These are my children…
08 Jan 2010 Leave a Comment
And the reason for (most) everything I dream, desire, hope for, and work toward. The stories I’ll tell about our lives will be riotously funny, sad, informative, and searching. But I will try to tell the truth, even when it’s–ahem–embarrassing.
The first thing I’d like to define at the outset is what parenting off-the-grid means and what an on-purpose parent is and is not. First, when I refer to on-purpose parenting, I mean making parenting decisions for and and often with our children that helps them along the path to an awake, aware, contributing life on the planet. I DON’T mean parents who have made the decision to have a baby then do so. Any parent, no matter how they come into being a parent, is capable of be either an on-purpose parent or an unconscious parent or anything in between at any given moment. The idea of being an on-purpose parent is that we commit to being aware and awake ourselves, choosing courses of action as a parent with information, training, and assistance. Most importantly, it means that we allow ourselves the options of looking beyond the mainstream for answers to our parenting tasks. And that leads us off-the-grid.
Parents who make conscious decisions concerning their children frequently do not find their path in the mainstream. From birth to emancipation, on-purpose parents question the status quo and want more complete answers than our parents before us had available to them. Sometimes a mainstream answer to a parenting issue will suffice just fine. But an on-purpose parent will not take that as gospel truth just because society says so. An on-purpose parent has to know for themselves, feels compelled to ask the questions and explore different methods.
But when parents are off-the-grid, we’re also in some uncharted territory legally, psychologically, physically, developmentally, emotionally, and intellectually. This blog is a forum in which we can find our way for the good of our children, together.
