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The ADHD Fraud

How Psychiatry Makes "Patients" of Normal Children
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 Kids Are Not The Problem

Why parenting is about adults
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"ADHD is not a disorder or disease or a syndrome or chemical imbalance of the brain. It is not over-diagnosed, under-diagnosed, or mis-diagnosed. It doesn't exist in 3%, or 5%, or 10% of the population. In fact, it doesn't exist at all. It's 100% fraud."
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How The American Psychiatric Association Tried To Scam Me And What I Did About It

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Exploring the psychology of happy and successful parenting
My favourite parenting book ever

neuro-linguistic programming:
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Teenagers: Your Essential Guide to the Weird World of... Adults

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"When I teach parents how they can apply NLP to their own lives they soon see how they can influence their children in exceptional ways. If you have children then you want to ensure that they keep what's most important to any person… the freedom to choose.

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The Double Bind

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How I Parent

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Self-esteem

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A book of wisdom for parents who are already "unschooling" and for parents who are thinking about it .

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"Owning an individual mobile device with wireless broadband browsing activates handschooling for the student it belongs to.

Handschooling can happen in classrooms, on school buses, at home, in a village with no school, in a slum with no school, for children schooled at home, for girls not allowed to go to school - and in any other situation where a youngster's curiosity motivates him or her to connect to the internet to learn something."

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Unschooling
An interview with Bob Collier,
Publisher of the Parental Intelligence Newsletter

by Elizabeth Kanna of Genie U



My Story

I was born in London, England, in 1951, the second of three sons of 'working class' parents. After my dad left home when I was eight, my two brothers and I were brought up by our mother in what today would be called a single parent family, but which, in those days, was usually referred to as a 'broken home'. Generally speaking, I had a sad, lonely and painful childhood and that's all I'm going to say about it, but it obviously had a big influence on what I'm doing with my life now.

My wife Mary is from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and she and I have been married for 28 years. We've been living in Canberra, Australia, for the past five years and are now both Australian citizens. We have two children - Bronwyn, who was born in Sydney in 1985, and Patrick, who was born in 1995, while we were living in London prior to migrating to Australia for the second time. Bronnie is currently at university studying Arts and Law. Patrick is currently self-educated.

My wife has always been the career-oriented member of our partnership, and, about six or seven months after the birth of our daughter, she returned to the workforce and I became our daughter's full-time at-home parent. At the time, we were living in the English countryside and, from then until we moved to London almost eight years later, I was the only stay-at-home dad I knew of, so I was a bit of a novelty.

By the time we'd moved to the city, I didn't need to be at home all day, so I got a part-time job and later returned to the workforce full-time, becoming a traditional dad in that respect at least.

Shortly after that, our son was born. This time, when my wife needed to return to her career, I stayed in my job for 'economic reasons'. As it happened, Mary and I had jobs with substantially different work patterns, so we were able to ensure that, most of the time, at least one of us could be at home with our children. However, we did need 'childcare' for Patrick for some parts of each week, which was a new experience for us (and not one I'd care to repeat).

When Patrick was about two-and-a-half, I quit my job to become his full-time at-home parent, and I've remained a stay-at-home dad to this day.

After we came to Australia, and Patrick started school, it was time for some serious thinking about what I wanted to do next. In the end, it came down to either getting a job stacking shelves at my local supermarket or doing something for myself with all the 'success stuff' I'd been reading about for twenty years, so I took a distance learning course in 'home publishing' and, eventually, I created the Parental Intelligence newsletter with thoughts of becoming a successful internet publisher. That was in August 2002.

My newsletter was probably almost destined to be a little unusual from the outset. At the time I conceived it, although I'd been a parent for 17 years, I'd never so much as ever looked at a parenting book, never mind read one, or even a parenting magazine article. In fact, I'd always made a point of ignoring them.

I've walked a narrow path as a parent. Being a stay-at-home dad for so many years has set me apart to some degree automatically; but, more relevantly, I've always been aware that many of my views on parenting are rather at odds with the views of the majority. As a consequence of that, whilst I am a friendly, outgoing kind of person, I've seldom actively sought out the company of other parents in my role as a parent.

...

My wife is just as much an untypical parent as I am, in her own way, and, between us, we've created a lifestyle for ourselves and our children over the years that's decidedly unconventional, certainly not what our own parents would have been used to, and it seems to work for us very well indeed.

Both of our children were delivered naturally, our daughter at a birth centre, our son at home (on the very bed in which he was conceived, in fact). I was present at the birth of both of my children and our daughter, at the age of ten, was there at her brother's. Both Bronnie and Patrick were carried in a sling when they were babies. Mary breastfed both of them into their third year. They both shared their parents' bed, whenever they wanted to, until they decided otherwise.

Our children have never had any limits placed on anything they want to do. They've never had a timeout or been grounded. They've never been 'disciplined' in any way, shape or form. They've simply been allowed to live their lives.

Most of the experiences I've had as a parent have been a dramatic contrast - and infinitely more positive - than those of my own childhood and are reflected in many of the things I like to share with others through my newsletter.

I do emphasise, however, that I'm a publisher not a parenting 'expert'. I'm an 'ordinary bloke' who publishes a newsletter that happens to be about parenting, because that's what I've mostly been involved in for a long time and it's practically the only subject I know anything about. Of course, I do have an opinion - and I'm very happy to express my opinion without necessarily waiting to be asked.

When it comes to advice about specific parenting problems, however, my most likely response would probably be, "I don't know. What do you think?" For me, that's the whole point.

What we think.


Q:  You are an advocate and writer of a website for parents.  Please tell our members about your site and your passion for helping parents take charge of their children's education.   How did it all begin?

After I'd been publishing my newsletter in email form for about eighteen months, it had blown out to a pretty hefty 50-60KB of text each week that was becoming very hard work to read through, so I created the Parental Intelligence website. Initially, it was with only the improvement of my newsletter's readability in mind, but I soon found myself thinking about the development of the website in its own right. Because of time pressure, I eventually decided to change from publishing my newsletter once a week to publishing it monthly, and that's allowed me to pay more attention to the website, which has now become equally important.

My intention with my newsletter has always been to explore the vast arena of human potential and accomplishment that lies beyond everyday parenting - all those aspects of the parenting experience that, I believe, are far more important than the day to day 'mechanics'.

My special interest in education has developed since my son quit school, at the age of seven, only four months after I started publishing my newsletter.

That proved to be a time of great 'discontinuity' for me. Around the same day that Patrick finished Year 1 and left school with no intention of returning, his sister graduated from high school. As a result of that coincidence, after thirteen years of being intimately involved with school culture - from washing and ironing school uniforms to attending parent-teacher meetings, and a whole host of other activities in between - it vanished from my life, just like that.

I didn't have much choice then but to look at the world a little differently! It was most enlightening.

Having now discovered for myself what can be achieved when you combine a desire for learning with the power of 21st century information and communications technology, I've come to believe that it's vitally important for parents to be aware of and understand what's happened over just the past few years - and is continuing to happen - to everybody's day to day ability to acquire information and knowledge.

The most powerful feature of the 'ICT Revolution', of course, is the internet. The internet has changed everything.

The internet is the most phenomenal information delivery system in human history. It seems to me, however, that many parents and educationalists (and especially politicians) don't realise yet what that means.

It's certainly become my view that the ability of the internet to deliver staggeringly huge amounts of information in multi-media from all over the world directly into our homes has created an unprecedented opportunity for all parents - not just those who've already chosen 'alternative' education - to make our own decisions about what our children learn without deference to any outside 'authority'. It's also become my view that, in the fullness of time, the internet will annihilate the institutional school system as we know it anyway. Whether anybody wants that to happen or not.

Good teachers will always be good teachers and we'll always need them, but school classroom teaching vs. self-motivated cyberlearning is already donkey vs. jet plane, and dumping a laptop on every pupil's desk won't change that. Creating 'better' schools won't change it.

Educational efficiency is the name of the game in today's complex and fast-paced society, and how many schools will be able to compete?

It's my prediction that private enterprise will ultimately take over the 'education industry' lock, stock and barrel, for the simple reason that there are now fortunes to be made in delivering to parents, via the internet, what the traditional school system can't - a 21st century education for our children.

But, as always, I can only describe what I can see from where I'm standing, so who knows?

I hope to be bringing my readers good ideas, expert opinions and cutting edge news about the exciting changes in the world of education as events unfold!


Q: Thinking of children in all types of educational settings (public, private, parochial and homeschool), how would you suggest parents protect their child's genius, even when they themselves may not have been raised to recognize their own genius?

It will be fascinating to discover how many different educational settings there are, say, ten years from now. As many as there are TV channels, I would suggest.

But, regardless of that, it seems to me that there's only ever one fundamental way of protecting our children's genius. We have to believe in it sufficiently to get out of its way, stay out of its way and keep other people out of its way.

Not everybody, I know, believes that all children are born with genius. Unfortunately, many of them seem to have rather too much to do with our children's education. I also read of parents who say that they hope their child will "become a genius" or that their child will "never be a genius", as if it's something to be attained from the outside. They've got the whole thing the wrong way around. Genius is something that's already there on the inside, waiting to be developed.

With most children, however, it never is. It's smothered - often very quickly - by often well-meaning adults who have forgotten their own and can only imagine that they're being 'realistic' in their limited expectations. And, of course, they pass on their negative beliefs to the children who will pass them on to other children in time.

One of my favourite movies is Billy Elliot. It's about an 11-year-old boy living in north-east England in the mid-1980s. Billy's mother is dead and he lives with his father and older brother, who are both coal miners. The story is set during the national coal miner's strike that lasted for over a year and during which time mining families struggled to put food on the table.

Billy's dad, however, finds the money to send him to weekly boxing lessons at the local village hall, to 'make a man out of him'. When a ballet class starts up in an adjacent room, Billy becomes intrigued and eventually joins the class and falls in love with the dancing. He has to keep this a secret from his family, of course.

When his father and brother discover that he's been squandering his boxing money on a less than manly pursuit, Billy comes in for a very unhappy time indeed. Until, one day, his father unexpectedly walks in while he's practicing one of his ballet routines and suddenly realises that his son has a genuine talent that it would be a crime to waste.

From that moment on, he does whatever he can to help Billy develop that talent, and the movie ends with a 'flash forward' to many years later, with Billy's father and brother in the audience when Billy makes his debut in London as the leading dancer for the Royal Ballet.

Billy Elliot himself is the central character in the movie, but, for me, his dad is the real hero of the story. Billy had the courage to follow his dream; his dad had the courage to act against everything he previously believed in. That's a much tougher thing to do.

Sometimes, though, that's what we have to do; but there is a better way. As Mahatma Ghandi once famously said, we must be the change we wish to see in the world.

We can help our children become all that they can be by working on becoming all that we can be.

With my own parenting, I was very fortunate to realise from the beginning, when my daughter was born, that, if I wanted her to be confident, I had to be confident myself; I had to be friendly if I wanted her to be friendly, creative if I wanted her to be creative, and so on.

As somebody who was once a timid and anxious person who failed at just about everything, I now know from my own experience how amazing it can be when we pay attention to developing in ourselves those qualities we wish our children to develop. It adds to everybody's life.

Those 'qualities of success' that we can learn to develop have always been there inside us, of course. We were born with genius, too!



Copyright © 2004, Bob Collier







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