My suggestion to you is to focus on making a "better" choice each time you can. I think that was the most helpful advice I got as a parent of younger kids—it was surprisingly practical and encouraging to simply consider at least two choices and pick the better one. The next time, try to think of the one you did choose and then one other—pick the better one. If you make a choice you're unhappy with, after the fact, think then about what would have been a better choice—have that one 'on hand' for next time.
Don't expect to be perfect, but expect yourself to be improving all the time.
—Pam Sorooshian
photo by Sandra Dodd, of something Keith Dodd carved
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Unless we've made many of bad choices in our lives, we won't be able to know which choice will be the better one.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with that. People can look around them and see better and worse choices playing out in others' lives. And if you know where you want to go, you can tell "getting warm" from "getting cold" without stumbling through a lot of bad choices to figure it out.
ReplyDeleteBut if (if) it's true for a parent (who might have gone through traditional parenting and traditional school), then a glowing advantage of radical unschooling will be that the same parent's child should be able to practice making better choices from a very young age, so that by the time she's to the big choices she's being thoughtful and analytical and not justifying bad choices.