http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=397672&in_page_id=1770

I don’t know what to say - poor her!  Her poor children!  I found this article insulting, but I’m not sure why - maybe because it implies that only dull, unintelligent women can find motherhood fulfilling?  I don’t have a problem with her not enjoying it (apart from the effect on her children, but you can’t make someone enjoy something - hopefully her children will not feel too rejected by her :-(), we can’t all enjoy everything!  I agree with her that training for years for a professional career spoils women for the joys of mothering to a certain extent - but it certainly doesn’t do that for everyone.  A huge number of my mother friends are highly intelligent women who have degrees and have had professional careers and they all genuinely find motherhood enjoyable and fulfilling.  Of course, mundane day-to-day housework is boring - no one denies that - but a lot of it can be made more fun if only one can let oneself enjoy it.  If you spend the whole time going ‘oh no!  this is so dull!  how can I continue doing this?’, there is no way you can enjoy it.  If, on the other hand, you are an optimistic person who tries to make the best of things who has a bit of an imagination, it’s easy to find enjoyment in mundane activities.  (or maybe I’m just dull and unintelligent!).  On top of that, it’s actually good for children to be bored - who doesn’t remember the best games they had as children being invented after a protracted period of ‘I’m bored, Mummy!’ whinging?  In my opinion, it’s fine to spend some parts of each day getting on with your own thing - reading, washing up, whatever - as children seem to get more enjoyment out of games they’ve made up themselves than from anything we can make up for them!  I’m not going to go on any further, as I’ve already written a lot about my thoughts on this subject in my post about Rachel Cusk.  I will just say one thing though - why do these women have children in the first place?  If it’s because they think they might enjoy it then find out they don’t, why do they have more????????

Having spent the last couple of years, since Flopsy’s been old enough for me to want to shout ‘careful’ at her every five minutes, I’ve been biting my tongue and trying to ignore the near disasters the pair of them get into sometimes.  ‘Near’ is the most important word here - as Deborah Jackson (Letting go as children grow) explains, children tend to injure themselves more when they hand over responsibility to parents…or rather the responsibility for their safety is taken over by well-meaning parents.  I’ve repeatedly had this demonstrated to me - seeing Flopsy climb a very scary, tall slide ladder at age 2 years extremely competently, until I came along to climb behind her, at which point she started looking behind her, not paying attention to where her feet were going etc.; watching Mopsy try to climb downstairs on her own and her taking a lot of care over it, until I decide I’d better remind her to take a lot of care over it and she starts looking like she’s about to hurl herself down the whole flight!  But I never seem to learn my lesson…until today, that is.  Mopsy was standing on their little table, about 2 foot high.  She’s recently got very bold with jumping off sofas - I say jumping, but I really mean stepping and stumbling as she can’t jump properly yet.  She’s trying to keep up with her sister.  She decided to try to jump off this table - a fair amount higher than the sofa, but she wasn’t aiming to jump onto the floor, she was hoping to land on an empty cardboard box that was close by.  Stupidly, I shouted ‘careful!’ at her and, instead of jumping and having a fairly soft, albeit slightly uncomfortable, landing, she stopped herself, lost her balance and fell head over heels landing right on the top of her head on the floor, which is carpeted but not particularly soft.  Of course, she really hurt herself, and I think she was lucky not to injure her neck and it was my fault!  She knew her limits - she knew she was aiming to land lying down on a big empty cardboard box and wouldn’t really hurt herself.  I didn’t trust her and interfered which caused her to potentially hurt herself much worse.  Even if the box hadn’t been there, she’d have hurt herself less landing properly as she’d have prepared for it.  The human race wouldn’t have survived if children didn’t have a protective instinct - I must, must, must remember to trust in that.

An article from the US explains the current world-wide situation regarding the freedom of HEors.  I agree with him entirely but have a couple of other points to add.

1.  Literacy and self-sufficiency also are goals of the public school system. Parents send their children to public school expecting them at the minimum to reach this standard by the time they graduate. 

I don’t know the full situation in the US, but sadly state schools in the UK are consistently failing to meet this standard that, as the author of the article states earlier on, home educators nearly always reach and surpass.  Thanks to the huge number of newspaper reports on the poor literacy and numeracy standards of schooled children (far too few students are leaving school with the required number of GCSE’s in the basic subjects); the fact that so many employers and universities no longer trust GCSE and A-level results (to the extent that some universities ask prospective students to take further exams to prove their worth!); and the increasing number of young people leaving school with no self-sufficiency whatsover (to the extent that the government have introduced a whole programme to deal with this issue); it is now pretty easy to argue the case for HE as a valid form of education on a one-to-one basis.  However, proving it to the PTB seems to be another matter entirely!

2. For example, in Puerto Rico, legislation has been introduced recently to bring home-schools under the supervision of the public school system. Home-schooling parents would be subject to extensive regulation, including the requirement to answer intrusive questions and provide personal information about the family to the government. This action shows a lack of trust of home-schoolers and a failure to recognize the outstanding academic achievements of home-schooled children.

Being a bit of a conspiracy theorist, I don’t think this is actually the whole picture.  I think that the good results consistently shown by HEors is increasing the numbers of families choosing this route for their children and this is a threat to governments.  It’s a threat because governments fear those who think outside the box, and HEd children grow up doing just that.  What is more worrying for governments than rapidly increasing numbers of young people growing up to question them?  Their parents are already questioning the ability of the state to educate their young, what else will they question and try to change?  The only way governments can hope to contain this potential ‘anarchy’ is to try to regulate HEors as much as they can, pushing families to conform.  Governments always have a hiddne agenda, in my opinion, and should never be trusted outright - unfortunately this is what mass schooling does - encourages children to accept authority without question.  If governments didn’t have a hidden agenda, why are they so keen to force parents to give their children the MMR vaccine?  Why do they use the excuse of increasing numbers of measles diagnoses and the fear of an epidemic?  If they were so worried about a measles epidemic, they’d start backing down and offering the measles vaccine as a single…but I doubt the drug companies would continue to support the government if they did as I expect the MMR makes them more money than the singles vaccines!  The governments aren’t worried that HEd children won’t learn enough - they’re worried they’ll learn too much!

HT: Carlotta

I think so, yes.  Deb, of NotSheep, has posted about how they do things within their large family.  She reckon’s it’s not autonmous, despite agreeing with the principles of autonomous learning, but I disagree.  This is part of the comment I left on her blog:

I think it’s really interesting that you put at the end that you think you’re life is very ’schooley’. I think it sounds very autonomous to me - if one of your boys said they wanted to go to school, and you let them, they’d still be allowed to learn autonomously as what they have autonomously chosen is to learn via teachers in classrooms. If what you are doing is working for all of you, and it sounds like it is, then surely that counts as autonomous. From what I know of you (and I’ve known you cyber-wise nearly since Flopsy was born now, I think, from various email lists etc.!), I don’t think you’d continue this way if one of the boys indicated that your family’s way of learning wasn’t working for him, you’d soon change things so that it was…? Autonomous education (in my opinion) doesn’t mean intentionally refusing to do workbooks or ‘normals’, but following your children’s lead (which is what you’re doing) and if workbooks and ‘normals’ are what works for them, then what’s not autonomous about it?

We consider ourselves to be very child-led in our family (ok, so we’re not at school age yet, but I think this is relevant nevertheless).  We try not to coerce either of the girls, and we certainly don’t ask Flopsy to spend set amounts on reading, writing or numeracy.  However, it just so happens that the only way I/we can cope is to have some sort of morning pattern to follow, and the girls just have to fit in with that for a while.  I never force them to help out, but I do ask them to, reminding them that chores will get done quicker, and I’ll be able to play sooner, if they join in - and they usually do help.  Flopsy loves the ‘workbooks’ that come out of some of the magazines she enjoys us buying for her, and is currently hooked on spending time writing over dotted letters to practice - she can now reliably write about 5 or 6 letters with nothing to trace, and can sometimes write a few more if she’s feeling brave.  My point is that she wants to practice writing because she wants to learn how to do it, so we end up doing a lot of it.  On the other hand, although she’s moving on very fast with her reading, she doesn’t appreciate practice time doing that with an adults - she prefers to be read do, to point out words she knows in her books and in ours.  The books she feels confident that she ‘knows’, she’ll often go and grab and read to herself, or to Mopsy, but not to us.  She loves the pre-school games on the internet (Cbeebies & Sesame Street are her favourites), and they are clearly intended to be educational, and lots of her interests have been inspired by those.  She is particularly keen on rhyming words at the moment, and will often be rambling away to herself then will suddenly say ‘Mummy, does cat rhyme with hat?’ or ‘Daddy, what does buggy rhyme with?’.  She loves numbers, and can now count to 30 - one of her books has a countdown to blast off in it, which she has taken a liking to, so she can now count backwards from 10 as well.  She has a lovely numbers book that my mum bought her and at the end it explains about adding and subtracting - yesterday she wanted to do the sums with me and she spent absolutely ages with me counting out lego bricks and adding and taking them away.  I thought she’d get bored first, but actually I did!  So, within any given day, we probably accidentally follow the government’s ‘guidelines’ as to how long to spend on literacy and numeracy - sitting down for fifteen minutes tracing over dotted letters; doing sums with lego bricks; talking about rhyming words; reading books over and over again; looking out for known words - it all sounds pretty schooley to me, but it isn’t at all.  Flopsy just likes that way of learning and it works for us.  We have little need of structure to our days at the moment, but I can see why a larger family would need to be a bit more careful to structure days in order to make sure that every child gets the time they need and the quieter ones don’t get left out.  In fact, I can see Flopsy being the one in danger of being ‘left out’ as time goes on - she’s much quieter and more pensive than Mopsy and if number 3 baby turns out to be more like Mopsy, I’m going to have to be very careful to not assume that Flopsy is ok and her needs are being met simply because she’s not making a fuss!  I can see that any more than 3 children, and the best way of ensuring everyone gets the time they need is to have some sort of loose, flexible structure to your days/weeks/whatever.  Ever eager to learn from those more experienced…are our childeren autonomous learners or not?

Ok, I admit it, I can’t stand Amanda Platell!!! I watch her on Richard and Judy ‘debates’ sometimes (ok, you can all stop laughing now - Richard and Judy is very intellectual, I’ll have you know!) and she says the stupidest things. Before I went on holiday they were discussing (along with Vanessa Feltz and some other mother of teenage daughters) the 18th birthday party of Princess Beatrice - an 1888 masked ball. When I read the news at the time, and saw the pictures, all I thought was ‘what a lucky girl!’. At that age, I would have given my eye-teeth to be able to dress up as a Victorian (or a party-goer from any other period of history, for that matter!) for anything, let alone my own birthday party! However, according to Ms Platell (and Vanessa Feltz, whom I also can’t stand), that actually makes me rather strange and someone to worry about! I admit, it’s not every teenager’s dream to dress up, but I certainly am not the only person who feels like I do. Poor Princess Beatrice, though, is pitied by these so-called experts as being too much under the control of her mother! This theory is ‘backed-up’ by the fact that the two Princesses often dress in very smart clothes that aren’t normally chosen by teenagers nowadays. Ms Platell & Ms Feltz think that this is unhealthy and something to worry about. I say it’s actually a good thing - unless they are beaten into submission (which I very much doubt), what teenager really would wear something just because their mother’s told them to wear it??? Ms Platell & Ms Feltz think that they’re worryingly strange because they are not trying to dress up as tarts! I reckon they’re healthier than most teenagers nowadays because they are self-confident enough to resist the peer pressure to dress like this and to say “stuff mini-skirts and see-through tops with push-up bras - I actually don’t like them. What I *do* like is grown-up clothes and I’m damn well going to wear them!”. Maybe I’m wrong, but it does strike me as worrying that people think it’s wrong that some teenagers have the strength to buck the trend and do what they want. In fact, what I’m jealous of is not the fact they had the means to dress up as Victorians for Princess Bea’s party, but because she had the *guts* to do it - she had the guts to have the party she genuinely wanted, not the party she felt she ought to have in order to live up to the stereotype of a modern teenage girl (ie. one who dresses up in tarty clothes and longs to get plastered and possibly laid at her 18th birthday party). What is truly sad, though, is that not only does the pressure to dress and behave a certain way come from one’s peers as a teenager, but clearly also from grown women who should know better! How would you feel if your mum had asked you what you’d really, really, truly, love to do for your 18th birthday, and made it happen for you despite the fact it’s not what most teenagers apparently want, only to be heavily criticised and put-down by the press afterwards? No wonder so many people find it difficult to step off the path and refuse to conform if they face constant criticism and derision at every turn. I hope my girls have the guts to do what they truly want as they grow up, and not simply conform just because of peer pressure and the risk of stupid women like Ms Platell criticising them.

Today we went for a lovely picnic with some other mums from our NCT branch.  We all had a really lovely afternoon and Flopsy delighted me by running up to me and Mopsy after Mopsy had come over to me from where they had been jumping off balance beams together in the playground.  Mopsy had wanted a drink, but Flopsy had come over to tell us she wanted Mopsy to come and play with her again.  It was so lovely because, despite the fact I see them playing together happily all the time, and despite the fact they are constantly checking on eachother’s whereabouts (Mopsy by signing ‘where’ and then saying ‘Reeoh’) Flopsy’s never yet come up to me to pro-actively tell me she doesn’t want to play the game she was playing unless Mopsy comes and joins in again.  And of course, when I told Mopsy, she went straight over to Flopsy, took hold of her hand and let herself be led back over to the balance beams.  I’m just so happy that my children genuinely do like eachother and enjoy eachother’s company the majority of the time.  And the icing on the cake was that I managed to drive them both the 45mins journey home without them falling asleep! Oh wonderful packets of crisps!  Hehe!  So we might actually get them both in bed by a reasonable time tonight - although now I’ve written that I expect they’ll both refuse to go to sleep until midnight!

I’m getting quite interested in the ‘file folder games’ idea…a bit simpler than making whole lap-books and I’ve always enjoyed making ‘collections’ of things, saddo that I am!  Lapaz Farm Home Learning has a wonderfully inspiring post that will explain the idea to anyone who’s not come across them.

We’ve had a lovely holiday and I feel very refreshed.  I’ll try to post some photos soon, but we’re moving house next week so blogging may continue to be a bit sporadic for a couple more weeks.

Gina Ford:  Threats of her lawyers have caused a huge UK parenting website/forum to ban discussions about her and her methods because they’re sometimes a bit rude (or ‘defamatory’ in legalese)!  This issue is actually very worrying, as well as quite amusing.  If she were so confident in her stupid, cruel methods (yeah, Gina, come and sue me too!), she wouldn’t care less about people sounding off about her.  I wonder if she secretly is a bit concerned about quite how ‘contented’ her books make babies…?  But quite apart from all this, what about the issue of free speech (or whatever the proper term for it is)?  How on earth are lawyers allowed to do something like this?  It’s not just that parents are unkind about her, any unpleasant remarks about her methods are actually backed up by many experts in psychology and childcare.  The Australian Association of Infant Mental Health have a wonderfully informative (and very alarming) position paper on the subject.  But even if one or two posters were actually writing things that were unkind about her character, I don’t believe for one minute that it was such a regular occurrance that it is necessary to take legal action about it!  Please can someone with more time and knowledge write a more coherent blog post about this issue?