Friday Post: Unschooling in public aka Shareschooling

Thoughts and a million questions about sharing our children online.

Here’s our very real creative mess - I was tempted to move things to look more insta-worthy, but then I didn’t. Because this is how it actually looks!!

(You can listen to me reading this post right here. It is 15 mins long.)

I recently listened to the book Growing up in Public, and I thought I would talk a little about my rather conflicted thoughts and feelings around putting my children online, about sharing our (their!) unschooling life, and about generally having my children’s life relatively visible to whoever might care to see.

Like, does what some of us home educators and unschoolers do count as sharenting?

Perhaps there should be a homeschool term for this - shareschooling? Shareducation?

I get why we do it. I can’t speak for everyone, but when I started my instagram account, I told myself I wanted to share the ways we could live and learn and thrive without school. Of course, what I really wanted to show was that MY CHILDREN could learn and live and thrive without school - because I talked way more about them, than about me.

In fact, my account is still very much about them. And yeah, it’s about me too, because our lives are entangled in many ways and I can’t really talk about my own life without including them.

I made the decision pretty early of generally not showing their faces on social media (with some exceptions). It was interesting because now, I’m not even sure this is much of an issue anymore - I actually think we over-focus on the “not showing faces” issue and under-focus on all the other information we might be disclosing, that perhaps isn’t ours to share.

I suppose the rationale for not showing identifying features was that perhaps I felt my children weren’t fully able to understand the internet and social media, and so not showing their faces somehow guaranteed that I was respecting their lack of consent.

I’m not convinced it works like this, honestly.

Now that they’re older, I often wonder whether it still matters that I don’t show their faces. It feels almost futile to keep taking pictures of the back of them, when people see them as we walk down the street, people take pictures of them at groups we attend or family gatherings. People would probably recognise us out in public, if I had a big enough following to be recognized (the upside of not having a ton of followers!).

It also feels somewhat futile to be talking about them, but not showing them. In the sense that, isn’t my sharing what we did, what they’re interested in, what they said, just the same level of sharing? I ask them before sharing most of what I share, but will they even remember me asking when they’re older? And when they look back, will they just see a bunch of posts, reels and pieces of writing ABOUT THEM? Will they turn to me and say, “I know you asked me for consent, but perhaps you should have not posted this anyway”?

Even when I write in more general terms, or I write about my experience - as I often try to do - will they look back and recognize that actually it was fundamentally about them?

Because the thing with mothering, parenting, homeschooling - is it HAS to involve young people, by definition.

In this piece about motherhood and writing, Christie Tate writes about how her daughter asked her to stop writing about motherhood, and she said no. If my children asked me to stop writing about unschooling and mothering, I’m not sure what I would say. I’d like to think I would say that I’ll simply write in general terms - but how do we separate the general from the personal? Do we stop sharing our experience only because it happens to be weaved into the experience of others?

What’s also interesting is we assume we can write about babies and toddlers and that we’ll somehow “get away with it”, and the problems seem to arise once our children are online and can witness what we put out there. This betrays a shit-ton of adultism, frankly. Are we saying that because babies and toddlers “don’t have a voice” (also debatable), then we can do with their image and information as we wish?

Perhaps if we began talking to our children about social media from the start, we could collaborate on the ways we all put ourselves out there online.

When I’m writing, I often think: would my child be okay with what I’m about to say about them? I can’t possibly ask them every time I mention them, and so I suppose this is my way of keeping myself accountable.

I wonder how my husband would feel if my writing revolved around marriage and I wrote about him all the time: who he is, what he likes, his identities, the things he says, the things he does, what he struggles with, what he’s learning.

Maybe he’d be okay with it, but if it was him writing about me - hmmm that would not sit right with me. Which I think partially speaks to the power differential in relationships.

Our children might say it’s okay to share something, but should we even be asking?

As the adults we more or less always hold more power and influence. Our children often want to please us, be accepted by us, make us proud. Even if we’ve tried hard to encourage consent-based-ness, if we’ve explained how they can always, always say no, even after all that - should we even be asking? Marcia Baczynski and Erica Scott write in their book, “Sometimes there are power differentials that make it almost impossible for people to say no”, so if we are not actively creating a culture of consent in our homes, simply asking for consent is not enough.

Given what we know about the power adults hold, should we even be expecting that it’s okay to put out children’s bodies, voices, faces, experiences and more on the internet, for anyone to see? And when I say “anyone” I mean that for me, it seems just as disrespectful for my mother to know what we did through my social media, than for someone who just happens upon my stories. From this perspective, “but my account is private” is no excuse. Someone is seeing it. Does it matter that that person is a friend from high school, or your sister? The information and pictures we’re sharing may still not be ours to share.

If your sister or your friend was right there with you, would your child be okay with you telling her what they did/how they felt?

Fundamentally, is it my information, experience to share?

I have so many questions.