sponsored by 

SolarNet.org
 Independent Home glyph: home, sun, wind, water

The New Independent Home

     by Michael Potts
from chapter 13 :

Independent Children

     Nothing ties us to our home and neighborhood more tightly than children. Nonetheless, independent homesteaders are not immune from the forces that necessitate two-income families, latchkey programs, and television-as-childcare.
     I looked for, and expected to find, ways in which off-the-grid children differed from their on-the-grid peers. Instead I found that children living on independent homesteads or in families striving to control their energy use are no different from children who live in any supportive family environment. People who work with children will quickly understand that this is not to say they are "normal" children; the supportive family environment is not at all common in our workaholic culture, where children have children, family life is submerged in the daily struggle to make ends meet in our relentlessly consumerist civilization, and the tv set is the chief pacifier and source of intelligence.
     Gender stereotypes can be markedly less rigid off-the-grid. As I already noted, system-management functions are performed by whichever family member is present when the system needs attention, even if the original system was designed and installed by the men. There seems to be excellent technology transfer, in the sense that all family members soon understand the basics of the system and are willing to tune it and their activities to fit the circumstances. What appears to be a remarkable mastery of amps, watts, volts, and other energy topics is nothing more than technological and environmental awareness; most of these children have spent their lives on "voodoo power," and its qualities seem quite natural to them.
     Many children reported to me that their friends like to visit them because they love the freedom and openness of a natural setting, and because the household's focus on energy management is intriguing. I was also informed, in surprisingly strong terms, that it was at times awkward to return the visit, because on-the-grid friends live in wasteful ways that make energy-conscious children uncomfortable. When asked what is missing from their lives, most children were stumped. "Maybe I could play video games more . . . but no, I like to go outdoors, even when it's raining," one boy told me. This sentiment is revolutionary in a nation where children increasingly keep indoors in all weather.
     Making the home into a rich educational environment benefits both children and their parents, whether children are schooled at home or in town. Liberated from the tyranny of generic housing, thoughtful parents can install child-oriented features such as light switches and kitchen workspaces low enough for short people to reach, so children can take care of their own needs and participate in family chores. Small doors on children's rooms and child-sized furnishings help children understand that the home was built to provide for their needs. When adults work at home and their activities become part of the daily routine, children are encouraged to perform their own work, the work of learning. In many cases, these children benefit from an environment enriched by the work of the parents, which is very different than the lonely households that the children of working parents return to after a day away at school. All this is a sharp contrast to a conventional world where children are sent away to learn, and return to be treated as noisy inconveniences incapable of affecting their own world and consigned to their own rumpus rooms and dinner times.
     Home schooling is an attractive alternative for many off-the-grid families, and is enthusiastically embraced by the younger children, aged twelve and under. Their favorite part is being able to stay home, living in the learning environment instead of visiting it for a short, intense period after enduring, for most rural students, a crushingly long commute. With some of the time pressure removed from learning, lessons come about naturally and in context rather than being dictated by standardized curriculum, schedules, and the added complexity of too many students and too few teachers. Among the families I interviewed, home schooling has been enjoyable and productive for the younger children and adults who participated. One benefit of home schooling in the early years is that it often gathers together a convivial group of children, and creates work in the home for one or more adults. This results in what might be called tribe-building, which carries over into the lives of the families involved no matter what educational paths they follow as the children grow up. Small groups of like-minded souls who congregate to educate their children together can provide a less rigidly programmatic, more serendipitous way of learning than is typical in a regular classroom. Since lay teachers come from differing educational backgrounds and seldom continue teaching the same age group year in and year out, they solve educational problems spontaneously, intuitively, often naively, but always with the child at the center of the solution. Life and work are sharply separated in the conventional setting, but can mingle freely in the independent-home learning environment, and this integration provides unexpected bonuses. In public schools, gardening may be one more distraction from the mandated programs, but in an independent home, some of a child's most important lessons can be among the flowers and legumes.
     Having served ten years in the oxymoronic role of teacher to teenagers, I believe that curriculum becomes less important than social interaction as the children pass through puberty. Almost every off-the-grid-raised teenager I encountered expressed, and was granted, a chance to go to a conventional school. Children who enjoy the tribe-building of early home schooling seem to make a good academic transition to conventional school even as they often find their new classmates distractable, disruptive, and unfocused. My home-schooled informants insisted that for them school's most important lessons were learned before, between, and after classes. They admitted that formal class sessions were occasionally interesting but mostly irrelevant to the world they expected to inhabit after graduation. These children expressed a strong appreciation for the truth, and conceded grudging respect for adults who told it, but were quick to express contempt for institutional education's slowness in awakening to their own and the planet's real future. I took dark comfort from my sense that children raised in the freer and more natural off-the-grid environment were specifically angry, while many of their on-the-grid peers seemed to drift sullenly in a river of helpless negativity. College students from off-the-grid backgrounds told me, in 1998, that much of what they were taught appeared to come from a time capsule buried in the 1960s, when the teachers were themselves in school. Several teenagers predicted that they would be entering a world much different than the one their parents had found at the end of their schooling, and wondered how they might ever be able to achieve the qualities of life their parents now enjoy. When they asked me, "Did it seem that way to you?" I was forced to confess it did not. The few children I met who stayed in a home-schooling environment well into adolescence were in some cases brilliant, but narrowly informed and somewhat maladroit socially. Peer exchange is so important for children of this age that any benefits of home schooling, unless an unreasonably large cohort of children can be assembled, are overshadowed.
     At the same time, my decade of teaching leads me to conclude that much of the important learning going on during the teenage years comes from caring adults in a richly educational home and community environment rather than from a traditional schoolroom. Independent parents tend to raise independent children who are immune to much of the emptiness and waste that plagues their peers. Lessons about the work ethic and acquisition of employable skills were apprehended more easily in homes where adults worked at home. When the adults involved in early childhood home schooling continue to involve themselves actively in secondary education and their children's teenage lives, the family relationships, although inevitably strained, held.
     As much as we would like for them to remain safe on the homestead, at some point most children leave their independent homes to seek the bright lights and consumerist temptations of the city. These adventurers are strongly motivated, of course, by their wish to meet people, to experience the world, and to define their identities. This causes temporary alarm among parents who may find their only solace in reclaiming the space in their childrens' abandoned rooms. Our alarm is often temporary, because most independent children soon report home about the joylessness of urban life, and begin their own movement toward a more peaceful lifestyle, often near their parents, or toward a more purposeful and conservative life in the city. Amazingly, they grow up, just as we did! It will be interesting to watch this process as it completes a second generation and enters its third.
     A problem universally acknowledged by parents and children alike, and one that is obviously not a circumstance limited to independent-home-raised children, is the difficult passage our boy-children must make through an adolescence infested with beer and internal combustion engines. In southern Humboldt County, California, where off-the-grid homes are more common than elsewhere, the too-much-testosterone (TMT) problem is compounded by bad weather, difficult roads, distance between home, friends' homes, and school, and the paradoxical values of an illicit, marijuana-based economy. Neither permissiveness nor strictness seem to work well to counteract testosterone poisoning, and young men literally bounce off the walls, carving tire tracks up the steep roadsides between Ettersburg and Redway. It is no comfort to off-the-grid parents that TMT also plagues on-the-grid and urban communities.
     I can recommend only one stratagem for helping a young man survive the awkward years between the onset of personal awareness and the time when he can take up some real personal power. Cautiously and with suitable adult aloofness, encourage him to build, occupy, and maintain his own separate shelter -- an independent homestead of his own.

 

NIHcover.jpg - 23672 Bytes

The New Independent Home


People and Houses that Harvest
the Sun, Wind, and Water
a book by Michael Potts
paper   *     8x10   *     408 pages
8 page color section + 200 illustrations:
b&w photos, graphs, charts, and diagrams
ISBN 1-890132-14-4   *     $30.00

this book at Amazon.com

    click to Table of Contents click to the previous excerpt TopB.gif - 904 Bytes click to the next excerpt click to the glossary   click for relevant Links

Michael & Sienna Potts, websters updated 25 December 2002 : 14:35 Caspar (Pacific) time
this site generated with 100% recycled electrons!
send website feedback to the Chelsea Green webster

© 1999 Michael Potts. All Rights Reserved.