How to free your child from domestication. A Happy Hour Conversation with Craig Richardson

This week's show is with someone we're delighted to have met... Craig Richardson. Craig joins many today who are engaged in asking the question, "What does it mean to be fully and authentically human?" As an advocate of the human rewilding movement he is interested in applying this question to all areas of life, including parenting, nutrition, education, lifestyle, and spirituality. He works both professionally and informally to help individuals to move towards authentic humanity and break free from the domestication model. He and his wife have unschooled their son since birth, and as a family they are interested in camping, hiking, natural family living, fire spinning, organic cooking, ancestral skills, and being as Earth-friendly as possible.

In this show we spoke how we can make different choices about how we raise and school our children to allow them to reach their full potential as human beings. We speak about unschooling, rewilding, attachment parenting and more. And what impact this way of raising children could have on the world and the future as a whole!

What you'll learn from this episode:

• Unschooling can seem like a novel concept but really it's how we've raised children in many cultures for thousands of years.
• Socialisation when done through unschooling usually involves connecting with a far more diverse range of people than through traditional schooling. There are many different ways for our children to mix with and learn from many different people and there's resources and networks in many places, online and offline.
• Craig has seen his son has a marked openness and eagerness to learn. Learning is its own reward rather than a means to an end.
• When it comes to the conveniences we've introduced into our lives, it's worth asking if the convenience is propelling the idea of developing or diminishing my child and I as humans? Questions like: "What does it mean to communicate as a human being? What does it mean to connect with my child in a human to human way?" allows us to see ways forward that allow us to grow as human beings in our relationships with our children and others.
• Schools are starting to recognise why linking subjects contextually (e.g. how we can learn maths through learning about something from history) is useful but this is something that happens very organically in a more natural setting such as unschooling.
• Lastly, Craig talked about the openness and the acceptance of diversity that comes from raising children in this way, that makes for a future in which we're less like to get caught up in dogma and differences. When we're connected to our primal state, it's much less likely that we'll want to wreak damage on others or the planet.