Travel-parenting

The way we parent our children is based on yesterday’s cultural perceptions, on the ownership-model of ‘having’ children, on our own agendas, and on what we and our culture arbitrarily think is best. We do not 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.
Travel offers an effective alternative to such 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!
‘Travel-parenting’ offers globetrotter tips and psychological insights based on a life-time of shoestring-travel and on raising two daughters in culturally diverse situations and within tribal societies. It gives insights into the effects of the consumer-world and its soulless technology on children; it questions our modern concepts for parenting and points at a severe lack of mind-development in our kids by comparing the growing incompetence of Western kids with ideal conditions and with tribal children who determine their own learning.
Apart from giving medical and practical advice, this book takes 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!
As far as parenting books go, this is not about attachment or non-attachment, laissez-faire or helicopter or any of those artificial perspectives. It is rather about parental humility and the letting go of arrogance. Travel or not, we need an entirely new structure to parenting, based on values and attitudes, and a respect for children that is sorely lacking in all conventional and in all recent approaches.
For a child to learn not only accepted facts, but to think for herself and to be emotionally and spiritually competent, more is needed than conceptual programming! A child needs to feel freedom to know it, feel respect to give it, and feel personally responsible to walk her own path!
Children could be much more than mere receivers of our redundant, non-working ideas, and more than obese, desk-warming copy-cats! They need to learn from real life, in real ways, not just repeat what they are told by their own society!
When fully under their own steam as travelers, children can become heroes! They can invent their own action movie and their own fairy-tale, and experience themselves as valuable and competent members of various groups rather than as purely obedient! Parent and child become a team where everybody learns, not just the child!
‘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 into 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.