Hello brave friends. Welcome back to the Brave Writer

podcast. I want to keep this conversation going about boundaries and rules because I know there's a lot to tease apart there.

One of the things that I think makes all of this so tricky is we feel responsible for our children. We feel

responsible to give them a safe, emotionally well environment to grow up in. We

feel responsible for their education,

whether we educate them at home or send them to school. We feel responsible to

provide them with food and a safe place to live. And yet in the midst of all those responsibilities, we sometimes

substitute an agenda or a vision or a dream for the responsibility.

There's a difference, in other words,

between having a joyful vision of family life that includes opportunities for growth and learning and

love versus a specific vision that you feel you must protect in order to think you are successful.

The only way to have a beautiful outcome in your family

is to keep all the options on the table at all times.

To be in a continuous state of learning.

Yes, you can make a choice like I'm going to send my kids to school,

or I'm going to home educate them, or I'm going to send my kids to school, or I'm going to home educate them, or I'm going to use unschooling as my educational

model. You can make a philosophical choice, but what we want to do to back up that choice is to understand that at any moment,

if that choice no longer serves the child, we look at the other options on the table.

We don't have to be in a hurry.

We don't have to be batted about by the ups and downs of the emotions of our kids, but we do want to pay attention, right?

I'm thinking, for instance, of when there has been a sustained period of conflict between parent and child,

the temptation to double down on an ideology or a choice,

...