Dear Fellow Parents:
Linda has asked me to write my experiences for you so I am finally attempting to do this. I/we are grateful for our parenting skills (i.e. what ones we have). Our thanks extend to our early parenting training with Waldorf Educators, parenting and family dynamics training with Ba and Josette Luvmor and our great parent educator at River School, Linda herself. Like all of you we want to be the best parents we can for our kids, we discovered parenting is not for sissies and we make lots of mistakes. The upside is we learn lots and have a great deal of fun.
Our son tends to be a super achiever. As we didn't want him to go over the deep end in stress city, we were encouraging him to lighten up a bit in seventh grade. So, the end of the first trimester he came home with an F in English. We were surprised and a little shocked, and truthfully had no idea what to do. So, as we had been trained we asked him what he thought. Well, he had no idea how he got it and still is bemused. He looked up his specific breakdown marks and spoke to his teacher bet she hadn't received some critical assignments. We encouraged him to think about how to bring up his grade and left it with him still not quite sure what he would do. (Meanwhile, we consulted with our mentors and prayed we were doing the right thing.) His face was shining when he came home for the holidays with an A+. When I asked him what he did differently, he said, "I listen really carefully for assignments when they are due now." He had really been working hard.
Grade 6, his first year at River School, he came across a fellow student who would hit him and other students when teachers weren't looking. One day he took it upon himself to thump this student hard as verbal requests hadn't worked. He brought this up at dinner one night when Ba Luvmor happened to be visiting (thank goodness). Ba told him that in his experience this hadn't been an effective teaching tool. He then asked him if he thought the boy had learnt from this. His response was, "well he doesn't hit me anymore, but he still picks on some of my friends." The conversation was cut short at this point. A week later, when I picked up my son, he said, "remember the bully I told you about, I went up to him today when he wasn't with anyone and asked him if he realized he was being a bully, and he said, no." When I checked back a week later, my son said that the boy was no longer hitting his fellow students.
He happens to love math and had not felt challenged in 6th grade. He tried the 7th grade and still felt bored. So he asked to be put up a class. We actually were happy for him to remain in 7th grade and for him not to load himself too much, knowing once he hits high school he'll have plenty of time for honors classes if he wants. However, he persisted and met with his teachers and with not a lot of encouragement he doggedly wanted to move up. After pep talks from our resources asking us what on earth we were doing standing in the way of his enthusiasm? We gave him the green light. To our surprise, he then proceeded to put off his decision for 2-3 weeks while he rethought it over and spent some time viewing his 7th grade work. As I write this letter, I asked him how he felt about his decision and he is very happy. Happy to be heard, happy to be respected, happy he has been successful in this class and happy to feel more challenged.
Early in the 6th grade year he had horrible angry moods every morning. Finally we sat down and said, "This isn't working for us, we need your help. If you don't want to get up and go to school then lets change our decision and maybe you can be home schooled or another school will work but something has to change." We had started to learn that none of our suggestions of course would work. He said he would try and figure something out. So several days later he starts getting up and going on a morning run as he found this makes him feel better and he really wanted to continue at River School. Ba and Linda constantly remind us our children are now ready and able to problem solve, just give them the chance.
It is a real balance for us to stay supportive and connected without inappropriate controlling behavior on our part. It wasn't that long ago when it was appropriate to be making more decisions for him and now that time has gone. He really does have to make many decisions now and learn to fall down and pick himself up, just as we are doing as parents right along side of him. I am incredibly grateful to our parenting teachers and especially grateful to the wisdom of our son.
A word from his Dad,
"The best time my son and I had together this year is when we laid some concrete together, three hours of heavy work. I remembered inquiry is the language for this age group and I asked him his opinion, gave him power to make his own decisions. I explained what I needed to do and we talked about the best way of doing it before we started. While working we had a great conversation about school, stories, jokes and laboring."
I saw my boy now in a new light, more competent, stronger, thinking, planning and laughing.
And of course a word from the man himself:
"It works best for me when I get a choice and can make a decision about how I organize my own time. If I'm angry it isn't the most recent thing that was said, but just that one was the last straw. I appreciate when you give me time to calm down and then I can do or talk about what has to happen."