Posts Tagged ‘respect’
Five Requirements for Effective Parenting
In an interview this morning, I was asked to name the five things that I think are crucial for effective parenting. Respect and trust were the first to come to mind; I’ve been talking about them forever as prerequisites for creating an environment in which kids can develop and learn. It took me a little while longer to distill everything else [...]
Unschooling, Radical Unschooling, or Something Else?
Most life learners don’t like to label their children – whether it’s using the alphabet soup provided by those who would drug children into submissive behavior or by means of school-style grades. So I’m always amused and disturbed in equal parts when the debate begins about what to call this sort of child-led, non-coercive, lifestyle that [...]
The Unschooling Route to Thinking for Oneself
One of the common criticisms of homeschooling is that it supposedly allows parents to “brainwash” their kids in their own narrow ways of thinking. Maybe that’s true in some families but there is a huge community of progressive home educating families that is focused on exactly the opposite. And one of the foundations of my own parenting [...]
The Not-Doing-To Lifestyle
The idea of life learning (or “unschooling” and its various subsets, as some prefer to label it) is elusively hard to understand. Many people have tried to define the concept and I’ve been observing a variety of discussions on the topic lately. I, too, have tried many times to define and describe it, although when our family was living the [...]