Shedding the Adult Agenda by Barbara Frank

I’ve always admired unschoolers for their relaxed approach to learning. Yet while my own style of homeschooling has become much more relaxed over the years, I will never be called an unschooler because I am incapable of being one. It is simply not in my personality.

Do the math: I’m a first-born (yes, there are Kevin Leman books on my shelves), public-schooled, Missouri Synod Lutheran (Lutherans live for and by their routines), child of a career military man. Let’s face it, I was never meant to be an unschooler.

But there are many aspects of unschooling that appeal to me, and perhaps the greatest one is that unschoolers are so willing to let their children have unstructured time to play. In my neck of the woods, it’s mostly the unschoolers that offer regular park days, where children run unfettered by adult agendas, while their moms (and the occasional dad) keep watch from a distance and share conversation and food.

I’m not saying other homeschool groups don’t have park days. But when they do, there’s usually a theme to it. We’re all going to look for signs of spring today! We’ve picked a park with a soccer field so Kevin’s daddy can teach us the basic rules of soccer! Bring a bucket and a magnifying glass so we can all see what’s in the park’s pond water!

There’s nothing wrong with these activities in and of themselves. But they reflect a larger trend that worries me: it sure seems like adults are writing all the scripts these days. Many of today’s parents (homeschooling or not) just have this need to run everything for their kids, and as a result, the kids lose their autonomy and their ability to find or make their own fun.

Maybe this bothers me because I’m old enough to remember when kids ran free. When I was a child, children had much more freedom than they do now. After school and all summer long, it was up to us to decide what to do. Sure, we had chores around the house, but once those were done, we were free agents. We played games, we had fun on the equipment at the park and we used our imaginations to become cowboys and Indians, or Batman, Robin and Batgirl.

Our parents were the spoilers, the ones who interrupted our fun to tell us it was time to eat or time to go to bed. If somebody’s mom had informed us that today we’d be learning the proper way to play hopscotch, we would have looked at her as if she were from Mars. Parents just didn’t get very involved in our play back then.

This lack of parental involvement didn’t hurt us. We all grew up to be productive members of society despite the lack of formal sports lessons and parent-run recreation. That’s why I wonder if today’s children aren’t being gypped out of the chance to play freely by well-meaning adults who think they know best how their children should play.

I guess the freedom I had in my childhood is what led me to homeschool in the first place; I loved my free time and I was usually bored silly in school. So while I may not be an unschooling parent, I’ve always tried to limit the formal lesson and study time in our home so that my kids have plenty of free time to indulge their own interests. When they play outside, they decide what to play, not me. I think that freedom is as important to their development as any other part of their education. I’m starting to wonder, however, how many other parents feel that way.

© 2006 Barbara Frank/Cardamom Publishers (Reprinted with permission)

About the author:
Barbara Frank is the mother of four homeschooled-from-birth children ages 13-22, a freelance writer/editor, and the author of “Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers” and the new eBook, “The Imperfect Homeschooler’s Guide to Homeschooling.” To visit her Web site, “The Imperfect Homeschooler,” go to www.cardamompublishers.com.