A friend asked re: Attachment Parenting International’s Eight  Principles of Parenting, “I wonder what this would look like for teen years? I'm curious about the equivalent [8] principles and what they might look like? Any thoughts are appreciated.”
The API’s Eight Principles in full are here: http://www.attachmentparenting.org/principles/principles.php
In brief:

1. Prepare for pregnancy,  birth and parenting
2. Feed with love and respect
3. Respond with sensitivity
4. Use nurturing touch
5. Ensure safe sleep, physically and emotionally
6. Provide consistent and loving care
7. Practice positive discipline
8. Strive for balance in your personal and family life

So how would these apply to parents of teens? Pretty much the same with a couple of tweaks.

1. Prepare
Read books. Talk to parents who have children you like and relationships you wish for with your kids. Consult with a therapist; clear out your own baggage and run situations past a neutral third party.

2. Feed with respect and love
Hopefully, you’ve been doing this all along. Incorporate more education. Explain why what they eat is important. Educate your kids how processed food is engineered to appeal to our natural desire for fat, sugar and salt. Follow their eating rhythms. Model good food behavior yourself (have an issue there? Back to the books or therapist or self-help group for you!)

3. Respond with sensitivity.
Teens can be confused and confusing. Their behavior can cause us and them embarrassment. Perhaps they were going for glamorous, not strip club, but they are still working out the fine points.  Ask questions and don’t feel like you need to know everything. Be OK with being the structure they need to push away from.  Remember their brains are reorganizing (yes, go research that) and their bodies are morphing. They don’t know who they are any more than we do. That Martian who replaced your kid is just as startling to them. Love the beautiful being in the midst of the chaos even if you aren’t sure what’s going on in there.

4. Use nurturing touch
We don’t touch our teens enough. Our kids need to know that they can get nurturing touch (a basic need of the human body) without being in a sexual situation. One great side effect of binge watching together was the “puppy pile” on the couch; it was fine to get some mom or dad snuggle time while we wasted a snowy afternoon in front of the TV. Keep kissing your kids good night and hugging them, even if it becomes a joke.

5. Ensure safe sleep, physically and emotionally
Teen sleep patterns can be different from the rest of the family. This has a physiological basis and is one of the main objections I have to high school. Teens naturally stay up late and sleep in. Trying to wrangle their bodies into a more societally acceptable rhythm is costly to their health. There are ways to make sure your kids are in the house and unable to be on their devices after a certain time (when mom and dad need to be sleeping so they can function). Use your parental controls on those devices and let your kids read all night, write all night or craft all night, but not text and watch porn all night. Then let them sleep in.

6. Provide consistent and loving care
This is what you have always strived to do. If you’re having troubles with that, get thee to therapy.

7. Practice positive discipline
Talk it out. State what is objectionable. Ask why it happened. How can the wrong-doer make amends? How do we move forward? Wonderful learning happens when mistakes are made.

8. Strive for balance in your personal and professional life
As that old chestnut goes: children learn what they live. As parents, we need to earn the respect and admiration of our children; after the age of nine or ten they start catching on if we’re being hypocrites. Are you the kind of person you want your child to be? Again, it’s all about you, the parent. Are you taking good care of yourself? Are your needs getting met? Are you aware of places in your life where you need some help? Are your behaviors and values in line with what you are asking of your teens’ behaviors? Are you walking your talk? Are you treating your children with the same respect you ask from them?

These principles apply to teens as well as babies. We must assume that our child is asking for something important in every behavior they exhibit. If there is something amiss then we need to look to our supports for help. And, in their twenties we get to learn how to be parents to grown adults. Very exciting stuff ahead!

When you see a picture of a pride of lions lolling about on the savannah, do you think, “Wow, such lazy creatures!” Of course not. Lions are smart. They save their effort for when they really need it.

As parents we are all asking, given our child's present ages/needs/desires, how can we facilitate their growth? When my daughters were very very small, a friend of mine chastised me for not signing Maggie up for preschool. She scolded, “You are not doing your job. How will she learn how to stand in a line and sit in a circle?” I was amazed by her questions. Really? I had to pay a lot of money (that we didn’t have) and deal with carting them about and taking part in activities, just so they could learn these basic things? My kids were already involved in two unstructured playgroups that were teaching them everything they needed to know at 2 and 4.  Just like the lions, our cubs practice in their play the same skills the adults use to survive.

Because our family sees the choices we’ve made as living choices, not schooling choices, we still ask the question, but the answers have changed drastically over the past few years. After being completely independent for a couple of years, Maggie decided to go to grad school, so we supported that goal by allowing her to live with us and being generally supportive as she completed her goal. Now that she is finished and employed, we helped her move out and now we encourage her to come home to visit and do laundry. Elsa lives in Columbus, so our ways of being supportive to her look very different.

How does this relate to being lazy? I don’t believe in creating more work for myself or anyone else. Life continues to present me with difficulties I choose to endure cheerfully because I really have no choice.  I have plenty of hard work to do in addition to all of the parts of my life that full of ease. And, for me, all of my parenting choices were about finding a way to meet our goals with ease and without unnecessary effort. Breastfeeding, family bed, child-led weaning, finding families to walk with on our journey, consulting families with older kids when I felt stymied; these are all ways that I found more ease-full than more conventional choices.

We live in a world that values striving, hard work, sacrifice, suffering and deprivation. If you’re not sweating with exertion then you’re not “fulfilling your potential.” In this world it is a chore to do everything and people will exhort you with their struggles, victories and busy-ness as badges of honor. One of my brothers-in-law said that his son needed to learn early that life was hard, that’s why he and his wife put their son in a rigorous kindergarten.

It is hard enough to be a parent without inflicting more difficulty on ourselves and our children. Believe me, life will throw back-breaking challenges at you regardless of what choices you make. Illness, a child’s learning differences, job problems, housing struggles, etc. will give you and your family plenty of opportunity to practice discipline and fortitude. Hard times also help us learn about community, strength and gratitude. We don’t have to avoid difficulty, just not feel obliged to undergo additional hardship because that’s what other people are doing. Education should be every child’s birthright, but it doesn’t need to be toilsome. As a parent, I found the school lifestyle arduous (we tried it for short periods when the girls were curious). When people exclaim, “How did you do it? That sounds like so much work!” I reply, “Having them in school was much harder! How did you manage?”

Almost all homeschooling parents went to school. We need to allow ourselves to be deschooled. That feeling that this can’t possibly be enough stems from the indoctrination we all continue to receive that traditional schooling must be a good and necessary thing or we wouldn’t spend so much time and money on it. I think my kids would have some interesting things to say about their own perceptions of “having got away with something” because they didn’t invest as many years in schooling as their peers did, but they would need to speak for themselves.

So how is my lion pride? In our family I can report that none of us are perfect, but we seem to be functional (for the moment). We all require help from others at times. We all appear to be mature adults capable of holding down a job, finding friends and community, and keeping reasonably healthy habits. We all have the ability to run fast after a wildebeest if we see one that we need. And when we’re not running, we know how to rest and play. Sounds like success to me.

Written in 2007

I want to address the child who is avoidant. Elsa has assiduously avoided math. We have had many many moments of the two of us battling over this. I gave up, we hired tutors, worked with friends. Nothing has taken. But Elsa knows she must do some official math so she can get to where she wants to go in life. Next year she'll be addressing that at MCC. One could accuse her of being delayed, or us of being negligent, but I truly believe that Elsa's ability to
grasp spatial concepts is fine, she just doesn't compute well. She'll find a way to deal with this. (She seems to be doing fine with the cash register at Cold Stone Creamery.)

But Elsa's situation is different from a child who has "issues". I have seen children reluctant to take on writing because they weren't  comfortable with producing a a "less than perfect" product. This has more to do with personality than ability. Again, using Elsa as an example, despite the ridicule she has received for her abysmal (but vastly improved) spelling and grammar she has posted stories for family and friends, because she cannot stop herself from expressing
her ideas. She is compelled to write, so she doesn't care about the errors. (Sometimes they make the story more interesting!) Elsa is not shy about putting her ideas out in the world. A child who expresses that they find writing difficult or impossible may be struggling with the exposure of putting a part of themselves on paper. I know of one
child who wouldn't show her writing to friends or family, but had a large online community that she wrote very prolifically for. She needed the anonymity to feel safe expressing herself. Not because her family was unreceptive, but because of her own stuff (which she appears to have outgrown).

What I used to tell my kids when I "compelled" them to do things was "Please do this so I can feel comfortable with what we're doing about your education. This is because I need it, regardless of whether you feel the need to do it." This worked because I kept those items to a very small number and because my girls are generally pretty compliant,
even if they grumble the entire time they are complying. I do have to add that whenever I took on the demeanor of "we're having a wonderful learning moment!" my daughters ran away. They really did not like the idea of doing "fun learning activities". They really have enjoyed the times when I shared things that genuinely interested me, or that I
thought might genuinely interest them.

Written around 2006

New homeschoolers read a lot of books touting a certain kind of homeschooler: the child with a passion for music, rockets, lambs, computer games, etc. We're often told to wait and watch for our child to find their "thing" and then the high school years and college unfold easily. I've seen a lot of homeschoolers fall naturally into that pattern and it is wonderful to see them blossom in that way.

But not all people fit that pattern. Some kids reach a certain age and they realize that high school is perfect for them. Supporting our child's choices can be very challenging when they've chosen school. (And you thought you'd be challenged by hang gliding or scuba camp!)

So I guess I'd like to say that we need to know that our children won't all find a "thing" (although some of them will). They won't all be the perfect SAT taker, the musical prodigy, or the nationally ranked gymnast (although some of them will). Or, maybe their thing will be something of dubious impressiveness: a makeup artist, a soap opera writer, a mechanic. Are you prepared to honor your child's dream to become a cosmetologist? Or a juggler? Most of them will be ordinary people doing ordinary things. We're here to be sure they're doing whatever they do with joy in their hearts, without the burden of other's expectations, with a sureness of their own selves. For years that looked like playing dress-up at our house. Now it looks like two days of MCC, a part-time job, trips to the thrift store, karaoke, skiing, and making SNL spoofs called Wednesday Night Dead; all with a group of friends we've known for many years who push us to become better people, not better resumes. I know my girls will be works of progress when they are my age. They don't have to have all of the answers by 18, 25 or 45. I have great faith that they have the self-esteem and confidence to know where they want to be today and how to plan for a meaningful future as they figure out what that looks like. They are so far ahead of where I was at their age because they have some idea of who they are, not who everyone wants them to be.

As for high school: Maggie tried it for eight weeks and came home disgusted and ready for MCC. Other kids try it and love it. I found it a very valuable experience for both of my kids to explore this alien world and choose for themselves the place where they felt they functioned best.

Originally written in 2006

I would like parents to think about what it means to you to send your child to a selective college and what that means to your child (yes, even those of you with little ones; we all dream about the future). I would also like to suggest that attitudes about "appropriate" college choices are bound in family and peer culture. Bucking that culture requires a lot of work from infancy on and the college application process is a little late to try and go against the tide. Is an ivy-league destination your goal for your child? How will you feel if they either don't want that or can't achieve it? How will you handle your child's disappointment if they don't get into the school of their dreams? It wasn't long ago that homeschoolers miraculously got scholarships to elite schools because they brought "diversity" to the student body, but those days are over. Elite schools want our kids, but only after we've proven that they fit the school's mold. In an age that values standardization our square pegs must be shoved into round holes.

Perhaps if your child's peer group and/or family culture points to disappointment with anything less than a selective school, then testing and preparation appropriate to that track from an early age is called for. At my house we don't have that worry: Maggie and Elsa come from a long line of state unversity alumni who have done quite well without ivy league pedigrees, we didn't start homeschooling with an ivy league dream, and their peers haven't been ivy-bound (although a handful have gone to ivy league schools). I'm hoping that we can find the schools that will want them so that the girls are being pursued instead of being the pursuer. I'm looking forward to interviews because the openness and excitement for opportunity that comes from our kids isn't communicated in paperwork. Everyone is amazed at the level of conversation my kids engage in, but they don't have anything resembling a transcript. It would be fraud for me to try and pigeon hole what we've been doing into arbitrary classes and grades. Their MCC work will have to demonstrate their performance potential. If this means that the pool of colleges that are interested is limited, Kurt and I are OK with that. It has been worth the trade for our family, and ultimately I think my kids will agree.

Although some kids may be great test takers, I feel that in the current environment SATs and SAT IIs require lots of preparation. Maggie is taking the SAT because prior homeschoolers have found that it is required at schools she may apply to, and a lot of scholarship aid is tied to the SAT. So we are paying a tutor to help level the playing field for her. (I didn't know there were strategies for the SAT. I took two practice tests and showed up on the test day with a hangover. This was back when our farmtown teachers told us the tests were designed so that studying wouldn't give you an advantage!) I will strongly discourage Maggie from taking SAT IIs, especially if they are only required of homeschoolers.

Every college has its list of homeschooler horror stories. There is some prejudice out there that our kids are over-protected, hyper-achieving, socially delayed ultra nerds with overprotective, hovercraft, meddling, pathologically-attached moms. Let's keep those diplomat hats on and give them a different picture. Unschooling means that college choices are just one part of a long life of learning, don't let the anyone (including US News & World Report) tell you otherwise. It would be a shame to let those relatives win in the end after all those years of standing tough ("Yes, I'm certain she will use the potty/ wean/ read/ do some algebra someday.") Where our kids go to college is not our final grade as parents. Our relationship with our kids, their ability to realistically determine and satisfy their own needs, and our ability to grow beyond being homeschooling parents is my measure of success.

Written in 2002

In response to a homeschooling dad who worried that his kids were missing out because our homeschooling group didn't have "an official logo, seal, colors and mascot."

Regardless of what I say next, please note that I find your concern about your kids touching and typical of the homeschooling parent. We all want to be sure we haven't deprived our kids of anything with our choice to homeschool.

When I talk about homeschooling at work, or in social groups, or with family members, I am always careful to point out that homeschooling is not necessarily BETTER than school. You trade one set of experiences for a different set of experiences. While we could debate which of the schoolish experiences it would be fun to adapt to our situation (such as proms, clubs, government, choirs, athletics etc.) it's important to remember that we can't have all of the good stuff that goes with school and not go to school.

It may also be time to point out that while RAHA does have a logo and is compelled by its constitution to have monthly meetings, publish a newsletter, and stay on top of homeschooling political events, RAHA has been very careful to limit what the organization does and empower its members to do whatever they feel compelled to organize for their family. This has been oversimplified in the phrase: "RAHA doesn't do anything, RAHA families do EVERYTHING." What this means is that you can use the RAHA name to organize events if you find it helpful, you can use the newsletter to disseminate information, you can come to meetings to drum up support, but RAHA will not take ownership of much, and when they do it is a very slow and deliberate event.

You say that there is a "sense of isolation and extreme privacy inherent in homeschooling." That runs directly contrary to my experience. I don't know how long your family has been in RAHA, but perhaps you are recent members and your family is still discovering the many different ways to be active within the group. My family actually suffers from activity overload. There is no way we can see all of the people we want to see and do all of the things we want to do. See past issues of the newsletter for more info on how RAHA members get connected. As for privacy, I find that society at large feels that my family's educational and lifestyle choices are open for comment. What we do is right out there for all of the neighbors and relatives to see.

Now on to the issue of belonging...Yes, it is fun to feel like I belong. Where do I feel that? (Keep in mind that I am a painfully shy, rejection-fearing neurotic regardless of any appearances to the contrary, so we could ask Does Mary Joan ever feel like she belongs?) When I feel that sense of belonging it is usually at home with my family, when I am with my close friends (and after ten years in RAHA and forty years of life I have a good number of those), driving around Rochester feeling happy to be here, or when I am part of a group that openly excludes others and has chosen me. Did everybody read that last one? Read it again.

Yes, I have an adolescent streak that would delight in being part of an exclusive club that requires special clothes, hand signals, secret rites and rituals, mascots, songs, the whole clubby, my team's better than your team bit. I wore a varsity jacket in high school (that I earned, not my studly athlete boyfriend's), I went to to the prom, and (gasp) I was a cheerleader. I was part of National Honor Society and Varsity Club, both of which you had to get voted into. Were there fun things that were part of all that? Yes, but the whole notion of my group is better than your group, my team is better than your team encourages competitive behavior as well as creating (what I feel to be a false sense of) community.

I treasure that my children feel like they are part of a community, not a school, club or gang. It might be fun if someone made RAHA t-shirts, but beyond that I would use caution. When you get into mascots and colors, you're talking not only about broadcasting that you belong to something, but that others don't. I believe that many of us (me included) crave the sensation of being part of a group that is select and has chosen us, but how much of that comes from experiences that taught us we didn't belong, we didn't make the cut? It could be said that ALL families homeschool, after all.

I believe that our greatest challenge (and greatest payoff) as homeschooling parents is that we have to create our own community for our kids. We have to help them (because of logistics, interests, etc.) find their niche. A true niche doesn't need to be broadcast with cheers and jackets, it's something one feels inside of one's self when one pursues one's true nature.

But don't let what I've said stop you. As a family you have only your time and pocketbook and energy as the limits, and there may be many other homeschooling families out there who have been hoping for a similar opportunity. Have fun!