Unschooling and attachment parenting in Asia | The Sattvic Family:
In Korea and Thailand, family is important to the culture. Not that it isn’t everywhere, but I have noticed it is especially so here. And they love children. I will be honest with you: in Cortona, it was much more reserved and less kid friendly. As a child growing up in France, I didn’t notice this as much, but then again we were in the South of France, and the motto their is ‘tranquille’. I feel more comfortable being a mom now that I am in Asia, especially in Phuket, because even if someone disagree with my homeschooling Kaya, they respect that that is what we do and have that same ‘tranquille’ attitude, which they call ‘ mai pen rai’. Think of this as ‘its all good’.
A lovely post on travelling and living in Asia is up at The Sattvic Family blog.

Mothering is amazing work for many women, a journey that has deep physical, emotional and psychological impact in a culture where mothering has been dispensed with in the name of efficiency. I was an older mother who had the good fortune to have journeyed through attachment parenting and I have learned many things from that journey.  One is that our society devalues the work of caring and the work of relationships. Another is that we do not grasp how human relationships work in our institutions.

I have written how thinking about voluntary learning in a culture of coercion is not unlike the work breastfeeding advocacy takes on to change a bottlefeeding culture.  We ignore relationships, we cannot fathom how anyone can learn anything "on their own," we devalue the learning happening everyday around us, and we are unaware of how deeply peer-orientation works.  Consequently, we cannot see how our education system works against our deepest human instincts and we confuse socialization with peer dependence and automatization.

Unschoolers focus on building relationships and in doing this,  accomplish great things many cannot seem to grasp. Supporting human beings instead of manipulating them may seem too unfocused or soft or lacking in control but it is a deeply feminine and natural way to help human beings grow and thrive and learn.

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