Passion plays

Truth:
The way our kids spend their time,
no matter how they spend their time,
is fine and valuable and educational and right.

This truth is one of the single hardest things for parents to wrap their brains around. It is also the thing that, once grasped, moves people from playing at unschooling to really doing it.

I grasped it long ago. I preach it. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy to live it. From our early deschooling to the present, my big struggle has been with Keeping My Mouth Shut when I can’t immediately see the value in my daughters’ chosen activities. The traditional parenting and schooling voices in my head are annoyingly loud, even now, which leads to ferocious little internal dialogs that would no doubt cause a psychiatrist deep concern. But I do my best to keep the struggle internal and just trust.

Sometimes that’s easier than others. For example, they’ve both had more traditionally academic interests over the years. It’s very soothing when that happens, and supporting them is a no-brainer. You’re writing a book? Great! You’re reading Shakespeare? Great! Is that Dante? Great! You want a sociology textbook? Great! You want to talk about math? Great!

For other interests, the educational value hasn’t been immediately apparent, but I have been quickly rewarded for supporting them. Chloe’s passion for anime and manga is a case in point. If a girl hugs him, he turns into a cat? Okaaaay. I didn’t get it, but I was able to keep quiet and see where it took us. And our house was suddenly bursting with history, art, Japanese, mythology, video editing, world music, and more.

But what about those times when the payoff is not so apparent?

Last year, Chloe had a long (long!) stretch of immersing herself in "Buffy." She spent her days and nights in Sunnydale, and just about everything she said related back to Buffy or Angel in some way. (It became a game: we'd toss out subjects to see if she could link them back to Joss Whedon's scary little world. She usually could.) Her interest went on long enough that I started to be concerned, with nasty words like "obsession" popping into my head. What do I do? I wondered.

And then it stopped. Just like that. Oh, she's still a huge fan, but she got out of it whatever she was looking for (I’m still not sure what that was) and moved on to other things. My job in the interim was to listen, participate as best I could, and otherwise stay out of her way.

Another recent example is MJ's current interest in the poetry of E. E. Cummings. She spends hours reading and copying out his poems. She’s reading voluntarily poetry most teens would have to be browbeaten into reading, I thought at first. How cool is that?

But this interest has continued for a few weeks now, leading to one of those internal dialogs:

E. E. Cummings? Still? Who besides a lit major spends weeks on a single poet?

Well, maybe she is a lit major.

Good point.

And then MJ confided her actual purpose in reading all that E. E. Cummings, and it's so much more clever and original than I could have imagined. I feel ashamed of the box I tried to put her in.

It can be all too temptingly easy to judge. And our judgments are so, SO subjective. I imagine some parents would find all of the reading and writing my kids do as much a waste of time as anything. There's no money in poetry, after all. (Hmm. There is money in video games. Maybe I should be forcing my kids to play more video games.)

But here's the thing: The value of our kids’ interests can’t be judged by anyone but our kids themselves. Only they know what they’re getting out of them, what thoughts and dreams they are inspiring, and how they are interrelated. And even they cannot fully predict where those interests will lead them.

"Everything counts," we say. But how do we know? How can we be sure?

Well, what kind of proof are you looking for? Test results? Laurels and accolades? Successful careers? Wealth at retirement?

For us, the proof is in our kids' bright eyes and happy smiles. It's in their quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) pride in their own accomplishments. It's in the ways they amaze us, every day, with their knowledge and wisdom, their creativity and kindness.

Isn't that proof enough?