Leaving the house while respectful parenting

It's hell, basically. And I blame capitalism. Also: unschooling as an adult, I'm now cancer-free, and an honest review of Prodigy Math (this is not an ad!).

Hello friends!

How are you all doing this week?

I’m going to write a bit about leaving the house and the Sisyphean task that it can sometimes be.

I’ll share my usual links for the week, what my family is upto, and share a bit about some good news I got this week and how it radicalized me.

But first, let’s talk about leaving the house. You know, any time you need to go anywhere at all, with your child or children.

It seems like it would be the easiest process - how hard can it really be?

And sometimes, sometimes, it is easy. Sometimes all of the stars align - I am full of energy and enthusiasm, both my children seamlessly go through the motions of getting ready and happily skip out the door, and we are on time to wherever we’re going.

Sometimes. (Rarely).

Most of the time though, leaving the house feels a bit like Percy Jackson’s quest to the underworld: nobody really wants to go, everyone has their own agenda and timeline, and there’s just a lot of arguing and shepherding and struggle.

Today we left the house. (Note: I wrote this post a few weeks ago. I believe this outing was to the library?)

As we finally left our building and walked towards the train station, I suddenly felt competely drained. Like I’d just run a marathon except it was an emotional marathon as well as a physical one.

Perhaps it’s me. Is it me? Am I just too sensitive, too emotional, too tired? Am I a little unhinged, easily overwhelmed, just basically not a chill person? Maybe. I’m not sure.

It’s definitely, partly, my children though. They are wonderful, amazing beings - but they are also their own people, and related to me, so there’s that.

I find myself going through minute details in the run-up to leaving - every step of what is happening needs to be pre-agreed, and then pre-rehearsed beforehand. Sometimes the pre-agreed steps are brought into question on the actual day of leaving the house. Sometimes they need to be re-negotiated. And other times they can’t be, because it’s booked, or because one child wants to go, and that’s tough because it’s hard enough leaving when both children are vaguely on board with the idea of leaving, but it’s absolute hell leaving when one or more children aren’t keen.

Then there’s the whole countdown to leaving. The getting dressed, brushing teeth, packing water bottles and snacks and books, wearing the right socks and shorts (and like, not our pajamas. I mean, I wouldn’t mind if they wore pajamas but they mind.)

Then there’s the whole thing of stopping what we’re doing so that we can do all the above things.

It’s the whole trying to slowly, gradually transition and check all the boxes so that we can all remain regulated enough to leave the house, and also on task for long enough to gather all the things to leave the house.

Then there’s the whole, But I never agreed to this, But I don’t actually want to do it, But I want to walk really slowly or sit here on this sidewalk that gets pissed on by actual humans regularly.

The tension builds and builds and then, later on, when my child is trying to help me buy train tickets on the touch-screen machine, I snap, “Stop touching!” and then I clearly need to apologise.

I’m pretty sure it used it be a lot harder too! It’s become easier! But I think I’m just older now, so it feels more tiring? Or perhaps I’m just better at co-regulating, and that’s why I get so tired.

I have no idea.

The other thing I wonder about though is the way parenting respectfully is basically not conducive to leaving the house.

And those two things both feel foundational for me: respecting my children like I would respect any other human, and leaving the house so we don’t all lose it and so we can live our lives.

I have for sure stayed home many a time because I just didn’t have it in me to go through the motions.

I also wonder whether we just live in ways that are messed up and just not conducive to being a human and to humaning in the way humans should be doing.

I’m pretty sure it’s easier to leave the house when you can shove everything in the back of a car and drive off (I know this for a fact, because I’ve done it.) Nobody complains about legs hurting or the heat or wants to sit on sidewalks. Nobody regrets going because they just have to sit there.

And then I wonder whether leaving the house is perhaps not even that much of a human thing, evolutionarily. Like, when we lived in smaller communities we wouldn’t have to make such a big deal of leaving our home and travelling miles to see other people. For one, people would be RIGHT THERE, on our doorstep. We wouldn’t be going to the other end of a city to see friends, because our family and friends would live in our neighbourhood. As I write this, I’m not sure if I’m talking about a specific time in history, or just a time I literally invented. Ha! I think that when we talk about what is “evolutionarily normal” we often fall into the trap of talking about a time that we can’t really place geographically or historically.

But perhaps - perhaps? - leaving the house in the way some of us leave the house today, is a relatively new thing?

Maybe we’re obsessed with leaving the house, as a society, because we don’t have enough work to do in the house. Because our kids and neighbours and family don’t actually help with the daily running of our home and our neighbourhood, because it doesn’t really feel like a home, because we’re not invested enough in our home as the centre of our universe. Because our home doesn’t feel like the core of our community.

Maybe.

Maybe we live in a small box that for all intents and purposes is floating in the actual sky, and are absolutely justified to want to leave it, daily even.

Or maybe we’ve been told we should leave the house in order to lead fulfilling lives, and so we do.

But also maybe we’re incredibly privileged. If we had to go out and forage for food, or run a farm, or guard our home from wild animals; or if we lived in a war zone, or even had a keener sense of a common goal, extricating ourselves from our individual pursuits indoors would not feel so painful.

We wouldn’t even HAVE individual pursuits!! We would be fully invested in our collective survival and wellbeing.

Maybe the issue is just individualism. We have lost all sense of collectivity, of being part of a whole. We have individual goals and aims, rather than collective ones, and marrying all of the individual pursuits and goals becomes virtually impossible.

If this last bit speaks to you, this post by

Ayesha Khan, Ph.D.

is everything that I’m trying to stumble towards right now.

Dedicating yourself to the struggle for liberation is uncomfortable AND worth it

And also, maybe it is just hard, for various reasons to do with who we are, with the brains and bodies we are born with, and our environment. Although I will say, I kind of reject that this is an individual issue with ME or with US - this is absolutely an issue with the way our community, our entire society, our entire economic system, is set up.

I can see that it’s a stretch to go from how hard leaving the house is to IT’S ALL ABOUT CAPITALISM but hey, I’m going there.

I’d love to know your thoughts!

Is leaving the house kinda hellish for you? Why do you think that is? Or do you just gather your many children and baskets and bags and whisk out of the door without breaking a sweat? (if you’re the latter person, I am in awe of you, tell me your secret.)

WHAT I’M READING

I am suuuuper into Taylor Lorenz’s book Extremely Online - it’s basically a history of the internet and social media and really fascinating.

At the library I picked up Grasp by Sanjay Sarma. I’ll be honest - I’m not one to pore over the neuroscience of learning. I find the way science breaks down learning actually kind of boring and dry (ok I said it!!), but this book makes some interesting points.

Really into the idea of unschooling as an adult that

Blake Boles

explores here. He writes, “If there’s a common thread here, perhaps it’s this. Adult unschoolers are those who look around at the expectations and constraints of normal adulthood and declare, “this is not how I want to live.” Then they make a decision that entails actual risk—the risk of appearing foolish, impractical, financially unwise, or romantically idealistic—in the pursuit of building a life of aligned values, improved mental health, and meaningful contribution to society”

I love this idea that I, too, can live a life unschooled.

Along similar tracks, I appreciated

Missy Willis, M.Ed.

posts about mid-life as an unschooler.

Embracing Midlife with an Unschooling Mindset

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO

For those of you who follow Sara MacDonald on social media (as in Happiness is Here Sara), she was on

Splendid To Be

podcast lately talking about unschooling her children from birth (the oldest 2 are now teens.)

In the process of bingeing every single episode of Maintenance Phase, I came across some true gems. The Jordan Peterson episodes (yes there are 2, and this is actually relevant to homeschooling because this man’s words get thrown around a lot in homeschool circles!), Soy Boys (yep, it’s a thing), The Trouble with Sugar, the 10,000 steps myth and last but not least, the Goop episode. The hosts, Aubrey Gordon and Micheal Hobbes, are both super smart and great at serious critique, AND hilarious which for me is an absolute winning combo for a podcast.

WHAT MY KIDS ARE INTO

Both of them are really into Prodigy Math and here is my honest review of it. It’s a game that is suspiciously like Pokémon (suspicious for me, a huge selling point for my children.)

There are creatures who do battles and gain health or get damage (I mean, this is my very basic non-understanding of Pokémon). So the game is fun, because it’s a video game basically. But then, at annoyingly inopportune moments, Prodigy asks you a Math-related question eg. Which one of these shapes is a trapezoid? or Where is 2/3 on this line? or Fill in the blanks of this equation. Sometimes answering the question is quick and relatively easy and requires no working out on paper, but often it requires careful reading of the question, breaking it down on a piece of paper, and a full explanation of the problem (by me, usually.)

The issue is that you’re in the middle of a fake-Pokémon battle! You don’t want to stop and do Math! The math is basically an afterthought because you need to defeat your enemy! And this leads to all sorts of issues like rushing, not fully understanding the math but just wanting to get the answer right, a lot of frustration when the answer is wrong (because you lose the battle, I think).

So in short, my children enjoy it, they have learned a lot of Math, but Prodigy hasn’t taught them Math - I have. I sit by them and we try to figure out the answers together. This is how they want to do it, because I can see it’s way more fun than just me sitting with them and teaching them Math. So we carry on. But if you’re looking for a program that will teach kids Math, this is not it. Prodigy might encourage them to learn, though, which is what has happened with both my children.

For any Zelda fans, we bought what I now refer to as The Zelda Bible and it’s been worth every penny.

The children really enjoyed this video, about Newton’s laws of motion (among other things!)

WHAT IS RADICALIZING ME

On Monday, I found out I am now out of remission and officially cancer-free.

You may not know this but I was diagnosed with lymphoma in December 2018, went through a bunch of treatment and was in remission (which basically means no sign of cancer, but also you’re not “cured” yet) in April 2019.

This month, I am officially 5 years in remission, which means I now qualify as cured: less likely to relapse, less regular and less invasive check-ups.

It’s a big deal.

I was so fortunate in so many ways: I had access to great healthcare, my family really rallied, and my diagnosis was a relatively common one with a high probability of getting better.

But still. It was a period of massive upheaval for me and for my family. It completely rocked the foundation of who I thought I was and what I thought I was doing, and ultimately set me on a path of unschooling myself (and then my children).

But more than that, it pulled me into the recognition that I had to be okay with knowing I might not make it, and that I needed to recognise that my existence was part of something bigger, and that I had been allowing that bigger something to pass me by.

It feels harsh to write that down, but I think it was accurate at the time. I didn’t know myself, and I didn’t know I had a role beyond myself and my family. I didn’t recognise our interdependence as humans, and the ways that our struggle is also a collective struggle.

All of that to say, I’m still here. And it sounds super cringe but I’m thankful for it, every day. And it’s true what they say about gratitude (and maybe about recognising life is precarious and finite): it spurs you into action.

You can’t guarantee how long you’ll be here, and the time you have matters.

Thank you all for being here, reading my writing and making this corner of the internet the fabulous place that it is.

DATE FOR YOUR DIARIES:

Our March zoom call for paid subscribers will be Monday 25 March, at 8am EST, which is 12pm in the UK/GMT, and 7pm Indochina Time. Woop! We will talk about digital devices and do we need screen neutrality?

Just so you know, these calls are less of me talking and more of us all having a conversation. I usually prep for them and have a few ideas to share, but I’m holding the space like a conversation rather than a workshop.

I’m hoping they will be consent-based, self-directed online spaces that are non-judgmental and where we can hold multiple truths at once.

Sending lots of love your way,

Fran x