Good thing Law and Order ended when it did for me, or else I wouldn’t have popped back onto twitter, seen this stream and had something to bitch about tonight.
Discovery Health’s Radical Parenting episode.
Disclosure: I didn’t watch the show, and a lot of my point of view has been surmised from posts reviewing the show, like this one.
I’m getting really tired of the constant labelling. What purpose does media serve, other than to create divisions, by using the word radical in reference to allowing a child of any gender to ignore the stereotypical gender roles and their denominating colours of pink and blue? How is global thought furthered by calling early potty trainers or elimination communicators extremists? Natural learners aren’t deviants, at all – they’re people who believe in learning, as most parents do.
These are all practices that are embraced and considered natural for parents to engage in, in most countries of the world. But for some reason, our little sector of the planet feels the need to cast about judgments and throw stones.
I breastfed until my daughter was done. She chose, not me. We started potty training when she showed initiative toward it – not sooner, because we didn’t have the communication (nor I the patience) in place for EC. If the media thinks that holding your baby over a pot to pee is militant, they should examine any other culture wherein wealth isn’t as prevalent or wasted. If ‘allowing’ boys to play with dolls and girls to wear blue while embracing their inner GI Joe is revolutionary, then I have to ask at a decibel-level just under a yell, why?
Why is that something to allow in the first place – it’s creative play. Creative play is shown, studies over, to create compassionate, open-minded and intelligent youth.
What do people who do consider this leftist see as the risk of allowing it? The stereotype, a homosexual child? A gender-confused one? Will little Billy will end up wanting to be Jill at 24 and you’ll be able to look way back in his history and remember how he baked cookies with mom?
It’s bullshit, narrow-minded, and as far as I’m concerned, a few minor rungs short of spreading hatred. It’s the media’s equivalent of us vs. them, normal vs. wrong, sane vs. unbalanced.
This kind of stuff is largely why I stopped following a lot of media – why I don’t have cable TV, read the newspaper or listen to the radio – the fear tactics, the creative labelling, and the need to put a title on every single little thing so that millions upon millions of people can all fit into little boxes that, ultimately, a corporation has created for them.
One of the first philosophical conversations my father and I ever had – and we had a lot, because even with the rest of it, we were able to talk for hours about nearly anything logic-based – was what was right and wrong. How that was determined. How do most know what’s ethically right? Or how to raise children? Or that 2+3=5?
Because it’s been deemed so, by a large group, adopted as a general rule, and taken in as a permanent scripture (whether that means biblically, or in a textbook).
Once upon a time, there was no universe, and that’s what people knew was right. A hundred years later, people could laugh at the naiveté.
Better example: How do you know that cigarettes are bad for you? Well, millions of people will tell you so if you ask (and often, if you don’t ask, too. Thanks, fuckers), and lots of those people are doctors, who’ve read or conducted studies and treated patients with various cigarette-caused disease. But less than a century ago, cigarettes were not only not bad for you, they were good for you for various reasons, not the least of which being that they helped you relieve stress during times of war.
But I digress, sort of. The point was to say that we live in a society wherein every moment seems to be throwing new information at us, and it gets hard to know which is the right fact of the moment. Whether soy will give you cancer or lower your cholesterol; whether you can trust a brand to use ethical trade/investment/sales practices; and whether (this was the real piss off, to me) unschoolers have children running around at all hours of the day, unwashed, without discipline, eating tons of doughnuts and ice cream, drinking soda like it’s all that’s left on Earth, playing video games and getting their educations from the trips to the grocery store.
Unschoolers aren’t anarchists. Unschoolers believe in natural education. Period. Just like any other kind of parent, homeschooler, afterschooler, Montessori-embracer, et al, Unschoolers want their children to learn, and to be successful and happy while doing it. Unschooling, just like any (and more) of the other education types I just listed, has a variety of differing practices.
I refuse to be boxed in with a label this show has created that denotes I might practice (what I consider to be just short of) neglect.
As parents, we’re responsible for the health and welfare of our children – I think we can all agree on that. This means, and here’s where some Unschoolers’ practices don’t jive with mine, that we have to look at a five year old and know he’s not emotionally prepared to decide whether to bathe at all. That the seven year old might not be the best person to make choices all the time about their diet. That some children, regardless of age might be able to express tiredness when they are tired, and therefore are capable of going without a set bedtime, but others will stretch themselves past the point of exhaustion, through to insomnia. And so, as parents, it’s our right to ensure that our kids aren’t dirty, on the path to diabetes and 42 cavities, and over-tired all the time. Even if we’re Unschoolers.
What this show did in (what I’m assuming was) an hour is create for viewers a picture of what Unschooling looks like. What they might have taken in is a dirty child, hopped up on sugar, extremely adverse to logic or self-discipline. Or, they could have seen parents that entrusted their children with their own lives. My gut tells me that those who are already versed in Unschooling might have had less judgment, but that’s an assumption.
But here’s the thing: they’re kids, man. They have to grow up a little bit, before they have the neural pathways to even be able to comprehend long-term results, such as malnutrition, tooth decay, diabetes, obesity, illiteracy, long-term sleep deprivation, dehydration, or inactivity.
Unschooling, to me, is quite simple. It’s the dismissal of an education system that was originally created to encourage drone-like behaviour for times of industrial growth. In Prussia. It’s believing that learning takes place during other hours, not just from 9 to 3, Monday to Friday. It’s saying, ‘hey, my kid can’t sit in a chair for 35 minutes, never mind a few hours until lunch time, but if he gets to run around, he learns about stuff twice as fast. So we’re going to a field to talk about geography.’ It’s providing extreme amounts of support and independence to your children, letting them pursue their own interests, but guiding them toward the tools to gain more knowledge in them. It’s allowing them opportunity and encouraging them to take it and run with it as far as they want to.
It’s why, for the people who do think so, I’m considered intelligent. My inherent ability to hyper-focus on a subject that I’m interested in and educate myself, using a variety of mediums that I know work for me, has given me a pseudo-graduate level of knowledge in a few areas. It’s not because I’m wicked smart, it’s because the opportunity and interest coincide. That’s natural learning, in a nutshell.
It’s why Microsoft exists.
Okay. Before you start hating on Bill, listen to the point.
MS used to be a really damn respected brand, and it was built from one little dude’s brain. (Incidentally, I think Stevie’s story is similar, but I’m not positive.) Bill was a nerd. Bill like computer stuff – what he had access to – so he bartered for more access, in his own time, and started living and breathing the things. Because he was Unschooling himself. His parents allowed him to stay out all hours, knowing he was safe in a gigantic room with a gigantic computer, because they saw the passion he had and the speciality he was amassing.
Get back in the Delorian, and we have Microsoft. And a once-veritable monopoly.
Had Bill’s parents assumed that what he was taking in school was enough, that a bedtime was to be enforced, or that he wasn’t to be trusted with all of this free time, you might not get to use Windows 7 or Vista. I know how sad you’d be, then.
After all of these words, I’ve convoluted (and proved) the initial message: media, like in tonight’s show, is too focused on classing people, which leads to people judging other people.
Some, after watching the show, are now thinking ew, Unschooling, and I’m sitting here going, ‘No! That’s not Unschooling! That’s Unparenting!’.
