You’re familiar with the phrase, practice what you preach? Well, I tend to invert that for myself. I’d rather only talk about what I’m already practicing or attempting to practice (whether good or bad). That way I can speak with some amount of relevance and experience about what I’m saying. Oftentimes when we say practice what you preach, it’s a reminder to folks that there’s a misalignment between words and actions. It’s much simpler when we remember that usually we can only lead others as far as we have gone ourselves. Transformed people, transform people right?

I was reminded of this on Sunday when we had a few families over to the house for brunch. These are new families whose children attend our school together. Like most parents new to the model of self-directed learning they had questions and concerns. Me being my eager self, I wanted to first tell them all (my) answers, but instead I choose to listen first as they shared what was coming up for them. Questions like, but how do we know if they’re “on track” or not? Or frustrations about the lack of clear communication or guidance were all familiar. Finally they got around to asking… so how do you all deal with it? How do you manage to be so hands off? Well, to answer that question we had to go backwards a little.  

Samantha and I have been preaching the gospel of conscious living for a while now, and to be fair it’s felt more like a progression rather than an abrupt shift in how we live, parent, work and play. For us it began with a slow recognition of a life too hurried and overwhelmed. We were simply doing the most, and that wasn’t necessarily a good or bad thing, it just wasn’t what we wanted to do anymore. After I ran for office we took a long trip away to the mountains and I can remember thinking, we can’t maintain this pace for much longer.  

And so, during the pandemic when the whole world was struggling to shut down and reopen, we were recalibrating. We started new habits, centered around practices that allowed us to create relational margin and be present. We turned our backyard into spaces where we could play and enjoy the outdoors, and so began the early years of fire-pit nights and treehouse days. We bought bikes and became that family known for riding through the neighborhood. We started taking road trips, a book club, family dinners, movie nights, date nights, and figured out how to live on less. We were trying to remake our way of living. 

Since much of our time is spent working, eventually even that had to change to realign to the way we wanted to live our lives. We could feel the tension growing, professionally, emotionally, even in our bodies. My wife and I were both raised to hustle, taught that we have to work twice as hard to get half as much while dealing with the obstacles of race and for Samantha gender. That ultimately takes a toll on your mental and physical health. We both found ourselves, either by choice or by circumstance working for ourselves and we haven’t looked back. What an amazing thing to be able to model for the girls, what it means to do what you love on your own terms. So many people hate their jobs (I know a lot of them!). We get to wake up each morning and do work that we love, and our daughters know that and hear about it and that makes them want to pursue work they love. 

It’s a generational legacy that we’d accomplished so much given where we started. But we knew we wanted to create a different legacy for our children, one where they learned to embrace the journey just as much as the destination. The truth is, the path for them will be different than ours, so we wanted to provide them with a few tools and experiences that we lacked until later in life. 

That’s why we made at the time one of our more difficult decisions, to pull them out of a public school that we love (and I’m still actively involved with), and set them on a path of self-directed learning. Reading Dr. Akila Richard’s book, Raising Free People, about the journey of a black family raising black girls (right up my alley), and their desire to liberate their daughters from the tyranny of compliance based education, changed my educational world view. I’d already been moving in that direction as an educator and practitioner, but this shift gave us an opportunity to test the model out for ourselves. We had our own unlearning to do as parents, but most of that we’d been working on throughout the pandemic. We had to relinquish our desire to control outcomes, and learn new ways of supporting our kids to be successful. It’s not been easy (it’s actually pretty hard to actively see your child fail at something without intervening to save them), but the growth is undeniable. What’s cool is that we get to be partners with them in that growth while the stakes are still low.  

To answer then the question of how have we managed to be so “hands off” with the girls in this self-directed learning, we had to be honest about the journey to getting here. We also acknowledged that this isn’t a journey that everyone decides to take, and that’s ok too. I just hope that as parents we can learn to be honest with ourselves about the choices we’re making, and why we’re making them. Because ultimately, it’s the children who are watching us most closely, and make no mistake about it, they care more about what we practice than what we preach. 

SDW3