Here is a highly insightful and progressive parenting and un-schooling book from the author of "Chess-parenting!" (read the 5 star review from one of the top US educationalists on Amazon!)
The way we parent our children is based on yesterday's cultural perceptions, on the ownership-model of 'having' children, on our own narrow agendas, and on what we and our culture arbitrarily think is best. We do not really respect our children or their own personal path, and at school we suppress their intuition and their instincts as worthless, while programming their minds with yesterday's beliefs that cannot possibly bring out their full potential. School also introduces kids to a distorted and disjointed version of reality, where there is no adventure, no self-determination, no insight, no motivation and no freedom, while kids are trained to sit still and obey and copy. Schools promote a 2-sense learning, where only hearing and looking are used at all, and poorly at that! Only a 6-sense learning, and learning through the body, can develop the child's full potential.
Travel offers an effective alternative to educational boredom and allows kids to learn under their own steam, in their own way, so they are always motivated to reach for their true potential, while living a real-life adventure! The senses of touch, taste, smell, and intuition are used for learning, and it is not only the brain but the entire body that is used!
Apart from giving medical and practical advice, this book offers a look at the shortcomings of Western societies and suggests an entirely novel approach to raising children, based on values and attitudes that need to be cultivated and that are today systematically ignored. Teenage-problems are explained as not purely hormonal or unpredictable, but as mostly cultural, and widely caused by parents and society and the way we rule our children!
'Travel-parenting' takes a hard look at modern society and the parenting of our time, while pointing at age-old working solutions. It challenges parents to look in the mirror, to grow up, and to take responsibility. While it draws mostly from a solo-dad's experience in raising two daughters, it ends with the story of finding a long-lost son and guiding him on a path of initiation into manhood, where the key is again respect, and the door to be opened - freedom!
Fritz Blackburn, born in Augsburg, Germany, studied law and economics before he traveled the world on a shoe-string and lived in remote cultures. He learned about mind development from Mexican shamans like Maria Sabina and employs techniques that cultivate the human potential. He taught yoga in the Philippines where he ran his own school on Boracay Island. He settled in New Zealand, worked as a holistic healer and continued travel with his two daughters. He wrote parenting books, on philosophy and cosmology and a work on ethnic feminism.
Today, he lives with his Filipina wife, Ikay, in Kerikeri, NZ, on a forested property full of wildlife and natural beauty.