A gentler touch with ourselves, and others, is the best way for genuine improvement.
You can’t yell at a cat and make it come to you. Same with real change.
photo by Debra Heller Bures
If you make your home-life more peaceful and fun, anxiety will lessen without any need to venture away from unschooling into the land of rewards and punishments.
Please take time for reflection. Take time for your mind to be calm and quiet. Take time to be open to input, not busy creating output. Don't respond, think. Take the ideas and let them "be" in your mind and go spend lots of time with your children and consider and observe how the ideas might play out in your own home with your own kids.
If you just do the nice things, that's what good partners do.
If you can recall a moment when you comforted an animal, you are remembering a good-hearted action. If you can think of four, or six, times that you made another creature feel safer, warmer, happier, you might induce the same feelings you had then.
Peaceful memories can be soothing.
Sometimes I would say "Hold on to something! I'm going to hold on to Marty!" so that it wasn't just a thing 'kids had to do,' but was a safety condition of crowdedness.I need even more help now, nine years later. Sometimes I help a grandchild or two.Now that I'm older, I still sometimes want to hold on to one of my kids when we're out, but now it's because I'm safer if they help me. Holly has held my hand crossing streets just this year, and she's 21. Marty and Kirby have helped me down stairs and off of steep curbs.
It's not just for children.