Many of us in the unschooling world talk about how school conditioning has harmed us and affected our relationship to self and others. When it comes to peaceful parenting, our schoolish beliefs can get in the way of our cycle-breaking, healing, and transformation.
Here are 5 ways schoolishness have affected and hindered my own parenting shift.
1. Fixed answers
School conditions us to believe that there is ONE RIGHT ANSWER. We want easy formulas and solutions to implement rather than taking the time to slow down, observe, be curious, and let the answers unfold. We see our children (and perhaps ourselves) as problems to be fixed. We experience frustration when peaceful parenting doesn’t seem to “work.”
The reality is that life and parenting is much more messy, nuanced, and complicated than the formulaic, simple answers we want. Deschooling invites us to sit in the tension as we wait and trust for more clarity. We learn to attune to ourselves and our children, resisting cookie-cutter solutions and finding unconventional pathways that align with our unique personhoods, goals, and situations.
2. Linear thinking
We are taught to believe that learning and growth is predictable and linear — one step leads to the next until we reach our desired goal. We treat ourselves like machines and robots and expect clear and evident progress. When our untigering is not so straight-forward, we struggle to offer ourselves compassion.
Organic and authentic transformation is rarely that nice and neat. Healing is often three steps forward and two (thousand) steps back. When we place a timeline on our growth, that makes it hard to accept and celebrate where we are in the moment. But when we resist this linear thinking and make room for the ebbs and flows, we learn to be gentler with ourselves.
3. Shame
We were often shamed for our mistakes, vulnerabilities, differences, & failures in the school environment. We learned to protect ourselves by trying to be perfect, staying invisible, leaning into defiance, etc. When it comes to parenting, we experience shame when we don’t live up to our standards and ideals. We burden ourselves with a lot of “shoulds” and give ourselves a hard time for struggling.
But shaming ourselves doesn’t help us to become more calm, connected, and compassionate towards our children. You know what usually does? Being calm, connected, and compassionate towards ourselves.
One mantra I remind myself of often is: “I am human.”
We don’t need to strive to be the perfect peaceful parent. We get to be human. We can return, over and over, to the belief that we are loved and worthy, just as we are. We are not defined by our behavior as a parent; by whether or not we yelled, lost our temper, shut down, disengaged, or destroyed their Lego creation out of spite. Just as our children’s challenging behavior points to unmet needs, we can get curious about what our unmet needs are. We can resist the voice of shame and tenderly remind ourselves: “You are loved. You are safe. You are enough.”
4. People-pleasing
Schoolishness teaches us to focus on what others think and how others view us. We are rewarded when we please the teacher, authority figure, or peer group and punished when we do not. This becomes an obstacle in parenting consciously because we get caught up in how we are perceived as a parent rather than being rooted in self-love so that we can meet the needs of our child. We want others to validate our choices & struggle to be confidently grounded.
Understanding our people-pleasing tendencies can help us to pause and notice the fears, insecurities, and shame that arise within us when our children don’t behave the way we want them to, especially under the watchful gaze of friends, family, or the strangers at the supermarket. As we become more aware, we can resist unconsciously attuning to the opinions and judgments of others (real or imagined) and projecting those fears onto our children. Instead, we ground ourselves in radical self-love and practice consciously attuning to our children and ourselves.
5. Suppression of intuition
In schoolish environments, we learn to ignore our intuition in order to comply with an external authority. We are conditioned to follow someone else’s rules, expectations, and standards. Our intuition becomes dormant. When it comes to parenting, we feel we must rely on “experts,” books, scripts, and outside resources, not trusting in our internal resources to know what is best for us and our family.
As we deschool, we begin to quiet the noise. We go inward. We listen to our bodies, our gut, our inner knowing. We unlearn the suppression and distrust of our intuition and begin taking baby steps to follow its voice as we let love guide us.
If we are struggling with these schoolish beliefs, this is an invitation to become aware, to name, and to grieve the ways schoolishness has affected us, NOT to heap more shame on ourselves.
It makes sense that shifting to peaceful parenting is hard. These are patterns and beliefs we learned in order to stay safe and survive. Now that we recognize that they no longer serve us, we can practice releasing them as we invite more:
2 Responses
I so loved this!
I kept thinking, as I read, “this totally applies to healing from religious trauma as well” not actually knowing whose article I was reading, then I scrolled down and saw that it was yours. I had pulled up your page while listening to, and resonating with, your conversation during the Low Demand Summit last week, but hadn’t had a chance to do much reading then. Now, as I read this post on how schoolishness affects our parenting, the ways that “schoolishness” and “religiousness” impact our parenting are often one and the same. Have you found that to be true in your healing journey as well?
I love how you invite us back to ourselves, to compassion, humanity, presence. “As we deschool, (deconstruct?) we begin to quiet the noise. We go inward. We listen to our bodies, our gut, our inner knowing. We unlearn the suppression and distrust of our intuition and begin taking baby steps to follow its voice as we let love guide us.” YES!
Thanks for speaking such beautiful truths and for inviting me to come home to myself again and again!
Love your reflections, Kara! I also see an overlap between schoolishness and religiousity. Both are institutionalized authoritarian systems that often condition us to distrust ourselves. Both are things I have certainly had to heal from.