Your children will certainly see you angry from time to time, and how you handle those situations will teach them a lot. Will you teach them that might makes right? That parents have tantrums, too? Or that anger is part of being human, and that learning to manage anger responsibly is part of growing up?
-Dr. Laura Markham, from Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids: How to Stop Yelling and Start Connecting
We have all lost it in front of our kids. It is part of being a parent, part of being human. For me, it is important to love and accept myself, and then ask my children to forgive me if my words or actions have harmed them. I let them know how I might have handled the situation better. I do this for myself and for them. Some of my best lessons are the ones my mother has taught me through her own mistakes and willingness to do something different the next time.
Thanks for sharing this…beautiful!
Care:I’ve found (through socializing, anhyow) that there are two kinds of unschoolers. The first are the conscientious parents who really want the best for their children. They integrate subject matter into daily life, and while they have no formal curriculum nor do the drive they child’s interests in subject matter, they make a point of including the absolute basics into their day in such a way that it’s not a grammar class,’ it’s a discussion on what they’re choosing to read, how the author uses punctuation, and various and sundry grammatical / usage / mechanics elements as well. It’s incredibly dedicated on the part of the parent, and the unschoolers using this method are, sadly, few and far between amongst people calling themselves unschoolers.The second kind are the kind who don’t want to send their children to public school, as that leads to inferior education, mindless automatons, troubles with bullying, take your pick. However, they are also woefully unprepared (mentally, emotionally, or cognitively) to actually focus on their child’s schooling. They believe it’s fine to just let the children go and learn, never checking for understanding, never doing anything to ensure their child actually is doing the learning they should be. The kind response to these people is to assume they just don’t realize what they’re actually doing, and are well-intentioned. The more realistic response is that they’re just too lazy to do what needs to be done, to fight the children to have that discussion on exclamation points, who use unschooling as an umbrella to hide under while they just leave their children home and ignore them. While I applaud the sheer dedication it takes to do the first kind of unschooling, and marvel at how difficult it must be to ensure that all educational criteria are met The second kind are really the prevalent ones, and probably ought to be stopped so their kids don’t end up paying the price for their idiocy. The question is how to do it without borking things up for the rest of the homeschoolers, who take their obligation to their children seriously.
Like any other form of education, the people engaged in it run the spectrum. In schools there are bad teachers, mediocre teachers, good teachers and great teachers. The same is true for traditional homeschoolers and unschoolers. Sadly, in all cases, when a parent or teacher doesn’t excel it is the children who suffer. How that can be remedied is a worthy question indeed.