library, in church.

What about the opportunity for youths to meet members of other backgrounds, other socioeconomic classes?
Most of the schools that I know anything about are tracked – there would be a college track, and a business track, and a vocational track. Studies have shown over the years that these tracks correlate perfectly with economic class. I think I know enough about most high schools in this country to say there is very little mingling of people from different backgrounds, different religious groups. The rich kids hang out with the rich kids, the jocks hang out with the jocks, the pointy heads hang out with the pointy heads, the greasers hang out with the greasers. Maybe there are some exceptions to that but the idea of school as a social melting pot where people of all kinds of backgrounds get together – pure mythology, folks.

What is your philosophy about teaching reading?
I think the teaching of reading is mostly what prevents reading. Different children learn different ways. I think reading aloud is fun, but I would never read aloud to a kid so that the kid would learn to read. You read aloud because it’s fun and companionable. You hold a child, sitting next to you or on your lap, reading this story that you’re having fun with, and if it isn’t a cozy, happy, warm, friendly, loving experience, then you shouldn’t do it. It isn’t going to do any good.I think children are attracted toward the adult world. It’s nice to have children’s books, but far too many of them have too much in the way of pictures. When children see books, as they do in the family where the adults read, with pages and pages and pages of print, it becomes pretty clear that if you’re going to find out what’s in those books, you’re going to have to read from that print. I don’t think there’s any way to make reading interesting to children in a family in which it isn’t interesting to adults.

What your philosophy about math?
My approach to math is to say, What do we adults use numbers for? We use them to measure things. And we measure things so that having measured them we can do things with them, or make certain judgments about them. And so I say let children do with numbers what we do with numbers. I’m a great believer in many kinds of measuring instruments – tapes (centimeter tape, inch tapes, rolls of tapes), rulers, scales, thermometers, barometers, metronomes, electric metronomes with lights flashing on and off that you can make go faster and slower, stopwatches, things for time.Another thing is money. Kids are fascinated by money. We all say: “We’ll have to teach them all this arithmetic so that some day they can deal with money.” I think dealing with money is inherently interesting to children. I say family finances ought to be out on the table, charts on the wall: expenses, food, taxes, insurance, health care, how much this costs, how much it cost last year. I think actually, like typing, double-entry bookkeeping and basic accounting are fascinating skills, and if you’re talking about basics, those are basics.The fundamental idea of double-entry bookkeeping, the distinction between your income and expenses and assets and liabilities is one of the really beautiful inventions of the human mind. It’s fabulous the way it works, and I think families should do their finances as if they were a little teeny corporation with income and expenses and assets and liabilities and depreciation.Some kids might get to the point where they would want to be the family treasurer and keep the family books and balance the checkbook. This is all really “big adult stuff.” Let the child write out the checks that are paying the bills, instead of the harassed picture, you know, of father with his tie untied, sitting at the desk and papers all over the place. Why? This is inherently interesting, so let’s at least make this part of our life – like every other part – accessible to children. The best way to meet numbers is in real life, as everything else. It’s embedded in the context of reality, and what schooling does is to try to take everything out of the context of reality. So everything appears like some little thing floating around in space, and it’s a terrible mistake. You know, there are numbers in building; there are numbers in construction; there are numbers in business;there are numbers in photography; there are numbers in music; there are fractions incooking. So wherever numbers are in real life, then let’s go and meet them and work with them.

What subject matter do you see as essential?
None.

What about the parent who works outside of the home?
One question which often comes up is “How am I going to teach my kids six hours a day?” And I respond to that by saying, “Who’s teaching your kids six hours a day now?” I was a good student in supposedly the best schools and it was a rare day that I got five minutes of teaching… that’s five minutes of somebody’s serious attention to my personal needs, interests, concerns, difficulties, problems. Like most other kids in school, I learned that if you don’t understand what’s going on, for heaven’s sake, keep your mouth shut.

What happens when children become ill, or have an injury, etc.?
Home teachers come in for three to five hours a week. It has been found that this is perfectly sufficient. These children don’t fall behind. No child needs, or should stand, six hours of teaching a day, even if a parent were of a mind to give it. It would drive them up the wall!

How are homeschoolers evaluated when they go to enroll at the university level?
Just like anyone else. You know, there are these tests you can take… the College Boards, the SAT, and so forth. Actually, homeschoolers do exceptionally well on these things. They’re more motivated to learn what areas will be covered, and prepare for them.

Does it sometimes happen that a homeschooling student will express a desire to go to or return to traditional schooling? How do parents handle this?
Various ways. Sometimes parents have to decide (we’re the grownups) that we don’t want them to go back to that school, and then stick with it. But other times, if the children want to go, then that means they’re immune to the manipulation the schools can do with the children who don’t have a choice about whether they have to be there or not. The school loses some of its power when the children know they can quit if they want.

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Mary: Hi my name is Mary, and I really want to unschool my daughter, age 4 instead of sending her to preschool next year. She currently goes 3 mornings a week. She always seemed to like it, but is now begging me not to send her. She just sits on the floor of the classroom, refusing to participate. She won’t talk, just sits there and looks incredibly sad. This is a child who is so exuberant, happy, creative, etc outside of school, and used to be in school. She creates pages and pages of artwork a day at home, with paints, chalk, markers etc. She makes collages and structures out of recycled stuff at home. At school she wont do art! How can this be? My daughter is always so sociable, now she won’t play with the other kids at school. I do not want to crush her spirit or her individuality . Please help me. Yesterday I stayed in her classroom with her, the teachers were happy to have me, but the director of the school was against it. She didn’t throw me out, but told me i needed to leave cold turkey, and it “is her job” to be here. What??? Anyway I did mention pulling her out next year, and the looks I got, made me feel so rotten. I was told how important the learning, the interaction with peers, the transitions from one thing to the next, all this is invaluable, and you can’t duplicate it at home.

My instinct says to leave now. I guess I just feel like an overprotective Mother. I guess I am afraid. Please help me, and so sorry to ramble, I am just upset. Thank you for taking the time to read this.
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Queenk: You were given instinct for a reason, so don’t dismiss it. If shes not happy theres a reason. Trust your child and yourself, and you’ll come to the right decision for your family.
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April: Trust your instincts. Listen to your daughter. You see that your daughter is miserable. She says she doesn’t want to go anymore. Take her out of preschool now. She probably doesn’t do art at school because they tell her HOW to do it the correct way, and WHAT she should do and WHEN. At home she is free to do art in any which way she chooses.

Of course the preschool people would tell you it’s a mistake to take her out, they’re losing money! This is their life! They don’t want anybody to think their jobs are unnecessary. I would definitely be wary of anyone that tells you you’re not welcome to stay in the class with your child.
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Steph: Mary, you have instincts where your daughter is concerned, for a reason.

It has always amazed me, that the first things that a person is taught in a child-development class, apart from the physical requirements of caring for children, are separation-anxiety, intrinsic learning, and trust. And yet it seems to me that childcare places all over the country, are encouraging their parents and teachers to believe in “cold turkey.”

It just doesn’t agree with any of the research which they are so quick to fall back on when it suits them. And maybe I’m cynical, but it is a business. It is hard not to take it personally when someone no longer wants your services, and I think that happens all the time.

It happened last year when we took my 5yo out of the preschool that she had loved the year before. The *feel* of the teacher and the direction of the class, was just too harsh.

Believe me, they weren’t *supportive* of our decision to have her at home. But what mattered to us, is that we’d been through not trusting ourselves with our oldest daughter, and ran into all sorts of complications that could have been avoided had we just trusted our instincts-which-are-there-for-a-reason, and what we saw in her.

Like you describe your daughter, our oldest loves projects and crafts at home, and yet at school was inundated with ditto work and disapproving looks. I’ll never forget her coming home with a ditto that they had to color just like the teachers.

It had rows of children sitting at school desks. She had colored it correctly, but when she came home, she took it out and made the children into mermaids, adding tails and prettying up their outfits.
In 3 homeschooling years, she hasn’t slowed down from her projects or plans or creativity. She doesn’t hate structure or dislike anything, really. She adapts difficult situations to herself, rather than visa-versa. I think that unschooling has validated that….validated her own instincts which might be more in tact than even mine.

There are still tugs (sometimes pulls) of doubt any time big changes are in the works. I don’t know if that ever changes.

Four is a wonderful age to learn to find and follow one’s own rhythm. What a gift that would be to her.
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April: I wanted to add, that it seems to me that society tries from the moment we are pregnant to get rid of our natural instincts. There are people telling us what to do from the beginning, and doctors that tell us we better listen to them, they’ve been to school they know best. Teachers know best. Friends and family members know best. From the very beginning we are told which professionals to trust, and throw our own instincts out the window. I learned that doctors don’t always know best when I gave birth to my first daughter. Yet I still didn’t completely trust my instincts.

I quit nursing both girls early because the doc said they weren’t eating enough. I saw the negative affects of too many trips to the doc for antibiotics when my girls were sick, but I STILL thought that surely doctors would only do the right thing.

It wasn’t until I saw my daughters in a weekly playgroup, stop doing spontaneous arts and crafts because they were waiting for instructions that I finally said to heck with what everybody tells me! This isn’t right.

From now on I will try to let my instincts as their mother tell me what is right, and stop looking to other people all of the time.
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Steph: I quit nursing my oldest too early, because a hurricane stressed me out. Had I stuck with it, it would have been calming and healing for the two of us. Instead I switched to formula and dealt with gas pains and crying fits that coincidentally were not an issue with the two children I breastfed afterward.
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Sandra Dodd:
-=- She always seemed to like it, but is now begging me not to send her.-=-

Don’t ever make her go again, no more than you would leave her with a scary babysitter, or put her on a city bus with scary-looking people alone. Each hour of stress will have to be undone. Cut your losses. Keep her home now. If you paid for this school, let the money go without another thought. If you could pay to undo what’s done, it would be worth it, but you can’t.

Get her some new art supplies (GOOD ones, not cheapo stuff) and put on some happy music and make her favorite snacks and live happily together!
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Zenmomma: Mary, congratulations for listening to your daughter! Many parents are so used to listening to the experts, that they disregard the statements of a 4 year old. She is so lucky to have you.

***I really want to unschool my daughter, age 4 instead of sending her to preschool next year. She currently goes 3 mornings a week. She always seemed to like it, but is now begging me not to send her.***

My experience has been that all of us, including kids, go through stages in our lives. Maybe your daughter enjoyed what the preschool had to offer at the beginning. Now that she’s gotten her fill, or had her curiosity satisfied, she no longer needs or wants it. When my now 7 year old dd was 4, she begged to go to “real school”. And I mean begged. Daily, and with passion, reason and full explanations. So, I found her a tiny, private kindergarten (6 kids) and had her go there. She enjoyed it while she went. At the end of the year, though, she had had enough. She asked to come back home with her brother. She got what she needed and moved on.

I’m really not saying anything different than the others who have have posted. Trust your instincts. I’m just adding that I don’t think you have to worry over having sent her in the first place. It seems like she got what she needed, and now she needs to know that she can trust you to let her stop and move onto the next stage.
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Laurie: I was going through the same agony not long ago with my two sons, who are 6 and 8. I followed my instinct and took them out of school (even though all the voices in my head were telling me that I was overreacting). I can’t tell you how WONDERFUL it’s been and how full my heart is having them home. The other day my youngest said, “I’m glad we homeschool because now I don’t get hurt every day” (he was being victimized by a bully…at SIX!). What your daughter is experiencing is just as bad as bullies…her spirit is being broken. Listen to your heart, not the disapproving people at the preschool. You are the person who knows what’s best for you and for your little girl.
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Donna: Take her out now. Do not hesitate. I hesitated and trusted the school system with my son and he has been paying the price.

It is very hard to live with yourself when you make mistakes with your children.
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Steph: Zenmomma, what a wonderful sense of peace you have. Suitable for your screen name. Thanks for sharing what you did, because it addresses my current wrestling in such a restful way.
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Mary: You guys are absolutely wonderful! I am so touched by all of your responses. You are right, I’m going to take her out tomorrow. I guess I just needed a boost of courage, and I got one. I only signed her up for preschool bc I thought it would be fun for her, not to punish her, and that is what it has turned into. I never wanted her to be there if she didn’t want to. Zenmomma, I think you are right. She probably wanted to try out preschool bc everyone around her (friends and family) talked about how “when your a big girl you get to go to school”, when she finally was old enough it was exciting to her. She has never been in daycare or anything, so all the kids, etc, probably interested her at first. Like ZenMomma said, she has gotten her fill and has moved on. It is no longer that interesting. And April, you are right, at home she goes to her art supplies, and just creates what she wants, when she wants. At school, she comes home with a painted picture of a strawberry bc it is strawberry season, and thats the unit they were on. Maybe she didn’t want to paint a strawberry! Maybe she wanted to paint a pumpkin, but they probably didn’t have any orange paint “available”.

Sandra, you are so right, I wouldn’t leave her with anyone she didn’t want to be left with, so why does the world say you’re supposed to do this when it comes to school? I guess I have had my head in the sand, just going with the status quo. I thought preschool would be fun, and now that its not, I need to listen to her and say no, you don’t have to go back. I feel much better now. And art supplies are our forte here, we cant stop creating!!

Thanks so much everyone. I am looking forward to all the fun we will have together. I am so glad this site exists. I don’t know what I would do without it.
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Laura: Well, when I first starting reading this, I was going to offer advice, but now, getting to the bottom of the posts, instead, I’ll offer Congratulations!

Your daughter sounds like my son did years ago. He enjoyed preschool for a few months, then begged to stay home. In fact, (rather pitifully to think back on) when I said that one of the reasons for preschool was so that I would have time to myself, he offered to just stay in his room for a few hours . I took him out of preschool at that point!

He loved drawing and painting at home, but after months of preschool, he did less and less on his own. He was never a coloring book kind of kid, though. All his drawings had to be his own – he wasn’t interested in just coloring someone else’s drawings. Unfortunately, that’s a lot of what they did in preschool – coloring pictures and following someone else’s directions.

He’s been drawing his own pictures and making things out of clay for almost a decade now. He’s 13, and unschooling was *definitely* the way to go for him.
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Carol: I’m too late to offer advice – it’s all been said already!

So I’ll just say – welcome back to the world of sharing and enjoying life with your child
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Steph: ***In fact, (rather pitifully to think back on) when I said that one of the reasons for preschool was so that I would have time to myself, he offered to just stay in his room for a few hours . I took him out of preschool at that point!***
This this just breaks my heart!!! What a sweetie. So glad for your decision.
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zenmomma: **What a wonderful sense of peace you have. Suitable for your screen name. **

Thank you. I’ll keep that as my soul nourishing thought for the day. I also want to share a little off topic observation I had recently.

When I first picked my screen name as “zenmomma”, I don’t think I was very peaceful or zenlike. In fact I know I wasn’t. I was in the middle of several life-changing situations and was stressed to the limit. I think I picked that name because it was what I wished I could be. Not consciously, though. In fact, at the time I thought to myself, “What a lie. If people only knew.”

Well, low and behold! Just like they tell us not to label a kid bossy (or whatever), because she’ll live up to that label, I have found myself identifying very strongly with the zenmomma label I gave myself. It’s now a year and a half later and I no longer feel like my screen name is a lie. I have a real sense of peace and joy about life now. And I feel like I can handle the curves that life throws me with a certain sense of well-being. It is, what it is. What will be, will be.

I think that’s why it gives me such a nice feeling to hear the positive way most kids are described on these boards. Just a thought. I’ll go back on topic now.

**Thanks for sharing what you did, because it addresses my current wrestling in such a restful way.

What are you wrestling with, Steph? Is someone asking to go to school? Or asking to come home?
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Steph: Oh, my incredibly free-spirited almost 9yo likes the idea of school again. The thing is, she has her eye on being around certain friends which may or may not even attend that school next year. We have been house-hunting and might move also. There is just nothing certain, and I dislike scrambling so. I concern myself with having “worked” to adjust my own goals and plans to our unschooling lifestyle, and now having to adjust again, and if so probably unadjust when she experiences that teachers are not “flexible” like mom.

She loves being home, and doesn’t want school to be closed to her either…and not for academic reasons at all. She wants friends that she can see often, and unfortunately because the support group has been scattered so far around our area, she hasn’t had that.

Her friends are school kids, who she doesn’t see enough because they have homework to do, etc. She is in activities, but the difference in schedule and others’ throughout the week, is affecting her. She just wants to hang out with people. We’ve talked a little about how kids in school don’t “hang out” much either, but this is her theory and she wants to follow it through. She makes plans and calls kids to invite them over, but usually has to wait weeks. We’ve also been very busy…too busy..for months.

Personally, I think that moving from a townhouse to a neighborhood house will fix most of this. We’d have more capacity and a front yard. So we’re working hard for that, and if we move to a certain area, I’ve read the support group info, and it feels more comfortable.

But then I think that most things in life can be changed drastically just by rearranging them. LOL A philosophy going back generations.

Just so much up in the air. Your post though…It truly gave me a sense of “::::::Breathe::::::::Stephanie, no matter what, it is going to be fine.” And we will be. Inside I know that, but it takes reminding to remember it moment by moment. And that is what zen teaches, yes?
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Anne O: ***it seems to me that society tries from the moment we are pregnant to get rid of our natural instincts.*** I wanted to share something along these lines. I had the final meeting last night with the library board about my grant proposal to start children’s programs. I worked so hard on that grant and when you read it, you can read my very heart and soul in it. The board needed to sign the final approval last night. I was a bit nervous because the board consists of people who are very academic-oriented. People for whom I don’t have a lot of respect, nor much in common. People who make decisions about a library in which they spend little time.

Anyway, they were speechless after reading my grant application. It was like they never even THOUGHT anyone could care about children in the way I had conveyed on my application.

After they signed the approval, I volunteered to work the desk while the librarian finished up the meeting. Jacob was with me, helping me and working on the computer next to my desk. I felt one board member’s eyes on us the whole time we were working.

Later, she came up to me and told me she couldn’t believe how I treated my child. She said it was clear that we were good friends and that I truly enjoyed him and enjoyed being with him. She said she never even thought of feeling that way toward her children…that she listened to all the negative things people said about children and applied those to her own mothering. She was guilty of saying that she couldn’t wait to get rid of the kids after a school vacation. She was guilty of signing them up for activities just to not have to be around them. She was guilty of belittling them and stifling their spirit. And she told me all of this because she never even CONSIDERED that you could be a nice, joyful mother…which she concluded I was from reading my grant application and watching me with Jacob (she is an acquaintance, also, and we often run into her while out and about in the community…me grocery shopping with my kids and them weighing the produce and figuring out how much it is going to cost…her alone, while her kids are in school).

Anyway…my point is…it saddens me that people have lost the basic faith in themselves to question what they are doing, how they are living, how they are raising their children, even when it just doesn’t feel right to them. They continue the path of *what society says I should do* instead of just saying “NO MORE” and letting the natural state of joy and happiness enter their lives by listening to their hearts.

This has been a beautiful, inspirational thread, and I honor you, Mary, for putting your concerns out there to see what the Universe would send back to you…you have blessed us all (and especially your own child).
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Steph: ***Anyway…my point is…it saddens me that people have lost the basic faith in themselves to question what they are doing, how they are living, how they are raising their children, even when it just doesn’t feel right to them.***

Just when I thought that the discussion had reached a peak. Anne, this news is fantastic, and the above is so completely the point!!
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Steph: ***I thought preschool would be fun, and now that its not, I need to listen to her and say no, you don’t have to go back. I feel much better now. And art supplies are our forte here, we cant stop creating!!***

How quickly you knew. Congratulations to you and your daughter, Mary.

Think of what your decision says to her, about how she has a voice in her life and how her presence is welcomed at home by her mom. It’s a big deal.
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Anne O: ***Congratulations!!*** Well, the grant isn’t actually awarded yet…the board just signed the required form…but thanks, as I envision and Trust it will be awarded…!
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zenmomma: **Just so much up in the air. Your post though…
It truly gave me a sense of “::::::Breathe::::::::Stephanie, no matter what, it is going to be fine.” **

And, no matter what, the way it is, is the way it is. My dh and I were discussing this very topic this morning. His brother called him yesterday and is (again) very unhappy with his life. Hard to understand for us, since he is healthy, with a roof over his head, with a loving woman at his side, able to eat, play, dream, live……To us, all the other stuff is just details. Take ‘em as they come and make what you can of ‘em. Or should I say learn what you can from them. That’s my newest take on adversity. “What am I supposed to learn from this?” Not a new idea, but new for me.
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zenmomma: Anne, Once again your post has left me with a smile (thinking of you and your wonderful children),and something to ponder during the day (wondering why all children can’t be so honored).
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Mary: well we had a beautiful day here. When I told Molly we didn’t have to go to school this morning, she was so excited. She said “I never want to go again!” My response was “thats great, then we won’t”. I could tell she was surprised, but she quickly accepted it and asked if we could make some blue play-do. Of course I said yes, and even showed her how oil and water don’t mix while we were making it. No, I wasn’t pushing learning, just making observations, and we had a great time. We even made brownies, and now she’s outside playing in the sandbox. I am totally into this life already. It is a very happy, peaceful way to live. I thank you guys for leading me gently to my own realization of it.

Anne, I loved reading about the bond you have with your son. It sounds wonderful, full of respect and love. I often wonder why I am the only one at the grocery letting my child weigh foods, find items on the shelf, etc. The world is in such a hurry isn’t it? Its nice to read about everyones family.
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zenmomma: Mary, I’m so happy for you both. It *is* a wonderful, happy, peaceful way to live. Welcome. And as Anne would say….Namaste. (I just love that, Anne!)
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April: Well, low and behold! Just like they tell us not to label a kid bossy (or whatever), because she’ll live up to that label, I have found myself identifying very strongly with the zenmomma label I gave myself

That is wonderful Mary (zenmomma), and I totally agree with you. We tend to live up to how we label ourselves, so it would be nice to label everybody as kind, patient, loving, and perfect just the way they are!

Mary, I’m so glad for you!! Doesn’t it feel freeing to know that this is the direction that you’re taking and it’s OKAY!!?
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Ren: Oh I wish I had found this thread earlier. I am trying so hard to transform myself from a Mom whose first instinct is to yell into a “zenmomma” (insert smile here) I just love how you labeled yourself…and IT WORKED! I am going to see myself as a calm, loving, joyful person and FAKE it if I have to until my brain gets it. I was proud of myself today because when one of the kids was doing something irritating I was able to inject some humor…it felt sooooo good. Anne, you are an inspiration! Nuff said.
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The message? I believe it’s two-fold.

1: If someone had to bribe me to do something, my first thought would be “It must be unpleasant if you have to bribe me to do it”. When my daughter Shawna was in school, they were always trying different bribes/rewards to make her read more. It wasn’t working and the more they tried, the more she hated reading. “We’ll give you candy if you finish that book!”. She read the book, but stopped when they candy ran out. “We’ll give you a prize”. She read for the prize and then stopped when the prizes ran out. They didn’t realize (or didn’t care) they were sending her a message that reading is so horrible that she would only want to do it for candy and prizes.

I’ve always enjoyed reading and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want my kids to enjoy it also….but only if they wanted to.

Fast forward to right now. The years that she has been out of school, she’s had the freedom to read if she wants to. There are no bribes. Just shelves and shelves of interesting books for her to read, when she’s ready and if she chooses. Nowadays, she reads for 3-4 hours a day, because she enjoys it. Ask her what her favorite activities are and reading is always in the top three. It took about a year of deschooling for her to get to that point. It took me backing off and letting go. It took me trusting her. If I forced her to read, how would she ever have the chance to do it on her own? How would she ever know if she enjoyed it, if she wasn’t given the chance to?

One of her friends came over last summer (a schooled friend) and my daughter was very excited to tell her about a book she had just read. Her friend said “You have to read in the summer??!!” My daughter was confused and caught off guard. Her friend went on to ask “What are you getting for reading that book?” My daughter said that she read the book because she enjoyed it. Her friend looked at her like she had two heads.

2: Food and candy were often used as bribes when my girls were in school. Pizza, chocolate, candy and ice cream were used time and time again to get the students to learn something that the school assumed the students would not want to learn on their own. I believe this sets them up with an unhealthy view of food. If a child has their candy controlled and then used as a reward, how else will they react other than trying to eat as much as possible when they have the chance? You see those kids at birthday parties, standing by the chips or candy, eating as much as possible. I’ve had children come to my house and finish a whole bowl of m&m’s that were meant for everybody. It’s sad. Don’t schools (and parents who do this) see that their giving that candy or pizza too much power?

Not only do I never use food as a bribe, my girls don’t have their food controlled. It didn’t happen overnight though…it took lots of discussions and modeling on my part to get to this point, but I now have two daughters with a healthier outlook of food than most adults I meet.

When we first adopted them, my middle daughter was that child hovering near the chips at a birthday party. She was the one who gorged herself on candy in fear there would be no more. So when a parent says “If I let them, they’ll eat candy all day”, I agree because if a child has their candy controlled and doled out only as rewards, yes, they will try to eat as much as they can get. Can you blame them?

But…if children are given the freedom to learn things as they come up naturally in life, there’s no need to bribe them with the promise of a reward to force them to learn something when they’re not ready. I believe that rewards motivate students to get rewards, not to learn.

PS: We’re almost done unpacking here at the new blog. If you help us tell others that we’ve moved, you could win an amazon.com gift certificate! Just a way of saying thanks!

*originally written in 2006-updated in 2009*

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