Future authoring
Happy New Year to one and all! To those that saw in 2025 with the bells, let me take my hat off to you. We didn’t quite make it this year – preferring instead the warmth of our beds.
Resolutions
But I do find that the new year calls for a time of reflection, looking back on the year we’ve had, and looking ahead to our hopes and intentions. I am always tempted by the allure of resolution making, but usually after only a week, and then again a month later, I find that I haven’t even begun with my new rules for life.
Future authoring
I prefer instead future authoring. I learned about future authoring through Jordan Peterson’s YouTube content.
It is more gentle, and slow, than resolutions, which rely on one single dramatic change, or a series of changes to suddenly revolutionise an entire life.
Everything is slow with me, but then, when it comes to change, for once this could be an advantage. High flying resolutions never even start. Future authoring relies on very small steps, shuffles even. I imagine, and write, my worst case scenario for my life in a year’s time, and my best case scenario for my life in a year’s time. It’s not just my life, because at this stage my planning stands for the lives of my whole family. My authoring includes worst and best case scenarios for my children too.
Imagine in 5 years…
After this I complete the same exercise looking ahead to 5 years in time. I find this approach helps me to be more realistic about my relationships, those worth persevering in, and those that ultimately don’t bring us forwards in who I hope to be. Future authoring also helps me to bring to my consciousness my hopes and aspirations, and how they may affect me or others around me.
How it impacts me
I have found over time that if anything that doesn’t contribute to my chosen trajectory I can choose not to shuffle in that direction. Anything that is supporting my longterm hopes is a step I’m willing to take. Future authoring rather than resolutions, is like physio, rather than painkillers – it’s not a quick fix – I’m still vulnerable to enormous amounts of time procrastinating. But it is a posture change. I have found this method to have made huge differences in my life. It helps to draw my awareness of what and who I value, and to choose to prioritise these people and dreams.
Dramatic changes
Future authoring seems very subtle and slow, but I find myself in a completely different place from where I have been previously. Very gradually, dramatic changes have taken place. I am now pretty much tee total for a year, (except Christmas week!) I was able to make decisions such as full time homeschooling. I prioritised my contribution playing piano at church. And I have navigated relationships by standing my ground and simply facing the direction I hoped to go. There have been long periods of simply standing and waiting, until I have felt able to take a single step.
Jordan Peterson has described this similar approach to tasks such as exercise, or tidying. When the goal ahead seems so unattainable, making a 5 minute change once a week is still a step in the right direction.
Changes last year
This year I look back on 2024 where we made enormous changes in our lives. We changed our entire life style, and chose to homeschool our 3 boys full time. Actually, we have faced in this direction for a long time. But finally, last April we took the step – a step which was something of a border crossing, or boarding a ship, and we left institutional schooling behind us. When I look back to my future authoring journal of last year, I can easily see how we ended up making this decision. It was in line with my priorities.
What makes good education
When I started writing my blog, I originally thought it would be to encourage others who, like myself, struggled with this hair raising decision to step outside the circle of society. But the process of writing reveals a lot of what I wouldn’t have known was the centre point. The blog still is for community and encouragement. But like future authoring, it is a voyage of discovery. I find myself constantly seeking out what makes for good education. And more significantly, what makes for good child raising.
I write from the perspective of a mother with neurodiverse children, though I prefer not to use this as some sort of excuse or to create allowances. Rather the knowledge provides a better understanding of how we can function within our parameters, and also how to shed the anxiety that we experience in this generation.
School education
I am finding increasingly that in education and child care are one and all. So I find myself asking, why are schools so behind on what scientists have long known is best for children? What might actually be best for children’s education? How can I replicate this for my children?
How long will schools shy from their responsibility of raising the children, aka connecting with the children, limiting screen time and setting behavioural boundaries?
(These are two recent blog posts I wrote about the importance of prioritising morality in education, and protecting children’s right to their innocence and childhood.) https://thereisnoshouldbe.com/religious-and-moral-studies-in-education/
https://thereisnoshouldbe.com/innocence-and-for-their-childhood/
I find that while homeschool is a valid and exceptional choice (I’ve no intention on going back) institutionalised schools are also vital for our society and economy.
New Term. New timetable
Future authoring is a useful tool for collecting information for creating a new timetable. I find it can absorb fine detailed specifics, as well as a general sense of things.
Over time I have collated new (to me) ideas for educational approach, and some sort of understanding of the task in hand. And now, with a new term, and after a deep breath, I need to start baking them into our new schedule as we embark upon a new term.
Previously in place I had:
– The curriculum that we have been using to allow our children to take control of their own learning.
– We have the daily tasks, such as animal care and walking the dogs.
– We have weekly extra curricular and tuition already drawn into the timetable.
All that energy
But everything I’ve found out about good education is pointing to creative and pragmatic learning, free play and outdoor time.
The priority has to be outdoor play first, to get the buzz out of those little legs. This blog post: https://www.maggiedent.com/blog/5-tricky-times-in-boyhood-that-every-parent-needs-to-understand/ talks about the insatiable energy of young boys. We can’t call our little boys naughty if we won’t let them run their socks off, exploring and discovering the world around them.
In Smart Moves, by Carla Hannaford, she describes the growth of the brain in connection with children touching and experiencing through their many sensory receptors. She describes the growth of neural pathways in an experiment on rats, where brain cells are able to develop after voluntary exercise in the running wheel (lateral movement). She also noted that development of these cells diminished with the same movement made compulsory.
We can benefit our children and their development when we allow them time outside to experience and explore. A recurring theme in Hannaford’s book is the healing that can take place in the brain when it is allowed to relax through movement, and to connect with the senses. Voluntary play, outside and in daylight is now to be first in the day, before we start our indoor learning.
Educational direction
Next, we need to adjust our entry into academic learning. This must be adult led, (controversial I know) in our house. There is ample time for individual interests and self initiated learning later in the day. But I feel personally that we would stall very quickly if we gave the children freedom of choice in their academic studies.
However, that is not to say that the academic studies must be the traditional analytical learning of reading, writing and arithmetic. At all. These skills can be accessed by book orientated, creative skills, pen to paper, discussion led learning. Reading together, looking through a book to access a topic, with room for emotional, pragmatic, imaginative, empathetic response, seems a good entry into the rest of the academic morning. Perhaps even a future authoring series would be helpful for the children. Creative writing from the perspective of whatever topic or character we’re learning about is a helpful way to encourage children into another person’s shoes, or to understand a principle more fully. The facts become the mortar rather than the bricks.
The Charlotte Mason approach does not seem to cram as much information as possible into the young developing mind. This is something I hope to learn about further, and to learn more about ‘living books’.
Free afternoon
For the younger children it seems to me that we have the rest of the day after lunch to discover and explore further. Perhaps we spend some time with our Shetland pony, perhaps we do some baking, or go biking or skate boarding. Gardening, music, crafting, an art class and German stories are more skills that we enjoy in our house.
This list may seem random, but new and various experiences are good for stimulating the brain. There are often going to be cross references with various activities. Games, baking and maths is an obvious one, as is mechanics and engineering. Fairy tales, gardening and languages can also gladly interweave.
Delayed gratification
Additionally, Carla Hannaford in her book Smart Moves writes about the importance of partaking in tasks that don’t offer instant gratification. This is also in the context of countering screen time for children. Of course, gardening requires a lot of patience, and is a highly rewarding example of delayed gratification. Learning an instrument or a language, or even playing a game, is a very gradual process, and very character building in the process.
Perhaps with the children writing their future authoring might help to navigate and guide some of these afternoon plans.
Nurturing our walk in faith
But there is one more topic that I haven’t explored nearly as much as I’d have liked, and this is the bible, the gospels and missionaries that have made remarkable impact in our world. I think it is precious to continue the tradition of teaching our young children the importance of ourselves as spiritual beings in a spiritual world, where we can view lessons through stories and perspectives. Jesus’ parables, and Genesis and Exodus in the bible are all part of what I hope to forge into our day throughout the term ahead.
‘High school’ afternoons
The oldest child perhaps has scope for more formal learning, but the question is, would it benefit him? Perhaps it would. Perhaps he will learn more, and by this I include problem solving skills and creative thinking, if we continue to allow scope for off piste learning. I will be curious to discover how afternoons with our ‘high school’ boy go this term.
Future authoring
I have got my future authoring started in my head, but for me, so much of it is a prayer. My hopes and dreams for myself and my children will be laid out in due course. I will imagine them and draw them up. I will write the pieces I hope to learn on the piano this year. I’ll specify the songs I hope to write. I’ll set a hope to run or cycle so far or for so long with the help of my physio exercises. But the relationships and my intentions are a prayer. I don’t just draw them for myself, I draw them up as a prayer.