Coronation; love it or hate it, it’s another educative opportunity

If you’ve read the story of our home educating days in ‘A Funny Kind of Education’ you’ll know that I never wasted an opportunity to learn.

Everything we did, everywhere we went, and everything we saw provided a starting point for discussion, exploration, investigation, research and the general development of skills, mental and practical. In fact, I think I got a bit obsessed and had to back off so as not to spoil every outing with ‘What’s that butterfly?’ or ‘Why do you think it’s like that? or ‘How much of this will we need to make a litre? etc

But when you home educate, you don’t just ‘do’ education, you live education and thus realise that the opportunities for learning are all around us all of the time.

Whatever your feelings about the coronation, the monarchy, the pomp and ceremony, the politics and the public spending, it is an extraordinary event. I was going to say, unlikely to be repeated in the children’s lifetime, but that would be wrong, as Charles is not going to be a monarch as long as our previous queen, the longest serving monarch ever, since coming to the throne at 18. So there will be masses to explore and learn in relation to it. And I don’t just mean the history of it. For there are many avenues of research; looking at other countries and their rulers for example, what the monarchy is for, the cost, what folks feel about it, the pageantry and how it’s developed, do we need it? etc. all of which will develop a variety of skills and broaden your children’s intelligence as you set about your related projects.

And this illustrates one of the key advantages of home educating; the opportunity for learning to be more related to the child’s direct experience, consequently of more interest, thus keeping them switched on to learning. Instead of switched off by a dull and distant set of facts prescribed by a staid and stultified curriculum someone else has designed for the sole purpose of pushing kids through tests for the sake of political agenda and not for the sake of the kids!

This is NOT the only route to becoming an educated and qualified person who is skilled, intelligent and fit for work, although the politics and the schools would like us to believe it is. They’re wrong, as is constantly proved by home educated graduates. Learning can be spontaneous and autonomous and work just as well. For it is not so much what you learn, as how you learn it that impacts on personal development and intelligence. And develops the skills needed to continue to learn in an independent and transferrable way, essential for life, not just for schools.

Children are fascinated by what goes on around them. Their fascination and curiosity are a valuable basis for learning, a basis that is so often destroyed by schooling.

The coronation is an exciting event, for the most part, even if we personally have reservations about it (the why of which also worth learning). It presents a chance for you to see how experiences in children’s lives can be used as opportunities for developing educational skills, whether these experiences are as massive as an event of a lifetime, or as small as investigating a bug on the pavement!

Advertisement

Are you a fair weather home educator?

Are you an indoorsy or outdoorsy type of person? I ask because this may impact on your child’s education and actually your whole family’s well being.

I’ve walked pretty much every day this year – whatever the weather and despite this rubbish Spring we’re having. I’m an outdoor obsessive, you see, need the light and definitely a sun junkie, but I’ll go out whatever it’s like. Because if I don’t’ I know there are serious repercussions.

There are serious repercussions for the kids too as studies are beginning to show. But even before I understood all that, I’d get out with the kids because it magically changed our days.

There’s a story in my book ‘A Home Education Notebook’ called The Outdoor Miracle which tells of the day we were all cloistered in the house annoying each other. So ignoring the intense resistance I managed to get the children out for a walk despite the unappealing weather. And the miracle happened; everything changed. Sulks turned to smiles. Aggressive moods turned to co-operation. Grisling turned to singing. And when we got back in the house we brought in with us a renewed and as invigorating an approach as the fresh air in our lungs.

And I’m so glad I did it – and made it a habit. Because research is now coming to light to show the monumental impact being outside, connected to nature, can have. Being connected to nature not only improves physical development, it improves mental, spiritual and emotional development too, the lack of which is bound to impact on learning progress.

I’ve just read a fascinating book called ‘Biophilia’. Biophilia is a term that’s been adopted to describe the innate human need to be connected to nature in one form or another. And that we need this connection not only to survive, but also in order to thrive. The book illustrates how we can make these connections through the way we live, work, arrange our homes, recreation, design communities and attend to our health.

It’s now understood that there is a direct link between nature and well being. Making periods of time to be out in the light directly connected to nature, whether that’s a walk in the park, being around animals, playing in a forest, field, beach or hill, having a pet, gardening. planting, making mud pies, whatever – has an impact. These activities can improve concentration and memory, reduce anxiety and depression, moderate behaviour and emotions and dramatically improve stress levels (all the more reason for you to get out there too).

A page from the book ‘Biophilia: You Nature Home’ by Sally Coulthard.

Conversely, the absence of attending to this need is creating conditions in children, like ADHD for example or behaviours associated with autism, which inhibit their well being, inhibit confidence, develops fear about being outdoors and in nature, and consequently inhibits their potential to learn and progress, both academically and personally.

So despite your resistance – and theirs, especially in challenging weather – it is still vitally important that you find ways to get outside and connect with nature as much as you can – fair weather or foul. Keep doing it until it feels more natural to be out than in. This way you will be bestowing untold benefits on your family and your children’s health and education.

I know it’s not always that appealing and Spring is so fickle, throwing conditions at us better suited to January, but you really cannot afford to be a fair weather educator!

Will we ruin the children’s lives?

I missed it! The advent of the one thousandth blog posted here.

I was busy moving house, settling into new routines of living and trying to find that network of support you’ve built up over the years of living in the same place, which you tend to take for granted until it disappears that is. Support like folks to fix your laptop, mend the car, sort out a leak in the roof and most important, install some decent heating.

So I completely missed the fact that since I started here, over twenty years ago, I have written over one thousand blogs about the life and times of a home educating family, now all grown up of course, and about education in general.

One from the archives – before the Internet dominated our learning.

Home education has dramatically changed since then, the biggest of those changes being the growth of the facility of the internet which has increased its accessibility; to others, to information, to a whole home educating community you were never aware of, consequently making home education so much less daunting, more doable and more connected.

When we first started out none of that was available.

And that connectivity has more importantly changed something else as well. It has changed the way many parents see education and schooling.

Most parents accepted that schools, the education system and the politics behind it, was bound to be the best education their child was likely to receive, the best and only way for their children to become educated adults.

No one is quite so accepting now. Flaws in the system, what it provides in the form of ‘processing’ the young in contrast to educating them, and the impact this has not only on their achievement but on mental health too, are much more visible as people talk and share and discuss it, through a whole range of public platforms that were not available before. It’s removed some of the elitism attached to those in the know about education (supposedly) who dictated what happened to our kids, which we never had the opportunity to challenge or question in the way we do now.

Now we do. Parents are raising questions, discussing problems, are much more able to shout their opinions widely and publicly express their distaste in an outdated system no longer suited to contemporary society. Consequently, finding courage through this connectivity, the number of home educating families seeking alternatives increases daily.

Anyway, back to this post-one-thousandth blog and the reason I mention it. It was to share with you what those little children of six and nine when we started, who are around their thirties now (can hardly believe it) are up to in case you worried that home educating would ruin them, as I know this can be a very large and imposing worry for many considering home educating: Will we ruin the children’s lives? (Odd how no one questions whether school will ever ruin their children’s lives – even with tangible truth of it now)

I’m happy to say that neither of them have been ruined, not from my point of view or theirs! And we all still have that lovely relationship developed through home educating. Furthermore, they are both educated, intelligent, working, independent young people, busy about their lives, like pretty well all of the others they grew up home educating with.

Our eldest has just completed a Masters Degree (Distinction), whilst working and running her own business (all through Lockdowns), after having a complete career change because of Covid. Our youngest also changing track, now working in a garden centre after deciding that being Manager of a shop in a renowned retail chain was not for her. She could not reconcile her distaste for selling polluting mountains of tat wrapped in plastic, and is looking towards a greener career.

Both have developed the skills of flexibility and adaptability needed in today’s working world and continue to grow and extend themselves. And their PR skills are exemplary – they are not social misfits as some fear that home educators will become. There have of course been many ups and downs on their journeys – as in all life journeys wherever you are educated. But I think home educating; by achieving what they needed through diverse approaches helped develop an attitude to life that showed them that; whatever isn’t working in life you can probably change even though that might not be easy, but you can find the courage to do it anyway.

And that’s what I would say to any new home educating parent reading this, or anyone considering doing it; that home educating is not always easy (school’s not always easy either) but if you can screw up the courage to do it anyway the rewards are immense. And no, you won’t ruin the children.

Processed education can be as unhealthy as processed food

An exclusive exert from ‘A Home Education Notebook’:

Some days I got so tired I wondered how I was ever going to get the dinner. And it was those days that packaged and processed food I normally abhor looked really appealing.

One particular day springs to mind where my youngest made mint creams which took a bit of supervision, mostly in the form of keeping her fingers out of it especially when they’d been other places. And the eldest made fudge and just needed an occasional question answering but then went onto maths which she was struggling with and needed explanations. This was much more demanding than anticipated as I couldn’t remember how to do half of it and had to look it up. Then the youngest was on a website trying to research something it wouldn’t and getting more and more frustrated. And I just seemed to seesaw between the two of them like this all morning. By afternoon I decided we needed to get out for a swim before I was torn in two, but that finished me off. So I admit to resorting to the easy option of opening a packet for dinner.

At least I thought it was the easy option.

Sometimes I think the packaging designers must sit in their studios laughing as they think up the most complicated arrangements of plastic and cardboard just to annoy tired parents at the end of a demanding day.

We rarely ate packaged or processed food. I like my meals to have ingredients as near to their natural state as possible – that’s where taste and nutrition comes from.

But when I’m beyond scrubbing potatoes or cooking anything inventive we resort to it at times, even though I never relish it. For processed and packaged food tastes like … well, it doesn’t taste of much at all. It is limp, lifeless, tasteless – apart from salt, suspiciously full of unknowns and mostly totally uninspiring.

And it was that day I thought; this is just like education really. Education has become so processed and tightly packaged it is almost unrecognisable as education.

Just like how hard it is to recognise nutritious ingredients in processed food, education has become so over processed it too is losing some of the value of the original ingredients. It has become as unpalatable as eating forced and cling-filmed strawberries in the middle of winter. There is no taste. There is nothing to arouse the senses and the effect doesn’t last.

Isn’t that like systemised schooling?

I used to think my mother was a bit of a nutcase insisting on buying dirty carrots. Now I know why she did it. Carrots with the soil still on them keep without rotting for ages. Those washed and plastic-packaged ones from the supermarket just turn gooey and stink like mad.

Packaged and processed education doesn’t last forever either. And I reckon it turns the children gooey.

I read of an experiment someone once did on a class of school children. They were told they were going to be tested on a certain subject at the end of the week and given information to learn for it. The children sat the test and the expected number did well. A few days later the same children did the same test without warning and hardly any of them scored well. The learning they had processed for the test didn’t last – just like the carrots.

Education like food needs to be as near as possible to its natural experience in order for it to be lasting, inspiring, arouse the senses and be worth having. Experiences are the basis for all learning, for meaningful learning. Learning packaged into tightly restrictive curriculum or second hand learning in workbooks, removed from the original experience, loses its appeal just as much as food. Learning and education need unwrapping.

It is natural for children to learn. During their everyday lives at home pre-school children learn loads of things. They acquire skills. They pick up knowledge. They do this naturally, experientially. Just as we all do all of the time.

All experiences teach us something. Our interests and pursuits broaden our minds. So do books, Internet, telly, ordinary every day interaction with people and things. And also our work, our outings, anniversaries, celebrations, social gatherings. Learning is natural. And learning from first hand experiences in this way is meaningful, rich, stimulating, and retained. Children learn naturally from this all the time.

Then they are removed from that natural learning environment just before they’re five and shut away from it in schools. We’re told that the only valuable learning is that which comes from teachers, packaged into a National Curriculum and contained in expected outcomes and objectives.

So children are processed through this type of learning and adults are conditioned to devalue learning outside of that. And what happens? Children begin to lose their ability to learn anything that isn’t neatly wrapped for them. And I see an awful lot of teenagers who have about as much enthusiasm in doing anything as I have in eating those out-of-season packaged strawberries.

In both the strawberries and the teenagers the zest has gone.

With food I have options. Mostly I buy food in its natural state. I am deeply suspicious of processed pies, potato alphabets, pasta shapes in suspect sauce and the infamous turkey Twizzlers! But sometimes at the end of a hard Home Educating day I’m as pleased as anyone else to open a pizza. When I can get it open that is.

But I do have the choice and you will probably know which is better for me. I suspect you might also be thinking that I would be a better parent for giving my child a natural potato that’s been baked than a processed pizza.

Yet it’s funny how people don’t seem to have the same view of education.

Everyone seems to think that a packaged and processed education is better for children than a natural one.

I got more criticism for allowing my children a natural education than I did putting them through an unnatural educational process. Yet if I continually gave them processed food instead of natural food I wouldn’t be considered a good parent at all.

Odd that!

Years ago, children didn’t have much opportunity to learn. They didn’t have opportunity to learn skills or access information like they do now. And many children didn’t live in homes where education was valued more highly than earning a crust of bread. Children were needed to mind siblings, pick potatoes, crawl along factory floors in between dangerous machinery and sweep chimneys.

Well I don’t know whether folks have noticed but that’s changed. Most of our kids today live in an environment where education is available, where there is access to information, where skills can be learnt. Naturally.

They are surrounded by people using skills and accessing information. And quite naturally they will learn from that.

But we as a society have been led to believe, as education has become more packaged and processed over the years, that this processed type of education is the only valuable one.

Our attitude to processed food is changing, thank goodness. We’re beginning to value unprocessed meals. We’re even beginning to see how processed food can make us ill.

I’d like to see our attitude to processed education changing too. For not only is some of it meaningless, unfulfilling and un-lasting, it too can make our children ill.

Like with unprocessed meals that I actually peel and prepare, I tried to give my children an unprocessed experiential education as near to its natural state as possible. If we were learning about plants – we had plants to hand that we dissected. If we were learning about history – we did it in a historical setting like museum or castle. Get the idea?

This way, just like fresh picked, in-season, unprocessed strawberries, the flavour of the educational experience we gave them was meaningful and stimulated all their senses in a way that is still lasting.

You can read more supportive stories in ‘A Home Education Notebook’. And the new edition has a new added epilogue which tells the stories of the children we home educated alongside now that they’re grown up!

Happy Easter and a reminder to be outside

I think of Easter as a time to celebrate the marvels of the earth through this season of rebirth, regrowth and the nature’s burgeoning vitality. When days of longer light can make my own sap rise along with that of the trees and plants as I suddenly feel more energised!

What better time than this to commit to more time outside, experiencing and learning about our essential connection to the earth first hand. Learn along with the kids how all species are connected to the lives of others and imperative for the longevity of the planet, for our own health and well being and that of our children.

Article here suggests children need at least two hours a day outside.

And this one goes into more detail about the benefits to both physical, mental and spiritual health and its impact on our immune systems.

So what better time to take a serious look at increasing your outdoor time than Spring, when it is so pretty and inviting and downright dramatic with its April showers!

The perfect time to educate for increased understanding of the planet, how to live upon it with more respect and less impact. The more the children know, the more their respect will grow.

Go out to witness and experience:

• Birds – with bits in their mouths, either for nest building or for baby feeding, or singing their Springtime songs, migrants that have recently arrived
• Emerging insects – from creepy crawlies in the crevices to the first bee or butterfly you’ve seen this year
• Rain – appreciating the fact that it is essential for survival. How often do you consider that? And consider also ways in which you can economise with your water usage – waste less of this essential resource. In fact, there’s lots of varying weather to experience during Spring
• Young – the best time for seeing newborns, especially lambs. There may be a farm or a centre nearby you can visit, a river for ducklings, or listen out for baby bird cheeps in roofs, trees and hedges
• Plants, shrubs and trees that are beginning to leaf up or bloom. If you have a garden get the kids involved in growing things, in pots if you don’t, in order to learn about the vital elements needed in order to grow; nourishment, light, water – which we need too! Along with health giving contact with soil!

You may live in a concrete environment, but that is all the more reason you need to teach the children about the earth that lies underneath and to find ways to get them back in contact with it. Otherwise how will they know it’s there, grows our food, supports our lives, and that it needs our attention? Use the occasion to celebrate this earth and the abundance of life bursting around us, on which all ultimately depend, however city central we live.

Have a Happy Easter and springtime!

Spring amid the concrete

Home School Wobbles?

Home educating is a glorious experience.

But it’s also no picnic – well – not all the time anyway. Although most if it for us did feel like a joyful romp away from the restriction of mainstream, with an expanding horizon of liberated learning all the way.

Even so, that doesn’t mean to say we didn’t lose the plot on occasion; have wobbles and tantrums (mine mostly) and doubts and bad days.

We did.

They passed!

Someone messaged me recently to tell me that whenever that happened to them they just picked up my book ‘A Home Education Notebook’ and could find comfort and reassurance. That’s good to know. For that’s exactly why it came to be written.

Because I knew exactly what those moments, or days, felt like and I wanted to offer something to help. In fact a reader of another of my books (Learning Without School), which came before the Notebook, said that she kept it on her bedside table for just those occasions. And that nearly became its title; the home education bedside book!

Having been right through home education, and those little children in ‘A Funny Kind of Education’ living and working independently now, it’s as if it never happened. It certainly isn’t really relevant to their days any more. You ‘couldn’t tell’ if they went to school or not – as someone once offered as a response to being told they were home educated. We did laugh over that! But it might reassure you to know that although it feels like an enormously unorthodox and controversial step to you now, come the future it will all even out into mainstream life.

So don’t panic.

When you’re panicking and wobbling and losing the plot – which is downright natural anyway, we’re only human – consider some of the following:

• you would be worrying just as much about your child in school
• bad days are natural – whatever you’re doing
• remember all the wonderful opportunities it gives you and why you did it in the first place
• you might just be tired – back off and trust
• not every single moment of every day needs to be filled with work and learning. It wouldn’t be in school. You achieve things quicker at home with individual attention, so your kids have more free time which is equally valuable to their development
• being a thinking and intelligent person as you must be to do this in the first place, you will not spoil your child. None of my contemporaries who’ve also come out the ‘other side’ have spoiled theirs – I don’t know a home educator who has
• love and happiness are as important to educational development as academics
• being social doesn’t come from being in school
• test results don’t equate to being an educated person
• learning ‘difficulties’ often disappear outside of school
• everything is always easier when you get outdoors – use that opportunity you have
• consider what you think an educated person is and aim for that, as much as ‘results’!

Just one of the chapters from A Home Education Notebook

All of these topics and more are covered in my ‘Home Education Notebook’ so it might help you to have one handy to dip into on such occasions as these when, like us, you lose the plot.

But always remember that whenever the plot is lost – you can always find it, or renew it, or recharge it, and get going again!

Meanwhile, enjoy your home education. It won’t be there forever!

Oh – and a little head’s up; keep your eye on this space – there’s a new edition of ‘A Home Education Notebook’ coming soon with a completely new chapter which revisits many of the young people we home educated with to see what they are doing now! Always a subject everyone wants to know about!

Every day with a child…

January can be a grim and gruelling month. A bit hard to get through I used to find during our home educating days, with the lack of light, post holiday blues, challenging weather making it difficult to get out with the kids, and moods also lacking in light! It’s hard to find any January brightness.

So in case it’s a bit like that for you right now now I thought I’d share this uplifting blog from a while back just to remind you what an amazing thing you’re doing, just being a parent, never mind a home schooling parent!

Here it is:

Every day with a child is an opportunity to enhance a future

Have you ever thought of it like that? Possibly not when continuous days with children can be a bit wearing, doing activities at their level a bit boring and their endless energy exhausting.

But if you think about it, every moment you spend with children influences a future. Their future. Your future. Society’s future. The Earth’s.

Why is that then?

Well – children are so readily influenced; so believing and naive and absorbent to learning. The experiences they have with you, however large or seemingly small, make an impact on them. They are like little computers gathering input from the things around them, from the things that happen and are said to them, and assimilating that with what has happened before. Small children don’t even have the filters that come with maturity to distinguish right from wrong, good from bad. They just absorb it all. Take it fairly literally. Digest it. And what they perceive becomes part of them.

So whatever experience they have, whether it’s fun or loving, wise or trusting, harsh or unjust, exciting or dull or dismissive, it moulds their understanding and view of the world, their impact on others, their education and even their personalities to a degree.

All interactions with our worlds shape who we are and what we do with our future. And the biggest influence on that shape comes when we are young, through the people we’re with.

Like your child with you.

That’s the way in which being with children has the opportunity to shape the future; we’re shaping a future being.

No small responsibility then!

But it needn’t be daunting. For it is quite simple really. Simply being with children – and being simply good – does the trick.

Being positive and fair, encouraging and caring, showing them what an unbelievably exciting place the world can be, what a myriad of fulfilling possibilities there are, how incredible all aspects of the planet are, how being loving and caring of the planet and the people in it will bring love and care back to them, and how to deal with aspects of the opposite in a way that dissipates harm rather than expanding it. Just showing how a simple goodness makes life good – that’s enough to shape a good future – make it simple and sweet.

These are the ways in which we have the opportunity to enhance a future. Everyone’s future, for the way in which our children grow up will impact on everyone if you think about it broadly.

That’s what you’ll be doing as you parent and home educate. How amazing is that!

Have a great day.

A little January brightness to look forward to

A perfectly imperfect approach to your Home Education

Happy New Year, and a happy new start to your home education!

As a fresh approach to it, which we were always ready for when we got back down to it again, how about adopting the philosophy of Wabi Sabi?

What is that, I hear you ask?

Well, I’m not going to be able to give you a clear definitive answer, basically because there isn’t one. I’ve read it’s as difficult to define as love; we all have ideas about love but to express what it is in words is almost impossible. It’s more a matter of feel than of definitions.

And it’s the same with Wabi Sabi.

Wabi Sabi is a Japanese approach to life which holds within it lessons about letting go of trying to make everything perfect, of letting go the idea that life can only be happy if we meet our expectations of perfectionism – many blasted at us through social media, and of accepting and appreciating things as they are in order to get the best from life. Acceptance of the fact that things don’t have to be perfect in order to be good.

If you’re anything like I was you’ll probably be worrying about making your home education perfect. You feel the responsibility of living up to this decision you’ve made to do it, of making it better than school, along with the inevitable comparisons and weight that subsequently brings. Worrying over the judgements made about you if you’re not getting on perfectly. Heavy weights indeed.

Having been through all this my advice to you would be to stop that immediately. All that will do is create tension and anxiety, stress and conflict none of which will be good. Certainly isn’t helpful in making a good learning environment.

Far better instead is to approach it with the wisdom this concept of imperfection brings. Understanding that imperfections are still experiences and all experiences teach us something; often show us the way forward, even when they’re the wrong ones!

And understand this about the educational process:

• It doesn’t have to be perfect to be valid
• Learning approaches don’t have to be perfect to be worthwhile
• Each day doesn’t have to be perfect in order to usefully contribute to the overall development and progress of your youngster
• Becoming educated is a diverse, sometimes messy, varied and experiential journey that has as many imperfections, as life does, and which never ends.
• There is no perfect time frame, no perfect approach, no perfect outcome, no perfect strategy, no perfect answer.
• But a perfectly imperfect education still works!

Many of your days at home will be less than perfect. Many days at school will be less than perfect. We wouldn’t actually expect them to be so, so why put that pressure on your home educating days?

And of course, children are not perfect either. Thank goodness for that, for all our diverse idiosyncrasies. Diversity is essential for our perpetuation. Accept your children as they are, where they are; they will change. Wabi Sabi embraces the concepts of impermanence, imperfection and incompleteness. As things are in all nature; as are we – children particularly!

So go gently with your days. Ditch any ideas about making them perfect.

Enjoy the good days. Accept and move on from the difficult ones. Take each day as it comes.

And allow imperfections to be naturally part of the rich pattern of home education.

Wishing you a happy new home educating year

(The book I read was ‘WABI SABI Japanese wisdom for a perfectly imperfect life’ by Beth Kempton)

You cannot photograph sensations

I’ve enjoyed Instagramming my regular walks – wanting to share a bit of the countryside with you all.

The danger of Instagram though, and other social media sites, is that you can be so busy photographing the moment, you’re not actually engaging with it. More than likely you’re engaging with the opportunity to show it off to others. In fact, holding your phone up almost creates a barrier – certainly a psychological one – between you and the sensation of mindfully enjoying.

I noticed this particularly on an autumn walk a month or so ago. I was so busy sharing the experience on my phone, and looking at the photos to see if they were good enough, I’d disengaged from the experience itself. Not just the sight of nature laid sweetly before my eyes, but all the other sensations of being there as well; a last bit of Lark song of the season, the smell of the damp foliage, the shine of the dew and the soft touch of the gentle breeze.

Instead of mindfully being there, I was missing it all. I put the phone away.

This is why I hardly took any photos at my daughter’s wedding. (See recent post here) There were several others snapping away, some who’d been particularly engaged to do so. There would be plenty of photographic memories, I could appropriate!

But you can’t photograph sensations. And it was the sensations of the day I wanted to bring away with me.

And it’s made me wonder, as I see so many photos of your delightful children and the activities they’re doing splashed across social media, whether some parents are so busy photographing their kids for posting on sites they’re actually missing out on the sensations of being there with them.

One day you won’t be! They’ll have flown.

A grainy one from the pre-digital days, when the odd personal photos were more treasured for being fewer, and we were consequently more engaged with the moment!

A single photo memory is nice to have, I agree. But I suspect our phones have pushed us beyond that, beyond even the sensation of wanting to share, towards an addiction of wanting approval, likes and endorsement. These gadgets and platforms are designed to be addictive.

Just a thought.

So this is a call for you to enjoy your kids while they’re there with you. Masses of pics are no substitute for living the moment, of being with them, engaged. The depth of those feelings cannot be reproduced in an other medium. Only that which you have experienced within.

Put your phone down and live your life as a parent for the experience at the time, not for the reproduction of it.

Educate away from Stuff

As we move further away from the memories of Lockdown and staying away from crowded places and shops I realise how little exposure I’ve had over the past year to overwhelming amounts of ‘stuff’!

I recently visited a garden centre looking for a plant present for a dear friend. Thought this would be a nicer gift to give than another bit of useless rubbish for the sake of giving to someone who has everything they need anyway.

To get to the delightful growing things I have to walk through walls and stands full of ‘stuff’, much of it Christmas related already and completely unrelated to gardens and gardening and growing things and probably destined eventually for landfill.

Shelves and shelves of unnecessary stuff just for the sake of buying

Having been locked away from regular contact with it all, as we have on and off over the past eighteen months, it seemed overwhelmingly vulgar. I couldn’t help feeling the weight of it bearing down on the planet; the weight of manufacture, pollution, the use of precious resources, for what? Probably for a moment’s pleasure soon diminished as we search for the next big fix.

I think our addiction to shop, and to have, is probably to do with our primeval hunter-gatherer need. A very real need in our psyche, but maybe one we should try and fulfil in other ways.

Our children are raised in a consumerist culture. They are educated in a consumerist culture. They are taught to be consumers. The system aims them towards it as sure as an arrow to a target, with promises of high qualifications equalling high incomes equalling high consumption (although that bit is never admitted openly) which is promoted as leading inevitably to high happiness. This is the overall message. Adverts on the telly promote stuff as equalling happiness, and push parents towards believing that the more stuff they buy their kids the better parent they are, the more educated their kids will be, and the more this indicates they love them.

Total balderdash!

The more stuff we buy isn’t any more guarantee of a better education than having the right shoes! And we should examine carefully all the insidious ways in which we educate our kids to be consumers and instead educate them to be the opposite; to ask ‘do I really need this?’

For the bottom line is; the more stuff you buy the more you destroy the planet upon which your kids, your grandkids, your great grandkids, depend. How does that future destruction show you love them?

What is needed instead is to teach them that life can be happy, successful, fulfilling without huge amounts of stuff. Teach them them to be resourceful. Teach them to reuse, repurpose, recycle. Teach them to look for ways to do things differently or do without – not such a bad thing – not deprivation as it is held up to be. Instead, it’s a way of avoiding the environmental deprivation we’re inflicting on the planet.

We need to change our thinking, particularly if we’re addictive shoppers. Readdress our own habits as an example to our children. And as an added bonus, appreciate that all this challenging thinking increases the intelligence and skills and mental agility of children far more than buying an answer will!

I came away with a beautiful plant that will no doubt be returned to the earth at some point. I’m under no illusion at the dubious pollutive practices (and the inevitable plastic pot) that got it to this point, but at least the plant itself will not add to the plastic mountain of unnecessary ‘homestyle’ trash I could have bought. Perhaps I’d just do better rethinking birthdays and gifts, rethinking any type of shopping or consuming!

Learning and education never end do they! Rethinking our consumerist habits must become a valuable part of that.