Contentment, where you are

Peace can be just contentment—to be happy where you are, to like your life.


SandraDodd.com/peace/noisy
(the quote is from the sound file at the bottom)
photo by Sandra Dodd

Whole people, with lives unfolding

I see my children as whole people whose lives are unfolding now. They may have memories as vivid as mine. What I do and say now will be part of their lives after I’m dead. And do I want to be the wicked witch? Do I want to be a stupid character that they grow up and live in reaction to and avoidance of? And so if I see them as whole, then I see that as they grow bigger, I grow smaller in their universe.

Improving Unschooling (transcript, and recorded interview)
photo by Elise Lauterbach
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Living in the world

Unschoolers live in the same world as other people. If you plan ahead, you can live in that world even better than most people do. If you stubbornly cling to frustration or fantasy, you can find yourselves isolated, and angry about it as though the isolation was imposed on you from the outside.

Don't pine for "unschool-world."

But as for ideas for what to say, there are lots collected here: Responding to questions about unschooling

SandraDodd.com/unschoolworld
photo by Wesli Dykstra

The bright, shiny parts

On a scale from dull and dusty to bright and shiny, where is your life? How much of the happy outside world is flowing in? How much are you and your children interacting with the bright, shiny parts of the world outside?

Unschooling should and can be bigger and better than school.

If it's smaller and quieter than school, more should be done to make life sparkly.

Let one thing lead to another for you. Explore. Not the parent pressing the kid to explore, but the parent exploring and connecting.

SandraDodd.com/strew/how
photo by Sandra Dodd
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That mom I want to be

"If my kids grow up and feel they had a great warm childhood and that they were supported and loved and are now doing what they love because of it and are happy, then I did a good job being that mom I want to be."

—Alex Polikowsky

SandraDodd.com/otherideas
photo by Sandra Dodd

Gentle changes

A mom named Angela wrote:

A gentler touch with ourselves, and others, is the best way for genuine improvement.

You can’t yell at a cat and make it come to you. Same with real change.

—Angela, in response to the post "Be sweet and soft"

Gentle with a child
photo by Debra Heller Bures

"Trying 'no limits'"

Someone wrote:

I see so many families trying 'no limits' and then…

I responded:

Two problems: "trying" and "no limits." If a kid knows the parent is only "trying" something, he will certainly take all he can get, desperately and in a frenzy.

"No limits" is not something any family should believe in, or promise their children The world has limits of all sorts. Parents don't need to add to that, but parents can't guarantee "no limits." They CAN give children lots of choices and options.

Gradual change would have helped.

Saying yes a thousand little times is better for everyone than one big confusing "Yes forever, don't care, OH WAIT! Take it back."

SandraDodd.com/cairns
photo by Sandra Dodd (in Albuquerque)