Trust

During the last year I’ve become kind of de-enamored with the unschooling world. Don’t get me wrong: we’re in this for the long haul. My kids are thriving, our relationship is strong, I love living life without school. When I say unschooling, I’m not necessarily referring to the act of living life without curriculum, but more so the label of unschooling or even self-directed education. I think the desire to “do” education in any format inevitably becomes limiting because you’re trying to fit into a box that you’ll likely outgrow, although I really do appreciate the role of unschooling and SDE for the deschooling process and how it opens up room for seeing the world in different ways, especially around how we raise our kids.

Unschooling has been an enormous rabbit hole having consumed a huge part of my attention and focus over the last 5 years. I had a friend ask me the other day how much of my time home education takes up and my gut reaction was “all of it?”. When education is no longer divided from living life, I guess “all of it” becomes an accurate reply.

As I’ve traveled down this rabbit hole and unpacked a lot of what strategies feel right for our fam (and what made things worse), I’ve come to recognize, with the support of other amazing people sharing this work, that there are some core tenants of raising children that can be applied to any walk of life allowing us to step out of the box of unschooling and look at the wider lense of raising children outside the western authoritarian paradigm.

Consent. Intersectionality. Connection first. Community. Communication.

Above all else, I think, is trust.

Trust is a tricky one. It is not a natural state to come to in this culture of ours. We are taught that trust has to be earned and is easily broken. But we’re also taught, pretty much from birth, that we cannot trust anyone. Not even the people closest to us. Not even our family. Hear me out.

In a typical family in our current culture, we have our trust broken almost constantly by parents, caregivers, and those who are supposed to love and care for us. We are regularly placed in situations where we feel abandoned, where we are under emotional duress without support, and where are told that we need to “toughen up” in order to mature. We are taught that this tough love approach is for our own good; that we can’t even trust ourselves. We are taught that our instinctual need for connection and support is bad, and that independence is what will make others proud of us.

Throughout childhood and into our adult lives then, we have absolutely no model for what trust-based relationships look like, and this is clearly reflected in the services, systems, institutions, and culture of our current society.

From childhood onward, our relationships are built on a model that replaces trust with domination. This model is based on obedience, conformity, and deference. The relationships that we witness are instead built on power dynamics, and that’s literally the only point of reference we have as adults. You can see it in our professional relationships. You can see it in our families. You can see it in our forms of government. You can’t trust others, you need to have power over them to make them do what you want.

When I co-sleep with my kids, when I give them options for what they want to eat for dinner, when I present them with the choice of going to school or not, when I let them decide when to go to sleep, when I engage with them in dialogue rather than making orders or demands, this is a demonstration of how to live in a trust-based relationship.

This parenting paradigm was all born out of the rabbit hole of unschooling, but this unschooling life we lead isn’t about curriculum or sitting in a classroom or socialization or worksheets or taking tests. It’s not related to education at all. It’s grown bigger than education, maybe even bigger than parenting. It’s about relationships. As such it feels weird to even call it unschooling. When we focus just on relationships, we can safely strip back all the layers of rules and labels and dogmatic principles and cultural expectations and just take a good hard look at the level of trust we have built together.

And with that firm foundation, now we can go out into the world and learn, grow, and share - and I guess that’s the unschooling part.

Once you’ve built that trust, everything else just kind of falls into place. I think that’s why people who are living firmly in the world of power-over relationships simply can’t believe that a trust based relationship with your children is possible; that kids could naturally want to learn things without being coerced. Likewise, when you’ve started to live with trust as the foundation of your relationships, any kind of attempts at control or manipulation are so blatantly obviously wrong and you can see them very clearly for what they are.

Yes, we’re still unschoolers, but this journey has taken us so much further. Maybe we’ll do worksheets sometimes if the kids are into it. Maybe we’ll even go back to school someday. As long as those decisions are made together and we can trust each other to know that everyone has power over their own lives, we can do in any direction and I know we’ll be just fine.