Parent Extremis

Like many parents, I’ve been skeptical of unschooling. Belief in unschooling often seem to accompany disbelief in other limitations, instead of teaching children how to deal with limitations. But MomIsTeaching explains that the point of unschooling is not to remove all restraints, but to let your child follow his or her heart. In other words, don’t try to push them in directions they don’t fit. I can appreciate that. If your children are not good at math, don’t tell them they will be failures if they don’t become rocket scientists.

So how far can we take this? If unschooling can be a good philosophy, how about un-parenting? Or has that already become common?
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unschooling

No, they can’t make you buy more popcorn at the movie theater by flashing the subliminal message “BUY POPCORN” on the screen. And watching Harry Potter movies will not turn your child into a wizard. But they will make your child think about bing one… (more…)

The Internet was based on goodwill. Everybody wanted to share, everybody wanted to help. That isn’t true anymore. The Internet reflects our world. Some people are not motivated by a desire to help other people. If they can make money, they will hurt people if necessary. Even children.

Reuters reports that some Nigerian primary schoolchildren have discovered their laptops, provided for less than $100 by One Laptop Per Child, can access porn site, prompting a response that “OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) needs to implement OBSPT (One Big Stick Per Teacher).”

To save money (remember, the goal is less than $100 each). OLPC originally wasn’t going to include Internet. But the creators wanted to share the wonders of the digital world with the developing world, so they made it happen.

It reminds me that, like the digital world, the real world is not inhabited solely by people who want to help our children. That’s why I want to raise my children myself, instead of letting the electronic forces do it.

Several years ago I helped to develop a new version of a leading intelligence test. Together with other underemployed college graduates, I worked second shift in a warehouse of test materials, scoring the verbal part of the test on old computer monitors on tables. The goal was to prove that the new edition could test intelligence as accurately as the the previous edition. This assumes that the previous edition tested intelligence accurately.

A short psychologist in her late thirties was in charge of our project. She had previously administered the test in prisons and other institutions, but now that she had seen what was behind it, she couldn’t do that ever again. She told us that she had tried to become an electrician, but the union told her she was too old.

People criticize schools for teaching to the test, for giving lessons that would result in higher scores on certain material, without necessarily teaching other material any better.

But it’s possible to teach to the test on intelligence tests. The only reason it isn’t done is that those who know what the questions are, people like me, sign a non-disclosure agreement. We can’t tell you what’s on the test. But if I wrote a book that talked about a particular kind of criminal, a particular non-Christian leader, a particular obscure proverb, and a particular view of government, I could advertise it as guaranteed to help you score higher on intelligence tests.

Amish people wouldn’t do very well on the verbal part of the test. They wouldn’t want their children to study some of the required topics, and they wouldn’t agree with some of the required answers.

More tomorrow.

Dave Taylor at Attachment Parenting Blog says, “The more we travel and the more I interact with kids of other families, the more I wonder whether we have a pocket of quasi-Luddites, veritable Amish families who are actually hurting their children by turning our collective backs on the marvels of modern technology and electronic gizmos.”

Of course, we all know how necessary it is to own and use gizmos in order to live a rich and full life. That’s why everybody born before our generation lived boring, unfulfilled lives. You should buy a gizmo for a child today. It doesn’t matter what kind or color.

Significantly, Dave admits that gizmos attract him and his church. I think that admission is nothing to be ashamed of. It shows he knows what he’s talking about. I support him in his neo-Luddism. I practice it myself.

The truth is that, like a drug, technology has the ability to become more appealing than real life. For the long term, my advice is to bet on real life. Just say No to gizmos for your children. At least, say Wait.

Parents often wistfully wish they could raise their children differently, spend more time with them, teach them themselves, protect them from pervasive influences. Their wistfulness implies it’s good, but it isn’t possible for them.

Well, is it good for their children to continue the way they’re going? Or just convenient for them? If what we’re doing is not good for our children, why don’t we make the necessary sacrifices to change what we’re doing?

Sure, society is against us, everybody does it this way, and hardly anybody does it the way we wish we could do it. No, I can’t change society, at least not right now, but I can change my family life. I can’t change what’s on television, but I can change the channel. I can unplug the television.

Maybe you’d like to give birth in a non-institutional setting, but your company insurance doesn’t cover midwives. Believe me, from personal experience, the difference is worth it. Under most circumstances, it’s safer and maybe it’s even better for your baby’s development to stay out of the hospital nursery. Why choose an unnatural, second-class experience for your child just because it’s not approved by your authorities?

People say that it’s too hard. It’s too different. Well, getting rid of a malignant tumor is hard too, harder than learning to live with it. But if to live, or to live more abundantly, I might have to do hard things.

Finances come into play in all of this, of course. Parents have to raise their children like other people do because they can’t afford to do it differently. They can’t afford to leave their job and work from home, with their children. They can’t afford to move out of their neighborhood or out of the city. But consider our children, maybe we can’t afford not to.

Parents told the Kaiser Family Foundation that they check on their children’s MySpace profiles and on the websites their children have visited.

That is, they check on them after the fact, apparently.

Half of the parents surveyed in the Parents, Children and Media study believe that their children aren’t exposed to too much bad stuff.

“They’re living in denial,” says Tim Winter of the Parents Television Council. A 2005 study by the same group showed that half of parents have no rules about television watching. This as the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York rules that four-letter words are acceptable at any hour of the day.

What is the goal of parental guidance anyway? Is it nothing more than to keep children from being killed really dead, as opposed to mostly dead? To let them drown a mile from shore as long as it’s not two miles? To let them eat a teaspoon of poison, and to take pride that we would never let them eat a whole tablespoon?

To make radical parenting work requires radical changes in society. Maybe not all of society but it might require something radical in your society, in your family. Maybe not in the national or international economy but certainly in your family economy.

Some parents find they may have to abandon the concept, popularized during the Industrial Revolution and rare before it, that work needs to be performed away from home, that career means pulling at your roots every day, hoping that the plants don’t suffer too much.

Some parents may have to give up the idea that watching how electronic people live, instead of living yourself, is a good use of your time. The average American child spends hours a day in front of a screen of some sort. Think how much he or should could accomplish in that same amount of time if he didn’t. How much could you accomplish?

Lifehacker offers a suggestion to prevent your children from calling you a meanie when you tell them, “No television tonight”. Instead, you can give them tickets, each redeemable for a half hour of television. According to the article, this will “let them take care of their own entertainment time”.

Along the same lines, you could give your child a bottle of whiskey and let them decide on their own when to drink it. This would save you the agony of having to say No. It would also be healthier than much of what’s on television.