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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The unschooler blog lady has been having some horrible encounters with organised "education" recently. (I don't think she does perma-links, but I'm thinking of the 7 December and 9 December 2003 entries)
The big post is about science in schools, and how most of the pupils just regurgitate text books or web resources without any idea of WHY things happen, or even any desire to find out why things happen.
It made me think of my knowledge of specific heat capacity. Yes, I understand that it's to do with how much energy you have to put in to raise x amount of whatever stuff it is by n degrees, but in my head in a distracting mantra I hear the secondary school physics teacher who had a slight s-related speech impediment, which made their expressing of "specific heat capacity" endlessly mesmerising. I had to relearn what specific heat capacity is recently when someone reminded me of that physics teacher and the mantra started up.
Yes, maybe if people who actually - duh - are excited about science themselves do the teaching, there's some chance that their students might remember more than the lisping n years later. But to actually begin to learn about science? That's a matter of starting asking "why?" about the things we sense following the trains of thought wherever they go. The chances of a school teacher helping you to work out why clouds stay up when that's what you're wondering are minimal. You're far more likely to be punished for staring at the sky and not concentrating on your ticker-tape timer. Go, learner-led education (and let's face it, that's home education - name the school that can take its eye off the league tables long enough to actually allow pupils to learn what they are interested in).
ps does anyone else remember hours of innocent entertainment with ticker-tape timers in physics lessons? And does anyone have any more memory than me of what ON EARTH we were working out?
Well, being a good enough parent that nobody in your family is systematically or repeatedly hurt is extremely difficult in this day and age. And we can't hang around a couple of hundred years and do it then. So, here is my checklist for Bad Days when feelings are running high and everything isn't going great.
1. Are you trying to make the kids do something they dislike? Take some steps back. Talk about it as you would to a respected friend, from a polite distance, in a spirit of trying to be helpful. Try and find some other way forward that they do like. Will the world end if you don't help them pursue their idea (which, by the way, is the only way to help children learn)?
2. Brainstorm, constantly. Ask the children for help. Brainstorm to solve problems, pre-emptively, and as a way of life. "Hey, I was thinking about how to get this, what if we try that and so-and-so, would that work? How about the other one? Did you have any more ideas, did you ask such-and-such?" and soon.
3. Do something fun. Is everyone happily occupied? Bored restless people are not enjoying life and not enjoyable to be around. Get on a bus and go somewhere new. If you're tired, activity will energise you.
4. Have a mini at-home holiday. Forget everyday chores and indulge yourselves in whatever shared activities you like- hire videos and watch them in bed with pizza and story books and a board game and your laptop, for instance.
5. Chill out. Regarding your own ideas and also other people's. Life isn't a big emergency. Maybe you're wrong, maybe they are. Get it in proportion.
6. Embrace change and the newness of problems. Don't worry or try to prevent things ever getting tricky, address what comes up. One of the most important parenting skills is expecting and dealing with the unexpected: You've never been a parent to the child yours will be tomorrow, before.
7. Don't get angry. Don't even get grumpy. It's just a problem to be solved, bad feeling doesn't help that, it attacks communication making it harder. Take a moment to re-sane your mind and get a cup of coffee and a double choc chip cookie instead. Or at least take a moment to promise that to yourself.
Later:
If you end up doing something you're not happy about, that's no good. If a problem keeps recurring that is hurting someone, that's no good either. You need to get changing things.
Brainstorm more and trawl your intellectual world for new ideas. If you still don't find a lasting solution, but don't know why then test the best suggestions you can find, including long-shots. If your problem is still not improving, try some outlandish ideas that just might work. If they sound unenjoyable, find out how to make them fun. Anything other people enjoy can be enjoyed by you if it has any value at all and you find out how they do it (ask them, for a start! and then listen seriously to what they say: they know more than you know here).
And don't kill yourself with self-imposed limitations. It may be possible to live coercion-free with a highly restricted lifestyle, but in general you need as many options, choices and sources of entertainment as you can get. And then some. Misery is normal in conventional families, remember.
Mr and Mrs 1950s treated their children like most 1950s parents: discipline and encouraging a proper respect for authority were paramount. “Not while you live under my roof” was frequently heard in counterpoint with “you’re not going out with that muck on your face”. Master and Miss 1950s turned 18 in the early 1960s. They shook the dust of home from their feet, never went on a family holiday again, and relished their financial and emotional independence from their parents.
Years passed, in which Master and Miss 1950s, now metamorphosed into Mr and Ms 1970s, had families (with which they may have had more success in interacting than their parents had had with them). Contact with Mr and Mrs 1950s was restricted to duty visits (in which everyone would be forced into unnatural stiff poses and made to smile at a camera), encouraging Master and Miss 1970s to send thank you letters at strategic times of year, and refusing to listen whenever Mr and Mrs 1950s tried to offer advice or give instructions on any matter whatsoever (aka interfering).
Fast forward to 2003. Now Mr and Ms 1970s are Mr and Ms Newly-Retired Noughties. Mr and Mrs 1950s are getting frailer. They are forgetting more things that are not really important to them. Most of their friends are dead or dying (just natural causes, nothing sinister here) and they are becoming more and more isolated. It is at this point that Mr and Mrs 1950s begin dropping increasingly heavy hints that all they really want is for their children to drop everything and come to look after them. Once the answer is clearly and explicitly “no”, open warfare begins.
All the old coercion methods come back into play. Saying “no” to Mr and Mrs 1950s is painful for our Newly-Retireds. They spent their childhoods trying to please their parents. The displeasure of the parents (expressed in terms ranging from apparent domestic helplessness through archness to open anger) and the ensuing emotional turmoil can only be avoided by capitulation. One friend says: “they spent my whole childhood attaching fishing hooks to my body. I had forgotten the hooks were there, but now my parents are tugging the fishing lines one by one”. Not literally. Sheesh.
What should the Newly-Retireds do? This is the moment, I think, when they should become TCS children (only TCS = Taking Codgers Seriously here), at exactly the moment when it becomes most difficult. Instead of wresting away power of attorney and coercing the Ancient Ones into a nursing home, they could approach the problems of rapidly approaching parental decrepitude rationally. Creative problem solving has to be one of the best ways of staving off senility. And it has to be one of the best weapons against being coerced by relatives in zimmer frames.
This answer is probably too easy, too vague. There are thousands of Newly-Retireds being manipulated RIGHT NOW by Aged Parents who have never considered the wishes of their children to be of any importance or interest when the wishes of said Aged Parents might be thwarted. How on earth can people overcome 60 years of bullying and build a relationship based on respect for the other's autonomy? Answers on a postcard...
I wonder whether things are very different with parents who treated their children as rational human beings from the word go? Perhaps they take responsibility for their own old age, living with equally decrepit friends and sharing the costs of nursing, or booking themselves into a nursing home before it becomes urgent. Perhaps they will accept any help their children wish to and are able to offer, but not try to manipulate their children into courses of action that will coerce any of the parties involved.
The generation with the most to learn are the breeding-right-now 30-somethings whose 60-something parents are wilting under the 80-something onslaught. Maybe they can lay the foundations now for a very different sort of interaction with their as-yet-tiny children in 50 years time. Go, growth of moral knowledge.
