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| 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
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.
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