The criticism sometimes levelled at TCS parents, that they must be doormats, is in terms of education actually more appropriate when applied to conventional parents.

It would be nice to be able to be perfect. Unfortunately, we're human, and we have to do the best we can now, not wait.

Why freedom in the matter of academic study is inseparable from freedom in the matter of chores, bedtime and everything else.

In a discussion about keeping your house clean without keeping your kids in cages, Rowina wrote about what a difficult issue cleaning has been for her:

I want to keep the house clean, but at eleven or midnight, I don't want to clean it. And when I say want, I mean really, REALLY want to, to the point of being anxious if I do something else (computer, bed) instead of cleaning. It has taken me months to get a point where I can even begin to consider the dilemma rationally. And it is precisely this that motivates me--I do NOT want my kids to feel this way about cleaning! Or anything! EVER!

The article on the old TCS website ( www.tcs.ac ) about cleaning really helped me change my perspective.

Feeling ghastly about housework is horribly common, and wanting not to cause your children to grow up having the same conflicts is a commendable start. I hope that anyone in this situation will be able to move beyond that to replace the horrible intractable conflicts, anxiety and self-sacrifice with the peace of actually solving these problems. As one who has been there and come out the other side, thanks to insights gleaned from fellow TCS folks, I have a lot to say about this, so lookout for another article on this soon. In the meantime, here is the piece Rowina found helpful. It is by Starlene Stewart, and was originally posted on the TCS List on Sun, 3 Jan 1999 13:37:20 -0800.

Kristel Nybondas

Thanks to TCS in my everyday life....

....I have noticed that I have changed my mind about a lot of small practical every day things that used to bother me and made my life more complicated, even before the children. This has not happened only by thinking about them, but by doing things differently and after that realising that I've been extremely inflexible about how I view myself(and through that, others at times). I might still prefer certain things and I'm perfectly free to do as I wish but there is no self sacrifice in helping children do similar things differently.

Once I realised this I also realised that I hadn't been self sacrificing at all, in certain areas. Nor did I defer. This hasn't diminished “the practical doings”, BUT emotionally I feel completely different. Help feels like helping and not like a stress.

Change can be extremely good. That was one of my fears throughout my life. This fear of doing things/beginning to think differently caused a lot of mental pain for me. I even used to think that I was a very flexible person, and partly I was, otoh, not at all. I used to actively NOT think at all about painful issues, leading to big emotional outbursts at some point instead. Outbursts that never helped, because it hurt so much that I only endured and then pushed the subject away again in my mind, when I was exhausted enough. No growth happened. No new knowledge. Just going in circles.

The idea of little tyrants leading our lives is deeply entrenched I think. If we live by that attitude it affects them. It's a statement of mistrust and not supportive of the capabilities children have. I don't think certain expectations automatically lead to certain outcomes, but I do think that a negative assumption about where the line between self sacrifice and helping goes, actually creates more self sacrifice in the mind of the person thinking about it.

I think the most difficult thing about all of this is to know oneself, and realising what kind of things are good things to do in order to help children(and oneself) grow knowledge.

It might be that some things one thought were perfectly fine wasn't that at all, that the self sacrifice was completely elsewhere, and vice versa. One might end up actually doing and thinking in ways that are very surprising if one does the, imo, mistake of comparing things too much, with other people, but also with our past self.