How Unschoolers (and all of us) Build Careers

High priority interest for my kids right now: experimental cooking!

My unschooled kids moved out recently, and now I'm processing all the choices we made! It's not so much the unschooling; there is no doubt in my mind that it served us all well. But the smaller choices we made on our twenty-one-year (so far) parenting journey have had huge impacts on our kids' career options; their confidence and courage, and even the way their interests have filtered into their careers. How DO people follow their interests into satisfying lives and careers, and what if they don't? I'm watching my kids' changing lives with fascination, remembering my own early adulthood, and discovering so much about how we grow and build our lives. So I thought I'd write a bit about this, from what is now my contemplation couch in my newly-empty, way-too-quiet nest.

 

Unschooling in the First Place: Why It Serves Us Well

The root premise of unschooling is freedom to grow along one's own path, following ones own interests. It means not being confined by the needs of classrooms, social expectations, or parents' expectations. Of course, unschooling parents raised in a schooled society (which is most of us) struggle very hard not to reproduce those constraints, so our kids rarely have pure freedom, but with our eyes on the unschooling prize we're supposedly holding that freedom of mind and growth in our hearts, and working towards it. I titled this section in the present tense and with 'us' very intentionally: It doesn't just serve our children well, and it didn't just do so while they lived at home. The freedom and responsibility of making and following all of our own expectations has served each of us well, and it continues to do so, now that the kids have moved out.

Unschooling isn't easy for anybody. That's because it's all about taking life at face value and being responsible for our own actions. It's actually what everyone everywhere is doing every day, but unschoolers do it intentionally--and life is just not ever easy. But it's good. It's good to have to make hard decisions. It's good to be disappointed or hurt and have to become resilient. It's good to learn to honour one's own needs; to put them before conformity, while always keeping the needs of others in mind as well. It's good to learn balance and responsibility and independence. All of these things are values that my various schools attempted to teach me, but I didn't learn them there. I learned them after I left, lived on my own, and began (slowly) taking responsibility for my own life. This is what unschooling does for children (and the caregivers who raise them): It gives them the responsibility as soon as they want it, so they can learn to handle and navigate life as it comes to them, instead of after they get out of school. 

The schooled mindset relies on following a plan laid out by staff and administrators--or by parents and curriculum writers, in the case of homeschooling. The point of unschooling is to step out of that mindset, set our own paths, and fumble along until we meet our own expectations. Or not, as the case may be.

Confidence and Courage

Fumbling and failing is a huge part of unschooling--and life, of course. My partner went to all the schools his parents chose for him, took some courses he liked and some he didn't, had lots of great experiences, and then went to university to study engineering. The first thing he did when he got there was to leave his religion behind. He was called to the university chapel after they got news of his arrival from his parents' church, and he gently told them he wasn't interested. I believe this, and a permanent change from short to long hair were some of the first steps he took towards making his own life-choices. Then he meandered over to a focus on physics and astronomy. It was around this time that I became Wiccan, and started dating conventionally-unacceptable people. Lots of them. I had to find my path! By the time I met my partner, I was no longer Wiccan, having re-embraced my atheist roots, and he was working in a Chinese convenience store and studying computer science. He was deeply interested in philosophy, which he processed muchly through conversations with the people who sat drinking concealed bottles-of-something at his corner-store-coffee-bar during his night-shifts. None of this was where we thought we'd end up when we left high school. It's just the fumbling that adults do, once we are handed the reins to our life and have no actual idea where we're going!

 

Back to my own (adult) kids: Right now they're experimenting a lot with food. Having moved out of our rural home and into the city, they've discovered all kinds of options for foods that didn't exist when I was doing the shopping. They've already had Door-Dash deliveries, signed up for a local Too-Good-to-Go discount grocery program (through which they've had some successes and some --ew-- failures), and explored all kinds of local grocery stores for the best deals on new and interesting and familiar foods. They sometimes tell us about the meals they invent, or send photos. The biggest deal of the photo up above, for me, is those beautiful smiles. My kids are quite obviously proud of themselves, and what more could I possibly want, as a parent? That pride will buoy them over all the fumbles and tumbles of life.

This fumbling--and the chunks of pride that carry our resilience--is how we build confidence. We experiment and meet failure after disappointment after unexpected adventure, and at every turn in the path we find a little more resilience; a little more determination and courage to make the next decision. To experiment more and learn more. Unschooling is all about facilitating that growth throughout childhood instead of afterwards. (Not that the growth ends with adulthood, as we and my kids are demonstrating!)

 

How We Follow Interests

As parents, caregivers and educators, we're often focused on identifying our kids' interests so we can support them. Oh--you like circus? Let's find a circus program! and Oh, you're interested in science? Here's a microscope. Sometimes these 'supports' are just the ticket our kids needed to the railroad of their dreams. Sometimes they couldn't care less, and even worse, sometimes our enthusiasm tethers them to fleeting interests that weren't empowered by or even embodied in the supports we offered. 

As a parent I've often felt disappointed when my kids didn't use the fancy tools we got for their supposed interests. I know I passed that disappointment onto them, and it turned into self-doubt, shame, and confusion about the paths they were on. How could my music-loving daughter possibly not want to play the Appalachian dulcimer that my mother bought for her? It's a tradition among the women of our family, for goodness sake, and she already plays guitar! It took me quite a while to leave my disappointment behind and accept that her journey might not include dulcimer. Or even music. She's now nannying and working as an assistant dog-trainer, while studying to become a certified positive reinforcement trainer. None of this was what I expected when she was ten and dressing up as Melanie Martinez. But she's happy. Likely happier, in fact, than she might have been trying to climb the ladder to pop stardom. And in the end, isn't that all we actually wanted for our children? 

 

Oh, and the dulcimer? She took it with her to the city, where it's hanging on her wall, and enjoys being played there by her and her friends. What looks like rejection to us parents is sometimes actually just reinvention.

Having an interest-driven career isn't even necessarily important. Or a single career. I often think my partner may have gotten more personal growth out of his needs-based night-shift convenience store job than he's ever gotten since out of his programming career. Now he follows his personal interests on YouTube, raising his children, building his home, and down at the docks talking to some boat guys. He likes his job as a software developer because it's stable, the people he works with are generally friendly, and he doesn't have to take it home with him. I guess for some people that's what matters in a career!

I'm not like that. I can only concentrate on an absolute passion. Too bad for math class and social studies in high school. I became an artist and then an art teacher, and then as I passionately unschooled my kids I drifted on to become a wilderness and explorative learning educator. Now they've moved out and I'm taking my art career more seriously. And it doesn't seem odd at all to me that all my installations are about social change. I guess what didn't interest me in high school does now. (What looks like rejection might just be reinvention...) Because I found out through fumbling how social science matters in my world. But most of my time is spent gardening or raising chickens. And I like that too.

What About Skill-Building?

What if my kid actually wants to become a concert violinist, and I allowed him to skip out on lessons just because his heart felt like digging a "mine" beside our driveway?? Sure. It could happen. (That was my son.) And what if we destroyed their passion for violin by pushing lessons when they just weren't into that? (Speaking from experience, here...) What if we destroyed their confidence in making choices for themselves by telling them we knew better, and that one day they would WANT to have learned to play violin? (Also us...) So my son never did pick up his violin again. He taught himself piano, instead, and digital music, and now sometimes he uses his music in videos. His career focus at the moment is digital art, but self-taught music makes him happy. We can't know what skills our kids will need, and we certainly can't know when or why they'll need them.

The amazing thing is, they WILL build them when they need them, if we can keep our fears and convictions out of their way. Once I finally stepped out of my kids' way, they taught themselves all kinds of skills they really needed: Math, piano, cooking, social skills, and even job-seeking and career-building. Once in a while they came to me for help, like when they wanted me to read over their resumes, and it felt like all the sparkles of joy got dumped on my head!!! Sometimes our kids do need us, but they need to be on their own for both skill-building AND deciding what skills to build. No matter how painful the process is for us parents to watch.

 

Building Careers

What career? What goal? What if "having an interest" is not the goal? What if instead we spend our kids' lives encouraging flexible navigation of any and all interests? We don't all have a single interest, and in fact most of us are always navigating a few. And they change. Maybe our kids were going to be concert pianists yesterday and today they're going to be magicians or farmers. Tomorrow they just want to bake cookies. Not for a career. Just because YUM. Maybe we work at our dream job, and focus all life around it. Or maybe we volunteer at what we're passionate about, and work to make ends meet. Or maybe we just work at a place where our friends work because it makes us happy; maybe friends are the current passion. Or cooking new foods each night, or reading, or parenting...

 

I have no clue who my children will be in another ten or twenty years. I have no clue who I'll be! But we keep on unschooling through life--reminding ourselves of the importance of recognising and following our hearts' needs--and we trust that we'll build the courage and resilience we need to stay upright around the unexpected turns. Or to right ourselves after we fall. We don't know where we're going, and we're learning to love the journey.

Raising Disciplined Adults Without Punishment

my 20-year-old son with one of his current devices

I was hauling on my son's laptop so hard I wrenched my shoulder. I heard myself blaming him for the injury over the grunting of his determined self, gripping and salvaging the one device he owned from my attempted theft. I have no idea what reprehensible act he'd committed. It may not have been related to the laptop, even. I just remember that I thought his behaviour was absolutely inexcusable, and the only power I had to change him was the threat of taking away something important to him. So when the threat didn't work, I felt obliged to act on it. And obviously he felt obliged to save his laptop. And that's how I ended up having a physical altercation with my beloved son. I didn't recognize the harm I'd done until I had the laptop, and looked back into his anguished face to realize that the important thing I'd taken from him wasn't the laptop--it was his faith in me. The look was betrayal. It took us a long time to repair our bond, and a lot of personal growth for me to forgive myself for that. And in that time I really cemented my belief that the only way to raise responsible adults with a sense of self-esteem and self-discipline is to do so without imposed discipline.

I feel like it's important to tease apart our culture's complex understanding of the word "discipline".

Merriam Webster says that discipline is:

1    a : control gained by enforcing obedience or order

      b : orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior

      c : self-control

2 : punishment

3 : training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character

4 : a field of study

 

Some of those are straightforward, but there's an impossible contradiction in there, too: The opposing natures of self-control vs. control gained by external enforcement. They're not just different; they're mutually destructive. We all want our kids to develop self-control, but our conviction that they can develop it by being forced, coerced, bribed, and threatened is simply wrong. And we're busy raising consecutive generations of people who have to tumble through adult life on a constant painful roller-coaster of building, breaking, fighting, and rebuilding self-control. 

 

Really? Am I out to lunch? No, I'm not. Study after study (after study after study) shows that punishment (call it "imposed negative consequences" if you like) leads not to better behaviour in the long term, and often to a lack of responsibility for one's actions. "We showed that acting under coercion deeply modifies the sense of being responsible for outcomes of one’s actions. It also attenuates the neural processing of outcomes. Both results can be interpreted as a cognitive operation of “distancing,” or reducing the linkage between one’s own decision-making, action, and outcome." (*Caspar, Christensen, Cleeremans, Haggard.)

 

To put that in tangible terms for us parents and educators of kids, teens, and young adults, the more we make the rules and enforce them, the more our kids learn to follow blindly, without taking real, thought-out responsibility for their choices and actions. Obviously, that's not what we want. But in the moment it's so hard to change the behaviour our whole culture has lived with for so long, that we were generally raised with ourselves, and that produces the behavioural results we want, instantly. If I really need my kid to get the chores done, I can just bribe him with extra TV time, and he does the job! If I really need him to get his homework done; to obey my rules, etc. etc. I can threaten to take away his devices or even just hint at the threat of my pending anger and he'll obey, right? 

Yeah. I've been down that road--as a kid and as a parent. And I did not like the place it led to, which in the short term was generally discord or all-out rebellion, and in the long term was apathy. 

 

I could write another few thousand words about the harm done to our psyches and our culture at large by imposed "discipline" getting in the way of self-discipline. But none of us has to look further than our own memories and parenting experiences (or just school, policing, or public space experiences) to find examples of times we or our kids surrendered agency to just follow blindly, and might have done better if we'd retained our agency. I want this article to be about solutions, so here goes. This is pretty much a list of things I keep in mind, regarding how my children will develop self-discipline. I'm not a psychologist; not any kind of "expert", but I'm a parent and educator who was once a child, and has put a great deal of thought, research, and practice into this topic. These are the things I think about, especially in my own family, and I encourage anyone to explore these ideas for themselves and their families.

Respect
I think one of the deepest, most foundational concepts that leads to self-regulation, self-discipline, independent thinking, and a sense of self-worth is respect. As parents, we often demand respect, but respect is mutual. It's built into the word: re:spect. Looking back at. It goes two ways. So how are we respecting our children? How are we seeing them looking at us, and looking back at them with open hearts and minds?

 

Respect is so basic that the exchange of it begins when our kids are infants. Instead of respecting their needs for sleep, food and connection, we often try to coerce their needs into our schedule. I mean, it's obviously better for our own physical and emotional health, and that of the rest of the family, but is it better for them? It means that in the first days of their lives, they have already lost determination of meeting their most basic needs. And it continues from there: We want to talk to them when we have time; we want them to learn the things that we think they should learn at the times we think they should learn them, and we often don't see the value of their play. In fact, we use the word "play" to devalue the work they are doing to grow.

How can we change this? Obviously, in a world that still expects children to conform and be unobtrusive, it's nearly impossible. But our homes are (hopefully) our domains, so that's where we can start. It begins with attachment parenting practices: listening and learning from our children, and reminding ourselves every single day that their needs are genuine, and should be respected. Even when we don't see the value in what our children are doing (or we don't understand why they're hungry again, or why they need more time than we have to give), this concept is paramount. 

When we respect our kids' needs, even if we don't understand them, we give our kids the idea that their needs matter, and that they are responsible for communicating them (and later, for meeting them). If my little one says he needs to pee, and I take him a dozen times but he never pees, it doesn't mean he didn't need to pee--it may just be that he's learning how to perceive his bodily needs; how to determine the proper time to go to the toilet, and how to regulate his body and needs. It may take him months of false-attempts to get it right, and the more we interfere, the longer he'll take to truly know his body and his need to use the toilet. Similarly, if we hold back dessert, or use it as a bribe to get our kids to eat vegetables, we've set up an artificial consequence that interferes with our kids' own bodily determination and regulation. Sometimes we fail to recognize that children are making choices because of experiences we aren't aware of. A University of Granada study suggests "that the bitter taste of calcium, present in vegetables such as spinach, collard greens, cabbage, onions, chard or broccoli, can be a factor negatively influencing children's consumption of vegetables." (**Dominguez, University of Grenada.) So all that time we called them "picky eaters", our kids were just tasting something we had learned to ignore.

 

Part of respect is consent. Of course we all want to normalize asking for and giving consent, but I personally have sometimes forgotten that this normalization begins with me. So I've created psychological reminders for myself to, for example, ask my kids' permission before posting anecdotes or photos of them. They don't always give it, and that's mine to deal with, not theirs. Another challenge for me is accepting their non-consent and not nagging or trying to convince them. I'm working on it. This article is published with my son's consent.

 

How is respect (or, as I've described, re:seeing our children's needs) related to discipline? Much of the disciplinary action taken against children is in an effort to force them to conform. Maybe, instead of expecting them to conform to our needs, we need to conform to theirs. Or, at least, recognize and provide for them.

 

Honesty/Trust

How can our children safely state their needs to us if they risk punishment for doing so? Most of us probably lost our kids' trust a very long time before we even considered trusting them. And how are we earning their trust? Obviously, an absence of punitive actions in their lives would provide that safe place for them, as would a community of adults who are open and honest, engendering trust and trustworthy behaviour in the whole family. Like respect, trust is mutual.

"Our goals, aspirations and outcomes are dependent on the collaborative effort of those around us. In environments with higher trust levels people are more willing to take the risks necessary for truly significant advances."  ~Trust Unlimited

Kids know when we're dishonest; when we're uncomfortable sharing, and they learn to mediate their own behaviour both to avoid danger, and to mimic ours. They learn to stop asking questions when they can't trust the answers they're receiving. They learn to lie when honesty is met with disapproval or even anger. They learn not to trust themselves, when we don't trust them. I envision a future (and I know plenty of families who are living this reality already) where children are heard, respected, and trusted automatically, from the moment they're born. The children of these families are honest and take great responsibility for their own actions. Because when we gave them our trust, they understood that we trusted them to be responsible, and they rose to the challenge.

 

Agency and Empowerment

Humans of every age are really good at rising to challenges. It makes us feel fabulous to succeed, so we work for it with abandon, when given the opportunity. The unschooling movement has shown that children who are given agency with their own education become empowered, determined, and responsible young adults. Universities are welcoming them with open arms--even without highschool displomas--because self-motivated people like that are a benefit to them. What happens when we empower our kids emotionally, in the same way?

My son is twenty, now, and I asked him to talk a bit about self-discipline--for this article, but also because I'm curious how my attempts at parenting towards agency and empowerment have worked out for him, in this regard. His response was, "In some ways I have good self-discipline, and I think I'm getting better at figuring out what methods work. I often struggle with keeping good habits and getting rid of bad ones, and over time I've found that willpower alone doesn't usually work, and leaves me feeling defeated when nothing changes. Instead I now prefer to find ways to make the goals I want to achieve easier." (Taliesin)

 

Life is never easy. Self-discipline, empowerment, lifestyle, personal values, and questions of identity are always going to be a complex journey for each of us, but I'm happy my son is able to feel in charge of his journey, as well as able to articulate and share it.

Attachment

The reason my son is willing to share his thoughts here is that our relationship is built on attachment. Yes, it goes without saying that there's also his hard-won confidence, our mutual trust and respect, and his maturity. But it's our attachment that laid the foundation for all of this, and my admittedly frequent efforts to salvage our attachment when my parenting choices and personal mistakes broke it. 

 

I broke our attachment often. In times of weakness I criticized, yelled at, and generally set a terrible example for my kids. I even purposely tried to Ferberize him as a baby, when I hadn't yet understood his nightly agony for what it was and just wanted to get some sleep (I sobbed at his bedroom door until I gave up, thankfully before he did). I bribed him to learn to use the toilet as a toddler, and when he was older I took away his computer. None of it served my purposes, and every single time I had to rebuild our attachment. Any punitive measure breaks the trust and attachment between adult and child, and further impedes the child's ability to grow and self-regulate. Here's a description of how that happens, specifically with time-outs:

"In most cases, the primary experience a time-out offers a child is isolation. Even when presented in a patient and loving manner, time-outs teach them that when they make a mistake, or when they are having a hard time, they will be forced to be by themselves—a lesson that is often experienced, particularly by young children, as rejection. Further, it communicates to kids, “I’m only interested in being with you and being there for you when you’ve got it all together.” The problem is, children have a profound need for connection. Decades of research in attachment demonstrate that particularly in times of distress, we need to be near and be soothed by the people who care for us." 

 

"When children concentrate on their horrible luck to have such a mean, unfair mom or dad, they miss out on an opportunity to build insight, empathy, and problem-solving skills. Putting them in time-out deprives them of an opportunity to build skills that other types of discipline could focus on."  (***Siegel and Payne Bryson)

We know it's essential for our kids to experience attachment, compassion, and opportunities for growth. It's essential that we don't isolate or otherwise punish them. So how can we lead? How can we ensure they don't make harmful choices? It's terrifying to just let go of the reins and have faith in a child who is only just beginning life's journey! It's terrifying to imagine that just my undying love will be enough. But it has to be. And some consideration of the following...

Modelling

I haven't been a great model for my kids in many ways, but it has not escaped me how important this is. My first boyfriend's mother once told me, as she butted out her cigarette at the dining room table, "I always tell my kids to do what I say, not what I do". I was sixteen at the time, and remember thinking that was a great thing to say, for a mother who couldn't stop smoking herself, but hoped her kids wouldn't follow suit. 

 

A few decades later I still hold a special place in my heart for that woman who welcomed me into her home and heart and life so generously. And it occurs to me that I, at least, did learn quite a bit from her modelling. I have never smoked, but she was one of the adults who spoke to me with respect and honesty, and I not only admired that, but have emulated it without even thinking. In that moment of saying something that utterly goes against conventional wisdom (there are plenty of studies showing that kids are in fact very likely to carry the same traits, habits, and viewpoints as their parents, regardless of attempted countermeasures). My boyfriend's mother was just being herself: open, honest, caring, hopeful, and determined. And I followed. It isn't always the things we think we're modelling that we pass on. Thank you, Sherrie.

 

Patience/Acceptance

But sometimes we do see ourselves passing on undesired habits to our children. Then, I think, it's time for patience and compassion with ourselves; acceptance that we can't climb every mountain at once. Neither can our kids. Sometimes we make change so easily; sometimes it takes us generations, and sometimes we take many steps backwards along the way. We really don't get further by beating ourselves up over our failures, so what's the point? Just like imposed punishment (call it external discipline), guilt over our failures is more likely to be a stumbling point than an inspiration to grow. We can be gentle with ourselves, remind ourselves that this is where we are in our journey, and empower ourselves to carry on forward.

Similarly, we can empower our children, not only by having patience with them and accepting that their journey may not be what we expected, but by modelling patience with ourselves. I'm really terrible at this. I learned in school that failure is not acceptable, and I learned from many adults' modelling to feel sorry. But as a parent I discovered how harmful my guilt and shame is to my children, and the last thing I want is for them to live under the burden of shame that I bear. So this is something I'm adamantly trying to change. It's probably the hardest change I've made in all my life. Sometimes it looks like me creeping out of my room after running away, and forcing my mouth to say "I shouldn't have run away". Sometimes it's simply a matter of gently stating my needs, before denying them becomes a problem. This is how I'm trying to develop self-acceptance, but it's deeply rooted in the kind of honesty that is essential for my kids' empowerment.

Communication

Lastly, in my quest to raise empowered kids (they're really adults, now), I try to remind myself to check in on our communication. I've done a lot of thinking on this subject, since it comes up a lot as a stumbling point in our family. (I suspect we're not unusual in this regard!) And recently I've had a real enlightenment from getting to know our dog. Yep! 

 

So our daughter adopted Clara a couple of years ago, and soon began telling us about dog communication buttons. Soon enough, she had some buttons, and was training the dog to use them to speak to us. After about six months, Clara can now tell us about her bodily needs (pee, poo, outside, etc.), can ask specific people for cuddles, toys, or outside time, and has even put together a few complex communications. After panicking when thunder struck and she was in the yard, Clara ran in, and looked around frantically, before pressing "Blackberry" (our cat's name) and "Something Outside" (her button for an unknown worrisome thing outside). Sure enough, Blackberry was sitting outside the door, and after I let her in to safety from the storm, Clara settled. Her compassionate need to protect her friend had been met, thanks to her ability to tell me about it.

 

This experience with Clara has of course led me to thinking about all the previous pets in my life, and how much I probably misunderstood them; how often their needs likely went unmet, and ultimately to the power-imbalance that exists between owners and pets. And children. I remember thinking something like this as our kids learned baby sign language, and I wondered how many kids can't communicate their needs at that early age. Indeed, how many humans in general live our whole lives without clear and open, honest communication? And how many times are our basic needs unmet because we aren't communicating? 

 

Our kids need to be heard. They need to know they're heard, by having their communications reflected back to them (respected). And they need freedom to develop, learn, and change on their own terms, so that they can be empowered to keep on growing. In fact, those of us raised without this empowerment can learn and gain so much by just letting them lead.

~~~

*Caspar EA, Christensen JF, Cleeremans A, Haggard P.  "Coercion Changes the Sense of Agency in the Human Brain." Curr Biol. 2016 Mar 7;26(5):585-92. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.12.067. Epub 2016 Feb 18. PMID: 26898470; PMCID: PMC4791480. 

 

**Dominguez PR. University of Granada. "Children eat more vegetables when allowed to choose, Spanish study finds." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 2 June 2011.

 

***Siegel DJ, Payne Bryson T.  "No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind."  Courtesy Random House  2014, September 23

Do You Really Want Your Kid to Be an Artist?

Me at 7, trying to be an artist.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an artist. Or a botanist, or a hair-dresser. My parents and grandparents gave me wonderful art supplies, and my father even made me a palette with a hole in it for my thumb, and positioned the kitchen stool in front of the wall of our trailer for me to use as a painting stool. That’s me in the photo, in the early nineteen-eighties, feeling wonderful and accomplished, but with absolutely no idea of what it meant to “be an artist”.

So What, Exactly, Is an Artist?

I'm an artist, now. Twenty-five years and two kids after I got my degree in visual arts, my career is built on helping people reach beyond societal expectations to un-silence themselves, and connect genuinely with the world we inhabit. I do paint, and I do have gallery exhibitions, but I also tromp in the forests, use materials I never imagined would one day be called “materials”, and make art I never imagined would be called “art.” The focus of my work is to connect people with our own deeply-held stories; as an explorative learning consultant I also encourage parents and teachers to do the same with their children. It turns out art was just a vehicle for something more important to me. And I’m still an artist.

The stereotype of the famous artist making masterpieces in his (he's almost always male, white and powerful) studio has almost nothing to do with a successful art career. I wish somebody had explained this to me when I was a kid. Picasso was an abusive, deceitful creep, and we don't have to appreciate his work to be artists. There’s SO much more wonderfulness in being an artist than I had imagined! So much more diversity!

Artists are responsible for not only the beauty we see in our human-made world, but also for the connection we make with neighbours, for the realizations we make about our own lives and feelings when we watch movies, listen to music, or read books. Artists determine how easy it is to use the devices we buy. Through media, artists determine which devices and foods and colours will be more popular. They understand the influence of shapes, colours, sound, movement and texture on our emotions, and... like it or not, our emotions govern much of what we do. Artists are powerful. A “career in the arts” is a massively open-ended term, but also, having a grounding in artistic practice and theory means a deeper foundation or influence in any career we choose. Moreover, having the ability to express ourselves is an important foundation of meaningful connection.

I like to imagine a world full of people who were encouraged in this way. How happy, satisfied, and valuable could we all be? How would our chosen paths be enhanced by a facility with self-expression and material, sound, or movement exploration? Do you really want your kid to be an artist? And if so, how can you support them?

What NOT to do: Unsolicited "Help"

It's incredibly easy to break kids' confidence in art (or anything) and less easy to build it. As with so much in life, the first thing we can do to "help" our kids succeed is to get out of their way. It's not easy, especially when we're watching them struggle with something we know there's an easy solution for. But we zip our mouths, find something else to occupy our attention, and trust that they'll get where they need to go. And never, ever critique.

Criticism is more likely to break our confidence than to teach us something, and a shattered confidence is a massive barrier to success. My daughter is a writer, and was recently working on her second novel. I edited her first novel for her, judiciously reporting back on only glaring typos and missing punctuation. It was an amazing realistic fiction coming-of-age story, written from the bold heart of a young girl whose grandfather had recently died. I love it so much I heartily recommend it to readers of all ages. Her next novel, though, was a departure from the world she knew and understood so well, and required a steep learning curve. It was an epic fantasy, full of people from different cultures and a massively complex magical world... all of which she dutifully researched and developed before writing. But then she was challenged by trying to fit this enormous complexity into a single story. And when it came time for me to edit her book, I didn't hold back with the criticisms and suggestions. Some chapters were confusing, some events seemed out of place, and mostly I was confused by the timeline. Sure, she was only fourteen, but I just knew she was capable, so I critiqued! Despite my attempts at being gentle with my criticism, it all seemed insurmountable to her, and after a few attempts at editing, she abandoned the book. To her credit, she's keeping an open mind about the possibility of writing it in the future, but unfortunately I feel I threw a hammer at a beautiful glass sculpture she was creating, that actually she just needed more time with, alone. Without my critiquing.

So that's how not to build confidence. Just think of all the ways we're doing that, in every part of our kids' lives, and even our own. So many of us have an overachieving inner critic. And a culturally-supported fear that that critic is what's keeping us on the straight-and-narrow. But you know what? It's not. What would happen if we just didn't correct our kids? Well I have some experience with that, now, both in teaching and parenting. It's ridiculously hard to shut up my inner critic sometimes, but when I do, the kids thrive.

My daughter is truly an excellent writer--so much so, that in her frantic enthusiasm she charges ahead, forgetting to put periods at the ends of sentences, capitals on names, or sometimes misspelling words. She edits herself, and (as we all are prone to doing) sees right through her mistakes to read what she intended to write. What if she asks me to edit and I just ignore those mistakes? I've experimented with that. Sometimes she looks over her work later and discovers her mistakes. Sometimes she puts it aside for a few months, grows and learns, and comes back to it to realize she would now write it differently. Sometimes, even, she submits or publishes something with mistakes. And you know what? That's just fine! I frequently go back to my own work from years earlier, and see how much I've learned and grown since my thirties--and yet my work was appreciated then, as well. Have you any idea how many typos I still find in my writing? Tons. I'm especially accomplished at missing words and totally redundant examples. Sometimes I don't even bother to correct them. Because they're part of my humanity. Our kids deserve that space to be human, too.

Honouring Growth

Rhiannon, age 5, experimenting with paints.

As a visual artist, I love to look back and see all my mistakes. I look at portraits I painted years ago, and wonder why I did them the way I did; sometimes I also notice things I thought were problems at the time, that now inform new directions in my work. Growth is where it's at, people! Otherwise what are we living for? In some deep place, children know this, as from the moment they're born they challenge themselves to grow by exploring different tastes, movements, and expressions.

Children, like my daughter in the photo, above, want to represent their world. But it isn't always as we might expect! As parents, we have a choice about whether to show our children how to draw things the way we think it should be done, or to allow them to discover their own ways, through experimentation. My son was once drawing a whole page full of lines, and I asked him what he was drawing (something I've since learned not to do), and he told me it was a drum. I was totally perplexed, and asked him where the parts of the drum were. This was a boy who had no problem drawing a circle--why would he choose to represent a drum with a whole lot of unconnected lines? "It's the sound of the drum." He said. Boom.

He didn't need my assumptions. He needed my appreciation, and the freedom to keep exploring. As long as we respond to our kids' experiments with curiosity and loving encouragement, they'll continue to know that where they are on their journey of growth is perfect. And that will be the impetus they need to keep growing with enthusiasm. I have no idea how my son's drawings of sound influenced his life, but considering he now is employed as a visual artist and makes music to accompany his personal visual projects, I'm relieved I didn't get in the way of that particular growth pattern by showing him "how to draw a drum."

Asking Helpful Questions

I realized during my children's earliest years that questions like "what are you drawing?" are extremely limiting. In that question I have determined that my child must be trying to represent a specific thing, and the assumption is usually that it's a visual representation of something we know. But what if it's not? What if it's our children's experimentation with colours, shapes or lines? Or sound, as in the drum example? That kind of experimentation--without intent to satisfy outside demands--is essential for learning to use materials. Professional artists actually bill for material experimentation; it's called "research". We even sometimes mount gallery exhibitions composed entirely of experimental output--often to great acclaim. So why would I limit the possibilities of my own child's artistic output?

But we want to ask questions! We know it's important to engage and encourage! So how can we ask questions that promote growth-dialogue about art (or anything), without limiting our children's growth or expression?

Think about the words in the question "What are you drawing?" The word 'what' carries the assumption they're trying to represent an object. The word 'drawing' means we assume they're focused on the output of the material in their hands, as opposed to the feeling, taste, smell, or movement of it. How are these assumptions limiting the range of acceptable answers?

Drawing by Taliesin, age 3.

Maybe we have a kid who is happy to contradict us, and says, "I'm not drawing anything. I'm dancing the pen," or, as in my son’s drawing, above, “Nothing. I didn’t tell you.” (I learned a lot about parenting from that bold rejection.) But more likely, our kid wants to please us; to learn from our example, and will find a suitable answer, like, "some lines," or as my daughter used to do, look at a bunch of lines she was experimenting with and come up with a wild explanation like, "it's a dog on a house with the family having dinner." It's tragically very common that kids learn to minimize themselves to match what they perceive coming from adults. I've seen plenty of kids who were making successful attempts at depicting what might have been people or animals declare that they were “just scribbling.” Why? Because maybe they feared hearing our criticisms, or maybe we've previously defined their drawings of animals as 'scribbling', or maybe, because their own inner critic is already developed enough to silence their voice.

Adults are notoriously bad at asking kids questions, and kids generally have rote answers ready to respond to each of them: How old are you? How is school? What are you making? What is your favourite colour/subject/sport/etc.? How are we so uninspired?! These questions aren't about engaging with kids or developing rapport; they're expected. What if, instead of asking what they're drawing, we invite them to tell about what they're doing? This is an open invitation to consider what they're doing and talk about it. It's up to us to be open to hearing their response, no matter how long, unexpected, or confusing it may be. Not all questions will be helpful for all kids in all situations, but through practice we can become better at asking good questions. Here's a list of interesting open-ended questions to use in engaging kids to talk about their art:

• Interesting! Can you tell me about this?
• Does this have a story or feeling?
• How do you feel about what you're doing?
• Show me how you like to use [material]...
• What do you think about the materials you're using?
• Are there any other materials you'd like to use?

Materials

Ah how I love shopping for materials!! And hoarding them!! Don't we all?! How much of our parenting waste is comprised of once-used adorable kits that were soon replaced by something newer and more exciting? I won't go on at length about this, because I've previously written a whole article about Materials for Open-Ended Art Exploration. But suffice it to say that well-chosen art materials are the foundation of good artistic experience. And I don't mean the expensive stuff. I mean well-chosen. Materials can be anything from kitchen supplies to mud and sticks outside, to a mish-mash of mark-making, gluing, cutting and melting tools. The important feature of all of these things is that they do not come with instructions or intended uses. How we present and use materials is much more important than what they are.

Modelling

From the moment they were born, and possibly earlier, our kids have looked to us to lead them. The important thing to remember about modelling to our children is that it's happening all the time; not just when we do it intentionally. Our kids see our hesitation and fear with art as much as they see our enthusiasm. They see us avoid trying new things, and they see us when we courageously do them, and when we have small successes and failures. They emulate not only our actions but also the way we emotionally deal with these things.

With this in mind, the absolute best thing we can do for our children is to use any and all materials available to us to explore creatively, for our own happiness. That last bit is important. Kids can smell a fraud from a mile away, so we have to be creative in the way that we want to be. Otherwise we're just teaching our kids to put on a show for someone else's benefit, and that's nothing about authenticity.

And we should stretch ourselves. If we're accustomed to buying craft kits and following the instructions, we should absolutely try to break that habit (more on why in the materials article, above) and try experimenting with new materials. We can also stretch our definition of art-making. Try experimental baking! Try sewing or crocheting! Try putting on your favourite music, getting dressed up in fancy dress or costumes and dancing your heart out! Try painting your whole self and rolling around on an old sheet, outside. In the rain! It doesn't matter what or how you engage in art, just as long as you do it. And if your output isn't what you expect? Even better. Keep experimenting. You're modelling growth to your children.

Living a life full of joyful exploration and learning, ourselves, is the best way we can teach our children.
 

Nurturing Important Skills

Me, age 4, being an artist.

We’re culturally trained to associate specific skills and attributes with art: dancers should be thin and flexible, visual artists should be able to draw realistic depictions with technical skills like shading, perspective, and colour theory; musicians should first learn to read music and do scales. Unless we’re born talented, of course.

Oh hell, I hate the word ‘talent’! It's such a harmful concept. I wasn't born talented; I developed some skills in accurate rendering of my observations by having a keen interest in observing how things are put together; how the light plays on them, and being given room to experiment with materials throughout my life. It was easy for me because I loved it, just like my daughter loves telling stories, so writing is easy for her to learn. We develop the skills we need when we realize we need them, and as long as we're not discouraged from exploring them.

As parents and teachers, we need to help build foundational skills for life, and trust that those material skills will come when needed. As an artist, I owe a huge amount of my career satisfaction to some less-concrete skills and passions:

• seeing the big picture in life, art, etc.
• a keen interest in social phenomena
• a passion for exploration and discovery

We really can't know what skills will be foundational for each of the unique kids we work with. Neither can we know the cultural landscape our kids will grow into, nor what careers will be common, when they’re grown. Who knew, when I was in art school twenty-five years ago that people would be making virtual and even invisible art to sell online, one day? Who knew I’d raise a son who gets paid to make thousands of geographically plausible planet renderings by using procedural generation techniques? His art process looks like a bunch of visual programming. I could never have predicted this, never mind taught him these skills. So when trying to support kids I parent and teach, I try to encourage growth of all sorts of skills. Life is not divided by subject. Careers are not determined by skill-acquisition. It's all interconnected. The more we learn, the more we can learn.

So Do You? Really?

Yes. I guess I really do want my kids to be artists--however that looks for them, and however it looks in the future we can only dream of. I want them to explore all the materials and develop all the skills I can’t even fathom right now. I want them to change the definition of the word “artist” to mean new and wonderful things, and I want them to keep on growing as the world grows, around them.

Parenting and Gardening with Climate Change: The Aesthetic of Allowing Diversity

This morning we put the tomato and pepper seedlings out on the porch again. They've been waiting for the ground to warm up enough to be transplanted, for weeks. It was nearly freezing last night, just above ground, in early May. And now weather forecasters are predicting that La Niña might stick around all summer. Bad news for the Atlantic hurricane season, great news for our Pacific fire season, and... sad prospects for my warmer-weather food crops. Climate change is one thing for sure: unpredictable. And along with the weather, our food, finances, and children's futures are all unpredictable, too.

Diversity in the Garden
Our strategy for dealing with this unpredictability has been to become more independent. I guess psychologically it's about keeping control of our own actions, when so much else is now reeling out of control. But practically speaking, it's also very helpful: The more we learn about the way we and our needs work, the more capable we are of supporting ourselves, of creatively solving problems that arise, and of adapting to our rapidly-changing world. So we're growing many of our own foods now, unschooling our kids, and diversifying our own skillsets. Put simply, we're diversifying how we live, just like financial investors diversify assets. Thrivent says "the idea is to avoid putting all of your eggs in one basket—because something bad could happen to that basket."  We don't have any financial investments, but the same strategy applies to living, eating, educating ourselves, and planning our future, in general. So we grow warm weather crops, cool weather crops, fruit trees of various types, summer crops and winter crops, and root, leaf, flower and fruit crops. It looks like this year we'll have a lot of potatoes, celery, spinach, kale, broccoli and cauliflower... and apples, if the bees do well, which is still in question.

There are a lot of questions, these days. Among them, how to save seeds. I received a newsletter from our local seed supplier recently, in which he explained the importance of diversity in seed-saving: 

        "We’ve all experienced accelerated climate change and it’s important to prepare for more of the same if we are to have successful harvests. The best strategy can be summed up in one word: Diversify!
        "We can be hit by extreme cold, heat, wind or rain at anytime during the growing season. If we can, we should not trust all our seeds to one sowing. We should stagger and expand our plantings as well as planting our crops in both shade and sun. We can also think about working with friends and neighbours to mutually maximize our locations."
                            ~ Dan Jason, Saltspring Seeds

See that? This is a seed supplier encouraging his customers to grow and save our own seeds, to share with neighbours, and basically to evolve away from supporting his seed-growing business. Why? Because obviously, he and his business will do better if we all do. He's diversifying his own network of seed-growers and customers, as well as his output. He also wrote a small book about seed saving, and frequently writes blogs, articles, newsletters and other things about how to grow plants and seeds in these changeable times. A greedier businessperson might not encourage seed-saving, when they can make more money upfront if their customers remain ignorant about this practice. Dan Jason is looking at our mutual future, and diversifying all of our prospects, in community. There will always be a place for that.

Diversity in Life and Education
Which brings me to the human side of this picture: How do we diversify our own human community; our own skill-sets, to ensure our adaptability as the world changes around us? I threw out the word unschooling back there, like it was nothing, and for our family it really is nothing these days, but I know it's rather out-of-left-field for some people. Here's what I'm going on about: Unschooling is the practice of allowing our kids (and ourselves) to explore any and all of their interests, on their own time, in their own ways, and just seeing what comes out of it all! Without going too far into our own experiences (read more about our unschooled young adult children at our blog, if you like), our family is now reassured that unschooling was an excellent choice for our kids' future. After many years of determining and following their own interests, they have become agile thinkers, able to check in with their own needs, fulfill those needs successfully, and change course when the need arises. What more can one ask for, in a future where no career choice is guaranteed, nor even the ground we stand upon?

But that's our kids--what about us? We're a couple of middle-aged adults, one dependent on a satisfactory job that doesn't meet our evolving ethical standards, and the other now disabled by long-covid. Can we still unschool? The answer is yes, and we've been doing it with our kids these past many years. Our skill-sets have grown as our needs changed, and we find ourselves becoming reasonably adept at growing food, raising and processing chickens, building needed devices, implements and home-improvements, and also learning to live together, twenty-four-seven, peacefully. We're also becoming very good at living more simply, and finding joy in a life far less cluttered by activities and must-haves than it once was. Life is always about unending personal growth--it's just that climate change and related social change have caused us to appreciate that more.

The Aesthetic of Natural Diversity
What I sometimes struggle to appreciate is the absolute chaos of natural diversity. I mean when you just let things grow however they're going to. It's a mess. Truly. My garden, my kids' educational careers, my own career and even my living room is just truly an absolute mess. But I've learned to see its beauty.

See this lovely mess of a garden bed? We had an open garden here a week ago, and I heard a few people comment on the number of "weeds" we have. And they're not wrong! But the tone of their comments was. Now that I am coming to understand the importance of diversity in my regenerative garden, this picture is pure joy, to me! 

one of the diverse salad-green beds in our garden

What you're looking at here is a few indoor-started heads of lettuce, now ravaged by our salad-needs, along with some dark green kale on the right, flowering out as it does every spring and fall. On the left there's a tiny pink flower--that's a Robert Geranium, considered a weed by most people, but it's antiviral and edible, so I put it in salads and smoothies. Along with this there is a whole plethora of edible asters: dandelions, wild lettuces (and some seeded from our previous years' crops), lambs' quarters, and others. There are teeny tiny bittercress plants everywhere, their leaves and tiny white flowers delicious in salads and sandwiches. There's some chickweed coming up, which will brighten my summer smoothies and delight our chickens, and in the woodchip-covered pathway at my feet, there's a lively mat of winecap mycelium, that pushes up big tasty mushrooms at totally unpredictable times. This garden feeds us. And when I see the diversity of flavours and promise, it's absolutely gorgeous to me.

Parenting can be like that, too. When my kids were young, I used to feel irritated by the drifts of toys, costumes, and craft materials that seemed to cover everything. But I also saw how it mirrored the creative mess of my own art studio, and how my kids dug in their mess, explored and improvised, and eventually also desired to tidy it themselves. Now they're older, their social lives are also somewhat of a primordial stew. I look at my own young-adult memories and how different my social life is now than what I thought I was building, at twenty. I have a few of the same friends, but our interests and priorities have changed many times. My children, of course, are no different, even though right now it's hard for them to imagine how life will change them. Their activities are an eclectic chaos of experimental successes and left-behinds. At twenty, our son is paid as a 3D modeller, but also practices music, concept design, drawing, and is a life-long physics and engineering enthusiast. Our seventeen-year-old daughter runs programs for kids, organizes an alternative education festival, publishes a magazine by and for kids, and has recently also begun a side-career as a dog-trainer. Three or four years ago I could not have predicted many of these directions, but our kids found them and followed them with enthusiasm, and that has set them up for success in our unpredictable world. They're accustomed to wrangling interests and commitments in multiple different directions. They're accustomed to changing course when needs demand it. Our kids' comfort and ease with this chaotic, changeable lifestyle is the gift that unschooling gave them. As our social climate becomes more chaotic, they will fit right in.

The Struggle of Allowing
Then there's the concept of allowing. I'm not really as comfortable with all this as I make it sound. Excited by the prospects; reassured by preliminary observations--yes! But I fight change like the devil, and I am not good at just going with the flow. I'm a child of the eighties. I thought I would pick a career and stick to it forever; have kids who went to school, grew up through birthday parties and grocery shopping and family holidays, and I'd always live a typical low-to-middle-class family life. I also thought Caesar salad would always be easy to buy. Now lettuce is too expensive, eggs for the dressing are even more expensive, chickens are dying by the hundreds of thousands in their barns from flooding and bird flu, and I'm allergic to croutons. Damn. I had to allow my palate to change with the times. 

Sometimes allowing my kids to make choices I don't understand or necessarily agree with feels like gluing my back to the wall; peeling my eyes from the view and willing my voice to fall back into my throat. I pound down my own fears to let my kids thrive or fall flat on their faces. It's like letting the weeds and lettuce seedlings stay under the dominating squash leaves, knowing they'll just die there, but that their failed lives will feed the squash. And then discovering that one of them grew and fed my family, anyway. Allowing is when I know for sure I could make things better in the short term if I just take control, but I also know that I can't see all the variables, so any control I think I have is just a sham, anyway. As our world becomes ever less predictable, I can't predict how my controlling actions will play out in my garden, my life, my kids' education, or even this article. So I force myself to quit trying.

Luckily I've diversified my needs and the seeds I plant, and am learning to cooperate with the changing climate.

We Like Field Mice in January: Returning to a Healthy Seasonal Rhythm

If you watch a meadow for a year, at least in places with our temperate climate, there are two down-times: When it's too cold, and when it's too hot. Those are vital down-times that we use to prepare and rest up for the up-times of spring and autumn.

Spring is, of course, vibrantly busy with new growth. Everything seems alive; everything is green, or flowered or bustling! It's like a great shout! for the sun and the great moving sky! Summer begins with the busy growth of berries, and the setting of seeds. Mammals, insects, birds and fish all rejoice in the excitement, fill their bellies with plants and each other, raise their babies, and build their homes and communities. But by the end of summer, the grasses have bent under the scorching sun; many of the animals shelter under them from the overbearing heat. Seeds dry and cure in the hot, persistent drought. Everything waits. Even the wind. It's just way too hot. What a huge relief when autumn comes to the meadow! The wind picks up, leaves and nuts and seeds fall to the ground and everybody gets busy packing in for winter; lining burrows and fattening up. Leaves of evergreens that folded up to protect themselves in the summer heat are now open again, washing and renewing themselves in the autumn rain. The rain and wind goes on for so long that by winter, grasses have died back, their old stalks brown and limp under the flood or snow. Rodents and insects still live, making and tending their pathways under the flattened grass of the meadow, and hungry prey birds sit still, hoping to catch one out of its shelter. Hungry. Everything is hungry. Trees and shrubs around the edges of the meadow stand naked without their leaves, just bending in the wind, cracking as their bodies swell with ice, and waiting. For spring. 

When my kids were young, our life was like the meadow. We, like field mice under grasses, nested in our house, in winter. We traipsed out in the meadow, sure, hungry like those field mice for a little adventure, but then we left our wet clothes at the door, and cocooned. Inside, we built cardboard box forts, did drawing and crafts by the fire, baked and sang and nestled in blankets with books. They call this hygge, now. Somehow in the post-Christmas lull, and without the demands of school and work (I was an intentionally stay-at-home-mom and unschooling my kids all year), we had freedom to just be. But it wasn't a pointless existence. In that quiet winter, like grasses, we were putting our roots down, deep, and by early spring we were ready to thrive.

Spring is when the whole world wakes up. And HOLY we partied!!! Everybody, like cherry blossoms, is out celebrating right through spring and into early summer. Everything has exclamation marks!!! For kids there are field-trips aplenty. There are festivals and conferences. Everybody is dancing their life out in the sunshine and flaunting the choices we made. This is when we were proudest to live our chosen lives.

As summer dragged on, though, the heat became oppressive, and we hid indoors, or in the cool shelter of our beloved forest. Drought meant even our well was close to dry, and we had to be careful about how much we used. No sprinklers; no water balloons. It was even too hot to go to the beach during the day, so we went there in the dark evenings, singing at campfires by the ocean with friends, watching the sun set again and again on the season of growth, as the grasses dried and we waited, again. We prepared our bodies for the autumn.

And there it was. Just like leaves fell in the meadow, summer friends went off to school, and we, like field mice, made our burrows under the grass. We prepared for winter by going over our goals, enrolling kids in programs, taking stock of our finances and plans for the coming year, and busying ourselves with all the considerations of raising children. My mother used to buy me a new outfit along with my school supplies, each year, and it felt SO GOOD. As an unschooling parent, how could I resist the displays of just-so school supplies, happy little felt pen packs and blank books just waiting for the glorious productions of the year ahead?! My kids got them too! More exclamation marks, because the giddy anticipation of this time of year is just infectious!!! Field mice are running with abandon along their grass paths, shoving their burrows full of treats for the coming winter!!!

Winter, again. December is a great distraction of bright-lights and colourful wildness, but then it's over and, again, here we are in the January lull. My family spent a few of our kids' teen years in schools of various forms. We abandoned much of our winter downtime for the routine of classes and general graduation preparedness. But when covid hit in 2020, we took it as an opportunity to drop all that, and returned to unschooling. It's very different, now that my kids are almost grown, one graduated and the other with no intention of graduating; both working their way to careers. But because of the increasing uncertainty in the world, we decided to grow our own food. Or at least, as much as we can, given the small bit of land that we rent. 

In the past year and a half we have begun keeping chickens for eggs, meat, and garden-maintenance (they eat bugs and till some of the soil), and we're growing about half the vegetables we consume each year (and none of the grain), through regenerative farming practices. It's certainly not full-fledged farming, but it has brought us closer to feeding ourselves, and also to the healthy seasonal rhythm we used to know, when the kids were young. Right now, in January, last year's veggie stalks are poking half-rotten from the melting snow. Seeds fallen last autumn are lying in wait--some in my seed box, and some in the ground. Chickens keep a low-key routine of scratching for bugs under the rotting leaves, and are beginning to discover (and eat) the first spring shoots. Spring is just around the corner and, like all the plants in the meadow, we've been putting down our roots for a strong spring start. Like field mice, we're watching for new shoots.

Regenerative farming (that is, growing food in harmony with the ecology of the land it's growing on) has brought us much closer to that easy seasonal flow we had when the kids were little. It's a satisfying way to live, in our climate: rooting in winter, blossoming in spring, resting in the hottest part of summer, and nesting in the fall. There's something to be said for living in tune with our bodies and the ecology of the world around us. 

And there's something deeply harmful about fighting it. In our urban culture, even our daily rhythms are governed more by the needs of the economy (whether personal or societal) than by our physiological needs. How many of us get up before dawn and trudge to work in the dark, dependent on a host of chemical and physical methods of preparing an un-rested and un-ready body for the work day? This lifestyle came close to eliminating my husband, before the pandemic saved him. How many kids do the same, for school? How many of us carry on our routines despite failing health, when the winters are too dark and cold; when the summers are beating the life out of us? We need to change.

I'm not saying we should be a solely agrarian society, but perhaps we can take the natural cycles of the year into consideration, in how we work, play, and parent our children. Some agrarian populations shift industry and school schedules to accommodate the needs of planting and harvesting. Maybe we could shift ours, similarly, or even determine some of the specific activities done at certain times of year to correspond with our natural energy levels and physiological needs. Maybe, like field mice, we can run in the pathways of our communities to spend this winter tidying, eating our stored grains, and watching excitedly for the sprouts of spring.

~~~

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Why and How to Unschool Teens

They're basically adults with jobs and dreams and full-grown bodies, but they still climb the walls. Or posts, in my house. In many ways, they're capable of conventionally adult activities and often hold much wisdom, but their prefrontal cortex, responsible for rational thought, won't finish developing until about age twenty-five. You know what part is guiding many of their decisions? The amygdala. That's right. The emotional centre of the brain. The one that makes us fall to pieces for seemingly small reasons, make decisions without regard for the future, and quite possibly is also responsible for their open minds, and daring escapades of emotional wisdom. That doesn't mean that we should shield them from hazards, of course. It means this is the time for them to experiment--to learn exploratively how life works for them, and thus to support that big development of their brains. Just like we learn to walk by taking steps, falling, getting up and trying again, we develop our thinking capacity in the same way. As our kids' prefrontal cortex continues developing, they will make mistakes and learn from them. They will be hurt and heal. They will grow. It's our job, as parents, to support our kids while they do that.

So, let's throw a massive social non-compliance on top of that whole mess of amygdala-guided growth: Unschooling! Maybe you started unschooling because of the pandemic; maybe because you found the school system or even homeschooling to be problematic for your teen. Maybe you, like me, have been unschooling all the way along, but just carry a lot of anxiety about what might go wrong, and how to do right. Maybe you're just considering starting.

Really, the answer to "How to Unschool Teens" is the same as the answer to "How to Parent Teens", but for unschoolers the challenges and solutions can be somewhat unique. Without school, and especially during a pandemic, supporting our kids through loneliness and associated mental health issues is a huge challenge. Supporting their confidence in a world that equates graduation and competition with success can be difficult, too. Luckily, unschooling also offers benefits: greater connection with our kids, more time and growth, together, and more opportunity for consciously supporting our kids through this time.

Social Challenges

Unschooling is all about exploration, experimentation, trial, error, and growth. But as parents, we're so worried that our kids will experiment themselves into harm's way! Most of us have held our raw-with-feeling teens as they've bawled their eyes out over social situations that neither they nor we (nor sometimes the others involved) had any control over at all. We're not different from school families, that way. We hold onto them helplessly, just willing our love to be enough to heal the wounds. Or worse, we've sat outside their bedroom doors, knowing they suffered alone, and didn't feel able to come to us for support. 

The feeling of impotence for parents of teens can be pervasive. When they were little we thought we knew and understood their experiences and feelings. We were often wrong, but they didn't make it so damn obvious as they do, now they stand at eye-level. Now we just step back in blurred astonishment, delighting and flailing and trudging through the tidbits of feeling they cast our way. 

I have two very different children; one talks to me openly about their feelings, all very rationally considered, while the other says "everything's fine" until they explode with little-to-no warning and sometimes no association with known events. All I can do in both cases is accept the flow. And it's hard!! Because I'm an emotional human being too, and my feelings matter! I'm scared for them, I'm thrilled for them, I'm excited about their social interactions and terrified of anything going wrong. But they don't need that. I imagine my poking in their emotional lives feels to them like trying to learn to walk while a hovering parent pushes and prods them from every angle. Maybe that's actually a pretty accurate comparison. My meddling makes them fall, and makes it harder for them to find their footing. 

Unschooling is about giving kids freedom to find their footing--academically, socially, and emotionally. It's that freedom that allows them to make the mistakes they will learn from, and it's the hardest thing in the world, as a parent, to stand back and watch them fall. Sometimes the fallout is a cake with too much baking soda; sometimes it's a catastrophically broken heart, or deep, deep depression. It's a constant assessment of risk and being honest with ourselves: most risks are not such a big deal. And even the big ones, we have to learn to deal with. And so do our children, through trial, error, and growth. We want to raise kids who are resilient, courageous, and unafraid. We can't always be there to pick them up, but we can be the foundation that helped them develop the skills to pick themselves up.

Academic Challenges

Again, there isn't actually a whole lot of difference between schooled kids and unschooled kids, here. It's entirely possible for unschooled kids to set up and jump through the hoops of high school graduation, college, and university, as it is possible for them (or anybody) to build a career without any of those things. The difference is, schooled kids are often led to believe that without the diplomas they cannot succeed, and unschooled kids (hopefully) have been raised without that fear. I say 'hopefully', because fear of academic failure is probably one of the greatest shackles we parents have carried forward from our own lives within the system, and most probably, we've passed it on to our kids. I certainly have.

If you follow my blog, Rickshaw Unschooling, you may know that my first-born was uninterested in high school graduation, until struck by a crushing belief that his interest in science could only be served by entering university with a high school diploma. (I know a high school diploma isn't actually necessary for university entrance, but... we unschoolers let our kids make their decisions and hold them when they fall, right?!) So he suddenly worked his butt off and graduated high school with honours. However, the process of taking so many high school science courses led him to lose his lifelong ambition for studying science. Graduation is not always the highway to our dreams. My son changed course and developed a career for himself as a digital artist. Maybe unschooling failed him, or maybe the school system he tried to compete in did. Definitely my own often-spoken ideas that university would be the path for someone interested in physics did. Maybe, though, unschooling gave him the resilience needed to bravely change course, without sacrificing his interests or values. In his work as a digital artist, he is becoming known for his skill in rendering physically plausible spaceships and planets.

Just like kids who attend high school, unschooled kids can fail to meet expectations, too, but for radically unschooled kids, those expectations are only their own. My son knew I didn't care whether he graduated or not. He knows he faces no disappointment from his parents when he changes course, fails to reach a goal, or spends all night watching movies. Because his parents' disappointment doesn't come into play, he has more time to consider his own personal values. And actually, facing disappointment with oneself can be extremely challenging, and we'll all do it sooner or later, if we live a full and independent life. Luckily, my kids have been expected to make and meet their own personal expectations since they were very young, so they're accustomed to it. They both frequently come to talk to me about goals not met, or when they're considering changing course; when they're afraid of failure. That--the fact that they come to me at all, is our enormous privilege, as parents.

Unschooling Takes Sacrifice, but Also Affords Privilege

Of course the choice to fully unschool our kids comes with some sacrifice. During early years, especially, it generally requires one parent to stay at home, or both parents, tag-teaming to share the burden of earning income and parenting. That almost always means financial sacrifice, and therefore necessitates less-than adequate housing for many, and refraining from many of the activities and purchases that families in this culture expect: travel, vehicle ownership, new clothes, eating out, and participating in sports or other expensive activities. Single parents, shift-workers, parents with low-paying jobs, and those with disabilities have an even steeper hill to climb. It's not impossible, especially within a supportive community or family, but requires quite a lot of flexibility, and flexible thinking, in terms of what sacrifices (time with kids, ability to do more affordable adventures like camping, hiking, swimming and visiting free festivals) we're willing to accept in our lives. We also often sacrifice our belonging in community, as we're shunned from local social events and sometimes even our families. And our teens--our teens are going to tell us, surely, that we sacrificed all the opportunities every other teen has, like prom, and sports and climbing the social and academic ladders, just to blindly follow our hippie ideals!! Or... they might. Just remember: That's their amygdala speaking. Just like we hope they will follow their own hearts, we followed ours in raising them the absolute best we could. And the privileges our sacrifices afforded us were probably worth it: A 2013 survey by Peter Gray and Gina Riley documents "improved learning, better attitudes about learning, and improved psychological and social wellbeing for the children; and increased closeness, harmony, and freedom for the whole family."

Unschooling our kids meant that we spent much more time together than we could have if they had attended school. It meant we were thrown together as a family, day in and day out, through thick and thin, when we wanted to be and when we didn't--and we had to work through our differences, because there was no escape. Now we know each other more than we could have if they had attended school.

Unschooling meant that we parents had to question our preconceptions and fears, again and again and again, and we not only became less fearful (and passed less fear on to our kids), but also demonstrated to our kids how to question their preconceptions and fears. Now we're a family who easily engages in serious conversation about Life, the Universe, and EVERYTHING. My kids know I got pregnant when I was sixteen. They know my fears and challenges, and they share their own with me, when they want to. We have a kind of connection that is not unavailable to school-attending kids, but is more difficult to develop, without sharing so very much of our lives.

Unschooling teens is in some ways similar to spousal or close-friend relationships: Ideally, we're equals. We all have friends who make a lot of decisions with their amygdalas, too (in my life, I'm that friend...) If we can survive road-trip arguments with our spouses or best friends, we can get through them with our fourteen or nineteen-year-olds, too. It's really no different when your partner thinks he knows where to turn off the highway (and he's wrong) than when your kid thinks he knows what's the best camping spot (and he's wrong). In either case, we're going to have to question our own convictions, and find ways to peacefully navigate a solution so that everybody feels heard. And in both cases someone is going to be wrong, and we all learn. And our prefrontal cortexes develop a little more.

One thing I ask myself, when faced with conflict with my teens, is whether the topic in question is mine to consider. If it's the place we're stopping to camp for the night, then yes! It sure is! And we're going to have to debate it, and grow, relationship-wise. If it's my kid's choice to spend hundreds of her own hard-earned dollars on a video game? Nope. Even though I cringe when she plays it. None of my business. Do I have to "just try the game--it's fun!!" No I don't. That's my business. I didn't play dolls, either. 

Unschooling means learning with our kids to know and hold our own values with confidence. Sometimes, like with a decision not to graduate, we feel at odds with the whole rest of our culture. But in the circle of our parent-child relationships (or our greater unschooling community, if we're lucky), we are held all the way into adulthood. Both parents and children can develop an innate self-knowledge and self-worth, as well as an independence made stronger by a secure foundation. And that is why to unschool teens: it's the privilege of a healthy, secure adulthood that makes unschooling worth all the sacrifice.

So You're Committed (or Recommitted) to Unschooling Your Teen--But How?

This is something I've been asked often, even before my kids were teens, and long before I began consulting for unschooling parents. The answer is so simple, yet so enigmatic. 

The answer is to just quit school, and the whole school mentality.
Hand the kids the reins.

If they've been in school, recently or anytime, let them deschool. For months or years--as long as it takes. And deschool yourself. Learn from them, and don't expect them to learn anything at all. They have enough of their own expectations to deconstruct without adding yours to the heap. During this deschooling time, question all your motivations and never question theirs. Become your best self, as a parent, and independently. They are watching you and learning how to be from every breath, word and action they see.

Let them make their own decisions; let them make wrong choices and scary choices, and totally unimaginable choices. Let them do all the research and development for all their choices. Don't help them research--especially if they're prone to asking for help. You've got your own stuff to do. Let them handle the consequences of their choices. I didn't mention academics or careers here, because that's not your concern. Ignore it.

Love them. Be there to commiserate, to celebrate, to listen to their stories and to share your own. Be their best friend and also the person who will fight the hard fights with them and for them and with your own fears and prejudices, when they arise. 

Be the one your kids can come home to, anytime, for the rest of their lives, and also be the one they're not afraid to leave behind. Be strong enough in your own values and goals and confidence that they know you'll be OK without them. This will give them permission to grow. 

Be their equal. Rise to meet their amazingness, and when they fall, sit down in the pits with them. If you're lucky, they'll be so confident in your love and support that they'll love and support themselves. 

That's how to unschool your teen, yourself, and also your adult children. It's not easy, but it's life. I'm still working on it, every day.

 

*Regarding that photo of my son, Taliesin, climbing a post: He declares that climbing has nothing to do with his amygdala. He will not stop climbing things when he's twenty-five, and I suspect that's correct, since when I met his father (then, aged twenty-six), he had a tagline on his treehouse webpage that read, "some people still have a bit of monkey in them". Maybe the wall-climbing is a perfectly natural part of life, and unschooling can support it. :-)

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