Autonomy-oh-my!

I’ve had this post bubbling in me for a couple of weeks. I’ve chatted to some of you in real life about a conversation with a woman who insisted she had the definition of ‘autonomy’ (except she called it autonomative, which really annoyed me! 😉 ) and was not up for debating it. My definition of autonomy is very different.

I looked on dictionary.com for some definitions too and found these:

Main Entry: au·ton·o·my
Pronunciation: -mE
Function: noun
Inflected Form: plural -mies
1 : the quality or state of being independent, free, and self-directing
2 : independence from the organism as a whole in the capacity of a part for growth, reactivity, or responsiveness

(pleasingly there was no listing for the word autonomative – but I guess that means she gets to write her own definition if she made the word up!! 🙂 )

Now this lady was very inspiring in many ways, she is passionate, had achieved great success in giving her quite severely disabled child not just an excellent quality of life but an independance and education far far beyond what would have been expected by the medical profession at her birth. She is someone a journalise would describe as ‘a powerhouse, unstoppable and unshaken in her belief in what she is doing’. I admire her and what she has done so far and indeed what she intends achieving in the future, her approach and dreams are not all that dissimilar to what mine might have been in a different reality. She is after setting up a very small school type set up for Home Educated children to get lessons from tutors in subjects that she feels she cannot offer such as science, PE, art and language. She explained how the ‘lessons’ are to be set up with the children experiencing physics rather than being taught, nothing is written down and so on. It did sound a very interesting approach and I imagine I am not doing it justice in my re-telling anyway but I think if I knew more about approaches like Steiner and Montessori I would probably be able to equate it better to those. I am cheerfully ignorant of educational readings like these as in the same way that Gina Ford and the What To Expect books pissed me off no end when I had tiny babies in presuming to know what my baby wanted and should be doing at 7pm or 8 months old I refuse to accept that it is possible to ‘raise’ children according to someone else’s teachings or findings or studies or ideas, I don’t even want to spend time reading about educational approaches as the most I could take from them are a few ideas which already fit with stuff we’re already doing. In which case I don’t need to bother really. But this lady is, IMO, utterly surrended to her children, she lives for them, through them and I suspect that there is very little of ‘her’ left. Whatever my personal feelings on that sort of life it is something I would be incapable of doing even if I’d wanted to try.

I’d love to live my life according to the sort of proverbs on teatowels and fridge magents which explain why you shouldn’t shout at a child, why one should have endless patience blah, blah, blah. But I can’t. I’m an individual, each of my children are individuals and our family is unique so what works perfectly for us would fail horribly for others, what is perfect for one family would be our idea of hell, even methods of parenting which are splendid for one of my children are rubbish for the other and whilst Ady and I share our ideals on how we want to do things sometimes our approaches of achieving them are even different. Which is why I don’t think school works. Anyway, as usual I have veered far from my original point. So I went to write this post on autonomy and then realised from reading a few bits of my blog that I already wrote it, about 8 months ago!

I realised in reading that that it had been the starting point for where we are now and that in the main I am very happy with the way things are going. Davies is two terms into what would have been his reception year and so far I would consider Home Education a huge success for us. The hands off approach to areas such as reading, writing, maths had been proven to work for him really well, he’s learning letters and numbers and playing with the oral and written concepts of both when he needs to and because he wants to and I have total confidence that as his needs for greater understanding and ability in both grow he will meet these needs accordingly.

The one area I still feel the need to tweak and adjust slightly is my own ability to listen and react to his needs. He is sometimes resentful of my failing to get down and play with him more – this is something he will probably have to live with as I am simply not a sitting on the floor playing with children sort of person and I don’t think he is being in any way harmed by me not doing so, but I do think I sometimes miss opportunities to impart knowledge, show him a new skill, demonstrate a point in the very best way or simply follow up a question or an answer at a later point with research, books or activities. This is a combination of selfishness, busyness, abent mindedness or on occassion apathy on my part and I think better organisation of my own time and maybe conscious dedication of periods of time would ease this slightly. The more I am having real demands on my time outside of the children with my CV work etc the less justifiable it feels not to have times when I focus solely on the children. I remain pretty sure that as they pass being dependant and needy small people and become more self sufficient bigger children my overwhelming feeling will be relief that that period is over and we can get on with the far more interesting business of getting to know each other more as people and engaging in things together which we share common interests in rather than me faking passion in megabloks or 6 piece jigsaw puzzles. So, I’ve re-evaluated, like what’s happening and have a plan for continuing in a very similar vein. All good. 🙂