Radical Unschooling is seeping into the mainstream.  It’s probably what some of us dreamed about and it’s definitely what some of us feared.  Years ago the Martin family appeared on Dr. Phil when he featured “The Great School Debate”.  More recently, Sarah and Chris Parent appeared on Radical Parenting on Discovery Health, a 15 minute [...]

Once upon a time, TJ and I had a tiny little house and not so much stuff.  Well, it was a lot of stuff but compared to what we have now, it wasn’t so much stuff.  As time went on and babies were born, and we became more financially stable, our houses got bigger and [...]

We visited the zoo yesterday.  Normally, I’m not a big fan of the zoo.  Especially after visiting one in Virginia a couple years ago that turned out to be some exotic animal collector who ran a shady operation specifically for money.  That’s a whole other post.
It’s really difficult to get everyone out of the house [...]

I spend a lot of time with my children.  I also spend of lot of time doing things for them.  Lately, I’m noticing two opposing schools of thought.  Some parents don’t want their children to think the whole world revolves around them and others are acting like the whole world should.  I can’t consume myself [...]

“There’s a somewhat dichotomy between schooling & unschooling because one is where one is really well defined and the other is more open ended. Both are testament to their pedagogical nature.”
This came to me in a couple of Tweets yesterday.  First of all, I hate the word pedagogical.  It doesn’t really roll off the tongue [...]

What the hell does that even mean?
Skylar bought a friend a snack the other day. When the child’s mother noticed, she very condescendingly asked him, “Did you use your manners?” Three times, no less. How horribly embarrassing for him. To not only, have to submit to his mother right there and [...]

I’ve added a new link to my Must Reads section. An article in Psychology Today called Trashing Teens. It’s a great article about the never ending limits we put on teenagers in order to keep them in adolescence.
Psychologist Robert Epstein talks about teenagers in other cultures, and how our society has artificially extended [...]

The topic of boundaries has been an extremely hard concept for me to grasp. Until now, I haven’t been able to fully understand it, or successfully implement it in my home. From what I could see a “boundary” was a “rule”, and in our home we do not have rules. Everyone should [...]

There are a lot of parents who are “behavior modeling” only to return to a discussion frustrated that it “isn’t working”. For some reason, they have gotten the wrong idea about this, that in unschooling, you model “good behavior” so that your children will exhibit it.
Well no, it doesn’t exactly work that way. [...]

Sometimes I hear people calling it permissive parenting. I don’t really like the word “permissive”. It has a connotation of control. Like I’m allowing or not allowing something. I think one can have boundaries or implement boundaries without resorting to control, or in this case no control. I’m not sure if I like the word [...]