Reschooling Posts // April 30-May 13 2023
Double whammy this week because my kiddo broke his arm last weekend and it was all consuming!
The Three Stages of Unschooling
May 13, 2023 from Happiness is Here
It’s fun to look back on what our life as an unschooling family has looked like over the last 10+ years, and most days I get a chance to do that thanks to facebook memories. Sometimes cringey, always nostalgic! Yep, that’s me saying that we were just trying homeschooling for the first year of school, and that’s also me sharing a post about how school is prison a few years later.
Trust
May 12, 2023 from Swimming Upstream
During the last year I’ve become kind of de-enamored with the unschooling world. Don’t get me wrong: we’re in this for the long haul. My kids are thriving, our relationship is strong, I love living life without school. When I say unschooling, I’m not necessarily referring to the act of living life without curriculum, but more so the label of unschooling or even self-directed education.
Can child development be about control?
May 12, 2023 from Radical Mothering
For this post I want to thank all the people who have said to me something along these lines: “Children can’t really know what’s best for them/can’t consent/can’t make this decisions until they are 5/10/16/mature enough/adults.” In other words, people who have said that children’s brains “aren’t mature enough” at certain ages and stages and therefore we must default to the adult’s idea of what is in our child’s “best interest.”
Parenting with GRIT | The Incredible Benefits of Nurturing GRIT in Our Kids
May 12, 2023 from BlackDad
Parenting with GRIT is something we all want for our children. I will be discussing the importance of parenting with grit and helping children develop grit, particularly as we are unschooling. Grit is a personality trait that encompasses a combination of perseverance, passion, and resilience in the face of challenges. It is a key predictor of success in various domains of life, including academics, sports, and professional careers.
46. Meeting our Edges & Setting Boundaries
May 12, 2023 from Radical Learning Talks
Limits? Boundaries? What's the difference? What are they about? In this episode, we dive into the deep waters of needs, emotions and what boundaries are really about: self-discovery and understanding ourselves, and how to learn how to honor our needs and develop empathy with ourselves and with others.
From The Soviet Union To Homeschooling
May 12, 2023 from Honey! I’m Homeschooling the Kids
Evgenia is a homeschooling mama of one boy and the founder of Fit Mama Method. She was born in the Soviet Union and lived in Russia until 29 years old. She holds 2 Master Degrees in Journalism and Sports. Evgenia came to Canada to complete a college program and decided to stay. She was the head coach of an Acrobatic Gymnastics Program and a personal trainer until she decided to stay home with her son.
Q&A Deep Dive, Episode 348
May 11, 2023 from Living Joyfully with Unschooling
In this week’s Exploring Unschooling podcast episode, we’re diving deep into a listener question submitted by Michelle in Texas. She writes: "I listened to the episode with Xander regarding gaming, and it really helped change my perspective, especially during this unschooling phase. The question that keeps coming for us is definitely fear-based, but for good reason, and that's online safety. Our son loves online gaming. Fortnite is the game of choice. But we struggle with the proper level of "parental controls" and his freedom to do what he loves, which is socializing and making new friends online.”
In Which Peter Gray Lays it All Out: Keeping Kids Super “Safe” Is Seriously Harming Them
May 10, 2023 from Free Range Kids
On Monday, New York’s favorite radio host, WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, interviewed Let Grow Co-founder Peter Gray. Listen here and you will probably cheer every single word. Lehrer invited Gray on to discuss his piece in The Journal of Pediatrics: Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Wellbeing. It describes how kids’ free time and free play have been declining since the 1970s, replaced by adult-supervised activities…and childhood anxiety. The understandable goal was to keep kids ever safer, by watching, assisting, and instructing them ever more.
Finding Homeschool Balance
May 10, 2023 from Raising Lifelong Learners
There are so many things that you need to accomplish in your homeschool each day and week. Besides school work and parenting, homeschool parents have to find ways to manage household work, meal planning, grocery shopping, volunteer work, and lots more. The to-do list seems impossible. So how do you find or create the perfect balance?
Born Wise with Gill Howarth
May 9, 2023 from Let ‘em Go Barefoot
Goodbye, Stories of an Unschooling Family
May 9, 2023 from Stories of an Unschooling Family
The other day, I found a 5-star review of my book, The Unschool Challenge, on Amazon. It was written by Patrice Fagnant Macarthur from Today’s Catholic Homeschooling website. “In The Unschool Challenge, Elvis provides short essays on various topics related to unschooling and then she provides challenges for readers to do. This is a pick and choose sort of book. You don’t need to read it in order.”
Raising Readers with Nikolai Pizarro
May 8, 2023 from Let ‘em Go Barefoot
#42 Why self-directed learning is a natural fit for our children, with Naomi Fisher
May 8, 2023 from The Unschool Space
My guest this episode is Naomi Fisher, who I am delighted to have back for a second conversation (see #5 for our previous chat). Naomi is a clinical psychologist, mother of two children who are at a self-directed learning centre, and author of the book Changing our Minds, which is about the importance of choice, autonomy and self-direction in education.
Where's the Balance?
May 8, 2023 from Think Again
Sometimes we have to make children do things. There are real non-negotiables in life. You can’t run across the road, you can’t hit other people, you can’t stay at the park all night. You can’t stop your parents going to work every day or there will be no money to live. You can’t play with fire. You can’t stop other people from doing things which are important to them. These are real fundamentals.
Parental Wisdom from Decades Past
May 6, 2023 from Freedom to Learn
A bit more than a year ago, I reviewed, here, Markella Rutherford’s remarkable book, Adult Supervision Required, in which she presented the results of her qualitative analysis of hundreds of articles and advice columns in magazines for parents over the past 100 years. She showed how advice changed, over time, from encouragement of children’s independent activities to what we have today, an obsession with safety and guidance, continuous monitoring, and supervision, which restricts children’s ability to learn how to take responsibility and do things on their own.
Worried Your Child is Already a Screen Addict? There’s Hope!!!
May 4, 2023 from Free Range Kids
“How many of you have closed your email and then immediately reopened it because you might have just gotten an email?” Laughter rippled through the audience members — including me — as we listened to Emily Cherkin give a talk at The Brearley School in Manhattan about tech and kids and us: parents, students, educators, email addicts.
Confident Kids, Confronted Parents
May 4, 2023 from Happiness is Here
It’s a strange experience sometimes, being the parent of children who have had a very different experience to you. Who have been parented pretty differently, who have never been to school, who have not routinely experienced judgement, shame, punishment, and all the other things that seem to go hand in hand with being a child. It’s eye-opening. It’s healing. It’s sometimes triggering. Let me give you an example…
Will Homeschooling Mess Up My Child's Life?
May 4, 2023 from Stark Raving Dad
I think we need to kick this off by calling out the elephant in the room: What parent doesn’t mess things up? We’re all trying to do our best, but perfection is impossible. Being a perfect parent, providing your child with a perfect life, is impossible. Public school, private school, homeschool, unschool…the flavour of ‘education’ you layer into life can never change the fact that you're human. You're fallible. You'll make mistakes.
Igniting Your Kids’ Passions
May 2, 2023 from Raising Lifelong Learners
Parents begin homeschooling for a wide variety of reasons. Some of us (hello!) began homeschooling completely unexpectedly because it was what our kid needed, even if it wasn’t what we had pictured for our family at all! Some of us chose homeschooling for relationship building or because of the educational flexibility and opportunities it provides.
This is Me, My Life’s Work, and a Boy Driving a Truck
May 2, 2023 from Free Range Kids
The Let Grow Project is so simple it’s almost laughable. Almost. But its impact is so profound, it changes the lives of most people who try it. Which people? Students. Parents, Teachers. Counselors. Even the producer of the 7-minute film below, Justin Toops. It features kids doing remarkable — and not remarkable — things, once set a bit free. And if you feel like seeing me after all these years, I’m in it too, busy promoting ye olde Project!
1.39 community update + shout outs
May 1, 2023 from The Unschool Files
You're Making It Worse
May 1, 2023 from Think Again
When a child is struggling at school and become reluctant to attend, their parents are given advice. A lot of it is about how to ignore their child’s distress. Other parents say ‘We just don’t give them the option’ and professionals say ‘You need firm boundaries’. Parents are told that their child’s misery is ‘behaviour’ and that it will be reinforced if they ‘give in’. Others are told that it’s anxiety, and that by allowing children to avoid school, the anxiety will only get worse.
Great Expectations
April 30, 2023 from Think Again
A lot of conventional parenting advice is about being clear and consistent. Make it clear what you expect of the child, and follow through with consequences if they don’t comply. If the child isn’t living up to expectations, it’ s assumed to be because the parent hasn’t set the boundaries well enough. The child needs to get the message. Whenever there is muttering about ‘poor parenting’ you can be sure that the words ‘boundaries’ and ‘inconsistent’ will come soon after.