Trusting Your Child

Natural Parenting: Trusting your childby Ela Forest It is natural to have fear for our children’s well-being, but there is no reason not to trust children to know their own limits. Everybody knows their limits much better than those around them. I know exactly how high I can jump, to what shelf I can reach or how big a hammer I can handle, and I don’t put myself in danger. The same goes for children, if we let...

Meeting Your Child’s Needs

Someone shared Jan Hunt‘s gardener metaphor on an unschooling list a while back and I wanted to share it here for anyone who may not have read it. It’s message is meeting your child’s underlying needs with patience and trust. “Imagine for a moment that you are visiting a plant nursery. You hear a commotion outside, so you investigate. You find a young assistant struggling with a rose bush. He is trying...

Taking Children Seriously

THE DAILY GROOVE ~ by Scott Noelle :: Taking Children Seriously :: We live in a society that doesn’t take children seriously. Sure, we care deeply about children’s welfare; we do our best to help them to grow into healthy, successful adults. But we, as a society, rarely take children seriously the way they take *themselves* seriously. To children, *play* is serious business — channeling enormous creative...

Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves

Every parent would happily give up ever scolding, punishing or threatening if she only knew how to ensure that her toddler/child/teen would thrive and act responsibly without such painful measures. Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves by Naomi Aldort is the answer to this universal wish. It is not about gentle ways to control a child, but about a way of being and of understanding a child so she/he can be the best of...

Naomi Aldort

When we (here at this blog or on the unschooling lists) discuss extending the principles of unschooling into other area’s of our lives with our children, Naomi Aldort’s message is very helpful. Naomi does not teach parents how to “get kids to be/do…” but rather how to be with children so that they are free to be their own magnificent selves. Parents say that what they get out of Naomi’s...

Nurturing Your Teenager’s Soul

10 clear and practical principles for giving teens a much-needed moral and spiritual compass: Nurturing Your Teenagers Soul: A Practical Guide to Raising a Kind, Honorable, Compassionate Teen by Mimi Doe At a time when teens face overwhelming issues-the hazards of substance abuse, issues of sexuality, the stress of high school, the importance of getting into a good college-it’s no wonder that these years often become a...