Nice, and patient

Being nice to another person is what makes one nice.

Being patient with another person is what makes one patient.

If a parent says hatefully "BE GOOD," he's not being very good.

Instead of telling a young child "Be nice, and be patient," the parent should be nice, and patient. It's a generality, and a truism, but it's generally true.


SandraDodd.com/virtue
photo by Sandra Dodd, in June 2016

Nice, and patient

Being nice to another person is what makes one nice.

Being patient with another person is what makes one patient.

If a parent says hatefully "BE GOOD," he's not being very good.

Instead of telling a young child "Be nice, and be patient," the parent should be nice, and patient. It's a generality, and a truism, but it's generally true.


SandraDodd.com/virtue
photo by Sandra Dodd

A real human being

Learn to see your child not as an ideal or a model or the memory of what a child should be like from their childhood, but as a real human being growing right there, as a real human being who's seeing and learning, and learning things that are beyond the parents' production and teaching.

They learn things that we don't know! It's awesome.

SandraDodd.com/considerations
(rephrased slightly for this post, but the original is at the link)
photo by Rippy Dusseldorp Saran
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Nice, and patient

Being nice to another person is what makes one nice.

Being patient with another person is what makes one patient.

If a parent says hatefully "BE GOOD," he's not being very good.

Instead of telling a young child "Be nice, and be patient," the parent should be nice, and patient. It's a generality, and a truism, but it's generally true.


SandraDodd.com/virtue
photo by Sandra Dodd, in June 2016

Sunrays and angles

Remember that different people see things differently, maybe because they're younger, or shorter, or more interested in the mountains than in the sunray. Maybe someone is thinking of song lyrics and will miss a joke. Being near running water can keep someone from hearing a question.

It's likely that more things are happening and being noticed than the parents saw or planned.

Do the peaceful, generous things when you can.

SandraDodd.com/being
photo by Lisa J Haugen
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Be more positive than I am

Once someone in a chat asked what I meant by "Positive." Quickly and bluntly, I wrote:

Positive is not being cynical and not being pessimistic and not taking pride in being dark and pissy.

Yesterday I added it to my newish page on Positivity. It is the least positive thing on that page. 🙂

SandraDodd.com/positivity
photo of Hadrian's Wall, by Jo Isaac

"Pure Entertainment"

There was once a mom who could say nothing good about cartoons except that pure entertainment should count for something. I had an opinion.

"Pure entertainment"? I don't think I believe in that.

If someone is being entertained, that person is thinking. That person is analyzing SOMETHING, and every trail made in the brain is a reuseable trail, and a trail to connect to other things.

If someone is NOT being entertained, they will be learning negative, yucky stuff—being made unhappy, learning what and who to avoid in the future.

Whatever your children do should be unfolding in as stressfree and joyful a way as possible. THEN it will be mindful.

If the opposite of mindless is mindful, it's not the stimulus but the thinking to consider.

SandraDodd.com/t/cartoons
(In the past few days I've been in three different homes with kids watching cartoons, in Bangalore and Pune, India. I've seen parts of Disney's beautiful "Snow White and and Seven Dwarfs," Tom and Jerry, Ben 10, 102 Dalmations, something in Hindi that I think was originally English, and a Hindi DVD on the origins and adventures of the Monkey God Hanuman.)

Be where your child is.

For unschooling to work, parents need to stop looking into the future and live more in the moment with their real child. BEING with a child is being where the child is, emotionally and spiritually and physically and musically and artistically. Seeing where the child *is* rather than seeing a thousand or even a dozen places she is not.

SandraDodd.com/being
photo by Sandra Dodd

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

Generalizations and exceptions

How easy would it be to define dogs as four-legged animals?

Yet there are three-legged dogs. Many. Some people have never seen them. I knew one personally, and have seen three others closely.

My children learned to read without being taught.

If my children were the only children in the history of the world who learned without being taught, it would still be a fact that some children have learned to read without lessons—that a child can learn to read without lessons.

But my children are not the only ones. There are many. There were many even before schools existed, though it was harder without being surrounded by talking video games and movies with subtitles and printed boxes all over the kitchen, and signs on every street and building and shelf.


(The quote is from this topic, about 4/5 of the way down.)
photo by Sara McGrath

Being merry and light

If a single, childless person wants to spend a LOT of energy being negative about school, cataloging school's ills, revealing and reviewing school damage, then that's a hobby.

If the parent of unschooled children wants to do that, I think the energy and emotion could be better and more positively spent being merry and light with children who are not in school.

No one can have everything. You can't store up and identify with cynicism, pessimism and self-righteous ire and still pour out joy and happiness to your family.


moving away from negativity about school
photo by Nicole Kenyon

Tender protection

Unschooling isn't anarchy. Being kind to a baby isn't anarchy; it's tender protection of one's young. Being sweet with a toddler isn't anarchy; it's opening up the world to a human being seeing it with new eyes.

SandraDodd.com/anarchy
photo by Cátia Maciel

Being a good parent

Being a good parent is not martyrdom. It's this: Being (in essence, in life, in thought, in action) a good (not bad, not average, but quality/careful/positive) parent.

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I don't know where I first wrote it, but Karen James saved and shared it in 2012.
Becoming the Parent You Want to Be is a fair match.
photo by Belinda Dutch
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Step by step

Schuyler wrote:

I can almost pinpoint the minute when I turned from feeling a need to have my own needs met in a separate but equal kind of way to seeing how being with Simon and Linnaea was meeting my needs in the most involved and deep way....

For me, it was very clearly incremental, it was a step by step building from small changes to a point where I was in a position to find personal fulfilment in being with my children. It wasn't martyrdom, or it didn't feel as though I'd sacrificed myself for their joy. It did help to get the almost kinetic memory of being kind to them, of meeting them where they were instead of expecting them to meet me where I was.

—Schuyler Waynforth

Read more; it's good: SandraDodd.com/needs
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Being a father

Frank Maier wrote:

Being a father means participating in, and belonging to, the world around me and not just sitting quietly, being an observer. I have learned from my family and blossomed within my own inner geography as much as the kids have blossomed and grown into the wide world around them. As with most kinds of growth, it's difficult to see the changes on a daily or short-term basis. It's when you look back over a longer period that you really see, and are amazed by, the amount of growth that has happened.

—Frank Maier

SandraDodd.com/dads
(I took an "also" out of the first phrase.)
photo by Colleen Prieto

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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Quiet idea-journeys

From my point of view and from my experience, if art and music lead a kid-conversation to Italy, and they make this connection at 10:30 at night, I could say say "Go to sleep," or I could get excited with them, and tell them the Ninja Turtles were named after Renaissance artists, and that all the musical terminology we use, and most of early opera, came from Italy. That maybe the Roman Empire died, but Rome was not through being a center for advanced thought. Or however much of that a child cares about. And some of that will work better with an art book out, and maybe a map of the world. Look! Italy looks like a boot for sure, and look how close it is to Greece, and to the Middle East. Look who their neighbors are to the north and west, and how much sea coast they have. Look at their boats.

Maybe the child is seven, though, and Italy isn't on the state's radar before 8th grade geography.

So I don't look at the state's requirements. I look at my child's opportunities. And I think the moment that the light is on in his eyes and he cares about this tiny bit of history he has just put together, that he wants me to say "YES, isn't that cool? I was much older when I figured this out. You're lucky to have great thoughts late at night."

And if he goes to sleep thinking of a camera obscura or the Vatican or gondoliers or a young teenaged Mozart seeing Italy with his dad, meeting people who thought they would remain more famous than Mozart... I think back to the circumstances of my own bedtimes as a child and I want to fill him with pictures and ideas and happy connections before he goes to sleep, if that's what he seems to want. I could be trying to go to sleep and being grouchy and he could be in another room trying to go to sleep and being sad, or we can go on idea-journeys and both go to sleep happy.

Other stories of Late-Night Learning
photo by Sandra Dodd
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A thousand to one

For unschooling to work, parents need to stop looking into the future and live more in the moment with their real child. BEING with a child is being where the child is, emotionally and spiritually and physically and musically and artistically. Seeing where the child *is* rather than seeing a thousand or even a dozen places she is not.

SandraDodd.com/being/with
photo by Chrissy Florence

Kind, tender and sweet

Unschooling isn't anarchy. Being kind to a baby isn't anarchy; it's tender protection of one's young. Being sweet with a toddler isn't anarchy; it's opening up the world to a human being seeing it with new eyes.

SandraDodd.com/anarchy
photo by Julie D
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Threads

"Connection translates to trying to find more things that might tie into something that she might have liked before. Connection could translate to being excited about a bug or a thread or a cartoon."

—Pushpa Ramachandran,
part of Being means being

Thread literally is a tiny cord, but thread figuratively is a series of connections, and so it comes full circle.

Interwoven
photo by Nina Kvitka
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