My challenge

I read a post today by WifeMomManiac that really resonated with me. Her daughter sounds so very similar to my own and, as she does, I worry sometimes about my daughter’s social development. It would be easy for people to read this and think “well, that’s because they haven’t gone to school”. And in some sense I do believe this is true. Sending my daughter to school would move her along more quickly in terms of learning how to get along with others, but at what price? The school of hard knocks may be effective in the short term, but if it results in years of therapy and relationship issues as an adult than I hardly think it’s worth it. For kids who are naturally easy with socialization that likely won’t be the case, but for kids like mine for whom social interactions do not come so naturally I believe the process would be very damaging to her self-image and in fact the very parts of her that make her so unique (I’ve found that uniqueness is not something that is well-tolerated among the school crowd).

The thing to consider is that children all have their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to both academic and social skills. My daughter can read circles around most children her age, but she finds social interactions to be challenging. Her academic prowess does not go unnoticed, but I have met children who are what I consider to be “socially gifted” who are not made such a fuss of (except by parents of children like mine!). I will say that my daughter gets along fabulously with adults – they find her delightful and interesting and she thoroughly enjoys talking with them. So no, I don’t believe that unschooling is at all the cause of her social awkwardness any more than I believe it is the cause of her academic success. Unschooling simply allows a child to be who they are, to be authentic.

Nevertheless, sometimes I worry. The girl has strong leadership abilities, but when this translates into her trying to “run the show” with a group of kids it can cause friction. Her driving need to be in charge and in control will take her far in life, but right now it often leaves her standing on the sidelines when it comes to playing with other kids. The important thing is, however, that it doesn’t seem to bother her. In fact it seems to bother me a lot more. She just doesn’t crave group social interactions; she much prefers one-on-one time with her friends (and their families). We have plenty of opportunities to group socialize (despite the misconceptions about homeschooling), we simply choose not to engage in many of them because my kids just don’t get alot of enjoyment out those kinds of activities (they do much better in small groups doing focussed activities).

WifeMom’s post was a timely reminder that the issues we struggle with the most with our children are usually the issues we struggled with the most as children ourselves. Many times it turns out that what we think is a problem for our children, is really just a problem for us. My daughter is not complaining that she doesn’t have enough friends, that we don’t socialize with crowds enough, or that she has problems relating to people. I have to trust in the process I am committed to, knowing that letting the child go at their own pace is key to self-confidence and achievement. I wouldn’t push her to read or write, so why should I push her to “get along well with others”? She will find her way, she will learn by experience and by having a loving, supportive mother by her side.

Evo Devo

One of the things that unschooling teaches me is how learning happens naturally in young children. Out of the blue a child asks a question that leads to a brief discussion. The discussion mulls around in the child’s mind for a while. How do I know? Because bits and pieces of that discussion manifest themselves in various instances for days later – a drawing, a comment made to a sibling, a particular book that gets pulled from the shelf, a scene in an impromptu puppet show. The way young children process information is so interesting to me. They mull it over in their words and in their play (play is a fascinating window into the child’s mind). You never know when and where it is going to appear.

Daughter is interested in the concept of evolution, something we’ve touched on briefly as I’ve been reading some books on the subject lately (our bedtime routine has changed from me reading her stories of her own choosing, to her requesting that I read aloud from books I’m currently working on; the latest are Endless Forms Most Beautiful: the science of Evo Devo by Sean Carroll (evo devo = evolutionary development) and Your Inner Fish: a journey into the 3.5 billion year history of the human body by Neil Shubin). The other day, out of the blue while we were eating lunch, Daughter asked me “Mama, why don’t humans have a tail?”. This led to a discussion of upright bipedal motion and how that differs from the bipedal motion of, say, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, who required his thick tail for balance (it’s all in the hips). I also pointed out that humans do have a tailbone (the coccyx), the vestigial remnants of our primate ancestors. And last night in “Your Inner Fish” there was a diagram of vertebrae in a human embryo showing that we indeed start out with a tail in our early development.

The book also illustrated the progressive development of limbs from early fish through to mammals. Daughter is already aware from her numerous dinosaur books that life on Earth has progressed from the ocean to the land, and from fish to amphibians to reptiles to mammals (loosely speaking). Evolution is now providing a context for that progression, a “reason” why fish came first, for example. Lately she has been playing games like “the last amphibian” or “I’m the last Dimetrodon”. She’ll say “look, I’m disappearing from the Earth!” and then hide behind the sofa or something. I’ll say “what happens after the last dimetrodon is gone (dimetrodon fascinates her because it is not, in fact, a dinosaur)?” and she’ll say “then came the dinosaurs!”.

These conversations are all necessarily brief; at not-quite-six years of age Daughter has little patience for lengthy explanations and lectures. It challenges me to reduce a concept like evolution into a series of short sound bites that give her mind something to chew over for the next few days. Fortunately, as you can tell from my reading list (and my collection of Stephen Jay Gould books), evolutionary development is one of my favorite subjects. So it’s wonderful that I can share this with my Daughter.

Gardening

It’s ecology, gastronomy, sociology, and antropology all rolled up into one, wonderful activity.

This year we planted our first ever vegetable garden. We’re using the Square Foot Gardening method, and we built two boxes. Daughter has been involved from the beginning. Here she is helping me break up peat moss before mixing the soil (the SFG method calls for a mix of 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 compost), and then planting radish seeds:

She’s watched with me as the seeds sprouted:

And she was there to pick our very first harvest:

One of the things I am learning about gardening is, especially in the early unpredictable days of Spring, to seize the day. When the sun comes out you never know how long it will stay out, so you need to be able to drop everything and run happily out into the garden. When you are an unschooling family, you can do that!