Enemies and monsters

Once I commented on one from a list of "truths" on a correspondent's blog:

This is not at all true. It has been claimed for years, but it’s nonsense.

18. Television turns you into a hypnotic state where the viewer switches off completely and is drawn into the world of the idiot box (well, that’s why it’s called that – an idiot box) for it doesn’t enable a two-way communication. Not even a silent one because you go numb.

If that were true, how much worse would books be? Plays?

I have collected accounts for twenty years of the learning that comes from television and video. People like to have enemies and monsters, sometimes, and “Screentime” is an easy boogey-man. SandraDodd.com/screentime/

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The blogger had already changed her mind about it before I commented, after having discovered my site, she said. I believe her. The post was a few years old when I objected.

SandraDodd.com/clarity
photo by Sara McGrath

Learning without instruction

It will help the children immensely to have the deep confidence that they can learn without instruction. Any child who has learned to read without "being taught" cannot doubt that he can learn other things without finding a teacher and following a prescribed course.

Confidence Grows
photo by Grace Santangelo
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"Seemed like overnight"

"I read for them as needed, then suddenly I realized they were reading these things without me. I've been amazed at how quickly reading progresses when they're ready — one of my kids went from barely reading to reading Harry Potter and the Little House books in what seemed like overnight."

—Kathleen W.

More name and text at Encouragement and Confidence about Reading (plus others!)
photo by Tiffany Bliss

Generous, soft, patient

Learning to be kind and gentle to a child will make you a kinder and gentler person. Learning to make choices that make you kinder and gentler to a child—more generous, softer, more patient—will help you be a better partner, adult child, neighbor, customer at the grocery store.

The original writing recommended this page: Parenting Peacefully
photo by Pam Sorooshian
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Figuring out how to read

How will they learn to read? In school or out, every child learns to read in his own way, as he figures it out. Different people read different ways. Some are more visual, and some are sounding out letters, and some are reading groups of words. Reading is complex, but teaching rarely helps. Until a child's brain and body are mature in various mysterious ways so that he can process the visual information and connect it to the language inside him in a manner that completes the puzzle for him, he cannot read, whether he's in school or not. Some children are three, some are thirteen, but shame and pressure never help.

Answers to the Most Repeated Unschooling Questions of All Time
photo by Chris Sanders

What ARE these things!?

In 2007 trying to talk someone out of using "screentime" for purposes of limiting a child:

When you're driving, the glass in front of you can be called a windscreen. Americans usually call it "wind shield." But is that screen time?


I think you should call things computer, tv, movie, etch-a-sketch. But even computer, sometimes I'm watching movies, sometimes I'm writing. Sometimes I'm reading e-mail or looking at my kids' MySpace. Sometimes I'm shopping. Sometimes it's research (quite a bit lately, reading in and about 16th century Bibles in English, early editions of The Book of Common Prayer). So I can't even call it "computer time" as though it's all the same thing.

Sometimes Kirby is playing World of Warcraft. It's partly keyboard, and partly talking to his team on a headset.
Sometimes he's playing Guitar Hero, with the guitar controller.
Sometimes he's playing stand-up-and-move Wii games.

Are those three "screen time"?


The original is about 2/5 of the way down at My 4 year old and the DVD player
Newer (post-MySpace) writings about screentime are at Screentime Index Page

photo by Belinda Dutch

Deep down, and wide, and high

If you're sure someone else taught you to read, you'll be waiting for someone else to teach you to do other things. If you KNOW you learned to read on your own, you'll know deep down and wide and high that you can learn other things too.

from an old topic called "Lazy or realistic"
photo by Chris Sanders
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Generalizations and exceptions

How easy would it be to define dogs as four-legged animals?

Yet there are three-legged dogs. Many. Some people have never seen them. I knew one personally, and have seen three others closely.

My children learned to read without being taught.

If my children were the only children in the history of the world who learned without being taught, it would still be a fact that some children have learned to read without lessons—that a child can learn to read without lessons.

But my children are not the only ones. There are many. There were many even before schools existed, though it was harder without being surrounded by talking video games and movies with subtitles and printed boxes all over the kitchen, and signs on every street and building and shelf.


(The quote is from this topic, about 4/5 of the way down.)
photo by Sara McGrath

Inevitable needs

"Reading is inevitable in a nuturing atmosphere where the person sees a need to read. . . . . Teachers, even specialists in a particular field of learning, are experts *only* on schooled kids who have school goals to meet by a specific age. They don't realize that those kids aren't natural kids. They don't realize that school is a huge contributing factor in the children's behavior because school, like oxygen, is apparently universal. They have no idea what a natural child is like. —Joyce Fetteroll

Some Thoughts about Learning to Read
photo by Brie Jontry

Like nothing else

If a parent can learn how to "facilitate learning"—to help a child get what he needs or wants—rather than to direct or try to own it, all of unschooling goes better. And if a child learns to read without "reading instruction," that can open the world up like nothing else can.

SandraDodd.com/r/deeper
photo by Alicia Gonzalez-Lopez
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Not what, but why?

When someone expressed shock that unschoolers felt TV was okay in any amount, Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

I wouldn't say that books are ok in any amount because it isn't *what* a child is doing that's important, it's *why* the child is doing it. A child who reads all day long because he has many options and his parents appreciate the value in choosing what you want to do is in a good place. A child who reads all day because his mother picks at him constantly when he's in her presence isn't in a good place.

I feel that TV is a resource like any other and that given the freedom to do so kids will use it when they need it and not use it when they don't, just like any other resource.

—Joyce Fetteroll

["TV" could be video, games, YouTube...]
SandraDodd.com/tvchoice
photo by Heather Booth

Quiet focus

Moments of quiet focus, and photo evidence of those, are both a bit magical.

SandraDodd.com/peace
photo by Ester Siroky
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Words can block thought

Have you considered putting limits on paper time?
       Cloth time?
               Other-human time?

I wrote that when the umpteenth person asked why unschoolers weren't limiting children's "screentime," without being able to break that down into what a child was actually doing.

Beyond the door
photo by Cátia Maciel
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One interaction at a time

One interaction at a time. Just make the next interaction a relationship-building one. Don't worry about the one AFTER that, until IT becomes "the next one."

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/peace/becoming
photo by Meryl Rosenfeld Ranzer

Individual needs

In an attempt to "be fair," parents can be very UNfair. Children don't all need the same things for the same amount of time. Measuring with rulers and timers and charts is often shortchanging one child or another. What they could use more than that is the opportunity to decide when they're finished for their own reasons.


SandraDodd.com/sharing
photo by Cátia Maciel

Right in front of them

Had I just taught my kids to read and then unschooled, they would not be the calmly confident people they are today. They might be saying "Okay, mom, time to teach me division" or "Mom, you didn't teach me to spell yet." Instead of that, I help them learn whatever is in front of them.

SandraDodd.com/r/deeper
photo by Brie Jontry
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Experience and confidence

Don't rob your children of the experience and of the knowledge that they can learn to read without help. If someone can learn to read, surely he can learn other things. I don't mean to say that after he learns to read he can learn other things by reading. I mean that reading is complex, moreso in English than some other languages, and if your child knows that he learned to read, he will have great confidence in his ability to learn. (So will his parents.)

The Deeper Effect of a Child Learning to Read: Confidence
(the quote is from page 86 (or 95) of The Big Book of Unschooling)
photo by Sarah Wassinger
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Thinking for fun and profit

Research means reading three or ten places, not just one. Don't consider all sources equal. If you think about it, try it out, and it helps, great! If it doesn't make sense or seems like superstition, be wary.

SandraDodd.com/mentalhealth
photo by Renee Cabatic
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Really reading

My recommendation to worried parents is to smile and wait and hold your child lovingly and to do no damage to his happiness while you're waiting for the day he can really read.

SandraDodd.com/r/real
photo by Quita Gray
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Reading and watermelons

When learning to read happens naturally, it doesn't look like school's reading lessons. It doesn't take years. It might take only days, but the tricky part is when those days will come. If you plant watermelons, picking at the leaves and threatening the vine will not get you a watermelon before one was going to naturally grow and mature. It's the same with children.

The quote is from page 86 (page 95, in 2019 edition)
of The Big Book of Unschooling
photo by Amber Stippy