by Ben Hewitt
It is no original thinking on my part to suggest that the business of being a child in this country is rapidly disappearing into an abyss that consists not only of programs and tests but also of extracurricular activities. Increasingly, it is disappearing into the pixelated screens of the innumerable digital devices that already dominate the adult world, and are rapidly encroaching on childhood. Even activities that were once considered “play,” and that occurred beyond the gaze and attention of adults, where children were free to negotiate the terms among themselves, to work out disagreements and injustices, are being lost to structured and supervised games and competitions. After all, who has time to just “play” anymore?
In his book Free to Learn, Peter Gray writes about the demise of true play, and how school—and, I would add, the expectations set by the culture of schooling, to which even homeschoolers frequently submit—has largely expunged self-directed play from our society:
The school-centric model of childhood has taken increasing hold over time and affected all aspects of children’s lives. Playgrounds are no longer places where children go and play freely with one another, but are places of coaching and teaching, led by adults. Children are sorted there into age-segregated groups, just as they are in school. In the home many parents today, in implicit acceptance of the school-centric model, define themselves as teachers of their children. They look for “teaching moments,” buy educational toys, and “play” and talk with the children in ways designed to impart specific lessons. No wonder parent-child interactions these days are often accompanied by lots of eye rolling and “whatevers” from the children. Home life begins to become as tedious as school.1
Indeed, for a time it felt to Penny and me as if we had to actively resist pressure to enroll Fin and Rye in adult-directed activities. Knowing of Fin’s physicality and love of movement, friends and family suggested signing him up for martial arts; when they became aware of Rye’s penchant for drawing and painting, they suggested art lessons. It wasn’t that anyone was particularly forceful in these suggestions; the force we felt compelled to resist was an interior one, the combination of the assumptions set by our own childhoods, along with the observation that everyone else was doing more than we were, and finally, the gentle, well-meaning suggestions that perhaps our boys would enjoy being part of these programs.
Obviously, not all adult-directed, extracurricular activities are detrimental to children. For us, it is not so much that any one of the activities our boys might participate in—be it Little League, wilderness-skills school, banjo lessons, or martial arts—is something to be avoided. Rather, it’s the accumulation of these activities to the point where our children have little time for self-directed play and our family is caught up in the bustle of practices and games and recitals and performances. We’ve flirted with this bustle enough to know it has the power to pull us away from our home and our appreciation of it. We know it has the power to fragment our family, to suck us into the vortex of “busy” and “crazy.” We know it is worth resisting.
All of this brings me to the central challenge of our unschooling, which means it also brings me to the central challenge of our parenting. It’s not our only challenge, but it is the one that on a day-to-day basis reminds Penny and me that we have not chosen an easy path.
Put simply, the freedom to self-determine how to pass so much of their time has cultivated a certain sense of entitlement in my sons. I wrote of this briefly in an earlier section of this book, but the subject deserves further examination, if only because it is the place where the majority of our conflict arises. In short, Fin and Rye are enormously particular about how they pass their time. In the absence of school’s daily schedule and demands that they must adhere to it, they have come to believe that their time belongs to them, and they are not always eager to deviate from whatever task they’ve set their minds upon.
Of course, this sense of entitlement does not absolve them of the daily tasks for which they are responsible. They know full well they are expected to care for their goats, and that certain contributions to the family’s well-being are expected. They know that Sunday mornings are when our family splits and stacks firewood, and they know that come winter, they’ll be asked to ferry endless armloads of that very wood from shed to stove.
Often, Fin and Rye do what is asked of them willingly, but often they do not, and my anecdotal observations suggest to me that they are uncooperative somewhat more frequently than many of their peers. Some of this, I think, is simply the result of temperament. My sons are fiercely passionate creatures, afflicted by a degree of willfulness that can fray my patience until only a single, slender strand holds it together. In these moments, my patience hanging in the abyss, I find it helpful to remind myself that this did not just happen. Our boys did not just decide to be opinionated and occasionally obstinate. Oh, no. They learned it from us.
The notion that our children’s contrariness might be an inherited trait didn’t occur to us until one day a few years ago, when Penny was bemoaning the boys’ stubborn natures to a friend. “They hardly ever do what I ask,” said Penny. “It’s like they do whatever they want and think that’s the way it should be.”
Her friend gave one of those quizzical looks you give someone when you’re wondering if it’s really possible they don’t see the truth dangling right in front of them. “But that’s exactly the way you and Ben are,” she replied. “You’ve arranged your lives so you can pretty much do whatever you want, and you think that’s the way it should be.”
Whether or not Penny’s friend thought this was admirable wasn’t entirely clear, but her observation prompted us to consider the many choices we’ve made that have allowed us to live as we wish to live, but have been inconvenient or simply vexing to others. Both of us left school (Penny dropped out of college), abandoning the presumed security of formal education for a self-directed and more financially tenuous path. When we had children, we flat-out forbade our respective parents from gifting the plastic baubles and electronic gadgetry so common to most families. To their immense credit, both Penny’s parents and mine have accepted these restrictions with equanimity, but I’ve no doubt they silently chafe at them. Even now, they know to ask before presenting the boys with gifts, because, as we are forever reminding them, even thoughtful gifts of useful items can create an excess of stuff.
In short, Penny and I are particular about the influences we allow into our lives, and even more so, about how we pass our time. I like to think of it as being discerning, rather than picky, but I suppose there’s really not much difference, and my point isn’t to examine whether or not this is a laudable quality but instead to better understand the roots of my sons’ frequent mulishness. Furthermore, it is important for me to remember that while my sons’ projects and pastimes often strike me as frivolous—do they really need another nailed-together scrap-wood implement for whatever convoluted game they’ve dreamed up?—their work is as important to them as mine is to me. It might seem perfectly reasonable for me to interrupt their game with a request to help with some task or another, but in truth it is little different than having them interrupt my work in the hope that I might assist them with the design of their latest contraption.
This is all compounded by our choice of an educational path that provides them with so much command of their time, and also that we’ve always encouraged them to question what they are told. As Penny often reminds me when I am seething about my sons’ lack of cooperation or general reluctance to take what I tell them at face value, that questioning will inevitably extend to us. Encouraging our sons to think critically is one of most important aspects of their education; it is also the one that foments the most conflict.
There’s often a misperception that unschooling parents don’t do much. That they just let their kids run willy-nilly while the adults go about their days. That unschooling is, when all is said and done, easy. In this family, at least, nothing could be farther from the truth. In this family, unschooling is not easy, o
r convenient. It demands significant reservoirs of thought and patience and, as I’ve pointed out, presence. Many parents aren’t all that accustomed to being patient and present for their kids anymore, if only because they’re simply not given the opportunity to be patient and present. Jobs get in the way. School gets in the way. After-school activities get in the way. As I have learned—as I am still learning—patience and presence are muscles that must be developed and exercised regularly. Some of us may be born with more or less of these qualities than others, but no one is born with them fully realized. More than once, I have heard some version of this comment from other parents: “I’d love to do what you’re doing, but I just couldn’t be around my kids that much. We’d kill each other.”
I understand the sentiment because I’ve felt the sentiment. Penny, too. It is not easy or convenient to be parents to children who think critically. It is not easy or convenient to be parents to children who feel a strong sense of ownership over their time. Furthermore, it is not easy or convenient to be parents to children who are encouraged to participate in the day-in, day-out work of running a small farm. We made a conscious decision early in the boys’ lives to sacrifice a degree of order and convenience so they might “work” alongside us, and this has required us to relinquish control in ways we could never have imagined.
Some of this relinquishing involved accepting the inevitable mistakes and messes that result from their learning—the row of fledgling beets they pulled, thinking they were “weeds,” or the folded-over nails in the cowshed siding from their early hammering efforts—and some of it was simply letting go of our expectations regarding how long a particular task might take. It takes a hell of a lot of patience to include young children in productive work, and it requires humbling yourself to the reality that it is not going to be as “productive” as you’d like. Except of course it is, because some of what you’re producing is a child with confidence, skills, and resourcefulness. But you have to take a pretty long view to see those things, and I don’t think humans are particularly good at taking long views. At least, not in this day and age.
For us, owing to the unique particulars of our lives, with both of us working at home, lending our presence to Fin and Rye hasn’t been nearly as hard as simply letting go. Penny and I have always been doers; put simply, we like getting things done, and incorporating small children into the process of getting things done all but ensures that less will get done. There’s just no way around it.
I still get impatient from time to time, but not very often. Part of this is because I have genuinely become more patient over the years. It’s a slow and never-finished process, not unlike developing gratitude or generosity. The other part is that the boys have actually evolved into legitimately productive contributors to home and farm. They no longer pull up beets by mistake. They don’t bend nails anymore. Or no more than I do, anyway. But to learn how not to bend nails, they had to bend some. To learn how not to pull up beets, they had to pull some.
It has always bothered me to see how some parents chase their children away from productive jobs. I have seen it many times, and while I understand the impulse, I have little empathy for the shortsightedness of it, because the truth is that long before they are capable of truly helping, kids desperately want to contribute.
Like all of us, children just want to be needed. It’s our job to make sure they actually are.
THE PRACTICE
We do chores twice each day, 7 days each week, 365 days each year. Where we live, there’s nothing unusual about this; many of our neighbors adhere to similar schedules, and have for half a century or more. Sometimes I consider the math: Twice daily multiplied by 365 is 730, multiplied by fifty years is . . . 36,500. Thirty-six thousand chore times. It is almost impossible for me to fathom, it feels insurmountable. But of course it is not.
Sometimes, chores are just chores: haul the water, throw the hay, run the fence. Cold, hot, wet, dry. Hurried. But often, I think of chores the way I suspect some people think of a practice—meditation, or yoga, or prayer. Maybe aikido or a musical instrument. I like to think of chores this way; it seems to give me license to sink into them, to inhabit them in a way that would otherwise elude me.
Chores are physical, and frankly don’t require great skill, but they’re also emotional, intuitive, and, I think, somehow artistic. I find this to be particularly true of chores that involve animals, which so many of ours do. You cannot live with animals and not have a relationship with them, not be affected by them. You cannot live with animals and not come to know something about them as individuals, each with his or her unique quirks of personality, like the way our milk cow Apple always pauses on her morning walk to the barn to twist her head so that she might address a hard-to-reach itch with her tongue. She twists to the right, then to the left, then back to the right, and you have no choice but to stand and wait until she’s ready to move again, and while you’re waiting, you do what you always do: look out across the valley below, obscured by the mist of a soft rain or basking in the honeyed glow of the rising sun. Stranded by a cow’s itch. Sometimes the greatest blessings come disguised as inconveniences.
I get up most days around five or five thirty. I do not set an alarm. In the summer, when it’s light or near enough to being light, I head straight outside. In fall and winter, when daylight is still an hour or more away, I start a fire, make a cup of coffee, sit for a while, and let myself adjust to the day while the rest of the family goes about their slow rousing. There is no electricity in the barn, anyway, and while I could wear a headlamp, I prefer to wait until the sky brightens enough to light my path.
If I’m honest, there are mornings I don’t much feel like doing chores. There are mornings when I’d prefer to stay by the stove, where I’ve parked my chair by the open firebox door, reorienting myself whenever the blast of heat becomes too intense. Of course, I do chores anyway and I can truthfully say that I have never been sorry it had to be so. In part, this is due to the sheer physicality of the work, the way it gets the blood moving on a slow morning, sluicing through the veins and arteries and small capillaries like water driven by some invisible pump. Fifty-pound hay bales will do that; five-gallon buckets of water carried up the hill to the cows will do that. There’s something honest about greeting the day with sweat, a small offering, and acknowledgment for the simple good fortune of being alive. Often I think the world would be a better place if everyone had the opportunity to make such offerings, but I know that’s presumptuous. I know of my bias.
There’s another part to it, and I think it’s that chores are an assumption of responsibility in a world that can sometimes feel devoid of such a thing. In a sense, chores are homage to the animals and crops under our care, the fulfillment of a silent promise not only to them but also to ourselves. It’s a promise not to take anything for granted, and that we won’t forget—for this one day, at least—that we are merely a part of something bigger than we can even imagine.
I cannot overstate our desire for Fin and Rye to know a similar sense of being part of something larger than themselves, to understand their dependence on and role within the cycles and rhythms that define the laws of nature. That define our lives. For this reason, we have always included them in the routines and rituals of this little farm, both the day-to-day and the seasonal. When they were infants, we carried them on our daily rounds, trudging through snow with a child on our back to water the cows, or collect the daily cache of eggs. When they learned to walk, we held their hands as they toddled alongside us.
As I have mentioned, it has often strained the boundaries of my patience to facilitate my sons’ involvement. I have gritted my teeth through the inevitable fumbling of their early efforts to join us at our work. I have often wanted to push them aside. How much sooner might I return to the warmth of the house if they did not help me with chores? How much faster could I have stacked that wood alone? How much neater would the stacks be? Or I walk past the cowshed and see the rows of bent-over siding nails
and remember the day Fin and Rye spent with hammers in hand, three whacks to the wood for every one that landed on the nail itself, and I remember how I wanted to stop them, to step in and take over. “It’s OK,” said Penny. “It’s just a shed.” It is just a shed.
It is not like this anymore. Now they greet the day with their own responsibilities in full: goats that must be fed and watered and milked, milk that must be strained and jarred and refrigerated. Now they are not merely “helpers” but actual participants in many of the projects that define our days and seasons. Firewood in winter. Planting in spring. Harvesting in fall. Processing pigs, making sausage and bacon. We do not compel them to assist in these things. And sometimes, they don’t. But more often than not, they join us, and I think I know why. Because slowly, over months, seasons, and years, they have developed a sense of responsibility and an understanding of how their contributions better this family and farm. Because they have learned that they are useful. And they know how good that feels.
8
Work of the World
MOST WEEKS, Penny and I take the boys on separate outings. This began a few years back, when it became clear that Fin and Rye could benefit by getting some space from each other. The amount of time they spend in each other’s company is immense; on most days, they do chores together, eat three meals together, and spend hours roaming our fields and forest together. Sure, they have friends in the community, but because most of those are shared friendships, playdates do not allow for much separation.
The boys’ personalities are so strikingly different, there are times it seems impossible that the melding of Penny’s and my DNA could produce such disparate beings. How can it be that Fin is so extraverted, so boisterous and talkative, his energy hot and piercing and room filling, while Rye is so prone to long bouts of introspective silence? It’s not that Rye is never rambunctious, but his energy is more self-contained, more readily reined-in and quieted. And it’s not as if Fin is incapable of sitting still, reading for hours or perched on a rock at the edge of a productive trout stream. Still, when Fin is in motion, things have an alarming tendency to break, seemingly without having been touched.
