With some kids, it IS too much to ask! If it's not too much for your kids, okay. But it's super important to acknowledge that Some Kids Need More - more time, more patience, more support, more silence, more explanation, more space, more options. And some kids Come with more - more energy, more sensitivity, more Big Feelings, more words, more curiosity, more creativity, more focus, more will. And our kids who need more and come with more need a different approach than "everyone needs to pitch in, and it's not too much to ask".
This is one of the hard things to convey about unschooling - and hard to acknowledge as a parent - that some kids aren't going to fit the cheerful "we're all a team here" model in the way other parents seem to be forever promoting it. Some of us don't get that life, no matter what kind of supersonic parenting wizards we may be, because those aren't our kids
Some of us have spent an hour trying to coax a child out from under a piece of furniture where we can't reach them, or trying to talk a child down from a tree, or hunting through the mall or neighborhood when our kid ran off, or sitting in the middle of a friend's driveway, holding a shrieking, kicking child to keep them from running into the woods, with the sun going down, because they could not bear for the day to end. And for those of us with kids like that, it's vital to realize that parenting itself is going to be different from what "everyone else" does, even the other unschoolers, and the nice mommies with the cooperative darlings will just have to go blow, because they don't have a clue about our reality. Having higher needs, higher intensity kids Isn't A Sign of Bad Parenting! I want to shout that from the rooftops and plaster it on billboards.
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