Of the many reasons for unschooling, two are prominent in my mind: 1) to cultivate a love for learning and 2) stay out of the way so my kids can find and follow their interests.  The question is really how – if I’m respecting the kids enough to make their own decisions, how do I, as a parent, matter?  I’m firmly on the side of unschooling – but not unparenting.  Regardless of how much freedom my children have, it’s still up to me & Trish to guide them, directly or indirectly.  It’s the how that’s tricky and probably freaks out a lot of people.  (Ignorance is bliss – it’s easier for many to just send their kids to school and save themselves the trouble.)

I’m always reading for knowledge & inspiration (plus the occasional escape too).  Most of my non-fiction reading is oriented towards creating the life I want – work from home, move abroad, bust out of the rat race, etc.  I’ve recently found a book that’s directly related to unschooling and offers some insight and advice on cultivating the mindset I really hope my kids will have: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck.

I first read about the book in a NYT article last month (If You’re Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow).  The premise is simple: there are two mindsets.  The fixed mindset views abilities and talents as carved in stone, creating a need to prove yourself repeatedly.  That’s what school teaches, with constant tests and labels (positive & negative).  The growth mindset is that your qualities and abilities can be developed through effort.  If you don’t do something well, it’s an opportunity for learning and growth.  It’s really the basic belief that you can learn.  Maintaining the joy of learning is what this is all about.

That’s pretty much the whole book – after going into some details about the two mindsets, the rest of the book is filled with examples nicely illustrating the concepts in business, sports, relationships and – most importantly – in education.  Like everything else, it’s not black and white whether someone is of one mindset of the other – most people have a combination of both, differing by ability and experience.  The ‘dumb jock’ stereotype might be the perfect example – someone who has a fixed mindset in a classroom, but a growth mindset on the field.  That really makes a lot of sense to me now, with a kid playing a game for fun (without judgement) and improving vs being repeatedly judged in a classroom (or at home or elsewhere).

As soon as I started reading the book I thought about unschooling -  the growth mindset is what I am hoping to instill in my children; it is the unschooling mindset.  What’s also great is that she dovetails completely with Alfie Kohn (Punished by Rewards; Unconditional Parenting).  Praise does not motivate people to learn.  Cheap self-esteem boosts (like a Good Job for just going down a friggin’ slide) don’t either.  Kohn teaches that praise, rewards and the like don’t promote lasting change and often make things worse.  Praising a kid anytime they say Look at me for something is a constant external, qualitative judgement that slowly saps their self-satisfaction and replaces it with the need to have external approval.  Think a kid raised like that will be affected by peer pressure?

Does that mean we withhold praise?  Of course not – Dweck puts it nicely:

It just means we should keep away from a certain kind of praise – praise that judges their intelligence or talent.  Or praise that implies that we’re proud of them for their intelligence or talent rather than for the work they put in.

Dweck performed many studies that showed that rewards and positive labels (ie You’re smart) didn’t work as well as praising the effort.  Telling someone that they’re smart for doing well on a test makes them feel fine – until the next test.  And if the next test result isn’t as good, well, they’re not that smart.  It also reinforces the idea that some people have abilities that allow them to achieve effortlessly.  Praising the effort or how the result was achieved reinforces the idea that effort was the why, and that it’s how anything can be learned.  Who wouldn’t want that kind of an attitude in their children?  For many people, it would turn the words You can be anything you want to be into something more substantive than an oft-repeated platitude.

Dweck notes that praise for an achievement results in reduced effort moving forward.  I totally believe this, because once upon a time that was me.  Until third grade, when I was in a tough, progressive school, I thought I wasn’t very smart since good grades were effortless to others.  I wasn’t the one with the quick, confident answers in class either.  Smartness was desired, as everyone in my family lionized intelligence.  In 4th grade we moved and I started Catholic school.  I was a year ahead in math.  My grades sky-rocketed and so did my ego.

By freshman year, I firmly believed that some people were smart and some weren’t (total fixed mindset), and looked among my high honors (positive label) classmates to determine who was ‘really’ smart and not just there to fill out the class.  The not-so-anonymous classmate who wrote in my yearbook ‘High Honor D!ck’ was right on the money.  So was the teacher who later called me a prima donna.

I prided myself on effortless studying (fixed mindset) and after junior year, everything fell apart after I started wondering Why am I doing this? (much thanks to Dead Poets Society)  School made no sense, learning wasn’t fun, and I wasn’t motivated to even do the little studying I’d done previously.  With more challenging classes, this resulted in lowered grades but not the expectation that I should be getting good grades.  The effort required – the learning process -was totally irrelevant.  Did that mean I tried harder?  I did, in a very half-assed fashion.  I was not used to the actual work anymore.  My self-worth dropped with my grades, I plunged into depression and eked into the college I had picked primarily based on its reputation and the pedigree I’d get.  I’d rather forget the next 4 years.

Mindset has shed new light on my own experiences and how to guide my children towards fulfillment & satisfaction.  The little things we say and imply make a big difference in how our children view themselves, their abilities and learning.  Inadvertently, we can put serious limits on their growth.  I would highly recommend all unschooling parents (and educators in general) read it and consider it deeply.

Additional inspiration for this blog and most of my thinking along these lines started in February with the NYT article Eureka! It Really Takes Years of Hard Work.

Vagabonding by Rolf Potts is about long-term, unconventional world travel.  Conventional would be the notion that long-term travel is possible only by the very wealthy galavanting from exclusive resort to private island in luxury.  In reality, long-term travel is very possible for people of more normal means, but to do it in a fulfilling fashion requires a mindset of openness and focus on what’s important.  This is also what is essential to a successful life as an expat, and Potts distills it so well that every expat (and expat-to-be) should read this book.

Vagabonding – n. a privately meaningful manner of travel that emphasizes creativity, adventure, simplicity, awareness, discovery, independence, realism, self-reliance, and the growth of the spirit.

This definition, from the book’s opening page, succinctly lists all the qualities that a successful expat needs.  Quite a few expats move out of their chosen destination within 2 years.  There aren’t any hard numbers, but it is likely in the range of 20-40%.  I imagine that a common thread amongst them would be a lack of flexibility and maintaining the same mindset and expectations they had in their home country.

Clocking in at 206 pages, the book is an easy, worthwhile, inspiring read.  Interspersed in the chapters are quotes from vagabonders, and each chapter ends with a profile of a path-blazing vagabond.  These pioneers include John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club), Thoreau and Walt Whitman.  It’s cool to read about them, but of more value are the quotes and comments by the less-reknowned, everyday vagabonds like ourselves.

Also included at the end of each chapter is a list helpful resources (books & websites).  A more up-to-date list of resources, vagabonding profiles, forum and Potts’ blog can be found at the companion website, www.vagabonding.net.

For Mother’s Day, I asked Arp to get me a copy of Dr. Sarah J. Buckley’s book, Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering. I actually didn’t know much about Sarah J. Buckley until I had the joy of seeing her in a pre-screening of the new film Orgasmic Birth. So I checked out her website and found out that she is a pretty fascinating person. I’ve been really into learning more about birth lately, since Arp and I might be considering trying again soon. So I figured that getting a copy of Buckley’s book would be fitting for Mother’s Day.

I am not exaggerating when I say that Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering is the most enjoyable book on birth and mothering that I have read, ever. At least so far. Some of my other favorites include Immaculate Deception II and Spiritual Midwifery. The first, in my opinion, does an excellent job of describing the research behind all the possible interventions that some women use in labor, and the second tends to speak to the more spiritual and sexual side of birth. But Buckley’s book is excellent because she does an amazing job of combining those two concepts – the medical and the spiritual, and finding how they intersect and/or interfere with each other. Also, unlike Spiritual Midwifery, in which Ina May Gaskin publishes the individual birth stories of a lot of women, Buckley’s book describes, in a very personal way, her own birth stories. I very much enjoyed the fact that I could read about the author’s own personal story at the same time as she writes essays on how women across the world have dealt with the issues surrounding birth.

Another way in which Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering is different than other birth books that I have read is that Buckley finds a way to bridge the gap between birth and parenting. So many times, in our culture, I find that women spend a great deal of time before birth, paving the way for a gentle, connected birth. But those same women seem to be at square one once the baby has come – our adult-centric culture takes over and women move quickly towards mainstream parenting and behaviors that do not inspire attachment between mother and child. I don’t have any facts to back this up, by the way, but it is something that I have often observed when I am at playgroups. While there is a certain contingent of women who have re-examined birth and chosen a less mainstream path, the Western assumptions behind parenting tend to be harder to resist among parents. After all, we may not remember out own birth, but we certainly remember how we were parented. So it is nice to read a book like Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering, which moves with fluidity between birth and parenthood.

Looking at the pictures from the covers of all the old books in my newspaper brought so many memories back from when I was much younger. I read every single one of the original Nancy Drew stories when I was a pre-teen, maybe around 9 or 10 years old. I love that age – it is probably the age when I remember myself being the happiest, so the memories are sweet.

I would walk to the library, about 2 miles away, with my best friend Meg. All the Nancy Drew books were on two lower shelves just under the card catalogs in a tiny room. I’d pretty much camp out on the floor and read the backs of the books for all the story descriptions as other patrons stood over me using the card catalog. I probably took home about 5 Nancy Drew books each time we went to the library, and I’d be finished with them in about 2 weeks, I’m guessing. And then I remember the sad days – when I had read almost all of them, and I’d be frantically looking on the shelf for one that I hadn’t read yet. Oh, the disappointment when I couldn’t find one, and the happiness when I did find one hiding at the back of the shelf.

The Nancy Drew books I got from the library were probably from the 50′s and 60′s – the yellow hardcovers with the picture on it. But after I got through all of the ones that the library held, my father introduced me to the really old ones he had in the attic – the blue hardcover originals from the 30′s. I read many of those too, most of what we had in the attic. I loved them all. I do remember being confused by some of things mentioned in the books from the 30′s. For instance, what were these “chains” that people put on their cars in bad weather?  I couldn’t quite grasp how they would work.

For some reason, I hadn’t considered reading these books to M yet, but I might give it a try.  He really likes spooky mysteries, and we often read long books, so it just might work.  If not, I just might read some just for myself.