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