Unschooling: Am I failing my kids?

My nine-year-old son sat staring at his comic book, lengthily, before raising his eyes to meet mine in the glassy glare that has always alerted me to my failings. He told me his friend, who was a year younger, was already doing grade five math. 

"So?" I said, wanting to reassure him, but already knowing that the river of his disappointment would overcome my small boat of hope before it launched. "You're unschooled. We don't even know what level of math you do. Who cares."

His eyes pierced me, and he muttered, "I can't even do math."

I knew it wasn't true. Sure, he would probably test 'below grade level' if we tested him, but I disagreed with testing, and besides, though he was ignorant of long division at the time, he was able to Google a useful formula and calculate the speed at which his theoretical space-station would need to spin in order to simulate earth-gravity for those on-board. I didn't really have any concerns about his ability to 'do math'. But his eyes told me that I had, indeed, failed him. If not academically, then socially. Or maybe in supporting his sensitive heart and competitive nature. There's always something. My boat was sunk.

I've been consulting for unschooling families since the beginning of the pandemic, and by far the biggest and most common reason people call me is because they're afraid of failing their children. I struggled with that so much, myself, in the earlier years (and off and on even now that my kids are grown!) I struggle with it as a teacher, too, and I'm pretty sure it's actually most parents' niggling deep fear. 

I think we always want to do the absolute best we can for our kids, but the truth is we can't ever know what the best is for each individual kid, and for our family as a whole. We won't even know when our kids are grown if we've done what might have been best for them. All we can do is to keep an open heart, an agile mind, and work through every challenge as it arrives. But picking through our human insecurities and finding ways to re-imagine them is kind of my life's work, so I've decided to dig into this one a bit. Every one of my thoughts won't apply to every one who reads this, because we're all unique, and in that uniqueness is an infinity of different possibilities and outcomes. So don't take this essay as advice, please--just some thoughts on our mutual journey and a jumping-off place for your own thoughts and conversations. And be reassured, although this list may bring up many deep-seated fears, I'm going to talk about how to overcome them later on.

Have I set my kids up for failure if they want to go to school (or quit school) later on?

Luckily, in most places, if you have the legal right to homeschool your kids, then you also have the legal right to send them to school, later on. Some systems make you jump through hoops in order to determine appropriate placements for new students, but some also make coming and going from school quite easy. And regardless, we can rest assured that many kids leave school for a variety of reasons (travel, illness, poverty, or exploring different education options) and manage to return when the time is right. The system is always willing to take kids back. 

Then there's the fear that kids will be 'behind' if they join school later than their peers. From the experiences I've had as a parent and also witnessed in other eclectic homeschooling families, I can say this is actually rarely the case. Sure, there will be differences between our home/unschooled kids' experiences and the schooled kids' experiences, but every school year begins with quite a bit of review, and home/unschooled kids are often quite skilled at harnessing learning opportunities. They 'catch up' quite quickly. 

The bigger issue I see here is the possibility of failing our kids' learning and self-esteem in general by succumbing to our own fears about 'grade levels' or 'keeping up' or 'being behind'. These competitive thoughts often lead to our kids feeling insecure about their learning. My son's insecurities about math were absolutely rooted in my own 'encouraging' him to practice math. I thought I was being mostly positive, but my actions made him aware that there was a bar he needed to reach, and he always felt in danger of failing. That's really no different than the very visible bar that school-going kids are expected to reach, so I'm not going to kick myself too much for bringing it into his world. Still, since my conviction that competition and coercion is detrimental to learning was a big part of the reason we chose to unschool, I really did fail myself, in this case. And my son's ongoing insecurity about his own intelligence is the result.

I don't know if [insert educational philosophy here] was the best choice for my child!

It might not be. Maybe you chose unschooling and now your kid is passionately yearning for the excitement and rigidity of the school her friend attends. Maybe you and your child researched the hell out of all the school options, then maxed all your credit on 'the best school', and now you're all miserable. Both of these situations have happened to me. Things change. Things can change. And the way we navigate these needs and unexpected changes with agility will be the greatest lesson to our kids. And after it all? Our kids will almost certainly blame us for choices we made that didn't serve them. That, too, is an opportunity for growth. How we work through our feelings of regret and uncertainty as a family is another of life's greatest learning opportunities.

I'm antisocial. How can I socialize my kids?

This one is hard for me. I have really deep social insecurities, and I passed them on to my children long before we even considered educational options. Unschooling, and being a part of an incredibly small homeschool cohort, was in some ways easier for me, because of the possibility of forging closer relationships with fewer people. But it was also devastating to all of us when friends moved on to school, or other communities, or just other friendships. My kids have witnessed my depression upon realizing that close friends had moved on, and this didn't help their social confidence at all. My experience with this led me to see, yet again, that the way I navigate this challenge is hugely important to how my kids will grow. Yes, unschooling in a small community amplified this problem for us, but that just gave us a chance to meet it, head on. 

My kids and I talk a lot about our social lives; our thoughts and feelings about why we or others behave the way we do. They know I don't have many answers, and frequently I have learned more from them than they have from me. As a whole, these conversations are one of the most important things we do. We all know that our house is the place we can safely air all our thoughts and feelings, that we'll love each other no matter what, and that we'll always have our hearts held, here. Dr. Gabor Maté "believes that most mental health conditions originate from unresolved childhood trauma" (Human Window, 2020). We can't avoid emotional trauma, but we can work to resolve it. So, rather than hold back about topics that challenge or frighten us, we talk about them. I'm not a psychologist and I'm not confident in my understanding of humanity, but I am my children's confidante, and that means it's my job to support them and to take their social and emotional journeys with them. Wherever we go, we go together. At least there will be someone there at the end of the road, holding their hand.

I'm no good at [insert subject here]. What if my kids want to learn things I know nothing about?

In my consulting work as well as on homeschool and unschooling discussion groups, this question comes up often, and in many different forms: 'My daughter is interested in sewing clothes, but I have no idea where to begin!' 'My child is asking to learn to read, and I don't know how to teach them.' 'I failed math in high school, how can I teach my kid at home?' In fact, the reason my son was so worried about his math level was likely because he sensed my own and his father's lack of confidence in math. I really don't understand much about math, but his father studied engineering and physics in university. His actual skill may have passed on to his son, but so did his lack of confidence. The confidence we lack as parents is normal, but it's also a detriment to learning, both for ourselves and for our children.

This issue is complex, but relatively simple to solve. First of all, we need to dismantle our thinking that learning is a top-town dissemination of knowledge. Many of us were raised in the school system and/or at home to believe that that's how learning works, but this system no longer serves our population, and even school boards across the world are beginning to change. While it's entirely possible to seek out a more experienced person as a guide or mentor in a specific subject area, that person is still growing, too, and there is always more to learn; more to share, and more ways to grow than just by collecting knowledge. The best mentors are just sharing their enthusiasm for learning with others. As parents, we can be those best mentors simply by finding some kind of enthusiasm as we go on the learning journey with our kids.

The learning can be direct, where we (or our kids) seek out information and learn it through whatever means suit us best (my own kids have variously accessed local experts, online courses, YouTube tutorials, in-school classes, and library resources). But it can also happen through undirected exploration and play, which happens to be how most of my kids' lifelong passions and skills have developed. The point is that my own skills were not needed for any of this. Maybe, especially when they were younger, I helped them access the resources they needed, but I didn't have to actually understand the subject matter to do so. My enthusiasm was for supporting their learning--whatever that was. I was the excited buyer-of-microscopes. I was the diligent driver-to-the-library. I was the supervisor of Googling, and the provider of the computer. I was the lady who made the muffins and insisted we were going to eat them in the woods, because I like the woods, damnit! That's our role, as parents: to be unflinchingly passionate, supportive, and true to ourselves. This is how our children learn to do the same, and how they learn to learn.

How to Support Our Kids:

Our kids are watching us, and they're learning 'how to human' from every nuance of our lives and behaviour. Working through our own insecurities is always the best work we can do, as parents. We will most definitely fail our children. All we can hope is that we've done our best to model resilience, agility, and a kind, supportive heart, so that when our failings rear their heads in our children's lives, our children are prepared to meet them with confidence, and grow.

How We’re Trying to Celebrate Sustainably While Holding on to What Matters Most

I had my annual Christmas tantrum, yesterday. It happens every year, as the list of stuff on my plate grows, and the time shrinks, and I--the mother around here--am nagging everybody, everywhere, every day, then finally reach my breaking point, and cancel Christmas. And then everybody has a big family talk, and they all agree that they'll help more, and I begrudgingly uncancel Christmas. The tension points are pretty much the same as during the rest of the year: too much to do, too much stress, and some members of our household are better at living in the moment than looking ahead and preparing for coming events (preparing food for dinner, preparing the yard for snowfall, cleaning gutters before rain, etc.) And at Christmas it's SO much more. There are the cards and the gifts to prepare, the house to clean and decorate, the various foods to prepare ahead of time, and all that time the necessary positivity-building; the encouragement and ensuring that these activities are happy. The days when I just got it all done myself are behind me now. So I am mostly the whip-cracker, and that role makes me miserable, as well as everybody else.

So every year on Mama's Tantrum Day (no, there's no actual date for this, but there's some guarantee it will happen in early December), some little thing pushes me over the edge, I yell at somebody or break down in tears, storm away, and then eventually come out to apologize, and calmly explain that if people want Christmas, we need to get some things done, and I can't do it all myself. Then they all make a truly good effort at not only preparing for Christmas, but also developing some real joy for the rest of the season. The resentful mutterings are quieter, and I slink off to my little corner of guilt and shame. This is not ever how I envisioned what in my heart is the happiest time of year. But it's the price of creating that illusion. As the years go by the tantrums are milder and the celebrations are easier, but that isn't the end of it.

Lately we're facing another foe to Christmas joy: the veil of innocent shopping sprees has been lifted from our eyes by the recent parade of floods, fires, storms, droughts, and disasters. Now we really just can't deny the fact that Christmas is unsustainable! We've known for decades that consumerism (including buying gifts) was destroying our future, but have been unable to break out of that tradition for various reasons (AKA various people's hearts being broken at the thought of not buying gifts). Add to that the gas spent on extra travel and shipping, the money we don't have that we borrow from the future to fulfill expectations, the imported foods that are a part of every December in our household, the new decorations, new candles, and total abandoning of our efforts at non-consumerism in order to over-fill stockings just so they look "right".

So this year I decided to see if we can dig down to the heart of what's important to us, and focus our time, effort, expense and expectation onto just those things that matter most. We wrote down the truly gigantic list of things we normally do at Christmas time, and sorted them into categories: what we would be happier without, what we don't care about either way, what we enjoy but could live without, and what we feel our hearts absolutely need to enjoy the season. The results were interesting.

My daughter had to make a special list item for "dogs everywhere", which I had never realized was an important part of Christmas at all, but now that I think about it, those fluffy smiling faces enjoying the gathering of family is really a traditional part of our celebration. I personally realized that I like making paper stars, but not hanging them in most of the windows, and it turns out nobody else likes them either. This was a part of both my partner and my childhood traditions, so we never questioned it. Now we know! Every single person had the same things at the top of the list: the wild tree we annually collect from our neighbours' driveway (we consider it sustainable because it's doomed, there, already), along with decorating and music and family gatherings. 

And gifts? They didn't register on three out of the four top lists! In fact, my son had them on the "rather not have" list, although opening his stocking was still enjoyable, and then followed by a feeling of guilt. My daughter, however, had gifts near the top of her list. This major discrepancy led to a lot of conversation in our home. It turns out we all carry so much ecologically-rooted guilt associated with consumerism that gift-giving has become stressful. We imagine it would be just fine if people gave gifts that were truly needed, like boot repairs, or the mixer my partner refurbished for his mother after she broke her arm. He gave her the gift of still being able to bake. Or time. Time together is the gift everybody in my household loves. It was consistently in the "can't be happy without this" category of our experiment. Singing with the family, gathering for anything and everything--those were also at the top of the list. Heartbreakingly so, during this time of pandemic restrictions, but knowing this means we have to find more ways to be together, safely.

This list activity has given us some great conversation and helped us to focus our hearts on what matters. We are boldly acknowledging that overspending on time, money or our future is absolutely not OK, and now we have a way forward out of this mess: Togetherness. A wild tree. Singing and playing music. Those things at the top of the lists are what we'll focus on, knowing now that our hearts will be filled without those things at the bottom.

How to Prepare for Scarcity and the Great Inflation

Illustration by Taliesin River

"You’d better prepare for the greatest inflationary wave in human history." That's the line that stuck out to me, near the end of umair haque's REALLY good article, "Why Everything is Suddenly Getting More Expensive -- And Why It Won't Stop". If you haven't read this article yet, or aren't already familiar with the idea of the Great Inflation, and how we're now paying for the affordability of past generations, I recommend reading that article before reading this one. 

umair's article was very helpful to my understanding of why our groceries are getting so expensive or why, for example, I looked into second hand electric cars a few years ago and could find plentiful good options under 9K, and now there are none. So we know the Great Inflation is happening. My question is, how are we preparing?

Emergency kits and Go-bags are not going to cut it. Home preparedness is totally underway at my house. After this year's excruciatingly horrible wildfire season, we made plans to back up our family photos and prepared a little waterproof box for our phones, wallets and hard-drive, for when we'll inevitably have to jump in the ocean and swim. After this year's heat-wave, we bought an air conditioner that doubles as a dehumidifier for the now annual warm-and-foggy (read: in-house-moldy) season. After the deep freeze we insulated our chicken-coop. After the current flood-caused highway (and whole-town) washouts, we put emergency supplies in our car. After gas prices jumped and the flood-caused supply chain disruptions made gas rationing necessary, we looked into electric cars. I already told you how that went. 

But what's next?? We all know that none of this is enough. We can hardly predict the next climate-change-related disaster. Who knows how we should prepare? The one thing we all have to do is learn to live differently. And the change needed is so drastic we can hardly fathom it. Personally, I need lists to help me fathom. So I'm making one. In my mind it breaks down to three broad sections: things we need "much less", "none" and "more". My list is not complete or well-organised, but it helps me sort out my mind, so here goes:

We need much less of this:
Most things in this first section should actually be on the "none" list, but at the moment our culture is such that we're going to need a transitional phase. I guess that's what this is. This gives us time to learn and share some skills we've abandoned and get prepared for the time when, whether we like it or not, all these things move to the "none" section.

Travel: As fuel and steel prices rise, it's going to become impossible for most people to travel, anyway, and the many industries that depend on travel tourism will die, regardless. But on top of that, it's already becoming impossible to commute for work, to send our children to non-local schools or programs; to visit our parents. We're going to have to use our great ingenuity, as we have already proven capable of during the pandemic, to work around this.

Dependence on government: I'm not sure what makes us think that the government will just keep creating resources to fix and replace those destroyed by climate change, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that right now our government and military are pretty taxed just dealing with the constant march of disasters. At some point that's going to break. There won't always be soldiers available to build dikes and put out fires. We might as well get used to that, and expect to do the work, ourselves. Yes we can.

Clothing: I have such a clothing addiction! I think I buy very few things--just a garment or four a year for each person in my household. And recently I try to buy sustainably. But I also still own, alter and wear many clothes from my teens, and every decade between then and now. I probably have about ten times as many clothes as I actually need, and it's not like giving them away would be any more sustainable. Some parts of the world are drowning in our "donations" (take time to watch that if you, like me, still thought donating clothes was helpful). The only actual solution to this is to stop buying, entirely. I know I have enough clothing to last the rest of my life, if I do more mending. And I could clothe the rest of my family, too.

Non-local food and industrial agriculture: We know that industrial agriculture, along with fossil-fuel driven production and transportation, is a disaster for our future. Thousands of chickens and cows just drowned in my province when the artificially-drained land they lived on flooded, because of climate change. Our flimsy, human-made systems are going to crash so hard they can't recover. We might as well accept that now, and start something new so we're ready when they're gone. There are many viable solutions for this problem, and they begin with all of us eating more simply. 

Imported food: We can do this now. My family is Dutch, and we LOVE our imported cheese. My family is also Mexican, and we--wait! We already figured out how to make our own tortillas from local corn! This isn't going to be as hard as I thought. This isn't as big a deal, perhaps, as how our food is produced, but it's one way we can make a difference to our impact, and become more engaged in local food production.

Fossil fuels. Resource Extraction. ALL. THE. WASTE: We're already making some progress with this. As we limit our needless use of office buildings for computer terminal work than can be done online, we will need less concrete and steel. As we commute and travel less, we'll need fewer highways and less fuel. As we drive less, fewer cars. And on it goes. The stuff that supported our wasteful consumerist existence will no longer be needed, and we can stop pillaging and burning our earth's resources.

We need none of this:
We already know these things are destroying us, and we can eliminate them, now. Yes, there will be devastating job losses, and huge shifts needed in our culture and thought patterns. We'll have to get very creative. But you know how when a close family member dies we're devastated and we don't know how we'll ever recover? But then we do, and we grow. And we end up somewhere new we never could have imagined before the loss. This will be the same.

Tourism: Yep. That's probably the end of the travel industry. Airlines. Cruising. Little plastic souvenirs and the trusted income source of so many communities, including mine. We'll find other ways to enjoy our world, along with other ways of supporting our communities.

Careers that depend on global travel: So much of our current air-travel is related to needless work-travel. It's the end of my career as an artist who exhibits in Amsterdam. A few years ago I might have said, "at least I got to do it once..." Now I'm kind of embarrassed I didn't make this realization before that. Lucky for us, technology has brought the world to our handheld devices. We can make the most of this.

Needless consumption, supporting mega corporations, escapism: I, like most of us, grew up in an age where Christmas was actually about presents; about light shows in shopping districts and buying stuff to feel happy. I learned to satisfy my soul by shopping, by travelling; by escaping my real-world life into screens, food, shopping, and travel. Now that that world is falling apart, it's no longer satisfying to fulfill those consumption needs. For Christmas I want to be released from the "age of stuff", as my friend recently called it on Facebook. Oh yeah. Facebook. That has to go too. I'm going to have to actually go to out and talk to my community members in person. I hope I find some walking around without their phones.

So now what? Now that we've dispensed of most of the biggest industries in the world, most of the jobs, and everything we actually loved about life... how on earth are we going to survive? Well, maybe not on earth. The billionaires are already playing with spaceflight. Let them move to Mars. The rest of us will dig deeply into that "More" category, and thrive. 

We need more of this:
This is the beauty section. This is where we take all the grief and fear from the previous two sections of my list, turn it on its head, and marvel at all the joy we've found.

Local food (and other resources): The more of us go find sustainable, local producers to satisfy our needs, the more such producers there will be. It's not cheap to do this, so a huge part of it is valuing the food for what it's really worth. My partner and I decided to eat very little meat, a few years ago, and what we do eat should be sustainably produced. So in order to afford this (both ecologically and financially) we went from eating meat three or four times per week to a maximum of once a week. And we eat cheese about twice a month. I'm still looking for a really good local cheesemaker. When I find one, that cheese is going to be as expensive as it should be, but deeply, deeply appreciated. When you don't get something very often, it becomes so much more valuable. It's the scarcity principle, but this time it's working for us.

Sharing: My family has chickens, now. Sometimes we don't have enough eggs even to bake bread. Sometimes, we have enough to bake, make quiches, and share with our family. Those are happy times, when we feel rewarded by our ability to contribute. Like when my neighbour grew so many apples she asked us to come pick some. We ate so many apples that year. Sharing isn't always about food, or even objects. We make a point of learning and sharing knowledge with our neighbours, as well. Sharing isn't just necessary for the equitable use of community resources--it's necessary for our survival.

Finding sustainable ways to contribute locally: This is the joyful counterpart to the misery of losing jobs and entire industries; economical collapse that will be a natural fallout from rampant inflation. This is where we find ourselves working instead of for money, for survival. And I can tell you from my experiences supporting unschooling parents, teaching and writing for free, and raising plants and animals for food, it's the most rewarding work I've ever done.

Connecting with community and local ecology: We protect what we know and love. Those who know and love us are our resources, and will protect us. This is the foundation of a wholistic society, but it's also the root of love and joy, so... what more can I say?

Pointedly appreciating what we do have: This comes back to the scarcity principle. My family has been regularly cutting back our consumption for a few years, now. We're eating mostly rice, corn, beans and lentils, along with what we grow, ourselves, and locally-grown veggies in the winter. We really enjoy our mushrooms, now that we only get them when they decide to pop up in the garden, or when we find them growing in the wild. It's the same for our homegrown chicken, eggs and veggies. It's the same for clothes we've mended or repurposed. Now that we rarely get to see our family (because: travel), we appreciate phone calls so much more. I make a big deal in my heart of what we took for granted, before. And that leaves me feeling deep joy.

~~~

Maybe it's weird to be talking about deep joy in relation to climate change disasters and our current basic needs becoming unaffordable. But maybe we're just not seeing straight. The cost (as opposed the price) of our lifestyle has been astronomical since our parents and grandparents were children. Now we're finally paying for it, in climate change disasters and rampant inflation. That's going to hurt a lot, no matter how we slice it. But maybe some mental preparation can make the hurt more tolerable. 

Maybe, instead of dreading the fires or floods or the housing crisis, we can prepare by living more simply, by forming strong communities of people who support each other; by building and living within our means. Maybe instead of rushing to the stores to stock up when we hear there's a shortage of microchips, maple syrup, or gas, we can embrace scarcity. Those last few spoonfuls of maple syrup are extra special now; I can feel resilient by making do with older devices, and I can walk instead of driving. I can even stay home. I can change careers, if I need to. And most of us will. Maybe, instead of working ourselves to death and spending more than we earn on big homes; spending time and money we don't have on travel and products that cost us our future, we can work less, spend less, love more, and look at everything we do have as if it is a gift. Because it really is. And we're finally learning to cherish it. That cherishing--that appreciation and finding of deep joy--is how we prepare our minds for the inevitable.

Survival: Agility of Mind and Heart

 

One of the various road-collapses on the Coquihalla Highway in British Columbia.
Photo used with permission from Douglas Noblet, of Wild Air Photography.
Douglas has shared a series of these photos here, on Facebook.

I was looking at these photos by Douglas Noblet, this morning, which seem to be mainly of the Fraser Valley, and highway collapses of the Coquihalla and the Hope-Princeton, and I found myself wondering how long it will take to restore our infrastructure. Months? Maybe years for the Coquihalla? (More on what's broken, here: North Shore News) 

Then I realized that we're in climate free-fall, now. Any restoration is going to be hampered by increasing floods, blizzards, storms, fires, deep-freezes and heat-waves, not to mention the human issues like pandemics, supply-disruption, economic strife, labour and food shortages. Maybe the answer isn't how to get back to old-normal, but how we move forward instead of backward, and build new normal. 

The flooded Sumas Prairie in British Columbia.
Photo used with permission from Douglas Noblet, of Wild Air Photography.
Douglas has shared a series of these photos here, on Facebook.

Upon hearing that thousands of dairy cows (half our province's dairy production) have drowned in their barns, I am ashamed to say that along with immense grief, I felt an urge to go buy "the last milk". My cousin reports that stores are bursting with panic-shoppers. What was I thinking?! Milk?! Really?! Milk is not a "need". Thankfully we didn't buy any. 

But you know what is a need? Love. Community. Right now we have some of our extended family here, who out of sheer luck got briefly lost on their way home to Princeton, and managed to just barely miss being caught in the Agassiz slide. So they're stuck here on the coast while their town is flooded. The silver lining to this situation is that, while we haven't seen them in over two years, due to the pandemic, last night I got to feel their arms around me, again. It was a huge relief. 

I know these photos are terrifying. It's awful to wonder if or how our kids will manage if schools remain closed, as they are now throughout the flooded valley and other towns. It's awful to wonder how our supplies and jobs and communities will survive if these highways and industries don't get repaired soon. It's awful just to wonder what we'll feed our kids if they can't have cereal with milk and they refuse to eat anything else! I know--it's a fear borne of privilege. But it's fear. We feel so easily lost at sea with no answers; no clear vision of where we're going. This fear leads to panic shopping, competition, greed, and more reckless consumption. It's exactly how we got to this place in human evolution, and the only way out is to let go of the fear. 

Now I'm thinking about how we can change, instead of rebuilding. It isn't the cows' milk we depend on, nor the farmland it came from. The Sumas Prairie was created a century ago by draining an enormous wetland. It was never our land, to begin with, and the question of buying milk seems so meaningless, now. It isn't the infrastructure that creates land for industrial farming, or brings our groceries from afar, nor the schools that hold our children while we work to buy the milk. It's love. Love is what makes us resilient. Love is what has brought citizens and business owners in the town of Hope to feed and shelter travellers trapped by mudslides. Love is what gives us the strength to grow food in the first place, to share with our neighbours even when we barely have enough, ourselves, to hold up our communities and hold on to hope. Love is what supports us while our minds are doing the amazing task of being agile; of finding solutions to problems we never fathomed just a few years ago. Love is what creates agility of mind and heart, and gives us the power to survive. 

The new normal we need to be building will become evident as the old normal is no longer available. For me, it is found in the arms of my loved ones. If I never drink milk again, and if my whole "normal" becomes something I can't even fathom, right now, it will be built on love.

Climate Catastrophe: Why an Unschooling Mindset in School or at Home Is Essential Now

Paddling in Wildfire Smoke on Tum Tum Lake, August 2021, photo by Kristina Calli

Yesterday I listened to a news report about the UN "code red" climate change report, which is likely to be the last such report written before we go beyond the 1.5° of warming that will put an end to life as we know it, if we don't take drastic action, NOW. At the end of the report, CBC played a clip of Greta Thunberg saying, "Today, it will probably be quite popular to talk about the climate crisis; tomorrow it will not be popular anymore." I knew she was right, and I can't let that happen. Today is tomorrow, and I had to do a text search just to find the reports I heard, yesterday. They've been eclipsed by reports of covid, bitcoin, defamation lawsuits, and the health status of movie stars.

And why not? It's easier to care about individuals than our vague and vast communal future. Easier to care that one local person lost their dog in a fire than the millions of animals currently burning just inland from us; people losing their homes and farms and futures. Unless we know them personally, their stories are just part of the mesh of disaster that we look away from. Because we're overwhelmed. 

Overwhelm is reasonable. It's acceptable to look away; to protect our mental health. But it's not acceptable to ignore the crisis. So what can we do? I've been asking myself. The answers are also so vast and vague. We know we need to consume less. We know we need to divest from supporting fossil fuel industries, or for those of us who can't afford investments, to simply question the ways we support those industries in our daily lives. Can we live more locally? Can we consume more locally? Can we eliminate foods and products and activities that depend on fossil fuels or other ecologically devastating industries? Those things are easy, compared to the big things--big things like the medical system and school system; our centralized cities and global industries; all the huge systems that are interdependent with not only the fossil fuel industry, but our rampant capitalism that feeds it. We have to move towards a post-capitalist, decentralized society, and that is not at all easy. Just the thought makes me feel overwhelmed and powerless. I'm only one lady with a crippling disability, one hard-working partner, and two kids, and I care most about my own little household. How am I going to save the world?

Then I realized that as parents we DO have power in how we educate our children. In places like where I live, we have legal options to home-school--with an unschooling philosophy if we choose, which helps move us away from the centralized society we currently have that supports the status quo. That moving away from the status quo is exactly what we need to do, and not only does home- or unschooling physically remove us from it, but it prepares our minds for a new paradigm. In fact, many of the concepts integral to unschooling will help us move in sustainable directions, even when used in schools. It's the mindset that we gain through this kind of living that will help us build and thrive in the new, post-capitalist society. Let me explain:

What Is an Unschooling Mindset?
Unschooling is the practice of allowing our children (or ourselves) to move, grow and learn exploratively, independently from the capitalist notion of "school". Sometimes this looks like bucking the school system altogether, and living a free-range life, engaged in whatever interests us; developing similar skills and understanding as school-going people, but organically. Sometimes, unschooling involves various parts of the school system, as they benefit the learner or the wider community. My unschooled children both attended school programs for a few years, when those programs (or social situations) served their needs. But we accessed them with an unschooling mindset: to use what works for us, in whatever way best serves us, and to skip the rest. 

What Does An Unschooling Mindset Have to Do With Post-Capitalism?
Moving to a new way of living, societally, will require us to have flexible minds. It will require us to be agile in our thinking; to creatively solve problems we never expected, and to move forward courageously in situations we're unprepared for. All of those things are habit to the unschooled mind.

Unschooling, whether at home or at school, means taking each experience as it comes, with a deep awareness of personal and community needs. At home, we look at the options the day has presented to us, and follow our instincts and current assessment of needs to determine what will best feed us on this day. We learn organically, in a needs-based prioritization, and hence develop the skills that will best serve us. Maybe we don't learn to read when we're five, but when the need to read arises, maybe at nine or ten or twelve, it's easier to pick up the skill, because our needs and prior experiences have prepared us. In school, the teacher hands out an activity--the one they feel will best serve the majority of students--and the students who are unschooling through school will assess the activity and determine independently whether the activity merits their participation or whether they might better benefit from working independently on something else. That can be difficult to do as an individual unschool-minded student in a school that doesn't allow for such independent thinking, but there are democratic schools all over the world that function very well in a scenario just like this. Students in these schools are empowered to work towards their own best purposes, and in doing so, empower each other to do the same. Students in unschooling groups, democratic schools and other similar programs are accustomed to assessing and providing for their own needs, as well as to determining their own engagement in the greater community. Hence they're also accustomed to keeping cognizant of the community's needs. Fast forward to a post-capitalist society, and these same students will find it easier to assess their own needs and meaningfully engage with their communities. When we are no longer told how to engage by schools, corporations, and capitalist-funded media, we're going to need to figure those things out for ourselves. 

That takes courage now, and as climate disasters become an increasingly large part of our lives, our need for courage and ingenuity will only grow. I think about the man I heard interviewed on the radio after he watched his parents burned alive, while they hid in a ditch and a wildfire burned through the town of Lytton. Now he has to pick up and carry on; to find meaning and drive in a world that will never, ever be status quo again for him. I think about the principal of the Stein Valley Nlakapamux school who fled her home at the onset of that same fire. She and dozens of other evacuees ran for the school, and her first thought was to make sandwiches for incoming people, because it was dinner time. Before she could finish preparing the food, the fire had jumped the river and they all fled north again, to settle in Lilloet. The people of Lilloet, themselves on evacuation alert due to a different massive wildfire, took the Lytton evacuees and housed and fed them. With courage and agile-thinking, everybody in this horrible situation stepped up as needed, in the moment. Interestingly, the Stein Valley Nlakapamux school is one of those forward-thinking schools, working to equip students with courage, community values, and self-reliance. It didn't surprise me that the first thing their principal did when arriving at the school as an evacuee--her home burning down just miles away--was to make sandwiches. Thankfully, the school was one of the few buildings spared in that horrible fire, and it also doesn't surprise me that now, with the town still under a state of emergency, they have delayed their school year and offered up their building as a relief and gathering centre for those working to rebuild. That is agility, courage, and creativity in action. 

We don't have a choice about becoming a post-capitalist society. Either we change voluntarily right now, or the now-commonplace storms, floods, fires and pandemics will drive our capitalist society into the ground. You know what will be left after that? People. Maybe with no landscape or resources to speak of; maybe with not much hope, but there will be people. And if those people are prepared with an unschooling midset, we will persevere.

Climate Catastrophe: How an Unschooling Mindset Will Help Us Persevere

My brother, Adrian, paddling in wildfire smoke at Tum Tum Lake, British Columbia, Canada
photo by Kristina Calli

Last summer, amid smoke and fire, drought and various ecological die-offs, came the news about the UN "code red" climate change report, which is likely to be the last such report written before we go beyond the 1.5° of warming that will put an end to life as we know it, if we don't take drastic action, NOW. At the end of the report, CBC played a clip of Greta Thunberg saying, "Today, it will probably be quite popular to talk about the climate crisis; tomorrow it will not be popular anymore." I knew she was right, and I can't let that happen. The day after that report came out, I had to do a text search on the CBC website just to find the report from the day before. It had been eclipsed by reports of covid, bitcoin, defamation lawsuits, and the health status of movie stars.

And why not? It's easier to care about individuals than our vague and vast communal future. Easier to care that one local person lost their dog in a fire than the millions of animals currently burning just inland from us; people losing their homes and farms and futures. Unless we know them personally, their stories are just part of the mesh of disaster that we look away from. Because we're overwhelmed.

Overwhelm is reasonable. It's acceptable to look away; to protect our mental health. But it's not acceptable to ignore the crisis. So what can we do? I've been asking myself. The answers are also so vast and vague: We know we need to consume less. We know we need to divest from fossil fuel industries, or for those of us who can't afford investments, to simply question the ways we support those industries in our daily lives. Can we live more locally? Can we consume more locally? Can we eliminate foods and products and activities that depend on fossil fuels or other ecologically devastating industries? Those things are easy, compared to the big things--big things like the medical system and school system; our centralized cities and global industries; all the huge systems that are interdependent with not only the fossil fuel industry, but our rampant capitalism that feeds it. We have to move towards a post-capitalist, decentralized society, and that is not at all easy. Just the thought makes me feel overwhelmed and powerless. I'm only one lady with a crippling disability. I have one hard-working partner, and two kids, and I care most about my own little household. How am I going to save the world?

Then I realized that as parents we DO have power in how we educate our children. In places like where I live, we have legal options to home-school--with an unschooling philosophy if we choose--which helps move us away from the centralized society we currently have that supports the status quo. That moving away from the status quo is exactly what we need to do, and not only does home- or unschooling physically remove us from the status quo of mainstream brick-and-mortar schools, but it prepares our minds for a new paradigm. In fact, many of the concepts integral to unschooling will help us move in sustainable directions, even when used in schools. Unschooling is more of a lifestyle or mindset than it is a pedagogy. It's the mindset that we gain through this kind of living that will help us build and thrive in the new, post-capitalist society. Let me explain:

What Is an Unschooling Mindset?
Unschooling is the practice of allowing our children (or ourselves) to move, grow and learn exploratively, independently from the capitalist notion of "school". Sometimes this looks like bucking the school system altogether, and living a free-range life, engaged in whatever interests us; developing similar skills and understanding as school-going people, but organically. Sometimes, unschooling involves various parts of the school system, as they benefit the learner or the wider community. My unschooled children both attended school programs for a few years, when those programs (or social situations) served their needs. But we accessed them with an unschooling mindset: to use what works for us, in whatever way best serves us, and to skip the rest.

Wait--skip the rest? Isn't that kind of arrogant? Or isn't that missing out on all those things that our kids need? After all, the people who built the school's curriculum know better than our kids do what's important to do and learn, right? Amazingly, generations of unschooling families have discovered that, while unschooled kids may learn and grow on their own schedule, they generally meet the same milestones as the school-going population at similar times. The reason is that those milestones (and curricula) were indeed made thoughtfully, based on the natural progression of learning, and age-appropriate activities. Not all kids will be inspired by all of these things at the same time, but on the whole, there's a predictable progression of skill acquisition, throughout childhood. So, unschooling kids who follow their own innate interests tend to choose and acquire the same skills at similar times. As an parent of unschoolers who has often been teaching my kids' peers in classrooms, I've frequently been amazed to witness this phenomenon.

What Does An Unschooling Mindset Have to Do With Post-Capitalism?
Moving to a new way of living, societally, will require us to have flexible minds. It will require us to be agile in our thinking; to creatively solve problems we never expected, and to move forward courageously in situations we're unprepared for. All of those things are habit to the unschooled mind.

Unschooling, whether at home or at school, means taking each experience as it comes, with a deep awareness of personal and community needs. At home, we look at the options the day has presented to us, and follow our instincts and current assessment of needs to determine what will best feed us on this day. We learn organically, in a needs-based prioritization, and hence develop the skills that will best serve us, in the moment. Maybe we don't learn to read when we're five, but when the need to read arises, maybe at nine or ten or twelve, it's easier to pick up the skill, because our current needs and prior experiences have prepared us. 

In a school that supports an unschooling (or self-determined) mindset, the teacher presents an activity--the one they feel will best serve the majority of students--and the students who are unschooling through school will assess the activity and determine independently whether it merits their participation or whether they might better benefit from working independently on something else. There are democratic schools all over the world that function very well in a scenario just like this. Students in these schools are empowered to work towards their own best purposes, and in doing so, empower each other to do the same. Students in unschooling groups, democratic schools and other similar programs are accustomed to assessing and providing for their own needs, as well as to determining their own engagement in the greater community. Hence they're also accustomed to keeping cognizant of the community's needs. Fast forward to a post-capitalist society, and these same students will find it easier to assess their own needs and meaningfully engage with their communities. When we are no longer told how to engage by schools, corporations, and capitalist-funded media, we're going to need to figure those things out for ourselves.

That takes courage now, and as climate disasters become an increasingly large part of our lives, our need for courage and ingenuity will only grow. I think about the man I heard interviewed on the radio after he watched his parents burned alive, while they hid in a ditch and a wildfire burned through the town of Lytton, British Columbia. Now he has to pick up and carry on; to find meaning and purpose in a world that will never, ever be status quo for him again. I think about the (now former) principal of the Stein Valley Nlakapamux School who fled her home at the onset of that same fire. She and dozens of other evacuees ran for the school, and her first thought was to make sandwiches for incoming people, because it was dinner time. Before she could finish preparing the food, the fire had jumped the river and they all fled north again, to settle in Lilloet. The people of Lilloet, themselves on evacuation alert due to a different massive wildfire, took the Lytton evacuees and housed and fed them. With courage and agile-thinking, everybody in this horrible situation stepped up as needed, in the moment. Interestingly, the Stein Valley Nlakapamux School is one of those forward-thinking schools, working to equip students with courage, community values, and self-reliance. It didn't surprise me that the first thing their principal did when arriving at the school as an evacuee--her home burning down just a few miles away--was to make sandwiches. Thankfully, the school was one of the few buildings spared in that horrible fire, and it also doesn't surprise me that now, with the town still under a state of emergency, they have begun the year with online learning, and offered up their building as a relief and gathering centre for those working to rebuild. That is agility, courage, and creativity in action.

We don't have a choice about becoming a post-capitalist society. Either we change voluntarily right now, or the now-commonplace storms, floods, fires and pandemics will drive our capitalist society into the ground. You know what will be left after that? People. Maybe with few habitable areas or resources to speak of, but there will be people. And if those people are prepared with an unschooling mindset, we will persevere.

Growing up without Grad: How It’s Going One Year in to This Epic Life-Choice

Rhiannon baking keto pecan shortbread, today.

It's a rainy day, eighteen months into covid isolation. My daughter just put a tray of cookies into the oven. Rain is falling thick and heavy, and through the dining room window I see the beans and luffa streaming fresh cool water onto the porch. It's been a long, dry summer. The well has run dry twice, already, and today I am just filled to bursting with gratitude for the rain, but also, on this labour day weekend, for having my family safe and close, and for my daughter's brave decision, last year, to drop out of school. It turns out that dropping out of the system was even better for our daughter than we expected. Finally, she is thriving.

Last year, around this time, Rhiannon faced the uncertainty of returning to her part-time school program during the pandemic, and opted to register as a homeschooler, instead, following her own interest in a self-determined path to adulthood. She'd been unschooling all her life, in and out of alternative school programs and musical theatre, voice and acting programs. But always, she thought she would eventually fulfill graduation requirements, attend university, and end up teaching preschool or--even more to her liking--open a school for self-determined learners. When covid hit, the school she attended went online, and she discovered two things: First, commuting to school had been sucking the life out of her, quite literally. And secondly, online school just sucks in general. 

Over the course of the lonely summer, she made peace with the reality of not seeing friends, and reassessed her needs. She contacted the university where she intends to study early childhood education, and formulated a plan for getting in as a homeschooler, which in our province means no graduation diploma. To her delight, they were very encouraging. And with that reassurance, she declared her decision not to graduate. What did she do with this first year of ultimate (but isolated) freedom? Well let me tell you about that.

Isolation
Looking back on those first few months of online pandemic schooling (all the school with none of the face-to-face contact), I can see why it was so awful. The greatest thing about school for my young socialite daughter was the friends. From her earliest days of unschooling, when she nearly decided to attend Kindergarten with her friends, it was about the friends. Now here she is, at the beginning of what would have been her grad year, with no grad to attend, no friend-group to plan with, no dress to buy, and not even classes, tests, and teachers to complain about. I offered to buy her a dress and host a prom for her but she declined. To say this is a loss would be a massive understatement. It's a cold miserable metallic wall between my girl and some of the major life experiences we are conditioned to look forward to. It's an equally massive achievement that she has surmounted this disappointment, and a great relief to me that she seems to appreciate the benefits of the other side of the grad-no-grad coin.

She's free.

She's free, and do you know what that means? Well, that's the thing--it could mean anything to anyone, and she's had the freedom of defining that totally for herself. I can't speak for her, and most certainly not for her future, but I do see her with the perspective of a mother who's watched her grow. I see her with uncertainty and fear for her future, as most mothers would, but also with a great respect as she's shown me again and again that she is capable of achieving goals I couldn't even wrap my head around, myself. I see her, also, with the eye of someone who used to have to describe her activities in a convincingly schooly way to satisfy ministry requirements, and worried grandparents. 

Evaluating Learning
Yep, there was a period of about six years, when we unschooled at home while enrolled in a ministry program that required me to report regularly how my kids' activities met the "prescribed learning outcomes" for their respective grades. I know now that unschooling would have been much easier if we'd just pulled out of the system entirely, but that experience really taught me to see the culturally-defined "value" in my kids' activities. So guess what? I'm going to do it again! But this time I'm describing the skills that I've seen my daughter develop during the first whole year of completely unschooling herself outside the system... including those activities that I have struggled to see the value of. Yeah. She's free. And here's what that's done for her.

Clara and Kalea waiting for their birthday pupcakes!

Raising a Puppy
Rhiannon began planning for a new puppy months before we agreed to it. Our previous dog had died quite tragically, so we adults were just not emotionally prepared to welcome a new puppy. But when the pandemic arrived and we watched our girl grow increasingly lonely, we began to see the value in it. The one requirement we had was that she would take this dog on, herself: poops, walks, vet bills and all. It would have to be her dog, and that meant a very big commitment. Years. Yes, she said. And she got her dog. Clara Snowberry Leftwie is now a year old. Rhiannon has trained her, walked her faithfully every day, taken on veterinary and other care decisions entirely on her own but with a great amount of research, and (mostly) kept our yard poop-free. When Clara ate something awful and needed to vomit every half-hour in the night, Rhiannon cleaned her bed and took her out. When Clara peed on the carpet, Rhiannon cleaned it up. When we ran out of dog treats, Rhiannon learned to bake some. When Clara's first birthday arrived, Rhiannon made pupcakes for Clara and her best doggy friend, Kalea. Rhiannon has not only shown herself to be responsible and a very capable dog owner, but also to be flexible, committed, and cautious in her decision-making.

Baking
Like many people during this pandemic, our family has done a lot of baking. Rhiannon eats a mostly ketogenic diet, due to her ongoing thyroid and autoimmune issues. So when she wants bread, sweets or, well... almost anything... she has to make it from scratch. In the past year she's become quite adept at baking cookies, cakes and quick breads without a recipe, as well as all sorts of interesting potato and veggie dishes, depending what's available in the garden. To my mind, the "without a recipe" part is the best part, because it means she's experimenting, and learning heaps about the properties of the ingredients and processes she's using. Above all, she's learning to take calculated risks; to have faith in her choices and to problem-solve along the way.

Once, when Rhiannon was much, much younger, I found her miserably hanging over a bowl of what looked like cereal, her spoon dripping thick-looking milk into the bowl. She looked near tears. When I asked what was wrong, she looked bleakly at me and said that she had made herself an invention of cornflakes, pepperoni, frozen peas, milk and lemon juice, and now that she had made it, she felt she had to eat it. But it was bad. Well... she's come a long way!! Plus, we now have chickens to help us deal with the accidents.

Our rooster, the Splash, helping to construct his new coop.

Farming
Yep--chickens!!! I saw a t-shirt the other day that said "I might look like I'm listening to you, but in my head I'm thinking about getting more chickens..." Well, that would be us, I guess. Before we agreed to the dog, we agreed to the chickens. We also agreed to visit a farm, where Rhiannon sat for hours (and more hours) watching the cattle, just waiting to see if one of the pregnant cows would go into labour. Was that a labour moo? I think that one's been pacing a bit. Do you think that one is standing especially still? ... So just over a year ago we brought home thirty chicks and built them a really fabulous coop and run. Over time, they needed all sorts of unexpected care, as well as a new coop to be built. Rhiannon and her brother, Tali built that second coop themselves, out of scrap lumber, which is infinitely more work than using new materials. It requires not only a good amount of construction know-how (which they learned from helping with the first coop) but also a huge amount of engineering problem-solving, since there really never is an appropriately-sized piece for the job. Learning improvised construction on the fly is something we didn't expect from farming, but it sure is happening!

In addition to the more tangible skills like construction, coop and run maintenance, and chicken husbandry, we've all had to confront our own ethical choices. We're raising chickens as part of a general rewilding of our home. We slaughter and eat our chickens, and Rhiannon has chosen to keep at a distance from that activity. Every time we gleefully give one of our broody hens some eggs and then count down days until hatching, we fall in love, and every time we do, we accept the eventuality that most of those chicks will end up on our plates. Some of them may die before that even happens, and a couple of times it's been Rhiannon who finds the corpses or ailing birds. Coming to terms with the reality of consciously farming and eating meat, as well as how much of our vegetable garden we need to sacrifice to the chickens while still retaining enough to feed ourselves, involves some deep emotional growth. Rhiannon may not always eat meat, but this farming journey, with its extreme elation (babies!!) and deep reckoning on slaughter days is, I feel, a very important part of what it is to be human.

Another lesson we're all learning from this process is to eat seasonally. Rhiannon (and all of us) have become much more adept at designing a meal around what's available in the garden today than we were a couple of years ago. No eggs today? No macaroons. No lettuce? Make salad out of kale, or pick wild greens. No pickles? I guess we should have grown more cucumbers. It forces all of us to plan for the future; to be aware of what we have now, and to consume as if our consumption matters. Because it does, and farming makes that more evident.

Playing The Sims
You might have noticed me mentioning babies quite a bit. The puppy, the chicks, watching cows hoping to see them calve... Rhiannon has loved babies since she was a baby herself. That's not going to change. So she's been playing The Sims for years now: Basically making homes for cartoon people to grow and raise babies in. Sure you can play without babies, but I'm not sure she does that much, if ever. I can't say I love the amount of time or the money (all her own) that she spends on this game, but if I'm going to write about the benefits of The Sims, I'll have to find some. 

Sims is all hers. That's one thing. She paid for it, and that means I can't complain, even though I want to. Independence is always good. And it turns out there's a massive community around this game, like so many others. She and an apparently huge number of other people livestream their gameplay and chat together about their experiences. In a time of very little in-person social interaction, I can see the benefit of this. And to be fair, she's learned a great deal about video game politics and self-regulation through her playing of this game.

Watching TV with Clara and a rooster.

Watching Youtube and TV
Erm. This is a hard one for me. She watches some things I really appreciate, and some that horrify me. I could say we're always learning from whatever we watch, and that's true, but actually, the shows the kids watch have led to some epic conversations (and arguments) about social and political issues in our house. And that's definitely always a good thing!

Writing Her Second Novel
Rhiannon actually somehow managed to write her first novel while also attending programs many days per week, but one thing we've all learned this year is that second novels are sometimes much harder to write. First novels often come from such a deep place of self-knowledge and personal experience that they can't help but be deeply moving and engaging. With a second novel, a writer wants, perhaps, to break the mould and create something new. That might require not only a whole lot more research than a more personal novel, but also a kind of deep personal introspection, as the writer makes infinite ethical, narrative, imaginative and descriptive decisions. In Rhiannon's case, this second novel has a much more complex narrative, so has required quite a bit more editing and rewriting than her first novel did. Learning to navigate criticism from editors as well as quite a substantial amount of redrafting is an intense lesson in self-regulation, resilience, and tenacity. Not to mention mastery of language, obviously. She's not ready to publish her second novel yet, but you can be sure I'll write about it, when she does.

Publishing a Youth Magazine
The whole idea behind this magazine thrills me. In a world where many people are looking for fame, my writer daughter decided to publish a magazine solely for the purpose of publishing other people's work. The Youth Voice Magazine publishes kids' work, of course, because... well... if you haven't noticed yet... Rhiannon's whole life is about supporting kids of all species. The number of interesting things she's learning from the process of promoting, collecting submissions for, curating, editing and publishing a magazine has been wonderful for me to watch. She figured it out all on her own, promoted largely through social media, and after a few months has a list of contributors from around the world, and another teen volunteering as an editor. She's been invited to speak about the magazine, and with every issue that comes out she learns more about editing, publishing, supporting contributors, and generally working with kids.

Babysitting, Mentoring, and Running Community Programs
Working with kids. You didn't think a measly pandemic could stop her, did you? She still babysits, outside and with masks on. But that wasn't enough for her, so she organized and ran some kids' book clubs over the past spring and summer, and has now moved on to mentoring young(er) writers, and will soon be running two programs for kids at our local school. The process of developing her career during a pandemic has taught her all the more obvious things, like networking, management skills, professional engagement with parents and the kids she's teaching, but it has also given her opportunity to grow, emotionally. She has had to learn to engage over Zoom, as so many of us have (but it's so much more difficult with young children!), and to stick to her values when presented with job opportunities that she doesn't agree with, from an educational standpoint.

Organizing and Facilitating an Un/Learning Festival
What is her educational standpoint? Well... it's basically unschooling. (Yeah, I'm proud and not going to hide it.) My daughter and some other young people organized an online Un/Learning Festival this past summer. It was amazing. They had attendance and speakers from some very well-respected self-determined learning organizations, as well as many interested parents and learners. They produced this festival on their own terms and were so successful that they're now deep in planning for an in-person festival, next year. Imagine families and educators all with dreams of creating deep self-determined learning opportunities for everyone, all getting together for one fabulous weekend of creative engagement. And it's likely going to happen on a farm. (A farm! See where I’m going, here?)

The Future
In one year of fully unschooling herself outside the system, my daughter has brought together everything she loves about life and is pursuing her dreams with abandon. Her rather large dog sits on her lap as she runs Zoom book clubs for kids, or runs out to protect the chickens when ravens fly through the yard. My girl can cook up a really delicious chicken dinner from a bird she watched hatch from an egg, but she knows herself well enough to stay in the house on slaughter day. She has maintained friendships with those closest to her, and broadened her circle to include people who share her values about nurturing healthy childhoods and providing freedom in education. She gets together nearly every day with either the Un/Learning Festival organizing committee, the kids she mentors in person or online, her young writer's group, Sims players from around the world, or other people out walking their dogs. Today she and one of her oldest friends had a puppy play date. They watched as the friend's slightly younger dog observed the signs of Rhiannon's Clara going into heat. She is hoping to go on an epic post-grad trip with friends. 

Oh yeah. It's her friends' grad; not hers. She's not graduating. But maybe there will be a formal un-grad ceremony and dance at the Un/Learning Festival next year. Because opting out of high school doesn't mean opting out of life. It means creating your own best life. And apparently, that's what Rhiannon is busy doing.

~~~

*For those wondering about our son, Taliesin, he's working as a freelance 3D artist, now. I wrote about him recently, here: Why My Son Quit Science and How to Raise a Scientist

Parenting from Authenticity When Everything Is Not OK

Taliesin, age five.

When I was a teenager, hammering and whining at the bathroom door where my mother was retreating from my rage, she called out from inside our small bathroom, "Emily, if you keep this up, the shit will really hit the fan".

Whoah. She actually swore. And what an expression! I pictured poop from our toilet, flying up to the fan and getting chopped; scattered in all directions. I imagined how awful that would be, and knew this was a big hairy deal. I would have to badger my mother another time. I had no concept, back then, of SHTF, go-bags, memes or fake news. I had no concept of Internet, or the rising tide of terror that my own kids would grow up in. You know: actual crisis. Like in 2021. Or is this just mini-crisis on the way? When do we get to authentically declare SHTF?

I long for the days when I worried that my kids would be traumatized because their birthday party was cancelled, or their great-grandparent died. I mean--that was traumatic, for sure, but these days the trauma is next-level. It's existential. I don't even know where to turn, sometimes, as a parent. It's like a video game that everybody else is winning but the more we play, the more we realize we won't make it. We just keep losing hearts. When my kids' grandfather died, and my son was hauled out of school in a crazed panic just to look at the pallid empty face of a man he loved, that must have been the BIG boss of childhood trauma. Right? Was it? Then the family fell apart and the kids lost their aunties, their cousins; their grandmother. Maybe losing Grandpa was just the mini-boss. Such personal loss is huge for kids; it's huge for us parents, and then... there's the Bigger Boss.

We rounded the corner and suddenly wildfires are burning entire towns (again) and there's evidence of thousands of children's graves on the grounds of supposed "schools". That would be the MEGA Boss for sure (or Boss Rush?), but we're battling it on top of severely depleted emotional strength and health stats, as our kids carry ongoing covid fears, pervasive stress around housing and food security, unending news of climate-change disasters around the world, and social/political crises increasing, everywhere. It's not going to get any better. This is the Battle Royale for our kids' hearts, and we need to ask ourselves whether we're going to exit the game or persevere.

Oh wait. It's not a game. We've been fooling ourselves. All this shit is real.

I often feel like it's my job to explain the hardship away; to help my kids navigate these experiences with documented evidence that Everything's Going to Be OK. I personally tend to catastrophize, so when I catch myself doing that, I try to turn it around and provide evidence of hope. Like I'm the one with the knowledge and can heal all the world's ills by just explaining them away. Or just by buying stuff or experiences to temporarily distract and blind us from the apocalyptic fire coming down around us. Whoops there I go again. It's just that I didn't know it would be this bad! Even in my direst catastrophizing moments I didn't quite expect things to be this extreme, this quickly. I was blinded by others trying to minimize the horror. I blinded myself, in constant efforts just to persevere to the NEXT Big Boss, and I have tried to blind my children.

Well that was a bad idea. My children are not blind! They weren't sold on life-as-a-video-game. They were begging us to stop war and climate change since they were very little, and we didn't. Just like our parents, back in the eighties and nineties, we kept buying them stuff and more stuff like somehow it could bury the fears. We kept sending them to schools and camps and socially-condoned experiences of childhood like if we just pretended it was all still OK, then it would be. We dragged them head-first into the very consumerism that's killing us just to hide us all from the truth. And all that time our kids were watching us. They grew in that reality. Some have knitted soft fluffy blinders to their eyes and walked right into the mirage we gave them; others have rebelled and are now leading marches without us. Most are just somewhere in the hazy smoke of youth trying to figure out which way to turn. And watching us turn away. Just like our own parents did, we have given up on our children. Like we could just Exit Game.

How many times have I been angry with my own parents for not making the changes necessary to save my world when I was young? Because honestly, we knew what the problems were back then, and they were still buying bigger cars, right? Now we're the parents. And how many times have I said, "we're doing all we can," or "the problem is too big to be solved by consumers" or how many times did we just buy our kids new clothes instead of fixing the old ones because their social lives mattered more than the climate--just today? That's me, sitting in my privilege, because I hope to be one of the lucky ones when the shit hits the fan.

So the shit has been hitting the fan for years now, and we regularly talk about packing a "go-bag" in case of social collapse or fire. I look in my kids' faces and calmly explain how, because we live on an island, our go-bag for wildfire will include life jackets for us and the dog, a floaty for the cats in their carrier, a whistle and sunscreen. Should we pack masks for the smoke, or flippers so we can paddle away from our home more quickly? My kids look at me with half-rolled eyeballs, because all of us know this isn't much of a plan. Because there can't be a plan. No video game prepared us for this. Our kids know we're feeding them a sham of security. They know. It's time for us to stop the charade and look this life in the eye.

But HOW?! 

We've been parenting from a place of fear; of deep insincerity. We've been downplaying the catastrophe of climate change for generations, now, because as each of us grows into adulthood, we become swept into the delusion our parents clung to; shackled to the same false hope that if we just climb a little higher, we'll come out on top--maybe get a ride on a spaceship--and survive the coming hardships. Maybe our kids will grow up to befriend Elon Musk and it will all be OK. We know that's a pile of shit, and even SHTF doesn't describe the sewer we've walked ourselves into. If we want to parent from a place of authenticity, we need to stop this fantasy, now. We've hidden this truth from our children, because we assume they can't handle it, burying it in toys and games and TV until we end up raising them into the same delusion we carry, ourselves. Our children are already handling the truth, and it's time we did, too. Let's face this truth now:

If we want our children to survive until old age, we all have to stop consuming, now. Jobs will disappear, money will disappear, entire industries and things we're accustomed to having in our lives will disappear. People will die. Our plans and dreams will die. And our delusion will disappear. It's going to be bloody hard. But easier than SHTF. We have no choice. And that is real.

I want to live in real. No more hiding. I mean to make some changes in the way I live, and thus make it easier for my children to follow suit. We know that living globally is part of the problem. Even when we're not traveling, our food and consumer products are produced using cheap labour and resources that always mean someone else is paying the price. Global capitalism is a foundational concept behind colonialism, consumerism, and carbon emission. It exists because of our privilege, and the more we live and consume globally, the more privilege we gain. But we don't need it--not the privilege or all the stuff it affords us. 

I'm sitting here today in the pale blue haze that is the remnant of inland fires, drinking tea. I know those are particles of people, houses, animals, forests and whole ecosystems drifting by outside my window. I know that remediation of the catastrophic time we're living in means staying home, and simple, even when it means sacrifice. I am trying to see my way through this very real circumstance not like a video game, but like a slow meditation of simplicity, connection, and hope. I'm thinking that this cup of chamomile tea, grown right outside my front door, might be a more suitable pleasure than store-bought distractions. I'm thinking that the gentle curve of my children's faces should be the thing I look to for positive distraction from crisis. This feeling of living in the moment--this deep appreciation of what is real--is, to me, what being in a place of authenticity feels like. I feel some of the heat of my own anger dissipating, and I want to do better for my children than the status quo.

Dear children, I will no longer behave like everything is OK. I see your open eyes, and I will keep mine open, with you, because I am learning courage from you. I will become comfortable not having all the answers. I will say "I don't know", in all honesty, and I will learn to be OK with that. I will no longer buy things to soothe your fears or take morally ambiguous jobs just to fund our morally ambiguous purchases. I will no longer drive or fly you out of our community for life-experiences. I will build this community into everything we need, just here. I will cry with you when we all feel hopeless, and I'll work every day to laugh, as well; to build and grow reasons to be hopeful. I will look at this world, my place in it, and your growing faces with hope, resilience and humility. Because those are the gifts you have given me, and I want to give them to you, as well.

Creating Hope as an Exit from Existential Fear

This has been a hard, hard month in my province. We're reckoning with our responsibility regarding both climate change and colonialism (which are inextricably linked). Our province is beginning to locate the remains of thousands of murdered indigenous children, at the same time as our towns, farms, wildlife and even humans burn, in the climate-change-fueled fires we're now accustomed to. And all the while we're trying to save the last remaining stands of old-growth forest on this land... with very little success, so far. Colonialism, capitalism, consumerism and industrial terrorism are huge foes and how can we not feel small and weak? Terror and hopelessness abound. Two generations of kids are growing up without hope. And now they're looking at their parents and seeing no reassurance, because we adults are scared, too. We have no idea how we're going to pull out of this one. I think the only way out is through. 

Yes, to some degree, it's necessary to recognize the fire and just run like hell. It's necessary to make sure our neighbours know about the fire. It's necessary to point out that the torch and gas are in our own hands. But then... where do we run to? Through the fire and out the other side? Where's the other side? And why even bother? The concept of "through" requires us to see an exit on the other side, and we have to want that exit.

The exit we want is joy. Harmony. Peace. Love. Those are things worth running to. So we have to find joy, again--or create it. We have to create hope. We have to find reasons to stop fighting and instead start working for change, and, even more importantly, we have to make that change joyful. We have to know that the place we're headed is the place we want to be going.

You get back what you put into the world. Most of us know that, at some level. And yet many, including myself, are feeling and putting out a lot of fear. I think I put joy into the world wherever I can, but maybe I can do more! Maybe instead of dwelling in the anger that my friends' missing siblings might be among those buried children, or instead of raging against the industries and "isms" that are creating climate change, I can make an exit door.

I know it's hard. Sometimes I just want to hide--bury my face in the pillow, or in the tear-soaked sweater of my partner, and wallow in my hopelessness. Sometimes I want to spend money I don't have on something I don't need and just pretend the whole scary world doesn't exist. That's OK for a minute, but then I have to look up again from my sorrow or my distraction and be real. 

I guess for all of us, the ways we "look up" and get busy creating our exit doors will vary. For me, it's working with other parents and teachers to find positive ways of encouraging exploration and discovery in learning. In helping others overcome challenges and find hope, I feel more hopeful, myself. But it's also the small things.

This is a picture of my salad. My family grew it in our garden, and picked it for dinner last night. We gobbled it up with a huge amount of joy. The diversity of colour, scents, flavours and ideas contained in this bowl looks to me like a visual story of hope for the people of our world. Despite all odds, and because of diversity, this abundance of life persists! And I eat it and am a part of my own ecosystem. And my wild and unkempt garden not only provides food for me, but shelter from the heat; shelter from the storm; shelter from the fear. 

My salad isn't enough to change the world. I know that. But in every small way that we cultivate hope in our own hearts, we bring more hope to all of our actions, and to the world. Maybe the small things we do at home give us courage or hope enough to make bigger changes in the world, like supporting those neighbours who suffer directly from colonialism, forest fires, and loss of hope. Having hope, too, is a great privilege, and once we've accessed it, we need to share it--by both small and large means. And when we all have hope, we can tackle the really big problems, like colonialism, capitalism, and consumerism. Or maybe those "isms", which thrive on a population devoid of hope, will just starve when we stop feeding them, and start feeding hope, instead.

So how do you create hope? What is your joyful exit door? What is your vision for a workable, hopeful future? How can we make positive change in our own lives and work towards change for our whole community; our whole world? How can we change our lives, our employment; our communications so that everything we do is working towards the future we want? And how can we be generous; how can we hold each other up, make joyful, hopeful futures for each other to run to? 

I want to be running toward something.