Don't trivialize "trivia"

What is trivia? For school kids, trivia is (by definition) a waste of time. It’s something that will not be on the test. It’s “extra” stuff. For unschoolers, though, in the wide new world in which EVERYTHING counts, there can be no trivia in that sense.

SandraDodd.com/trivia
photo by Tara Joe Farrell,
in Cerillos, New Mexico

We really like it.

Paula L, in a brainstorming discussion about jobs:

And the list didn't mention cleaning and organizing businesses! My husband and I started our business, Simple Solutions, 16 months ago. You can do very well financially if you want to push the hours and even maybe hire employees. Right now we work a combined total of 40 hours a week—we take turns working so one of us is with Andy. We have no desire to make this a big venture. It's just the two of us. We will be raising our rate soon. We are not rich, but we are getting by just fine, better than ever before. And we have virtually NO overhead expenses, which is awesome. We're even getting a pretty good tax return.

Best of all, we really like it. 🙂

—Paula L

Stories about Jobs
photo by Karen James, of her workspace,
new wallpaint, her own organization

Principles, rules, and coaching

Sandra Dodd:

Principles produce all kinds of answers where rules fail.

Alex Polikowsky:

Some people come to unschooling and in the beginning of their journey they ditch rules but try to replace them with unschooling "rules". Replace them with principles.

When you do, most of your questions and doubts will no longer be there.

Michele James-Parham:

Another common "unschooling rule" or frame of mind due to misinterpretation: We're unschoolers and don't have rules, so we don't have to follow your rules (in-laws, restaurant, museum, etc.).

Just because you allow jumping on your couch at home, doesn't mean that Grandma has to allow jumping on her couch or that the museum has to allow jumping on its couch in the lobby.

SandraDodd.com/coaching
photo by Belinda Dutch

Deciding what's good

People can say "no judgment" but people cannot think without making judgments. People can't make any choices without deciding moment to moment what's good, what's better, what's a bad choice.

SandraDodd.com/judgment
photo by Colleen Prieto

When to say no

Sandra Dodd, response in 2000 to: Can anyone explain to me "unschooling"?

It's like "just say no."

Just say no to school years and school schedules and school expectations, school habits and fears and terminology. Just say no to separating the world into important and unimportant things, into separating knowledge into math, science, history and language arts, with music, art and "PE" set in their less important little places.

Most of unschooling has to happen inside the parents. They need to spend some time sorting out what is real from what is construct, and what occurs in nature from what only occurs in school (and then in the minds of those who were told school was real life, school was a kid's fulltime job, school was more important than anything, school would keep them from being ignorant, school would make them happy and rich and right).

It's what happens after all that school stuff is banished from your life.

Several Definitions of Unschooling
photo by Rosie Moon

Deschooling...is to sit and think

Nicole Kenyon wrote, December 25, 2020:

My husband came home the other day saying he had the perfect Christmas present for our 9 year old son - a gel blaster toy gun. He was beaming and so happy. My first thought was "oh no, not a gun!" ... [and then I've left out the angsty part, and the Swiss-army...gun story, and the mom's transformative thoughts...]

Deschooling for me is sometimes not to act straight away but to sit and think about it. Is it a pattern the media has fed you? Where is the "no way" coming from?

While I wrote this story my husband and child are down in the living room and enjoying life, making little cardboard targets, laughing and having a great time. ❤

—Nicole Kenyon

Toy Guns
SandraDodd.com/peace/guns
You can read what I left out, and if you can get to facebook you can read (linked from that page) comments at the time.
photo by Supriya and Aseem's Mom

Quickly but gradually...

Instead of just going from lots of control to "do whatever you want," a really sweet way to do it is quickly but gradually. Quickly in your head, but not all of a sudden in theirs. Just allow yourself to say "okay" or "sure!" anytime it's not really going to be a problem.

If something isn't going to hurt anything (going barefoot, wearing the orange jacket with the pink dress, eating a donut, not coming to dinner because it's the good part of a game/show/movie, staying up later, dancing) you can just say "Okay."

And then later instead of "aren't you glad I let you do that? Don't expect it every time," you could say something reinforcing for both of you, like "That really looked like fun," or "It felt better for me to say yes than to say no. I should say 'yes' more," or something conversational but real.

The purpose of that is to help ease them from the controlling patterns to a more moment-based and support-based decision making mindset. If they want to do something and you say yes in an unusual way (unusual to them), communication will help. That way they'll know you really meant to say yes, that it wasn't a fluke, or you just being too distracted to notice what they were doing.

SandraDodd.com/eating/control.html
photo by Cátia Maciel

Aversion and motivation

Bob Collier wrote:

After Pat quit school, he refused to read a book. He hates them. Thank you school for teaching my son to hate reading books. My son has never read a book since school and that was five years ago. He's had not even one minute of a reading lesson since school. Yet his reading is excellent. He developed his reading skills from reading videogame manuals and web pages of cheats and walkthroughs and from videogames themselves, some of which have an enormous amount of text in the gameplay that you need to be able to read to play at all.

Pat's motivation for developing his reading skills came not from being told it was something he needed but from his own understanding of how it would help him get what he wanted.

There's no more powerful form of motivation, probably.

—Bob Collier
(whose son left school at seven)

SandraDodd.com/game/reading
photo by Gail Higgins

Seeing more paths

Ben Lovejoy wrote:

The difficulty of having so many rules in your life is not that you can’t get things done; it’s that you find it hard to do things truly on your own. If you’re constantly told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it, how will you react when the people who’ve always done the telling aren’t around to do so anymore? How will you develop your own decision-making process with someone else’s rules constantly weighing in? People sometimes have a hard enough time trying to figure things out; but adding additional roadblocks only narrows the number of paths that someone can take. Rules become those roadblocks because they’re normally established for the purposes of controlling other people or events.

—Ben Lovejoy

SandraDodd.com/lovejoy/norules
"No Rules-Sir, Yes Sir"
photo by Cathy Koetsier

Knowing needs

Anna Black (in Australia, so the cookies and biscuits were same and sweet):

Today we were driving home from the library discussing what we would eat. Usually we go to a cafe after the library, but we are saving money for an aquarium visit on Wednesday so I offered to make milkshakes and cinnamon butter cookies at home, which both kids love. My six year old was enthusiastic, but then said, "I think I'm too hungry for biscuits. I'd like something more filling and not sweet." She ended up having a bowl of tuna and mayonnaise, followed by a milkshake. I am so glad she can listen to what her body needs and choose accordingly.

Sandra, responding to that tuna story:

When kids don't get enough sweets, their bodies need sweets. When sweets are there, but their parents say "no," then their souls need sweets, and love, and attention, and positive regard. When sweets are treated sweetly, then children can choose tuna over sweets.

SandraDodd.com/eating/sweets
photo by Cátia Maciel

Valuing Scooby-Doo

Colleen Prieto was talking to her son Robbie, who was nine, about "Frankenstorm." Below is Colleen's account:

He thought for no more than a second, and then very excitedly told me:

"Mom, Frankenstein is not evil. People just think he's evil but he's not - he's just trying to be good even though he's failing. Even though I haven't read the book or saw the movie if they made one, I know that pretty much from Scooby Doo. So we have nothing to worry about with the hurricane if now it's Frankenstorm because Frankenstein is good. If we were supposed to be scared, then they should have picked a better name!"

Many, many times in my daily life with my son, I am reminded that there is value in so very many things—be those things Scooby Doo or Pokemon or Star Wars or Harry Potter or 1,000 other "easy to criticize" forms of media or entertainment. Life is so much more fun when you look to the happy parts, look for the good, and keep an open mind.

Scooby-Doo, Frankenstein, and a Big Storm
photo by Sandra Dodd

Safety and communication

My children have no reason to dodge or manipulate..., because Keith and I haven't concocted any made-up arbitrary rules and their accompanying punishments. With safety and communication as principles and priorities, we've had safe, communicative kids.

page 46 (or 50) of The Big Book of Unschooling
photo by Sandra Dodd

P.S.: That probably only works only if you begin very early.

Webs, nets, connections

The terms "web" and "net" have both been commandeered by the internet. The idea of a grid or web or matrix to represent the connections involved in learning and memory is a good one, though—of many "dots" connected in all directions.

The photo here is of the two-dimensional web—very flat—of a garden spider, outside my house this week. Black widow spiders make a web that's three-dimensional, but has no pattern. We have those in our yard, too.

The webs on which our own mental models of the universe are based are more complex—with past and future, emotion and theory, alternative stories and secondary theories. We have sounds and songs, scents and tastes to remember, and can sort things by temperature or texture, in our minds and imaginations.

Rejoice in the random!

SandraDodd.com/random
photo by Sandra Dodd
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No shoving, please

Set it out, don't try to shove it in.

That line is from small talk I gave once, to dads only. I was talking about logic—to draw it in, not to hit people with it. But "Set it out, don't try to shove it in" can apply to many things—food, interesting things, ideas, and to unschooling itself.

photo by Sandra Dodd

The more we said yes...

Sandra/me, in 2003:

Sometimes one will say "I'm really not feeling good," as Holly did yesterday, and her need for juice, a blanket and some mom-comfort were real. She has a cold. So that was suddenly more important than her helping me get firewood, or whatever it was. I really don't remember anymore.

Nobody's ever said, "NO, I'm playing a video game, do it yourself." But they have said "When I get to a saving point."

The more we said yes to our children, the more willing they were to say yes to us. It worked like please and thank you did!

...on family life
photo by Kinsey Norris

Grandparents might worry

To a question about elderly grandparents of young unschoolers, I told this, of my mother-in-law:

When Kirby, my oldest, was seven or so, his grandmother pressed me at dinner in a restaurant with this: "Are you planning to have him tested?"

"No."

"How will you know he's not behind?"

I was sitting there surrounded by relatives, and Kirby was there looking at me. I said, "I know he IS behind in some things, and he's ahead in some things. So are the kids at school." And I put food in my mouth. And that was that.
. . . . Simply saying, "Thanks, we'll keep that in mind" can go a long way toward soothing worried relatives.

SandraDodd.com/mha
photo by Sandra Dodd
of my kids and their paternal grandmother
in those days, 1993 or so

Helping teens

Written when Holly Dodd was 18 (2009), of when she was in her mid-teens:

Holly has had a few jobs. One was working at a skateboard and clothing store in a mall a few miles away. One was working at a flower shop just a few hundred yards away; she walked. But the shop had another shop on the air base, and sometimes she worked there, so she had a base pass and a key to both shops. When Holly's jobs require driving, we let her use a car. Some of her school-attending friends are told they can't get a job unless they buy a car first. It seems to be a way for the parents to say no and then blame the kids for it.

Some mainstream families press their teenaged children to get jobs, and shame them if they fail, while putting conditions on when and where they can work. The result is that getting a job was just one more "do what the parents make you do" situation, and the jobs aren't fun; they're an extension of school and of parental control.

When teens or young adults have chosen to have a job without desperation for money, and when they are accustomed to learning all the time and living joyfully, they are a different sort of employee.

SandraDodd.com/jobs/bigbook
photo by Cathy Koetsier

Consider saying 'yes' more

Clare Kirkpatrick, responding to a new unschooling mom in 2015:

Consider saying 'yes' more often. Don't just say 'yes' without thought 'because some unschoolers told you to'. But *consider* saying 'yes' more often—in each instance in which you would normally say 'no', ask yourself 'why not yes?' And really pick apart (in as appropriate a time-frame as possible) why you would say 'no'. Is it because a 'yes' would feel frowned upon by others? Is it because you've always said 'no'? If you find yourself saying 'no' to the same things time and time again, then do a bit more deeper work on that issue. There may be something getting in your way you need to unpick— some cultural conditioning; some unhelpful and possibly untrue ideas about children.

Don't put yourself under loads of pressure with this...just work on questioning your 'nos' and 'yesses' in more detail, more mindfully.

—Clare Kirkpatrick

SandraDodd.com/yes.html
photo of Kirby Athena Dodd with her grandpa, Keith,
Halloween 2020

The whole set of everything

We didn't have problems with our unlimited turns, but it's because nobody ever played longer than he really wanted to just to keep another kid from getting on. Not even nearly. If Kirby knew he wanted to play for a really long time, he would offer Marty a turn, knowing Marty couldn't last so long. Sometimes I would appeal to one of them to trade out, but it was for real reasons every single time. "Kirby has to go to karate, so can he go now and you can play all the time he's gone?" or "Holly's pretty sleepy anyway, and wanted to play Zoombinis. Can she have her turn soon?"

As with so many other things (every other thing, maybe) in our lives, though, it wasn't that single slice that "worked," it was the whole set of everything. They trusted me because I had spent years being trustworthy. They knew there was no secret agenda, and that I really did want them to all have fun things to do, and that they WOULD get to be on the computer uninterrupted, soon.

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That was in the dial-up days. The world is better now, with more computers in homes, with wifi, with tablets. At the link below you can also read how Pam Sorooshian handled sharing a different way, when she had three children at home.

SandraDodd.com/sharing
Helping Children Share
photo by Sandra Dodd
(re-used, because it's from the days of the writing)
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What to wear...

If a parent tells a child "You can wear ANYTHING YOU WANT TO!" the parent isn't being honest, helpful or truthful, unless they're just going to be at home and no one is coming over, and they have all the choices in the whole world.

Depending on the destination or weather, there are many inappropriate clothing choices. The parent should be helping the child learn what's good, and when there are lots of options, and when there are fewer.

It's not oppressive to coach a child about what's appropriate to wear to a funeral (NOT a swimsuit and goggles, even if it's a burial at sea) or to a wedding (NOT a black dress and black veil).

SandraDodd.com/coaching
photo by Julie D