"Come on. Come on. We don't have all day," someone says to their kid at the supermarket. The little girl is holding a piece of fruit and asking her mother what it is. "Is this a pomegranate, Mom?" she asks again. Her mother is throwing peppers into a bag and her patience is wearing very thin. "I guess so," she says, "Now, let's get going so we can get home and get supper over with. Dancing With the Stars is on tonight."
I felt like whacking Mommy Dearest upside the head with a bunch of celery, but she's more to be pitied than celeried. Yes, we DO have all day. Well, we have all day unless we keel over and she looked pretty healthy to me. Frazzled, but healthy. We have the same amount of time as gurus who spend all day gazing at their navels or multitasking CEO's who jet back and forth to Europe while talking on two cell phones, typing on their laptops and ordering around minions. (By the way, I'd love a minion. But can I have only one? It always seems to be plural. I'll have to look that up.)
Coincidentally, I was shopping with my daughter. She's a flitterer and a chatterer and I'm... Well, I'm 56 and I've shopped a few times. Let's just say that weighing veggies and comparing unit prices have kind of palled for me. Not for her, though. Even if we didn't want any potatoes, they got weighed because she bet me that they weigh more, each, than sweet potatoes do. By golly, she was right too.
She's not much of a fiction reader, but she likes to read about "real stuff", so when she wants to read something, I'm all ears. That's how we both learned more about fresh spices like cilantro and parsley than even Alton Brown knows. (They're both Good Eats, by the way.) She read every word on the packages to me until I was afraid that our cheese might molder or our chocolate bread would go stale. I didn't really need to hear about spices as we started our weekly shopping at 4:30 in the afternoon, but I listened.
If she had wanted to know about pomegranates, we would have picked up a couple, examined them, weighed them, checked out the produce dictionary that the store displays and then taken a couple home to experiment on. Buah-ha-ha! (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
Unschooling - which is what this is all leading to, of course, you know me - means never having to say you don't have time to help your kids explore the world. It's very hard for kids to learn and explore if you rush them through their days. It's very hard for us to learn and explore if we rush through our days, also, but that's what so many people do.
If your kids, like most kids, spend all day in school, I think it's even more important that you connect with your kids whenever there's a moment like the pomegranate one. Sure, there are times when we don’t have time for long explanations, but sometimes we do if we give other less important things a miss. I don't think "getting through supper" is as nurturing as sitting around, sharing a stew you made in the crockpot so it was ready when you got home, and really listening to your kids and sharing yourself with them. (I share the cleanup with them too. I tell them it's a bonding moment and say it with a straight face because I really think it is. Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.)
Okay, I know homeschooling isn't an option for everyone, much less unschooling. But I wish more parents would consider looking into it with an open mind. It would also be nice, I think if everyone would step back from their busy lives and take some time to think about what they really want to fill their days with. When a bunch of pixels making make-believe on a lightbox keep us too busy to identify a piece of fruit for our kid or relax over supper, we're making a statement about what's important to us. Whether we say it out loud or not, our children hear it and they take it to heart. If you don't believe me, just ask them.