As beautiful and fascinating as a Zen garden or terrarium may be, they both require a mastery and precision that betray the tension between control and entropy, between omnipotence and chaos. When carefully considered, they also provide useful metaphors to measure our mindful parenting journey within an unschooling context, particularly for this avid gardener.

Unschooling parents, especially of young children, often wonder how to balance living a principled life with exposing their children to the wider world. When so many aspects of our culture not only run contrary to our own values but also seem downright disturbing to our children’s well-being, parents often can’t help but question the radical ideas of honoring our children’s autonomy and trusting in their ability to discover a balance that works for their own bodies and for building their own set of values. Where, so many parents have asked, does one draw the line between expanding a child’s world and exposing him to everything in the whole wide world?

Think about that question, though—how could anyone expose her child to everything even if she wanted to do so? Most, if not all of us, operate under natural constraints of budget, time and geography to name but a few. People—both children and adults—encounter natural limits all the time, and no parent need feel obligated by unschooling philosophy to expose his children to everything under the sun simply for the sake of exposure.

Another possible answer to that question, however, can be found in the title images of the Zen garden and terrarium, which challenge our thinking as unschooling parents. Using these images, we can ask ourselves what kind of environment exists in our own home. Does it resemble the austere simplicity and rule-bound nature of the Zen garden? Does it imitate the artificial, isolated bubble of the terrarium? If so, then careful and honest examination of our roles and goals as unschooling parents is likely in order!

When young children naturally encounter something in the world and are supported in their exploration, those children are free even if their parents have not gone out of their way to expose them to it. When a child grows up in a vegetarian household, for instance, his life will naturally be vegetarian for as long as his world revolves around the immediate family.

The key is not unnaturally to prolong that life by artificial means of control—pretending that the whole world is vegetarian or that there’s no such thing as carnivores or omnivores among humanity by not allowing children to encounter other forms of life—and to aid and support our children in finding their own path. The goal with unschooling, as I see it, is to let life flow into the larger world without attempting to contain it within the delicate glass walls of a terrarium.

The difficulty in practice lies in the ever-expanding nature of children’s worlds, which organically stretch beyond our limited control. Finding ways to encourage our children’s explorations while remaining true to our own values can be quite challenging, and often, being mindfully aware of the challenge is enough to open the door to creative problem solving and the many avenues available to nurture our children’s explorations. In this way, we take our first important step toward creating a flourishing, organically flowing environment conducive to natural learning.

For instance, as my son has grown older, he’s expressed more and more interest in exploring heroism and, by extension, weapons. Being able to separate my own values of non-violence from Sam’s effort and need to follow his own passions and define his own values has been invaluable to our relationship and to unschooling itself. Not to mention the ways in which his passion has become contagious and led to bonding with other members of the family.

Rather than viewing Sam's explorations through my own world-view, I try hard to borrow his eyes so I may catch a glimpse into the nobility of principles like bravery, heroism, and self-reliance. By seeing value in his nascent principles, I’m able genuinely to help him nurture these passions, which has led to all kinds of learning, but more importantly to his own sense of self-worth and empowerment.

Becoming mindfully aware of our own values and the ways in which they both influence and limit our world, thus excluding a multitude of other worldviews, we open ourselves to the validity of other possible paths. When we can acknowledge and own our values and the choices that flow from them, we are better equipped to remain open and aware of alternate values and alternate choices our children might make. In this way, we become more available to help them explore their world as their partners rather than masters, navigating potential conflict and transforming it into peaceful solutions that meet everyone’s needs.

This organic partnership, then, depends upon an environment that remains open to possibility and difference. Simultaneously, however, it ought not to expose children deliberately to situations that run counter to our own values or that push beyond our children’s natural curiosity and developmental comfort level by barraging them with images and information a la Clockwork Orange. As Naomi Aldort, author of Raising Our Children; Raising Ourselves, has advised, expose but don’t impose: expose in a supportive world-expanding sense without imposing in a frightening or authoritarian sense of the word.

For instance, a natural progression for a child born into a tv-free family could be for that child to live a tv-free lifestyle for an unspecified amount of time, but then be able to watch one day at a friend’s house or grandma’s as she naturally becomes aware of the different lifestyles and choices available.

This openness to difference, so useful to unschooling parents and familiar to many in the La Leche League guideline “Don’t offer, don’t refuse,” can be a tricky line to walk, but a line that has everything to do with living and learning organically. Once a child’s world expands, mindful awareness on the parents’ part can enable open communication and a solution that meets all family member’s needs, including but not limited to the possibility that one family member may choose to bring television into her world.

There is nothing inherent in an unschooling philosophy that dictates a vegetarian family must bring a variety of meats into their home for the sake of exposure, that a pacifist must purchase an arsenal of weaponry for his child to play with before she has asked, or that a family who has no desire to have television must buy a tv and dish network to illustrate the difference between Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon.

What organic learning does mean, however, is that we allow our children to learn from life as life naturally unfolds, which goes against the practice of creating an artificially controlled world where meat, sugar, television, weapons, video games, people different from ourselves culturally, religiously, physically, philosophically, etc. do not exist as much as it goes against the idea of force-feeding images and information for which the child has not indicated an interest. When parents attempt to erase large chunks of the world from their child’s life, organic learning becomes impossible, and the terrarium lifestyle takes over. This omission can be as derailing to the natural learning process as forced exposure.

The challenge we face as unschooling parents is to find a middle ground between creating artificial worlds terrarium-style and barraging our children with everything that’s out there, both good and bad. If we can consider our homes as dynamic and organic ecosystems and embrace the natural progression that comes from living and learning organically, we may begin to see our children and our relationships flourish without control.

Unlike boulders in a Zen garden representing miniature mountains, children are not miniature versions of adults, though too often parental expectations operate upon such assumptions. Whether expecting behavior beyond developmentally appropriate guidelines or viewing children as perfectible products of a particular philosophical, religious, or educational system, parents risk transforming their children from dynamic beings into static ideals.

Allowing our children to find their own paths, we are able both to leave behind the glass-enclosed world of the terrarium and to break away from the rigid, rule-bound nature of the Zen garden. A child’s path to her True Self unfolds organically without rules or repetition of another’s journey. It meanders and lingers and often appears chaotic and haphazard to the gardener.

Homes are not terrariums, and children are not Zen gardens, and our role as metaphorical gardeners is not to control but to create rich, nourishing soil and conditions conducive to growth. Children exist in a constant state of becoming—unfolding and unfurling Selves that react to and interact with the constant input around them.

We do our children a disservice when we attempt to confine and circumscribe their potential to our own narrow expectations. We can choose, instead, to focus our energy on nourishing our children’s environment and recognizing the complex interconnections beyond ourselves that enable our children to grow and thrive. Most important of all, however, is to acknowledge that we cannot grow the plants, but can only choose to nurture the conditions that enable them to grow themselves.

© Danielle Conger 2006-07