~~Forcing children to live a parent's philosophy doesn't necessarily produce
kids that live those same philosophies and could actually produce the
opposite.~~
***I would love to explore this more in regards to unschooling. Is there an
exact expectation that because we choose to live an unschooling life that it
will produce a certain type of teen or adult?***
I was thinking about 2 different things that I've seen parents do to kids and the kids went the opposite. The biggest is religion. If parents are forceful, whether they are nice or not, sometimes the kids grow up with damage related to religion and choose another way.
The other was more about environmental issues. I've seen kids grow up with parents that are super hard core into recycling, living green, etc, and they grow up with those things more central than they are. It's the same as religion being forced on someone, whether the parents are nice or not, some kids will grow up with a negative association to living those same ideals.
When parents are forceful about their ideas, yet kind in many other ways, they may maintain a relationship, yet still choose another life style. When parents are forceful about their ideas and extremely unkind about lots of things, they'll probably grow up thinking their parents are pretty stupid and everything that they believe is, by extension, stupid too.
What I've found to be true for me and my kids, is that I truly respect the things they believe in, so they tend to do the same with me. I've seen that to be true in unschooling families that are very religious too. The kids, because their ideas and very beings are respected, don't reject their religious upbringing.
Those are the ideas that were floating around in my head when I said the above. What usually triggers this thought for me, is that I live in Oregon, a very "green" state and lots of people choose to live with those ideals, so I find it bumps into unschooling ideas from time to time.
