Wonderful wonder

Pam Sorooshian, of something she learned before she was unschooling:

It really makes a huge difference how the parent is feeling about what the kids are doing.

My sister inadvertently taught me this when her now-24 yo son was only about 4 years old. They had old very beat-up furniture and her son, Alex, was standing next to a couch with holes in it. He was pulling out little bits of stuffing and rolling it in his fingers, feeling the texture, stuffing it back in, pulling out another tuft, feeling it, and so on. He had a faraway look in his eyes and was clearly really focused on experiencing the sensation of the texture of those tufts of couch stuffing.

She and I walked in and saw him at the same moment. MY reaction would have been to stop him from pulling stuffing out of the old couch. Julie stopped and smiled and said, quietly to me, "Look at that — he is having such a deep sensual experience just with a bit of stuffing from an old couch. How wonderful!"

Another parent might have complained, "My kid is so bored he's literally pulling the stuffing out of our old couch. That's the best thing he can find to do?"

This might sound sort of phony or silly and unimportant - I'm just recommending that people look at what their kids ARE doing and see if they can change their own thinking about it - see it in the best possible way. It doesn't change what they're doing, but it changes the "tone" in the home and that is so all-important it can't be overemphasized.

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/wonder
photo by Belinda Dutch