Wendy Priesnitz

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Wendy Priesnitz

 

Trusting Ourselves and Our Children Is Not Regressive – April 1, 2005
Life learning families make choices that differ in some ways from current societal norms, and therefore sometimes struggle with the tensions and seeming contradictions inherent in those choices. Giving our children the honor of learning without schooling is bound to bump up against many other issues, from how a family makes its living to how the chores get done.

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.
Posted: 2005/04/01 12:10 PM