Here’s a trick to deal with homeschool fear and anxiety. When you feel it coming on, get out a piece of paper and write down all the things you appreciate.

The brain cannot simultaneously be anxious and appreciative. Other emotions can overlap fear and appreciation, but fear and appreciation can’t co-exist. It’s one or the other.

Fear is telling us something, sometimes. But it can also grip us into a downward spiral so we can’t see anything clearly. Consider the list of appreciation as a way to move away from overwhelming fear and anxiety, and to create space to explore where the fear was really coming from.

Although I appreciate the sentiment - she wanted to protect her fellow homeschoolers - the article itself was not convincing.

Any pleasure seeking activity in excess is not healthy. But cocaine? That is quite a stretch.

Managing video games consumption is not equivalent to teaching our kids to stay away from cocaine. A better comparison would be a food addiction. Our kids are growing up with them. We need to learn how video games affect us, while not to being afraid of them. Comparing games to cocaine makes us afraid, which makes us unable to look at them objectively.

As parents, it is our responsibility to know the whole story. This is how we can help our kids better understand themselves and the world they live in. Equanimity towards video games, and a strong relationship with our children is the way to peaceful play.

Here are some other articles about video games that might provide a more well-rounded approach to the subject.

About.com: It is important when considering the possibility of a video game addiction to not simply consider the amount of time spent gaming, but also the function it is serving the individual.

PBS.com: Video game myths

Techradar.com: They conflate normal play activities with addiction and that’s going to produce gibberish.

Gamespot.com: Gaming isn’t the root of the problem, getting someone to stop playing games is great… sure… until they find their next addiction and starts all over again. (from comments)

There is no easy solution. If you are an involved parent, sending kids to school is just as much work as homeschooling. It just comes out in a different way.

I think you’d be surprised how all the hard of homeschooling is found at the beginning because of simply not having a story in our head that we can use to know what it’s like. In other words, the hard comes from us stressing about it. It’s kind of like imagining what it’s like to move to a foreign country. The more experience one gets, it becomes much easier simply because there is no longer any weight given to the mind’s scary stories. You just do what we have to do instead of focusing on what is scary.

With each struggle, life gets easier, because you learn who your child is, who you are, and how to work together. You can make changes, adjustments, and redirections whenever you need them, making the path easier and easier to tread over time. If you have a great school, this can happen there, but in order for everyone to adjust together in school, school has to become part of the family - like an uncle or cousins (ie emotional connection) - in order for it work. Otherwise, it’s simply a matter of business/customer transaction, where the customer or the business bends to the will of the other. In most schools, the most logical and easiest solution is when the customer bends.

School seems the easy choice in the beginning because it doesn’t take a huge mental leap to imagine what the choice entails. But the day to day, month to month, year to year grind of school is very stressful. It never gets easier. It just gets harder as the requirements pile up.

If you go with K-12 or a public school program, you’ll have a crutch. It’s an emotional one, mostly. But, if that doesn’t work, be careful not to immediately blame yourself or homeschooling, because whenever you are in a system where you do not have autonomy or input on the large picture decision making, the system wants you to think it’s your fault things aren’t working. That’s pretty universal. The concepts that maybe it’s not working because the system isn’t a good fit, or because we are forced into a cognitive dissonance in order to keep the peace, make the system look bad, so others in the system will rarely tell you that’s the case. If it does work, though, wonderful!

In homeschooling, if you go independent, you do have 100% responsibility. But the truth is, you always do, no matter where your children go to school. Having them go to school, or doing a public school homeschool program, or going independent, it’s all the same - we are responsible for everything. With school, we are simply outsourcing the work, and accepting whatever the outsourced person/organization presents as their solution.

So, all that said, whatever choice you make, you’ll be fine. You are capable, smart, resourceful, thoughtful, and strong. So are your kids. No need to defend your decision. Simply make it, make no apologies, and be proud of what you’ve done. That’s it!

Good luck to you. It will all work out fine.

Imagine showing a video of a homeschool conference and telling the audience it was a video of a group of public schooled kids. Would they be thinking “They are so well socialized?” What about showing a video of public school kids and telling the audience that it was a video of homeschoolers. What do you think they’d say?

People say that homeschoolers are weird, or that public school kids are unruly, or whatever. I wonder if we would think the same way if we just thought of kids as people and not the labels we put on them of where they came from.

This is audio of the talk I gave today at the Sepulveda Unitarian Universalist Society (the Onion).

In this talk I parallel the reasons we chose not to have a religious doctrine with why we do not have an educational doctrine. There are questions at the end, which all delve deeper into the educational side of it. Enjoy!

Life Without Religion or School - SUUS - 5/9/10

When you do this, you can then teach children how to make their best art and to share their soul with the world, too.

When we are all doing our best art, it makes the world a better place.

Zenhabits tells us to kill our to-do list and to do the one thing that needs to get done today. The one thing that won’t happen on its own (laundry and driving the kids around will happen whether they are on the list or not), the one thing that we want to do but never have time (we always seem to have time for procrastination), the one thing that will change us (it’s so much easier to do the same thing day in and day out, under the guise of making sure we get it all done).

Housework gets done. It’s the creative, personal, self-growth efforts that don’t. If we have something important as our one thing, the other stuff will get done. If I had to choose between having a pristine house and having art to show for my life, I’d raher have art. You don’t have to live in a sty to find time to create or grow. Our society’s taught us that there is only black or white. The housework gets done or it doesn’t. We do art or we clean. The truth is we can do both. We seriously do not need to spend all day doing housework. We can spend some of that time on creating.

But for most of we are so worried that we aren’t getting every bit of laundry done that we make excuses for not expressing ourselves. Having the daily practice of having only one thing on our list is how we get our heads out of trying to be perfect and into being extraordinary.

This one thing also sends a powerful message to our children - what’s inside us is important. It’s far more important than a to-do list.

However, there is always time for quick links and quotes, which I have been putting up on my few Facebook page. There, you can find more homeschool info and thoughts than you can stand, all delivered to you several times a day!

Stay tuned here for longer posts and more in depth information.

Also, my publisher is calling for more pre-orders of Zenschooling. Order early and order often. The more pre-orders I get, the bigger of a launch I can have and the sooner I can start my promotional tour!

If you’d like me to speak in your area, let me know. I speak at schools, churches (UU churches are particularly fond of my talks it seems), libraries, park days, info sessions, conferences, Expo’s, moms groups, preschool coops, and pretty much anywhere you can find a group of people who want to hear about homeschooling. I’m looking to fill my schedule in October and early November, and in January and February.

Thank you for your continued support!

[Update: Tomorrow morning they will be showing a follow-up with Pat Farenga. Perhaps they shall redeem themselves?]

Good Morning America did a piece this morning on unschooling. Not just any unschooling, but a radical unschooling.

The first page of the online article was fairly straightforward and balanced, but on page two, we get to hear from their “parenting expert.” Who, apparently, is also an educational and alternative education expert.

“This to me is putting way too much power in the hands of the kids, something that we know kids can often find anxiety-producing, and it’s also sending a message that they’re the center of the universe, which I do not think is healthy for children,” she said.

Dr. Reef Karim, a psychiatrist, agrees.

“The whole concept of cooperating with your kid, it’s kind of cool in theory,” he said, “and if a child was a little adult I think it would be great, but he’s a child.”

The whole concept of cooperating with your kid? Well, what about in practice? Because right there in front of this “expert” is a family who is practicing it, and it’s working. Did this psychiatrist meet the family? It sounds like he might have been asked a rhetorical question in a separate interview with the reporter. In which case, this is an opinion given about a rhetorical situation, not based on evidence.

Also, in regards to putting too much power in the hands of the kids, it makes me wonder - what do they think these teens are preparing for, if not for a future, only a few years off, where they will be holdling all the power to decide what to do in their own lives? “Too much power”? It’s interesting that the parenting expert looks at this as an issue of who has power over who, and for what. Why is parenting a matter of power at all?

In a traditional school setting, power is such an important aspect of the way kids are taught and how the school system works, it’s not surprising that the parenting expert would make this comment. What would happen if high school kids were suddenly given all this power to decide these things for themselves? It would indeed be likely a catastrophe for many. But what the parenting expert fails to acknowledge is that this”power” or rather, “freedom” is not new to these unschooled teens and they aren’t in school. How can she possibly know what it is like to grow up like this? She doesn’t. She’s looking through the lenses of school.

I’m not a radical unschooler. The radical unschooling parenting approach doesn’t resonate with me, and it doesn’t fit with our family. However, I have seen it work too many times for it to be dismissed outright. Just like any parenting philosophy, it doesn’t work if the parents are not involved and positive influences on their children. However, the nature of the philosophy of radical unschooling, in and of itself, does not lead to a higher number of fast-food workers or ditch-diggers. There is no evidence of this, and yet, and yet… there is a confident claim by two experts, without any proof or evidence, that radical unschooling is less effective than the authoritative, power-directed philosophy of education that our culture prefers.

In regards to the research conducted outside of their in-house experts, Good Morning America did not bother to try and get in touch with any of the Massachusetts’ homeschooling groups. They only attempted to contact the Dept. of Education, and they linked to HSLDA. (I’m curious what HSLDA would have said, actually, if they had been interviewed.)

This gem also stood out:

But what happens when the kids get older? Shaun Biegler, 13, last went to school when he was in the first grade.

He doesn’t regret not attending anymore, but said, “I wonder what my life would be if I continued going to school. I was never really into some of the stuff that I had to learn in school.”

He added that sports “haven’t really been an interest of mine,” but he also hasn’t been exposed to many sports because he doesn’t participate in a PE class.

Who do you think this part was written for? And how many people do you think are all up in arms because he wasn’t exposed to many sports? Is school about exposing kids to sports? Is this really an important issue that really digs deep into the effectiveness of radical unschooling, a child’s exposure to sports? And notice the comment by the reporter that he wasn’t exposed to many sports because he doesn’t participate in PE. Why did the reporter fail to mention the number of schools that have removed PE from the curriculum because they don’t have money? Not to mention the millions of other ways to be exposed to sports, yet PE is touted as the only real way kids can be exposed to them?

Me thinks this reporter (and her team) did not listen to one single thing the family said. Just took notes, then stuck in the quotes in an already-written article. (Ok, that’s probably not true, but it certainly does make one wonder if anyone was really paying attention to what the family was saying!)

This is next:

Shaun’s sister, 15-year-old Kimi, doesn’t even know what grade she’d have been in if she had remained in school, and doesn’t feel prepared for college.

“I haven’t done the traditional look at a textbook and learn about such-and-such,” she said. “If I wanted to go to college, then I would pick up a textbook and learn.”

The reporter first says that Kimi’s not prepared for college, yet in the next quote, the teen says she would be fine if she went to college.

Overall, this article is a so-so interview. Even though I’ve picked on in a lot, I have to say that I’ve seen much more scathing interviews of unschoolers, let alone radical unschoolers. The quotes from the family are taken out of context a bit, but all of the negativity towards unschooling comes from the editorial commentary and the experts. The family themselves seem rather well-adjusted and happy, although different than the mainstream.

Those who can see past the editorial bias and see the family as-is will really think about what it might be like to live differently. While the rest of the people who were taught for years in school to base their ideas and opinions on what the experts and talking heads think about things will continue to do so and will continue on their merry way not really understanding these people who are different than them, while touting  oh-so-important “socialization” we are supposed to get in school.

Homeschoolers are told time and again that school teaches people to accept and “get along” with people who are different. Is this what “getting along with people who are different” looks like? Criticizing them and posting negative and leading opinions about their lifestyle on a nationwide morning show? If that’s what getting along means, I don’t want anything to do with it.

So much has been said about this case, that there’s not much more for me to say about this sad, terrible abuse of parental power. However, I would like to address the larger topic of how these kinds of abuse stories create a stir of anti-homeschooling sentiment.

You and I know that 99.999% of homeschool abuse stories in the media have nothing at all to do with homeschooling. Homeschooling regulations and monitoring will not decrease the number of these cases, nor will they stop crazies from doing crazy things.

Yet, extreme abuse cases are so often used as examples (and sometimes the only examples) of why homeschooling needs to be regulated and homeschoolers all should be monitored by the state. Little do these bloggers and social politicos know that they are being duped by their own brain. Using these extreme cases as abuse as an example of why homeschooling, in general, is a bad thing, does not come from logic reasoning. It comes from emotion, defensive politics, and the desire to take a shortcut to feeling better. The reason I know this is because of my fear, and the fear that many of us have, of riding in an airplane.

Airplane and car crashes

For a long time, people believed that flying in an airplane was more dangerous, and therefore scary, than riding in a car. But as you know and we all know now, it has been proven time and again that flying in a plane is very close to 100% safe. Yet, when a place crashes, it is horrible and very scary. The intensity of our feelings for this scary event makes us feel like flying is dangerous and deadly. Even with statistics and evidence to prove that flying is far safer than riding in a car, our brains still want to believe that flying is dangerous, especially when we think of deadly crashes killing a hundred people at a time. When we see a deadly crash on TV, our mind easily skips the logic and focuses solely on how dangerous planes are, because one just crashed, and it crashed hard.

This is what is happening when politicians and politicos use these extreme abuse cases to try and “prove” homeschooling needs more regulations or should be outlawed all together. They use this emotional shortcut to bypass logic to reach an illogical conclusion. They use emotions and logical fallacies that our brains easily attach to, to encourage us to come to a conclusion that is not based on facts or evidence. They know that it is very difficult for us to overcome this unsupported logic in our own brains, let alone on a mass scale. Get a lot of people together who are feeling these strong feelings and it’s next to impossible to get them to back up and look at the facts.

We have a “feeling” that airplanes are dangerous. Even with the facts in front of us, we are hard pressed to not feel fear when we step in an airplane. Why don’t we feel this with cars? Why don’t we get scared to jump in our car after hearing about a deadly crash on the freeway we’re about to embark on? Confirmation bias and desensitization is what makes cars seem benign, when they are in reality far more dangerous than airplanes. In fact, airplanes being so safe is what actually makes them seem so dangerous.

Extreme cases about unusual things short-circuits our brains

We rarely hear about airplanes at all. Most of the time, it’s non-news. Airplanes fly back and forth, they do their thing, and unless we are a frequent flyer, we don’t give them much thought at all. Then, there’s a crash, and it’s all over the news like flies on… well you know. We are bombarded with messages of “terrible plane crashes, OMG! It’s horrible!”

Car accidents, on the other hand, we hear about all the time. There are so many crashes, the news couldn’t possibly keep up. We not only hear about them on the news, but we see them on the freeway, our friends tell us about them, and we probably have been in one ourselves at some point. So when it’s on the news, it’s nothing noteworthy. Someone dies in a car here, someone dies there. Ah, another crash, ho hum. Sad, but not worth paying much attention to Another death, how banal. We are constantly exposed to car crashes, and this teaches our brains that deaths and crashes in a car are commonplace and NOT THAT BAD. While, although much rarer and probably never going to happen to us or anyone we know, a death in a plane is VERY, VERY BAD.

It is because air travel is working so well that there is really nothing to say about it, and therefore, makes it seem absolutely terrifying when things go wrong.

Uncommon or unusual programs and activities that are working well get the most scrutiny and the most criticism when things go wrong, while the everyday programs and activities that have problem after problem go unnoticed.

The media knows this, and feeds on it. They specifically choose to report on uncommon and unusual practices, especially when they go horribly wrong. And we get caught, hook, line and sinker. We feel like we’re being given enough information to make an assessment, and whatever holes we have in our understanding we instantly fill up with something that makes sense according to what we already know and believe. And since we don’t know much about this unusual thing, our brain naturally assumes that since we haven’t heard anything before, and the only thing we know about it is a bad thing, it must be all bad. What other conclusion is there? The absence of general knowledge about something unusual leads us to believe it is bad if the only information we have on it is bad. And because of how our media works, cherry picking the most extreme stories, systems that are working well but which are not in our day to day understanding (like airplanes, for example), will be the most suspect when things go wrong.

Homeschooling and school are like airplanes and cars

Homeschooling is rarely in the news. Because it works so well, and most people don’t homeschool, there is rarely anything about it that the news is interested in. Until, that is, something absolutely horrible happens in a homeschooling family. The news catches it, and suddenly everyone is thinking about this one homeschooling story.  Since most viewers haven’t heard anything else about homeschooling except these extreme cases in the news, they see these deaths and abuse cases as VERY VERY BAD. So bad, in fact, that it hurts. Something MUST be done! Nevermind that there is a huge hole of information they don’t have. They have enough to start a story. Their brain is perfectly able to fill in the rest of the story with one piece of information.

School, on the other hand, is in the news so often, that we are desensitized. One child is molested here, meh. Another child commits suicide there, bah, whatever. Another child is found dead, shot by gangs, raped, kidnapped, beat up, no big deal. Happens all the time. The brain has enough of the whole entire story to know that school is not *just* these extreme cases. And, if the viewer is in school, they have many experiences to draw on to be able to shrug off the bad news. “Just as long as it’s not happening to me, I know there is plenty of places where these aren’t happening, so I’m OK.”

Because of this desensitization and confirmation bias effect, the death of a homeschool child is worth far more worry points than the death of a school child.

Twisting the story more for self-preservation and distance

There’s one additional layer of misunderstanding that creates a hightened emotional reaction with the homeschooling that doesn’t occur as often with school related stories. The death or abuse of homeschool children in the news never has anything to do with homeschooling, but, so often, the two are linked anyway. People who jump to the conclusion that these abuses happened because of a lack of homeschooling regulation, or homeschooling in general, have a vested interest in doing so - it gives them distance by saying it’s people who are NOT LIKE THEM who are doing this. This is different, unknown, not understood, and so easy to use as a distancing tool. That is very good for the brain to create a self-preservation bubble.

So there are two jumps in logic. First, our human brain, which hates new and unknown things, hears one bad thing about something that works well, and because there is no other data to go on, assumes the entire thing is bad, even though there is no logical evidence. And second, our human brain hears a very bad thing and at the same time sees an unusual detail, making it an easy connection to make to put the blame on something that is very far away from our personal experience, and therefore, the problem is over THERE.

What can we do?

Politicians may not know any of this intentionally. Humans are pretty good at using these natural illogical jumps to justify our decisions and opinions without knowing why or how they work, especially when faced with having to take responsibility for our own mistakes. Even in the face of facts and numbers, we still have a hard time getting our brains out of that illogical loop. To be fair, it happens to homeschoolers too, as we are easily enraged by things we hear in the media just as everyone else is. Our brains work like everyone else’s, and it takes great resistance and effort to keep our brains from making these automatic, yet illogical, connections.

Coming back to case of Khyra Ishaq, we can see the double-illogical justification is happening yet again. There is clear evidence that her death had nothing to do with homeschooling. And yet, and yet… many still use this as “clear” evidence that homeschooling is BAD and needs to be smacked down, somehow, some way. And the truth is, that their call for action against homeschoolers makes scared people feel good, in the same way that after hearing about an airline crash, we feel better knowing that there will be more regulations because of it. While at the same time, same people, when there is a car crash, we shrug our shoulders and don’t really care if they make more regulations or not.

“We” of course is the human race. It’s how our brains work. As homeschoolers, we’re sensitive to this jump in logic that we all are prone to when it’s about homeschooling, because we know the larger truth. Homeschooling is not new, unusual, or “the other.” To us, homeschooling is like a car, not an airplane.

Is there a way to help the rest of the world see homeschooling as another kind of car, instead of an airplane, so that our media and politicians no longer use innocent little girls like Khyra and our desire to feel better about her death to make money?

There is hope

Not everyone came to the conclusion that homeschooling was the cause of Khyra’s death. The judge who sentenced the parents for manslaughter did not. However, there is still grumblings from the Birmingham Council that it was homeschooling’s fault, not anything the social workers did. Grumblings like this only work in the media, and in the political arena, where feelings and personal preservation are of utmost importance. They don’t work in the court of law (or shouldn’t anyway) where facts, and not feelings or personal bias, are used to determine causation.

Let’s keep the public conversation going, and keep track of these court cases, and media stories. And, let’s be honest with our own bias and tendencies to let our brain make convenient connections because it makes us feel better or gives us a better political edge. Stepping out of the game and noticing, simply noticing and explaining what we see, is the only way to keep mental and logical manipulation at bay, and to show the homeschool-abuse rhetoric for what it is.