Stronger, and calm

As you understand unschooling better and have stories of your own child's learning, you will be stronger, and bigger, and relatives will start to love those stories of natural learning, too. It takes a while. It will always take a while.

When the stories are about YOUR children, and not just other people's children, you'll be in a more stable, calm place.

SandraDodd.com/knowledge
photo by Sandra Dodd
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the best Now

Colleen Prieto wrote:
"I know that no matter how wonderful a childhood he has—no matter how accepted, nurtured, loved, and cared for he is—I can’t control his Future. His Someday is his—and he will run up against a whole world that is full of potentially confusing and potentially damaging things and people. We give him the best Now we can, in hopes that’ll carry him through his Someday as well as it can."

—Colleen Prieto

That's an almost-direct quote. There's a "but..." coming in the original,
but you might not need it today.
SandraDodd.com/addiction
photo by Sandra Dodd

Really reading

My recommendation to worried parents is to smile and wait and hold your child lovingly and to do no damage to his happiness while you're waiting for the day he can really read.

SandraDodd.com/r/real
photo by Quita Gray
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Simple joys

If you practice noticing and experiencing joy, if you take a second out of each hour to find joy, your life improves with each remembrance of your new primary goal. You don't need someone else to give you permission, or to decide whether or not what you thought gave you joy was an acceptable source of enjoyment.

SandraDodd.com/joy
photo by Kirby Dodd
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Magic (it isn't)

Read a little, try a little, wait a while, watch.

Unschooling cannot be learned by reading or writing.

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SandraDodd.com/readalittle
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Wrapped in thought

"Self control" is all tied up with being bad, and with failure. Choices, though, are wrapped in thought, power and freedom!


SandraDodd.com/control
photo by Elise Lauterbach
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Secondary benefits

Look at all this impermanence—pixels showing a digital photo of the shadows of paper banners. Nothing very solid. Nothing that will last a century. But when you share an observation with a child, or with a friend, it is possible that you will be offering a missing piece, an inspiring opening, a near-magical life-changing clue.


What seems small to one person might be life changing to another.

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The text above was written for the image, but here's an example:
SandraDodd.com/mylittlepony
photo by Sandra Dodd