Written by Laura Markham for Aha! Parenting. Most parents know that negative judgments undermine children, and at least try to bite their tongue instead of saying “What?! Are you an idiot?!” But positive judgments like “What a smart boy!” also sabotage children. Kids who are told they’re smart don’t want to disprove it, so they avoid situations in which…
Author: Editor's Pick
Selected content picked by the editor of Everything-Voluntary.com.
Spencer W. Morgan
“Toward Freedom” is an Everything-Voluntary.com series sharing personal stories about the journey toward freedom. Archived stories can be found here. Submit your story to the editor. The story of how I “arrived at liberty” is a long and gradual one. It is one thing to understand liberty and self-determination in general, but it is quite…
Information Liberated
An interview with Jeffrey Tucker by Reason.tv.
The Right Thing for Our Children?
Written by Kicking it Unschool. Why do we send our children off to school when they are 6 years old? Just because that’s what most everyone else does? Because that’s what our parents did with us? If we didn’t have the idea that we needed to send our children to school at age 6, would…
The Open Society
Written by F. A. Harper, as published in The Voluntaryist, April 1992. The advantages of an open society on a world basis have been explored to only a slight degree and would seem to deserve much more thought as a solution for solving major international problems. To see its potential, one might think of how…
The Many Monopolies
Written by Charles Johnson, as published at the Center for a Stateless Society. We libertarians defend economic freedom, not big business. We advocate free markets, not the corporate economy. And what would freed markets look like? Nothing like the controlled markets we have today. But how often do we hear mass unemployment, financial crisis, ecological…
Unsolicited Evaluation Is the Enemy of Creativity
Written by Peter Gray for Psychology Today. Longitudinal research has shown that children raised by parents who are relatively non-directive and non-judgmental exhibit more creativity later on than do those raised by relatively directive, judgmental parents. In a classic study, conducted in the 1970s and ‘80s, David Harrington, Jeanne Block, and Jack Block assessed the…
Traditional Human Wisdom of Child Development
Written by Cooper Zale for Lefty Parent. Once the hunter-gatherer child no longer needs to “ride” and can walk and speak for themselves, they are generally granted an autonomy that a society like ours (what Diamond calls a “state society”) might well consider criminal child neglect.Read the full thing »
School is Bad for Children
Written by John Holt, as published at NaturalChild.org. Almost every child, on the first day he sets foot in a school building, is smarter, more curious, less afraid of what he doesn’t know, better at finding and figuring things out, and more confident, resourceful, persistent and independent than he will ever be again in his…
How do Unschooling Parents Know their Children are Learning?
Written by Jan Hunt for NaturalChild.org. In unschooling, the child’s current interests are followed, and the parents act not as teachers but as tutors and resource assistants. This approach is often misunderstood, because it is based on assumptions that are quite different from those implicit in conventional schooling.Read the full thing »