A woman has been slammed after describing her unusual approach to homeschooling – as she admitted to teaching her two young kids without a curriculum and instead letting their interests guide what they learn. An influencer known as Mami Onami, who sports a tattoo of the word ‘gentleness’ across her forehead, took to TikTok to publicize her chosen method of education – known as ‘free-schooling’ or ‘unschooling’ – for her six-year-old son and three-year-old daughter. ‘So we don’t teach our children anything’, said spiritual influencer Mami, who is also currently pregnant with her third kid. ‘Everything that they learn is in response to either their interests or their questions.’ ‘We have no curriculum, we have no school hours,’ Mami, who was born into the notorious doomsday cult The Children of God, elaborated. ‘We really just respond whenever they want to know something and do our best to make sure they really get it.’ She admitted that her ‘big fear’ about the strategy was that ‘they would never be interested in things like reading and writing and math.’ When it came to the progress of her six-year-old son, she continued, ‘it took some patience and not comparing myself to other moms.’ ‘But this is his book. Look at this!’ Mami then took out a small notebook, and pointed out where her son had attempted to write out different words. ‘Lamp. Egg. Jar. Lion,’ she declared, flipping through the almost otherwise entirely blank notebook. ‘This is him doing this by himself! Copying down words from other places, asking us more,’ she declared with pride. By most standards, six-year-old children should be able to recognize and spell words and begin writing simple sentences ‘consisting of a subject and a verb,’ according to Mighty Writer. Between six and seven years old, kids should progress to the point where they are able to ‘write a page or more about personal experiences and what they’re learning in school,’ per Understood.org. Mami then added that her son was also quizzing her about mathematical problems. ‘Same with addition. “Mom, what is seven plus five?” It will come at the right time,’ she assured. She then launched into her rationale for the approach, explaining: ‘If you do not like this idea of sending your kids away for 40 hours a week and then wondering why they have no energy to do anything else, if you are not into your kids conforming, trust that you can follow their interests. ‘And they will learn everything they need to learn. Not what other people need them to learn! ‘You’re welcome!’ she concluded. Thousands flooded the comment section of the TikTok, the vast majority deeply unsettled at Mami’s teaching ideology. ‘This is such a disservice to the child holy hell… he should be further than this at six…’ one wrote. ‘You’re crippling your children. It’s fine if you want to keep them ignorant and at home forever. Personally, I want better for my kids’, a second added. ‘Man that’s impressive! Imagine what he’d be capable of if he was given the opportunity of being taught by professionals!’ a third snarked. ‘This is how my son wrote at three,’ another scoffed. ‘Homeschooler as well. This is quite behind for a six-year-old,’ worried a fifth. Someone else claiming to have subjected to insufficient homeschooling as a child exclaimed in anger: ‘My parents ruined my life doing this. RUINED it. I have never been able to catch up. I will never be able to live the life I wanted to.’ In subsequent responses, the same woman admitted that now, as an adult, she wasn’t able to help her own third-grader with math homework. However, it appeared that Mami was unbothered by the hate, not to mention undeterred in her convictions. In a later TikTok, she claimed to have just been ‘added to a mastermind’ of people making $250,000 or more annually. She claimed that, while conversing with others in the secret, unnamed group that’s supposedly made up of ‘everybody making a lot of money on terms they really like,’ she discovered that ‘all of the parents’ were also ‘unschooling’ their kids. Brushing off the criticisms from commenters, she shot back: ‘This is so validating for me, because I wanna take life, education, parenting advice, from people who have actually succeeded. ‘And nobody that’s experiencing actual success has the time to be a comment troll,’ she sneered.
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