Slack and choice

Feeling like a good parent is huge. The opportunity to be successful every day at something with immediate feedback (hugs and smiles and the little-kid happy dance) is rare in the world. But giving children more slack and choices creates more slack and choice for the parent, too.

If it's okay for a child not to finish everything on his plate, might it be okay if the mom only cooks what he likes next time? Or makes the best parts in new ways? Not every meal has to look like the centerfold of a cookbook. If children can sleep late, maybe the mom can too. If children can watch a silly movie twice, maybe the mom gets to be in on that. If a child (or a seventeen-year-old) wants to watch a butterfly for a long time, perhaps the parent will have the priceless experience of watching her own child watch a butterfly.

From "Changes in the Parents," page 268 (or 309), The Big Book of Unschooling which links to SandraDodd.com/change
photo by Sandra Dodd

Small, simple steps

There are people whose lives have been transformed because they wanted good relationships with their children and they took small, simple steps to get there.

SandraDodd.com/change/ (Thoughts on Changing)

SandraDodd.com/change.html (How Unschooling Changes People)

SandraDodd.com/gettingit (Unschooling: Getting It)

Those three pages are an impressive collection of the powerful difference a deep understanding of unschooling, and its practice in a home, can make to parents as individuals.

SandraDodd.com/oneonone
photo by Cátia Maciel

Becoming unschooling parents

In order for parents to unschool, they need to become unschooling parents.

Saying "we're unschoolers now" isn't enough.

There are changes that need to take place.

the quote is from Who can Unschool?
but this will help: Becoming Solid
photo by Ester Siroky

Esoteric and foofy? Why?

Even in the long term, unschooling is not about the completion of a project at all. It’s about becoming the sort of people who see and appreciate and trust that learning can happen. And who can travel with children, not just drag them along or push them along, but who can travel with children along those interesting paths together not until you get there, but indefinitely.

And for beginning unschoolers that sounds also a little esoteric, a little foofy. And not solid. They want to know what do I do when the kids wake up in the morning? So, the beginning information is very often, “What do I do?” But the information that will get people from the beginning to the intermediate is why. "Why do we do this?"

Changes in Parents
photo by Ester Siroky

The quote is from a podcast episode of Pam Laricchia interviewing me.
I tweaked the quote just slightly, capitalizing "even"
and using "unschooling" rather than "it."

I've used this quote before, but used better titles:

2017: Travel interesting paths

2018: "Why do we do this?" (with the same photo, even)

Better, for your future children

If parents become complacent and don’t think that they need to do better and could do better, then they can’t do better, and they won’t do better. And if they’re ever going to get to be the unschooling parents that their future children need—their bigger, older children with bigger questions and problems—they need to keep getting better.

Changes in Parents
photo by Holly Dodd
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Questioning and learning

Pam Laricchia said:

I recall when I was beginning unschooling, my days were typically a mix of learning about how natural learning works and starting to question a lot of the conventional wisdom I’d absorbed growing up. There are many ways that preconceived ideas and prejudices can limit people’s thinking and get in the way of moving to unschooling...

—Pam Laricchia

Changes in Parents with Sandra Dodd
photo by Karen James, of her own art (process and progress)
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Peace and joy and love

Children need peace and joy and love. If the parents are going to be their sole providers in this home environment of learning, they need all the peace and love they would need from their parents and they need all the peace and love they were going to get from their teachers.

When a family is very negative, with a very cynical parent, they’re sacrificing the chance that maybe the teacher would have been happier than they are. So they need to be twice as peace-and-love as they might have been if they weren’t unschooling.

Changes in Parents
photo by Pushpa Ramachandran
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Changes in the parents

I think the most common changes parents have reported are that they are happier and calmer, and have become clearer in their thought processes. The "reports" I hear are often in online discussions, so that might explain the latter. When people help each other work through confusions in thinking, writing becomes clearer.

Slack and other rare and priceless things
photo by Elaine Santana
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Ages and stages

Yesterday I bent over and picked an inch-tall tumbleweed sprout from a crack in a sidewalk. It was a tiny bit of community service.

The wind is blowing here, and all the big tumbleweeds will pass through chain link fences, or barbed wire, and scatter themselves into thousands of seeds. It happens every year.

A tiny baby hardly resembles adult forms, or the changes that take place in old folks. Where you are now is young compared to where you'll be later. Those changed old folks are always saying you will miss having those young children, and I found it to be true. It also irritated me for someone who was sleeping in a quiet, clean home to tell the baby-sticky, frazzled younger me that these were good days I would miss.

"Truth" is irritating, when we're sprouts, sprigs, teens, new parents, but just as the winds blow, people express the wisdom they gained as they aged and discovered that they missed having children in the house, as those other older older-folks had told them that they would.

"Results" (a half-random link)
tumbleweed photo by Holly Dodd
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"Why do we do this?"

Even in the long term, unschooling is not about the completion of a project at all. It’s about becoming the sort of people who see and appreciate and trust that learning can happen. And who can travel with children, not just drag them along or push them along, but who can travel with children along those interesting paths together not until you get there, but indefinitely.

And for beginning unschoolers that sounds also a little esoteric, a little foofy. And not solid. They want to know what do I do when the kids wake up in the morning? So, the beginning information is very often, “What do I do?” But the information that will get people from the beginning to the intermediate is why. "Why do we do this?"

Changes in Parents
photo by Ester Siroky

The quote is from a podcast episode of Pam Laricchia interviewing me.
I tweaked the quote just slightly, capitalizing "even"
and using "unschooling" rather than "it."

Again, again!

“No-one is ever likely to read my whole website and I don’t ever need them to. It’s not written to be read from one end to the other any more than a pharmacy is intended for someone to start at one end and eat, drink or inject every substance in the whole room. If you find a page that does help you, guess what? It will help even more if you read it again after a year or two. And if you read it after you’ve been unschooling for five years it will seem that the first time it was a black and white postcard and now it’s a technicolor movie. Because you’ll understand it better and you’ll see the subtlety and the artistry of what people wrote and maybe you’ll wish you’d been able to understand it better sooner.” ~ Sandra Dodd

Changes in Parents (episode of Pam Laricchia's interview podcast)
photo by Sandra Dodd

Detox, gradually

For a child, deschooling is just the time to relax and get used to being home and with Mom—a child who’s been to school. A child who hasn’t been to school has no deschooling to do. But for parents, deschooling is detoxification from a lifetime, and recovery from all of their schooling and whatever teaching they might have done. And it’s also the start of a gradual review of everything...

They don’t need to do it in advance, they don’t need to do it right at first. It’s so big, but it’s also gradual—it's just like living and breathing and eating and sleeping. Because every day a little more can come to the surface and be examined as it pops up.

Changes in Parents
The quote is from a recent podcast of Pam Laricchia interviewing me.
photo by Lisa Jonick

Circumstances and consequences

Questions such as "How important is this, really?" and "What's the worst that can happen?" change people's perspectives in several directions. They might decide the project really is pressing and urgent, but the difference will be that they considered the circumstances, the consequences, a range of choices, and made that decision.

From "Changes in the Parents," page 268 (or 309), The Big Book of Unschooling
which links to SandraDodd.com/change
photo by Sandra Dodd

If you think that photo has been used before, you might be thinking of this one, from a different London city bus, at the same museum.

Slack and other rare and priceless things

Feeling like a good parent is huge. The opportunity to be successful every day at something with immediate feedback (hugs and smiles and the little-kid happy dance) is rare in the world. But giving children more slack and choices creates more slack and choice for the parent, too.

If it's okay for a child not to finish everything on his plate, might it be okay if the mom only cooks what he likes next time? Or makes the best parts in new ways? Not every meal has to look like the centerfold of a cookbook. If children can sleep late, maybe the mom can too. If children can watch a silly movie twice, maybe the mom gets to be in on that. If a child (or a seventeen-year-old) wants to watch a butterfly for a long time, perhaps the parent will have the priceless experience of watching her own child watch a butterfly.

From "Changes in the Parents," page 268 (or 309), The Big Book of Unschooling
which links to SandraDodd.com/change
photo by Sandra Dodd
__

Happier and calmer

I think the most common changes parents have reported are that they are happier and calmer, and have become clearer in their thought processes. The "reports" I hear are often in online discussions, so that might explain the latter. When people help each other work through confusions in thinking, writing becomes clearer.

"Changes in the Parents," page 268 (or 309), The Big Book of Unschooling
which links to SandraDodd.com/change
photo by Sandra Dodd