Five Huge Unschooling Mistakes I've Made

Has your kid ever looked at you in earnest, and accused you of causing them problems by unschooling them? Mine has. And it was in that moment that all the indignation and arrogance I'd built our unschooling life upon totally collapsed. Because indignation and arrogance might have given us the courage to jump out of a system that wasn't working, but in the end they were just walls we built around our hearts to keep us from the vulnerability of life. Some of us unschoolers needed those walls to protect us as we built this new world, but now it's time for the walls to come down. I have made lots of mistakes. Now I want to own up to them, and grow.

Mistake #1: Succumbing to Self-Doubt

Actually, my reaction in that moment, a few years ago, when my son told me I had set him up for failure by unschooling him, was to question everything I've done as a parent and to cave in. It's a great thing to question ourselves, to evaluate, assess, and make changes, but there has to be an end to it. At some point very soon in the questioning we need to adjust course (or not) and keep on steering the ship. Instead, in that moment, I told myself I'd failed. I told myself I'd destroyed my son's life. He calls me dramatic and he's right! I mean, there's place for drama in the world--I'm an artist and writer, and I know that drama is often the key to reaching people. But when the people is your kid, and the reaching needs to be done with a supportive and steady hand on the wheel of his life, drama is not the way to go. Yeah. I bombed that. I basically let go of the ship's wheel and hid in a corner for a few weeks. 

Unschooling being what it is, he already had the freedom to steer his own ship, and he really did quite well, getting into a groove that worked well for him, and forgetting all about that day he had blamed unschooling for whatever the frustration was, at the time (we have both forgotten, by now). But unschooling is really largely about leading by example, and in that time I unfortunately set an example of succumbing to self-doubt--something that my son already struggles with, and which I desperately wish I hadn't modeled so well.

Another way that we often succumb to self-doubt is defensiveness. Other parents or family members question our unschooling choices (or lack thereof) and out of fear, self-doubt, or frustration, we get defensive. A little explanation can go a long way in educating others, and that's definitely a good thing, especially when making social precedent for others to join our journey. But when we get wrapped up in trying to defend the place we are in the journey, it's hard to keep moving--to carry on the actual journey. We can get stuck in that defensive place, and that's not the great big adventure unschooling was supposed to be!

Live and Learn, as they say. The learning is easy, because, as unschoolers know (or are trying to remind ourselves, constantly), learning just happens. It's the living--or sailing, to return to my previous analogy--through all the rough seas and mistakes and course-adjustments that happen along the way that can be challenging. But we're up for a challenge, right?

Mistake #2: Protecting our Kids from Challenges

It seems obvious, when you look at a title like that. We know our kids need to face and overcome challenges in order to learn and gain confidence. But watching them trip and fall and not rushing to catch them before they hit the ground is another matter. Or not clearing their pathway right from the start to avoid them even tripping in the first place. I've done that. OK, I still do it!

I'm so guilty of this that after all nineteen years I still catch myself doing it almost every day. I'm OK with the big things: hearing my kid's plan to attend a school program that I don't really like, and buckling in for the ride, for example. But in the moment, I have very little control over my own mouth, and find myself constantly forecasting problems that I think my kids should avoid, or advising them on ways to keep safe, or be successful in their endeavour, etc. My son made himself a great keyboard tray this morning, and was struggling to fit it into his desk. I just had to advise him on what I felt was a "better" way to design it. Gak. What does this constant advice do to my kids' confidence?! I know very well what it does. It kills it. I walked into the problem he was well on his way to solving himself, and reminded him that somebody else knows better. What the hell?! I only know better because his father and I made a keyboard tray for that same desk, ourselves... and figured out the challenges, ourselves! And we did this at a time when we were gleefully living away from our parents, free to make our own mistakes, and learn from them.

Seriously. Like I mentioned before, living and learning sometimes seems to take a lifetime. I wish I had held my mouth shut this morning. He probably would have made a great keyboard tray that might have been very different from my design, and possibly even better suited to his needs.

Confidence-shattering is not the only harm caused by protecting our kids from challenges. Having a life devoid of struggle, strife, and challenge, or--alternatively--a life in which somebody else was always ready to solve their challenges, leaves kids unprepared to meet the challenges they will inevitably face, in life. It leaves them looking for solutions from other people instead of exploring and trusting their own ingenuity. It leaves them less resilient.

Now, as an unschooling parent, I've been told many times that my kids need to face the bullying and hardship of school so they can "toughen up", but that's not what I'm talking about. Toughening up isn't becoming resilient; it's building a hard shell, and that doesn't seem very healthy to me! I know. I've had a hard shell all my life. I don't want that for my kids. I want them to feel so confident, so resilient; so intrinsically strong and ingenious, that they can be vulnerable and live their lives without fear. That is resilience. 

Although I'm still struggling to allow my kids to fall, I'm all good on being there to commiserate or snuggle them when they're picking themselves back up again. Unschooling gives us the chance to really live with our kids, and if we can master allowing them to meet their own challenges, we're in the wonderful position of being their support team.

Mistake #3: Comparing

The whole school system works on comparison. No matter how hard our amazing teachers try to nurture the unique skills and needs of every child, they work in a system that requires them to evaluate our kids. This kind of evaluation requires some kind of a measuring stick, and by nature that means comparison. The root of our whole school system is therefore competitive, and that's exactly why many of us chose to unschool. But then we got our kids at home and panicked that they weren't "keeping up", or that they'd struggle should they ever need to join the system. 

Remember, most of us were raised in the system. We're terrified of failing, of allowing our kids to fail. Those fears are deeply ingrained and didn't just get left behind when we stuck the word "unschooling" on ourselves. They are firmly rooted in our every word and action. In fact, some people even choose to unschool because of the reported competitive advantages it gives kids in adulthood. But then we forgot that the competition was so dangerous.

To me, the biggest benefit of unschooling is the fact that we can separate ourselves from that kind of competition and live by our own intrinsic values. It gives us the opportunity to make our choices based on our own moral and intellectual standards--and by "us" I mean parents and kids separately. Unschooling means that kids are defining their own goal-posts, their own compasses; their own personal evaluation criteria. Every time we judge them, or even worse, compare their achievements to others or to some kind of outside expectation, we take back that power from them, along with their impetus to lead themselves. 

Sometimes we're comparing our kids, even without words. I can't tell you how many kids I've taught art to who walked into my program with the idea that they couldn't draw, or that they only knew how to draw one specific thing (usually a cartoon character). You know how they became that way? From guided art projects, where either the book they learned from or the adult they were with set up an expectation for them to follow. Maybe they succeeded and their work was comparable, but more likely, since the book or example-drawing was made by an adult with much more experience, they saw all the dissimilarities between their own work and the example, and they felt defeated. Luckily, teaching art was something I did for a long time before I had kids, so I managed to stop myself from creating situations where my kids would compare their art to mine, and the results were amazing. My son used to draw the sounds that the instruments made! "Tell me about your drawing," I would ask him, and he would say, "It's a drum!" This drawing he proudly held out consisted of many many repeated lines. He was drawing the sound of the drum. If I had shown him how to draw a drum, he would have copied me, but the genius--the uniqueness of his own experience of learning to draw--would have been lost. He grew up and did teach himself to draw visual representations of what he saw, but he did so without self-criticism, fear, or road-blocks, because in that one respect I was able to give him room to be himself, uncompared, un-assessed, and unhindered by my expectations.

Partly, for parents, this issue comes back to self-doubt, and defensiveness, again, because when we're already struggling with our own fears, we're more likely to turn tail and run, or to dig down into some kind of defense. Getting stuck in a competitive mindset leads to fears of failure, self-doubt, and possibly over-protection. All these things are intertwined, of course, and it's hard to move on from one without tackling the others.

Mistake #4: Not Enough Time with the Same Group of Kids

This, unfortunately, is a challenge that most unschoolers face, and many--including us--fail to overcome. The nature of unschooling is to be following the needs of each individual kid, taking them out of situations that aren't suitable, and experimenting frequently with new activities and interest groups. Obviously, this sets kids up for an ever-changing array of relationships, rarely having time to settle into long-lasting relationships, to tackle and overcome the challenges of long-standing relationships, and to make all the personal growth that these experiences would have afforded. It takes many years of shared experiences for kids to build deep connections, and kids without a consistent cohort miss that. It is even more challenging for families who live in rural areas than it is for urban families, who likely have more access to regular programming and a larger unschooling community. 

Our family lives on a small island just outside of a big city, so while we did develop bonds in a community of homeschoolers when the kids were young, it wasn't long before most kids in our group either went to school or became busy with an assortment of other activities. Both of my kids were very lonely, and due to our unschooling convictions we were reluctant to put them in school. We did try out a couple of different alternative programs over a two-year period, but in the end both kids pulled out for a variety of reasons. My kids did end up attending a democratic school on the mainland for a few years, and really found their people, there, but by then there was so little time left of school that deeper connections were very few. Consequently, my two never spent more than about three years with the same group of kids and, while they've made a few very treasured friends, they really missed out on the experience of growing up in community. Of all the mistakes I've made, this one was possibly the most harmful. 

I still don't know how to reconcile in my mind the choices we regret with our educational philosophy. The only options that would have given my kids a consistent cohort of friends over many years would have been to ignore our educational values and send our kids to mainstream school, or to move or commute to the mainland for a significant portion of their lives, thus losing connection with our island home and their extended family, who also live here. Would those options have been equally damaging? I can't know. This is a horrible dilemma that I know many unschoolers face, and I think the truth is we just can't ever know how things will work out. On the whole, I think my kids are OK, and we controlled the damage as best we could over the years, but it's still a deep regret.

Mistake #5: Vilifying the School System

In the middle of writing this article, I had a beautiful long talk with my brother, who is a teacher of grades six to nine in our community. We talked a lot about politics and education, his work, and the struggles of teachers and parents in the increasingly divided, challenged world. And goats and chickens, but that's another story. I have a deep, deep respect for teachers. All three of my mothers were teachers in some capacity (preschool teacher, elementary art teacher, and high school educational assistant). I have taught art and wilderness exploration in a number of different schools, sometimes working with teachers to integrate with their activities or the curriculum. If I criticize the school system, I do not do so lightly. I am extremely critical of the system as a whole, and the speed at which it is changing, given that for my whole life I've been witnessing good teachers trying to make changes that still only scratch the surface of the problems. I'm very serious about my criticisms. They're a big part of the reason we unschool. But I sometimes veered into vilification when my kids were younger, and I regret that, now.

There were a number of incidents with schools that made me angry, over the years. I sought to link programs I was running with public schools, or to integrate schools with homelearners, or to ask whether my kids could join for certain programs but not the whole school experience, and was frequently shut down. I think feeling rejected often makes people reactive, and it did me. But even worse, I felt I could offer something to the whole community by making these connections, and when my ideas were shut down I felt the system was arrogant, ignorant, and harmful. That made me really angry, and I often told my kids about it. Now my daughter tells me that at a certain point in her childhood she was worried about going to pick up her friends from their school because I'd told her so many negative things about it that she felt unsafe. 

I'm sorry. I unequivocally apologize. That was a terrible mistake, and I truly plan never to repeat it. That school I vilified to my daughter was my school. Sure, they rejected my unschooling family, and still ignore my emails offering programs or volunteering, but damnit, we're a small community and that was the school I attended, myself. It's our school. People I love teach at that school, and we share many philosophical ideals. Countless children I adore attend that school, and my careless words during a couple years of my children's lives left them with many more years of distrust in one of the most important institutions of our community. More than that, my words made unschooling appear adverse to mainstream schooling, and actually I fervently believe that unschooling is a stepping stone in the betterment of mainstream schooling. As an explorative learning consultant, some of the people I work with are teachers in mainstream schools. Many of the readers of my articles are mainstream school teachers and administrators. My apology is deeply felt because, as so many of us in the education world know, we're not at opposite ends of a scale; we're all in one big soup together, and we need to be working together, not against each other. 

~ ~ ~

I considered calling this article "Unschooling Regrets" but here's the thing: We all make mistakes, and if we learn and grow from them, perhaps we can avoid regretting them. It may have taken me a long while to see the benefits my family gained from these mistakes, but in the end I'm glad we had the opportunities to grow. Because that's unschooling: the whole family, the whole community, the schools and the teachers and the self-doubting, arrogant unschoolers just running and tripping and getting up and learning, together: All the hands on the wheel, all determining our course. All the things we do matter, and we're always learning, together.

Still thinking about all the ways we can fail as parents? In this 2021 article I discuss some of the biggest concerns of unschooling parents: Unschooling: Am I Failing My Kids?

how our social system perpetuates cruelty, and how we can break the cycle

When I was a kid, I wanted to disappear. I didn't have much resilience, and didn't know how to protect myself from the typical schoolyard bullying of the eighties. I felt small and dark and afraid, and spent many lunch-hours sitting out on a small, hidden bluff, hoping desperately that nobody would find me, and with a number of shrubby, mossy escape-routes already mapped out. Hiding was my solution to a social situation I wasn't prepared for. I escaped grade school into high school and became weird and vaguely threatening as a means of keeping other kids at bay. It worked, and I was lonely. Throughout the first thirty years of my life, I assumed the problem was me. I assumed I was just simply anti-social. Worthless.

It wasn't until I was a mother that my desperation to save my own children from the same fate caused me to really consider how I could prepare them for the culture that had crushed my own childhood. I began with keeping them home from school in order to protect them, but amazingly, it was a piece of wisdom from their school-going friend that finally helped me see a real escape-route: how we raise our children, and the society we build for them, matters entirely. We can look thoughtfully at our schools and other community groups just like we can carefully consider our home environment, and how those things make or break our children's mental health.

Once in those middle-years of raising my children, a boy I love very much and who I consider an extra son had this conversation with me:

"I feel like I'm at preschool when I'm at your house."

 

He was about 10, so this very much surprised me, and I asked him what he meant.
 

He responded, "...like I have to be polite and not swear... like in preschool."
 

I was astounded by his self-awareness, and even by his memory of preschool, but I pressed on. "Don't you still normally behave that way when you're not at my house?"

"No." He said, assuredly. "I can't. People would beat me up."

"What?!" I was incredulous. I, with my kids who stayed home every day and had big happy romping visits with friends (including this boy), couldn't imagine the threat my treasured child was describing. The threat of his schoolyard.

"I have to swear and act mean at school. I have to."

"But not at home," I begged, looking for a bit of hope.

"Not always but the boys from school come over to use my trampoline, so I kind of do there too. They always come over."

My heart broke for this boy--one of the gentlest I've known--to feel so trapped in his own community that he felt he had to become a different person. 

I have known a variety of violent, cruel men in my life. And every single one of them was a loving, compassionate person who had been raised in a culture or family that made him feel inadequate, hopeless; small. Every one of them used emotional, physical, sexual or verbal violence to control the world around him when he felt he was threatened. Every single one of them was doing what he felt was necessary to survive. 

After the conversation with my young friend, I saw so clearly the desperation in all those men's behaviour. I sat with that realization for weeks at the forefront of my mind, and it changed the way I saw that boy's father. It changed the way I saw my own partner. I forgave my fathers. I forgave my ex-boyfriends and my husband their variety of transgressions. I forgave my son for the many things I imagined he might end up doing because of a heartless culture that mocked him for wearing a tutu as a preschooler and pummeled him into a little corner full of muscle trucks, fear, superheroes, villains, and existential threat. And as I saw my own brave, intelligent daughter growing up toward a sexualized, diminished expectation of humanity, I forgave my mother and myself for all the ways we've fought without conviction and tried to disappear in life. I forgave us. Then I just cried.

What are we to do, as parents of children who our own community vilifies for the mere fact they're boys? I've been a feminist, all my life (yes, I've been fighting for my own and my mother's rights since before I ever heard the word 'feminism'). And I'm surrounded by the anger of my fellow feminists over boys who are excused from terrible crimes because their social status is at stake. I'm aware that those excuses leave girls unsupported; women languishing in shame and lifetimes of victimization. But as a mother of a boy, I also think about the boys. The 'social status' or 'future prospects' argument sure sounds hideously arrogant and small-minded, but maybe it's worth looking at. Those boys' and mens' social status may be what pushed them to commit the crimes in the first place. 

Perpetrators of abuse are usually victims of some form of abuse, themselves. That doesn't excuse their actions, it opens up a door for healing. It opens a door for us to see them as humans in need of help. In fact, it opens a door for us to look at every single child as a potential victim of abuse (familial, scholastic, societal, sexual, intellectual, etc.) and set them up to be resilient and--hopefully--to avoid abusive situations.

It was all very simple for me to assume that my kids would be safe from the schoolyard bullies because I didn't send them to school, but isolation from their own community isn't a solution, either. Both of my kids did end up attending some form of school in the few years after my conversation with their friend, and we did deal with the kinds of social trauma that happen there. However, the best thing I think I ever did in this respect was keep them home in the first place.

I and my husband unschooled our kids at home from Kindergarten to grades six and seven, respectively. They weren't isolated while they unschooled, because we did have a small community of other home- and unschoolers that we visited with multiple times a week. Picture groups of three to ten kids of all ages and their three or five parents all hanging out together at a park. Or maybe somebody's house. It was messy, it was chaotic, but it was whole. And by whole I mean that each gathering was a motley collection of different ages and types of people, all awkwardly sorting out social cues and each other's needs and values, in each moment, all the time. Together. We were a whole. Of course there were disagreements and social issues that came up among kids in the group, but the parents were involved in each moment, and were developing and modeling our own social skills in front of the kids, all the time. Our kids learned to respect each other, and more importantly, they learned to respect themselves and their own needs. 

Because so many of them were unschooled, and the play-times were for leisure, with no expectations of 'learning', kids weren't obliged to come along, and when they did they weren't obliged to participate. If something felt wrong to them, they could step aside and nobody would fault them for it. They learned to trust themselves in this way; they learned self-preservation that didn't rely upon reactive, hurtful behaviour. They learned practical social coping strategies from free, open play in a supportive environment, and by watching their parents engage with thoughtful empathy and a sense of enjoyment.

When my kids went to school, they both eventually experienced some form of social cruelty. I can't say they weren't harmed--they were. But pain happens in life. Other people do and say things that hurt us. We can have compassion for those people, but we can't change them by changing who we are. That's a lesson I am still learning now in my forties, but my children had apparently learned it by the time they were young teens. And I note that so had many of their homeschooled peers. 

So no, I'm not saying everybody should keep their kids home. I know that's not an option for most people, nor is it desired by many. But I feel like there must be a better way to raise our kids so that they develop a sense of self-worth. Boys and girls are equally susceptible to the degradation of self-worth that happens in the schoolyard and in our culture in general. Boys are more often encouraged by our culture to preserve their dignity and physical safety with violence, cruelty, and a kind of masculine arrogance. Girls are encouraged to do so by emotionally belittling other girls, by remaining calm in the face of fear, and by not taking up too much space, physically, intellectually, or emotionally. All are expected to conform. And may heaven help you if you don't fit the mold.

Can we just stop this now? No, I know it's not that easy to change centuries of cultural learning. But we can sure try harder! I would like for all children to spend their time in small, supported groups of mixed ages, genders, cultural backgrounds and political ideals. Free exploration in a supported, diverse environment is how we learn to really see other people, and it's how we learn empathy, as well as real dignity and self-awareness. 

That once-ten-year-old boy who told me my home felt like preschool is now eighteen. He's studying computer science and he still comes by and talks to me about his life. He's not here mainly to visit me; he's here to visit my son, who considers him a best friend. But he also takes time to talk to me. He takes time to talk to my daughter, who considers him an extra brother. He has grown out of those schoolyard bully days to find a path in his life that feels right. He doesn't have to swear just to keep himself safe, anymore. Probably through his amazing self-awareness, as well as his many social connections with people from all walks of life, my 'extra son' has grown out of the culture that limited him as a child, and is one of the beautiful young men emerging as a new adult in this world.

We can learn to live and tumble along with our culture's faults, or we can heal them, and thrive. We're never going to keep our children safe from pain and struggle. Hard times and heartbreak are part of life, and how we get through them is how we grow. But we can build diverse, supportive environments for our children and for ourselves, so that the getting through is easier, safer, and conducive to personal growth.

Unschooling Screen Time!

Probably the biggest source of stress in our unschooling home as been screen-time. I just can't stand seeing my kids sit in front of their screens all the time! I literally ran an outdoor exploration program since they were babies, and brought them outside to play and gallivant in the woods every single day until they were too old to be easily led outside. And slowly, as they grew into teens and now older teens, computers have seeped into every aspect of their lives. As our culture moved more online, even I became a constant screen-user, and with this pandemic, well... screens have won. 

My inner voice screams at me, "bad parent! You're ruining your children! Where's the outdoor time?!"  And at way-too-frequent intervals over the years, my inner voice invaded my throat and I bullied and badgered my kids, tried to bargain with them, tried to limit their screen-time, even took away computers and other devices, once resulting in a physical conflict with my son as I tried to walk out of his room with his laptop and he righteously tried to stop me. None of these actions align with my own moral, parenting, or unschooling values. My kids are supposed to be self-directing! They're supposed to be free-range! They're supposed to be unencumbered by my parental fears and judgments! Definitely free from me stealing their stuff. And yet my deep shame over screen-time has caused me to break all those values so many times.

It's a struggle, for sure, and I know it's the same in so many homes around the world. But I'm writing this to share the one thing I think really helped us in this situation. Did you notice I said I was "stealing" my son's laptop? That's because it's his. He owns it. And that's the big deal, here.

My kids at 11 and 14 with their first personal laptop.

 
I remember a Mad Magazine comic from my childhood in which Webster (I think?) gets sent to his room, and is delighted to go up there and be with his big TV and whatever other electronics he had. I remember thinking what a good child I was to own none of those things - not even as a family, at that point in my 10-year-old life. And I think that pride set the stage for my rampant shame over screen-time.

Then I had my kids in the early 2000's. In their first few years we had one family desktop computer which my husband used for telecommuting two days a week and the kids and I shared for online adventures like videos, games, Google earth expeditions (WOOOOOT!!) and word or image processing on other days. It was pretty ideal. I felt like we were graciously treading the waters of screen-time.

Then we went to an unschooling conference where we discovered entire families of people gleefully wrapped up in creating a Minecraft version of the hotel where the conference was taking place. COOL!! I discovered that it's really OK to enjoy video-gaming with our kids, and in fact it can be a creative family experience. Enter Minecraft in my life. And with so many more amazing resources becoming available around 2010, enter so many more amazing times spent on screens. I didn't feel really bad about getting a family laptop. It meant the kids and I could use a computer even when their father was working from home on the main computer! 

I saw our slow slide into more screen-time, and the conflicts became more frequent. Also, conflicts between the two kids became more frequent as their screen-time needs and values diverged.

Around that time, my kids became old enough to earn their own money, and we have always maintained that while they don't earn money for chores at home (because we don't earn money for this either; it's just a part of living in a home), any money they earn for themselves is theirs to spend as they'd like. This is basically our unschooling way of teaching them to manage their money. And they managed it differently from each other, one saving and saving, while doling out tiny bits for necessary items like gifts and dates with friends, and the other saving exclusively until making larger passionate buys. And guess what! The first big purchase each of them made at around twelve and fifteen years of age was a refurbished laptop. Now at fifteen and eighteen they're migrating to more powerful desktops as their studies and interests have pushed them into daily computer use. My daughter has recently been given a free desktop and financed her own accessories, and my son built himself a powerful machine for his rendering and digital music composition. 

My son's new fancy set-up, complete with a rolling stand that he built to hold it.

Why is this so great? Learning. Self-discovery. Money-management. And personal health choices. The best part of all of this is that they always financed their computer owning on their own. This gave them the independence to provide for themselves in a limited but very important way. It made them feel powerful. It means I can't freak out about screen-time, because they truly own their computers, and they worked a long long time to get to this point -- on their own terms. 

Of course, I still freak out about screen-time once in a while, to my great shame, including that time I tried to steal my son's laptop from his desk, but I'm getting better over time, and so are they. The fact that they own their own devices helps remind me that their lives are not mine to control. The basic tenets of the unschooling life we aspire to mean that I will do better by loving them and leading by example than by trying to control them. Just seeing their fancy self-designed set-ups on their desks reminds me of that. Life and living in community is always a complex challenge, and my own growth as an intentionally laid-back parent is always slowly improving as well.

Most wonderfully and surprisingly, having complete ownership of their own devices seems to mean that my kids are also pretty responsible with screen-time. The pandemic has meant a lot more computer time, and I've noticed both of them intentionally scheduling outdoor, off-screen, or exercise time into their lives. I won't say I'm always calm and accepting, nor that there aren't days they rarely see the light of the sky outside, but despite all my fears over the years, I think we've done all right in navigating this one. 

I'd like to thank the massive support network of unschooling families all over the place who have kept reminding us that it will be OK. It truly is. May we all keep swimming up like good little Minecraft players before all our bubbles pop, and then run around on the land exploring and being creative!

the apocalypse is trickling in, and unschooling accidentally prepared us for it

dragonfly coming out of its larval skin - photo by Taliesin van Lidth de Jeude Roemer

I went in this morning to look at my eighteen-year-old son while he slept. He looked so peaceful. I wanted to wrap him up in my arms and cherish that peaceful face, now so much longer and with stubble around the chin, as I used to when it was round and soft and chubby, and the whole world seemed so much safer. It's not safe anymore. His whole future is in question, as is my daughter's, and how will we get from here to there? From pandemics to fascism to economic and social collapse to apocalyptic storms and other disasters wrought by climate change, holy this is a crazy time we're living in. Back in the 90's people were talking about this. 2020 was a year that I heard spoken of as a turning point. Would society as we know it even make it to 2020, we asked? Would it be worth having children if in fact things would be as dire as predicted?

Well we did have children. And climate change is pretty much as predicted. Turns out (also as predicted) that the rise in climate change disasters really did trigger global anxiety and a tightening of the screws of power. We're watching in real time as fascism rises, power is abused by corporations and government, the gulf between rich and poor widens, and communities are just beginning to be wiped out by floods, fires, storms, and now rioting. Social collapse is increasingly looking likely. Three years ago, Rachel Nuwer wrote on BBC Future that "Putting aside species-ending events like an asteroid strike, nuclear winter or deadly pandemic, history tells us that it’s usually a plethora of factors that contribute to collapse. What are they, and which, if any, have already begun to surface? It should come as no surprise that humanity is currently on an unsustainable and uncertain path – but just how close are we to reaching the point of no return?" Well guess what--pandemics are here too. This doesn't bode well for our children's future, or even our own. Our family is now home in isolation for the foreseeable future, and learning to grow what crops we can, hoping to develop survival skills. Pretty extreme, right? But for an increasing number of us, this is the new reality. And unexpectedly, unschooling prepared us for this.

We didn't even want to call it unschooling, in the beginning. I valiantly tried to use the terms "life-learning" or "self-directed education", because they seemed so much less confrontational. But as the wave of unschoolers grew across the world, my pacified terms increasingly met with blank stares, and we relented. We unschooled our kids because it seemed like a natural extension of attachment-parenting and the non-coercive learning environment my mother created in her preschool program. We unschooled because it made our kids happy. We continued unschooling because, as time went on, we saw that they were thriving, and that their developing interests, skills, and personal values were increasingly supported by our way of life. Now, in this time of global pandemic and societal upheaval, we are aware that the basic benefits of unschooling are what are keeping our whole family sane and together.

First, we're comfortable being maverick. This seems not like something we'd strive for, and it definitely wasn't. It just came of always being the family with the weird lifestyle. But here we are, accustomed to gently explaining our choices to people and carrying on despite the criticism. This is a very useful skill when our autoimmune-afflicted family is choosing to wear masks during a pandemic when so many others seem to find this practice ridiculous or even offensive. It's a useful skill when isolating ourselves even as the rest of our community returns to normal. Feeling comfortable with being maverick is a useful skill when staying home as a family raising chickens and vegetables and doing "farm things" that many of our kids' city friends find bizarre. My daughter and her friends like to joke that she sleeps in a pile of hay. She updated her zoom background accordingly with a hay pile, and rode the wave of her maverick.

Speaking of being home as a family and farming together (truly we can hardly call it a farm; it's 1/4 acre, but we're doing our best!), we're happy as a family. That is pretty amazing, and like any relationship, it's always a struggle and a rollicking adventure to keep the harmony alive. Especially during this pandemic when we're now having to look at all four of each other's faces most of every hour, every day. But unschooling prepared us for this. Once when my daughter was about six or seven, and we were out on adventure with a wilderness program I led, she came to me with a confused look on her face. She explained that a woman had stopped her on the trail and asked if she's sick of having to be with her mother all the time instead of going to school. She didn't understand why she would be! That is the gift of unschooling, or of any situation that leads to more family togetherness: we have to work out the kinks and create a harmonious living situation. It's not that there aren't times we're frustrated, hurt, or angry; where our various needs or values clash. Of course there are! And plenty of them. However, like in any democratic society, we have to work those issues out with as much respect and listening as possible, if we want to maintain the harmony. Yes of course there have been many times when as parents we put our feet down, because sometimes kids just really don't understand the risks of their actions. But we explain our demands, and we try very hard (not always successfully) to give our kids freedom within the structure of a family all living together. In this way we have all managed to find happiness in each other's company.

Like all democracy, sorting out ongoing life and relationships is always a struggle, and we keep persevering. Jeff Goodell says in Rolling Stone that "the other big takeaway from [the 2018 IPCC] report is that it’s time to get serious about adapting to a rapidly changing world. If we don’t, a good percentage of civilization as we know it today won’t survive." Unschooling has helped us in this by providing endless opportunities for adaptation. A kid with lots of free time and options necessarily learns to manage those options herself, to solve problems herself, to research and find solutions when nobody is presenting any. She learns to compromise and to stay strong when needed; she learns the difference between wants and needs. These are things we all learn as adults, but unschooling, in removing kids from the pre-ordained structure of school, gives them an opportunity to learn these things sooner. They gain confidence in making life-choices for themselves, confidence in standing up for their needs and values, and confidence in their ability to adapt to new situations.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, unschooling has taught us resilience. I suppose resilience is a confluence of all the things I've talked about already. It's being a person who is able to stand strong when faced with a challenge, adapt to the moment, and persevere. It's about having a positive outlook even when circumstances are dire, and using that outlook to chart a path to a happy outcome. My Dad had Parkinson's for most of my adult life, and when people asked him how he was doing, he sometimes responded "better than I look". And he managed to have a fulfilling and active life for more than a decade beyond what the doctors predicted. In the last few years of his life, when his disease made him severely disabled, he said his cup was not half full, but "overflowing". Life is always, always going to give us challenges, and some of them are going to seem insurmountable. Some of them actually will be insurmountable, and eventually we'll lose loved ones, and die. But we can go down feeling bad, or we can go down with our hearts full, knowing we lived the best life we could. That is what I hope for my weird little unschooling family.

Last night our family put the chickens to bed, made some popcorn, and went out to the beach to look at comet Neowise. We brought our telescope and my son brought all the cameras to capture the gorgeousness of our night sky. After much standing around looking at eyepieces and setting up lenses and tripods, the sky darkened enough that we saw Neowise above the northwestern horizon. My daughter in her hedgehog onesie that feels like a mop leaned into me as we stood in the warm breeze. Eventually her brother's and father's arms wrapped around us both as we watched bats flit by against the starry sky. Soon we all found ourselves lying on the pebbly beach, comfortable being in each other's company, gazing at the amazingly vast collection of stars, meteors, clouds, satellites and black-blue space. Maybe the apocalypse is trickling in. We're as ready as we'll ever be, because our cup is overflowing.

comet Neowise - photo by Taliesin van Lidth de Jeude Roemer

How Covid Saved my Husband

This is going to be a vulnerable post. Telling you what's happening now means telling you what happened before this, and that part was horrible. I lost my husband. Not his life - thank goodness - but I lost his heart to the point where we haven't been wearing our wedding rings for most of ten years, now.

Let me tell you our story. Nearly twenty-five years ago now I met Markus. We were introduced by our friend Chloe, because she said we were so similarly strange. Actually she coerced me to go meet him; I tried to refuse. But off we went to the bus station in Vancouver, where the bus from Victoria pulled in, and I sat complaining about the stupidity of a blind date, while watching the passengers get off the bus. One of them meekly stepped off towards the luggage, his head turned away from where we were sitting, and his long blonde hair tumbling over the brown leather jacket on his shoulders. I wanted to meet him before I saw his face. I wanted to meet him before I knew he was Markus. He walked over and shyly shook my hand, eyes lowered behind blonde lashes. It wasn't until a minute later that he braved a glance at my face; I saw his gentle green-blue-hazel eyes, and fell in love forever.

I knew in that first moment that he would be my friend for the rest of my life. Over the next few years we adventured together; we traveled and explored, and talked about everything interesting and zany in the world. We found we agreed about everything - even burning candles on our Christmas tree and how to decorate our home! Our Chloe was right: we were perfectly matched for each other in our apparent weirdness, and completely relieved to have each other to share such a fascinating world with. Everything was comfortable, and most things were easy.

After 4 years together, we got married. It was an amazing wedding, and although the idea had been mine, our families made the event so wonderful that it seemed to be a community event. It was a true bringing-together of our beautiful tribes. Then we left the city and moved to this house - the house I grew up in on this beautiful island I love. And Markus loved it too. He began telecommuting two days a week, and commuted to the city on the other three. And less than a year later we conceived our first child.

Our kids' early years were idyllic. There were times Markus couldn't telecommute, but mostly he managed to make it home in time to eat dinner with his children, and any distance that might have grown between us all during the week was mended on the weekend. We had such a rich and wonderful life, full of music sessions and parties, family adventures and fun. I loved being a stay-at-home mother, attachment-parenting my kids, and for the first time in my life I had lots of friends, and felt supported in a life I was creating for myself. We eventually decided to unschool our kids and discovered we agreed about even that! We thought we were doing really well for ourselves.

Then slowly there came the creeping feeling that something was wrong.

By our tenth wedding anniversary something was very wrong. I realized it had been years since we'd had a good conversation. I realized Markus had begun disappearing, both physically and mentally, on a regular basis. He would take the 4:30 ferry home, and instead of walking straight to his waiting family, arriving by about 5:30, he'd arrive at 6 or 7. Often I worried something terrible had befallen him, until I became used to it. He was usually just walking on the docks. When he was home he was usually drinking. Beer and whiskey in the evenings; coffee you could stand on all day. On weekends he'd sleep in until 10 and wake with such a raging headache that he was incapacitated all weekend.

I begged him to quit all the addictions, and he did. He's a good and loving husband, and wanted to do well by his children. We quit drinking together, and it seemed so easy (not to mention a huge financial advantage!) But we couldn't connect anymore. When we did talk he was often bitter; unhappy with who I was and unsatisfied with life. He was uninterested in our home and family, despite going through the motions of participation.

Don't bother trying to diagnose. I tried that. And when I realized his memory was disappearing, we involved the doctors. Sometimes he forgot important life events; sometimes he forgot what happened two minutes earlier. Constantly, he just couldn't. get. moving. He drove off the ferry at about one quarter the speed of the other cars, and it took him at least a minute to get up to speed. He took so long to answer the phone that it often went to the answering machine. He couldn't make sense of simple household tasks, even though he was simultaneously working full time as a software developer, raising two kids, and miraculously rebuilding our home on a relative shoestring and partially reclaimed materials. Despite being one of the cleverest, most interesting people I knew, his brain seemed awash with confusion. He said he lived in his "empty box". I noted that our problems began soon after we moved to this island, and asked him many times if he'd like to move back to Victoria; if maybe being nearer his parents would help, or in the city he had lived in before me. He had no interest. In anything. At my behest, he asked the doctor about his symptoms, underwent various tests including a CT scan. No cause of this misery was found.

For over ten years now, if I ask him what he thinks or feels, his answer is "I don't know". We've fought many times because this is so unbelievable to me. I've accused him of not caring; of being lazy with our relationship. But it has persisted. He says he loves me but he's just not there. The kids tease him about smiling because it happens so infrequently that it seems weird to see on his face. I wish I had been more gentle with him.

Then came this pandemic. He was reluctant to work from home, because for nearly two decades, now, from the day we moved to this island, he's been getting up at 5:30am at least three days a week and trekking into town. It's his routine. It's one of the few things that's normal to him. He has always said the lack of sleep doesn't bother him, and the morning walk to the ferry is nice. He goes to work like a zombie and wakes up by the time he's there in the city at 7:45. Also, how would he connect with his coworkers by virtual meetings? He feels connection at work is important (ironically, I thought, since we don't have much at home).

But he had to stay home, so he did. And the miracle happened. We didn't get covid; we just self-isolated. And eventually he even received a pay-cut from work. These aren't supposed to be miracle-inducing events. But here we are, one month into this isolation, and I have my husband back. He wakes up every day around seven or eight, and commutes one minute to work in the office of our home. Then he makes me breakfast and brings it to me in bed. I make him lunch and we sit on the porch and look out at the world together. Sometimes we walk down the hill to get the mail and we look at all that changes along the trail, on the way. We talk about everything. For the first time in twenty years, I can say he's my best friend again. I feel supported by his love, again. He has ideas. He has opinions. And he smiles.

And now we know: It wasn't addiction or lack of love, or depression or even illness that took my husband away from me. Those were all symptoms of lack of sleep. We know that sleep deprivation causes many terrible symptoms, including most of those experienced by Markus over the past couple of decades. He now sleeps eight to ten hours a night, and his symptoms are gone. But just in case this wasn't enough to convince me we'd found the root of the problem, we ended up going back to the mainland a few days ago. We woke up at 6:40 and drove in for a day of shopping - our first masked and gloved isolation shop. He drove off the ferry at the same speed as all the other traffic, and was helpful and thoughtful about our shopping! It was wonderful to feel in connection again - living life together for the first time in so many years! But he hadn't slept well the night before, and by the time we returned home in the late afternoon, he was exhausted. He walked around like a zombie. He couldn't understand what our evening plans with the children were, and my heart broke a little to see him so weak. It took him two days to return to the old normal. Two days to get my husband back again from one night of bad sleep.

Never again. Sure, we'll go to town again, and there will be sleepless nights. But this rift in our marriage - this long, slow tumbling off the cliff of mental wellness and family connection - this can't happen again. The life we were living - that so many of us have been living for so long - this can't go on. We can't do it. Our supposed future security isn't worth the loss of our present life, as we trudge along the conveyor belt of our society's life-plan. No way. By whatever means necessary, we're going to have to stop this conveyor belt, and build a new and better normal that affords us the fulfillment of a simple basic need: sleep. As much as food and shelter, we need sleep, and somehow our whole culture needs to build that into our expectations. We can do this! The pandemic situation is giving us impetus to develop new ways of working and socializing, and as an added bonus, we're already getting more sleep. I love this train that we're on. Let's keep it going.

*Note*  I never write about other people's struggles without their permission. Markus has read and approves of this sharing of his story. We both hope it brings some clarity to a world where most of us have been pushing ourselves too hard, and maybe we can use this isolation time as a new beginning.

After Planet of the Humans: Where Do We Go Now?

Yesterday was Earth Day, which we ignored for most of the day, since we were busy with a bunch of important things, among them my partner Markus' work where he makes software for various land-based companies. Some of them are supposedly environmental companies; some are resource extraction companies, and one even has plans to log our home. But never mind. It's a good solid job and gives him employment and financial security in a time where there's not much security to go around. The bosses even took huge pay-cuts to keep from having to lay off employees like Markus. And besides. We live in a wooden house with glass windows, appliances and a car, and we need those resource extraction companies to supply the raw materials for these things.

So last night at the end of Earth Day, Markus and I snuggled up in our cozy foam bed and down quilt, with a cup of imported fair-trade hot chocolate with instant factory milk, set our nifty black laptop on our knees, and watched the movie about humanity's demise. Planet of the Humans. Well Happy Earth Day to us. We're wrecking the place. Thanks, Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore, for bursting our hot chocolate bubble.

This film has received a good chunk of criticism, mostly (that I've seen) for being biased, and for using some of the fossil fuel industry's tactics to demean green energy and economy. But some of the points they bring up are truths we actually need to face. Like that switching over to electric cars (which I covet endlessly despite this film) will still require far more resources than the earth has to spare. And more importantly, we need to face the fact that our consumption is simply not sustainable. Green tech is not going to save us; we have to make some sacrifices, and yes - we're capable.

What we already knew:
The problem isn't fossil fuels as much as it is overpopulation and over-consumption.

If we curbed the rate of human consumption, we could make a better go of long-term survival for our species. Like Markus' bumper sticker says: Save the Humans. We all know we'd be OK without tourism, commuting and global travel-for-work, imported foods, large homes, or all-the-stuff. The kind of consumption our species has become accustomed to is not necessary.

We want to do better by our planet and our future, but we're competing in a world where everybody is waiting for everybody else to change, and none of us is willing or able to make the first big jump to a new way of living.

We're competing. Did I mention that? School is a competition, financial markets are a competition, getting ahead in business and life is a competition, the rat-race is a competition. Hell, half the time even friendship turns out to be a competition. So in some deep-seeded way, our minds know that being the first person to jump off the train means losing the competition -- losing at life. It means our kids won't keep up with their friends; it means our kids will cry about being left out of Disneyland and Hawaii and Broadway musicals; our kids will badger us about why their friends have better computer systems and better cars and better, bigger houses, and why-can't-we?! It means the guy we sit beside at work has a better house or works out harder or just gets paid more. Being the first person to jump off the consumerism train means I will lose, and nobody wants to be that guy.

What we learned from this movie:
No, technology can't actually save us. There is no "green" technology. There is only green consumption... which means less consumption.

Most of the "green" or "ethical" products we buy or use are in fact not green at all. Most rely on fossil fuels - including solar power, wind power, and every. single. company. that claims to run only off of green energy. Hmph.

Electric cars, solar panels, and other green tech are just shiny destructive sink-holes for our hard-, rat-race-earned money. Second only to replacing rotten bits of our home, getting an electric vehicle has been our main goal. We realize now that driving a heap of metal and plastic around using electricity isn't going to save the world. We have to stop traveling. Period.

We've been deluded, and we don't want to be that guy.

What coronavirus isolation is teaching us:
Isolation has taught us that we are happier with less!!

Markus isn't traveling to work every day, and for the first time in about twenty years, he has energy for more than just work. He's building a chicken coop in his spare time. We have interesting and engaging conversations. Our relationship is renewing itself and we're discovering that we're still in love with each other's minds. I can't ever see us letting this go again, no matter how frightening it feels to be that family who stays in isolation when the world goes back to "normal".

Our kids are happy! Don't get me wrong - they're not at all happy about the chasm between them and their friends right now, but the lack of travel to and from town, along with the lack of pressure to do all kinds of activities means that for the first time in years they're well-rested and healthy. Their relationship with each other and with us has improved, as well. We're all finding ways to live authentically as a family and enjoy each other's company, when before we barely had time to sleep between outside engagements. We all are watching the need for all those outside engagements fall away, and discovering that most of what we needed was right here.

Hugs are more important than we realized. I really miss hugging the people I love. If we didn't live in such a globalized community, we could live in small isolated groups and hug each other more.

We don't need as much stuff/food/money as we thought we did. The first thing we did in this pandemic time is realize that our income was going to drop, and make adjustments. We quit buying more than the essentials. That hot chocolate we had last night? Yeah. The cocoa is finite, now, and suddenly we're all very very careful about consuming it. We have a hunk of cheese in the freezer that I keep offering to get out, and the kids decide they'd rather save it for very special occasions. We're doing just fine on (mostly) rice, lentils, oats, and veggies from our garden.

Growing our own food!! Like so many people out there it seems, we now have more time to commit to our food-growing, and it's very, very satisfying. Currently we're eating cauliflower, kale, and weeds from the garden, and next week we'll get a clutch of chicks to start our new flock of egg and meat birds. Around that time we should also get our first asparagus harvest.

I know we're very privileged to be able to say all this - not everybody is having a good or easy time of isolation. We have some land to use (not ours, but a very secure rental from my parents), and Markus' secure job, and the skills we've developed over the years to provide for ourselves without some of the usual conveniences. Additionally, unschooling gave us the confidence to see that change is possible. We can at least lean out the windows of the consumerism train and feel the wind on our faces, so all this change is less of a shock than it might have been.

What we can't change (yet): 
Land ownership. We can't afford to buy land, and we're going to have to make do without it. We acknowledge that moving to a much more isolated location would potentially give us the ability to own land, but that would mean leaving our family behind, and we don't want to do that. Additionally, land ownership can only happen if we borrow money from the industrial complex that we're hoping to put an end to. So that, too, is not an ethical choice. You might say that renting is still living on the same system, and it's true, but right now we have to accept it, because we don't know of an alternative.

Working for the complex. The transition to a more self-sufficient life can't happen instantly, so Markus plans to keep working, and hopefully keep earning enough to pay our rent and buy the things we need.

Fossil fuels. We can't yet source everything we need locally, although one day we hope we'll be able to. The more people are living a sustainable local life, the more we can trade within our community and provide for each other, but for now we're still going to need our vehicle to drive out to the valley and buy some farming supplies, grains that we can't grow ourselves, and other such things. Maybe once in a while a piece of local(ish) cheese or a new pair of farm boots, too.

Our kids' decisions. These are kids who have spent time at climate protests. There's no way they don't care about their future. But it's not our place to make decisions for them, and if they choose to keep going to town, the choice will be theirs. Their independence and freedom to choose will enable them to make sound decisions. As parents, we can lead by example better than by force. And besides, who knows -- with their open, creative minds and youthful courage, they might end up teaching us quite a bit! In many ways they already have.

Not being able to make all of the changes doesn't mean there's no point in starting. The more of us get on the bandwagon and live in supportive community, the easier the bigger changes will become.

What we can change now:

We can dream. I envision a day when we grow a field of oats. The oats will feed us (and to some extent, our chickens), and the hay from them will be bedding for the chickens, and then will become a fertilizer-rich additive to our vegetable garden (soil-building!) The chickens will give us eggs and meat and fertilizer for the garden. The garden will give us innumerable different foods: starches, greens, fruits and proteins. I see a cycle of life all around our beautiful home, with all household-members contributing because we're finally home often enough to do so.

We can make our dreams come true. Markus and I have made a massive commitment to carry on consuming less -- a LOT less. The pandemic isolation has shown us that we are capable of living a better, happier life while consuming a fraction of what we did before, and we plan to spend the next year working towards being mostly self-sufficient. By this time next year we'd like to have gotten through a winter on largely our own produce, and be well on our way to getting our energy-consumption (currently wood and electric) under control. Yep - we put a short timeline on our dreams, because otherwise it might be too easy to be waylayed by the rat-race.

And no more traveling. We're going to have to find our adventure locally. Entertainment-wise, that's not hard to do. I just walk out and look at the world around me, and I am endlessly entertained. Most devastatingly, though, no traveling means we might never see some of our European relatives again, and while that feels truly horrible, we are going to have to find other ways to connect. Globalism has to stop if we're going to have a livable globe.

We can share our dreams and struggles and successes, and I hope you will, too! Judging by the people who, over the years, have told me that this blog helped them make changes in their parenting or lifestyles, I think writing here may be the best thing I've done with my life. Sharing our story has apparently given confidence to others. Imagine if each of us took a bold step to make a change, and shared our story? It could spread like wildfire. It could spread like coronavirus. No, we don't all know what we're doing, but neither did I when I started this crazy unschooling journey. A while ago I asked Markus if he thought I'd changed in the time he knew me. He said that in the beginning I just tried stuff and wanted to know stuff. Now I know stuff, and I share what I know... and I keep learning. I think it was the biggest compliment of my life! If we can give each other the courage to jump, we'll be there to help each other figure out the details along the way.

We can love. I woke up this morning imagining that I was sitting back-to-back with my brother on my porch, just leaning into the love of him. Without sharing our moist speaking, we shared our breath, through the rhythm of our lungs, and the feeling of our bodies, together. I had "phone tea" with a few friends over the last while. I visited a couple of people from a long distance and I longed to hug them. I'm picking up some chicks for my heart's sister and am going to drop them off at her door, hug her from afar with my heart, and then we're going to go on the adventure of raising chickens together, as we keep each other up way too late on messenger, sharing our lives and laughing so much we wake our children. Love is not gone. We can always love.

Watch Planet of the Humans, and don't let it bring you down. Let it light a fire under you! Humanity can change! Please join me in figuring out a future that is sparing on consumption while abundant with life, love, and hope.

Everything our Children are Losing in the Time of Coronavirus

Last night I sat beside my usually bright, positive, creative, and self-assured daughter as she cried over the loss of everything. And she wouldn't even let me hug her. A month ago she had her life neatly sorted out: On weekends she studied, worked, gardened, and created. On Thursdays and Fridays she attended a musical theatre program, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays she attended a self-directed highschool program, and on Mondays she worked a babysitting job in the morning, and then spent the afternoon with other youth, planning an annual theatre festival which would have happened this spring, if the pandemic hadn't swept it away. Coronavirus and the necessary social isolation swept everything away: her social time, her school, her source of income, even her ability to plan for her future. We haven't lost any family members to the disease yet, but our friends have, and we know it may just be a matter of time. We're all on edge, waiting to see what happens. Coronavirus isolation isn't just a time of boredom; it's a time of uncertainty and anxiety, bordering on abject fear, and loss of identity.

Imagine going for a snack, only to discover that the chips are gone and your parents don't plan to go shopping for... weeks! It's not that hard to imagine, right? We're all living the lack of convenience right now. And while that's a pretty mild inconvenience, such events are happening all day every day, in every aspect of our lives. Everything is different and uncertain. We're all living the loss of control of each day. We can reassure ourselves by remembering the things we can control: when we eat and sleep, how we interact or what we wear. Difficult though it might be, we can even imagine the future to some degree, assuming that in a few months things will go back to normal and we've seen normal before, and we know what it might look like. Our kids may find that future harder to imagine. Their parents, friends, and school are everything, and suddenly everything has changed. What's coming next? What can they even do to influence the future? They don't have control over their lives in the way that we do of ours. All they had was the security of knowing what was coming each week and each month, and that security has been taken away. They used to have the security of the predictability of a schedule. Now all plans are on hold. School, employment and entire industries are fizzling before their eyes. Some are losing family members to this pandemic, and all are losing contact with family members and friends. We can't reassure them that school will happen again next year, because we don't know. We can't reassure them that they'll be able to visit friends soon, because we don't know that either. We thought that time spent in nature could bandage the wound, but now the parks are closing. Many of us parents can't even promise that we'll be able to provide shelter or food in a few months because the pandemic puts our livelihoods into question. Of course, there are plenty of families who live with this uncertainty all the time, and it's only our middle-class privilege that makes this such a new source of anxiety for many of us. That doesn't make it any less frightening for our children.

Our children are suffering huge losses: Loss of independence, loss of freedom, loss of security of home, education and social network, loss of certainty about the future and often also loss of hope for the future. Loss of something to look forward to; loss of their dreams. We have systems in place in our homes, hearts, and communities for helping each other deal with loss. But right now everyone - including our children - is suffering multiple losses, and both the physical systems and our physiological systems are overwhelmed. This enormous loss can easily be a wormhole into depression for people of any age. At the very least it's hugely anxiety-provoking. It's terrifying to live without security or hope. We can't take away our children's fear, but perhaps in seeing and acknowledging it we can at least help them not to feel so alone.

I wish I had answers, but I don't even know what new concoction I'm going to make with all the dried lentils and chickpeas I bought, never mind how we're going to overcome these crippling feelings of loss and fear. I'm taking each part of each day at a time, relying on the satisfaction of creative problem-solving to distract me and keep my mind active. It turns out that for me, however annoying, having a rapidly-decreasing supply of ingredients and a LOT of lentils and chickpeas is a problem to be solved with creativity, so every afternoon I get creative with that. We're obviously doing all the curries and hummus and breads, but also blended sauces, lentil sprouts (fresh greens - YES!), and (fingers crossed) planting some lentils to grow our own! Creativity and problem-solving is my way of working through anxiety. It may not be everybody's.

Advice was the last thing my daughter wanted, last night, but she said that having some structure to her days might help, although she doesn't feel she can handle too many demands or deadlines right now. She decided she'd make herself a schedule each morning. We both went to bed still feeling the big sadness of this pandemic, but with the knowledge that we love each other, and we're in it together. Then she got up this morning and folded a heap of laundry, bringing mine to me in my bed before I even got up, myself. She tells me she made a schedule and put a half hour for laundry onto it, because she needed to do her laundry. Mine was still unfolded so she folded it. I had a roommate once who cleaned the house fastidiously every time she fought with her boyfriend. Maybe housekeeping is my daughter's way of working through anxiety, or maybe just having a schedule was the ticket, and laundry was a necessary job. It isn't for me to determine. Only to listen when she's willing to talk, open my arms for the unpredictable times that my affection is a poultice, and to accept her feelings and the cold truth of her pain when it presents itself. In this moment and maybe always, that's what love looks like.

Meltdowns? Your kids are de-schooling, and so are you!

Last week my son was being surly, expressing his anger about my intended 'family time' of watching Neil Young in isolation. I figured he could just do something else; he didn't have to make my screen-time miserable, but since he was there he should help make a happy evening. So I freaked out and yelled at him. Of course - because that makes sense, right? And then I ran away and had a mama-tantrum because I was so mad at everything. Mostly I was upset that my father has cancer and we're all in isolation with lack of money and I'm just scared, but I yelled at him about ruining my Neil Young moment. Because we're all home together all the time and why can't we just all enjoy watching Neil Young wash his hands and sing some songs?! Like a three year old who's overwhelmed at daycare, so she comes home and bites her mother. That was me. I'm telling you about my own meltdown because I forgave myself. I forgave myself because I'm de-schooling, and so is my son, and these things are going to happen.

De-schooling is simply the period of time in which families adjust to not being at school. It happens when families switch from schooling to home-schooling, but also just over school breaks, and... during the time of coronavirus, when school break ends and "school" becomes a never-before-experienced jumble of teachers online, free time, confusion, and curriculum you didn't know your kids had. Suddenly everybody is kind of homeschooling kids, without ever having intended to be a homeschooler in the first place, and possibly while newly trying to work from home, leaving the house to work in essential services, or struggling to maintain a household on a sudden lack of income. How in hell are you supposed to teach your kids or even keep them safe in this kind of situation?! This is some seriously stressful new experience for everybody in the house; we need time to decompress.

De-schooling is decompression. It's a time of adjustment. When I was a kid my father used to work in the bush - sometimes for a couple of weeks at a time - and we all had to adjust every time he left and every time he came home. I used to scavenge one of his work-shirts to sleep with when he was away. I missed him horribly, and was often angry with my Mum for missing him too. And when he came home, the excitement of picking him up from the airport or the ferry was a predictable highlight of my childhood... but then I felt angry with him for not having time to do things I wanted him to do; for not being the imaginary father I had while he was away; for having been away in the first place, and even for going back to work in his office in town. I guess we could have called it de-Pappa-ing? Adjustment is always difficult.

De-schooling on its own can be difficult, as experienced by so many families at the beginning of every summer, when Facebook fills up with memes about summer-can't-end-soon-enough, and parental countdowns to school getting back in. Right now we're even more challenged, since most were unprepared for this non-school time, and it also comes with social isolation, fear of disease and loss of loved ones, daily dead-counts on the news, an overwhelming feeling of having to become homemakers when we weren't, before, and for many of us a significant or total loss of income. On top of that, somehow we're supposed to provide "school" at home?! Oh, and if you want to really do this right, you'll be harvesting yeast from the wild, baking bread out of nothing at all, and dancing around the table with your delightful children while they produce amazing schoolwork in perfect harmony, and you pick up a Phd on the side.

Give yourself a break. You deserve one, just for having gotten through the first week and still loving your kids, despite the meltdowns. You deserve a meltdown, too.

I live in British Columbia, where the ministry of education announced that this year's grades will be based on the work done in the year before COVID-19. So if your kid had a B in science in term 2, and does nothing more for the rest of the year, they'll still have a B in science. If they had a frighteningly low grade in science, and want to improve it, the school will offer options for remote activities, with which they can improve their grade from home. They will not be behind in September. THANK YOU BC MINISTRY OF EDUCATION for giving us all a break!!! This means we can relax and deal with the emotional stress of this transition, before we get worried about academic success. We have some much-needed time to de-school, decompress and figure out how to live in the pandemic reality as a family. We can even have time to make that yeast bread if we really want to, and post photos on social media, where we all pretend everything is awesome. Whatever we need to do to keep ourselves and our kids sane, and find a way to thrive.

What to do while de-schooling?
As I wrote in a recent article about how to unschool during isolation: nothing. Just get through. This is early days, and de-schooling isn't a thing you do, but a time of disengagement of one thing in mental preparation for something new. Maybe you have some big project to work on, or a book waiting to be read, and these things can be wonderful as distractions, but they're not going to change the fact that the whole family is going through a big, confusing, overwhelming and scary adjustment. De-schooling is the time where we all give each other some space and forgiveness. It's when, as parents, we remind ourselves that our kids' seemingly ridiculous melt-downs are founded in legitimate feelings, and we catch them in our compassionate arms. Maybe we watch a movie. Maybe we go back to sleeping with them or we just sit watching the suddenly-quieter world go by, letting all our feelings just hang in the air. Maybe we tell ourselves it's OK to do nothing, and it's OK for them to do nothing.

Doing nothing looks different for different people. For many kids these days it looks like video games or sleeping - a lot. And that's OK. We have to give ourselves permission to do whatever nothing is or to not do whatever something is. Read some A.A. Milne.

“I’m not asking anybody,” said Eeyore. “I’m just telling everybody. We can look for the North Pole, or we can play ‘Here we go gathering Nuts in May’ with the end part of an ants’ nest. It’s all the same to me.”                   ~ Winnie the Pooh, Chapter 8.

What I'm saying is, it's OK. It's going to be OK. Some things won't be, but we'll get through this with love, even when love seems like not enough. Find what helps you make things feel OK and do it. Make school happen at home, start unschooling, or ignore this all entirely and watch TV until you stare blankly out the window, just to see something other than a screen. Go for a walk. Play 'Here we go gathering Nuts in May' (whatever that is!). Cry. Wrap your kids up in your arms and just love them. Leave them alone when they ask you to, or join them making inane TikToks. Whatever you need to do. It's going to be OK. You're de-schooling.

Has COVID-19 Already Changed Humanity?

Everhard van Lidth de Jeude stands looking over his pond after feeding the trout. 2014

There's a beaver on our property these days, gleefully chewing up my father's prized rhododendrons, his willow, and other plants, and using them to plug up the outlet from the pond. Nearly every day my father pulls the sticks and mud out of the end of the pond, removing branch after branch of the shrubs he's been nurturing for years and hauling them away to dump at the edge of the forest. My kids and their father just went out to wrap some special trees with wire, hoping to spare them the wrath of the beaver. They're improvising with whatever supplies they can scavenge from the yard and recent chicken-coop build. We hope it's only one beaver. We don't actually know. Beavers have the capacity to wipe out and completely transform a landscape, creating wetlands out of parched slopes and grassy meadows out of rainforests -- and this property is like a craft supply shop for beavers. So we persevere with the pond-unplugging and tree-protecting. It's like repeatedly washing hands in an effort to save us from coronavirus. Just a month ago, all of these precautions had never entered our minds. Now they're routine. We've changed.

Reading this interesting piece from Fahd Humayun this morning, I am thinking about how our family's life might change; how our culture might change, and especially how our interconnected social structure might change, following this pandemic. As a parent of two teens hurrying into adulthood, I think constantly about my children's future. Will their education programs thrive or falter in the sudden age of digital engagement during pandemic? Will the fact that I unschooled them help or hinder them in this new world? Will their formal education even matter in the future we can't predict? Will my love have been enough?

It was only a year ago that my son fully embraced the educational norm of our society and decided to motor through the system, earn his highschool diploma, and work towards a university degree in science. He's part-way there, having completed the highschool grad requirements, and now at college upgrading his science and calculus education in order to make himself part of that teeny weeny cream of the crop that makes it into his chosen field. My daughter is slogging through the highschool requirements mostly on her own time and in a 2-day-a-week alternative program while putting the larger part of her spirit and time into a musical theatre program. Social isolation and the threat of this pandemic has put most of these activities on the backburner, while some attempt haltingly to carry on via video chat. So what now?

As unschoolers, we might seem to have been eminently prepared for this, and in some ways we were. The four of us are getting along reasonably well, considering the stress of the teens' social isolation, and we're not worried about the future, academically, because we dispensed of that fear many years ago. But what about the future of humanity? How will kids of the future grow and learn, in a post-pandemic world? There are so many questions we can't answer, and that alone is frightening.

Post-corona, I think humanity may go in one of two general directions: either we tumble further into capitalism, relieved to regain access to quick fixes and cheap thrills, and falling in line as obedient citizens, having learned to follow instructions during the pandemic, and having let go of many of our personal freedoms, or we discover the fallacy of our current system, and build a new one -- one that works less like a monoculture and more like a wilderness. A monoculture is very susceptible to attack from a single predator, weather event, or disease. Without the balance of diversity, a monoculture becomes less resilient as it continuously sucks nutrient from the earth, unable to replenish what has been taken. In this weak state of being, one serious disease can wipe out a whole landscape, leaving the land barren and unable to recover. A diversified wilderness (or true permaculture wilderness farm, if you want to look at it that way) loses some inhabitants to predation and other adverse events, but works well as a whole, because the nature of diversity means that there is always something left to persevere, fill in the gaps, and heal the whole. Capitalism and human dominance of Earth's landscape has led us to live like a monoculture, and it's killing us.

So can we escape this fate? We're used to the way things are, and nobody really wants to take the hard road. My family has just finished consuming our store-bought fresh produce, and now we're carefully whittling away at our remaining frozen and canned goods, while simultaneously harvesting wild greens, setting up a flock of chickens, and getting this year's veggie garden going. We're trying to strengthen ourselves as a family in the absence of our friends and community; in the absence of fresh groceries and trips to town. And it's HARD! We feel scared and heartbroken to be without the arms of those we normally turn to for support. This is a change for us - a deeper isolation than the one caused by our choice to unschool in a community that largely followed the mainstream. But for the first time in a long time, we're not doing it alone! We and all our loved ones have been chucked out onto this hard road in our separate little bubbles and we're fumbling along together, sharing advice and support over social media.

The question of what education will look like when or if this pandemic is all over is huge for me. My brother is sorting out how he and his colleagues will support a previously active and outdoor-engaged middle school over the internet; I had to simply cancel all the courses I teach, and will likely offer some online; my son is persevering through a newly lab-less chemistry class led by a teacher who struggles with the technology, and my daughter is about to meet her theatre cohort on Zoom to create some semblance of the togetherness that used to happen with physical movement and contact. Nothing is what it used to be; we can't know how these experiments will work out, and I feel certain that entirely new forms of human connection and development are now nascent. But these things are evolving in a largely democratic, wilderness-like way: Millions of people trying things out and breaking them here and there and repairing them here and there with scavenged and improvised solutions, some casualties and some surprise successes -- just like the process of evolution. Education, like the rest of our societal norms, is evolving in front of our eyes.

And despite the isolation, we are not in this alone!

Charles Eisenstein puts into words what I and likely so many others are feeling:

Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future. We might ask, after so many have lost their jobs, whether all of them are the jobs the world most needs, and whether our labor and creativity would be better applied elsewhere. We might ask, having done without it for a while, whether we really need so much air travel, Disneyworld vacations, or trade shows. What parts of the economy will we want to restore, and what parts might we choose to let go of? And on a darker note, what among the things that are being taken away right now – civil liberties, freedom of assembly, sovereignty over our bodies, in-person gatherings, hugs, handshakes, and public life – might we need to exert intentional political and personal will to restore?

Last night my father came home from a surgery to remove some melanoma. It has been three weeks since I came close to him, because the risks of this pandemic are high for a man in his seventies who is embarking on a cancer journey, and also for me, who has an auto-immune condition that tends to inflame my lungs. We protected each other by keeping apart. But the last time one of my parents went for surgery, he died unexpectedly. I lost my other father in a wilderness of confusion, just as we thought he was almost ready to come home. My fear of losing my second father was so great that I was sick all day with worry, and when my mother finally brought him home on the last ferry, I waited at their gate to let them in. My father showed a rare vulnerability as he let me walk him and his hospital-provided vacuum-pack machine to their house, and when he got inside, he hugged me. My pandemic-induced fear of closeness vanished, and my hope returned.

In the piece I linked to at the beginning, Fahd Humayun states that "the pandemic will likely demonstrate that a world without safety nets, cooperation and deep cross-border engagement is no longer tenable." If we want to thrive as a species, we're going to have to become a wilderness instead of a monoculture. We're going to have to take all the best changes this pandemic has brought us and keep them alive in human culture: finding ways to utilize the neglected foods in the back of our freezers; finding ways to help the loved ones we can't come close to, noticing and supporting those who are at risk and may have been invisible to us, before; supporting those who risk their own lives to save ours, and seeing the value in every single one of our diverse community members. We have all learned so much already in the past month. Let's keep expanding our minds and hearts and learn to run nimbly on our toes in the landscape of our wilderness, sharing skills and ingenuity and love. Certainly it is our love that will make this wilderness possible.