Homeschooling and Socialization

Our kids spend a lot of time just playing in small groups: as a sibling pair, with a friend or two, and even alone. The benefit of this is that they have a lot of focused time to develop social skills and to grow true to their own moral convictions. Because they live and grow in the community as a whole instead of in large age-based groupings, there is a lot more adult input, which helps them navigate their changing world with a little more understanding.

Socialization, as defined by Dr. John Baldwin, professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, is "the process by which children and adults learn from others" (online document for his soc142 class). Well... it seems obvious to me from our experience that the socialization my kids gain from living life in the world is more to our liking than an imposed pre-ordained sort of socialization provided by schools. And as unschoolers, we're not alone.

In his report on an unschooling survey he conducted, Dr Peter Gray states that

"...their children were happier, less stressed, more self-confident, more agreeable, or more socially outgoing than they would be if they were in school or being schooled at home. Many in this category referred to the social advantages; their children interacted regularly with people of all ages in the community, not just with kids their own age as they would if they were in school."*

*Read the full report on Psychology Today: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201202/the-benefits-unschooling-report-i-large-survey

So that all sounds just lovely, doesn't it?

But.

Ask any homeschooling family about the most common question they get from non-homeschoolers, and they will likely answer "What about socialization?"

[Yes we're still unschooling, but I write 'homeschoolers' here because the socialization issue comes up first for homeschoolers as a general group.] As unschoolers we more often are asked "How do they learn anything? How will they compete? How will they enter back into society?". (Though I would argue that unschoolers are already more in society than schooled kids are, so there is no entering needed...) The socialization question only comes up after these are satisfied, and I think it's interesting to look at the progression of fears and how easy it is to ride the fear-train from one question to the next... and end up at a projection of a lonely life as a social outcast.

Whoah. Social outcast? Yeah. That's us. We're the only unschooling family in our community with a 12-year-old boy who's interested in physics. By some twist of fate it happens that he's pretty much alone in his niche of our community. Our daughter doesn't have that issue. She's invited to all kinds of lovely events. But our son has been an outcast since he first split from the mainstream and didn't go to kindergarten. There was never a group of similarly-aged kids for him to adhere to. We keep trying, but we always feel like intruders on somebody else's social scene. This is the potential downside of home/unschooling, but it isn't actually a problem of circumstances, so much as

it's my problem.
 (Hm... have I said this before...?)

I am so upset to see the other kids his age going off on great adventures without him; so sad for him; so lonely for him. Yes, I am. Not he. He's not sad and lonely. I am sad and lonely for him. Does that sound insane? Well, I can't find any research to support this, but I feel confident that this is normal. We want the best for our children, and our greatest parental fears come from our greatest childhood fears. Those are the things we're afraid will happen again. As parents, we have to confront those fears.

The greatest unresolved issue I have, personally, is a feeling of being unwanted. I felt unwanted throughout my schooling journey, in every group I've been a part of - even in my own close relationships and family, and still, to this day, struggle with these feelings. My greatest fear, therefore, is that my children will feel the same way.

This is something I have to resolve within myself, and on the long road to that resolution, I have to keep reminding myself that this is my journey; not my children's. I am sad that my children are not invited on cool field trips. But they don't care nearly as much as I do. And in fact, I may be passing on my greatest fear simply in not dealing with it within myself. It's actually quite possible that I got it from my own mother, and she from hers. Time to put an end to it!

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of homeschooling parents chose this route to protect their children from things they feared, but unschooling ourselves - with compassion and honest acknowledgement of our own fears - is at least part of the solution. The fact that home/unschooling creates so many situations for my fear to manifest also means it creates so many opportunities for me to confront my fear. And in confronting it, I teach my children to do the same.

Maybe being outcasts from a system we don't thrive in isn't such a bad thing!
Maybe having to confront that word is actually quite a good thing.

Please comment! What are your fears? How do they contribute to your parenting choices?

I am a mother.

This is a repost from my MAMAproject blog...

There is nothing particularly special about me. 

I am like billions of other people in the world: I am a mother.

And yet,

I am a mother.

I hold the lives of my children in my hands, on my breath I validate their dreams, and my intentions and mistakes determine their futures and their children’s futures. Retail, investment and service industries market to me; my interest is a hot commodity. And yet I have very few real resources, because those industries don’t benefit from my triumphs; they benefit from my needs.

You know who benefits from my triumphs? My children. Your children. Our children’s children. Every single generation to come benefits from every single time I get it right. And that makes it imperative that I take my job seriously and get it right.

We need to take responsibility for our children! As our children soak up every word we say; every hand-gesture, every movement of eyes and facial expression, are we living the life we want them to emulate? How many of us just sit back and allow our kids to play games (online and otherwise) without engaging them in conversation about what they are playing, and the ramifications of it? When my children asked me what rape was, I told them. We talk about wars, and politics, and sex and drugs and mental illness. We pause movies and games when things need to be explained, and my kids soak up the explanations (and questions) sometimes with more enthusiasm than the media itself. I can't stop them from participating in what is now popular culture, and if I did, they'd only want it more. But I can lead by example, and so can you. We all can. We have to. It's our responsibility. We didn't bear our children out of necessity; we chose this path because we love children. And children grow to be adults, to inherit our world, and to have more children, themselves. So it's our responsibility to raise them with integrity and awareness, that they go into the world full of questions and willing to look around, but also with a conviction to find their own truths and their own right paths.

There is no time to waste. And the smallest things make a difference; the random comments from my children remind me of this. My daughter once said, "I can't wait until I grow up so I can have pimples and wear cover-up, too!" My son said "I hope my wife doesn't think I want her to shave herself. That wouldn't be nice of me." Once my daughter reprimanded her father for some grammatical mistake and then turned to me with pride in her eyes. Oh no - did I teach her that? Of course I did! And it will take a lifetime to undo. Not everything we pass on is what we hope for. It matters very much not only that we lead by example, but also that we teach our children - from birth - that their own opinions and questions matter; that any question is valid, but that we also don‘t have all the answers. It's important that we reach for the best possible version of ourselves, because that will be the standard our children measure themselves against, and it will effect every single generation to come.

It is not OK for us to condemn violent video games but to watch violent movies, ourselves, or to wish death on politicians, talk trash and laugh about the emotional trauma of celebrities. It's not OK for us to practice attachment parenting but escape our children for a night at the bar. When they find us in the morning and discover that sour old booze smell on our breath they will learn that that is the smell of being with friends, and all the threats in the world won't take that lesson away from them when they're 14 and their friends are offering them cheap vodka under a bridge. It's not OK for us to tell them to be nice to each other, but to put our own community members down, to gossip, and to blame. Our children will learn more from our acknowledgement of our mistakes, and the lessons they’ve watched us learn than they will from the threats and consequences we’ve doled out to them.

We are mothers, and our demonstrated values and behaviour are the greatest teachers our children will ever have. We are mothers! We must take the importance of this incredible occupation very seriously, because there is nobody who can make a bigger change than we can, in choosing how we raise each new generation. 

beltaine for atheists

Happy May!

building the fire

Tali's wild salad

Rhiannon's May Cakes

...aaand... look who joined in the maypole dance this year!!

Changing the World

cormorant and gull with freighters

Some days I look out around me at the forest, my community, the sky, the creeks and the ocean... and I see something so beautiful - so needed in and integral to my life - that it brings me to tears. Happy tears. Sad tears. Tears of honest terror and helplessness. I look out and I see that we are using it up. Just using it all up and it's not ever coming back, and this - THIS is the world that's keeping us alive.

And I'm scared.

There's no point in seeing all the changes that need to be made without doing anything to make them, but I can't change the world alone. Changing the world - saving the world - happens in all of us. I am moved to my core to see my neighbour and my friend sing his heart into our community, making it OK for us all to be real. Changing the world happens when my sister makes it her personal mission to disseminate discarded goods from the recycling depot so they can be reused, first. It happens when my son overcomes an enormous fear of confrontation to yell at a man he sees hitting a snake: Stop! Please stop! It happens when a friend gives up plastic and empowers me to do the same. It happens in all of us every day.

Wild Art kids releasing some tadpoles and changing water for those we're still raising.

Today was the last regular day of this year's 9-14 year-old Wild Art Group. These kids just rocked my world, this year. The premise of Wild Art is that we hang out for 4 hours and they basically do whatever they want, with encouragement, guidance, and mediation from me. Today we were looking at our tank full of tadpoles (a project not at all taken on lightly, and accompanied by a huge amount of moral discussion) and we talked about monoculture vs. permaculture, as it pertained to our little aquarium and the pains we take to replicate the pond the tadpoles came from and to which they'll be returned. This year these kids have created spontaneous forest villages complete with financial and labour systems, wild food stores and ethical consultation. And now they're putting the finishing touches on a play. The entire year, the artwork, the discussions, the explorations - all came from the hearts of these kids. I'm just the facilitator. But that is the work I love, and I hope that in holding this space for some wonderful people I can help amplify the waves they are making.

Wild Art play planning.

Changing the world isn't done alone. It's in the connections we make and the passion that connects us. When I share my feelings - the negative ones, the idealistic ones, the dramatic ones and the fearful ones - I'm just trying to change the world. Because I have hope.

This looks like a stock photo. It's not. It's a real moment of hope revealing itself.

Click this photo to enlarge it. That ain't yer average little clover, there! We took this photo today out on the field as the kids were going over their inventive and improvised script. We took this photo in the April sun, in a gentle breeze, with the movement of sequoia boughs above and a few species of birds snacking in the grass around us: six passionate kids and a four-leafed clover. There is always hope.

easter for atheists

Despite being not Christian at all, we love Easter! For us it's about spring and growth and family; joy in new life and resurrection of the garden!

Most of us got together for our traditional Easter-time nettle picking!

And the Easter Rabbit did not disappoint the children!

(comparing quantities of chocolate eggs)

Rhiannon made a paper egg-hunt for the parents earlier on the weekend, and Markus found the last missing egg on Easter morning.

We bought some gorgeous local aracauna coloured eggs from a friend (for old time's sake; when we were children we had green- and blue-laying aracaunas, too), but since Tali is allergic to real eggs, we made him a sausage-and-apple-stuffed woven bacon egg, instead. I think he approved; he ate the whole thing! I got this idea from Mike at Atomic Shrimp (who is also a wild food enthusiast!). But his was quite large. This is my smaller, 1-person version, filled with natural pork sausage and sauteed apples.

(See our colourful eggs?) And I think we were all pleased to finally have a dog sleeping under the table, again. 

What a joyful day! Happy Easter! Happy Spring!

life these days

Rhiannon made a trampoline for Mela

This is another photo dump. Our spring has been wonderfully busy, full of various activities at home, as well as Wild Art, circus school, homeschool field trip, visiting with friends, and... a puppy!! Kalea is not our puppy, exactly; she's my parents' little golden retriever baby, but we quite like to babysit and play with her, and you will probably see quite a few fluffy golden photos, from now on...

Tali got somebody's discarded (but functional) record player and has been experimenting ever since.

Both puppies and 9-year-olds LOVE to play in the mud!!

If you ever doubted that our home was once a trailer... now you know. Despite it's rather house-like features, it is still decorated with 2 steel trailer hitches! Markus is removing a sword fern from inside of one, here.

Sometimes Kalea's walks are rather slow...

We are building new garden beds on the east side of the house.

Ahh... what could be better than reading on a sunny day!

Well... if you are Tali you might just pretend it's raining...

Kalea thinks she helps with gardening, but... just like the merits of a sunny day, it's all a matter of perspective.

Springtime

Time for a photographic update of springtime at our house... :--)

oregon grape blossoms

peach blossoms

budding magnolia tree

star magnolia

chickweed

ladyfern fiddlehead

Rhiannon's hyacinths

some kind of buttercup

grape hyacinths

flowering current

forsythia

daffodil

skunk cabbage

red legged frog

red legged frog tadpoles hatching

Preteens and Teens: How to Play

We seem to have an idea in our culture that we need manufactured objects for play. Even when we do play outside, we tend to stick to manufactured spaces like parks, sports fields, trails, etc. It seems so bewildering to imagine what we would do without these things. But kids don't have that problem.

The things the kids in my world get up to with a bit of wilderness and no rules are really quite beautiful. They develop the most complex socio/economic systems which basically mimic those of their parents. They take whatever the wilderness offers them and weave it into their play, taking on various jobs, trading for services, objects and 'money' (this week it was alder catkins), hiring each other and volunteering, maintaining the spaces they create and filling in their world with creativity, philosophical/moral conversations, and a whole lot of laughter.

These aren't 6-year-olds. These are 9 to 13-year-olds. They are squatting bare- and boot-footed in a creek (above), diverting clean water for a handwashing station, and creating moss-on-bark sponges to scrub their handmade wooden planter pots which they plan to sell at the pet (slug) and variety store over to the right, on a log. On the surface, to those of us accustomed to the commercially-available expectations of preteens, it looks like their play is childish. But if you really pay attention you see that the things they're working through here are in fact very mature. I heard conversations ranging from impacts of climate change to fair wages to questions of morality in petting zoos and circuses and ethics of catching wild animals, to gender equality, particle physics and nutritional values of wild foods. Really. With 0 adult input, these are just a few of the conversations that came up in 4 hours of wilderness play, yesterday.

I could not dream up these things. I can only give them space to do it themselves.

This is what happens when you leave the manufactured toys, spaces and rules behind and leave kids to play with nothing but time and lack of constraints. Oh -- and some wilderness at their disposal. Some trees to climb. Creeks to get muddy in. Nobody standing around injecting teachable moments or safety concerns.

Kids don't need us to tell them how to play and learn. They need us to get out of their way.

Book Review: The Golden Spruce

I think this may be my favourite book of all time. I'm currently reading it to the kids -- and to my husband! I read it a few years ago, and while it completely captivated me, I thought the kids were a bit young for it. But not any more!

This book will give you a deep narrative-based understanding of BC's history, forestry, resource-based economy and west coast ecology... all while being a truly gripping read. I think that's enough! It's wonderful. I am thoroughly enjoying this second read - maybe even more than the first one, as the kids interrupt frequently with questions and philosophical explorations. In addition to being an amazing read, The Golden Spruce is an amazing thing to share.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88335.The_Golden_Spruce

Catch up with author John Vaillant here:
http://www.facebook.com/JohnVaillant
http://www.thetigerbook.com/
https://twitter.com/JohnVaillant

Save the World! Stop Raising Tadpoles!

Raising Tadpoles: Maybe I was wrong.

It's such a tricky issue!! YES, it's possible, and if everything goes to plan, and you look after them really well, then you may be doing them a favour, and certainly, if you couch the whole experiment in conservation, then you can educate children and adults so that they care about the frogs in the ponds, and the ecology (on a broader scale) of our whole community and planet.

BUT.
Too much of a good thing is a bad thing!
My mother used to raise tadpoles at the preschool, now I do it with the kids I teach, and I have, in the past, advised teachers of other programs on how to do it well. Eventually I became aware that people were trying it at home, and egg-clusters were dying en masse, as people didn't know how. I recognise that these people were trying to do something very good: give some tadpoles a head start and raise ecologically conscious kids. So, to help this problem, I published instructions on how to do it properly with Red Legged Frogs, including notes on conservation, because Red Legged frogs, while abundant in our neighbourhood, are blue-listed. In fact most frogs are threatened, to some degree, because of the ecological devastation and habitat loss that our rampant human population growth and over-consumption is causing.

Now it seems that my instructions are spreading all over the place. People are trying to raise tadpoles across this whole island, and on the mainland, too. People are tromping through wetlands and ponds and lakes in search of frog and salamander eggs, and disturbing the very areas we'd like to protect.

I was wrong. 

Although I think that raising tadpoles is still very beneficial for education, and even conservation, when done properly, I do not in any way think that every family should have an aquarium full of tadpoles at home.

Everything in moderation seems to apply to... well... everything! It's probably just fine - even healthy - to drink a beer once in a while, but 10 beers maybe not so much. Plastic was a miracle invention for various reasons, until we started using it for everything, and now our beaches, oceans, soil, and air are full of microscopic plastic particles, wreaking havoc for every species on earth, including humans. For thousands of years humans lived in symbiosis with the rest of the flora and fauna; now there are too many of us, and we're causing devastation. Everything in moderation. A tank of hatching frog eggs - maintained carefully - in most schools was a beautiful thing, and the kids who examined the wetland they came from learned to care for their own ecosystem. That was a good thing. But a tank of eggs (or a few tanks) in every home... some leaching plastic chemicals into the tadpoles' water (which causes reproductive issues) and some just simply dying due to a simple mistake or lack of understanding... that's too much. And it's not good.

We need to know the wilderness not as other, but as part of us. We need to understand it so deeply that the rain doesn't keep us from living in it, that the forest is a better playground than a gym, that we recognise the changes that happen all year long and see when something's off, and that when something's off we do something about it, because we know that our lives depend on it.

Something is off with this raising tadpoles thing.
Save the world. Stop raising tadpoles and get out in the wilderness.

Neverland Tea Salon

Gluten Free has become normal for us - except that we don't go out. We don't go, not because we don't like going out, but because it's so incredibly hard to get good food, especially good food that's gluten free. This isn't a dietary fad for us, as some people seem to think. Three of us suffer quite seriously (to varying degrees) if we eat gluten, and the risk of accidentally ingesting gluten at a restaurant is not at all worth the pleasure of dining out.

But Rhiannon and I decided to risk it - because she wanted to experience high tea. Honestly, I wasn't expecting much. I've gone out for high tea a few times, and it was always a little disappointing - even when it was full gluten and ridiculously expensive.

This time was different. Rhiannon invited her dear friend along... and, well...  

Neverland Tea Salon in Vancouver completely blew our minds.

$15 for a 3-tier 1/2-size gluten- and dairy-free high tea service (plenty for one hungry kid), plus endless selection from the very long tea list. $30 for a full service, which was way too much for this hungry adult. I'm picky about my food. It takes a lot to impress me. The food was by far the best high tea I've EVER had, and the teas were wonderful; steeped to perfection. The service was understated and thoughtful; the food was quick, and they tipped us as we left, with a tiny bag of their Neverland Tea blend to take home.

And they have style. 

beautiful steeping teas

1 tea service: 5 different amazingly delicious sandwiches, 5 different desserts, and one scone - definitely the best I've ever eaten - served with cream and homemade jam. And gluten and dairy free. Why is it so good? Because they make everything in-house. It's fresh. It's real. It's AWESOME. And the girls were completely delighted. O.K. So was I!

Pinkies!

So... you know... after high tea, and while wearing the fanciest gowns and fairy wings and grandmother's Russian fur hat... the proper thing for ladies to do is...

Ahhh....

Oooh! Let's jump off this bank!!

Oh oh -- lost something!

My shoe!!!

Never mind. Might as well go sockfoot!

Or barefoot.

Awesome.

Just. 

Awesome.

.