Kelly Callahan

  ---Mainly I have been watching several posts come through and am noticing that parents speak of problems they are experiencing with their thoughts about their children.  I feel like there are emotional/development issues that are couched in “unschooling issues”. ----
 


 My kids each did 3 years in Waldorf early education before transitioning to a couple years of public school. Our time in Waldorf/Steiner added layers to my deschooling. 

Unschooling has helped me to look at *my* seven-year old, and not what Steiner thought 7 year olds should be doing, thinking, creating with, or inspired by. His ideas are interesting, and I'm a homeopath, so I am no stranger to 'woo' concepts ;) But they are limiting and for children who do not naturally fit the mold, and are damaging. It's just like public school- different vocabulary, different activities. 

 I treat many children who are at the Waldorf schools and guess what? I don't see developmental issues... I see 'Waldorf issues.' Being in a school that supposedly keeps the 'whole child' in perspective and teaches to the whole child has not spared these children of having anxiety, depression, being bullied, feeling dumb, or somehow not conforming to his ideas of developmentally appropriate behavior. On top of trying to meet the child where he/she is at, I also have to counsel parents to see *their* child as an individual, who is not broken or wrong or doomed because he/she has been in Waldorf since they were 3 and has anxiety or can't read - even though Waldorf scoffs early reading, if your kid hasn't figured it out by 9, they are labeled and treated just like they do in the public schools. 

Often when i meet with families who have been immersed in some pedagogy or another, what is often tossed off as developmental issues would be easily softened if radical unschooling principles were embraced. They would become a non-issue, or if not resolved, bring peace to the child, and connection back to the family, where labels and comparisons and expectations have interceded. 

My son loves video games, movies, tv shows... if I had kept on with Waldorf and Steiner, I never would have connected with my son around these things that he loves. We never would have had fun and long conversations deconstructing Bob's Burgers characters. Likely we would have been arguing over his screen time, and I would have been going on about how it's not developmentally appropriate and his brain isn't ready and needs to only have nature. But we aren't, and we didn't. And his brain has been more than ready for video games and Bob's Burgers and the tv and movies he is interested in and we don't spend some of our days arguing and I don't wonder about what the 11 year old soul is supposed to be doing- I just look at my son and see it :)