Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Living With Balance

Traditional parenting focusing on controlling kids behavior and training them to be obedient. It is important to realize that the most important things for parents in a traditional paradigm is how their children appear to others and how convenient the child is to live with.

The traditional authoritarian parenting paradigm of solely meeting the parents’ needs, as marketed by the media, in books, and on shows like Nanny 911, are the norm in our culture. People coming to this way of life from the norm think that the pendulum must swing all the way in the other direction of being devoted to meeting the child’s needs only. Not so! Parents have needs, too. This is a big reason why I have heard parents say, “Unschooling didn’t work for our family.”

All that most people know is power ruling, rather than balancing and respecting equally the needs of everyone in the family. These parents surrender their own needs in place of running around meeting the needs of their children, while ignoring their own. They get burnt out quickly and in doing so, give up thinking that what they just did was Unschooling. Not so. They were only half way here! It is so important to take the responsibility to meet your needs. Modelling this self care and self love to our children is how they learn to honor their own needs and yours as well.

We live in that wonderfully balanced place where parents’ and children’s needs are met in harmony. I look at our lives as a little microcosm of world peace. Living this life means we are sharing how it is possible to be partners with one another. Everyone in our family, in our lives, matter and are important.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for this post, you worded some ideas that I have been trying to put together in my head. For us we look at our family as it's own small community, how would we each expect others to act.

Secret Garden Supper Club said...

I have two grown boys and a toddler boy. Right now we are in a work too much, spend all our paycheck to survive, overly busy, can't get to bed on time, too tired when we get up RUT!

I am weighing the idea of jumping out of a very cozy job to farm full time and unschool the toddler.

Right now - I am in that process where it's time to train the baby not to do this or that or whatever...and you are right it's all about other's perceptions and parental convenience.

I was trying to express this in my head, and here you did it for me on the very day I needed it.

Thank you :)

Lori said...

beautifully put.

the parents who let their children run roughshod over them and everyone else are doing their children a disservice — they’re making it extremely difficult for their children to successfully make friends and fit in with society, because they’re giving them a completely incorrect idea about how people get along. so, so true about the pendulum. and then the failure! and, presumably, the return to totalitarian rule.