Dawn

It has been a long time since I posted.  I fell down my somewhat-annual  pit of despair and only recently began to climb out again.  I was generally sad, and becoming obsessively worried that the kids weren't learning enough of X, Y, and Z.  Elise was having a hard time her friends and Albin hit a brick wall in writing class.  We were doing traditional parenting, and everyone was pretty miserable.  You know, eat now with us or no food til breakfast, work first before play, now is bedtime so go to sleep.  It all felt wrong, but that's the way to raise self-disciplined, respectful, hardworking people, right?  So all these things combined to make me want to crawl into a hole and not come out again.  I felt that telling my family what an awful time I was having was like fuel to the fire for they way we were parenting and educating the kids.  (It also rained almost every day in October.)

Well, I'm no longer down the hole and we have really turned the corner on how we live and get along with each other in this house.  It just took some good conversation with my friend and several books that she loaned me.  (Radical Unschooling, A Revolution Has Begun and Parenting a Free Child.)  I know this method of parenting and education may make some of you want to tear your hair out when you see us put it into action, but I ask you to bite your tongue and give us, oh, twenty years to see how things all turn out.  And boy, do I wish we had started earlier! 

I could sputter on at length about how school is not education and how children are treated as second-class citizens, but those two books are so much more articulate.  I really recommend you look them over if you want to understand why we no longer have bedtimes, require regulated eating, and plan to give our children freedom of choice in many more things than our culture deems advisable.  I won't post again on how we got to this point, but continue joyfully on this path of mutual respect and curiosity. 

Things have really been looking up these past few weeks!