I’d like to say a few things about parenting children. I have three kids, and my fourth grand child will be born anytime now.
My youngest child is 24. She was born in a tipi, and lived her first year and a half in a tipi, including 35 below zero when she was about three months old. She grew up with no electricity or running water till she was 16 when we did get the power turned on but never had running water till she moved out on her own. She grew up living in seasonal camps while I tree planted or picked fruit. She rode horses, could chop wood, start fires, all when she was very young. Her older brother and sister lived the same way but didn’t come to live with me till they were 4 and 6 years old so they started out in a more conventional scene.
When they all were younger they were pretty well adapted to our lifestyle. as they got older and became more interested in what other kids were doing, things changed. They had a hard time sorting out why we had to live like we did when everybody else seemed to have all this really cool stuff. Even though we lived in a area that was very poor economically, even the mainstream people were just scraping by and our neigborhood had quite a few families doing the same kind of thing as us. The kids had no ideology that they were trying to live out, they were just stuck with us and had to live in whatever situation we provided for them.
As they got older it got harder and harder for them to come to terms with things. Imagine if you had a choice between playing chinese checkers with your friends or playing some totally sensory stimulating high intensity video game. What would you choose when you were 13 and had to live with your loser bush hippie parents with no electricity and an outhouse?
A lot of times I would wish I could just live in isolation so they would not have those evil outside influences and I could control who they hung out with. I wanted them to only hang out with the kids of other people like us.
We home schooled and had a pretty good set up with other families in the neighborhood. Then one year all the kids in the neighborhood got together and demanded to go to public school. It was like a revolt. Once they started in public school they were no longer isolated with only other hippie kids and we lost all control over who they were friends with and spent time with.
Now they were hanging out with all kind of kids from Jehovah’s Witnesses to kids who had all kinds of video games and Gangster rap and you name it.
Even though we would have wished for control there was no way and trying to hold on to control would have been stupid. They would have hated us. We did however continue to live the way we felt we needed to live to be true to ourselves. We did our best to allow them to explore the mainstream world without compromising our own values.
The modern world held so much fascination for our son that by the time he was 15 he was spending more and more time in town and sometimes wouldn’t come home for a week or more. By the time he was 17 he was all but gone. He had to go wild in his own way through drugs, alcohol, violence and crime. He is now 31, he started turning his life around when he was about 25. He now says that he’s thankful for the way he grew up and how we allowed him to go his own way but never caved in on our own values. And that the most important thing we gave him was the feeling of security in our unconditional love.
My youngest daughter who I mentined earlier moved to Calgary ( a city of about a million people) when she had just turned 18. People had told us when the kids were growing up that we were handicapping them by not providing them with a modern lifestyle. They would not be able to deal with the outside world and we were being neglectful and borderline abusive by being such radical hippie zealots. When I took my daughter to Calgary and drove home I thought they had been right and that she was in no way prepared for life there. My hope was that she’d realize it and be back home in a month or so. Seven years later she is still there and is an office manager in some big skyscraper office building in downtown Calgary. She just has a highschool diploma. The skills she got from growing up the way she did have nothing to do with the modern world but they are foundational skills. She knows how to figure things out, she knows how to learn. She knows she can do whatever she decides she wants to do.
She didn’t have a tv or a computer when she grew up, she was training horses that had never been ridden when she was 13.
None of our kids have chosen to live like us. They all say they are thankful for growing up the way they did and have learned about unconditional love and values from us.
You can’t brainwash your kids into adopting your values or ideals. You can’t be attached to them believing in the same things that you believe in. From a kids perspective a simple life will never be able to compete with all that modern society has to offer. All you can do is give them an example and a foundation.
I became the father of two kids when I was 24 and we had a third when I was 25. Up until then my ambition in life was to be a hobo which I had already been doing for a few years. I had very little to offer. Looking back from my current perspective I can see that the thing I could offer was the security of them knowing that whatever happened I was there for them and loved them. IMO that is the best thing a parent can give their kids.
I’ve known a lot of addicts in my life and one of the things I’ve seen that separates those who can recover and those who seem forever lost is the knowlege that life can be different. That’s what my son had that helped him turn his life around. So my kids are all in the city living pretty conventional mainstream lives now. That’s something they have to do, but they know there is another way if they want it or need it.
