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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Someone asked on the TCS list today about cool ways of teaching about fire safety, how to put them out, and exciting ways of exploring fire.
An expedition to the beach is the short answer.
Here's a longer one:
Go to the kind of beach that has lots of driftwood at the high tide mark with lots of newspaper and matches.
Getting sticks burning at one end and then plunging them into the sea or into a heap of sand is a good way of exploring what puts fires out. Not tending it for a bit is another way of illustrating how fire goes out. Take a fire blanket and smother the blaze to explore how they work? Or just an old sheet and soak it in the sea before using it to smother the fire? For exploring ways of putting out different types of fire, one could get an old pan full of fat so hot it goes on fire and then... er... pour water on to show how burning fat floats (with a long-handled pan to avoid collatoral damage). And THEN smother with fire blanket or the right kind of fire extinguisher.
Cooking marshmallows on sticks, sausages, baking bananas in foil etc etc gives a focus to the expedition, and allows everyone to get close to the heat.
Building a shelter for the fire with stones can be good to make sure it doesn't go out, and with canny building and draught management you can get it REALLY hot in there. When we carried the hot stones to the sea (on a plank, obviously...) last time I had a beach fire, they didn't just make the sea boil, some of them broke in two along fault lines. :-)
Take some Acriflex or other soothing burns cream along, or just encourage people to shove slightly charred fingers into the sea till they don't hurt much.
By the time children have had lots of bonfires with as much advice and assistance from parents as both parties want, they'll be all set to go and make fires without supervision.
I was thinking about what Rational Parenting might encompass, since I haven’t posted here before, and it’s always worth getting one’s parameters clear.
I have something in mind to post another day about rational parenting or rational offspringing at the other end of the spectrum – that is, when both parties are drawing pensions. But today I am inspired by an anonymous comment on Dawn’s blog about moodiness in pregnancy (the post was 28 November; I can’t do a permalink because of my ongoing underscore problem).
Obviously a proto-parent can’t interact in a rational manner with the foetus during pregnancy (duh). But can the proto-parent act in a reason-led manner that will set the habit for their future parenting once the foetus has turned into an independent entity?
The tiredness, nausea and so on associated with early pregnancy are also often connected with moodiness and anxiety. But if a proto-parent can fully understand what is causing the tiredness, say (it takes a lot of energy to grow a baby…), perhaps the moodiness and anxiety can be replaced by satisfaction that all is proceeding according to the usual pattern. The wonderful exhaustion felt after a day breathing fresh mountain air and looking at miles and miles of view rather than the slightly blocked-sinus-y tiredness at the end of a day spent sitting on the motorway…
Proto-parents can approach the symptoms of pregnancy by reference to their internal causes rather than responding to each symptom as being a proportionate response to external stimuli. Maternal weeping at the slightest provocation (as Dawn mentioned) can be understood simply as hormonally induced 'random weeping', as Dawn’s anonymous commenter put it, rather than being magnified by post-hoc rationalisation. Nausea doesn’t necessarily mean that the stomach is really upset, just that the placenta isn't fully regulating foetal sugar levels yet; nose-bleeds don’t mean that Jonquil needs her nose cauterised, but that it is in the interests of the foetus to push blood pressure up a bit; cravings for eating coal and chalk do not have to be acted upon (my mother always mentions these cravings as ones she is grateful she never had!) any more than a non-pregnant “Mmmm… icecream” has to be satisfied IMMEDIATELY and WITHOUT NEGOTIATION.
I wonder whether this approach to pregnancy might give parents practice at responding in a rational manner to the child’s actions and desires once it is born.
There are some great historical dramas on TV these days. If your child is a TV-viewing expert who knows the language of visual drama (which is less likely if she has had her viewing severely limited from age dot), and is able to follow plots, interpret characters and so on, she may well enjoy watching this kind of thing with you. It has the added interest of containing historical truth, as well as being a good story (history is packed with great stories).
If you're not sure about the historical accuracy, but the child is interested in the characters and events, a good tip is to go to the library and take out books about the period, including books aimed at children, and then look at them together afterwards.
As always, genuine interest stimulated by really gripping material is a much better way to learn than boring teachers and textbooks. I can't remember any of my school project on the Chinese Revolution at all. But I know a few new things about the British Monarchy now than I did a year ago.
Only a lunatic or the victim of some mass universal conspiracy would voluntarily take on the work load required of a half-reasonable parent, unless they were possibly both a millionaire and extremely well-versed in the practicalities of humane and effective child-raising.
(Effective: most people's idea of what constitutes effective child-raising would not be similar to ours. But there is a kind of effectiveness in helping children grow their autonomy, which matters, and which consists of real active creativity, not just notional agreement that coercion is bad for people).
I was fairly good at academic study and fairly good at helping young people get good exam results. But parenting is much, much more challenging than anything else I've ever done. This doesn't mean it's no fun: I generally love challenges (or if not, I can generally live peaceably with them). I think parenting is challenging because it is changing: conventional parenting would be easier, and future parenting will be easier, but combining parenting with pushing out the boundaries and creating new frontiers for you and your children to create new lives on (which is what real, good, post-coercive parenting consists of) requires immense creativity of a kind that most of us can currently only aim for.
The rewards are immense too, of course. And most of those go to your children. Parenting is not for egotists. Every bit of meanness and needy greed will rebound back on you and if you don't notice, it'll keep rebounding until you do, which could be a long time. The only way not to get hurt from this is to become hardened and cynical and that's not much use either.
"Non-coercive parenting! That sounds nice! But..." *looks at small child padlocked into playpen and older child snowed under with Level Test Stage Preliminary Literacy Standard National Guidelines homework and revision, contemplates prospect of total anarchy, asks self wtf?*
"Oh, um, er. Did someone imply that it was easy?" *looks embarrassed*
So; non-coercive parenting. It seems to me there are distinctly two kinds of this and only the first one can be achieved by anyone less clever than Mr Clever winning the Cleverness Gold Cup at International Clever Day in Clevertown, Cleverworld, the Cleververse.
Non-coercion type 1:
Don't attempt to "discipline" your children. Then deal with whatever comes up as best you can, as and when.
Non-coercion type 2:
Replace using force on your children AND replace using force on yourself (we call this self-sacrifice) with active and directed better ways of doing things, following the basic maxim that happily occupied people are easy to get along with.
One snag with Type 1 of course is, it's not actually non-coercive. It's passive and inadequate, and what people used to call "permissive", and doesn't protect against either pain or future trouble anyway (which is kind of the whole point of doing away with the use of force in the first place).
And one snag with Type 2 of course is...
"Well? How do you do it? Are you going to give us any ideas or not??"
I make no apology for always doing everything (spot the exaggeration) on the spur of the millisecond, therefore, if the time is still not right for Rational Parenting to rise from its sleep and take over the world, you won't find me apologising in any corners. However: people who want to blog ideas that fit our remit will be welcomed with arms as wide as those of Mr Tickle himself, if not more so. Thank you!
*wanders off to look for an arm-stretching machine*
I thought maybe we should revive this blog? The remit here is to improve the ideas and resources of parents, working towards autonomy-building modes of family life where coercion and self-sacrifice are things of the past. Not everyone will agree but those who live near the margins may be interested and catch a few of our memes.
Anyway, I sometimes have informal parenting things to write, so I'll stick them up here as and when.
