—Clare Kirkpatrick
photo by Janine Davies
__
The story quoted below is from nine years ago and involves a sixteen-year-old.Today, in 2025, I update it:
Marty is twenty-five now and is getting married in a couple of days.
The story quoted below is from 20 years ago, and involves a sixteen-year-old.
Marty is 36 now, and is moving with his wife and two children to Anchorage, Alaska in six days.
[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.
"Your child is not you"—that one stopped me cold, way back, when I was resisting, thinking it All sounded odd and crazy. It was a gigantic "well duh" moment in the best way. It was so obvious! And yet I was using my adult needs and fears waaaaay too much to make decisions about what my kids "needed" or "needed to learn".—Meredith