I’ve started calling my parenting style Parenting With Abandon.

Parenting with abandon means taking all the worry and anxiety and stress and control and fear about parenting and throwing it into the wind. Just saying, “fuck it” and running unabashedly towards a life of joy and connection instead.

Sound crazy?

Sound unattainable?

That’s why I invented a name for it!

During a conflict with your child try this thought on for size:

“What my child wants right now is just as important as what I want right now.”

How much resistance do you feel to this idea? What kinds of thoughts does it bring up for you?

As the adult in the relationship your wants and goals are important. You’re keeping your child fed, clean, sheltered, safe, and educated.

As the child in the relationship your kid has some pretty big wants and goals, too. They’re constantly learning and exploring, and figuring out big things like autonomy and the mores of their culture.

I keep seeing it: TOP 100 Tweets About Parenting This Week. I read them, and they are hilarious!

But there’s always this tickle of doubt in my mind.

If I knew that these parents were truly, deeply respectful of their kids day in and day out…

…And I knew that their tweets only reached the minds of other people who truly, deeply cared about kids…

…Then I could laugh along with them. It’s ok to be exasperated at people you love and to make hyperbolic jabs in good fun as long as it takes place in the context of a healthy, respectful relationship.

But I know good and well that most parents don’t respect their kids much at all, and most of their audience doesn’t either.

I have a dream of hosting a skill share camping event here at The Wallow.

I’ve always been interested in primitive skills festivals, but they are so expensive! This dream started by thinking about how to make one affordable to everyone, and step one is holding it on my own land. I could host at least 50 campers here.

Primitive skills include things like fire making, foraging for wild food and medicinal plants, and creating and using stone tools. I imagine my event including primitive skills, but also a wide collection of practical and philosophical skills relevant to living right now in an uncertain world.

There we were hanging out with our forest playgroup at a new urban wilderness playground. My son was alternating between begging me to leave and hitting other kids.

Then I called him a butt, and his face fell in hurt and disappointment.

How did we end up here? There has got to be an explanation for how this went so wrong!

Let’s back up.