Part of the journey

One of the many things I've discovered and love about radical unschooling is how much it opens up my world in addition to my children's.  We help our children find the resources they need to learn about the things they want to learn about, we take them to new places to experience new things, we meet their needs for being social by getting together with friends and making new friends when we have the opportunity.  We learn right along with them and experience what their experiencing day in and day out and vice versa.  They have become interested in things Lee and I are interested in and in turn Lee and I have become interested in what they are interested in.

The really cool part is that I have lost a lot of my negative judgements along the way in terms of my likes and dislikes.  I'm more open and accepting to things because I have children who like things that I used to have a big dislike for.  A huge one is video games.  I've never had a real passion for video games and Lee and I never owned a gaming system before we had children, and I went so far as to state that we would never own a gaming system when Damek was a baby mistakenly thinking that playing video games was a waste of time.  Boy was I wrong.  A couple other things I used to hate were math and science.  I hated them because I didn't understand them, and no one ever presented them in a manner that was anything other than boring and totally removed from daily living.  Having kids that are interested in math and science, due to having an intense interest in learning about the world around them, has opened it up to me and I now find it utterly fascinating learning about the two and how they relate to our everyday lives.

From having children I've learned that my children aren't me and that their going to like different things than me.  I don't necessarily have to love or even like the things that they do, but because of the relationship that I have and want to continue to have with my kids, I've been able to share in their enthusiasm and have changed my mind on lots of things because I don't want to pass on my fears and negativity to them.

I believe that fear comes from that which we don't understand and I also believe that hate comes from that same place.  We hate what we don't understand or what is vastly different from us and it becomes a wall in which we are not able to look past.  Radical unschooling is all about taking joy in life with your children and in appreciating all that the world has to offer.  Understanding that which we didn't before or being able to find joy/beauty in something we thought we hated is a wonderful thing I've found:)