Pivot point

Something tips the balance, when people's lives change. It's likely that some person, somewhere, said or did something that changed your viewpoint and direction. Someone's voice is in your head, encouraging you to be brave. Your voice might be in someone else's head someday.

From the description of a workshop in 2013
photo by SandraDodd

Calm and thoughtful

"Rebellion for the sake of rebellion is as bad as conformity for the sake of conformity."

—Sandra, 2011

Live in the middle. A life of calm, thoughtful choice-making is more relaxing.

SandraDodd.com/balance
photo by Brie Jontry
(there's a moose)

Learn, and be an example

Colleen Prieto wrote:

Realize your unschooling life and someone else’s unschooling life won’t look exactly just the same, and that’s because your kids and their kids, your partner and their partner, your house and their house, your interests and their interests… they’re not the same either. But still read, talk, and think about what you are doing, and listen to what others are doing. Learn from the example of people who have been there/done that, and be an example for those who will come after you on the unschooling path.

—Colleen Prieto

---

When I first shared this Colleen quote in 2015, an anonymous commenter wrote:

Love this post.

It reminds me that you can't make all of the changes at once. When I look back I see we have traveled a long way but in little steps.

So I will share "Do It" and "Gradual Change"—pages to help balance the changes.

SandraDodd.com/video/doright
photo by Cally Brown

Other things flow

Being a child's partner rather than his adversary makes the balance of knowledge unimportant. Nowadays my children drive me around, help me out, read small print and get things off high shelves. For many years, I did those things for them.

SandraDodd.com/partners

SandraDodd.com/balance

Learning first, and partnership and being present close after, and all the other things flow in around it.


Part of a longer response to an odd question: The other things flow in around it.

See also "Snapshot" on this blog
photo by Karen James

Harmoniously better

Harmony makes many things easier. When there is disharmony, everyone is affected. When there is harmony, everyone is affected too. So if it is six of one or half a dozen of the other (right between none and a full dozen), go with harmony instead!

And harmony expresses the same idea that balance does in these social instances. How you live in the moment affects how you live in the hour, and the day, and the lifetime.

Some have written that unschooling made their family life better. In every case I've seen, making a family's life better is exactly what makes unschooling work well. So which comes first? Neither grew wholly in the absence of the other.

SandraDodd.com/balance
photo by Theresa Larson

Manipulation vs. persuasion

In a 2005 discussion, someone asked:

Where is the line drawn? (Because of the inherent power difference between parents and children, when is a parent persuading instead of manipulating?)

I responded:

It's different every time in each dyad. Some parents manipulate all the time. It is neither ideal nor illegal. Some parents never manipulate nor even learn to persuade, to the point that they are what is called "walked on" and marginalized by even their own family.

In the middle is a balance point and that will be different in different circumstances.

If I see one of my boys getting emotionally involved with a girl who seems desperately needy to have a baby to get away from her family, that would call for more commentary and discouragement than if he's liking a girl who seems calm and thoughtful and balanced. To declare in advance a rule about how I will be in future unseen circumstances would be to turn off my own freedom and judgment.

Living by principles and not by rules, as I try to do, having a rule about what is and what isn't violates my principles.

Sandra

literal meaning of "manipulation"
photo by Rippy Dusseldorp

How does it balance out?

When children choose their foods, they will choose things you didn't expect!

SandraDodd.com/eating/balance
photo by Sandra Dodd

Balancing on changes

Things change. Even in the best of peaceful circumstances, things change. Keep your balance, find gratitude and abundance, and accept changes gracefully when you can.

Impermanence
photo by Colleen Prieto

New and better

Lean, one choice at a time, one conscious thought at a time, until your choices and thoughts are solidly in the range where you want to be, and you no longer lean that other way so much.

Your new range of balance will involve better choices and options than your first attempts did.

Sandra, from a talk on being partners
photo by Sandra Dodd

Finding and using tools

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

The basic idea of unschooling is that we learn what we need by using it. And that's exactly how kids learn to speak English. Toddlers aren't trying to learn English. They're using a tool (English) to get what they want: which might be juice or a hug or picked up to see better. The English tool is more efficient than other tools they've been using: pointing or crying or wishing. And because English is more efficient, they use it more. And because they use it more, the get better at it. Kids learn English (and everything else) as a *side effect* of living and pursuing what they enjoy.

The theory of school is that someone can't be an engineer until they know everything an engineer needs to know.

But that's not now people learn best. Someone who loves to build things learns how to build things by doing what they love: building things! And since they love to build, they'll be fascinated by things that connect to building. They may be fascinated by history of building or artistic design in building or how structures built with different materials behave or the physics of balance and load distribution and so on and so on.

—Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/joyce/products
photo by Roya Dedeaux

Doing Nothing, and finding balance

Halfway between the past we can't change and the future we can only imagine, we find ourselves in the present. Not just the present year, but the present day; not just the present day, but the present moment.

From Balancing in the Middle Ground:

[Some families] had stopped doing school, and then stopped making their kids do anything, and now their kids were doing NOTHING.

Aside from the idea of the rich potential of their "nothing," the parents had gone from making their kids do everything, to "making them do nothing." And interestingly, it did make them "do nothing," at first. Or at least the parents couldn't see the new things they were doing.

Rather than moving from one edge of a dichotomy to the other, the goal is to move to a whole new previously unknown middle place.

Holly Dodd, and the false sea onion

photo by Holly Dodd in 2009
original post, 2010

All or nothing or...

Should people live in the water in the middle of the ocean, or should they live on land as far as possible away from an ocean?

Quickly! What's your answer?


This was a trick question just designed to make you think. But people really do ask the same kinds of questions of themselves sometimes. In some people's heads, "Don't believe everything you read" turns into "Don't believe anything you read."

In the middle are things like "Believe things that make sense and seem to work after you've thought about them and tried them out," and "Don't believe something just because you read it, but wait for it to be confirmed by other more trusted sources, or by your own research or observance."

By thinking in extremes, "There is more than one truth" becomes "All things are equally truthful." Just because there are many truths doesn't mean there's no such thing as nonsense.

SandraDodd.com/balance
The last bit was a paraphrase, to be courteous,
of the original statement from a few years before which was
"Just because there's more than one truth
doesn't mean there's no such thing as bullshit."

photo by Sandra Dodd

Not so extreme, please

If the old rules were that school is vital and "an education" (defined as the curriculum of an ideal school) is necessary, will the new rules be that school is not important and an education is not necessary? We don't make school disappear by turning the other way. It's still there. Our kids might want to go to school someday, in some form. We don't deny that knowledge is important by becoming unschoolers, but many come to prefer the idea of "learning" with its vast possibilities over the narrower "education."

SandraDodd.com/balance
photo by Sandra Dodd

Foggy confusion

I've always been uncomfortable with the idea of "self-regulation." Regulation has to do with rules—creating and enforcing rules. I like the idea that children will find a balance. And it has helped me in moving from kneejerk what-would-my-mom-do (when my kids were babies I worked consciously to make decisions a better way) to try to avoid using phrases of children that I wouldn't use of adults. I don't say my husband self-regulates his leisure time, or that my friend self-regulates her diet or that my sister self-regulates her housekeeping.

People will come [to a discussion] and say "I've given him freedom, when will he self-regulate?" and I think (though I've never asked) they mean "When will he somehow do what I would have made him do if I were making him do things?" Some newer unschoolers are similarly waiting for their kids to ask to learn biology, or to wake up one morning eager to write a book report.

SandraDodd.com/self-regulation
photo by Karen James

Slide bars or dimmer switches

Rather than moving from one edge of a dichotomy to the other, the goal is to move to a whole new previously unknown middle place. My model won't work in everyone's head (as we're not as plug-and-play as some would like to think), but here is one way to look at this problem: See if you have a dial in your mind that says "everything" at one extreme and "nothing" at the other. It's impossible for anyone to do everything or nothing. Maybe label it "too much" and "not enough" instead, and try for the midpoint. Replace any on/off switches in your mind with slide bars or dimmers!

SandraDodd.com/balance
photo by Rosie Moon

Be more involved

Joyce Fetteroll wrote:

Unschooling is the opposite of both authoritarian and hands-off parenting. It's neither about creating rules to remote parent nor about letting kids jump off cliffs. It's about being more involved in kids lives. It's about accompanying them as they explore, helping them find safe, respectful and empowering ways to tackle what intrigues them.

—Joyce Fetteroll
2009

SandraDodd.com/balance
photo by Eleanor Chong

This image might be hard to interpret. It's wintry yard art. A forked branch was stuck in a container of water, and when the top layer froze, it was pulled out and hung up as a temporary decoration.

Being, in balance

Sandra, about Always Learning (the discussion list referenced):

I think finding balance is probably the hardest thing. It's easy to make an extreme caricature of "being an unschooler" rather than finding a way to live unschooling. Someone recently assured us she was "doing it," but having someone else say "that's it, you're balanced on that bicycle" is worthless if the bicycle falls over. There's doing, and there's being, and there's "it," and the reason this list exists and thrives is that those ideas (doing, being, "it") live in the realm of philosophy, of the examination of ideas, of the weeding out of error and fallacy.

Half of me says "bummer" and half of me says "cool!" and so at the balance point of those two, we continue to discuss unschooling.

SandraDodd.com/control
photo by Linda Wyatt

Next week, next year, next century

People DO think of next week. They think of last week. But they're doing their thinking from inside their present selves.

Balance depends on the fulcrum. Be solid. Be grounded.
Be whole, and be here.

SandraDodd.com/peace/becoming
photo by Sandra Dodd

Sometime maybe

Karen James wrote:

When people think "always" and "never", they get stuck in "always" and "never", and can't see the in-between where, most often, the details and valuable bits of wisdom are.

I've found that a lot of new unschoolers seem to get stuck in extreme thinking--the always and never lands. 😉 I probably did too. Maybe it's part of adjusting to a new paradigm of thinking.

—Karen James

SandraDodd.com/balance
photo by Marta Venturini

"I feel it in my fingers..."

Karen James, on math:

I took the leap and we began homeschooling, with me trusting that like walking, talking, reading, writing, and all the other things he had managed to learn through his play and exploration and with our active support, he would come to have a meaningful understanding of math too. When I came to a greater understanding of unschooling, I suspected we had not made a error in judgement. As I have watched Ethan's relationship with math grow and deepen, I knew we had not.

What I didn't realize when I was worrying about how to bring math to Ethan, was that Ethan had already found math. He found it on his fingers. He found it in the seeds of an apple I had cut open. He found it in the peas spread over the tray on his high chair. He found it in every repeated drop of his cup or spoon. He found it in the music we listened to. He found it in the timing between jumps on his jolly jumper. He found it in the balance he needed to take the next step. He found it in the distance between steps. It was everywhere already, and he was already finding the art in it. I just needed to stop my worrying and start having fun.

So I have.

—Karen James

SandraDodd.com/math/found
photo by Belinda Dutch

The title isn't from the quote, it's from a 1967 Troggs song.


In 2023, Ethan James is newly grown up and working at a video game company, at least for a while.