Reason #58: The Infuriating Self-trusting Child

My previous blog post was about trusting oneself - about tuning out all the competing voices that surround us, tuning into ourselves, and believing that we can find and know whatever it is we need to find and know.

I must confess doing so has been known to annoy my husband a time or two. "Why can't you ever just take what I'm telling you at face value!?" he's been known to grumble. Well, I'm not the best at accepting without question a lot of "wisdom" out there because I'm doing a gut check. I'm noting the similarities and differences between what I've learned and what my experience has been. Going back to the Emerson quote, I'm receiving the provocation, but accepting nothing on a word unless I've found it true in me. How annoying is that!?!

Can you imagine a whole classroom full of kids gut checking everything the teacher says. Trying to prove or disprove for themselves that 2 + 2 = 4. MORE annoying would be them trying to disprove much of our spelling and "phonics rules" for English. Why on earth IS "no" ALSO spelled "know." (Then you take the "k" off and it's "NOW"!!!????!!!)

I, for one, CAN imagine how frustrating such a reaction from children might be, because I faced that sort of reaction from my daughter each time I taught. After blogging about trusting ourselves, I realized THAT was the part of her I didn't want the schools to break. (I'd written in another post "...if she went to school either she'd break them [meaning the school] or they'd break her. And that would really be the greatest tragedy of them all!")

Teaching my own self-trusting child has been a challenge. For years she didn't sing her ABC's the same twice. (Why couldn't SHE make up a version as nice as mine?) Even younger than that, when I'd try to move her away from standing too close to the tops of staircases, she'd scream at me in frustration. If she'd had the words then, I'm sure she would have yelled, "I've got this mom!" She'd fallen enough that I knew she was at risk. But it was a risk she insisted  repeatedly on taking. And when she decided to tackle writing, my spelling suggestions seemed ludicrous. (Why would I have all the answers all the time, anyway? Couldn't she ever know something with as much "rightness" as the things I knew?!)

As maddening as this may sound to any sympathetic parent, it is a PERFECT reason to homeschool! To ALLOW the learning process to flourish, self-trust in tact! Infuriating as this personality can be to a teacher, the student is our own child, and who better to put up with this than the parent!? :)

Is this slower? Yes! Would my daughter be "behind" compared to her traditionally schooled peers? Well... that's an interesting question.

Lets imagine that, as any good teacher might, I squashed the singing of the ABC's "ABCD Q FG." "Look dear," I might have lovingly explained, "That's not how it goes." Why? she might ask. "It's just not." And when she wrote me a note spelling the word "are" simply with an R, I said kindly, "When we say 'are' we can't use just a letter." But we ARE just saying R, she might protest. "I know but it's just not spelled that way." And with every other venture into knowledge she made, I kindly showed her where she was wrong, though my explanations of WHY she was wrong usually boiled down to, "because I said so" and therefore implied, "You need to trust ME."

Well, she might have come to spelling "are" correctly a lot sooner. But the more important lesson mastered would be that someone else knew better than her how to do whatever she wanted to do. Perhaps she'd better wait for instructions. When in doubt - and it's best to be in doubt about even things that seem obvious - you are probably wrong. So wait. Someone will be along shortly to tell you what to do.

(She IS grasping correct spelling now. Reading other "authors" use of the A-R-E spelling helped. Noting her own "spelling" was sometimes met with confusion by the receivers of her notes helped too.)

I'm going to make an important distinction now. Knowing facts from a curriculum before your peers is not necessarily "being ahead." Discovering truth for yourself after your peers have completed a curriculum is not necessarily "being behind." I'm not suggesting we shouldn't teach our children spelling or math or anything beyond what they are figuring out for themselves.

I AM noting that many adults struggle to trust themselves. When we consider how we are taught - largely in our experiences in school - we may discover a diminished sense of self-trust is the natural by-product of such teaching . I AM suggesting that fostering self-trust will give our children an edge in life. And I am LOVING homeschooling, where learning and self-trust can progress hand in hand!