More peaceful

Someone on unschooling-[dot]-info (now defunct) was frustrated with advice that she be more gentle with her daughter and wrote:

You guys do it your way, let your kids run wild, let them curse, let them do every little thing they want to do.

arcarpenter/Amy responded:

That's really not how my house looks or feels—not wild, not out-of-control. There is something in-between the extremes of demanding obedience and having children feel and act out-of-control all the time. The something in-between is giving feedback about how a behavior is affecting me and others, while also being understanding that the behavior is coming from a valid need. The something in-between often takes more time and attention than either of the extremes, but it is worth it, because my children get a chance to problem-solve and to grow in their own emotional awareness now, when they're young, instead of trying to figure it all out on their own when they're older.

. . . .
The more we practice these principles, the more peaceful our house becomes. *That* is what our house looks like—not what you described above.

Peace,
Amy

What I left out was a story with examples of how unschooling was creating peace at their house. It's here: SandraDodd.com/peace/fighting
photo by Gail Higgins

What do you know?

If we avoid thoughts that are negative or non-productive or illogical, we move toward a better, lighter place. People can work on thinking and on being.

How will you be, as a parent, and why? What's keeping you from being the way you want to be?

Inventory your own tools. What do you already know that can make you a more peaceful parent? What tricks and skills can you bring into your relationships with members of your family?

A Loud Peaceful Home
photo by Rosie Moon

Stories, music, light and movement

a mom named Lisa wrote:

There is plenty of value in TV/movies. It's as much of a dream world for kids as books (if not more). I know it can be frustrating when it's all new to you... I can't tell you how many times I wondered if I wasn't doing something horrible by letting my children watch as much TV as they wanted. I was sure it would backfire and that it would make my kids passive.

They're still lovely and beautiful and full of life....driven from the inside instead of following my lead so much.

Relax and enjoy the wonder of your child. 🙂

—Lisa

That's the end of something sweet, and longer, at SandraDodd.com/t/whatif

photos by Rosie Moon (stained glass)
and Kelly Halldorson (wood stove)

I brought these pictures to a TV post for being older versions of moving-light images. They are associated with stories, and with music, too. Television and film are related, culturally and historically.

Immersion

Robin Bentley wrote:

Seeing kids immerse themselves and being okay with their immersion can be enlightening for a parent!

—Robin
(original)

SandraDodd.com/focus
photo by Rosie Moon

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

Learning gently

Don't have him around others who will tease him. That's the main benefit of homeschooling, being away from bullies. Don't bully or tease him and don't let anyone else do it either.

Unschooling really depends on helping kids gently get to their own learning in their own way. Wanting them to conform uniformly and on schedule isn't the way unschooling works.

An archived discussion with a bad name, but good info
photo by Jo Isaac

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

Words might kinda hurt you

Heather Booth wrote:

One of the things that helped when I started unschooling was becoming aware of the words I used. The clearer I became in my thoughts and the more aware of the impact of my words, the better I was at being an unschooling parent. I want to discuss with my group the power of words. "Read a little, try a little, wait a while, watch" and "Say yes more" are great phrases to get you going in the right direction but if you are still saying "have to" or "junk food " or "screen time" then you're stuck in negative thoughts.

—Heather Booth

Weed Away Words
photo by Sandra Dodd

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To any non-English speakers who don't get the title, we have an old saying that "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." The post's name is in the rhythm of the end of that; it has scansion.

Let them live THEIR childhoods

Someone (who was against video games) wrote:

Being exposed to new stuff is what will generate new interests.

I responded:

If they're being "exposed" to new stuff just to generate new interests, though, they could easily decide to resist and avoid the new stuff, long for video games, and not trust or desire time with mom.

Wanting kids to do what mom envisioned her own ideal childhood to be is a trap to be avoided. Don't try to get them to live YOUR missed childhood. Let them live theirs, or they will miss both.

How important is your child?
photo by Alex Polikowski, of a computer her son built, with her help, when he was younger. That son is grown and an engineering student now.

How (and why) to help kids

I would help my kids with anything they needed help with, if I had the time and patience. When I didn't do so, I wasn't being the best mom I knew I could be.

I read video game directions to them just as I read books to them or song lyrics or cereal boxes or menus. I assisted them in the world until they chose to function without me. They still do ask for help sometimes, of other sorts, because they trust me to help, so it was an unforeseen investment in the future of our relationships.

Holly played a game called Harvest Moon quite a bit before she could read. I made her some charts to help, and I would come and read, and from printouts of internet hints and details, I made her a booklet so she could decide which crops to plant, and printed out a calendar of the Harvest Moon year, because there are seasons and festivals that factor in to decisions sometimes.

SandraDodd.com/panel
Unschooling Panel Follow-Up (HSC 2007)

photo by Sandra Dodd
of my kids' actual things

Fifteenth Anniversary!

Images and parts of the text are links.

First post, with some nice comments, from 2010:

This would need more candles now, but...



May the richness and riches of this trove of words and photos seep into your soul and give you sweet dreams and good ideas.

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With this, there are 5,343 posts. A few were deleted in the past for lacking longevity (announcements, temporary info). Some have been repeated for being especially good. They are labelled four ways, to keep it from being one big label/tag, so if you would like to see some "greatest hits," these are clickable, and are called

again (72 of those)

again! (147)

re-run (151)

repeat (136)

For today, then, if those are excluded, there are 4,837 non-repeated posts. Still around 5,000.

Most posts link to an unschooling page or two on my website. Most of those pages link back to this blog (from a little link in the upper right corner).

If you would like to help fund the maintenance of that site (from which most of the quotes come), there is a donation link at SandraDodd.com (which can also be accessed from this image on most of the unschooling pages:


The donation link is halfway down there. It's PayPal, debit or credit.

I can accept checks or Christmas cards to:

Sandra Dodd
8116 Princess Jeanne NE
Albuquerque NM 87110     USA

(If cool foreign money, save it there; consider photo request below!)

Also useful would be photos for the collection from which I try to pull a match for a text. Not all get used and some get used very late, but it's nice to have a variety. Send just a few you love, so I'm not overwhelmed, and tell me how to credit you (full name or truncated how). Those can go by messenger or by e-mail to Sandra@SandraDodd.com (and larger files are fine).

SandraDodd.com
tree art by Bo King
cake photo by Sandra Dodd
photos by many different people at the repeat/again links

P.S. I want the website to last a long time, so if I'm not able to collect funding assistance someday, maybe find Holly Dodd or Vlad Gurdiga and see if they need financial help keeping it going. It's a bit less than $20 a month these days; might go up as things might do. Thanks.

Seeing; doing; being

Jenny Cyphers wrote:

In the newer days years ago, what helped more than anything else was to actually see my kids and what they were actually doing. I would try to see the world from their eyes and see how they lit up and give them more of that. Just being with them and enjoying them for who they were regardless of what they were doing, watching tv, playing dress up, whatever helped keep my energy focused on them, rather than on fear of what they weren't or weren't doing.

—Jenny Cyphers

original writing, at Always Learning
photo by Sadie Bugni

Gently untangling "kind and gentle"

Part of something longer (linked below):

If your childhood abuse and neglect have left a lot of closed-off areas inside you, it would help to get therapy—even light help, to get you started on looking, a bit at a time, at what happened, and looking with a compassionate eye—compassion for the child you were, compassion for the adults who might have done better if they could have, if they knew more, if they had support for being kind and gentle. Then that would help you spread "kind and gentle" into the present, while you were gently untangling the snarls of your childhood memories.

The clearer your mind is of trauma and fear, the more easily your thoughts can flow, and connections can be made.

SandraDodd.com/awareness
photo by Sandra Dodd

364 Days of Learning

Sandra, from a recorded interview:

When people who are running a school, charging money for people to send their kids there, where they will keep them there every day, like the law says, and they're reporting to the state, like the law says, to then equate themselves with what radical unschoolers are doing, it’s cheatery. They are cheating, They are trying to suggest that they can do in 180 days—whatever 6 times 180 is in hours—that they can take the state requirement of hours and create, in that time, what a radical unschooling family can create in 364 days of learning.

Amy:

My audio wasn’t being recorded properly at this point, but here I said something sort of snarky, like “You mean 363 days, because of 'Learn Nothing Day',” because apparently I don’t know how many days there are in a year, and Sandra said:

Sandra Dodd:

I took out the one already, it would have been 365.

Amy:

And we had a pretty good laugh about that. But eventually we got back to talking about the other benefits of unschooling—things that people don’t necessarily think of as "education."

SandraDodd.com/familybonding

Learn Nothing Day (July 24)

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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Purely learning

Facebook Memories showed me that someone on another continent had quoted me, years ago:

Learning does not teach us, but from learning we learn.

I still haven't found her source, but in looking I found its "wordier" cousin posted here in 2011:

Mastering ideas about learning

As some of my articles are being translated (now into Japanese, French and Italian) I see how much of my writing and thinking is about language itself, and so some of these ideas won't translate. But sometimes, that fact is very good. Some of our confusion about teaching and students and study and learning, in English, has to do with the words we use, and if the problems don't exist in other languages, that's wonderful for them.

In Romance language (Italian, French, Spanish and so on) our "teacher" translates to something along the lines of "maestro," a word we have too in regards to music direction. And we have the English cognate "master" which is more currently left in "master of arts" and other college-degree titles. Once that meant a person was qualified to teach at the university level. That meaning is gone in the U.S., pretty much.

Considering the word family from which "maestro" comes (and not knowing all its connotations in other languages), the English verb "to master" means to learn. It means to become accomplished in the doing of something. Whether mastering horseback riding or blacksmithing or knowing and controlling one's own emotions, it's not something someone else does to you or for you.

So for any translators or bilinguals reading here, have sympathy for English speakers who can't get to natural learning without disentangling all the graspy words and ideas about teaching and education and their implications that learning is passive and teaching must be done to a person.

SandraDodd.com/wordswordsother
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Thoughtfully and respectfully

Cara Potter wrote:

Having the concepts of authenticity and freedom foremost in your mind doesn't help unschooling - they're freighted with political meaning - actually, all sorts of meanings -that have little to do with unschooling. Better to instead think of helping your child make choices - choices that take others into consideration, (which is respect).

What we as unschoolers are doing is helping our children learn to make choices so that they can live and thrive in the world. You can do that without getting tied up in knots about authenticity and freedom.

There'a an Annie Dillard quotes that always makes me think of this process - "How we live our days is how we live our lives."

If you live your days being kind to your family and helping your child make choices that take other's feelings and expectations into consideration you'll be helping him learn how to have live thoughtfully and respectfully in the world.

—Cara Potter

SandraDodd.com/nest
photo by Colleen Prieto

Going all in

Jen Keefe wrote:

I fought motherhood for a long time. What helped me settle in and fall in love with this life and in practical love with my kids was going all in.

—Jen Keefe

SandraDodd.com/being/allin
photo by Rosie Moon

Things some people know

Teens who were always unschooled *know* things that other people don't know. My children, for example, know one can learn to read without being taught. They don't think it, kind of believe it, or have a theory about it. They know that it's possible to be honest and trust your parents. They know it's possible for a fourteen year old girl to hang out with her older brothers pleasantly and at their request. They understand why those with unlimited TV in their own rooms can go a long time without turning it on, or why they might want to leave it on to sleep. They have years of experience with the fact that someone with the freedom to choose to stay awake will get sleepy at some point and want to go to bed and sleep. They all understand when it's worth going to sleep even though fun things are going on, and they know how to decide when it's worth setting an alarm to get up.

There are many adults who don't know those things.

All three were teens when I wrote that; they're in their thirties now.

SandraDodd.com/teen/people
photo by Monica Molinar

Sounding off

Patti Schmidt wrote:

It seems to me that "phonics" essentially serves the purpose of "teaching" a child to read before he's ready and fully grasps context and meaning. I know that I can read Spanish, which is a much more consistently phonetic language than English, complete with accent and everything, and literally not understand one bit of what I'm saying.

I remember being tested separately for "reading" and reading comprehension. If one can't understand the words and phrases, then isn't it just decoding with an internalized phonics decoder ring?

Turning script to sound is one trick, but the reading that people want will turn marks to meaning. The same way that musical notation (and a musician who can decipher and play or sing it) can bring music into the air, so can the written word becoming lively language again.

Patti discovered, as many unschooling parents have, that while some children appreciate phonics hints, or figure phonics out on their own, others learn to read in their own other ways.

More of Patti's story of children learning differently:
SandraDodd.com/r/patti
photo by Sandra Dodd

The photo was taken of the insde of a church door in Durham, in England. "The draught is dreadful" cannot be read easily with American phonics (or sight reading, or look-say). But it's cute, and it's alliterative, which is an ancient tradition in the English language, and in the naming of the alter-egos of comic-book super heroes.