Where are you headed?

When you come to an intersection, how do you decide which way to go? It helps, before operating a motor vehicle with all its attendant expenses and inherent dangers, to know where you want to go. When you DO have a destination, then each intersection has some wrong ways, and some better and worse ways.

It's the same with unschooling. If that's where you're headed, there are some wrong ways you can avoid simply by being mindful of your intent.

Mindfulness in Unschooling
photo by Sandra Dodd

Radical Unschooling is...

"Radical Unschooling" is unschooling fully, from the roots, from the principles, extended into all of one's life and being.


This was inspired by Family Bonding, Amy Childs interviewing me
about the benefits of radical unschooling.
(and there's a good transcript there)
photo by Sandra Dodd

Become trustworthy

Parents, in order to have their children trust them, should become trustworthy.
. . . .Trust and respect go together. Someone who is trustworthy will be respected.

SandraDodd.com/trust
photo by Lisa Jonick

The heart and mind of the parent

Robin Bentley wrote:

Radical unschooling (and the "radical" means "from the root") is all about mindset and changing beliefs and relationships for the better. Some people approach it from letting go of "academics" first, trying to see learning in everything. But if beliefs about learning and kids and partnership are changed first, then unschooling will proceed more smoothly. The real work is done in the heart and mind of the parent.

—Robin Bentley

SandraDodd.com/change
photo by Sandra Dodd

New and different

If an experience is new and different, children learn.

SandraDodd.com/beginning
photo by Sandra Dodd

Gratitude for everyday things

Spoons. Flush toilets. Roofs, walls, doors. Paper and lights. Colored markers.

Love. Time.

Thoughts. Ideas.

SandraDodd.com/gratitude/chairs
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Knowing someone loved them

We never minded putting them in the bed after they were asleep. It was rare they went to sleep in the bed. They would wake up there (or in our bed, or on the couch or on a floor bed) knowing only that they had been put there and covered up by someone who loved them.

Going to sleep wasn't about "going to bed."

SandraDodd.com/sleeping
photo by Sandra Dodd