The Therapy Fund

By Nathanael Schildbach

The title of this column is courtesy of my wife, who jokes about saving for therapy for our kids instead of college (and she’s a therapist herself.)

A friend of mine shared with my wife that she felt that parents don’t share with one another enough how difficult a job parenting really is, and she’s right, even before throwing unschooling in on top of it. In truth, there are few jobs in life where there are really no right answers, where you often can’t tell if the positive results you see happen because of or in spite of your efforts, where no matter how good a job you’re doing you can easily see how you could do better, and the people you’re doing the work for will not appreciate the job you did until years later, and will disagree with some of what happened in between.

To me, the title is also a joke about how therapeutic writing is for me, how this writing is a way for me to work through all the big stuff that comes up. Not the “what math curriculum should we use?” type of questions or “should I use a math curriculum?” or even “exactly what constitutes a math curriculum and can I put one together and sell it too?” But “am I clinically paranoid because I’m worried that men in black jumpsuits and jackboots are going to stage an assault on my house when they find out what I consider a math curriculum?”

That includes the part between “I think we should homeschool the kids” and “Gee, they all went to Harvard on scholarships.” The dark nights, the questions. The reality of the experience, the lack of definitive answers. And that is what the title of this first column is about, which I also didn’t come up with, borrowing it from a Paul Gaugin painting. Those are heady questions, just like the ones faced every day of independent learning. It’s liberating to free yourself from the shackles of structured education, to indulge the fresh air of self-directed learning, but it also comes with many questions, many stresses. It’s dull in an ant colony, but at the same time you’re much less likely to be eaten by an anteater. (Now if you are worried that you are going to be eaten by an anteater because of what you consider a math curriculum, you are clinically paranoid.)

These questions Gauguin loaned me for the column headline are all the spookier since we can also relate them to our children. I mean, I had this knowledge that they wouldn’t be replications of me, and would have their own spirits or souls or randomly assembled personality traits, or whatever you like to call it, but I don’t think I really understood this.

Take my oldest son for example. He loves sports. Loves sports. That is his life. I can now name off nicknames for many sports figures (so when he says, “This could be the year Manny beats the Iron Horse’s record for career grand slams.” I know he means that Manny Ramirez could surpass Lou Gehrig.) But I didn’t know this stuff at his age. I was overweight, sluggish. Hated sports. I was more concerned that my glasses were going to get broken than if we won and convinced I couldn’t compete anyway. I was into watching sports on TV for a little while, but it wasn’t an obsession. So what do I do with that? Besides, how do I discuss math and history in the context of sports with him (both of which fit in nicely,) what do I do with the fact that here is an individual, and I’m supposed to be helping him become a great human (and get that scholarship to Harvard don’t forget,) and I have to work through all of the things I think he is supposed to be doing and learning, and figuring out how to convince him that he really wants to go to Harvard. On a scholarship. And he better get crackin’ if he wants to get there.

So while I’m dealing with the crushing realization that my oldest son isn’t a clone of me, and trying to figure out exactly how annoying it would be to have to live with a clone of myself, I have to worry about whether or not he’s on the right path with these interests. Should I introduce him to something else? Am I letting him down if I just let him go off and be interested in sports? Shouldn’t I force him to take a class on something at the opposite end of the imaginary learning spectrum, like drawing? What would Gaugin think?

Which brings us to my second son. His older brother loves classes and group experiences. He, not so much. Not even within range of not so much. He is content to hang out, learn about primates and evolution, field my questions about Darwinian theories without becoming too flustered that I still don’t quite get where a galago fits into the evolutionary picture, that sort of thing. He likes people, is very personable. He just doesn’t feel like joining a group. Am I doing the right thing by letting him do this and not join, or by allowing him to skirt taking classes, somehow negatively affecting his development?

It’s real easy to see these things when I’m joking about them here. But when I see a possible class listed that I just know my son would really love or meet children who think the Iron Horse is a sculpture that they saw at the museum last week, I begin to question myself. Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Now, my youngest son is just a baby. I watch him roll on the floor, but he should really be crawling, don’t you think? Isn’t it about time he crawled? So I try to get him to sign up for the “Crawling for Beginners” class from the local recreation department, and he won’t even talk to me about it. Lots of raspberries and squeaky noises and grunting, so I’ll hand him the closest thing to him that I don’t want him to have. I should really be working with him to get him to that next level, to be all that he can be. I’m really failing him by letting him roll over and grab that wooden woodchuck toy. At least I could lay out Albert Einstein and Beethoven dolls for him to grab and stuff into his mouth.

This all seems pretty goofy to do with a baby but, for some reason, when he’s eight it will seem to make all the sense in the world. Once again, it’s the “you trust them to learn to walk, why not trust them to learn how to [fill in the blank]?” The aforementioned paranoia-inspired assault squad is part of it. The local school board isn’t looking for a portfolio demonstrating the baby’s work in learning to walk, and it is easier to say that pretty much everyone learns how to walk than it is to say that pretty much everyone learns how to find the area of a triangle, and not many babies say to their parents that they hate learning to walk and aren’t going to do it.

That ant colony is looking nice and cozy. Dull, oppressive, but nice and cozy. Parenting, independent learning, and therapy – all things covered here, none of them with many concrete answers, all with plenty of “what if’s.” I start to understand what Frederick Douglass meant when he said, “Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.” My wife thinks I should take up knitting so that I can work on something where I can be assured of a final product that is close to its intended outcome (she does this as therapeutic respite from her work as a therapist and parent.) I think I’ll stick with writing. After all, I have realized in writing this that despite all of this uncertainty, my oldest son has helped me develop a love of playing and watching sports, my second oldest son has nurtured the “non-joiner” inside me, and I have had a lot of fun rolling around on the floor with my third (although that wooden woodchuck could use a cleaning; it tastes a little funky.)

Nathanael Schildbach lives and (he hopes) learns in western Massachusetts with his wife, children, dog, cat, and some racing pigeons. This is the first article of a column called The Therapy Fund that ran in Life Learning Magazine in the late 2000s.