Committed to finding ways out of the coercion/self-sacrifice mire of conventional parenting. We are variously critical rationalists, libertarians, home educators, attachment-parents, but we take our ideas where we find them.
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Having just spent hours adding all those links you now see on our sidebar, I now know why it took me so long to get round to. However, they are very interesting net places (mostly blogs), well worth visiting, especially as most of them have something new every day.
The blogosphere has not been around for very long so far, but it's a growing force of knowledge-growth which criticises as well as drawing on the traditional media, and which gives a free voice to anyone interested in sharing their views. I predict that before long there will be subsections of the blogosphere, like little countries in a new world, called things like the scientosphere, the musosphere, the chocosphere and the mathsosphere. Any area in which new knowledge is being generated fast and people seek to share their ideas lends itself to this medium. It's the perfect combination of permanent website with rolling news-and-views.
Of course, there is also inevitably tons of uninteresting stuff, but the beauty of net communication is that good stuff rises to the top. Just as news of interest buzzes round the blogs, blogs of interest get more links and build up a bigger regular readership. I recommend all these links. Enjoy!
Even mindless force doesn't necessarily solve this problem, as one can work out from the toddler-manuals that advocate escalation up to and including locking children's bedrooms from the outside and putting fishing nets over their cots. Unfortunately, such measures are dangerous, as is any activity which involves coercing children to stay away from you in the night whether or not they wake for whatever reason, which is basically what those approaches boil down to. There is one thing you really cannot force someone else to do, and that is go to sleep. Sleep is a state of deep relaxation, and coercion induces stress, which is the opposite. However, you can force people awake and manipulate their sleep-pattern that way; obviously they will be tired earlier if they were up at six instead of noon. But it's not a very sociable thing to do (unless they like it) and it won't make you popular or improve family relations, which is where consentual parenting grows from.
Darlene wrote to "Rational Parenting" for ideas about a child's very late sleep routine causing difficulties for other family members. When a child is young enough that they need a conscious adult companion throughout their waking hours, and cannot be left alone in the house to lie-in of a morning, this can be a major problem. Like all problems, it is best solved consentually and in a co-operative or non-hurtful way that builds relationship and good feeling, rather than undermining them. Here are my thoughts, but the more the better: please add your ideas by clicking on "Comments" (all contributions appreciated enormously!).
First of all, a late sleep routine can have many advantages. If everyone goes to bed sometime after midnight, say, that means the whole family is free to go out late-night shopping (or partying!) in the evening, and bedtime routines don't get in the way of real life. Early rising may not be important for those who work from home, say, and some people prefer evenings to the crack of dawn in any case. Plus, my observation is that some children require a lot less sleep than the norm (whatever that's supposed to be), and are really better off staying up late then sleeping similar hours to their parents anyway, or maybe just an extra hour at night and in the morning, say.
However, if your child is keeping you up till dawn, you are probably both missing out on interesting daytime events, not to mention suffering from sunshine-deprivation, especially at this time of year. In order to change things, the adult needs to lead the way, or maybe share this job with a co-parent, especially at weekends. Someone needs to get up some time before the child, and encourage him to wake up earlier too, which is easiest with the lure of incredibly wonderfully fun activities (or, ones that appeal to the child as such, anyway). Most people are easily capable of leaping out of bed an hour or two early on the morning of their holiday or Christmas, say. Parents can devote their energies to having fun at this time, rather than conserving it for later in the day, so to speak, and excite their children up in the morning. Obviously, then they have to keep it up until things are established, and go back to the routine if things start slipping backwards. It's a long-term commitment, but it's worth it- if you want it.
The other thing is obviously to ensure that children are relaxed in the time leading up to when they start to get tired in the evening. Adrenalin and excitement can keep people awake for hours into the night, which is why it's hard to sleep on Christmas eve and the night before the holiday. Staying in other people's houses always changes my sleep routine. Generally they go to bed earlier than my bedtime, but a quiet atmosphere late at night makes one relax and switch off sooner. This is why those toddler manuals recommend baths, quiet stories and so on. The thing is to get the timing right, though; relax too early, and you're simply refuelled for another round of jumping games. Too late, and the adrenalin has kicked in like a backup system to keep you insomniac for ages.
Sleep problems are supposedly endemic in our society. This is a complex problem that can't be solved in a day, but adopting a positive approach of encouraging change for genuinely beneficial reasons, rather than employing locks and threats, seems the safer course in terms of future somnolistic health.
The problem of how horrible school toilets can be is highlighted in this Guardian piece. This problem is no superficial one. School toilets are traditionally the hang-outs of school bullies and nasties, people skiving lessons and smoking fags, or worse. No wonder children make themselves unwell avoiding them. They are the underbelly of all that's wrong with coercive institutions.
I knew a very small school child who refused to use school toilets because they were filthy and unpleasant. Fortunately, his teacher allowed him to use the staff toilet instead. Not long ago, I went to a home ed group meeting in a hired room in a school, and the toilets there were appalling. Plaster was falling off the walls, and there was damp and no evidence of heating. One day we turned up to find that the main hall ceiling had collapsed overnight. Lucky the children weren't having their assembly in there at the time. But I digress.
There are many reasons why details like decent toilet facilities are tremendously important to children's development as civilised human beings. But I'm sure you can think of them without my help.
On the Rational Parenting website, which explains more of the ideas that lie behind this blog, the homepage says this:
"Rational: respectful, caring, helpful, honest, generous, useful, considerate.”
A couple of people have pointed out that this is technically incorrect. Yourdictionary.com says:
"ra·tion·al
(click to hear the word) (r sh -n l)
adj.
1. Having or exercising the ability to reason.
2. Of sound mind; sane.
3. Consistent with or based on reason; logical: rational behavior. See Synonyms at logical.
4. Mathematics Capable of being expressed as a quotient of integers."
…and some more.
Then there was some suggestion that the "Rational Parenting" definition is an implicit reference to Taking Children Seriously ideas, which would explain what lies behind the “rational” definition. However, the truth is, the definition of “rational” on the RP website is not intended to be referential at all: it is just trying to point out some things which seem like common sense. In fact, I think they really are self-evident to many.
“Rational: respectful, caring, helpful, honest, generous, useful, considerate” is not a definition at all, in the usual sense. It is just a string of ideas which we think logically arise from the idea of rationality in the context of parenting. It’s clear they don’t herald from the average dictionary, so hopefully readers will either agree that the connections make sense, or argue if they do not.
"Most people get happy sitting indoors all day eating cake. There are only a few who get happy setting and achieving their goals and even most of these, once they accept that they are not going to do all the achieving they want to, learn to accept the little bit of joy offered them by Mr. Kipling."
I think it's a bit more complicated than I made it seem in the blog. Cake is fun and good, and everyone should enjoy it, in my view. But total self indulgence in basic obvious physical sensations isn't enjoyable for very long. A whole life of nothing but cake would be pointless, otherwise binge-eaters would be happy people; we do need to achieve things, by our own lights, in order to feel good about ourselves- and people who don't like themselves are not happy people.
Doing all the achieving you want to is right: and eating cake along the way as well! Cake alone won't do. Basically, I don't think very many of us aim too high and work too hard to achieve the good things we want from life. Should we aim higher and decide to do more, in general, or should we accept the limitations of life and knuckle under, in general? I believe in the first approach, because the first approach can include all the cake you want, which the second one excludes the satisfaction of achievement.
I'm all for realism, but the giving-up meme seems very very bad indeed, to me.
There is no age when cell-bunches or children suddenly become human. As newborn babies they reason as well as they can about the things that concern newborns (comfort and discomfort, of different kinds, which gradually become more differentiated from each other), and as thirty-year-olds they reason as well as they can about the things that concern thirty-year-olds (ditto).
There are two ways of looking at reasoning, the ability to think rationally which defines us as valuable human beings, the murder and abuse of whom is wrong, ie immoral. One is binary: there are creatures that reason (Einstein, Escher, Bach), and there are things that don’t (pot-plants, teapots, toasters). On the other hand, there are degrees of reasoning ability, and degrees of rationality. A dog can work out that food satisfies hunger, and so can a newborn baby. Human babies have incredible potential and an extremely fast rate of learning, but they are probably less able to solve complex problems at age one day than a fully-grown pig. (I am aware that there are philosophers who disagree with this apparently blurred line, and claim that only humans are rational while animals are merely instinctive, and who identify babies as human, but this is where I’m up to right now: all contrary arguments welcome).
As they grow, human beings develop their ability to solve complex problems. They learn how to walk, talk, cook potato pancakes and surf the net. They become more independent, and less needful of the full-time parenting work that is the constant ongoing immediate help very small children really do need most of the time. A sixteen-year-old still benefits from having a parent to live with and probably support him financially, say, but he doesn’t need nursing through the night and giving drinks ten times a day and having things found for him and shown to him and jigsaw puzzles made up.
More developed human beings are (or should be!) easier to live with, in the sense of being more actively autonomous, less needful of the kind of repetitive constant extremely hands-on support, and involved in solving problems which are more complex, and therefore more interesting to help with. It’s the difference between living with an active, healthy adult partner, and living with a loved-one suffering from a serious disability. A person with cerebral palsy, for instance, can be extremely intelligent and thoughtful, but still need huge amounts of constant ongoing care every day, which an able-bodied person would not require. This doesn’t mean it has to be a nightmare caring for disabled people, or two-year-olds, but the fact is that this sort of parenting is hard work, time-consuming, physically demanding, and often very stressful. If your toddler wants to walk outside but hates wearing shoes, and you are still looking for solutions, you will know what I mean. Other people get to pop out for milk as and when: you can’t.
So, what I am saying today is, children get to be even more fun and nicer and more enjoyable to live with, the older they grow. Unless you have completely f&%$*d them over, of course. I would love ten pounds for every adult who ever saw me with a baby or toddler and said:
“It’s tiring, but those are the best years! You wait till they go to school! Then the trouble starts! They’ll never be as lovely again as they are while they’re little!”
Well, that’s rubbish. Good relationships with nice people get better and better, not the other way round. Be horrible to your kids and treat them like idiots and don’t bother helping them the way they need your help, and sure, you can expect a future of misery. But invest in your little ones with genuinely generous time and effort and more time and more effort, and you will find that they not only get more and more capable of reason: they actually get more and more reasonable, and rational, and life with them improves all the time. It’s good news: for those who want to know.
I read a “how-to” book about business management lately. Or maybe it was “life-coaching”. One of those upbeat, common-sensible philosophies that you can’t reasonably argue with; only, negativity and blehness tend to drag you down and sap your energy so that hot chocolate seems more appealing than Just Doing It or whatever. Anyway, the book said this: there is one major characteristic of people who succeed in their life ambitions; they do more.
Sometimes, thinking too much is bad, when it consists of procrastination and avoidance and (bad) self-indulgence (in bad ideas). Often people spend too much time sitting around pondering when they really need direction, vitality and dynamic action in their lives. Ponderers are amazed and sceptical when they come across active successful types: “How on earth did you find time to learn Chinese?” they say. “I’m always far too tired in the evenings for anything more than Eastenders and a large G&T!” But often the answer is extremely simple: one decided to learn Chinese, worked out how best to do it, and went ahead.
TCS philosophy talks about win-win solutions (common preferences) and how there is no need for compromise between people, because they can work together to find better ideas all round that people can be happier with. It’s about cranking up the family (or relationship) dynamic, having higher expectations then discovering ways of meeting them. Refusing to accept second-best, and always looking for something better, is a good way to improve things in your life; in this case, to get away from the conventional self-sacrifice/coercion traps in family life.
What’s as useful as postponing coercive/self-coercive “solutions” as and when, to find better, happier ones? How about setting and living towards the best, highest goals you can think of for yourself, and sharing those ideas with other people? Deciding what you want to do and be, and then working out how best to get there, and then going ahead. Not regardless of everyone else’s feelings: taking them into account and working them into the details of the decision-making process. Not at the expense of other good things: looking out for difficulties and addressing them along the way. Is there an inevitable conflict between achieving something you believe in and meeting other responsibilities and goals? Of course not. It’s a matter of fitting the different tunes together so they harmonise beautifully, not sticking to a monochrome melody for the sake of an easier life! People get happy from meeting challenges, not from sitting indoors all day eating chocolate cake and getting unhealthy.
Set out your goals, and why you want to meet them (five reasons per goal), and be honest about how things will be for you if you fail. Write down what you are doing so far (almost certainly nothing, apparently) and then what you should be doing, to get those ambitions met. (That’s what the book said, the one I mentioned up there.)
And if you f*%$ up, then take stock, apologise if necessary, learn from the mistake, and go back to the beginning and start again. Which can be harder than anything else, and also more valuable.
*successful: being good at setting and meeting your own goals
Michael Peach says this, and I agree with him, and I imagine a few other people do too:
"If you have a principled belief in liberty then why is it so hard to apply that belief to your own children."
It seems simple, doesn't it? (sigh)
Michael was blogging here about another blog here. That's how the blogosphere works. Once our children start getting into serious blogging, everything will look so different...
It's very noticeable that despite being called "Rational Parenting" and not "Rational Educating", this blog has a lot of articles on education so far, especially ones about home education.
This doesn't mean we think all schooling parents are totally crazy and/or horrible. It's partly because we tend to think that parenting and educating in a very broad sense are more or less similar jobs. Libertarian/ unschooling/ autonomous home educators take the widest possible view of what children's growth and learning consists of. They understand that phoning one's grandmother every day, or growing tulip bulbs, or making dinner, or constructing birds out of pieces of paper, or inventing complex role-playing stories, all embody important kinds of learning that are actually no different and no less significant than the equally random and arbitrary tasks set by schools every day- drawing and measuring triangles, or memorising lists of French words, or making up and acting stories, or seeing which objects float in a tank.
Growth is more than maths and spelling. It's about how to get along with people, what is right and wrong to do, how to solve problems and find answers and use reference-books, reference-computers, reference-humans, how to get money and find ways towards your goals, whatever they are, after finding how to invent good goals in the first place. All of this is education. Schooling families often organise plenty of learning outside school hours- music lessons, trampolining, sleepover parties, dinner and conversation with grown-up friends, reading Tolkein.
In fact, everyone home educates (or should): even if they school as well. Homework is home education, and so are TV and CDs and the internet and digging in the garden on a Sunday. And as parenting is the job of helping children grow and learn, home educating more or less is parenting (if you include the part of the job that is making sure your children find good ways of learning with other people, outside your immediate relationship).
Parenting is home educating. Attending school is part of home educating. That may sound like wordplay, but perhaps it conveys the significance of both this parenting job we do and the whole education and growth and freedom issue.
Here is a great article about someone who didn't go to school, or have any formal coercive schooling or teaching anywhere, and did wonderful things with his life that would impress about anybody. One to convert the sceptics.
The current law on home education in the UK is very good and sensible. Families have the right to educate in whatever way they please, including according to the philosophy known as "autonomously", ie (broadly) by supporting children in learning what they want to learn rather than enforcing a curriculum on them and making them sit tests and so on. As I never tire of telling people, home educating families have roughly the same status as that other great private education institution, the British public school (they are called public because they are private, and I don't know why). When people ask, "Don't they have to do tests? What about the National Curriculum?" I am perfectly happy to compare my household to Eton College and ask them what they think UK education ministers would know that the Headmaster of the Prince of Wales' sons' school doesn't.
However, UK home educators groups like the venerable and established Education Otherwise rightly keep an eye on their legal status and generally make their voices known if something goes amiss, so I trust that they are doing something about this latest apparent governmental attempt to keep us rebels in check; new guidelines from the Department of Education telling Local Authorities how to manage us. I haven't studied them yet, but Michael Peach seems to think there are inaccuracies and he tends to be pretty sure about his onions.*
Although the law as it stands is still firmly on our side, there is no end to the presumptiousness of beauracrats and officials in passing judgement on other lesser mortals about what they can and can't do, regardless of whether they are actually able to tell one end of their own torso from the other. I'm hoping that's what's happening with this, but on the other hand thin ends of wedges tend only to be visible as such once the thick end is also in sight. We shall see.
* to know one's onions: to be on the ball, know what the score is, not have any flies on oneself.
