How do I see my children?
A friend asked me the other day how my daughters are growing. It got me thinking.
I see my children all day almost everyday. You know that saying, “You can’t see the trees for the forest?” When my friend asked me what my girls are like around other kids and how they’re developing — her teaching background and deep nature seems to have informed her question as most people don’t ask specifics like this but only have time for surface answers when they ask after the children — it made me ponder for a moment before answering. Can I answer that question? I’m writing this post to do so, because the questions triggered something even deeper.
Can we see our children clearly when they are nearly always in front of us? We see them more than anyone else, so yes, we know them deeply. When this question first tumbled around in my mind and heart, though, I was worried I didn’t actually know how to answer: that I didn’t really see my children, that the fog of being with them almost full-time instead of sending them to a school setting clouded my view, and that maybe the lack of intentionality that comes with wandering through our days in our unschooling approach means I’m not doing a good enough job home educating or parenting.
Let’s pause here a moment. I am determined to stop these negative mind fucks that often penetrate the psyche of most parents. Why did my brain go there? For starters, school (an institutional education) and other parts of the culture we live in taught me to weigh up my work against a certain set of expectations, and it also taught me that my work, tied directly to my personhood, was essentially a performance. So of course I am automatically assuming my parenting efforts aren’t measuring up to someone else’s, or at a deeper level, that they aren’t on par with my own made-up standards of who I should be based on the well-intentioned but ultimately flawed nurturing and tuition I was given in childhood through mainstream education.
As David and I are constantly unschooling ourselves, I’m proud to say that my next thoughts were so much more affirming to myself. I see and know my daughters deeply. I can arrange our days with disregard to itineraries. I can feel my way through our weeks. I don’t have to have it altogether. I don’t have to be a home educator MVP within this scene. Nothing in life is a competition.
Having my forest in front of me doesn’t mean I can’t see my trees individually. How do I see my children? I see them well. I can trust my instincts in the middle of chaos. I know that the environment I set is honest, and my expectations of myself are becoming balanced. This then balances expectations I put on others, too, including my children.
So, tell me, how do you see your children?
To answer this question personally, I will be writing a paid subscriber-only post next time. My children are not newsletter and content community characters. Neither are they products, but the way I am parenting and schooling them is an honest brand I am purveying, which is a way I am able to vet out the consumers of my content. As parents, we have an opportunity to protect the nurturing of childhood, and our efforts will be enough, going further than we think they do.