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Welcome to these regular musings, meanderings, wonderings and wanderings by Wendy Priesnitz.
Trusting
Ourselves and Our Children Is Not Regressive – April 1, 2005 I have been exploring some of those issues – both in my own life and in a broader context – as a result of the reader feedback I’ve been receiving to a recent Life Learning magazine column (see my March 21, 2005 blog entry – “Learning Neatness”). As part of that exploration, I am reading a book entitled The Paradox of Natural Mothering (2002, Temple University Press). Academic Chris Bobel has massaged her dissertation into a book that portrays a group of mothers engaged in homeschooling, natural health care, voluntary simplicity and various attachment parenting practices. The paradox in the title arises from what Bobel sees as a conflict between a lifestyle that is both progressive and regressive (i.e. anti-feminist). While the women she interviewed feel they are making choices in their lives, Bobel denigrates these as non-choices that are biologically determined because they are emotionally-based rather than intellectually thought-out. (Presumably, if they’d thought about their choices, they’d have behaved like more conventional mothers!) What these mothers are, in fact, doing is trusting their emotions, their intuition, their bodies and their children. Perhaps our societal agendas have swung us so far away
from the inherent “knowing” that characterizes primitive societies
that so-called “natural parenting” seems to contradict the
principles of equality for women. My own life – and I would say those
of the women Bobel has portrayed – is an ongoing pursuit of the
balance between trust and intellect. Trust, after all, is one of the
cornerstones of non-coercive parenting and life learning. Taking
ownership of our own education and allowing our children to own theirs
requires trust in what we call “human nature”. In the case of our
children, that means trusting that they will behave sociably and want to
learn things, including both academic knowledge and social skills...with
our help and example, of course. Return
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