Sunday, July 24, 2011

Unschooling all of life

Banana and chocolate muffins

I often say to people that unschooling is easy, it's just LIFE, and with all of our lives we do unschool except one. Food. So now I've decided to take the plunge. What clocked me over was when I caught myself saying "but that wouldn't work for my kids". 

I was instantly reminded of all the people I've heard saying exactly the same thing only about unschooling. It was a light bulb moment for me. Since then I've been going over it in my head quite regularly. I've come to the conclusion that it might work with my kids!

They self regulate bed time, dressing themselves, computer time, TV time ... the only thing we don't unschool is food. I've had the "that wouldn't work for my kids" broken record playing over and over for quite a while now.

Bliss balls with cacao, berries, and coconut

So why do I think it won't work? 
Because my son has a damaged gut and he maintains the unhealthy flora with sugar, yeast, and carbohydrate cravings. However he will willingly eat quite a number of healthy foods, fruit, vegetables, yogurt, eggs, and nuts to name a few. 

So why do I think it will work?
Because the idea that children are unable to self regulate is not supported by common sense, nor any facet of my son's life. 

Why do I want to do it?
Because I believe it will self regulate his eating, and balance his cravings for unhealthy food with healthy food.

So now that I've gotten that off my chest I have to learn more about how it works and do some planning so that we can start soon!

Sugar free berry cheesecake 

2 comments:

Sannah said...

Wow - light bulb moment absolutely! I have never thought about it like that. This is really interesting food for thought. We have had issues with gut flora too, and I have thought that perhaps by trying to make my children eat a wide range of foods, rather than letting them follow what feels right to them, could possibly be part of the problem. I guess that it would work if you could ensure that your house only contained healthy food, then they could choose what they wanted and it *should* be alright. That would be my fall down. We are pretty healthy, but I guess not anywhere close to where I would want to be if I was going to be as game as you are with this. I will be really interested to see how you go with it. best wishes!

Alice and Mother said...

We're pretty healthy eaters, but like you, we could do better. I don't have an overwhelming amount of crap in the house, most of what we buy is whole food so I'm hoping that will get us home and hosed lol

Thanks for the feed back!