Editor’s Pick. Written by Ariadne. Using compliance as a parenting strategy commonly involves conflicts, power struggles and threats of losing a privilege, punishment or bribery. Many parents want and expect compliance because they are the parent or “things need to get done” or “time is of the essence” or safety is a concern. However, compliance…
Tag: children
Why Parents Should Leave Their Kids Alone
Editor’s Pick. Written by Jay Griffiths. Take a step back for a moment. Letting children have their own way? Doing just what they like? Wouldn’t that be a total disaster? Yes, if parents perform only the first half of the trick. In the cultural lexicon of modernity, self-will is often banally understood as brattish, selfish…
Self-Ownership as Birthright
Send him mail. “One Voluntaryist’s Perspective” is an original bi-weekly column appearing every other Monday at Everything-Voluntary.com, by the founder and editor Skyler J. Collins. Archived columns can be found here. OVP-only RSS feed available here. I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of “children’s rights” over the last several months; really wrestling with…
The Politics of Play
Editor’s Pick. Written by Jay Griffiths. Aged fourteen and without his parents’ approval, the future King Henry II hired a band of mercenaries, sailed from France to England, and failed to take two minor castles. In the realm of fiction, the audacious and adventurous Huckleberry Finn, only “thirteen or fourteen,” rebels against the mores of…
Control Your Child! Oh Wait, How did you do that?!?
Editor’s Pick. Written by Ariadne Brill. I was at the store recently, doing groceries at the end of a long day. Our dog had died the day before and the kids had come down with a cold. I was feeling sad, grief struck, tired and really all I wanted to do was buy some food,…
Radical Unschooling vs. Permissive Parenting
Editor’s Pick. Written by Dayna Martin. Over the years, Radical Unschooling has been mistaken for “permissive parenting,” and many judgments have been made about it based on this misbelief. The truth is, Radical Unschooling is an extension of Attachment Parenting philosophy and is a very hands-on, involved approach based on connection, rather than control. The…
How to Teach Your Child To Do What’s Right
Editor’s Pick. Written by Laura Markham. Kids need our hugs, but that’s not what teaches them to do right. How do kids learn? Our modeling. When we take responsibility, when we apologize, when we regulate our own emotions so we aren’t yelling at them, children learn to take responsibility, to apologize, to regulate their own…
The Measuring Spoon, or Enjoy It While You Can
Send her mail. “Living with Wild Abandon” is an original bi-weekly column appearing every other Tuesday at Everything-Voluntary.com, by Breezy V. Stevens. Breezy is a long-time radical unschooler, an advocate for children’s rights, a crazy dog lady, a crafter in various mediums, a lover of all things tropical and beachy, and the designer of “EVC…
When Does Discipline Begin?
Editor’s Pick. Written by Kelly Bartlett. Parents often ask, “When should I start disciplining my child? At what age is it appropriate?” It is a common question of when it’s time to transition from the nurturing parenting of babyhood to using more of the “discipline” tools of toddlerhood and beyond. To answer this, we first…
The Most Basic Freedom Is Freedom to Quit
Editor’s Pick. Written by Peter Gray. In general, children are the most brutalized of people, not because they are small and weak, but because they don’t have the same freedoms to quit that adults have. Anthropologists tell me that this is not so true in hunter-gatherer cultures, because children there, to a considerable degree, can…