A video & an addendum

First, Sarah reminded me again about this video and website, Where the hell is Matt?.

His videos are a lot of fun.  I guarantee they will make you smile.

The addendum is about my chores post.  Reading it over, I wanted to clarify something.  I briefly mentioned that I don’t agree with all the Radical Unschooling concepts but like the idea behind them.  We don’t consider ourselves radical unschoolers.  I found Sandra Dodd’s website while I was still pregnant and I loved reading through it.  It gives some great ideas for specific ways to handle some situations.  But as Kris said yesterday, neither of us believe in following a set formula, website, or book in our parenting, and there was something about RU that just didn’t feel completely right to me.  I couldn’t put my finger on it, until I met Annie in person the first time and we talked for some time, and it became clearer after I read The Continuum Concept.

Annie and Paxye both explain it much better than I could, I think partly because Meredith is still so young, and partly because right now she’s still an only child, so some of their points aren’t relevant to us yet.  But to me, RU is too child centered.  I want my daughter to grow up feeling respected for who she is, but I also want her to learn that others deserve her respect just as much, including her parents and other people who might be around us.  If I were to try and label our lifestyle, I would say it is much more along the lines of consensual living.  There are definitely overlaps between the two, but I think consensual living takes into account everyone’s needs more than RU does.

Something I had meant to add to my chores post, but forgot to say, was that while I don’t believe children need to earn their keep, that doesn’t mean I think the parents should end up doing everything.  Ideally, my thoughts at the end about pointing out specific tasks Meredith can do as she gets older and not forcing her, along with us not complaining constantly about housework, will help her see it as just something that needs to be done rather than something to be avoided.

However, someone always leaving her dirty dishes around, throwing laundry on the floor, or leaving behind a mess in the bathroom, is making more work for someone else to do and certainly isn’t consensual.  I can’t say what I would do in any of these situations, since they’re all hypothetical and any course of action would depend on the specifics, but I just wanted to clarify that I don’t believe that children should get to do nothing while the parents or siblings follow along behind picking up after them, and that as the children get older I would hope there would be more jobs around the house that children would be willing and able to help out with.  My point more was that if I’m not willing to drop what I’m doing at a moment’s notice to set the table or take out the trash, I certainly won’t expect it of anyone else, including my husband or my children.  Also, if a child really hates a particular job, I’d like to think the family as a whole can come up with solutions to either make it easier on the child or for someone else to do it.  (For instance, I actually don’t mind cleaning the bathroom, so I’d trade cleaning bathrooms for vacuuming any day!)

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