Radical Christian Unschooling

I recently had a conversation with another homeschooling mom who wanted to know about how to get their children to do housecleaning and pick up after themselves without prompting from the mom. The children are happy to help when asked, but don’t initiate cleaning up on their own. The mom was frustrated and bugged by the lack of intrinsic motivation in her kids to clean.

My thoughts:

I don’t think, until the stuff is really theirs and they care about it, will it become important to the kids.

You know, my mom had very high standards, and forced me to clean my room and help around the house, and help in the yardwork. If my mom found a bread crumb on my floor, I would come home from school to find the contents of every drawer and closet in my room (I had two, one for clothes and one for toys/junk), and my school desk, all piled on top of my bed. I was told I wasn’t going to bed until it was clean. It didn’t make me a better cleaner, or better at taking care of the yard, either. My yard looks horrible to this day. Oh, we mow it, and trim the bushes once in a while, but I don’t care for it.

I think it isn’t until it becomes important to the individual they just won’t see it, and we can’t *make* it important to anyone else. Modeling responsibility, asking for help when you need it, and realizing that it is your own standard and not theirs is all you can do. It is up to the Holy Spirit to impart that cleaning conviction into their hearts. Honestly, I don’t think you can *make* them care. You can *make* them clean, but the damage that does to your relationship with them isn’t really worth it.

Here’s the thing I learned from Sandra Dodd about this subject: Being frustrated, bugged, upset, annoyed, or angry about it is a choice you make. You can choose to look at the stack of dishes in the sink and have dark thoughts about the thoughtlessness of your family, or you can look at the dishes and remember what fun everyone had laughing around the table and how good the food was, and how wonderful you can stand at your sink and wash your dishes and look out into the backyard at the children playing there.

What if you think of the cleaning as another part of your job as an unschooling mom, to make the house clean and inviting, making sure that craft supplies and art supplies are kept well stocked and accessible, and cleaning up after they are done is your opportunity to reflect on what they have been learning and doing?

You know how after you have had a party at your house, the guests aren’t there to clean up, but you go around picking up the paper plates and cups and seeing the 1/2 eaten cake and the huge collection of bottles and cans in the recycling bin, and you have that satisfaction of having had a great time and giving the gift of a great time to your friends? Do you feel resentment at your friends for leaving a mess for you? Or do you feel grateful that you have friends and can’t wait until the next opportunity to have them over?

Now transfer that attitude to your home. Your job is to provide *and maintain* as cool and rich and interesting an environment for learning as you can for your kids. Look at the bits of yarn and paper and fabric and paint blobs and half-created things as a snapshot of unschooling. Think about what they were working on, how they were learning, their laughter and fun and discovery, and how they didn’t clean up because they were running out the door to look for the neighbor’s lost kitten…

As you wash their clothes think about how they got so dirty at the park because they were exploring the creek. When you trip over their jeans on the floor think about how they spent all day out building a fort in the backyard and had to hurry to change clothes for Grandma’s birthday dinner, and what wonderful hugs they gave her.

Of course it is perfectly okay to ask for help when you need it. And if it is given willingly and cheerfully, be very grateful!

And also see if you can free them as much as possible from expectations of orderliness and cleaning so that they can be free to learn and discover and grow. Watch what they are doing, and consider what you would be taking them away from, to come help you clean the living room.

I learned to care for my home by having my own home, not by all the nagging and punishing and chores my parents made me do. I learned to use cleaning supplies by reading the bottles, because you can be sure they had changed a lot by the time I was grown. Like every other aspect of unschooling, when it becomes important to us, then we learn and remember and use that knowledge.

Someone on one of my e-mail lists wrote: “I was just reading a quote from a book by Shulz, I think. He was saying the importance of teaching a strong “work ethic” to boys. He said that with out it they will sit on the couch playing games all day? What do you think? Is work ethic something caught, taught, inherent? It makes the assumption that children who play a lot of video/computer games are lazy and will grow up to be lazy and not have a work ethic.”

Well, first of all, “work ethic” refers to a societal standard, not to individuals, as I understand it. It is a moral standard, which is dictated by a group, not an individual. Individuals just uphold/conform to the societal standard, or don’t.

Secondly, that is a bunch of hogwash. Just last week my 14 year old spent two days working long hot hours in the sun and pollen to help my friend’s father build a huge playset in the backyard for her kids. And her father was so impressed with Andrew’s attitude and willingness that he told him if he ever wanted to work for him, he would be glad to hire him! That he worked harder and without complaining than any of his adult employees! LOL!

Andrew spent all day Saturday at another adult friend’s house helping him make several huge batches of chili for a chili-party that night.

Last Wednesday his 15 year old cousin David was over, and they played video games and computer games about 1/2 the time. The other 1/2 they went down to the creek and caught tadpoles for Aaron, horsed around in the woods, played sword fighting with Aaron in the front yard, ate tacos and talked.

Andrew has no limits put on his video game playing, or his tv time, or his computer time. He has no assigned chores, and yet willingly helps around the house, often cleaning the kitchen or taking out the trash without being asked. He cooks, reads, goes outside, mows the lawn, takes care of his animals, does his own laundry, picks up his room when it strikes his fancy. And yet there are many days when he chooses to stay on the couch watching tv or playing video games. That is just as valid and right as any other choice.

I think the difference is that he is free to choose. And without restraints put on him, he can freely choose to walk away from the tv or game, knowing it will still be available in a couple hours when he returns.

It sounds to me, not having read the book, just this one person’s comment on it, like this Schulz guy is afraid. Afraid of kids, afraid of teens, afraid of what might happen if they aren’t controlled. They threaten his ability to control his own world, and their choices aren’t valid if they conflict with his own. He is putting arbitrary values of worth on different activities. Pah-tooey! He needs to loosen up and learn how to play Halo 2 or Battlefield 1942 or Animal Crossing. LOL!

Seriously, though, the difference is freedom. People seem to believe that most adults are not free to choose what they do or when they do it, so children must be taught to accept such limitations and controls from an early age so they won’t question it when they are older. But that simply isn’t true. It takes no external motivation to get someone to do something that they have freely chosen to do. There is no slavery in this country any more; someone who is working a paying job is just as free to either do the work required by the boss or to quit and find a new job.

And who would you rather have working for you? Someone who is there of their own free choice and wants to be there, or someone who is there and feels they have no choice? Which employee do you think will give the best work? Which one will complain about everything, and only do enough to get the boss off his back?

Someone on a homeschooling e-mail list recently asked, “How do unschoolers learn Math and Grammar?” I can only answer for my own kids, as other unschoolers will learn in ways that are unique to them, and probably look totally different than how my children have.

They learned basic math when they were younger through playing board games, card games, video games, having their own money to spend, cooking, building, gardening, sewing, playing legos, swinging on swings, listening and playing music, etc. All those things helped them learn multiplication, division, fractions, percents, and the infinite number of mathematical concepts, both theoretical and practical, and also sparked their interests to know more, and to seek out ways to learn what they needed. As they needed to know, they asked questions. Answers to those questions led to newer, better, deeper questions, experiments, and hypotheses, that led to even more questions.

Andrew, at 14, loves to cook. He makes the best pot of chili ever. He watches science and cooking shows all the time. And one of his favorite shows is “Numb3rs” now, so he now wants to learn algebra. He spent two days this week helping a friend’s grandfather build a huge wooden playset in their backyard, so he used math all day long in so many different ways…the cost of lumber, the time needed, measuring, estimating, number of and size of nails needed, how to space railings, degrees of angles and planes and levers and joists…

Sarah, at 16, is an artist and is interested in geometry because she feels it would help with her art. She is learning about chemistry because she wants to go to cosmetology college then on to art college someday, and feels that at least having a basic knowledge of chemistry will help in those areas.

Sometimes they want to use a workbook or textbook or reference book, sometimes they just want to be told how, sometimes they look it up on the internet, sometimes they spend hours just observing and thinking, sometimes they ask a friend, sometimes they ask a parent. Whatever meets their needs at the moment.

They learned language usage by using language. Playing word games, reading, writing letters and e-mails, IMing with friends, things like that. Language surrounds us and it is almost impossible NOT to learn language if it is something you care to notice. At the age of 12, Sarah decided to write a book, and she spent many hours writing, looking up things like punctuation, how to write dialogue, etc. in the reference books we have here.

All I have to do is provide a rich environment with lots of opportunities and supplies, and be willing and available to help them do the things they want to do, and they seem to thrive that way.