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We live without rules or punishments, and the kids are free to choose what to do with their time, with my support for what they choose. That *sounds* extreme, but when you get to know us - we're fairly normal. We wouldn't stand out in a crowd, except we're happier than many families I know, and get along better. OK, maybe we'd stand out a bit.
I do talk to my kids about societal expectations. I wouldn't let them misuse public property or anything, in the name of radical unschooling. (some parents would, unfortunately!) I hope they're interviewing a responsible, happy, established radical unschooling family!
What if they break something of yours or ruin the furniture, or something, or hit each other, or something? How can you not have rules or punishment?
I had also wanted to respond to an old discussion about unschooling, which I won't dig up because it was contentious, in which someone asked why the discussion didn't belong in education. I've found how I parent to have a profound effect on unschooling - they are intertwined, and can't really be separated for me.
To answer rkb's question, though -
It starts with assuming positive intent. If one of my guys broke something of mine or ruined furniture, I wouldn't think they did so maliciously. It was either an accident or an unintended consequence. What if a friend broke something of mine? Would I think she needed to "learn her lesson"?
I also try to meet needs proactively. Hitting is usually a sign of frustration or anger. Sometimes boredom and attention-seeking. My oldest was not a hitter, my youngest was. I'd redirect him, and remind him, "Hitting hurts!". He grew out of hitting, without being punished. I think most kids grow out of things naturally, if they have support and communication.
I needed to be with him as much as possible to head off that boredom or frustration, before it got to the point where hitting seemed like a good solution to him.
They are trying to get needs met - my goal is to help them meet those needs. If hitting happens, there was a need there, and hitting seemed, to him, to be the way to get that.
Same with breaking furniture. Do they want to jump? "OK, jump on this mini-trampoline, or on this old couch we have, not our new couch. If you jump on a couch, it can break, then we couldn't sit on it any more."
If they jump without me there, and the couch breaks: First-hand lesson! More than likely, if they're old enough to understand that their jumping broke the couch, they already feel bad about it. And if they don't, that's likely a function of their personality. Punishing won't change that. If they're not old enough to understand that their actions caused the breakage, then punishment also won't help them grow into understanding any faster. It would just serve to create distance and hurt between us.
A rule: "Don't jump on the couch" wouldn't change anything about any of the above scenarios, except adding an additional, unneeded layer of kids either sneaking past the rule and feeling bad (or excited, or any other possibility), or not being old enough to understand the rule in the first place.
Personally, I let the kids jump on our couch. I've always had old, second-hand furniture. Perhaps the life of the couch was shorter because of that (they never broke one though!), but we had a lot more fun together.
Because I'm an unschooler, I want learning to flow as easily and naturally as it can. For that to happen, I needed to create an atmosphere where the kids knew they could explore and learn and create, without fear of punishment, or thinking my response to anything would be "no". If they can trust that the "yes" is there, they can follow their thoughts and exploration, knowing I'll support what they're doing. To do otherwise would stop that trail of learning in its tracks.
Also, how does unschooling work? How do you measure progress? How do you reinforce core concepts?
I trust that learning is happening, all the time - because it is! I don't measure progress, except making sure my kids are happy and engaged. If they are, I know, without a doubt, they are learning what they need. That can also be true sometimes if they're frustrated and engaged - learning things can be hard! But we shoot for happiness, overall.
The core concepts come because they ARE core concepts. If math is needed in the world, then they'll learning it by living in the world. If reading is needed, they'll learn it. It might not happen on the same schedule a school would determine, but it will happen.
Natural learning doesn't look anything like school learning, most of the time. Bits and pieces of things are picked up here and there, without agenda or a preconceived notion of "things that need to be learned". Over time, those bits and pieces come together. I wrote a blog post about that, years ago (I don't keep a blog any more). I'll post that, below.
There's a list of questions going around facebook now, it started as questions for homeschoolers but they were very school-at-homey, with things like "What do your children wear to school?" or "Favorite subject?" or this weird one, "Sports, music, or art?". Someone changed the questions around to better suit unschoolers. You can see the questions on Ronnie's blog. I chose to do just one question, question 5.
Here's my answer.
What kinds of ways do your family members learn about stuff these days?
I don't even think about learning any more. It's not something I can quantify, or say how it's happening for anyone other than me - and quite frequently, I can't for me, either. It's organic. It's in bits & pieces so small we don't notice.
It's in this or that conversation, chance meeting, or something we come across on google. I can say, "I want to learn the lyrics to I'm Yours" so I google that, but who can say what I learn along the way? I learn how sing365.com lays out and organizes their search function, I learn that lyricsmania has a bunch of pop-ups, I learn how to block pop-ups. I learn something from every visual image I come across - wow, that lime shade of green on that site looks really good with that blue. I learn Jason Mraz sings barefoot - or did at least once. I learn his drummer hits the drum differently than most people I've seen. Along the way, I'm seeing ads, links to other videos, etc. I can't tell you what I learned because it happens so quickly it doesn't make a conscious impression. Apparently, Land o' Lakes has a new half & half they're very proud of. I learned that.
I got this years ago, when, walking the dog with my oldest son, he started talking about the origins of the universe, and different theories about it, and his thoughts about it all. I know he's never checked out a book from the library on the origins of the universe. He may have read a magazine article about it, but at that time, we mostly had Utne Reader, XBox, and Game Informer in the house. He may have seen something on Discovery or Nature or PBS or History, but I know we had never sat down together to watch anything like that - it's something I'd want to see! What I realized happened is that he had picked up a piece here, a piece there, probably not even consciously. All those pieces got put together in the joyous amount of free time he has to dream and ponder and BE, until he had this cohesive collection, and wanted to share it with me. He couldn't have told you where he learned it. Or when. I doubt he would have said that he had learned it. It wasn't a conscious thing.
That's what unschoolers mean when we say learning happens all the time. It doesn't mean at the end of the day we can list and quantify and sort out everything that was learned, neatly into school subjects. It means it happens like breathing, you can't stop it from happening. You can't tell when it's happening, because learning truly isn't separate from living.
That's one thing that helped me let go of controlling television - I saw in his drawings how he used shading to create a mood, or changed his characters' eyes to show how they were feeling. He learned that through living with real people who interacted with him, but also through TV. Even if he hadn't been interested in drawing, I could see I could not tell what he was learning from watching. I wasn't able to get inside his brain, and even if we talked about it, he wouldn't have been able to tell me everything. The play of one character off another. The colors of the sets. How dialogue was working - or not working - to sound natural. Lots of people find farts funny.
We learn through all five senses, frequently the sixth, and through connection with each other. We learn from books, from magazines, from movies and TV and You Tube Poop. We learn from Barbies, from guns and swords and Bionicles and Legos. We learn through talking, through watching and asking, or waiting. We learn through cooking, shopping, eating, eliminating. We learn from driving or riding the bus or walking or biking. We learn by listening to music, or playing an instrument or singing or banging a rhythm on the table. We learn through living, whatever life looks like that day, whether it's a trip to Discovery Place and the library or a day of not getting off the couch because we're so hooked by David Tennant as Dr. Who we watch all the episodes on the XBox.
There are as many ways to learn as there are... people. Multiplied by infinite ways to learn. Learning's not an event, it's in every moment.
Last edited by CharlotteGal; 11-23-2011 at 06:37 AM..
I had also wanted to respond to an old discussion about unschooling, which I won't dig up because it was contentious, in which someone asked why the discussion didn't belong in education. I've found how I parent to have a profound effect on unschooling - they are intertwined, and can't really be separated for me.
To answer rkb's question, though -
It starts with assuming positive intent. If one of my guys broke something of mine or ruined furniture, I wouldn't think they did so maliciously. It was either an accident or an unintended consequence. What if a friend broke something of mine? Would I think she needed to "learn her lesson"?
I also try to meet needs proactively. Hitting is usually a sign of frustration or anger. Sometimes boredom and attention-seeking. My oldest was not a hitter, my youngest was. I'd redirect him, and remind him, "Hitting hurts!". He grew out of hitting, without being punished. I think most kids grow out of things naturally, if they have support and communication.
I needed to be with him as much as possible to head off that boredom or frustration, before it got to the point where hitting seemed like a good solution to him.
They are trying to get needs met - my goal is to help them meet those needs. If hitting happens, there was a need there, and hitting seemed, to him, to be the way to get that.
Same with breaking furniture. Do they want to jump? "OK, jump on this mini-trampoline, or on this old couch we have, not our new couch. If you jump on a couch, it can break, then we couldn't sit on it any more."
If they jump without me there, and the couch breaks: First-hand lesson! More than likely, if they're old enough to understand that their jumping broke the couch, they already feel bad about it. And if they don't, that's likely a function of their personality. Punishing won't change that. If they're not old enough to understand that their actions caused the breakage, then punishment also won't help them grow into understanding any faster. It would just serve to create distance and hurt between us.
A rule: "Don't jump on the couch" wouldn't change anything about any of the above scenarios, except adding an additional, unneeded layer of kids either sneaking past the rule and feeling bad (or excited, or any other possibility), or not being old enough to understand the rule in the first place.
Personally, I let the kids jump on our couch. I've always had old, second-hand furniture. Perhaps the life of the couch was shorter because of that (they never broke one though!), but we had a lot more fun together.
Because I'm an unschooler, I want learning to flow as easily and naturally as it can. For that to happen, I needed to create an atmosphere where the kids knew they could explore and learn and create, without fear of punishment, or thinking my response to anything would be "no". If they can trust that the "yes" is there, they can follow their thoughts and exploration, knowing I'll support what they're doing. To do otherwise would stop that trail of learning in its tracks.
Interesting discussion. We have more rules than you do, but I also lean towards fewer rules. We make rules when we feel we need them. We do not set them up in advance. My kids are free to date when they are ready, wear what they like, and pursue the activities that they enjoy. I don't let them jump on the furniture though.
We have some rules but all of our rules serve some practical purpose. They are not arbitrarily set down because I decided there needs to be a rule. For example, the kids are not allowed to eat in their bedrooms. Meals are eaten at the table. They may snack in the family room.
We teach our kids to live by teaching them right from wrong, not by setting up a whole bunch of rules. We do teach them to obey the laws of the land. We also teach them to respect other people, which includes following house rules in other people's homes.
When the kids were small we would frequently teach them the appropriate way to carry out what they wanted to do. For instance, when my oldest was about 3 he would get stir crazy in the house all time. He was an active preschooler and wanted to play ball all the time. There was no appropriate place for him to do that indoors in the winter where we were living. So we set up a space in the basement where he could play with balls. Instead of a rule that said "Don't play ball in the house" we told him "If you want to play ball go down to the basement where there is a nice space to play."
So no rules doesn't mean no learning the appropriateness of time and place. We just tried to provide a reason to say yes and fewer times that we had to say no. Of course, there are times when we have to say no but it makes it much easier for kids to accept no, when you say yes to most of what they want.
This works well for teens because it just gives us less opportunities to fight. We try to find a way to say yes. Sometimes that means asking kids to suggest an alternative that makes us more comfortable than their original pla. We find that they are more likely to abide by our wishes when they are part of planning.
We also tell them why we are saying no to something. That sometimes turns to a reason for us to say yes. We rarely fight with our teens because we try to work things out with them. For instance, our 15 year old was invited to a party in Miami (45 minutes away). We did not want to make 2 trips to Miami and we had plans for dinner that night. Instead of saying no we told him that he needed to arrange a ride there and we would be able to pick him up along with whomever gave him a ride there. So it wasn't "no" it was "yes-if you can help us out). He arranged his ride there. We took the other kid home. Problem solved. No fights. He got what he wanted (to go to the party). We got what we wanted (one trip to Miami, not two).
I have an adult son with Down syndrome and when he was in school, they sat him at a table with large Legos and I figured I could surely do better by him. Yeah, we fought the battles at every level but too much energy expended and nothing for it. When I researched, I learned about "unschooling" and it worked miracles for our son who is lower functioning. Still, today, at age 25, he is "unschooled" and still learning and expanding. We did learn about "redirection" and that was probably our biggest blessing and boy, that works with other people in our life too! People fear what they don't understand and few have the courage to think outside the box.
It starts with assuming positive intent. If one of my guys broke something of mine or ruined furniture, I wouldn't think they did so maliciously. It was either an accident or an unintended consequence. What if a friend broke something of mine? Would I think she needed to "learn her lesson"?
This is KEY to some of what I have posted in other threads about rethinking discipline strategy. Why would one assume that a child is "naughty"? (I hate that word.)
Yes there are times when a child's (or anyone's) wants are at odds with what is right.
In both cases the result is the same. The child DOES need to learn a lesson. I am responsible for my actions. My actions have consequences. When I break something that does not belong to me, I am responsible for seeing it fixed or replaced. When I hurt someone I am responsible for helping them feel better...
Never do you even have to take out some obscure punishment when you can just look at the situation and say what is the responsibility in this case.
Has nothing to do with unschooling for me. Even when we home schooled we did not unschool. (Eclectic style if you need a term.)
Quote:
I also try to meet needs proactively. Hitting is usually a sign of frustration or anger. Sometimes boredom and attention-seeking. My oldest was not a hitter, my youngest was. I'd redirect him, and remind him, "Hitting hurts!".
For us it was remedy and amends. Look at your sister. How does your siser feel? Do you like to make your sister feel that way? What can you do to help her feel better? Usually winds up with a hug and a boo boo bunny. Then we can talk about next time when you are frustrated what ELSE can you do to communicate?
Helping them understand the tools to manage these situations correctly is HUGE. "You do not have the right to take that toy out of my hands. please give it back right now!" "When you call me that name, it hurts my feelings. I don't play with people that hurt my feelings." And walk to another room.
...
We role play situations similar to ones that they have been in so the skills feel more natural when new situations arise.
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He grew out of hitting, without being punished. I think most kids grow out of things naturally, if they have support and communication.
My son hit exactly ONCE. When it was brought to his attention that it was hurtful, he was horrified.
We do speak to them with very direct language. We feel that the notion that who a person is is not defined by their actions is nonsense. We call people who do murder murderers. Not that person does murder. Who we are is going to be seen and judged by our actions. And I tell my kids that. What kind of person do you want to be? That is entirely up to you. Do you want to be a good, kind, loving person? Or do you want to be mean?
Of course he wants to be a good, kind, loving person! That combined with knowing that we all make mistakes and how to remedy mistakes goes a looooooong way.
Quote:
I needed to be with him as much as possible to head off that boredom or frustration, before it got to the point where hitting seemed like a good solution to him.
They are trying to get needs met - my goal is to help them meet those needs. If hitting happens, there was a need there, and hitting seemed, to him, to be the way to get that.
Same with breaking furniture. Do they want to jump? "OK, jump on this mini-trampoline, or on this old couch we have, not our new couch. If you jump on a couch, it can break, then we couldn't sit on it any more."
Better still couches aren't for jumping. Can you think of something that IS meant for jumping?
Start them solving their own problems.
Quote:
Because I'm an unschooler, I want learning to flow as easily and naturally as it can.
For me it has nothing to do with unschooling. For me it is the most effective at the end goal of what I want. My kids brought up to be the best thems that they can be.
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Radical Unschooling and Parenting
Great minds. 
