The Intersection Between Unschooling and Resilience

And, should we be 'teaching' resilience but is it something naturally occurring in the right environment?

Firstly I’ll say that if you’ve not read much of my writing before, on kids and learning, you also might not know that my views on childhood have been formed while observing children and not from books about children.

And by something of an introduction to that, I’ll tell you that when my first daugher was less than 12 months old, my husband came home with a quite shocking book that changed everything for my family.

But not right away because, quite frankly, I did not understand it. I found it annoying because it gave me no answers. I put it down for the longest time. Maybe some people do that with the things I say about kids.

That book was ‘Punished by Rewards’ by Alfie Kohn.

My daughter was still in that very cute phase where she didn’t do anything for the views, her behaviour was entirely instinctive and basically cuteness overload all day long. But I wanted to be prepared. I wanted to know WHAT TO DO when that ended and she started challenging me with the ‘no’s’ and the ‘why’s’ or when I saw her doing something ‘naughty’.

We were still in the era of ‘The Supernanny’ who, at that time, was a big advocate of the naughty step. I got that Uncle Alfie was suggesting NOT to do that. I was on that page having already recounced smacking.

Unsatisfyingly though, he did not say what to do INSTEAD.

As luck would have it, a perfect storm of events happened over the next few years.

I had four babies, around 2 years apart each time.

I had a husband who worked alot and studied in his ‘spare time’.

I did not have regular, practical help although I did build a lovely village of other women around me.

My four kids were all cough ‘spirited’.

What this meant, in practice, was that there was mostly everything going on, all the time, all at once, all day long.

I did not have the right number of hands to stop my two year old from (iconically) running ahead and crossing the road by herself. I’ll never know if it was her skill or her size that led to her never once getting hit by a car! Did she stop traffic (she absolutely did, more than once)? Did she really know how to assess that it was safe to cross? I can still see her small blond head looking right, and then left, and then right again and I was far enough back, struggling under the weight of the extra scooters and the picnic, that I couldn’t tell if she was just copying what she saw others do, or if she was actually looking and determining that it was safe.

I have a thousand examples just like this.

Refusing to brush hair and everything being OK.

Not wanting to tidy up and everything being OK (psst and my kids still somehow knowing NOW, how to tidy up).

Only wanting to eat brown food and everything being OK.

Not wanting to share a toy and now, as teenagers, knowing how to share when they want to.

So, there was some intention - a spark, if you like, of knowing that I wanted to do some things differently to what I’d seen before. AND the happy accident that was the practicality of multiple small children and only two hands.

I’ll really never know how things might have been different if I’d had less children, or more hands!

In any case, through a mix of intention and circumstance, my parenting style has been quite Laissez-faire. I’m using that term in the trust sense - low intervention, little interference.

So, not only are my observations of childhood grounded in the real work of actual children, they’re rooted in my experience raising kids who have been allowed alot of freedom and almost as much time as they want, not being told what to do by adults.

Resiliance.

The first time I thought conciously about how this word is now used, within a childhood develpment context, was when two of my kids were in school. I was very involved, partly because it was one way of ensuring my kids were happy (ish) to go and also because I’ve always felt that involvement (as distinct from interference) in my childrens lives, is important. I had a seat on the governing council of the school and as part of that role, we spent a (tokenistic, I eventually realised) frustrating few months reshaping the school values.

The headmaster at that time was quite obsessed with including RESILIENCE. And when I say, ‘obsessed’, what I mean is that she was already decided and set about manipluating the rest of us into agreement. I never did but in the end it made no difference.

That year, I realised the importance of school values in determining the culture of the place.

Because once a word is in print, on all of the school marketing, it can be pointed to. Repeatedly.

See?? RESILIENCE…

How does a child build resilience within a schooled context then? Well as far as I could see, by repeatedly being put in situations where theirs was tested and then pointing to the sign. Or the pamphlet. Or the website. Or the t-shirt.

See?? RESILIENCE! Period. Exclamation Mark.

The alarm bells really started ringing when the standard response to bullying, was the suggestion that the kids being bullied do a course.

In RESILIENCE. Not even kidding.

I started to understand that, contrary to the definition I had, for ‘resilience’, that it was being redefined as ‘resignation’. Or, to put it more plainly, ‘to put up with’.

A quick Google search comes up with this definition:

• Psychology: The ability to cope with stress, trauma, or major life changes and keep a positive attitude.

• Physics and Materials: The property of an elastic material to bounce back to its normal shape after being bent or pressed.

• Ecology and Systems: The capacity of a community or system to resist damage and restore its basic functions after a major shock.

  (Cambridge Dictionary, Meriam-Webster Dictionary, American Psychology Association)

What’s interesting to me here, is that for physics, materials, ecology and systems to show resilience, they show an ability to ‘bounce back’ or be restored to their former state of function, while the definition for pyschology mentions only an ‘ability to cope’.

Might it be that our modern day understanding of resilience through a schooled lens, cares not for what ‘coping’ might look like or what it costs the individual? That the appearance of coping is considered the same as 'bouncing back’?

Certainly we can probably all point to any number of adults who have developed coping mechanisms and who, contrary to the idea of ‘bouncing back’ have possibly become stuck in a childhood loop.

If we also bring in the nature of behaviour management in the classroom, we could probably fairly confidently say that many of the strategies employed by teachers are designed to keep things moving along and reduce interruption; that, paired with the ‘textbook learned’ understanding of childhood development AND if appearing as though one has bounced back using a variety of coping mechanisms is, for all intents and purposes, the same thing, that no one much cares if there is true resilince at play.

What I noticed was that this very natural human skill, that develops all on it’s own without the need to orchestrate situations in which to learn it, was manipulated by the adults running the show.

That not only was there this belief that children needed to be put in situations where their ability to cope would be tested, but that kids would repeatedly be left in situations, without the coaching or support of adults who could reasonably help. And if they didn’t, cope that is, they would simply be signposted to the need to learn ‘resilience’.

The examples are countless and they involve many children other than my own.

And of course it’s not that surprising that adults who developed coping mechanisms thoughout their life, which is NOT the same as building true resilience, would not know how to support young people in any other way than flogging the proverbial.

Where an unschooling lifestyle differs is the philosophical foundation that children are well equipped to be the leaders in their own life and education. In practice this is less ‘unparenting’ and more ‘very well engaged and connected parenting’, with parent and child working in partnership. It’s almost a flattening of the usual top down, authoritarian approach on which school is modelled and reinforced.

The more deeply one leans into this, and of course it becomes easier to do so once you’ve seen evidence that it ‘works’ (that’s an idea that will be chewed over another time!), the more you see that kids rarely need explicit teaching and ‘on purpose’ lessons and that the best teachers are, in fact, themselves.

A toddler will not need anyone to design an obstacle course so that he may learn how to climb and balance. He will simply see a low wall and clamber on it, maybe asking for a hand as he gains confidence. Obviously he will jump off at the end, naturally lowering his centre of gravity to reduce the risk of injury. Further, if he missteps, he might cry for a minute possibly loudly, before going on his way. Over time, that same child may ask for an extension of this, with a more complicated and riskier setup - or he might design one himself, pushing various pieces of furniture together or moving around obstacles in the backard. As his body becomes stronger and his feet surer, he’ll naturally discover where his newly increased limits lie.

Interestingly, and because I have the benefit here in having multiple kids, I’ve noticed a pretty consistent methodolgy for finding resilience, but not all kids need resilience in the same areas - one child might enjoy and seek physical risk and more than likely that child will be tolerant of scrapes and bruises. Another child will be drawn to more cerebral pursuits and naturally won’t put himself in physically risky situations - another nonsense of the school system is that, generally speaking, children will be funnelled into a ‘one size fits all’ model where the expectation is that resilience will be demonstrated before it’s naturally learned and the kids who are rewarded for it will be those who happen to fit into the standardised shape, or who have already developed coping mechanisms.

So while the methodology (as in, what’s going on INSIDE, that we can’t necessarily see) might be the same, the way it looks on the outside could well be different. There will be the kid who runs into the playground and throws himself onto all the equipment, immediately finding a friend. The other, quieter child who takes their time to acclimatise or who is drawn to the swing over the high slide is still learning resilience by choosing how and when to push themselves, but it might look outwardly like they have a different tolerance and thus ability to bounce back.

Which is precisely why observation is the friend of the unschooling parent. As we are learning that kids aren’t much like the books say, we need to supplement our education by noticing what is actually going on.

The different ways that kids naturally push themelves. Because pushing ourselves is basically the way we build the skills for resilience - as grownups too.

How they respond when things don’t work the way they imagined. Is it a problem, or was it always more about the process than the result?

What sort of help do our kids actually need and do they simply need to know we are close by but not jumping in too soon?

Do they actually learn to ‘bounce back’ when they can feel, in their own bodies, what their set point is?

That toddler insisting, ‘I do it’, is really desiring to learn resilience. They don’t much care about the result - it’s the journey on the way that they’re all about!

This is really where environment is important and it’s possibly the thing we miss when we talk about childhood development and in particular educating outside of school.

If we’re rejecting the environment created by school (and regardless of our reasons for home educating/ homeschooling/ unschooling etc etc all the terms, we are) what are we designing for our kids instead?

Kids do need opportunities to push themselves, to build resilience in a way that makes sense to them, inside of their bodies.

The key difference here, through the perspective of self directed learning, or ‘unschooling’, is that in a rich environment AND where kids feel free and also safe enough to take risks, it’s not necessary to force experiences where kids are pushed into demonstrating resilience before they’ve built the skill base.

I’ve also not found it necessary to protect my kids from real life experience and I’ve noticed a direct relationship between how they assess risk now and make their own decicions about what they’re willing to do and what they’re not, and how much freedom they had as toddlers and young children, in determining how and when to push their own limits.

To use an example that any parent of young children can easily call on, I noticed, when my kids were of any age where they naturally wanted to climb stairs and ladders (which is around the age they can pull themselves up to the right height to do so) that although each of the four used a slightly different approach, the consistent element was how they’d feel into their centre of gravity, staying close to the step and getting low enough in their legs, to reduce the risk of falling AND to limit injury if they did. I didn’t tell them how to do this. I’ve watched plenty of other children, since then, do this exact same thing, when they are given the space to do so.

This is where our own experience of building true resilience comes into play. Because if we have lived with a falsified understanding of resilience and concurrently never had the space to trust ourselves, it's very VERY hard to trust our young children. And we may wrongly believe that they need us to teach them how to use the stairs. But we are so much taller and we no longer have to crouch! Can you see how an adult supposing they know how a child’s body feels, is actually not only denying them a crucial chance at discovering their own bodies and thus ability to risk assess, it might even be more dangerous!

Of course it’s also our job, as parents, to keep our kids safe and give them opportunities to push themselves physically and mentally - all at the same time! Which can feel hard when we’re sold the story that danger lurks around every corner, in every ap, in every online game.

Which is the true beauty of the parent/child relationship within the scaffolding of unschooling and self directed learning. And where our kids can lean into our resilience, as they learn their own.