Go Break It...

The following was written as a response to my 19 year old daughter who expressed on Facebook that she needed to change how she was conducting her life. She was asking for assistance from her family. I woke up, read what she said and wrote the following back to her:

You know you have my support 100% darling. I will not leave you and it is my ardent desire to help you become the best you you can be.

Remember, I want only two things for my children when they grow up: their happiness and their ability to obtain it. There's no magical formula for that, just honest self-evaluation and and then lots of hard work.

Only *you* have the power to get what you want for yourself, everyone else is here to help or hinder you.

Sit down, think out what you really want for your life and then tell us about it. Helpers will find ways to help you, hinderers won't. Minimize your interactions with hinderers. Lather, rinse, repeat.

All life is a game of trial and error. We make mistakes, we learn from them, we get better. We are only failures if we don't learn from our mistakes and get better.

Now I'm going to let you in on two secrets of adulthood: First, no matter who you've been or what you've done, you can *always* choose something new for yourself. You don't ever have to be who you've been.

Second, THERE IS NO END ALL BE ALL TO LIFE.

You may look at me and see how happy I am and think "she's got it all down," but then you know damn well I don't. It was just over a week ago that I cried my eyes out for hours because I made a mistake.

And what did I say about it?

 "I broke it and fixed it better than it was before I broke it."

THAT'S LEARNING, THAT'S GROWTH, THAT'S LIFE. THAT is how you achieve happiness.

So please, my love, my darling daughter, go forth and break it, then learn how you broke it and fix it better than it was before.

Education for all...

We are now an entirely unschooling family once again. Aurora and Caed, of their own desire, will be working on curriculums to give themselves mode to progress. We do see this as quite helpful for Aurora as she is very specific about going to college and doing so soon, but has seemed unable to progress herself in math and english to a point that will be considered acceptable by a community college.

Andrea is returning to college life, she is registered into two classes for the Spring Flex (short) semester. She will be taking English 1302 (2nd required English) and Principles of Macroeconomics. She is especially excited about the economics class as the class covers the current U.S. economy and discussing this in college sounds like mucho fun to her!

Sam also plans to begin school again, but he is having a paperwork hang-up that may take months to resolve. :(

Shane continues his job working for the tax company and Karma has begun work housecleaning, generally making $100 per week, which suits her spending needs more than adequately. Andrea has begun part-time work tutoring one child and helping with general care for his older, mentally handicapped brother. All in all, everyone is satisfied with the ways in which they are earning money and the amount of money which they are earning.

That's about it for updates!

Freedom to Learn

We want to share with all of our readers this excellent blog on how children learn. The author is Dr. Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College. He has conducted and published research in comparative, evolutionary, developmental, and educational psychology and published articles on innovative teaching methods and alternative approaches to education.

The blog starts at the bottom of the web page with the Introduction and then progresses bottom to top. If you have any questions about the value or worth of how our family is being educated, we highly encourage you to read this blog.

http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn

New Directions

At some point in everyone's life (many points for most people), one feels their whole life taking on a different direction. Here in the Dharma Family, we feel the change coming. We've made many changes and hope to make many more in 2008.

Let us tell you about some of the things we've changed and some of what's coming...

• We mentioned back in November that we now speak to Sam's oldest son fairly regularly. We were on an every other month pattern last year, but we started out this year well by speaking to him both in December and January.
• We have, as a family, decided to wholeheartedly embrace unschooling. We've done a lot of research and realized that so long as each of us has a deep internal desire for personal betterment, this will be successful. We've also realized that if we don't have that deep internal desire, that no amount of school or workbooks at home will change that.
• We still want to open up our own store. We've had to put the idea on the backburner with the housing slump because lenders all over are more hesitant to give out their money. This leads us to:
• We've created a budget. We bought this great book called America's Cheapest Family and we've actually created a workable budget. We've already begun applying some of their money saving principles and plan to start our budget in February. Already though, we've found more money in our pockets just by applying some of their money saving principles.
• We're also changing the children's allowance system to a work and get paid system that is a modified version of the one found in America's Cheapest Family. We are all excited about it.
• We plan to move this year, because we're not happy with where we live now. We're still very unsure about where we're moving to, we'll update you when the time comes.
• Since embracing unschooling, even Sam and Andrea have rekindled their individual desires to learn and so learning is constanly happening around here.
• We're embracing our sister-in-law's desire to unclutter her house. We plan to spend 2008 decluttering our living space.
• Andrea is finally taking charge of her health and saw a doctor today to discuss her lack of weight loss and constant fatigue, among other things. She goes in for lab tests tomorrow.

Well, that's about all of the changes. The last thing that we'll be changing is that we're going to make more of an effort to keep our online followers updated. We belong to an unschooling listserv where everyone has been posting their days and we plan to do something similar here.

That's all for now folks!

Lots of love,

The Dharma Family