Learning by touching

An adult with 20 or more children to watch will say "Don't touch it" quite often. An unschooling parent might rarely need to say it, being close at hand.

As my children had examples of people being gentle with their things, and were with me when I was gentle with other people's things, it was easy for them to learn to examine objects without being rough or careless.

SandraDodd.com/checklists
photo by Jo Isaac
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Up!

Up seems better than down in many ways—mythologically, linguistically, psychologically. Birds are up. Sun is up. Perk up. Cheer up.

Things are looking up.

A happy spiral upward
photo by Megan Valnes
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Good to great

Good things build up gradually into great things. Bad things erode faith and trust.

SandraDodd.com/choices
photo by Sandra Dodd

Better everything

Learning to be kind and gentle to a child will make you a kinder and gentler person. Learning to make choices that make you kinder and gentler to a child—more generous, softer, more patient—will help you be a better partner, adult child, neighbor, customer at the grocery store.

SandraDodd.com/random
photo by Karl Morgan (I think)
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Clutter or beauty?

Clutter and beauty can coexist. Seeing what's interesting can remind you that clutter can be cleaned up later, but beauty should be seen whenever possible.

When children are older, clutter can subside. Find the good parts today.

SandraDodd.com/chores/joy
photo by Sandra Dodd

Quiet abundance

Health, sunshine and opportunities can be the best parts of life. Children's blessings are parents' blessings.

SandraDodd.com/abundance
photo by Ve Lacerda

Take your time

Sometimes a day comes when the best thing to do is to eat leftovers and hang out.

Don't feel bad about some slow days of rest and recovery.


SandraDodd.com/gettingit
(That link doesn't have those words, but it has calming ideas.)
photo by Katy Jennings
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Soft

Sometimes children are soft, in soft surroundings, and a mother's heart is soft.

Sometimes they're loud, sticky, and stinky. Sometimes moms are frazzled.

Remember the quieter times will be there, too. Help to soften their lives.

SandraDodd.com/calm
photo by Lydia Koltai
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Normal

Anna Black wrote:

I sometimes look back and see how far my thoughts and actions had shifted from where I started and it was (and is) dizzying and exhilarating. Things that made me feel panicky five years ago are now so accepted and normal and joyful in our house. And I am still moving forward and trying to choose from more and better choices every day.

—Anna Black

SandraDodd.com/change/stories
photo by Megan Valnes
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Aware of words

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.
. . . .
"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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Stop time

Cameras can stop time. Memories can try. But really, the moment is gone and new moments are coming. Keep your balance, live lightly, be sweet.

SandraDodd.com/moments
photo by Parvine Shahid
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This planet

"Unschooling requires you to take joy in life. It requires you to appreciate the wonders of the world."

—Pam Sorooshian

SandraDodd.com/negativity
photo by Becky Sekeres
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Stop and hush

Meredith Novak wrote: Ultimately, what helps most to do first was not set myself up to yell—and that meant going back a few more minutes and noticing how things went wrong in the first place and changing those dynamics. Most of them were about expectations I had—kids should or shouldn't do some thing. As I worked through expectations like that, there was less to yell about. So basically I worked the problem from both ends—I found ways for life to flow more smoothly for my family on the one end, and learned to stop and hush and start over on the other. —Meredith Novak

New at the bottom of SandraDodd.com/parentingpeacefully
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Health and contentment

I think learning happened better here when our focus changed to their mental health and feelings of contentment.

Sandra Dodd, quoted by Joyce Fetteroll at
The Unschooling Philosophy
photo by Celeste Burke
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❖

Sleep when you're tired

It can help to encourage a child to sleep when he's tired. When children get older, parents can do it too, without feeling guilty, if it has been a policy for anyone without immediate responsibility to sleep when sleep comes.

SandraDodd.com/sleeping
photo by Nicole Kenyon
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Empowering Others

Helping people learn to find their own answers is vastly superior to distributing answers on demand. . . .
Empowerment is a principle, not a rule. Learning to examine one's own life and needs and beliefs is necessary for unschooling to work.

These quotes were about unschoolers helping other unschoolers, but the ideas work with parents and children, too. SandraDodd.com/rulebound

Younger Keith Dodd and his baby Kirby
photo by Sandra Dodd

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Totally lifted from September 20, 2010
so that I can go back to bed to recuperate from a long, hard week.

Dark corners, lit up

"Don't let fear and worry drive your decisions and interactions with your kids, though. If you focus on joy and partnership, dark corners won't seem dark. You and your kids will be able to illuminate them together through open dialogue and trust."

—Jo Isaac

SandraDodd.com/partners/child
photo by Erika Ellis
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Acceptance and relaxation

"When kids feel respected, when they've experienced a life time of their desires being respected and supported to find safe, respectful, doable ways to get what they want, kids won't push the envelope into craziness. That behavior just doesn't make sense to them. "Kids who've been controlled focus on pushing against that control, sometimes focus on the hurt of not being accepted for who they are, and do things just because they're not supposed to." —Joyce Fetteroll

SandraDodd.com/partners/child
photo by Andrea Taylor
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School days

One wonderful thing in unschooling is realizing you don't know whether it's a school day or not. It is evidence of deschooling.

Don't forget school days completely, though, because you can plan outings when the museums and playgrounds are empty. There won't be a crowd at the cinema.

Old information has new purposes.

SandraDodd.com/unexpected
photo by Jane Clossick
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The more you know...

When I was a student I often asked why something was important to learn, but my teachers rarely had good answers.

When I was a teacher, I was asked those things too.

Then one day, the question came phrased a new and better way: "What is this GOOD for?" The answer I gave then changed my life and thinking. I said quickly "So you can get more jokes." I think we were reading a simplified Romeo and Juliet at the time. I could've gone into literature and history and fine arts, but the truth is that the best and most immediate use of most random learning is that it illuminates the world.

The more we know, the more jokes we will get.

The larger paragraph above is from:
To Get More Jokes
or "Thinking and Learning and Bears"
by Sandra Dodd, 2007

photo by Heather Booth

Healing

It will help you heal from your childhood, to be a good mother. Seeing your own child's bright eyes when you do something sweet can heal the child inside you who would have loved to have had someone do that to, for, with her, years ago.

SandraDodd.com/healing
photo by Rodrigo Mattioli

Evidence

So what do we need besides seeing things in a new light, trying to be more understanding about noise and mess, and being our children's partners? I mean tools for moving toward being with children in new ways?

Maybe LOVE the mess

See it as evidence of health and joy and learning, and then it's not "mess," it's proof.

SandraDodd.com/chats/being
photo by Julie Markovitz
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Critical Thinking Day

Don't believe everything you read or hear today! It's April Fool's day, and people will be trying to trick you or trip you up.

All the rest of the year? Don't believe everything you read or hear then, either.

SandraDodd.com/clarity
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Positive, abundant gratitude

Finding the positive, finding abundance, finding gratitude, will take a person in an entirely new direction, and many of the other problems fall away effortlessly.

SandraDodd.com/understanding
photo by Chrissy Florence
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Explore the world

"Children will flourish if their needs are joyfully met as they explore the world. Creatively support your child in what he's genuinely interested in."

—Debbie Regan

Sometimes they're exploring imaginary worlds.

SandraDodd.com/teaching/problem
photo by Abby Davis
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Angels and chickens

Knowing I wanted to use this photo of Lydia Koltai's daughter and a favorite chicken, I pulled up my site search and put in "angel" and "chicken," partly as a joke—thinking I might get a quote with one of them.

Up came the page on cakes. Well, then! I invite you to go there and read the brief story of how my young boys, during a viewing of Spartacus in 1994, helped me discover one of the coolest things of my whole life—that the candles on birthday cakes, and the cakes themselves, are sacrificial offerings. Also they're sweet, and fun. There's light. There are wishes. There is celebration.

Cherish those things.

SandraDodd.com/cake
photo by Lydia Koltai
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Diverge!

I had a professor, years ago, tell me that one mark of intelligence was the use of tools other than the way they were intended to be used. I thought that definition would show up in other places in my life, but it hasn't. So here I share it with all of you. Try not to say "That's not what that's for" too quickly—your child might be about to do something quite intelligent. "If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society." —Piaget, quoted by Deb Lewis in "Unguided Discovery"

SandraDodd.com/deblewis/discovery
photo by Andrea Taylor