An Unschooling Essay: What Kind of Plant are You Growing?

By Lisa Ross

I think of being a parent like being a gardener. One child is as different from another as a tomato plant is from a carrot. They all need to be nurtured and cared for, but the type of care they require is different. A good gardener is flexible and knowledgeable enough to see the difference, and doesn't waste any time yelling at the tomato plant for refusing to grow a thick fleshy root, or at the carrot for not flowering and setting fruit. S/he concentrates on helping the carrot be the best carrot it can be, and the tomato plant to grow the reddest, sweetest tomatoes.

With children, we've been given an unidentified seed. We have no idea whether we're trying to grow a carrot or a tomato or a sunflower or a rose. We blunder along as best we can, taking cues from the emerging leaves and petals, doing more of what works and letting go of what doesn't.

What makes it especially dangerous to judge parents when their kids make "bad" decisions or get into trouble, is that the plant *is* unidentified. Unlike a carrot, which you can compare to other carrots of the same variety and know whether or not it has reached its full potential, with a human being you can never know that for sure. So a homeschooled teenager who apparently had everything she needed is still having problems? Don't be too quick to judge. She may or may not have had everything she needed, on the one hand. The "package" didn't come with instructions. And the garden plot, no matter how much effort the gardener put in to it, probably still had rocky places. On the other hand, we can never go back and say "let's see if we did this differently, whether it would make a difference." The same child, raised in a different way, might have had worse problems. We can never know.

Most of us, it's safe to say, were raised in an era when the definition of a good parent was one whose children didn't express too much individuality, but rather reflected well on the parent by being "good," getting good grades, not causing trouble. We grew up in what we could call the era of monoculture, where heavy doses of pesticides are used to stamp out every plant in the field except whatever the farmer wants to grow.

That's what school is all about, in my way of thinking, and why I have decided to have no part in it.

This is the problem I have with a lot of books on parenting... and on homeschooling, for that matter. What works for one family, or even for one child in a family, isn't necessarily going to work for everyone. Like the good gardener who gives the lettuce more water than the beans because this is how you grow good lettuce and good beans, a good parent recognizes these differences and works with them. We should be careful not to judge each other because some of our children are more difficult than others. Orchids, after all, are harder to raise than petunias.

I have sometimes blamed myself, and decisions I've made, for my child's problems. To some extent this is accurate. But then I think back to the day when she was four months old and I left her with a neighbor while I went grocery shopping. I came back to hear frantic screams filling the apartment building. I rushed upstairs to see what horrible thing had happened, and found my neighbor trying in vain to comfort the baby. Over the screams, she gasped, "I offered her some applesauce. I think she didn't want any!"

So I remind myself that I'm not a bad parent, I've just been given a very unusual type of seed to grow. So have many of us. Makes life interesting, doesn't it?

Copyright Lisa Ross 2003

Lisa Ross is an unschooling single mom to one wonderful unique child in Argenta BC. She's a writer, caterer, Spanish teacher and violinist. She's currently working on a book about unschooling in difficult circumstances.