Unschooling in School - Part 2

Reparenting/Deschooling

Reparenting means to unlearn the harmful messages that we receive from our parents and caregivers when we are kids that persists into our adulthood. It’s a discovery and healing practice for the grown-ups that has the potential to benefit the whole family, into the community, and beyond. It’s a soothing of the authoritarian voice in our heads and a recognizing that it's not our voice, it’s an echo of the systems and institutions in our particular society. It’s unlearning the labeling of ourselves and others that was influenced by schooling - schoolishness, as coined by Akilah S. Richards of Fare of The Free Child. Reparenting is also deschooling, the process of noticing the traits we thought were true about ourselves and our world based on what we learned in school and then working to repair those beliefs with self-compassion and patience. Traits like being people-pleasers, linear thinking, not listening to our intuition (our gut-feelings), seeing emotion as a weakness, talking back as disrespectful, personal boundaries as non-existent, that punishments are the only way to learn “proper” behavior, etc.

Since they are interconnected, I will use reparenting and deschooling interchangeably throughout this post.

Whether intentional or not, these messages that many of us received as children by our caregivers and were reinforced in school became part of our internal view of ourselves and our world. For me and many others, this settled in our minds and bodies as a deep sense of personal shame. This shame can affect the way we show up in the world as adults, particularly as parents of young people. Iris Chen of Untigering puts it plainly: “The beliefs and conditioning we received through compulsory schooling can hinder our shift towards peaceful, conscious parenting.”

To undo this inherited guilt and shame, and not pass it along to our children, reparenting is an essential aspect of living a life aligned with unschooling and liberation, even if kids are in the public school system. This deschooling process is an evolution. There is no end goal, no graduation to becoming reparented. The word stays a present-tense verb. Reparenting takes time, patience, and slowing down. To do so, we examine our history. For me, this was the hardest part because it can be easy to get stuck in that history, to get triggered by the traumas and insecurities of our childhood. That deep dive uncovers what has been camouflaged, like a glowing fish at the bottom of the deep, dark sea.

One of my glowing fish is a story about me that has been retold many times by family as something funny that happened to me when I was a toddler. The story goes that I’m, two or three years old. It’s nighttime and my parents are out, leaving my older brother and I in the care of my mom’s sister, my aunt. It is bedtime so I am dressed in footie pajamas. It is then that I decide that I’d like some ice cream: “Tia, quiero helado”. My aunt informs that, no, it’s not time for ice cream because it’s time for bed. Even though I insist that it is time for ice cream, my aunt does not bend to my request, which turns into a demand which turns into a full-on tantrum. I scream for ice cream! At this point, my aunt laughingly recalls, I am so worked up about the ice cream that she does not know how to calm me down. So she picks me up, screaming and crying, and carries me into the shower. She turns on the cold water tap and plops me in, pajamas and all. This solution appears to work because I stopped asking for ice cream. Maybe it was the shock of the cold water that made me forget the ice cream? Or was it being in the shower wearing my pajamas? I think there may even be a photo of this scene to document what she thought was hilarious. Perhaps I imagine a photo exists because I’ve heard this story so many times.

It took me experiencing my own child’s tantrums to recognize that the discipline I received that night so long ago was actually cruel. Though usually short-lived, tantrums can be very intense and emotionally draining for all involved. A tantrum is a full-body, somatic, emotional takeover for the little person in the middle of it. It can also be highly stressful to the caregiver in its proximity; the level of stress depending on many factors, such as personal (does the caregiver have anxiety), environmental (is the tantrum at home or in a restaurant), physical (is the caregiver tired, menstruating, hungry) societal (is the caregiver being judged for the tantrum or do they have support), and adultism (is the child’s emotional state being viewed through an adult lens of superiority over children). It would seem that ending the tantrum as quickly as possible would be the best solution for all involved. And ending tantrums quickly implies immediate physical intervention - spanking/hitting the child, dragging the child away kicking and screaming - or threats of physical discipline - “If you don’t stop this right now I am going to (spank you, give you time-out, take away your favorite toy, leave you here, etc.).”

With a two-year-old at home, I find myself in the thick of tantrums once again. When a tantrum happens, I brace myself. I take a few audible, deep breaths then I begin the dance. Step one, I try to reason: “I know you don’t want to put on clothes, but we’re not allowed to go into the market naked”. As usual with someone whose prefrontal cortex has at least twenty three more years to develop, reasoning doesn’t always work. Step two, I try to shift the focus, “Which pants do you want to wear, Santa or Bluey?”. Sometimes this works, but it’s not a guarantee, so then we move onto step three - wait. If it isn’t an emergency or we’re not inconveniencing others (like in the middle of a quiet movie theater), then I try to manage the tantrum and my discomfort with it by simply doing nothing other than waiting for it to subside.This does not end the tantrum quickly, but it does give it less feedback, which makes it easier for me to regulate my feelings to tolerate the discomfort of the tantrum.

Another of those glowing fish in the murky waters of my childhood memory is nighttime wakings. As people do, sometimes I’d awaken in the middle of the night and reach out for comfort and help falling back to sleep from my parents. They would receive my nighttime needs with anger and annoyance. They were tired, after all, exhausted by the needs of three children under five, one of them a baby. My parents needed sleep and they believed that allowing children into the bed with them would cause more sleep disruption over time. So, instead of helping me fall back to sleep, they simply kept their bedroom door locked, or locked mine so I couldn’t leave my room. As a three-year-old I learned to crawl out of the small window in my bedroom that opened into a little courtyard with a short path that connected to a separate bedroom for guests. Sometimes my aunt slept there, or my grandmother, or the housekeeper (a norm in Colombia at the time). I would scurry over and try to fall asleep with whoever was in there. Eventually I lost the ability to unlock the window in my room and learned to rely on myself to fall asleep. I am sure my parents saw this as vindication that they were right to refuse my nighttime wakings.

When my oldest struggles to sleep at night, he knows there’s a mattress made up in our bedroom on the floor next to our bed. He knows the door to our room will be open and that he can come in and lay down in the mattress. He tries not to wakes us (unless he’s not feeling well) and is able to fall right back to sleep without our assistance simply because the comfort of knowing we are near is all he needs in that moment. Some mornings we wake up and find him there. Most mornings we don’t.

The concept of reparenting is not meant to implicate my parents as bad parents or any other parent who does these things as bad parents. I know that parents are trying their best within the societal norms and beliefs of their time, culture, and often, religion. However, many parenting norms are unknowingly influenced by White Supremacy Culture, even for those of us whose parents are not white. In her book “Spare The Kids,” Dr. Stacey Patton says, “Beating a Black child is the whitest thing you can do.” Leslie Priscilla of Latinx Parenting has dedicated her life to ending what she calls “Chancla Culture”. She writes - “The movement to #endchanclaculture will take all of us doing our part to unlearn the legacy of physical, psychological, and emotional violence that our ancestors learned through our colonizers.” And, Yolanda Williams of Parenting Decolonized advocates for children’s right to live free from violence by connecting child abuse to colonization and slavery:

It’s heartbreaking to see how normalized violence in parenting has become, rooted deeply in the legacies of enslavement and colonization. These practices taught generations that control and fear were the ways to raise children. When we believe punishment is deserved, we perpetuate the same cycles of oppression and dehumanization that were used against our ancestors. No child ever deserves to be hit—there’s always a better way to guide and connect. Breaking the cycle of generational trauma begins with us questioning what we were taught and daring to parent differently. Healing starts when we recognize that love and respect, not fear, are the foundations of a healthy family. Let’s move away from punitive approaches and towards compassionate, conscious parenting.

It’s okay to get angry for the injustices we were subjected to - the lack of consent, the lack of choice, of a voice, of a say in your own life. Since this practice of deschooling can be so emotional, it’s important to be gentle to ourselves and give ourselves grace. It’s possible to both have compassion for ourselves and our caregivers, and admit that there is abuse at the root of how children are treated. The more we learn of and speak out about the oppression in childhood, the more things change. Some disciplinary practices, like hitting and spanking, are not as common today as they were when I was a kid because normalizing violence on the most vulnerable people in society, children, is not as socially accepted anymore. Teachers no longer have the right to swat a child’s hand with a ruler and the days of lining up all of the “naughty” kids when dad gets home from working in the mine so that he can “discipline” them with a switch are long gone (a story from my father’s childhood). This doesn’t mean that children aren’t still hit, unfortunately, but it’s not a form of discipline as commonly used as it was decades ago.

Deschooling is an integral layer to unschooling and one that happens to be accessible even if kids are in school since it’s reflection work for the caregivers. Reparenting/deschooling takes the intentional exploring of the deep, dark ocean floor to expose the glowing fish and marvel at them. Discover the fish. Gawk at the fish. Learn from it. Tell others about these creatures thriving in the darkness, their bioluminescence shining bright. Just make sure to leave the glowing fish where they are; move on so you don’t drown.

This is part two of a five part series on unschooling within the school system. For part one, click here.