Pam Laricchia's Blog, page 5

EU360: What’s So Magical About Age 18?

What’s so magical about age 18?

Pam, Anna, Erika, and our guest Erin dig into the transition from childhood to adulthood and what it means for our unschooled kids. It’s common for parents to bump up against some cultural beliefs about this phase of life and inadvertently put expectations on young adults. Strangers, friends, and family also all seem to be interested in the choices that our kids are making at this age! When we become aware of all of this messaging and remember that people are all different and unique, we can create a supportive environment for our young adult children to follow their own path.

Erin is an unschooling mom with four children over 18 and member of the Living Joyfully Network. She was previously on the podcast in episode 285, which you can check out if you’d like to hear more about her story. And check out her website, everlearning.ca.

We’re so glad that she was able to join us for this discussion and we hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey!

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, coaching calls, and more!

The Living Joyfully Network

EU285: Unschooling Stories with Erin

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

Follow @helloerikaellis on Instagram.

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling.

Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. This month, we’re talking about Building Community. Come and be part of the conversation!

So much of what we talk about on this podcast and in the Living Joyfully Network isn’t actually about unschooling. It’s about life. On The Living Joyfully Podcast, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia talk about life, relationships, and parenting. You can check out the archive here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hello! I’m Pam Laricchia from Living Joyfully and today I’m joined by my co-hosts, Anna Brown and Erika Ellis and our wonderful guest, Erin. Hello, everyone!

So, Erin has been on the podcast before, back in episode 285, so please check that episode out to hear more details about her unschooling journey. But today, she’s joining us to explore the question, “What’s so magical about age 18?” which I am very excited to dive into.

But before we get started, we just want to encourage you to visit the Living Joyfully Shop. There you’ll find my books, our growing catalog of courses, you can join our online community, and book coaching calls with us. I’m just so excited to build a one-stop shop to support you as you navigate relationships with your loved ones and dive deep into your unschooling journey. So, you can follow the link in the show notes or just go to livingjoyfullyshop.com.

And now, what the heck is up with age 18? And Anna, would you like to get us started?

ANNA: I do want to get us started. Oh my goodness. I’m so glad we’re doing an episode about this age and season of life. I feel like it’s not talked about nearly enough. And there are so many parts at play. Culturally, we have this idea, I think, that once they’re 18, our work is done, but this really isn’t even about unschooling at all and it just couldn’t be further from the truth.

There’s this older labor bureau study from around 2007, 2008, that talked about age 27 being the average age where the majority of kids were living independently, so that’s age 27. And that’s just the majority, so this idea that everyone is on their own at 18 just isn’t true.

And I think letting go of that idea really helps us focus on the individuals in our family and what transitioning into adulthood is going to look like for them, because it’s so unique.

I think actually it’s easier for us in unschooling families to understand this, because our focus is on connection. It’s on relationships. And those relationships and connections last a lifetime. So, for us, the age is maybe a little less relevant, because we’re not product-focused.

But that said, when our kids start moving into adulthood, there’s a lot of messaging. It’s coming at them, it’s coming at us, messages about next steps and, “What do you want to do for the rest of your life?” And it can be this really stressful time.

And I think it can be fraught with triggers for us. I found that time in my own life to be stressful and I had a very conventional upbringing, but it was really important for me to separate my experience from my kids’ experience and I wanted to really protect the space and help quiet the noise as they navigated this time.

And so, I know we have so much to talk about, but those are the things that came to mind first, this cultural expectation and really understanding what’s bubbling up for us, because this is an age we all remember, whereas some of the earlier ages, we may not.

PAM: I remember the interesting piece, too, is, even though we have a different perspective on things because we’ve been unschooling and living unschooling, but there’s also the piece that, for me anyway, I was deep in the moment with them doing the things and everything and the “18” messages started coming more powerfully as my kids got older. So, when they were younger, it was like, I’ll worry about that years from now. And in general it was, I don’t have expectations anymore. But as 16, 17 started coming up and people are now asking different kinds of questions, “What college are they going to? What are they going to be doing?” all these pieces, those expectations started hitting me then.

So, it was another wave where I had to work through it again. What is it? Why are these messages throwing me off kilter? It would just have me wobble a bit and I’d be revisiting all sorts of pieces that brought that lifestyle and perspective into this new season of our lives there.

ERIKA: This is going to be a really interesting conversation for me. So, my kids are 12 and 14 right now, and I’m just thinking that you don’t really know what your vision of “18” really means until you’re confronted with it. And so, I like the idea of thinking about it now and just being more aware that what people are going to be expecting is going to change, and even of what messages my kids have internalized about what it means to turn 18 and what it means to be an adult.

Because I know that they do have some of those stories for themselves of like, when I grow up then this will happen or whatever, but not getting so hooked on that number, that age, because obviously things will change over the years. It’s not going to be that they wake up when they’re 18 and now everything they thought about being an adult is coming true.

ERIN: Yeah. I can relate so much to both of you, Anna and Pam, as far as, you’re humming along and you’ve done some of the work, and then there is this shift. It’s just a really interesting entrance into people’s perceptions of what adulthood should look like.

And so, I think last time we spoke on your podcast, Pam, I was talking about this period of time for several years where I really had this sweet spot, I would say, with our life and doing life without school. And I felt really confident. And as we got closer to “18,” it’s whenever people perceive the high school years as being over, suddenly, it’s a lot of questions is what it is. Because I found through a lot of the homeschool/unschool journey, people didn’t really know what we were doing, so they would ask some questions. It was almost so far from what they were used to that, unless it was good friends of mine or family that I could maybe talk a little bit more specifically with, there was a generality to the questions.

And then I think you come to this space that everybody’s pretty familiar with, right? Whether it’s the world of work or it’s college or university or whatever people are doing, moving out, driver’s licenses, all those kind of older things. Suddenly the conversations were different because they had some familiarity with that stage of life.

One of the things that’s kind of neat about that, too, though, I find is that now that my youngest is 18, I’ve really officially moved out of that zone. There is a little bit more parallel at times in conversation I can have with people, because, as much as we might think that everybody has it all together and their kids’ path to doing whatever, I’m just finding in all kinds of places there is trepidation about what their kids are doing, if their kids are happy, if their kids are safe. And so, there’s some commonality, too, that we can have, which is nice.

ANNA: Yeah, that’s that piece, right? Because I think sometimes when we’re unschooling, we get caught in this belief that this is specific to unschooling, this concern that they’re not going to do this thing or it looks different. And I think you’re right. I think it’s very common. I think it’s really this commonality of everyone moving through it, because it is just such a time of change. And as parents, we’re letting go of pieces and things are happening. And so, I think it just can be really helpful as unschoolers to step out of this idea that it’s specific to that.

And then when we can let go of that, that’s when we can focus on the individuals. Because, Erin, you have several kids, Pam as well. I have two. And it’s been absolutely unique for each of our children. It has been so different and unique and that’s the cool part about it, too.

ERIN: And I think it gives other people a little bit of space. We’re having conversations and maybe asking each other how our kids are. And you can feel they are feeling that same nervousness that we all feel. And so, I think when we can just really give a lot of space and breadth and encouragement to whatever’s happening for their kids. I think maybe that’s what we can offer in those conversations. We’re not coming with judgment or preconceived ideas and I find that people maybe are feeling a little bit better for having those more open-ended conversations.

PAM: Yeah. And I think that that age comes in there, too. When we can bring the energy of, there isn’t a timetable. We don’t need to have this solved. Or our kids don’t need to have this solved. And I think, for me, the fun thing about those conversations was that piece, was that curiosity, that space you were talking about, Erin, where it can be like, oh yeah, they’re interested in this thing and they’re trying out this thing and they’re doing this thing that they’re enjoying. And it brings a conversation, for me anyway, back from the, “I have an 18-year-old or an almost 18-year-old,” to, look at this amazing person in front of me. When you can bring it back to the individual who’s there and talk about them.

Like you were saying, Anna, the way it unfolds is so unique to each person. And, for me, what helped me when I was starting to wobble was really just steeping again in “unschooling is a lifestyle.” And there doesn’t need to be this timetable, like back when it was about learning to read by a certain age and the idea that there was a timetable. I’ve been through those kinds of messages before, so I could tap back into that. It’s like, oh yeah, you know what? There doesn’t need to be a timetable for this either. I can lean into what they like to do. This is who I want to be as a parent. I still want to maintain a strong and trusting connection with them no matter their age.

Actually, it was reminding myself about all those pieces of the kind of parent I wanted to be that I honed through unschooling, and just realizing, or remembering yet again, that this is a lifestyle. This is what I’ve chosen for my family and for how I want to relate to them really. That, no matter our ages, and right now, my kids are all in their twenties and thirties, it’s still how I want to relate to them. It’s how I want to relate to human beings.

But there was definitely that time where I needed to process and remind myself of that, and then I could bring that easier energy to all those conversations. And yeah, sometimes you could just see them relax. When they’re chatting with me, it’s like all of a sudden they recognize that this isn’t a conversation with someone to whom they need to give the answers about what their child is doing, because those are the questions they’re typically getting, too. So, you could just see them relax a little bit. It’s like, oh yeah, this is the stuff they’re up to. And even just to help them relax a little bit on that, it made the conversations really interesting.

ERIKA: I love that. I can totally picture that and how you’re talking about those earlier conversations, too. Anytime there’s that societal expectation on parents and on kids, everyone around is feeling that pressure. And so, it’s so nice to be able to be the one to help maybe relieve some of that pressure, at least in the conversations with us, because they’re probably just feeling a bit defensive about what their own kid is doing and worrying about being judged for what they are and are not doing yet. And so, yeah, I just love that. I love that we can question it and just be like, there is no one right way and people are different.

ANNA: Right. And that’s my PSA portion of this one is just stop it. We can be the generation that stops those questions at that age. Because when Afton, my oldest, was that age, she was traveling by herself and she was probably 18, 19 and I mean literally strangers on airplanes asking her, what college are you going to? Or, what are you doing now? Like, find other words. Connect with people about, what trip are you going on? What’s happening with you right now? What are you interested in?

And for those teens that are in that stage, what I would tell her is, turn it back around and say, what did you love about college? Are you working in the field that you went to college for? And turn it back to them. Because so often they were like, oh, I hated this. Or, oh no, I’ve done this. Or, oh, I didn’t do this. And it was a much more interesting conversation. And I don’t think there’s any kind of malice with the questions. I think it’s just that we don’t know how to ask questions of kids. What grade are you in? What’s your favorite subject? So, this is just another area to stretch and leave space for us all to be different and for there to be different paths.

ERIN: Yeah. I got thinking about that, Anna, when I was thinking about this topic. People are at a loss for other things to say and other things to ask, because most kids are in school for a good chunk of their day and their week. And so, it’s what people know.

And so, yeah, I agree with you. It’s not said with malice, but I know my kids have found it just really repetitive. Even if it’s something that they want to talk about, even if it’s a passion or an interest or something they’re feeling really comfortable about, it’s just like over and over. What other age is like this?

Can you imagine? Everywhere you go people are asking you like, what are you doing? What are your plans? And then what are you going to do with that? Because it’s not just, what are you doing? We had a line of questioning happening over the holidays and it didn’t stop there. Then it was sort of like, well, do you think that there’s money in that field? Do you think there’s security? It’s a lot of questions!

ANNA: That we would never ask anyone else. We’d never go to the neighbor and ask about their personal finances and have they really planned ahead for what’s going to happen next? We just wouldn’t do that. So, it’s such an interesting thing.

ERIKA: There’s got to be something about the promise or the hopefulness of that age. They’re just starting to be an adult. And at this phase, we know so much about all of the trials and tribulations, all the decisions and all the things we’ve had to do, but looking at that fresh new adult who has all the decision-making in front of them, I think it probably makes people a little bit excited, a little bit concerned. A lot of things are brought up in us just because we remember. We know all that we’ve done from that age until now and I think a lot of people really like to pass along their words of wisdom or share the things that they’ve learned in order to help the next generation. So, I see why people get excited, but it’s so tiring as an 18-year-old to be like, oh my gosh, I have to explain myself to everyone now.

PAM: Yeah. That is such a good point. And I think back to our work as well, a big paradigm shift for me as we dove deeper into unschooling was holding back my two cents. Because it would get in the way of my kids’ exploration. It’s like, “Oh, should I be going in that direction?” It quiets their instincts, their motivation, their inner voice, however you want to phrase it. But if I could not jump in, “Oh yeah, this is really cool if you do it this way,” and learn how they may well do it differently, but I came to realize how much sense it made for them to do it that way.

And yet to recognize and realize that it’s the same. It doesn’t change because now they’re a young adult. Yes, I’ve learned these things. But you know what? It doesn’t mean those particular things would make their path any easier.

There’s that beautiful dance, that beautiful line of supporting them and helping them, and even pointing out things that we feel might be helpful, but again, without that expectation. And often, I found that I needed to give so much more space than I first anticipated to let things unfold, for them to pick up nuances, for them to understand themselves.

Because also, as we were saying earlier, there are so many ways their life is changing as well when they hit these ages, more opportunities are opening up. So, to give them that space to explore them and figure it out for themselves, while also being there to help. It’s not hands off. We’re always talking about that dance and that we’re not always going to get it perfect, but we’re going to get clues. If we jump in and they’re like, what? Or, no thanks, don’t wanna hear that. Or they immediately do something completely different. Not taking those things personally again.

It’s revisiting all these lessons that we’ve learned and recognizing that they apply to our kids as young adults, and then do it again as adult adults, wherever you decide you’re going to draw those lines. So, that is really fascinating to me. And something you always say, Anna, which is that there’s plenty of time. That is always such a great reminder, because if we remind ourselves about the individual in front of us, we can start to recognize how their timeline is unique to them. And it doesn’t need to be a rush. I don’t need to prove to other people. The priority is the child in front of me and their journey and their journey is a lifetime, to just keep reminding myself. We don’t need a deadline. We don’t need a deadline for anything.

So, there’s just so many different circumstances for each person’s life. It’s just so fun to hang out with them and see how it unfolds, even if it’s different, even if it’s like, that would not be a choice I would make or anything like that. It reminds me just to celebrate the person that they are and each time I just learn something more about them and I go, oh, damn. That’s pretty cool.

ANNA: And that it’s not a race and that this is a lifelong journey. And if we’re lucky, it’s pretty long. And so, I was just talking to a friend this morning and saying that disappointment is taking stock too soon. And I think that’s when we put these artificial deadlines that we’re measuring something. And really, it’s just the unfolding. It’s still unfolding for me at 55 years old. If we can embrace that piece.

And I will say, mine are now just turned 24 and 26, that societal pressure does ease. It’s pretty intense. It’s pretty specific to that timeframe of, like you were saying, Erin, 16 to 20, where it’s these milestones that people have in their own mind and then they just kind of are like, oh, they’re living their life doing their thing. It’s not so micromanaged.

But something else I wanted to say that’s almost the reverse of this is something that you said earlier, Erika, about how they’re taking in societal pieces and they’re taking in things about it. And so, something that I had to embrace, give some space for, was that they were going to maybe try things from motivations that I didn’t think were great, that were motivations from external pieces, societal pieces.

But it’s like you were saying, Pam, that’s not my journey either. I can’t stop them from doing that, and I can’t guide them around that. They knew they weren’t getting pressure from me in particular and that they had my support and I could be there to facilitate, but I could see them at times making choices. And now looking back, we can have conversations about it and they’ve said like, yeah, I kind of wish I could go back and do some of that again. But we can’t change that for them. So again, I guess it’s the reminder of so much of this is our work to just recognize we can’t control the path.

ERIN: I’ve also been thinking about the idea of how much more space and time I shouldn’t say I’ve had to leave, but in order to have the relationships that I want to have, I’ve had to leave. And it’s not even that they necessarily need all that time, but just having enough margin to be available for some of those conversations. And I know we talk about this with teens for sure, but I think it continues.

I think we were up till about 2:30 the other night, just kind of spontaneously, similar to what you were talking about. My son was just processing different things with his job and his path and management versus going a different route and just really thinking it through financially and all those kinds of things, too.
And some of it was that balance, I guess, if you will, between what externally people are saying he should do, or not him specifically, but people, and then what he enjoys and the quality of life he wants to have. And that’s not a quick conversation apparently. It just went on and on. But he really needed to process that.

And you could see bits of that, being aware of what’s expected. And maybe it’s a little bit tricky when you’ve come up through a childhood where you have a lot of freedom and things aren’t very standard and it’s wonderful in one sense, but you are also very true to yourself when you grow up that way. And so, then there’s a little bit more of a rub between the external expectations. It’s more to sift through.

PAM: Yeah. I love that example, Erin, and that reminded me that something that I’ve picked up is a realization that, oh, this is what relationships are. Because it’s like, okay, they’re 18, even if they’re moving out and they’re doing other things, it’s like, I’m still not “done.” It’s still the processing. Because yes, they’re used to actually processing things as a human being, to not just to do what’s expected of them, but to think about it and consider it, making real choices as to whether it’s something they want to do and then maybe they do try it out and then later on they might change their mind. But that’s a conversation. That’s processing.

Even as adults, how cool is it to be able to process, to continue to really move through your life with intention? Even if it’s like, I don’t have time, I’m just going to do this thing because it seems best to me, or that’s what everybody’s telling me to do, I’m going to try it out. They are just learning so much about themselves and that we have that relationship with them, that when they want to process and when they want to bounce ideas around or any of those pieces, that they trust and know that we will do that with them. So yeah, it was like, oh, adults out of the house. I’m done now with my parenting. And no, no. It’s like, oh these are the relationships that I wanted to have. And it is a lifelong thing. Oh, how interesting.

ERIKA: And just the part about the lessons that we’ve learned and those things that we question now as adults, they might not be in a place to question that yet. And so, it makes sense that they’re going to have their own journey just as we did. Maybe they have a little bit of an advantage for listening to that inner voice, but there will still be a process of critically looking at society’s messages and expectations, listening to their inner voice, figuring out what works for them.

And so, I think it makes sense that young adults, sometimes even unschooling young adults, are like, “I think I’m going to try this thing that everyone else is doing,” and we could be, from our position, like, “But why? You don’t have to. You just don’t have to do that.” But I think it’s wasted energy for us to try to convince them about stuff that it’s taken us this long to come to. They just are going to be on their own journey with it.

ANNA: Yeah. And I think it’s that being available. And Erin, just like your experience and yours, too, Pam, it is a time of intensity. And really, Erika, you’re already seeing it with your early teens, this need to process these big ideas and then go away and be doing things and then all of a sudden, yes, we’re here for the three-hour conversation.

And I think you’re right, Pam. It’s just relationships. When we think about the people we’re closest to that we want to process things with and we want to bounce things off of, how cool is it that we are that person for our adult children, these adults. And I don’t know. I love it and it can be intense at times. And I think partly that intensity for me comes from the triggers. I remember how intense it felt to be on our own now. Like, this is what’s happening. And then we’ve got to make all these decisions that seem really weighty and big.

And so, I do love what I see in them, Erin, like you said, a stronger connection to self. And also just that they are coming to me to talk about it. I didn’t go to my parents to talk about the stress I was under with some of this stuff. I just kind of felt like I had to do it. I just had to figure it out and do it. And so, I love that there’s more space for that collaboration, that community feel of relationships.

ERIN: And I wonder if some of that not going to your parents, because I think a lot of people have that experience, is that maybe we normalized that degree of stress. And it was like, well this is the stage of life I’m in. This is just how it needs to be. So, I don’t know. And there might be some of that, but it’s fun that they can play with that a little bit and think maybe there are some choices within this or some different options.

ANNA: Yeah. It’s cool.

PAM: It’s really cool to see the different kinds of choices that they make over time. And just like when they were younger, you see the learning and the things that they’re figuring out, not just through the processing, but just through the choices they’re making. Oh, we’re going to try this out. Well, something motivated you to try that thing out. And how interesting is that? And yeah, so there’s just so many pieces.

And I love that, for the most part, we remember, or re-remember that breadth of what it means to be a person, that we have revisited over time as we’ve wobbled with unschooling and gone back to looking at our kids and, oh yeah, look, they’re a complete human being. They have interests. They’re learning things all the time. I say learning things all the time, and then I worry, oh, people will look at their kid and think, oh, they’re not digging into this interest or anything like that. Because there are cocooning stages where it doesn’t look like they’re doing much, but oh my gosh, they’re learning so much about themselves just by existing in this season and seeing how things unfold and just getting curious, especially when their choices maybe don’t seem like they will work out the way they hoped they would work out. But how many times over the years, over their lifetime so far has it surprised me? So, like we were saying, I’m not going to jump in and say no, but I can sure be curious as to how it unfolds.

ERIN: I have something that popped up just about choices that they make and so, on the one hand, I think you’d mentioned earlier on Anna, about triggers. This can be a period of time or a stage of life where there are a lot of triggers for us, and I know a lot of it is we want the best for our kids, but some of it is that external opinion of what they’re doing. But to a certain degree, I think we have to just observe how much is our own ego as well. Because you know people have been watching, right? People have been watching the homeschool journey. What is this strange thing that this family’s doing? How will the kids turn out?

And so, yeah, there is a certain amount of pressure on us that’s real and I think to be able to observe that, be aware of it. I’m curious. I’ve never asked my kids. I don’t know how much they feel that or if they even do. But yeah, it’s an odd thing that there’s this low-level observation happening.

ANNA: And it’s real. And I think, that’s why, for me, when I talk about this, because obviously we’ve been talking about it for many, many years now, I really do focus on, it’s about me being the person I want to be.

I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen down the road or whatever. But I truly believe if I’m being the person I want to be, showing up in kindness and compassion and supporting, that that’s the best I can do. So, it’s like, for me, to really pull it away from the outcomes, because that’s their own personal journey.
They’re going to take that journey and have all kinds of things about their childhood and other pieces. I will say, at this stage, I am grateful to have the relationships that I have with them and that we enjoy being with each other so much. But yeah, it’s so tricky.

But the other piece did come back to me, which you touched on it a little bit, Pam, but it’s like, remember the tools, because I think sometimes when we move into this stage, suddenly you’ll see parents maybe double down on the conventional piece. Like, we’ve done all this stuff, now we’re going to college, or now it’s going to look like X, Y, Z.

And even if they go to college, what I love about the mindset we bring with unschooling is the curiosity. And it’s a tool. A college course is a tool. A welding course is a tool. Exploring Europe is a tool. All of it is valid and real and important. And so, I think it does take extra work, like you’re saying, Erin, for us to do that at that time, because the eyes are on us, all the eyes.

But for me it was just like, shut that out and focus on the individual in front of me. What’s making their heart sing? What is helping them move through this stage? Just thinking of our kids, how many do we have with all of us here? Eleven kids between us! So unique and different. Every single one of them is so different and this journey is so different and all just as cool and interesting as the next.

ERIKA: When you said people are looking to see how the kids turn out, that triggers me so much, because I’m just like, what does turning out mean for a human? I’m still changing so much and growing and learning at this age, and so, I think keeping that front and center for me that there’s not a finish line and if there is one, there’s certainly not one at age 23. And so, just remembering that journey, there’s no turning out. And it doesn’t matter if you’re unschooling or if you’re in school or whatever, no matter how you grow, there’s still not a finish line as much as some people think that there is one.

ANNA: Oh my gosh. I would not want someone to think my journey ended at 23, even though it looked pretty conventional up till that point. Yuck. Oh my gosh, so much has happened since then and so much growth and that’s happening with each and every one of our children and all of the people out there.

PAM: That’s true. I just turn it back to myself each time. It’s like, oh yeah. I have changed so much in that time. I need to give everybody the grace to have their own journey.

ERIN: Yeah. Just one more thing on that, which is what I started to notice is it wasn’t even just the 18, it’s like people started to prepare for the 18 sometimes at 13, 14. And so, a lot of the people that we would have been together in the past, these memories of the kids on the hiking trails and the all the different things and just having a lot of fun together. And I really started to notice for quite a few people that joy just got swept right away in the teen years. They’d had all these wonderful years, some were traditionally homeschooling, some were unschooling, it didn’t really matter. They were all kind of finding their own joyful way of doing things. And then there was this period of time where suddenly the teens didn’t have time to get together.

Whether it was, I don’t know, just getting into a lot of structured courses or work or whatever and not that those are bad things and they can be what kids want to do and they can be really helpful. But I think it depends on the mindset. If it’s coming from that mindset of fear, “We need to prepare for 18,” it just felt a little bit sad to me to see some of that energy change.

ERIKA: That reminds me of the energy that changed when my kids were turning three and four. It’s these milestone places along the way. I remember my own mind going there. And it didn’t stay there for long, because it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. But I had thoughts of like, well, Oliver’s turning three, so things are going to have to get more serious around here. He’s really going to have to start learning.

And so, I think that high school thing is the same. It’s like, okay, they’re entering the high school years. Things have to get more serious. They have to start making decisions. And so, it’s just noticing when those more cultural things are popping up in my mind.

PAM: Because societally, when the goal is, more conventionally, college or university, high school is when you’ve got to start prepping for that, right? You’ve got to get the grades throughout your high school career to get into the school that you want. So, you can pretty easily see how that unfolds, why that starts bubbling up then. And when it bubbles up for us, I think it really is just noticing expectations and the fear that’s behind those expectations, as you were mentioning, Erin, that maybe when they were younger, we didn’t realize that we held, because there was no reason to think about it. It’s just so fascinating to me. We can think, oh yeah, college, they can choose whether or not they go. Yep. Done with that. Yet when the age starts, all of a sudden it’s like, oh, well, maybe just in case, maybe we should, all those pieces.

So, I think it comes up in maybe how we talk with them. It comes up in our conversations outside our family. It comes up in the conversations they’re having with other people.

So, yeah, it is really worth the effort, I think, to just peel back the layers for ourselves when we just start to feel some shoulds and, “We have to do this,” when we feel those, it’s just such a great clue to dive in and just ask, “Do we have to? Why should we do that?”

Because even if we come to the point where, for us, yes, this feels like something I really want to happen, at least now we have the language and the understanding about ourselves and the self-awareness to be able to share at least, “I’m feeling,” to bring that to the conversation.

A conversation that starts with, “I’m kind of feeling this,” versus, “I think you should do this,” it’s a 180 degree difference as conversation starters, just to start feeling it with them and seeing what they’re feeling. And maybe we’re commiserating and maybe we’re coming up with some new ideas.

Maybe they’re thinking about things that we didn’t know about yet, and it’s like, oh, well that’s so much cooler. Because that is something else I realized. My plans, which were coming from expectations and, “This is how life should unfold,” just were never as creative and interesting as so many of the plans that they chose for themselves, because then all of a sudden it’s like, oh my gosh, that makes so much sense for you.

ERIN: Well, and naturally, often teens do become more serious and focused on something in particular or maybe just generally. So, I think, it isn’t to say that they don’t drive some of that focus, because they do. They get passionate about things and they want to learn, and I think they are interested in their future. And so, they will find steps that might make sense or pieces that they might be interested in.
But I think it’s that idea of, what’s driving it? Is it external? Is it this fear that we are saying, okay. It’s time for things to get unpleasant.

ANNA: Right. And I think that “there’s plenty of time” piece is a really good place to start, because even if we can let go of the artificial timelines of it, just because they choose not to go to college at 18 doesn’t mean they won’t at 22 or 28. So, if we can let go of the rigid timeline, just even that alone provides a little breathing room to learn more about ourselves, to make sure someone’s ready for that step. Make sure someone’s ready to do whatever the next thing is. And so, even that’s a piece of work we can catch in ourselves and go, okay, right. We don’t have to buy into artificial timelines.

Again, I think the piece is tuning into the individual who’s in front of you, what do they need, what makes sense for them? And really just being there and creating that space. I think that’s a great place to start with all of this.

PAM: What bubbled up for me there, Anna, is just the reminder, not only tune into the individual and the things they’re interested in, but their personality and who they are in the world, how they like to engage with the world, to remember not only just introvert, extrovert, because we can be like, okay, now you should be doing this. We can start to see them as, “They’re adults now.” Group things. But introvert, extrovert. I was just reminded very strongly there of Michael’s more multi-passionate way of going, because he had applied and been accepted to college and had this job and was thinking about doing this thing and this thing. And it’s important for me not to get fixated on any one of those paths, because he’s just got so many possibilities that he loves. And again, just be curious to see how things unfold when these decision points come for now. For now. They can come again and again. But right now, oh, you know what? This is the path that he’s going to choose.

So, understanding that, for him, having so many different interests and paths and possibilities is just how he works and how he thrives. So, supporting that versus another child who’s just deeply into their passion and just diving into that deeper and deeper and deeper over the years. That is really cool, too. But to expect that out of another because their personality is so different, it just doesn’t work.
Knowing the individual and their unique interests and everything, but again, the root is that people are different and their personalities and the way they approach their life is just another great thing to keep mind, I think. Any last words before we go? I think we’ve hit everything.

ANNA: I think we’ve definitely covered a lot. I think there’s just lots to think about with this one.

PAM: So much. Yeah. I love this age, because I feel like it’s another one of the big seasons. The toddlers into choosing unschooling and then the teen years and I think it’s just another season where there are so many expectations that we have absorbed growing up, and that society is bringing in on us. It’s just another time when I found I needed to just get more purposeful and ground back in my why and ground back in remembering who we are and who I wanted to be as a parent, but in relationship with the people in my family, regardless of their ages. So, yeah, I’m glad we’re exploring this.

ERIN: Sorry, one more. Something came to my mind. I was thinking that it was kind of funny timing that I think when I joined two or three online groups within a season and I think my youngest was 15 at the time and my oldest was 21 or something like that.

And it’s such a funny time to start like diving into these, but it’s been so helpful and it continues to be helpful. So, I don’t know, I guess I would just like to put that in as a word of encouragement that, I think I’ll be curious to see as time goes on, but I feel like more and more people are doing that.

I’m noticing there are a few of us who still are wanting to talk about these things and sort these things out, because it’s the same principles but new life stage. There’s still a lot to think through and work through in ourselves. So yeah, just wanted to put that out there that I found that really useful.

ANNA: I love it, because I mean, when we started the Network, both of our kids, Pam, were grown whatever, but it’s like, right, because it’s so much about the journey. For me, it’s so much about learning how I want to show up in all my relationships, including the ones with my adult kids. So, yeah, it’s really a very cool time.

PAM: And it’s just very inspirational. It just reminds me, again, like are you making choices in the direction of the person that you want to be, regardless of life stages? I just learned that these questions are just so valuable for me and the reminder to live intentionally, don’t just get on this path even though you chose this path and do the things, just get your little to-do list, but moving through my life with intention and just hanging out with people who are doing the same thing is just very inspiring. Day in and day out.

All right. Well, thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun and I hope everyone listening has found this conversation helpful on their unschooling journey. And yes, you can come leave comments on social, on the post on the website. We would love to hear what’s sparked for you about this idea of, oh my gosh, my kids are going to become adults, this magical age of 18, where it’s like, okay, I’m done. Y’all take care of yourself now.

But if you are looking for some individualized support, whether it is about unschooling, whether it’s about your relationships, your life with your kids, work, etc., we would invite you to check out our coaching options at livingjoyfullyshop.com.

And as we mentioned, we would love for you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network. You will find links to that in the show notes, and we wish you all a wonderful week and we’ll see you next time. Bye! Thanks, Erin!

EU359: Unschooling Stumbling Blocks: Quitting vs Sticking It Out

In this episode, we are starting a new series called Unschooling Stumbling Blocks, where we talk about common challenges on the unschooling journey.

For this first stumbling block, Pam, Anna, and Erika talk about “quitting” vs “sticking it out.” This idea comes up in parenting regardless of whether you’re unschooling or not. Do we need to teach our children to persevere? If we paid for lessons that aren’t feeling good to our child, is it okay for them to stop? We dig into the cultural beliefs, the sunk cost fallacy, and give some food for thought about all of the choices that we have.

It was really fun to discuss this topic and we hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey!

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, coaching calls, and more!

In our newest 4-week focus course, we explore Validation, a transformational relationship tool for building understanding and connection in our most important relationships, like the ones with our kids and our partner. Check it out and we hope you’ll share how it helps you in your relationships!

The Living Joyfully Network

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

Follow @helloerikaellis on Instagram.

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling.

Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. This month, we’re talking about Celebrating Interests. Come and be part of the conversation!

So much of what we talk about on this podcast and in the Living Joyfully Network isn’t actually about unschooling. It’s about life. On The Living Joyfully Podcast, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia talk about life, relationships, and parenting. You can check out the archive here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

ANNA: Hello! I am Anna Brown with Living Joyfully, and we are so glad you’ve joined us for this episode of the Exploring Unschooling podcast. I’m joined by my co-hosts, Pam Laricchia and Erika Ellis. Welcome to you both.

PAM AND ERIKA: Hello!

ANNA: Hello! Before we get started, I just wanted to remind people to check out the Living Joyfully Shop. We’re adding things all the time, and recently we’ve added a focus course on validation. Validation is a topic near and dear to my heart, and I find it to be quite magical. It transforms any exchange and enhances connection in such a deep and meaningful way. You can find it and other offerings, including coaching, at LivingJoyfullyShop.com.

Today, we are going to be talking about a common stumbling block. While not specific to unschooling, it does come up a lot in unschooling circles, and that is the idea of quitting versus sticking it out.

I am very excited to have this conversation, because it’s such a valuable paradigm shift for all involved, and I remember it for myself and my work there, so I’m excited to talk about that. But, Erika, do you want to get us started?

ERIKA: I do. So, yes, this idea does come up a lot, I think, both in mainstream parenting and in unschooling. And I think I want to start with what we’re referring to when we say quitting versus sticking it out and where those ideas or cultural beliefs might be coming from.

So, when people say quitting, most people are talking about when their children start an activity, a program, a class, taking lessons, doing a project, and then change their minds and want to stop. And then sticking it out is when, even if your child is no longer enjoying it or it feels boring or something inside them is telling them to stop or it’s feeling too hard, they keep going and either finish that project, the course, whatever. They keep attending the lessons that they signed up for.

And this is not just about children, either. We could find ourselves in these situations, too, where it can feel like we’re either “quitting” or we feel like we need to stick it out. And I find myself putting “quitting” in quotes every time I say it, because it just feels like it’s not a helpful word. It does not tell the whole story.

And one of the first things that pops into my mind when I hear these two options is that there are never just two options. Like, are these really the only two options, quitting or sticking it out? But maybe we can talk more about that later.

Anyway, where do these ideas come from? So, I think we have a cultural belief in laziness, which we’ve talked about before, and the idea of quitting feels like laziness. It can invoke a fear of failing or of being left behind, maybe not making enough money to survive in the world, some of these really big core fears. And then on the reverse side, we have the idea of sticking it out, which has really been romanticized in our culture. Grit. Toughness. Perseverance. These are ideals in our culture. And so, regardless of the circumstances or regardless of if it even makes any sense to stick it out, there is this inherent cultural value in staying with something that’s hard.

And so, I think these became loaded ideas and loaded words for people, which makes sense. It feels bad if we’re thinking our child will be judged as being lazy or if we think that these choices mean they won’t find success in life. But I know I’ve talked before about how laziness isn’t really a real thing and it bothers me to even say that word. And I think once we dig deeper into those beliefs and really tune into what is actually going on, then we can get to the root of those fears and rewrite the story for ourselves.

PAM: I want to say what comes to mind, too, as you were talking there, Erika, is I think we can feel like we need to teach our child how to stick it out. Like that that is something that’s teachable. And all those other messages, like you were saying, are more about guilting them into doing it, versus a skill.

One of the big a-ha moments for me was, oh, it’s not about teaching them to stick it out, because, “They committed to this.” We’re going to have a lot of air quotes going in this episode! But it’s more about exploring the world and finding the things that are so interesting to them that they choose to commit to them, they choose to stick it out, even if something’s frustrating for them. There’s a frustrating moment, but they know in the bigger picture this is something they want to do, and they’re so determined.

Sometimes we even get frustrated, because our kids are so determined to finish this game or to build this tower that keeps falling down and they’re getting upset, but we can’t get them to take a break. We can’t get them to stop. They still need to keep trying. That is determination, that internal motivation.

And so, when we’re thinking about interests and the things that our kids are trying out, it was so helpful for me to just frame these as choices and exploring the world for them to find the things that are interesting enough that they want to commit more fully, if that’s the way you want to phrase it.

So, it wasn’t about teaching it as a skill, it was about finding things that were innately something that they were more determined to push through. And the thing about the word “quitting,” Erika, yeah, it is very strong word, because really, for me, and it’s not something I would ever use. Because it’s choice.
For me, it just, my choice is not to go this week or not to do the thing this week. So, we’ll get to that choice piece, but that was the most important thing, because when I go to choice, that reminds me about all the learning that happens. But anyway, I won’t jump too far ahead.

ANNA: But I think the language is important, right? Because I think the language really is setting the stage, because it’s like you said, Erika, I think when we get caught up in those cultural stories of, but the stick-to-it-iveness and the perseverance, and that’s how you get ahead.

And what I think is really interesting that I observed just in being an unschooling parent and having these more organic environments was that there really were lots of times when they were very focused on things that were of interest to them. And then it was like, oh, it’s the same for me.

When I’m really interested in something, I will stick to it. And when I’m not, it’s really hard. And I know, and this is my own personal journey, I did stick with things when I was younger that passed the point of my enjoyment. And what I realize in looking back is it actually didn’t serve me or the class or organization or other thing involved, because I was half checked out.

And so, a sports team is a good example for people, because they’re like, “But you’re there for the team! And you’re this and that.” And it’s like, yeah, they’re not there for the team if they’re already half checked out because this is not the sport for them or they’re uncomfortable with it. If it doesn’t feel good to them, that isn’t serving the team, because there are people on that team who really want to be there and can’t wait to get up in the morning to get to practice.

And so, can we just learn to honor people where they are? Because, like you said, Pam, then it becomes a process of finding, where are these slots? And there might be many, and there might be a particular lane, depending on your personality. It’s like, wow, when we can find those things that really get us excited to push through that frustration to figure it out, because it’s so interesting to us, I believe that’s where we serve the world, more so than this pushing ourselves along the lines of convention, which I don’t think serves anyone.

ERIKA: Yeah. I love that point of looking at it from our own experience. Can someone else make you persevere at something that you don’t want to do? And what are the results of that? Is that really the best decision for you?

And so, I know we have all seen our kids push through tons of discomfort and difficulty when it’s something that they’re really invested in. And so, I think it’s that judgment of their interests that gets in the way. This thing that they really are diving so deep into, we can’t even see it, because we’re looking tunnel vision at the things that are more valuable to us. And so, I really think any parent with children could find an example in their life of their kids not wanting to stop something that’s hard because they just want to keep trying and trying until they get it. And seeing that right there shows you that they have those abilities. It just depends on what activity they’re doing.

PAM: Yeah. It really is a transferable skill, if you want to think about it that way, that perseverance, that grit, all those buzzwords around that. It doesn’t matter. You can see it in whatever they’re doing. And I think you’re totally right there, Erika, that we can judge, like we don’t value it if it’s pushing through on something that we don’t value, but it is as meaningful for perseverance, because it’s meaningful to them and they can bring that energy to whatever is that meaningful to them.

I wanted to jump into one of the bigger areas where people can feel pushed to wanting their kids to stick it out is when they’ve paid for things. So, if they’ve paid for an activity, if they’ve paid for a team.

Oh, and that reminded me. I remember so many times, when the kids that don’t want to be there, they’re out in the field looking up at the sky, they’re in the karate class, chatting with somebody else. In all the places, you can tell they don’t want to be there. And it’s just less fun for the people who really do want to be there and they’re taking up space.

Anyway, when we pay for the karate class or joining the baseball team or whatever it is, I think that is something that can trip us up, as well. And I know you talk a lot about the sunk cost fallacy, so I’m going to turn that over to you, Anna.

But one of the things that I noticed for myself at the beginning of our journey that was a big a-ha moment for me was that I didn’t need to jump to paid activities the moment my child had an interest in something. So, if it’s baseball, we can throw a ball around, we can have a bat. We can set up T-ball, we can explore it.

We can dance around the living room. We can go to public swim time. All these pieces. There are so many ways that we can help our child explore something before we put money on the table, if that’s something that can trip us up, if we find that’s a trigger for us. So, just to open up our creativity at the beginning. I think there’s an expert thing in there too, right? It’s like, oh, well, a coach needs to tell them how to do that. Or, a teacher needs to show them how to do it properly. They’ll get bad habits. All these little pieces.

So, I think it can be challenging if our kid expresses an interest in something and then the first thing we do is send them out to some sort of paid opportunity, and if that doesn’t work out for well for them the first few times, I think they will be less interested in expressing interest to us in things because we’ll just keep sending them out to do the thing and to do the thing.

ANNA: Right. That’s the piece. Okay. So, the two pieces I wanted to touch on, that is a big one, which is this unintended consequence of forcing someone to stick it out. And I think especially with kids, but really with anyone, it’s just people don’t do it to adults as often, is that you just stop being interested. You just stop wanting to try things, because, if I even dabble, they’re going to make me do piano lessons for the next three years. And so, just this unintended consequence of really stopping them from finding the thing that’s their passion and the thing that really speaks to them.

I do want just touch briefly on the sunk cost piece, because I’ve talked about it in a lot of places, but it was a really big shift for me, because I do want to be a good steward of our money. I want to be aware. We wanted our kids to understand that and have a sense of money.

But my husband is in finance and he very much talks to them a lot about money, so it was surprised me in a way when he was like, “It’s a sunk cost.” And I’m like, “Well, what do you mean?” He was like, “We’ve already paid it, so the money is gone. So, you can force them to go to something they don’t want to be in, and this unintended consequence potentially happens, or you can take them out. You’re not going to get the money back either way.”

And so, then it was like, oh. Then the shift for me was, we’re paying for the opportunity. We’re paying for the opportunity to try this. And so, if it was a large financial commitment, we would have conversations about it. Like, this is a large one, this one does have a long time frame. It’s expensive.
Are there ways to try it for free or try something that’s maybe a little lower stakes if you aren’t sure?

So, you can absolutely have those conversations about being a good steward with the money, but realizing that, when we make the decision, we are paying for the opportunity, just really opened up a lot of free-ness for me.

ERIKA: I think, along those lines, children, especially in younger ages, aren’t going to be able to wrap their head around the entire financial picture. And so, to expect that we say, “This course costs this money, do you really want to do it?” That’s not something that they’re going to be able to really understand, the whole depth of what that might mean for us as the keepers of the money. And that feeling of, oh, it’s going to be wasteful. I think so much of the conversations need to happen more in advance and with us as the parents realizing that the financial decisions are ours. We can’t put the decision to enroll them in that class on them, like, “You told me to spend this money on you and now look, you want to quit.” Because kids live in the moment, like you’re always saying. And so, their feelings about the activity are not going to be so tied into the amount of money that we, as the adults, chose to spend on it.

And so, I think that in the beginning, like Pam, you were talking about exploring the interest in ways that are not so expensive, is really important, because that way you are getting more information about what the child is interested in without having added weight for yourself of all this money that I have spent.

PAM: And you’re gaining more experience, too, with the environments as well. So, with the activity itself, for example, like with karate, when Michael was wanting to do that, we could do free trials. I can phone up and ask, can we try out a lesson or two or for a week just to see if it’s a good fit? Even if it’s a payment for a week, but it’s not a commitment for a year or for so many months or whatever.

Because that’s the other piece for our child, right? Again, it’s not about the money, but what is it about? It’s about the interest that they have, but it’s also how they want to engage with the interest. What is that environment? Is it very rigid and rules-based and adult-controlled? Sometimes that fits. Sometimes that’s what kids are excited about, that vibes with them, but sometimes it doesn’t.

So, there are so many other possibilities. You can check out different dojos, you can check out different dance studios, all these pieces lead to or give us more information before we commit any particular amount of money to it. The more information that we can all have just helps us reach a choice in the moment that seems to make more sense. More confidence. More confidence in the choice that we’re making, because we want to be as confident as we can.

And yes, maybe three months from now it is just not working. But we haven’t pulled it out of the air and said, “Oh, here’s the closest studio or dojo and yes, they want you to commit for a year. And you said you wanted to go, here we are.” There’s just so much more information.

I think we kind of want to throw our hands up in the air and say, oh, I’m doing the best for my child. I’m finding the best dojo, or the best place. Again, that’s the external looking in, the external judgments or maybe somebody’s really good at marketing, but to remember that it’s our child, this particular child, and something that they’re interested in. And the goal is to help them learn, not to put a sticker on your car that says, we dance at whatever place.

ANNA: So, that tangentially reminds me of just how much learning is happening in all of these experiences, right? Because, even when someone decides to leave a particular environment, there’s so much that they’re learning about this interest. Like you said, how they want to engage with it. Is it this piece they like and don’t like? And so, what I wanted to be careful was to not put my piece on that by saying, you need to stay. Or even, you need to go. It wasn’t about me. It really needed to be about what they were learning.

And then we could talk about the fine tuning, because it was like, well, maybe I didn’t like this piece, but I really liked this piece. Okay, well that’s interesting. So, then if you look at it, that’s what we paid for. We paid for that fine tuning of knowledge. We didn’t pay necessarily for six weeks of a particular class. We paid for us to get this information about ourselves, how we want to engage with this particular interest.

And so, I think, again, just turning those things around and realizing, like we were talking about earlier, Erika, just turning it back to our own experiences. I do learn a lot from those things, and there are times that I’ve signed up for classes about a particular interest and ended up being like, this is not at all how I wanted to engage with this, but I learned things. Maybe I met someone that then we could do it differently. Or maybe I got just a few tools that I didn’t know about and I could take those and experiment with them myself. And so, it’s letting go of that judgment and just celebrating what we’re learning about ourselves or our kids are learning about themselves.

ERIKA: Right, because self knowledge is such a great goal. To think of that as the end result of all these choices that we’re making and all the interests that we follow. We’re either going to learn more about ourselves, they’re going to learn more about themselves, we’re going to learn more about them. That has so much value.

As we’re talking about it, I’m thinking of a couple of lessons that I’ve learned in this area over the years. One very expensive, unfortunate one was I prepaid for a year of a trampoline location that we had never been to, because I’m like, it’s trampolines. This is fun, you know?

And so, they had a really great deal, but it wasn’t open yet. And so, I was like, you know what? I’ll just sign up for the year, because the kids love these other trampoline places. It’s going to be fine. And then we go on the first day and they have all these placards of rules posted everywhere, and it really triggered Oliver feeling like he might get in trouble. And he’s like, “I don’t like the people who work here. I don’t like the rules. I no longer like the color orange,” because that’s what they were wearing. It was very intense for him. He was like, “The entire place is everything wrong, and I don’t ever want to come back here again.”

And so, that hurt me a bit, just in my pocketbook and just feeling like, oh my gosh, mainly feeling like, why did I make that decision in advance knowing that there was this chance? But what I’m glad I didn’t do is blame him for it and try to guilt him into, “I paid a lot of money and we need to do this.” Because him knowing himself and being able to express that it was not a good fit for him and it did not feel like a safe place for him is so much more important than anything else really. Just that knowledge of himself and being able to make those choices.

And so, that was one that I definitely learned from where I was like, okay, so next time, we’re not going to rush into paying for things. We’ll just see. Take the free next step or the one-time, one-day pass next step and see how it goes.

PAM: Yeah, I think it’s brilliant how much they and we learn in the situation, like you were saying before, that learning, when we can make that flip, all of a sudden, that’s worth it. Even for extraordinary amounts of money, it’s like, oh my gosh, we know each other better. They know themselves better.

And I think it might just be worth talking a little bit about how much we learn with the quitting piece. I think it’s like, okay, they learned they didn’t like this interest. But maybe that’s not what they learned in this moment, right? Oliver didn’t say, I hate trampoline. Now, there were a myriad of reasons why this place was not a good fit, but the fact there was a trampoline on the floor was not one of them.

But that’s exactly it. I remember, over the years, sometimes when an interest was a big thing and was taking up lots of hours and it was like, oh, maybe I want some more hours back. What would I do instead with that time? And to be able to play around with that. It’s like, oh, I wonder if I’m going to miss it. Do I miss it? There’s learning that happens long after the quitting that is just so valuable as well. It’s just so much about the interest. Are there other ways that I can pursue it?

I remember when Lissy took a break from photography for six months and she came back and she’s like, “Oh my gosh. I thought I’d stopped learning and now I’d have to pick up where I left off, but I just learned so much just from the magazines I was looking through, the websites that I was on,” just all this other learning was bubbling around. And when she came back, she was a different person after those six months, after choosing to get back to it. So, we can think they quit, so now they’re not learning about that thing anymore. Oh my gosh. They may not be learning as much about that particular thing, but they are learning an intense amount about themselves.

Okay, Anna, go.

ANNA: But that just reminded me, we saw this several times over my girls’ childhood where an interest that was gangbusters, and this didn’t even have to do with money necessarily, but just this gangbusters interest like go, go, go. Then they would stop. Whoa, okay. That’s gone. And then six months, eight months, even a year or so later, suddenly it’s back.

We’re bringing new things to it. It’s going to a different place. Maybe they took a different aspect of it. Maybe it’s the exact same, but we saw that so much, and so I would really watch myself to not go, oh, you stopped the, whatever it is, piano or the thing, or the whatever. Instead just being that observer of like, okay, this is where we are now. Interesting.

Because you really don’t know what kind of connections are happening. It’s like we talk about with the cocooning times. Things are happening in there. And pieces are being pulled together and things from different areas, and we just saw that over and over again.

So, just watch that judgment about stopping an activity or quitting or whatever, because there’s often just way more to the story. And even if, like you said, they never come back to that particular interest, there’s something in the thread of that that you will see echoed somewhere down the road, and so, it’s very cool to watch.

ERIKA: Right. I mean, that’s kind of what I was wanting to get to with that, there’s not just quitting and sticking it out. There’s a world of things that are in between those, and so, I think it’s really important to not write the story for them about what their, their conclusions are about this. So, maybe these piano lessons aren’t working right now, but if we start telling them, “I guess you’re not interested in piano anymore,” that’s not fair, because it probably is not that.

And then I just think it’s pretty common for us to write stories for children, culturally and try to pigeonhole them into their interests and things. And so, quitting can be a sign to us of like, oh, I guess that’s over. But like you were saying, that’s not what we see with real humans, and it’s not what we see with ourselves.

Just because we stop something at one point does not mean it’s not going to come back later. And so, just leaving so much space for that to happen and leaving the judgment behind when it comes to these choices that they’re making so that then they can decide for themselves. They can really have the space to think about, “But I did really like that part of it.” And then they can make another choice where that’s still part of their lives.

ANNA: Love that.

PAM: It is so worth our work to peel our way through those expectations that we have and to peel our way through what kind of conclusions we’re jumping to. Because yeah, when they quit something, as you’re saying, it’s not maybe that they are no longer interested in that. “I don’t want anything to do with it.” And when we can come and realize, oh, they’re not interested in that particular aspect or situation, way of exploring that interest at the time, but it doesn’t mean now they don’t like dance or whatever, just pulling something out of the air. Because after they quit lessons at a school, maybe they still like to watch musicals. Maybe they still want to dance around the living room.

There are just so many ways that we can still bring this into their lives. And if we’ve done the work so that we aren’t doing it with any expectations, that we fully support their choice to quit the thing, and we’re fully excited about the thing that we’re sharing and curious if they’re interested. And we don’t have expectations and energy around that, it’s just more exploration for them.

ERIKA: Yeah. I had one other thought when you were talking. When we are bringing too strong of opinions about their interests, then it’s hard for them to have the space to make their own decisions and choices about it.

And so, I find that the less I label, the lighter my energy is, the less attached I am to what they’re doing, all of those parts, which are all just internal work that I have to do for myself, the more that they can make their own choice. Whereas if I’m trying to convince them to continue and I’m saying, we put all this money into this thing, or, oh, I thought you really liked that, just trying to convince and convince, then they are going to have to get stronger and stronger in their storytelling to themselves of, I don’t like this, I don’t want to do this.

And so, it’s always going to help for me to have a lighter energy about it and less attachment to outcome for them, because then there is that space for them to really be listening to themselves and making a decision rather than just reacting to my energy.

ANNA: I think that’s right. Exactly. Then it becomes a reaction and it’s kind of confusing. And I think I want to go back to personalities that we talk about so often, because you can have the rebel personality who, the minute you start pushing them towards it, they’re going to back off even if they like it. You’re going to have the people-pleaser personality who is more like, mommy really loves it when I play piano, you know? And so, and it doesn’t even have to just be money or this, it could be like, you’re such a great pianist, you’re going to do this for the rest of your life. It can add this pressure.

And so. I think it becomes tricky, because I know sometimes then we have to back off. But for me that nuance is celebrating, letting them lead the way of what those conversations look like and celebrating when they’re celebrating, commiserating when they’re commiserating.

Just really let them be the guide of the energy. And so, I love that coming in with lighter energy, because I think we’re more apt to sense their energy when we’re not bringing in a lot of strong energy into the situation. I think it is a nuance. I think kids that do have a particular passion do like to be celebrated for it. They do like to know that we know how important it is to them. So, this isn’t necessarily a hands-off, don’t react, be a robot. It’s like you said, it’s just bringing more of a generous, kind, light energy and really picking up on what they’re putting out about it. I think it makes such a difference.

PAM: Yeah, I think taking their lead on that. It’s not about being hands off and having them figure it out. Again, personality wise, how much processing they want to do externally with you. Celebrating the moments that are important to them, even if it’s like, yeah, I’ve heard that a hundred times on the piano, or whatever it is. When they’re excited about it, it’s something new for them, something has struck them and if I don’t know in particular what that thing is, it doesn’t matter. I can still match their energy. And if I don’t know why they’re frustrated, I can still commiserate with them, all those pieces. I can meet them where they are emotionally versus having some sort of fixed target or reward. It’s not about rewards, consequences, that kind of stuff.

I wanted to go back to outside voices. Like, “Oh, you’re going to be a photographer,” was the one I remember, because Lissy was into photography at a pretty early age. And I still remember my sister-in-law and I was telling her, oh yeah, she’s been taking pictures every day this week that she said, what’s going on? What’s Lissy doing? She’s like, oh, she’s going to be a photographer. That is conventionally the message. People just like to latch on and tell a story. Okay, here’s the story. She’s 13 years old and very into photography. She’s going to be a photographer. And those messages can be really challenging for kids.

So, even having those kinds of conversations with them and holding that lightness around it. Just having a smile and a giggle and I just said, well, maybe, and changed the subject. Because maybe, but the expectations around it, there’s just so much more life in their interests and the staying with something or choosing not to do something in a particular moment is all just a rich part of life.

I feel it’s just another learning thing, and maybe six months they come back to it. Maybe three years from now you’re looking back and you didn’t realize, but this thing they’re doing now, actually, it is related to that thing that they stopped doing, but they picked up on that aspect and that’s what they kept moving forward with, versus the way it looked through that particular interest.

Maybe they found the root of it and now they’re doing it in another way, or learning more about it in other ways. It’s just so much richer than, in this moment, there’s an expectation that you stick it out because we make commitments and we follow through with our commitments. And worried that we have to teach them that, that that’s some skill, because look, the only time we need to make them stick it out is when it’s something they don’t like. It’s just so fascinating to think about, isn’t it?

ANNA: It really is. And I just think that language is so important. I think watching for our own triggers about this, like how we were treated as kids, what it’s bringing up for us. Are we thinking that the grandparents aren’t going to like that they’ve quit piano? As always, we talk about it’s doing our own work so that we can separate that to really tune into the person in front of us, whether it’s our spouse or friend or child, because it really is very similar, the way that we just show up to celebrate people.

Because that judgment is just so damaging for relationships. And so, it’s just, what is the work that I need to do to let that go? Because that is always about me. It’s not at all about the other person or what they’re doing. It’s always about something in me. And so, just taking that time to recognize that just gives us so much more information and just keeps those connections where we want them to be.

Well, this was really fun. So, I’m glad we talked about this topic and I just really appreciate you both being here and I thank all the listeners, too. And I hope that this conversation has been helpful on your unschooling journey and just in life in general, because a lot of times we can look at ourselves and say like, oh yeah, I can quit this thing that I don’t want to be doing anymore.

Do remember to check out The Living Joyfully Shop. There are links in the show notes, and just comment on social media and let us know what you’re thinking about this topic, and have a great week, and we will see you next time.

PAM: Bye everyone!

ANNA: Bye.

EU358: On the Journey with Jahaira Luzzi

This week, we’re back with another On the Journey episode. Pam and Erika are joined by Living Joyfully Network member Jahaira Luzzi. Jahaira is an unschooling mom of two, ages 6 and 8, and a former early childhood educator.

We talk about Jahaira’s path to unschooling, including her exploration of various types of elementary schools after she left college. We also dive into the spiritual aspects of unschooling, the importance of presence, and more! We hope you enjoy our conversation and that it inspires you, no matter where you are along your journey.

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Visit LivingJoyfullyShop.com to find our coaching, courses, and books.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram, Facebook, and check out the Living Joyfully website for lots more info about exploring unschooling and decoding the unschooling journey.

Follow @helloerikaellis on Instagram.

Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

Join Pam on her next grand adventure on Patreon!

We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. Our theme this month is Building Community.

So much of what we talk about on this podcast and in the Living Joyfully Network isn’t actually about unschooling. It’s about life. On The Living Joyfully Podcast, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia talk about life, relationships, and parenting. You can check out the archive here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

ERIKA: Hello, everyone! I’m Erika Ellis from Living Joyfully, and we are so glad you have joined us for this episode of the Exploring Unschooling Podcast. I’m joined by my co-host, Pam Laricchia, and our guest, Jahaira Luzzi. Welcome to you both.

PAM AND JAHAIRA: Hi!

ERIKA: And before we get started with our conversation, I just wanted to mention that we have a variety of coaching options available on our website, livingjoyfullyshop.com.

Sometimes it can be so helpful to get some one-on-one support. And Pam, Anna, and I all offer unschooling consultations. And Anna also offers coaching for individuals, couples, and families. So, whether you want to talk about unschooling, relationships, work, or just life, we’d love to hear from you. You can click on Coaching on our website, livingjoyfullyshop.com, and we’ll put that link in the show notes as well.

So, now I’m excited that we have Jahaira here with us today. And Pam, do you want to get us started with our conversation?

PAM: I do! Absolutely. Thank you so much, Jahaira, for being here. I have really enjoyed getting to know you for the last while on the Living Joyfully Network, and I know we all appreciate your contributions to the weekly calls, because they are always so valuable. So, I am very excited for even more people to hear from you.

And, to get us started, I have a two-part question, because I have always loved starting off with, if you could tell us a bit about you and your family and what everyone’s interested in right now, and then I’d love to hear just a quick overview about how you came to unschooling.

JAHAIRA: Okay. Hi, everyone. I just want to say thank you so much, Pam, because when I found out about unschooling and was looking to dig deeper, it was your podcast that made it possible. When I listened to the stories, I realized, oh, okay, this is real. This can happen. And this woman and all of these people have done it before me. So, okay, I can do this. I can do this. Because it’s just such a radical shift from being in school all your life and knowing that as the only way.

So, your podcast showed me all these stories about what’s possible. I remember being brought to tears, realizing the depth of what was possible and how it could even heal me. I just want to say thank you so much to you and Anna and Anne Ohman. Shout out to Anne and now Erika, too. Thank you guys so much for doing this for the world.

PAM: Thank you so much for sharing.

JAHAIRA: So, I’m Jahaira and I just celebrated my 43rd birthday and I’m a full-time stay-at-home mom. I’m with my kids full-time.

My favorite thing to do right now is to work out. I have been part of a workout community called Get Mom Strong. I found her on Instagram and I’ve basically been doing her program for four years now. And it’s weight training, it’s body weight, and it’s also dumbbells and other small equipment that I’ve built up over the years. And it just makes me feel stronger and more capable. And her way of teaching fitness is basically, especially for moms, is instead of trying to get skinny, you want to just appreciate your body for what it can do and what it has done and how beautiful the stretch marks can be when you look at it from the perspective of, this is what my body did to create my babies. So, it just brings this whole new spectrum of appreciating your body instead of trying to change it. And so, that’s why I love that program.

And I also am new to Jiujitsu, thanks to my husband, which is very interesting, because there’s a lot to learn and I feel like you have to practice a lot in order to get better. So, I’m doing that three times a week with my husband.

And I’m also learning a lot about something called non-duality, which is hard to explain, but I basically came across it through, Eckhart Tolle’s teachings. I know a lot of people probably know about The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. And it’s basically a way to think about life in a way, or not even think about it, but noticing how your thoughts are basically what’s making you suffer. And all suffering is basically caused by this thick veil of thoughts, this dense layer of thoughts that’s clouding the reality of what is in this moment. So, I’m into that now.

And then my husband is John and we’ve been married for almost 10 years. He is a software engineer and a business analyst. And he is crazy about Jiujitsu. He wants to go every night of the week now and super passionate about it, watches YouTube videos all day, and is excited that I’m doing it now, too. But he’s super into it. And he likes chess and Jiujitsu is a lot like chess, because when you’re in certain situations, it’s similar to wrestling, but it’s how to move your body in certain situations in order to gain an upper hand. It’s kind of hard to explain, but it’s fun.

And then he also likes to hang out and smoke a cigar and is into cigars and knows how to take care of them and which ones are the good ones now, and is always looking for cigar buddies. And then we also just got a pizza maker, which is fun, because it hooks up to the gas thing outside. It’s powered by the gas, but it’s an actual pizza maker, fire, not wood fire, but fire, pizza maker. And so, he is learning the science of that and it’s really, really great to have delicious homemade pizza.

And then we have Leo, my 8-year-old son, who loves Roblox and VR and is really into Gorilla Tag right now and Rec Room. And he just got the new Oculus Quest headset, which he’s very lucky to have gotten that. So, now I was just watching him and his little sister play together for the first time, because now she’s using the older one. So, that’s really fun to witness them playing VR together.

And then Lianna is six and she loves Bluey which, I know, Pam, your kids are grown up, but you have seen Bluey, right?

PAM: Yeah.

JAHAIRA: Okay. Healing for the soul. I don’t know if everybody’s already seen Bluey. I’m sure everybody here in this community has already seen Bluey, but it is a beautiful production. From the music to just the things that they talk about. And just to see, to witness, how the parents can be so playful with the kids. And it’s just such an amazing example of being able to come back to that childlike state, to be with your kids, and just gentle parenting overall. It’s so amazing. It makes me cry. I am brought to tears watching that show sometimes.

And then, she also loves gymnastics and she’s gotten really good at her cartwheels and she’s working on her handstands now, so that’s fun. Gotta be careful in the living room, because there are flying legs every now and then, but it’s good. So, that’s us.

PAM: I remember when I was a child doing the cartwheels in the living room and smacking my ankle on the furniture. Swollen ankle. That’s my childhood. Indoor gymnastics.

But, anyway, all that aside, thank you so much. That’s what I love about the snapshots of people’s lives. I mean, maybe it’s just the way my mind works, but I can just see your four lives and all those interests weaving together. There are so many overlapping bits. And I love the jiujitsu and chess comparison and can totally see that and how a software person would be very interested in that as well. So much of it weaves together so beautifully. Thank you so much for sharing.

ERIKA: Yeah, we just got a new Oculus Quest. Oliver got the new one here, too. And they’re both very into Gorilla Tag, so that’s very fun. And Bluey is so beautiful. I’m glad that you mentioned it. Maya is 12, but she will watch it and she’s just like, “It makes me cry. You have to see this one. It makes me cry. It’s just so beautiful.”

JAHAIRA: She says that, too?

ERIKA: Mmhmm. She said that, too.

JAHAIRA: Yep. And she’s just 12, too. And I noticed the other day, Leo, he’s eight and he can see what the meaning is. You know what I mean? There’s the one episode where the smallest daughter is in her dream and she sees the sun and he recognized that the parallel is like, oh, mom is the sun. That’s what’s happening there. He could see it and I was just like, oh, yes. That’s so good. With that storytelling, being able to see those archetypes, like you talk about, Pam, through Bluey, it’s just so beautiful.

ERIKA: Yeah. And all the layers. Yeah. Did you want to share about how you found unschooling or when that was?

JAHAIRA: Yes. So, after high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do, of course, because I never got a chance to figure that out. And so, I just went into business administration after high school. So, my first two years of college, I was just studying business administration, just because I didn’t know what to do and just going through the motions and then waitressing and bartending at the same time.

And then at some point I got a job as an assistant in a childcare center. I thought, oh, these kids are lovely. This is wonderful. Like, okay, this is what I want to study. This is what I’ll do.

So, I went to school to study early childhood and, for internships, was placed in different public school settings. And then finally when I graduated, I got a job in a charter school, which I think now, charter schools, of course there are good ones, bad ones, but I think charter schools still have to comply a lot by state standards, so it’s very hard for them to do things that they want to do.

But I got a job in a charter school, in a kindergarten classroom, and basically only lasted six months, because it was heartbreaking every day to see what they were doing with the behavior charts, and then they would get punished. The punishment was supposed to help them to do better, but it just made it worse and it made them feel shame.

And just the standardized tests. We were doing standardized tests in kindergarten. They told them they couldn’t use the bathroom during the standardized tests. And I was like, this is just crazy. And then, all of the staff was just so mean and I was expected to be mean, too. I was expected to do what everybody else was doing, and I just couldn’t do it. And I was just like, this feels wrong. Every day, it was just like, I’m supposed to be doing this thing where I’m supposed to be disciplining them and I’m supposed to be doing what the head teacher’s doing, and I can’t do it. It was just, I couldn’t do it.

And my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, he witnessed all of this and I think that, since he saw what I was going through, that’s why he signed on to homeschooling, because he realized, too, how it just doesn’t make sense.

So, I ended up quitting that job and I had always had night jobs, waitressing jobs, bartending jobs, jobs in bars, and it was always really good money. So, I always say that that was the reason I was able to walk away so easily from that position, because I knew that I would be okay. I didn’t need that job. I could still take care of myself, because I had this night job.

And then that’s when I went down the rabbit hole of, I don’t remember exactly how I found the podcast. The first podcast I found was Brett Veinotte’s podcast, which is School Sucks. I know that you were on it, Pam, once. It’s called the School Sucks Podcast. I think I searched, why is it so hard? Or something. I don’t remember what I was searching, but I came across the School Sucks Podcast and that’s what led me down. Oh my god. That’s where I learned about John Taylor Gatto and the beginning of public school and why it was created and how, back in the industrial revolution, how they needed trained workers to be able to work the machines and they needed people to just comply.

And wow. I learned so much in that podcast. And I realized, oh, this is why it was so hard. That’s the intent of schools. And so, that’s why it was so hard.

And then that’s how I came across Pam’s podcast. And that’s when I started volunteering in these different schools now, because I was like, okay, I can still be a teacher, maybe I can still find a place for myself, not in the public school setting, but somewhere else maybe. So, I would just volunteer. I’d just go to these schools and be like, listen, can I just help you guys? What can I do to help? I’m a certified teacher, but I don’t have a job right now.

And so, I went to the Brooklyn Free School in New York, where it’s a Democratic free school, just to see how it worked. And I went to Montessori schools and volunteered, and then I ended up in a cooperative where I volunteered. It was a co-op. And that school was the first time that I witnessed the opposite of what I witnessed in my first teaching experience where the teachers were just so mean. In the cooperative, the teachers were so gentle and loving that it just fed my soul. It was just a shocker to see how you can treat them with dignity and they will cooperate. That is a thing.

And so, they ended up hiring me, which is what John Taylor Gatto preached about, because he was a teacher for 30 years and he talked about letting kids volunteer, putting them in the real world in these situations. And so, I was putting myself in those situations and then I ended up getting hired. They hired me after a certain amount of time and then after that, I had my own baby, and then that’s when I stopped working.

But that was also when I learned about Janet Lansbury, who is a woman who preaches about giving dignity to your children even when they’re babies. When I learned about how she preaches about how, when you pick up your baby, say to the baby, “Hi, baby. I’m gonna pick you up now,” instead of like, oh, this is just this chunk of meat that you just do whatever you want with and you don’t even treat it like it’s a human, because they don’t understand you anyway. What a gift that I got from Janet Lansbury. That was the beginning of gentle parenting and everything else, but yep. So, the kids have not ever been to school and they’re six and eight and that’s where we are now.

PAM: Oh my goodness. I love that. I love that you were discovering this whole other world before you even had your own children, that you had found that connection with young kids and you’re like, oh, this is something that feeds my soul, as you were saying. But then, the more typical route, early childhood education and working in public schools and just feeling how that did not fit, because you were in that space. That’s so interesting, to see what the head teachers were trying to accomplish and seeing the impact on the kids. And then seeing that, this is just something I’m not comfortable doing myself, engaging in myself. And then in a space where you could leave that, just reaching out to just try something. “I can volunteer here.” Yeah, I mean, that feeds MY soul.

It’s very different, right? Where we might think, oh, we have to go get a job. We have to stick to that and coming across the School Sucks Podcast is very, very interesting as just a way to open up. It’s like just crank on that idea a little bit. There are all sorts of interesting things under there and Gatto’s idea of just participating in the world and volunteering. That connection you made between your volunteering out there to find what connected with you, alongside that, you’re already living the ethos of the lifestyle before you even had your own kids.

And it’s lovely that your now spouse was your boyfriend then, because he could see you going through that without your own children being in the mix. Because I think sometimes that can be really hard, because of course we all want the best for our kids. And typically, the best is a good education, a good school. That is the typical path. But you guys had encountered and explored that path before you actually had your own kids. So, I can see how that was so super and so wonderful and lucky for them.

ERIKA: Yeah. It sounds like having that open and curious mindset well before Pam ever said open and curious on the podcast to you. You could have gone into that work situation and just held onto the same beliefs that everyone else there did. But since your mind was open and curious even then, it was like, I see this, I hear what they’re telling me. But it’s not okay with me, so let me explore. And that can just lead to a whole life journey. And I just love that.

I was thinking that one of my favorite shifts that happened when I started unschooling was that maybe I had an idea about how my children would end up, or had a vision of what childhood is like, or what education is like, or what my children will be like, and shifting to noticing how unique they are, how different they are from me, seeing them for really who they are.

And I love thinking about every day as a chance to learn something else about this unique person who’s in front of me. And so, the choices that they’re making and all the things that they’re doing are just giving me more information about who they are as humans. And I think it’s just so fun and so interesting. I know you’ve also talked about studying your kids or learning your kids and so, I just wanted you to maybe share about what that looks like for you.

JAHAIRA: So, yeah, the studying my children, I don’t know if Pam remembers saying it, but it was something that I got from Pam. I think it was talking about buying curriculum and it was like, instead of buying a curriculum, your kids are the curriculum. Instead of, here’s these books. That’s gonna tell you what to teach them. It’s like, how about just learn about them and then go from there?

So, for me, I feel like lately it’s hard to really slow down enough, especially maybe because I’m a stay-at-home mom. So, you get busy with doing the dishes and cleaning the house and doing all the things around the house and you see that they’re okay and they’re doing their own thing and they’re learning and they’re having fun.

But sometimes it’s like, nope, you’ve got to remember to come back and just sit down and actually listen to them. Like slow down, slow way down enough, so that when they’re telling you a story, really listen to the words that they’re saying and really focus. Because I feel like my mind as a mom is always like, oh, I gotta do this. There’s things I gotta do. There’s something I have to remember. Don’t forget that you’ve gotta do this. So, it’s hard to set that part aside for a second to really slow down enough to be like, okay, what’s going on guys? And just being present with them. And that’s the first step, I feel like.

I feel like unschooling, it’s hands off in a lot of ways, because obviously you’re just letting them be curious and discover their own interests and everything. But also, and I know you guys talked about this before, it’s also all encompassing, it’s all hands in, because you really have to just be paying attention all the time. And you have to be that facilitator for them. And if you’re not willing to do that, then it’s not better than school in a lot of ways.

But I think that, yeah, slowing down enough. It is like the course that you have, Childhood Redefined. It really is redefining this role that we have in their lives. They’re not just this little thing to be molded, but they are someone who’s growing into their own whatever it may be. I’m not explaining that well, but you guys know what I’m talking about. And so, it’s our role to really be curious and then from there, whatever you see that they’re into, offer different things to them to get them even more excited about life and learning.

PAM: We can help expand their world around the pieces that they’re interested in. And over the years, there will be all sorts of pieces that they will be interested in, but they will also all connect. I’ll get myself all excited about that. But it really does come back. I do love the idea of being a student of our kids. And I love the way you pulled that out, rather than a curriculum, but it’s like, okay, what do I do instead?

I say, I don’t use curriculum, but then what do I do? But shifting it to look at our kids, oh my gosh, we learn so much. I think we learn so much about human beings, because I remember when I first came across homeschooling and then very quickly unschooling, to spend that time with my kids, I realized how capable they are at very young ages. That whole molding thing comes with the idea that, well, they don’t know these things. They don’t know themselves. I’m responsible to teach them how to be a human being. But they are human beings right from the get go and they have personalities and they actually have likes and dislikes and challenges and strengths that all make sense for who they are.

And if we are not a student of them, so much of that seems random. Like, why are they mad about that? Or even, why are they mad about that today when it was fine last week? There are reasons. It is just so fascinating on that human level, I think, to discover who they are. And then from there, then it is so logical, but it just flows so beautifully, the things that they’re interested in or the way they like to learn and just dive into something or sit back and watch for a while. You just discover who they are as a person.

You don’t need to teach them how to be a person. They are just so incredibly capable of taking in what’s going on in the moment and reacting even when they don’t have the words for it or the deeper understanding, but you can see their reaction, how they are trying to communicate in that moment. Even if they’re trying to communicate overwhelm, they’re feeling overwhelmed, and they’re expressing it.

So, when we learn their language, rather than expecting and waiting, like, I’m gonna teach them what emotions are and what the names are for them and I’m waiting till they can communicate that to me and until that point they don’t really understand that, they intuitively as a human being understand so much about themselves. And when we are there with them and understanding on that level, I have to backtrack and say not a perfect understanding, but we are with them as they’re processing and we can help with a little tweak here. Maybe we try something that might help reduce the overwhelm that they’re feeling and maybe it doesn’t really work, but we’ve shown them a tool and we have both learned that, yeah, that doesn’t help me at all in this particular situation. There is no wrong. It’s always learning, right? We learn more about it.

And again, when it comes to relationships, it’s not about like getting it right or fixing it fast. Even if we sidestep, even something goes a little bit off kilter, that repair and them knowing that we are there because of the relationship, not their actions. You know what I mean? They don’t have to act right or do the thing that we told them would solve the problem for them.

And the other thing, and then I’ll be quiet for a moment, but the other thing that I love that being a student of our child helps us do is something that I found to be such a huge a-ha moment, which is seeing things through their eyes. When I’m going into a situation and I care about them and I love them and something’s upsetting them, I try to put myself in their shoes and I’m like, oh, this thing would make me feel so much better. So, I go and do the thing and it does not help them at all.

And I’m like, well, that’s weird. That’s strange. Something’s off. Yet, how different if I can say, oh, I’m gonna see this situation through their eyes, because they’re a different person, they’re a different personality. They have different things that overwhelm them, different strengths, different challenges. They are a different human being.

And if I can try see through their eyes and have that level of understanding, I may choose to try and help or support them in a way that I would never want somebody to do for me, but I know them and through their eyes and this might be more helpful for them. And when I can do that, I do find that I am more successful at connecting with them, more successful at helping them move through it. And when I’m looking through their eyes, I am now all of a sudden taking away that pressure of, I want to solve this fast. I want them to move through this fast. This is really uncomfortable for me.

And when I can go and meet them where they are, all of a sudden their timetable and their processing makes a little bit more sense to me, and I can take that edge off the pressure. Because when we’re all worked up and we come at each other with that energy, that can just make things spiral even more.

ERIKA: Yeah. A couple things came up for me when you were talking. The first is, it’s helpful for me to remember how I felt when I was five or six. I remember being young and I remember that I was me then, too. And so, I know that my kids are themselves now. I don’t need to wait for them to grow in order for their opinions and their choices and all of those different things about them to make sense. They are who they are.

And so, that’s why that curiosity of just learning more about them and getting to that point where I can see things through their eyes, getting to that point where I know if they’ve made a choice, it makes sense for them. So, if it doesn’t make sense to me that they made that choice, I just have more to learn about them. That’s just so fun and interesting. And I think remembering how it was for me, that I have always felt like a human all along, can help me put that into perspective.

And then, Jahaira, I loved how you were talking about being really intentional about spending the time just being there and observing. And I think that’s so important, because when you can put something on your list, like, do this math page with my kids, it’s something that’s easy to check off and it’s a task to do. Or like, cook dinner. That’s a task. But this “be there” doesn’t feel as much like I’m putting that on a to-do list, and so it really can get just pushed aside. I have these other tasks. There’s the work to do, there’s house stuff to do, places to go. And those more time-sensitive appointments and tasks can start to take over the time.

And so, I do think especially in the beginning, or especially if you don’t feel like you have all that knowledge about who your kids are and really wanna get in deeper with that, taking that time and being super intentional about, this is something that I’m going to do today. And what the thing is is just sitting there with them and seeing what they’re doing and what they’re interested in and being there.

We had a podcast guest who mentioned “very important sitting.” That was the phrase she used to increase the importance of that task for herself. So, she felt like it really was a valuable and important thing to do, just sitting in the living room, being there and having the kids exploring the world around her. It makes such a difference for them. They love it. They love having someone accessible like that. And then, for me, just such a huge difference in being able to pick up on the language and what they are talking about, what they’re thinking about and just getting to know them better. I love that.

PAM: I did love that piece, too. When Anna and I started the The Living Joyfully Podcast, where we were focusing more on relationships, the very first episode was talking about priorities, because I think that’s absolutely it. It’s so easy to get caught up in prioritizing the tasks that are more defined. Like, I know what I have to do. I pretty much know what I have to do, and I can get that done and I can knock it off. So yeah, naming it, just understanding that, oh, with our choices and our lifestyle, this is something that’s a priority for me.

And if it helps to frame it as being a student of my child and this is my learning time, it’s learning about ourselves in such a way that we know how to frame things or we learn how to frame things such that we will give it the priority commensurate with the value that we get out of it. Because it is such a valuable thing to do, isn’t it?

JAHAIRA: Yeah. You forget how valuable it is to just sit, like you said, Erika. Oh, well that’s not a thing. It’s like, that’s the most important thing. If I think about what my values are, of course, my children, that connection with my children. That’s connection. That’s what’s gonna nourish them. And if they feel nourished, then everything just is so much easier from there.

PAM: Yeah. Well, I think this last question is going to flow very nicely from this whole conversation, because I have found that, for many of us, when we embrace unschooling, it does become almost like a spiritual practice, right?

There are lots of different facets to it that ebb and flow over time, like we were just talking about, that presence in the moment, being there, challenging so many of our deep-rooted beliefs, which you did a good chunk of before even having children, and breaking the cycle of our own childhood trauma, there could be so much to process there as well.

So, I just thought it would be great to hear some of your experience around this aspect of unschooling or this way of looking at the deschooling and unschooling process and lifestyle.

JAHAIRA: Yeah, I think that in the beginning, it was just about education. It was just about, there’s a different way that they can learn. It doesn’t have to be like that. Let’s find out about these different schools and these different theories about education.

And then, the years go by and you realize it’s a spiritual thing, because with religion and spirituality, it’s like dealing with the unknown. This existence of being alive, what is this? And people turn to religion to try to comfort that feeling of the unknown. Like, okay, I can have faith in this thing, or I can believe in this thing. My husband, he’s been going to church more lately and it’s a Catholic church and I’m open to, what is this existence and what are they teaching there? I don’t know much about the Christians. They have this deep faith and it seems to really be this healing thing. It’s like this beautiful way of just having faith about this lifetime.

So, I think unschooling becomes this spiritual thing, because it’s the same thing. It’s like, okay, I have to trust here, because I don’t know. This unschooling thing, this is a new thing and people don’t even know about it and they think it’s radical.

When I tell people about my kids, let alone home homeschooling is already like, oh wow, you do, but if I try to explain unschooling, it’s like what!? So, for me, I have gained the confidence because of the stories that I’ve heard from so many people who have come before me and shown that it can be done.

But there is still this thing inside where it’s like, whew, I’ve really gotta stay present here and look at these old beliefs and trust that it’s gonna be okay. This nourishment is what’s most important with the children, not this education thing. So yeah, with the trust and mystery and that parallel with spirituality.

PAM: I love that. The trust piece. That wasn’t what came to mind for me at first, but absolutely. I love that you mentioned that, because yeah, when we first come to it and we’re learning about it and we are hearing from people who’ve done it or who have much more experience than we do and it’s making sense to us, you still need to trust, because you don’t know how that is actually gonna work in your family.

JAHAIRA: I feel like I need to know.

PAM: Because I don’t have your kids. And I think one of the big things that I found, I remember thinking at the beginning of the transition, that all of these experienced families, I love the relationships with their kids that they’re talking about. And I am really worried that they just have easy kids.

I remember that so well. It’s like, how is this relationship I have going to look like that relationship sometime in the future? But they say it does and it makes sense to me the way they explain the process. So you know what? I am going to trust and I’m gonna dive in and engage with the process.

I think one of the challenges comes if we choose not to engage. We just say, oh yeah, that’s really cool. And, kind of hands off, we just let them do their thing. That deeper relationship, that strong, connected, trusting relationship would be much harder to develop with our kids in that kind of situation where we’re kind of worried about engaging with them, worried that we shouldn’t be telling them what to do. We don’t do that.

But if you, instead of thinking about the education, because that’s where we’re first coming to it, so many of us. It’s like, well, if they’re not going to school, how else are they gonna learn? How are they gonna become educated? You know? So that’s what we think we’re replacing. And it’s like, oh, well if I’m not focused on that, what do I do? Focus on the relationship. Be a student of your child. Engage with them, be with them there, you can engage it. It’s a new way. It was for me, anyway, to learn how to engage with a person without directing them in the way that I would think this moment should unfold.

And the very important sitting, it all ties together. But watching them in the moment and seeing how they take it, while being with them. If I’m not with them, I can’t see how it’s unfolding. I can’t learn about them. I can’t see them making a different choice and go, oh yeah, that’s not a choice I’d make, but it sure makes sense for them. And it works out. Because maybe I saw it and I’m like, yeah, that’s not gonna work, but I’ll let them discover it for themselves and it does. And you go like, boom, mind blown. Learning my way isn’t the only way. It isn’t the right way. I can say it’s the right way for me, but yeah. It all goes back to that trust and then engaging in the moment.

And that’s how we build that trust, too, because we start to see it unfolding in our own families. And often it looks a little bit different. All unschooling families are different, because we’re all different people in them. But to see that trust piece unfolding right then and there in front of us over those first few months and years, then that becomes so valuable, that becomes our priority.

And then it’s so much easier to lean into that when we realize, oh, if I focus on just my relationship with them, everything else just kind of bubbles up out of that. We’re all doing the things that we’re interested in. We’re all learning, we’re all enjoying those pieces. We’re all having things go wrong. We’re all tweaking and changing and doing all those pieces. Oh yeah, this is life. This is the lifestyle that we’ve chosen, the practice.

I love thinking of unschooling as a practice and spirituality as a practice, because it’s just showing up each day and being present in the moment and bringing that ethos in and the “who I wanna be” into my engagement with my children, but also any human being that I want to be in that close of a relationship with, that I want to be connected with, want to have a trusting relationship. I get to choose who I want to have that depth of a relationship with.

ERIKA: Yeah. I think it is interesting how the unschooling journey leads to the deeper processing, the deeper revelations, and questioning the beliefs, and breaking our cycle of trauma. But it makes sense and I think it starts with that curious mindset that comes towards the beginning of unschooling. Like, what if? Is this possible? That starting place.

To me, it felt almost like just opening my mind up to possibilities, rather than just thinking I already know the answers, or I already know what’s going to happen, or I already know who my kids are going to become, I know who I am, all of that kind of stuff. Once I really started being in the moment with these new humans and really seeing, okay, they are different than me. People are different. One curious thought led to another and it really does just become this much deeper process of self-discovery. And so many really valuable things happen, I think, along the journey, if we can keep our minds open and just focus on the relationships, the relationships with ourselves and the relationships with our family, it’s just an incredible journey.

JAHAIRA: Yeah. That whole thing where you said, I know this, and I know that, and I know who I am. It’s like what I talked about, what we look at in non-duality, how it’s this thick layer of like, oh yeah, I know. I know how this is. Oh, we’re so sure of it. We just know. We just know. It’s like, you don’t know anything! We don’t even know what is this. This could be a VR game in itself. You know what I mean?
We get so caught up in that and I think it is because of all those years of schooling that we went through that it’s just mind blowing.

Here’s an example of an epiphany I had the other day. So, I thought it’d be a great idea to take the kids to go see The Nutcracker. I did research on it and I thought it was going to be this kid-friendly show with child actors and I just thought it was a great idea. I showed them the video real quick and I said, this looks like it’ll be fun, right? And they’re like, yeah, that looks like fun.

This is what ends up happening. I end up insisting to my husband to buy the tickets. He’s a real homebody and I’m the one that’s always like, let’s go try this thing or let’s introduce the kids to this and that and stuff. So, I insist that he buy the tickets. And he did. He wasn’t that happy about it, but he did buy the tickets.
We end up going there and it ends up being the ballet. It’s just the ballet. It’s a Nutcracker ballet. It’s just them dancing and the kids, they sat through the first act, I guess, and then the intermission. And then of course the intermission, it’s like, oh, we get to go home now. I’m like, no, no, this is the intermission. So, now, I’m embarrassed to say it, but now I’m insisting that we don’t leave and that we stay for the second act. Because I have this belief now, which now I can see it. Hindsight’s 20/20. I could only see it afterwards that I had this belief in my head.

Well, I made my husband buy the tickets. So, now we can’t leave, because I made him buy the tickets. And what if now he’s going to be mad at me if we leave early and he bought the tickets and he spent money on that. And there’s this whole thing, right? I’d really let that get the best of me in that moment.
And I wasn’t conscious of it then, but we ended up staying. The kids were so upset and I should have just said, you know what? Let’s just go. But I didn’t. And Leo was crying. Now I feel guilty. So, then we stayed. It was okay. Ended up being okay.

But I realized in that moment that him being there and not wanting to be there, imagine that every single day of your life for fucking eight hours a day. I had a glimpse of like, oh my god. He had to do it for an hour. Imagine you wake up in the morning and then you have to go somewhere you hate and sit through it for eight hours a day for however many hours of your life. What that does to a human being. It makes you lose that touch. That makes you lose this interconnection with whatever spiritual thing is going on.

And it was a bad thing that I made him go through that, but it just helped me remember, too, that we had to go through that. And that’s just layers and layers, day upon day, going through this. And it’s just shocking that we do that to people.

PAM: Well, thank you so much for sharing that story. And, oh my gosh, yes. But I don’t know. For me, anyway, I did not even realize. When I was in school, there was just no choice.

JAHAIRA: Yeah. You’re just resigned to it.

PAM: Right, exactly. You’re just like completely resigned and how am I gonna make the best of this? Because this is my life. And, oh my gosh, there’s so little choice. And, like you said, the spiritual aspect, the understanding of ourselves, it is so hard. I can kind of learn who I am within the constraints of all that, but there is just so much control over your life. You really just have no idea who you would be without that.

It reminds me, I remember Lissy in Girl Guides and they were going off to high school and they were like, “Oh, are you coming to school? Are you gonna come try at high school? Now we’re gonna go to high school. High school’s gonna be awesome. We have so much more time to ourselves. We can get a free period and we can leave for lunch.”

It just felt like their world was opening up and they literally would say like, “What do you do? Your life must be so boring,” because they could not envision what somebody would do if they didn’t have to go to a building and engage with the people who were in that same building with them. They, even as kids, could not imagine what they would do with that time. And so, yes, it really goes deep when you start thinking about it, doesn’t it?

JAHAIRA: Leo was playing video games and he got on with a cousin of his, who’s older. He’s probably 15 or 16. So, they’re playing Fortnite together, because Leo just started playing Fortnite. And so, they’re on the Discord talking and his cousin goes, so, wait, you don’t go to school? And he is like, no. He is like, so what do you do all day? And Leo’s like, I play games. He’s like, you just play games all day? You game all day and that’s it? That’s what you get to do? And Leo’s like, yeah, pretty much. And for this kid, it’s like, what? He can’t conceive of it.

And to hear that as a mom, too, like, oh, he is just playing games all day. But nobody knows what that means. Do you understand that he learned how to read, write, and do math through playing games all day? It’s like, no way!

ERIKA: Yeah. Just the time and space that you have in this kind of lifestyle, it’s such a gift and it’s something that you don’t even realize what it could mean if you don’t have it.

And I was thinking, too, that after we leave that system of schooling, we impose that on ourselves forever more unless we start to question it. And so, that really is such a big part of the unschooling journey is just realizing how much of our mind now is structured by school and starting to question things and starting to change some of the things we believe about ourselves and about the world, and yeah, it’s pretty amazing.

PAM: I know. It is. Because school just leads into college, university, into getting a job, into all those things, like you were talking about earlier, Jahaira. That’s the path and that’s what it’s training us for. And oh my gosh. I know. It’s just so exciting. Remembering back, I was like, I can question those things. I can make different choices and the world won’t blow up. It’s just amazing.

And they reach all aspects of your life. All of a sudden, it’s like, oh, this is up for grabs. And I can actually try and figure out what makes sense to me as a human being. And still, I learned so much about that by watching my kids, that oh, you can just make choices and see how they turn out and then make a different choice and make another choice.

JAHAIRA: And you’re like, I forgot about that. Oh, right. When you slow down enough to just be present with them, then you’re not being controlled by that veil of thoughts. Okay. I’m gonna slow down.

And I’ve talked about that on the calls, too, where if something does come up where I’m starting to feel anxious, I’m like, whoa, I can feel a feeling coming up. Something feels anxious. Hmm. What is that? What’s that about? That space to be curious and to slow down enough to be like, okay, I see, here’s this belief. Okay. I’m believing this. I’m believing that if he doesn’t do it this way, it’s not going to go right. It takes a lot.

Even though I do want to go to church with my husband and I want to see what it’s all about, and I want to learn about the Christians and Jesus Christ, at the end of the day, when I meditate, that quiet space, that is my church. I’m like, this is where the peace is. I don’t need to seek it by some dogma or somebody else telling me how I should be or how I should treat people. This silence here is the source of everything good or something.

We talked about on the call where it’s like, when you can slow down enough to be like, whoa, all these thoughts are going, and all these sensations are going. But hold on a minute. Let me just slow down enough to get back into my senses. What am I hearing? What am I feeling? Okay. It’s just right here, right now. Then from this quiet place, life is going to take me to what needs to be done. Instead of the mind and all the beliefs and all the years of schooling telling me what I should be and what will make me happy, and I’m so sure of it. I’m so sure this is going to make me happy.

It’s like, no, actually none of that shit’s going to make you happy. What’s going to make you happy is slowing down enough to just connect with these people right in front of you. It’s just so beautiful. I’m just so thankful that I came across unschooling and it’s just a blessing. It’s a blessing, right?

PAM: So much. Yes.

ERIKA: Yes. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jahaira. We really enjoyed speaking to you.

JAHAIRA: Thank you.

ERIKA: And thank you to all of our listeners. We hope that you found it helpful on your unschooling journey, and if you enjoy these conversations, I really think you’d love the Living Joyfully Network.
It’s such an amazing group of people connecting and having thoughtful conversations about all the things that we encounter in our unschooling lives. And you can learn more at livingjoyfully.ca/network. And if you’ve been on the fence, you can join with a monthly subscription option so you can check it out for a month, meet the community, explore the archive of themes and resources, and join in the conversations to get a sense for how the Network could fit into your life. And we hope to see you there. Wishing everyone a lovely week! Bye.

PAM: Bye bye. Thank you so much, Jahaira. Lovely to speak with you.

JAHAIRA: Thank you.

EU357: Building Community

In this episode, Pam, Anna, and Erika dive deep into building community. As we regularly mention, people are different, and each member of your family will likely have different needs for community, friendship, and social time. We talk about in-person versus online connections, the value of interest-based communities, some of the many different ways we’ve found community during our unschooling years, and more.

It was really fun to discuss this topic and we hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey!

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, coaching calls, and more!

In our newest 4-week focus course, we explore Validation, a transformational relationship tool for building understanding and connection in our most important relationships, like the ones with our kids and our partner. Check it out and we hope you’ll share how it helps you in your relationships!

The Living Joyfully Network

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

Follow @helloerikaellis on Instagram.

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling.

Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. This month, we’re talking about Building Community. Come and be part of the conversation!

So much of what we talk about on this podcast and in the Living Joyfully Network isn’t actually about unschooling. It’s about life. On The Living Joyfully Podcast, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia talk about life, relationships, and parenting. You can check out the archive here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hello everyone! I am Pam Laricchia from Living Joyfully and today I’m joined by my co-hosts, Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. Hello!

ANNA AND ERIKA: Hello!

PAM: So today, we’re going to talk about building community, and I am very excited to chat about it, because at first, it seems like a pretty simple idea, right? Find and connect with other people. But really, it’s so much more nuanced than that. So, I’m excited to dive into that. But before we get started, we just wanted to remind you about our shop.

There you can find my unschooling books, book coaching calls, or buy one of our courses, and our newest course is Validation, which is a transformational relationship tool for building understanding and connection in our most important relationships, like the ones with our kids and our partner. All our course content is available in both text and audio formats, whichever style works better for you.

So, maybe you want to listen on some days and you have a moment to read on other days. They can fit into the flow of your days, whatever they look like. You’ll find it in our store at livingjoyfullyshop.com or just follow the link in the show notes.

So, building community. Anna, would you like to get us started?

ANNA: I would. I’m pretty excited about this, because I have so many ideas bubbling around. So, we’ll see where it all goes.

But I think where I want to start, because this is a question that comes up a lot on the Network. It comes up just over the years. You hear a lot of, I need friends for my kids, or, what do we do about finding community? Or, there’s not a lot of unschoolers around me, or all these different pieces.

And so, I think the first, grounding place to be is we’re just going to slow it down and take a deep breath and just say, okay, where are the messages coming from? When I look at my kids, are they happy? Are they asking for more? Are they okay with the relationships that they have? Do I see that they’re wanting a little bit more? Is it me? Is it that I’m wanting more? Is it that I’m not wanting more?

And then I want us to talk about people are different in that way, so that we can recognize that this is going to look unique to each family, it’s going to look unique to each child. And so, just really recognizing that there are some cultural messages of ‘kids need to be with kids their own age.’ And it’s like, hey, let’s just pick that apart a little bit and see where it comes from. So, I want to throw that to you all first, but wanted to start there.

ERIKA: Yeah. I totally have heard that and felt that and all of those things. And right, if we’re looking at our experience, if we did go to school as kids, life as a kid looked absolutely packed full of time with other children. So, it makes sense if our children’s lives are looking quite different from that, that maybe that could be a little jarring or like, is this okay? And those questions can come up. But if we actually look at the personalities in our families, what our kids are asking us, how we are feeling, how they’re feeling. And it’s okay if I’m the one who is wanting more connection. And it’s okay if my kids are asking for more connection, but just tuning into, is it just that everyone else is in school and in all these activities and it’s feeling like maybe we need to be doing that too? Or is it really tuning into who are we? Are we happy with our lives right now?

ANNA: Yeah. I love that.

PAM: I do think it’s so valuable to take that moment and just really consider how much of it is stories and messages that we’ve absorbed growing up and over the years because, I found myself jumping to community as the first answer, as in, oh, you’re interested in this? Let’s join the sports team. Let’s go take a rec class. That community and that type of more conventional learning is the first answer that comes to mind.

And so, just really pulling apart that like, oh, okay. That doesn’t always have to be the answer. What actually is happening here? Is this something that I’m just pulling out? And then, even for our kids too, I think another thing that was always so helpful for me, even when my kids were looking for community or looking for friends, was to realize this really wasn’t about the unschooling at all. It’s really helpful to help them dig into it, too. What is their need that they’re actually looking to fulfill, because often we can, and our kids can too, jump to friends, other people, groups. Those are the answers. But to take that time to just really dig in and ask, well, what am I really trying to accomplish? What do I really want to do? And just to open things up again can be so, so helpful, I think.

ANNA: Yeah. And I think maybe not to romanticize the past, because I did live in a neighborhood where we were out and we were playing and there were kids around, but it had its challenges. I’m an introvert. There were challenges to it. And thinking of school, segregating us by geography and age into a box of a room, it didn’t always work. Those weren’t always the people that I’d connect with.

And I think of my life now where I have friends 15 years younger and 15 years older. And so, I think really we’re so lucky in our life that we can really lean into what works for our children and for ourselves in terms of connection and relationship and learning. Because, like you said, Pam, if we go to, well, we need to do a kids’ class on science, that’s its own thing, versus maybe it’s being mentored by somebody that’s really interested in the field that you’re interested in and they’re an adult and it’s more of a one-on-one. So, yeah, I love that idea of just unpacking all of those pieces.

ERIKA: Right. There’s not one right way for community. So, just like everything else we talk about, there’s not just one right path for, I’m interested in dance. Okay. It has to be this group class. That’s not necessarily the thing. And I love that idea of like. In many cases, socializing with an adult who’s super interested in the things that they’re interested in, that might feel like a way more suitable community in certain moments. So, I really love that.

And I was thinking about some of our experiences with kind of in-person community for my kids. And so, a couple of things that we tried just based on what I was looking for, what the kids were looking for, and again, just playing with all the possibilities. We really liked hosting park days because I found just kind of going to that same location at the same time each week was a way to have time for those kind of connections to develop. Because I have found that if we do these one-off activities like a class or, let’s all go to the museum, there’s not enough free time for the kids to really have a chance to interact.

And so, since my kids are very introverted, slow to warm, we laugh about it with Oliver’s best friend, that it took just months and months of this child following Oliver around and trying to talk to him before they finally really had a strong connection. It just took all that time to warm up and make that connection. And so, having that regular park day was something that helped us develop friendships.

And while most other groups that we saw were doing things like a planned, adult-led activity at the park, I was careful to make mine more just an open playtime so that the kids could find their buddies and make connections that way. And I advertised it in early days as just a parenting group. And then as the kids got older, we turned it into a homeschooling group, because then that way, we were finding the kids who were available during school hours.

ANNA: Yeah, I mean that’s definitely our experience, too. So, we were at the time in a fairly large city on the east coast and so, there were a lot of homeschoolers in the area, but we found that consistency of the park date was exactly that. It was just this known. It felt good. We could do different things.

And the only thing I kind of wanted to add to that is thinking about the different ages. I always found this kind of fascinating, because with the younger kids, it’s a lot more physical in nature. They like to have physical things, the playground equipment, the whatever, and then you get to this teen age where they want to sit. They want to sit and they’re chatting. Or sometimes they need like a side by side kind of thing. None of the people that that came to this were particularly sporty, but we would play kickball and it’s not super sporty. Pretty much anybody can play. But it did allow for a little bit of kind of parallel time for the teens and for those pre-teens to have something that you’re focusing on that’s outside yourself, but also it’s not super involved or competitive. It’s just kind of fun. So, that was something that worked well for us.

But yeah, having that open park day where people could hang out in a place that had different places to sit, places to climb, places to do, really worked well.

I think another piece that was important for kind of our in-person thing is I did a lot of driving. Our city was large and I just was okay with driving to connect with other people and to do. So, it wasn’t the neighborhood kids, it was driving to find people that were available during the day and that we do. So, letting go of some of those tapes of like, oh, you should just be able to swing open the door and there’s a pack of kids. Thankfully we didn’t have that. Actually, I didn’t want that. We didn’t have it. I was glad.

But for some people that’s a stumbling block to realize like, okay, there’s going to be a little bit more facilitation. But I think this may lead into your experience, too, Pam, the interest-driven pieces. We did do the pieces of homeschool groups and homeschool things, but we found a lot of connections were made via interest, and I think that was kind of your experience.

PAM: Yeah. Because we did not have lot of park days yet, 20-odd years ago here in Canada. There were just less numbers of homeschoolers, so there really wasn’t that kind of activity to participate in. Yet, like you said, we really went through interests.

So, the nice thing about connecting with people through an interest is you’ve already got that point of connection, right? You don’t have to find something to come up in conversation with. The other fascinating piece, too, that ties in with what you were saying with the driving piece is like, okay, you’ve got an interest and you’ve decided that actually participating in that interest around other people and with other people is something that they want to try out, or you want to try out, and then it was about finding a place that connected for them.

So it wasn’t, oh, you wanna take dance class? Here’s the closest dance studio. We’ve signed you up. Here we go. No. There were times when I was driving an hour, hour and a half, but to a place that really spoke to them and that really helped them get that experience that they were looking for. So, that was a very helpful thing to kind of unpack for myself that, oh no, why would I go and drive a distance when I’ve got one around the corner?

But when you go back to what the desire is, when you go back to this child or myself, like we’re a unique person and we’re looking for a specific thing. When you can find that and find the environment where that can thrive, it just makes a whole world of difference.

I remember Lissy and Girl Guides. For a number of years, she was looking for some more connection and activities, but not a particular one. She was looking more for that engagement, so that served for her for many years. And then when we wanted that space that you were talking about, Erika, because yeah, that space to just hang out and see how things unfold and to just let conversations and activities grow, when they found someone that they would like to connect more deeply with at the activity, then I would talk to the parents and invite them back to our house.

And that was the thing, too, is being open to being the place where people would hang out. Maybe I needed to drive and pick up the child and bring them to our house for that to happen, because the parents were maybe busy with a sibling or something else. They didn’t have time. And for them, it wasn’t a huge priority to drive their kid to some other kid’s house. Because their kid’s in a class with 30 other kids. They see other kids all the time. They weren’t prioritizing that. But if the other child wanted to come for a visit, I would say, ‘I’ll happily go pick them up and bring them over and drop them home whenever you need. And yes, they can stay over or they can stay for meal, blah, blah, blah.’

But I was open to doing that extra little bit, because it was accomplishing what we were wanting to do. It was meeting a desire. It was something to try out and some lifelong friendships have grown out of that. And it’s just so fascinating to see it in action and to realize that, when we talk about building community, we don’t need to know that there is a community at the end of this path and I just have to quickly walk it as fast as possible.

But when I’m open and curious and I see possibilities and ask what feels good in this moment, what feels like it might help us walk towards this pull that we’re feeling and then seeing how it unfolds is just so much more serendipitous. Things happen, I think, when we’re open to that versus, we must build community right now. Here we go.

ERIKA: I feel like that’s something we talked about in the Network a bit, this kind of playing around with setting up activities for a group and seeing what could come from it. And that was something that, as someone who was organizing events for a number of years, I had to really come to terms with being okay with people not showing up or being okay with things not going according to plan and just trying again.

And so, one thing that I learned was just to choose activities that I would be happy and our family would be happy to just do, even if no one was there. And so, if you are a family with some extroverts or with some people who do like doing activities in groups, it does make a big difference if you’re the one willing to plan things, because people are always looking for things to do and then my advice about that would be to just choose things that you’d be happy to do, even if no one shows up. Because then there’s really no disappointment. You get to do something fun. And if other people come, you’ve chosen an activity and then met someone who enjoys the same thing you do.

ANNA: That is exactly what I was going to say, because we got to a place where we had a pretty good sized group, but there were certainly fits and starts and that was the key. Talking to my kids, okay, is this something you want to do? I’ll put something together. Because you’re so right in that that’s the part people don’t want to do. And partly it’s time and extra kids and all the things. And it’s something that I don’t mind doing.

And so, when I would build it, they really would come, because they were so grateful. And again, we lived in a city with a lot of homeschoolers so we could get homeschool deals. I could make that call and get a super cheap price at the trampoline place or at those things. And people were so happy to participate in that. And it did give us just people to share things with.

But one of the other things I want to talk about, too, in relation to this in-person piece is our own needs as adults and as parents, because I think we’re all introverts here, but we have varying needs of wanting to be around people.

But I guess one of the things I want to say is that sometimes we think we’re going to go to the park day and we’re going to get our needs met to talk to parents. What I found was that that was not true, that I needed to let that part go, because I wanted to be there for the kids. I was really creating that particular environment for the kids to make connections, enjoy themselves and whatever. And often I did need to be even peripherally involved, aware of it. It wasn’t really my time.

So, then it was like, okay, then what do I do for my time? So, then it was finding ways. I had a friend that we did grocery store dates. And I found sometimes parenting conversations were hard for me, because I can get a little worked up about children and all of that. So, I actually found, for me, interest-based was better, too. So, if I was going to something that maybe was a group about rocks or a group about singing bowls or something else, that’s what we were talking about. We weren’t talking about the curriculum they were using or, what are your kids doing about this, or that kind of thing.

And so, I think the big lesson for me, and it’s not going to be a surprise to you two, it’s just open and curious. Don’t get tunneled in on it looking one way or a certain way. Just really start opening it up to, okay, what are the needs? There’s a million different ways to meet it. What can we do?

PAM: I think it is so valuable and helpful to realize that when I think of building community, I want a community, I don’t need a community that meets all my needs. One group doesn’t need to meet all my things. I can have various groups that support me when I want to talk about singing bowls and maybe another group is where I come for parenting stuff.

I remember when I was wanting to build a community and there really wasn’t, I decided to start a conference and I ran a conference for six years. I kind of forget that now. It’s like, oh yeah, that’s right. I did that thing. And that was great for bringing some unschooling families out of the woodwork and gathering them in a spot for a couple of days. So, that was a lovely way to meet some people that were local-ish. Because people would definitely drive to come. But it was nice to just be surrounded for a couple of days with other like-minded parents who at least who were open and curious and wanting to learn.

So, that was actually a nice connection for parents. And then we had kid-focused activities alongside it and what was beautiful was the shared parenting style, where we were totally comfortable with parents coming and going from talks and hanging out with their kids’ activities, kids running in, looking for their parents, et cetera.

So, yeah, when you’re open, like, what could I do? There are all sorts of possibilities, from letting people know that you’re at the trampoline place to running a conference.

ERIKA: That idea that we don’t have to find a whole family that fits our whole family as a friend group. That does give us a little bit of freedom then, so we can really look at the individual members of our family, what are we all looking for? And what I did as far as finding in-person community for myself that ended up working out so well, was doing a book club. Because I wanted to find other people who like diving into ideas. I wanted to find people who are curious and want to learn. And so, a book club is something that draws that type of personality.

And then the books I chose were things like How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and books by Alfie Kohn. And so, it was like, this is what we’re going to be talking about. And then I could start to see, who is that resonating with? Those are the people who kept coming. Then we started reading Pam’s books and it became just a fully unschooling book club. And so, for a few years, that was a really good place for me to connect with people in person who really were having the kinds of conversations that I wanted to be having. And it really filled my cup. So, yeah, I loved that.

PAM: I love that. You can just choose the books and somebody can pass and say, oh yeah, no, that’s not something I’m interested in. They’re moving on. It’s not a judgment at all, but it’s just this kind of call that says, hey, over here we’re chatting about these kinds of things. Are you interested? Yeah, I love that.

ANNA: Yeah, so much. But I think that leads us to that we all live in different types of places, some smaller, some bigger, all across the world, when we’re talking about who’s listening to this podcast and even who’s with us on the Network.

And so, I guess the Network brings to mind just this idea of how important online communities were for me. And I think we all will have our stories to share about that. But I feel like the online communities, I mean this is even way back in the day, were critical. Back then, it was Yahoo Groups, a little bit primitive. And Pam and I have been friends for almost 20 years, probably, meeting on an online group and it’s just incredible.

And so, what I love is that now we have things like the Network, where it’s just so much more rich in the tools and how to connect and how it brings us together and having those conversations. Because it’s very much like you alluded to, Pam, but it’s like when we have maybe a more parenting question or something that’s happening with our kids, I really wanted to take that to people that got it. If I was going to ask a co-sleeping question, I wanted somebody that would go, ‘Okay, the bolster here and the thing there, and this is how I did it,’ versus, ‘Oh, just put them in a crib and you won’t have that problem.’ Because for me, that wasn’t what I was interested in. And so just finding that community of people that are thinking about the ideas that are going through similar pieces, I just felt like that online community was such a rich part of my life and I have traveled, really, the world, meeting them since and that has enriched my life in so many ways.

ERIKA: Well, I was just going to say, online community is real community, which I know sometimes people can kind of poo poo it. It’s like, these aren’t real friendships. But oh my gosh, with my kids and their connections and with me and my connections, we know that this is real. And we have such better tools now for connecting online with Marco Polo and Discord videos and video calling and everything. And so, I feel like online connections can be so deep and rich and just provide access to a whole world of people in order for us to make better and deeper connections.

PAM: Yeah, I remember back when we were first connecting, Anna, online, it was like, those aren’t very meaningful when you’re an online friend. And like, oh my gosh, you’re going to go meet someone that you only know online? That’s scary. Those were the stories at the time.

But yes, I have found them to be such rich and meaningful connections that have lasted for many, many years. But as I was thinking about the value of community, for me personally, I just found that being in community with others who are on that same journey, a similar journey, really just helped me learn more. So, maybe it’s about what that journey may look like from somebody who’s further along. I learned so much about myself, about different things that I might want to ponder, where my blocks are. I find it inspiring to hear how things are going for people who are further along.

Like you said, Anna, that’s a place where I can take questions and get ideas that I would really like to think about versus having to discard the first six or seven, because it’s like, yeah, no, that’s not my path. So often, if I would ask parenting or even learning kinds of questions in my more conventional friend group, et cetera, it would be, send them to school or send them to their room. And fine, I can completely understand why those are your answers. But I found it would be a little bit of a disconnect in that relationship if they, out of the goodness of their heart, were trying to help me with my issue and I was going to completely ignore all their suggestions every time.

So, I wanted to find different communities where I wanted to bring different thoughts, different questions, and I would get different things out of them. So yeah, it wasn’t holding one and it wasn’t that it had to be in person. There was so much value all over the place.

ANNA: And I guess that’s making me think, too, just, we have this vast world. And finding people, Erika, like you were talking about, who like to think about the nuances or the ideas, for all three of us that’s important.

And when Erika and I connected, which was also online, it was just like, ah! Oh my gosh! There’s so many things that we can talk about and do and want to process. And that connection was so deep, so quickly. And I just think, how lucky are we? Because I live in kind of the mid of the United States on the East Coast, and she lives in Miami as far as you can get away and still be on the east coast there. And yet, it’s this relationship that has been so valuable to me and there’s been so much personal growth.

And one of the things I love about the Network is that very piece. There’s so much personal growth for me, because obviously our kids are grown, Pam and mine, yet it’s such a process of understanding ourselves. We still obviously have our kids in our lives, thankfully. And, I just feel like it’s so rich to learn from these other parents that are being so intentional and so interested in talking about the nuances and connecting and just loving up our kids and all of those pieces.

And I love the cultural aspects that that opens up to us from people all over the world and what’s different for them. I just think that cannot be beat. It’s just such a gift of being alive in this time right now. And so, I love that piece. Erika, you go and then I want to say something about kids.

PAM: Yeah, that’s where I was going, too.

ERIKA: Oh yeah. I was just going to say one more thing about the Network. Online communities are so great because they draw the people in according to what that community is. And so, if you can find a community that fits you, it’s just filled with people who you’re going to have fun connecting with.

And so, for me, the learning that I’ve had in the last three years, I feel like it’s been just exponential, because I’m now in this online community that really fits like what I like to think about and talk about and just all these amazing things come up.

So, I think, being able to travel around the world, finding these individual people who are such a good fit would be just this impossible thing if it were not for online groups.

And really, it’s the same in other groups that I’ve been on on Facebook or just different places on the internet about certain things. So, finding people that love to talk about the things that you’re interested in is just super great and you can’t always find that in person where you live. And so, yeah, I just love what we have available.

ANNA: Yeah. And so, where I’m going to go with that, and then Pam, to you, is that it’s the same for kids. Because realistically, again, the geographic location, the age, wherever we happen to live, that can be a very small pool of people. But both of my kids have met people from all over the world, still have relationships a decade late that they connected with over gaming or other interests, in different ways. And so, there are so many tools to help our kids take advantage of this rich, online environment that, like you said, Pam, can sometimes get this kind of scary rap. But there really are ways to navigate that world in a way that is super enriching.

PAM: Yeah. And we’ve talked about it in many episodes before. We can just go back to our navigating technology episode. But it’s like a night and day difference, because we’re cultivating connected relationships with our kids.

And our kids know that when they want to do something, we’re going to help them figure out ways to do it. So, they’re not worried about sharing pieces so much when they’re ready to share them. It’s not an expectation, but when they need your help to try and go meet another family, meet up with a friend, we’re there helping them, trying to figure that out and connecting with the other parents and all those pieces.

But yes, that’s where I was going. That’s the interesting thing, like the same way we’ve found that it’s so fun to connect with other people who want to think about whatever the particular interest is that we want to dive into. And maybe it goes from just following some people on Instagram or on Facebook just to start getting an idea and then maybe digging a bit deeper, maybe finding a group that starts talking about it, and then maybe more of a private group. There are different levels to it, and it depends on how connected we would like that community to become.

So, it’s not that I have to dive into the deep end right away. I can dip my toe in and start having an idea. And it’s the same with our kids. Our kids can have interests that maybe there aren’t a lot of people locally that are interested in that same thing. So, they can find that connection and that conversation that they’re looking for, that enriches their lives, that helps them learn, that helps them feel part of a community. They are part of a community.

I look at Lissy. She connected online around photography. There weren’t a lot of high school aged kids around who were interested and had the time. There were some who were interested in it, but they were just busy with classes and things. So, she found online community at the time, that was through Flickr and that really sustained her for a number of years.

And then she was like, oh, I really want in person. I want to start finding my tribe, face-to-face, which initiated her moving to New York City when she was 18 because that’s what she was looking for. But oh my gosh, we just set that up as kind of a two-month thing. Let’s try it out. Go see what it’s like. And she was very excited with what she found and they wanted to stay there.

So, working that out for her, it’s a journey. We always go back to it’s a journey. You don’t know where it’s going to end up, but it’s like, I’m going to try this next step. This next step looks really interesting. I’m really curious about it. Open and curious. Oh, here’s a way that we can kind of make that happen. And you work together and the thing happens. And then how did that unfold? How did people feel? Did we want to take the next step into the pool or whatever metaphor you want to use. But that’s just an example of how community can grow and how online community can be beautifully enriching at times.

And then at times you’re like, I’m looking for in-person community, and oh my gosh, I need to go to another country. I mean, she had an agent here who told her. I’ll never forget that at our first meeting, I don’t know, she was 15 or whatever. But she said, if you really want to work, it needs to be New York or LA. And that seed was planted. It’s true. That is where the vibrant communities are.

And she spent eight years or so in New York, and then a year in change ago she moved to LA and is finding another vibrant community. And literally the other week she was telling me about the difference between the creative communities in those two cities and LA is vibing for her right now. It’s really fitting who she feels she’s become and she just loves it there. And so, her community has changed yet she’s had New York people fly out and stay with her and hang out with her and LA people. It’s just so fun to watch how our communities can unfold and how we can cultivate them and how we can find new ones.

And it really does, I think, just help, like we talked about the beginning, to take the expectations off it and to understand what our true desires are. What are we really looking for? And then, not like we have to beeline right there. It’s like, okay, so this is kind of what I think I’m looking for. What’s a step I can take now in that direction? And valuing whether that’s online or in person, it really doesn’t matter, because you can get value out of that. And it doesn’t mean that you’re stuck there forever. It’s not a feeling of stuck. It’s like, let me try this out and see what I discover about myself and about the other people. Oh my gosh. I just love the idea.

ERIKA: It’s such a valuable way to look at it, no one right way. It’s just a journey. And it was reminding me of something I heard about the more true to yourself that you are being, the easier it is to connect with community that will actually suit you.

So, if you’re being true about your interests and what you like to do and, and the kind of conversations you like to have and all of that kind of stuff, then you’re more easily able to find the connections that fit. And so, I think the way that our kids’ lives are, is really set up perfectly to be able to follow that, because they can really just be themselves and follow the things that they’re interested in and what they want to do. And we have this whole world of potential community online and in person.

And the fact that my kids have seen me make online friends and then go visit them, they’re like, oh, so that’s possible too. Really the whole world is open for us. And since I’ve visited Virginia and visited Anna, Maya keeps saying, “I’m gonna live in Virginia one day. It’s so beautiful.” And so, I don’t know, it just opens up the world. We’re not just in this one place. And really, as long as we are following what our inner voice is telling us, it’s awesome.

ANNA: Right. And I love that.

And just a funny story from our lives, so Raelin was 13 and the two years prior to that had been on an unschooling gamers group and had made connections. And so, a mom that I had met in person but actually lived in Maine, so we were in North Carolina at the time, the other mom was in Maine, we decided to fly, sight unseen, to meet these boys that they had been gaming with on the west coast in Washington state. It’s a huge flight. It’s a big deal. And people thought we were nuts at the time. What are you doing? You don’t know these people at all.

And these boys’ parents were like, this is a little bit weird. And yet they’re now 10 years, 11 years later, they’re getting married, they’re still in touch. These were these rich friendships. And I think that comes from just, again, opening it up. There’s not one right way. There’s not one avenue to making friends and making connections.

And so, as unschoolers, we have this whole world to choose from and to explore and to be a part of. And like you saw with Maya, it just opens up this idea of, I can be friends anywhere. We can travel anywhere. We can meet people. We can figure things out. And I love that. The energy of that is so much more expansive.

So, I think one of the things I want to end on for me is, if you feel yourself feeling constricted about community, listen to this, breathe this in, because it’s really expansive. It really can be this expansive idea of all the different options, so many different ways to make connections locally, online, in person, with travel, all of these things.

And when we come from that expansive place, that’s when we see the opportunities just start appearing.

ERIKA: I had one other thing pop to mind that I forgot to mention earlier with the kids stuff. Sometimes there are kids who are super extroverted who will play with anyone they meet at any time, and that’s okay too.

I’ve seen parents worry about, but they don’t have friends. But if you’re going to the park and they’re playing with kids and they’re having a great time, if that’s not something that the child is worrying about, it’s the no one right way thing again about that too.

And just really listening to what the individual members of the family are saying and just knowing there’s lots of options.

ANNA: Yes!

PAM: Yes. I love that piece. It is the individual person. What are their needs? And again, like you were saying, if they’re enjoying whatever it is they’re doing, there’s your answer for now, right there.

So, that’s just another piece of the puzzle. That’s who my child is, you know? And that’s how they like to engage with the world right now. We can get ourselves in our head, worried about the other thing, the other way.

Well thank you so much! That was so much fun.

ANNA: Yes. Loved it.

PAM: And thanks everyone listening, for joining us. We hope you, too, have enjoyed our conversation about building community and will find it helpful on your unschooling journey. Wishing you a lovely day. Bye!

ANNA AND ERIKA: Bye!

Harbor Highlights, Issue #1

Pam shares the first edition of Harbor Highlights, the new monthly audio dispatch she’s creating for her Patreon supporters. In it, she’ll be sharing the behind-the-scenes details of her next grand adventure!

Listen in to learn more.

And click here to join her on Patreon!

Note that it’s only her Patreon page name that has changed, not the podcast name!

EU356: Unschooling “Rules”: About Food

We’re back with another episode in our Unschooling “Rules” series. And we use the word “rules” in quotes to draw attention to the fact that there is no such thing as an unschooling rule!

It can feel easier to reach for a set of rules to follow, especially when we’re learning something new, but we want to offer you space to look within, to find what makes sense to you and what makes sense to the individual members of your family. There are no unschooling police. Nobody is going to drop by your house and give you a failing grade—or an A+. Our goal with this series is to explore these apparent “rules” and cultivate an environment for self-discovery, for inquiry, for agency, and for growth.

In this episode, we’re diving into some common beliefs and misconceptions that people have about unschooling and food. We all bring with us a lot of societal messages and personal experiences with food when we become parents. And for many of us, the unschooling journey offers us a chance to unpack some of those underlying beliefs and expectations and to create a healthier relationship with food for ourselves and for our children.

It was really fun to discuss this topic and we hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey!

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop

Navigating Family Gatherings Focus Course

Just in time for the busy holiday season, we have released a focus course on the Living Joyfully Shop called Navigating Family Gatherings! In this four-week course, Pam and Anna share mindset shifts and practical strategies for making family gatherings a positive experience for you and your loved ones, and leave you feeling empowered and looking forward to your family gatherings rather than dreading them. Check it out!

The Living Joyfully Network

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

Follow @helloerikaellis on Instagram.

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling.

Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. Our theme this month is In the Flow, and we’re exploring it through the lenses of parenting and living.

So much of what we talk about on this podcast and in the Living Joyfully Network isn’t actually about unschooling. It’s about life. On The Living Joyfully Podcast, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia talk about life, relationships, and parenting. You can check out the archive here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

ANNA: Hello, everyone. I am Anna Brown with Living Joyfully, and we are so glad you have joined us for this episode of the Exploring Unschooling Podcast. I am joined by my co-hosts Pam Laricchia and Erika Ellis. Welcome to you both!

PAM AND ERIKA: Hi!

ANNA: I wanted to mention one of the new Focus Courses we have available at the Living Joyfully Shop. It’s called Navigating Family Gatherings. It’s kind of a timely topic for this season for many of us, and we will continue to be adding things to the shop. So, we’d just love it if you could pop in there periodically and see what’s new and share it. You can follow the link in the show notes or you can go to livingjoyfullyshop.com.

But before we get started, we wanted to remind everyone that with this Unschooling “Rules” series, we use the word rules in quotes to draw attention to the fact that they’re no such thing as a rule, not when it comes to unschooling for sure.

It can feel easier to reach for that set of rules to follow, especially when we’re learning something new, but we want to offer you the space to look within, to find what makes sense to you and what makes sense to the individual members of your family. There are no unschooling police. Nobody is going to drop by your house and give you a failing grade or the A+. Our goal with this series is to explore these apparent rules that are floating around and cultivate an environment for self discovery, inquiry, agency and growth. And we’re going to change up our format a bit and just have an open discussion about the topic area. And I think it’s going to be a lively, fun conversation because we’re going to be talking about food. Erika, do you want to get us started?

ERIKA: Okay! So, I’m excited. We decided to call this episode Unschooling “Rules”: About Food, because I don’t think there is even one particular food role that comes to mind when we think of unschooling, but there are a lot of beliefs, fears, misconceptions that people have. And it is a topic that people are asking about all the time. And so, I thought we could start out with sharing what some of those beliefs are.

And so, I’ll just list off a couple and then we’ll go from there. So, here’s a few that I’ve heard over the years. The first one goes, if kids can eat whatever they choose, they’ll only eat ice cream. Or fill in the blank, whatever the thing is that feels the scariest. Kids cannot be trusted to know what their bodies need. We, as adults, need to pass along what we’ve learned to them so that they can be healthier than we were when we were kids. Kids should eat how we’ve learned works well for us to eat. And also that unschoolers must just not care much about physical health. If they’re letting their kids eat what they want, what they choose to eat, physical health must not be important.

ANNA: They just don’t care at all. I think we’ve all heard all of those and more when people are just first diving into this.

PAM: Oh, yeah, I think it’s so interesting to think about those and I would love to hear, in the comments below or whatever, what rules come to mind for you. And even though we’re giggling here, that’s because we have spent lots of time processing through this, because this is a huge conventional wisdom piece.

And it comes down to that last one you were talking about that, oh, we must not care about our kids. But no, it’s a different way of thinking about it. And I think we’re going to bring that same analysis that we bring to all our Unschooling “Rules” episodes in that, oh, you know what? People really are so very different. People’s bodies function so very different. And when we can start to look through that lens and just have conversations with each other, we can start to just pick that apart, peel back those layers, because people are different.

It’s not hard to get someone to say yes to that right off the bat, but the depth to that is incredible. It applies to everything from relationships, to food, to sleep, to how we like to engage with the world, to how we react to constraints. Everything is wrapped up in how people are different.

We’re talking about food. So, we can say, “Eating this way feels good to me. My body feels really good.” We can hold that completely. That is our truth. And yet, also, we can hold that I don’t need to tell everybody else, my partner, my best friend, my children, that, “Oh my gosh, I’m feeling so good eating this way. You should do this too.” It’s like when you first get to unschooling, you go, “My gosh! Everybody should unschool! Because it’s working really well. I’m really excited about it.” To be able to hold that, unschooling is really exciting. This way of eating is really exciting and working really well for me. And yet, it may be different for other people. It may be different for other families. To be able to hold those together, that, for me, is the first step.

Because once you get to that point, then you can shift to being open and curious and learning about our kids and food and how it feels to them and supporting them in their choices.

It’s like journeying alongside them, I think. And it’s a funny thing. My kids didn’t have too much weight around food. I didn’t find unschooling until they were a little bit older, but I wasn’t overly judgmental about food, even when they were younger.

But to realize that, oh, I can also discard a lot of the weight that I’ve been carrying around about the messages that I grew up with and that I was getting from society in general. I was like a newbie on this journey alongside them. So, I was exploring food, learning what felt good, all those pieces, and, like we were talking about in the last episode, it changes over time, and I learn more.

It’s not something where I’m looking for the answer, and this is the way I want to eat forever, and then judging myself if I eat in a different way or change something up. It’s more about understanding ourselves and figuring out what’s working for us and exploring and playing and just having all those interesting things.

Ice cream for breakfast is not going to hurt anyone. Ice cream for breakfast for a week, for a month, is not going to hurt, but it’s exploring that and having the conversations. That’s where the learning is, in the conversations. And if there’s judgment, people don’t want to have conversations with you. Like, “Oh, my gosh, you did what? Oh, you must feel horrible!” If somebody said that to me, I wouldn’t want to have a conversation with them about it.

ANNA: And I think that’s the piece that I want to talk about, because you kind of said like, Oh, keep it to yourself. And I don’t think that’s exactly what you meant, but, but that’s not how we did it. I did share my journey with food, because I had some really unhealthy messages given to me as a child. And so, this journey with food has been a long, long one for me to figure out my body, how I want to move, what fuels it, what feels good, all of those pieces. And I am very open with that.

The difference is I don’t think at all that it would necessarily apply to anyone else. But what I think is valuable about the conversations, because in my family, with my kids and my husband, we always talk about food and what feels good to us and how we want to do things, because I think the conversation is interesting. It does give us this mind of like, what does feel good for me? How does this feel? What do I feel about this? We’re able to have conversations, because for me, it was such a valuable piece of my path that I didn’t want to keep it from them, because I think that’s where we can go to the hands off.

We can go to like, just don’t give them any information at all. And I just really am a believer that people want information. And what I saw with my kids is that they eat very differently. One will never eat fruit, still to this day. One loves fruit and this one loves vegetables and this one loves this. And it’s so different how they do it.

There was no judgment about that. It was just like, does this feel good to you? And a lot of it was textures and a lot of it was about energy.

And I loved in a previous episode where, Erika, you were talking about how candy felt different in Maya’s body at different times, like she craved it and wanted it. And I’m thinking, wow, think of how she’s growing and the energy she needed to do things and candy and sugar is a fast energy. So, those kinds of conversations I think are interesting. And so, I think for people, it, it’s not about not sharing information. It’s about keeping that judgment out of it.

PAM: Yeah. When I was talking about journey alongside each other, I meant in conversation and sharing that journey and telling each other, oh, like, “I’m really craving this,” or, “I’m really interested in this and I want to explore this,” and how it felt. Yes, absolutely. That is what I was trying to get to what I talked about journeying alongside each other together.

Because yeah, that is so much of what’s come out of all these Unschooling “Rules” episodes and specifically that Self Regulation one, our last episode that we were talking about. It’s in the conversations. It’s in being together where we all learn pieces, where we can process and bounce ideas off each other and just really dig into it and be curious without the judgment piece.

But information is awesome. With my kids, something that was I found different as they grew up with their peers was that the “people are different” idea was really the lens through which they saw the world and their friends.

There weren’t those judgment pieces. There weren’t the expectations that other people were doing it the right way, the one way, because that’s the way they grew up. How you do things is okay. And that’s working well for you. And that’s really cool. And somebody else is making different choices and that is just as cool. There’s no judgment as to one better than the other. And to be able to even just take that idea with you as you move on into the world and how you relate to friends and all those different pieces, that has been something that has stood out for me over time,

ERIKA: When I’m looking at these beliefs, it’s these cultural messages that have been ingrained for our whole lives.

And so, it makes sense that these are challenging, when we first come to unschooling, especially, and as our kids go through seasons of eating different things if it looks different than what our beliefs are telling us it should look like.

I wanted to go back to the one about if kids can eat whatever they choose, that they’ll only choose ice cream or chips or candy or something like that. And so, I feel like this one is such a popular belief because so many people are going from really extreme controlling of food. And so, if that has been your culture in your family up until this point, and then you decide now, my kids can choose, they’re going to choose the things that they didn’t have access to before. That’s just human nature.

And so, I feel like, in a way, yes, this happens. It happens for a while. It happens until they really do have choice. And then, like with my example of Maya and the candy, there are seasons to it as well. And so, I do think it’s interesting and important to notice, what are you coming from? What are your kids’ internalized beliefs about food? Do they think they really have a choice? How limited have they been in the past? And then really look at that “It seems like they only want to eat ice cream” moment for what it is, which is a human being who wants to choose the thing that they have never been allowed to have before.

PAM: I do like that, because that is such a valuable lens, because especially when restrictions are being released, it’s not so much about the choice that they’re making, it’s the fact that they have the choice. It’s like, oh, now I can choose this thing. Can I still choose this thing an hour from now? Can I still choose this thing tomorrow? They’re going to keep choosing that or don’t be surprised if they choose to keep choosing that until it really feels like a choice that they have that will not be taken away from them. “If I choose it one more time, will you finally decide that we’re going to put restrictions back in place?” And it works with food and it works with tech use. And it just works with anything that is previously restricted, because it’s human nature when something has been restricted. “I can do this now?!”

ANNA: And to test it, because kids want to make sense of things, so they’re going to test that. “Where is the limit? Ice cream for a month? Is that the limit? Is it every meal? Is that the limit?” But something that just keeps popping up to me as we’re talking, I really think the release of judgment is probably the most important piece, because we can think about all different aspects. So, it’s the particular food, it’s the time they eat, the whatever, but I’m also thinking, so I was what was called the picky eater. I had a very limited diet when I was younger. It involved a lot of potatoes in all forms and I think there were times my parents worried about how restricted my diet was, but they really never said anything about it. And what’s interesting now is, as an adult, I understand looking back that it was certain textures. It was certain things that just didn’t work for me.

And now, I have this incredibly varied diet of things that I love. I know different things that I didn’t have access to when I was a kid. And so, I think it’s just not about judging. Because I’ve seen families who are like, “You have to try everything on your plate. I want you to be this well rounded eater,” but back to people are different.

We don’t know how that food is being experienced, spicy versus not spicy, textures, salty versus sweet. We don’t know what that even feels like to another person.

And so, I think that trust and just letting go of that judgment, we just learn so much more. I feel like my parents probably could have done that. I don’t think they shamed me about my eating, but I don’t think they also asked a lot of questions where I probably could have said, “I just think mushrooms are gross. And so, I don’t want to eat that thing that’s smothered in mushrooms.” But we didn’t have those conversations, but I feel like I did with my girls and that we would talk about, “What is it you don’t like about fruit?” “Okay, this is what it is,” and then we could figure out different things. I don’t know. I think letting go of the judgment and having that curiosity leads to so much learning.

ERIKA: Yeah. The letting go of judgment is not easy, because of the culture and just how deeply ingrained it gets. And so, I think that is like a really big part of the journey is just intentionally trying to release that, learning new and different things about food that you didn’t realize before, learning things about child development, and trusting that you cannot know someone else’s internal experience. And so, we really just have to believe people when they say it doesn’t work for them for whatever reason, whether it’s just it makes them feel more comforted to eat foods like that or it’s a texture thing like you’re saying. I mean, there can be so many reasons.

And when kids are young, they won’t even be able to describe, necessarily, how it’s bothering them. Maybe it’s even making them feel sick. They just can’t even describe what that is. And so, for something like food, it’s a shame that there are such strong beliefs about what is right and what is good, because that can distract us from really listening to the only person who knows what this experience is like, which is the person who’s eating the food.

ANNA: Right, and not to be dramatic, but I think that can lead to disordered eating in that we’re not listening to what’s working for us. We’re either being influenced by this outside voice or being shamed about what we’re eating. And so, it just disconnects us from what actually works for ourselves.

PAM: Yeah, and I think for me, when I was starting to feel that worry rise or things, it wasn’t about stuffing that down or saying, “Oh, I’m an unschooler. I shouldn’t worry about that stuff.” But for me, it was more information like, what are other possibilities?

I came across intuitive eating, the idea of that, the concept of that, as I was looking into diets, looking for the best way to eat. When I could get more information, that really helped me see that, oh, yeah, this is the conventional story that I am hearing regularly, but there are other stories and other things are working for other people that open things up.

When I think about all the many, many different pieces of our food journey, they include being vegetarian for many, many years and include Type 1 diabetes and all these different pieces and textures, likes, dislikes, all those things just alongside. For me, what really helped me move through those, looking back, was just coming at it with a lens of abundance versus scarcity. That lens of abundance, if somebody had a texture thing, it’s like, “Oh, that’s really curious,” and thinking about other things maybe with that same texture or without that texture.

So, it was always about bringing more possibilities in if they were feeling that they didn’t like certain things. I didn’t want them to think, “Okay, yeah, sure. I don’t want to make you eat that. I’m not going to make you eat that, but we’ve got a peanut butter sandwich here for you. That’s your other choice.” So, to have that abundance really just helped us play so much more and be so much more relaxed around food.

ANNA: It’s so funny how, like, our brains are so similar in that way, because abundance was exactly what came to mind for me in kind of a different angle. For me, food is medicine. I don’t really participate in Western medicine. And so, the food I eat is important to me and it was important and it was something that we talked about in my family. But it was with that lens of abundance. And that makes all the difference, because there was never anyone feeling like they didn’t have the sweet they wanted, the salt they wanted, the variety they wanted, the everything they wanted. We would just find a way.

So, I think it can be so unique to every family. So again, there’s not one way for this to look. So, I hope everybody’s getting that. There’s not one way. There’s a variety of ways that people are going to eat and it’s going to look. But what I would say is just, how does the energy feel? I feel like that might be a more helpful lens too, than like the specifics of, they’re eating ice cream every day for breakfast. Or they’re never eating ice cream or they’re never having soda or whatever the thing is, how’s the energy? Because what I know from my family and some people find this hard to believe, but you can ask my kids. They’re old. They’ve been there a long time. The energy around food was just, we love food.

Like, let’s find good, amazing food and enjoy it. And so, it just had a feel of, we can have all kinds of amazing food that we love, and there was never a scarcity.

And I think checking that energy. And I would say, that’s not what I felt growing up, because there was some shame around eating and some, you know, Oh, don’t eat. And I mean, bless, my mom just turned 90. She still talks about her weight. So, I grew up with that and that’s what I didn’t want. It wasn’t about the specific foods. I just wanted an energy of, we can eat delicious foods and feel good and love our bodies and know our bodies.

ERIKA: So, as my kids got bigger, it seemed like they narrowed in on, “These are the few things that we want to eat right now.” And it gets a little bit frustrating for me when I know all the abundant foods in the world and they’re just doing this narrowing, but I think it’s probably just a phase of growth too. But one thing that really helped us was food TikTokers. So, to see people quickly making foods. Oliver started showing me, “Doesn’t this look amazing?” And then we could make it, things like that. We got one of those recipe box deliveries, where you pick out the recipes and then they send you the food.

So, we tried that for a little while just to kind of mix things up and both kids liked seeing the photo of the food and it had a name to it. And it was just a little bit different, a little more like, “Oh, we’re at a restaurant,” like, “Oh, this is something that has been designed to be really delicious,” or whatever.

And so, things like that have helped us to expand what’s possible or what they’re interested in. It’s cute to watch them grow up. I’m just having the best time with it. And recently, Oliver just said, “I was so hungry and daddy gave me leftovers and there was a lot of beans and rice and I just ate it all.”

I don’t know if he had ever even tried it before, but in this new growing phase, he’s just like, I need some food. And so, he’s just much more willing to try anything. And so, he was like, “And I think I really like it. I’ve been thinking about beans and rice a lot lately.” Rather than when he was little, if I had said, “This is good for you. I want you to eat beans and rice. You have to try some beans,” if that had been the path, I just feel like the experience would be so different and he wouldn’t have that kind of realization and the ownership and deciding for himself, like, “Okay, this is a food that’s now on my list of foods I like.” And so, yeah, it’s really fun.

PAM: I think, too, even as they’re narrowing in, the huge difference is it’s even with that abundance mindset in that they know it’s a choice. It’s not because these are my only options. It’s not the scarcity mindset of it. It’s the abundance. “Of all the things that I could choose, these are the five that I want for the next six months.” Or however long. But yeah, it’s just a completely different energy, as Anna was talking about. Just consider the energy around food and that, I think, will be a great guide as you’re starting to play with things.

And just with older kids now, that was reminding me, Erika, as your kids were playing with the food meal boxes and all the different things, I see right now to that playful attitude is also transferring and helping with my grown kids now cooking their own food. They have made food along the way. And just over the years, as they have taken that on more and more, that playful, open, abundant kind of attitude has also helped them as they’ve been transitioning to adult lives or whatever, as they’re taking on more of the food prep as well for themselves.

So, it comes with that whole mindset. I think the whole ethos of them growing up where, we can figure things out, we can play with things. There’s no judgment of one thing as better than the other. There’s lots of conversations. They even check in. They’re okay with saying, “Ew. I didn’t like that. Next time when I make it, I’m going to do this,” and we’re okay with asking, “How did you like that?” if we made something and getting feedback from them. It’s not judgmental, or you did something wrong, but it’s for that person, that person’s taste, because people’s taste for salt, people’s taste for spices, all those pieces are really how people are different.

And that just made me think, as we started unschooling that first year or two, where we ended up with food for a very long time, and I would say even still now, was that our meals became more kind of like, we would just put out different things. We wouldn’t mix everything together and, “Here’s your one meal.” We wouldn’t make plates for each other. I would put out a variety of things and be sure that there were other things for the vegetarian, Lissy, to have that weren’t meat-based. And if somebody doesn’t like this, but somebody else really loves this. We’re going to have this, but we’re going to have something else. So, it’s not like I’m making three different meals. It’s like when I’m coming up with a meal, I’ve got like three or four different pieces to it, but I keep them separate, so people can pick and choose what they want. And then they can add more things that they know are around the kitchen, et cetera. But to put it more potluck-ish, so that people still had the choices right then and there as to what they felt like eating out of a few options that were there really helped with not bringing judgment to it, because there were options. It also really helped with the people are different and, “Yeah, your sibling grabbed this thing and you grabbed this thing and, oh geez, everybody went for that. We’ll make more of that next time.” It just really, again, helps the energy be more open and playful around the whole food experience, I think.

ANNA: Yeah. I’ve talked on the Network before about those adaptable meals, where it was like, okay, we can take this sauce off, add onion separately. But again, with no weight about it. It’s just like, yeah, we all like different things and they see me grabbing different things than David grabs and they grab different things. And so, I love that.

And we tended to do that type of adaptable meals for dinner. For lunch, sometimes it was completely different. This one wanted this and I’m making this thing. And then, they want this and they want to heat this up from yesterday. And so, again, I just didn’t want any weight around it. I just wanted it to be like, we eat because we enjoy eating and it fuels our body. And it doesn’t have to have the weight that it can have that, that I’ve had to shed for a long time.

ERIKA: I was just thinking that to be able to have a childhood where it’s okay to say that you don’t like a food, that in itself is such an amazing gift. Because, I mean, I get it, because the adults are the ones who are buying the groceries, trying to figure out what works, preparing the food, and so, it can be hard to hear, “Yeah, this doesn’t taste good to me.” But if we are open and curious, really focusing on learning about the different people in our family, then it’s really good information and they’re learning about themselves and they’re feeling comfortable enough to share with us what they’re learning about themselves. And then, the next time we have a chance to make it even better.

And so, I just think that’s amazing. And I also wanted to mention just the seasons in our own lives. Just like we were talking about with the expectations of this self regulation, there is not an end point you will get to in life where we figure out the diet that works period, because our bodies change over time. Their bodies are growing and changing over time.

And so, just to view it in this long game, this food journey, that we’re all individually on, I feel like it’s much more expansive. It’s much more abundant. It’s much less judgmental. It’s so much more about just right now and how my body is right now, what is working well for me, and not extending that to what is going to work well for anyone else. And it helps me and my family avoid arguments and conflict and everything if we all are really free to be where we are with our eating.

PAM: Okay. I want to grab from what both of you were just talking about, because I love that bigger picture, longer seasons, things change over time, and tying that to you talking, Anna, about, “I just make this lunch and this lunch,” because we did the same thing. Breakfast and lunch were just kind of, what would you like? What would you like?

And so, when you take that lens of the big picture and you put it to your day, time also doesn’t need to control it. So, the reason breakfasts and lunches were just, what would you like? and grabbing you something, was because they weren’t often all hungry at the same time. I wasn’t hungry at the same time that they were hungry. I was hungry when I first got up, so I ate something. And then when they got up, some were hungry immediately, some wanted to eat later.

And then, even though I made that adaptable-meal dinner, there was also not specifically a time component that said, “Okay, now you need to stop what you’re doing and come. Now, I would definitely go around. We’d have conversations, “Oh, I wish I knew that dinner was ready because I like to eat it hot,” or whatever. So, I would always walk around and say, “Hey, food’s ready when you’re hungry. Food’s ready if you can take a break.” And to this day, I still go to my husband, “Food’s ready! I’m going to eat now.” He always comes and joins me, unless it’s the odd time, if there’s something that he’s right in the middle of doing, et cetera.

But so often, they did all come within five, 10 minutes, but it wasn’t an expectation. If the odd time they were busy with something, totally. If they were super busy with something and they said right away, “I can’t come,” it’s like, “Want me to make a plate and bring it to you? Do you want this, this, and this?” My guess, out of what was there, that they might like.

So, yeah, that whole long season, long term, seasonal changes with food. Also, that time component, really within your day, too. Right? That the timing of when people are hungry and what they might be fancying can be very different and we can adapt with that as well. I thought that was really cool to think about.

ERIKA: It can’t really be intuitive eating if we have to eat at a certain time, you know? Yeah, I love that.

ANNA: But I think it’s a good in terms of this “rules” episode to think that some people think that unschoolers never eat together and we actually did. I would say 80% of the time, we had our dinner together at a table, but it was kind of like you’re saying. I would just check in. If they were in busy with something, no big deal. We eat. I bring a plate. Something else. But so often, it was just a time we enjoyed being together and doing it, but it never had that weight.

So again, I feel like so many of these things are, what’s the energy like? Is it creating conflict? Like you were talking about, Erika, you don’t have that conflict because they’re able to say, “I don’t like this. This doesn’t work.” And so, what’s the energy like around those meals? Because a forced family dinner, ugh. That doesn’t feel good. And so, I think it’s just keeping all that in mind, but it’s going to look different in each family.

PAM: Yeah, just to jump off that for a quick, hot minute. The idea of the family dinners, that is another conventional idea that, “Oh, yes, you must bring your family together for a meal and put the devices away,” and all those pieces. And absolutely that comes from a very well-meaning place, because parents are off at work. Kids are off at school. You don’t have time to be together, to engage with each other, to talk, because then you’re doing homework and then you’re doing go to bed routine. It is kind of the one time of the day when everybody can talk to each other.

Yet when you just take a moment to say, ah, but we’re not living that lifestyle. We are at home together. We can choose to talk to each other when something comes up, when we connect, when we go in and check in on them, when they come out to share something interesting. We’re connecting at various points all throughout the day. So, there isn’t that focus on this is the one time when we can talk to each other, so we must sit down and eat together.

So, it’s not about saying that that’s wrong. It’s about saying, oh, that doesn’t fit with the lifestyle that we have. We don’t need that tool to maintain connection and relationship with our kids.

ANNA: And so, then it becomes about the choice, right? And so, then it’s like, maybe sometimes that still works. And so, from the outside, maybe it looks like, oh, they have this conventional dinner, but when in fact, it’s not at all that. It really is just like, we have the choice and this is what’s working for this season or for this time, and so I love just looking at those cultural pieces. Are they serving your family? Are they making things better? Or is it creating this rub or this weight or something that you’re carrying around that’s making you feel bad?

ERIKA: I’m giggling because I’m just thinking about our family dinners, which are don’t usually happen family style, but it’s so funny. So, Oliver is gigantic and eats super fast, so he can get back to what he’s doing. He’s always very busy. And so he, you know, we just all know if he’s he comes to the table, he eats. It takes about 5 seconds and he’s gone. That’s what it feels like Maya takes her time, but she loves to eat alone.

And so, the only real chance for us all to eat together is for us to have some meal that we all like, which that alone is kind of unusual. So, we have this food we all like. We have to not tell Oliver to get to the table until the right moment. We have to plan it just right. Get Maya to the table. Don’t tell Oliver yet. We get there, Josh and I sit down all of our foods ready, so Josh will be like, “Look! We’re all together!” And it’s like this little snapshot of it. But it’s funny and, right, we just have so much time together that there’s no weight on that happening. It’s just this funny little lightning moment of, we were all eating together! And then it’s over again.

ANNA: I love that. Okay. So, this was really fun. I think we’re never going to cover all that needs to be covered about food, because it’s evolving and people bring different things to it. And then that reminds me, join us in the Network, because we’ve had some amazing talks about food. We’ve had snack plate pictures and all the different creative ways people bring food into their life. Parents that are struggling to even make food and talking about that. So, I love that community aspect of people that are blowing the lid off and looking at it differently, being able to share insights and really have just beautiful conversations that don’t have the weight of those cultural expectations.

So, join us in the Living Joyfully Network. That would be a lot of fun, but I really appreciate you both and just all of this fun conversation about food and the “rules” that may not be serving us.

PAM: Thanks so much!

ANNA: All right. Take care. Bye bye.

PAM AND ERIKA: Bye!

Podcast Update, Nov 2023

Quick Links

Check out the Black Friday-inspired bundle specials on the newly refreshed Living Joyfully Shop!

Transcript

Hello, everyone! I’m Pam Laricchia from Living Joyfully and I’m popping in to share a couple of bits of news with you.

First is the Black Friday-inspired sale happening in the Living Joyfully Shop right now! It runs until November 30th. In celebration, we’ve added a new course on Validation, and I’ve added all five of my books! 

You can use the code BLACKFRIDAY, all caps and no spaces, to get 25% off all our courses and books individually, but we’ve also put together two amazing bundles.

One is a 50% off bundle of all our courses.

Navigating Unschooling Wobbles is dedicated to walking with you through the challenging seasons, inspiring and re-energizing you to continue on your unschooling journey.

Navigating Family Gatherings is full of mindset shifts and practical strategies for making extended family gatherings a positive experience for you and your family.

Validation is our newest course all about validation, a transformational relationship tool to help our loved ones feel seen and heard.

And Navigating Conflict dives deep into the messiness of conflict, sharing new perspectives and tools to help you navigate conflict with more grace and compassion.

You get all four courses for 50% off! The lessons for each course are delivered weekly by email, but we’ve also created full ebook, PDF, and audiobook editions for each course, which you can download immediately. They’re great for those of you who are excited to quickly immerse yourself in new and interesting information. You might find your sweet spot to be the combo of reading the ebook or listening to the audiobook and then using the weekly emails as guides to dive deeper and focus on the questions provided for each lesson topic.

The other bundle is 50% off my five books. That’s What is Unschooling?, Free to Learn: Five Ideas for a Joyfully Unschooling Life, Free to Live: Create a Thriving Unschooling Home, Life through the Lens of Unschooling: A Living Joyfully Companion, and The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide.

This bundle has never been available anywhere else, and you’ll be able to download all five ebooks immediately after you purchase, so you’ll be reading all about unschooling in no time.

You’ll find the link to the shop in the show notes, or just go to livingjoyfullyshop.com. And as a side note, I had an incredibly fun time redesigning the home page last week, so I would love for you to check it out.

AND PLEASE SHARE! We’d deeply appreciate it if you shared the Shop and the Black Friday Bundle Specials with your unschooling friends and groups. We’d love our work to reach new people! We’d be honored to help them navigate their unique and beautiful unschooling journeys.

Also, thanks so much for shopping with us directly! Buying from us allows us to keep a bit more of the profit, so you’re supporting our work even more. We really appreciate you and hope you find our work helpful, both on your unschooling journey and as you navigate your most important relationships.

And the other bit of news: in the new year, the Exploring Unschooling podcast turns eight years old. Wow! Last year, we took a bit of a breather, moving to releasing a new episode each month. 

And while we took some time to ponder whether we wanted to wind the podcast down, Anna, Erika, and I are feeling refreshed and re-invigorated and have decided to move to a bi-weekly schedule next year. That means we’ll be showing up in your podcast feed every other week with new and interesting conversations that explore unschooling in all its wonderfulness! Woohoo!

We’re excited about that and wanted to share that with you! 

And we wanted to make sure you knew about the sale in the Living Joyfully Shop before it ends on Thursday November 30th. Again, the link is livingjoyfullyshop.com and please share it with your unschooling friends and groups!

Wishing you and your family all the best, and we’ll be back in your podcast feed next week.

Thanks so much for your support!!!

Bye.

EU355: Unschooling “Rules”: Freedom Leads to Self-Regulation

We’re back with another episode in our Unschooling “Rules” series. And we use the word “rules” in quotes to draw attention to the fact that there is no such thing as an unschooling rule!

It can feel easier to reach for a set of rules to follow, especially when we’re learning something new, but we want to offer you space to look within, to find what makes sense to you and what makes sense to the individual members of your family. There are no unschooling police. Nobody is going to drop by your house and give you a failing grade—or an A+. Our goal with this series is to explore these apparent “rules” and cultivate an environment for self-discovery, for inquiry, for agency, and for growth.

In this episode, we’re diving into the “rule” that freedom leads to self-regulation. We start by exploring the term self-regulation itself. Then we look closer at what freedom actually does give our children and we share some examples from our lives to show how it has all played out for us over the years.

It was really fun to discuss this topic and we hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey!

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop

Navigating Family Gatherings Focus Course

We have released a new focus course on the Living Joyfully Shop called Navigating Family Gatherings! In this four-week course, Pam and Anna share mindset shifts and practical strategies for making family gatherings a positive experience for you and your loved ones, and leave you feeling empowered and looking forward to your family gatherings rather than dreading them. Check it out!

The Living Joyfully Network

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

Follow @helloerikaellis on Instagram.

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling.

Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. Our theme this month is In the Flow, and we’re exploring it through the lenses of parenting and living.

So much of what we talk about on this podcast and in the Living Joyfully Network isn’t actually about unschooling. It’s about life. On The Living Joyfully Podcast, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia talk about life, relationships, and parenting. You can check out the archive here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

ERIKA: Welcome to the Exploring Unschooling Podcast! I’m Erika Ellis from Living Joyfully, and I’m joined by my co-hosts, Pam Laricchia and Anna Brown. Hi to you both.

PAM AND ANNA: Hello!

ERIKA: We are now, somehow, nearing the end of the calendar year already and for many of us that means a season of holidays and family gatherings and navigating family gatherings can sometimes be challenging. After all, like we always talk about, people are different. And most people have their own expectations and opinions about how the holidays should be. And so, it can sometimes be a recipe for worry and misunderstandings and conflict.

So, with this season in mind, we have released a new focus course on the Living Joyfully Shop called Navigating Family Gatherings. In this four week course, Pam and Anna share mindset shifts and practical strategies for making family gatherings a positive experience for you and your loved ones, and leave you feeling empowered and looking forward to your family gatherings rather than dreading them.

Navigating Family Gatherings is based on a monthly theme of the same name in the Living Joyfully Network. It consists of four weekly focus calls between Pam and Anna, each discussing a particular aspect of the theme, plus the weekly question we share to encourage members to think about the topic through the unique lens of their experiences and family.

You’ll receive an email each week with a new lesson, as well as an e-book and an audio book version of the material, so that you can engage with the course in whatever way works best for you in the moment. And the course is yours to keep forever, so you can feel free to explore at your own pace. To learn more and to purchase the course, visit livingjoyfullyshop.com. We’ll also put the link in the show notes. We hope you let us know how Navigating Family Gatherings helps your family navigate this holiday season.

So, today on this unschooling rules episode, we’re going to talk about an idea that we hear floating around, especially when families are newer to unschooling, and that is that freedom will lead to self regulation. So, I’m really excited for this one. But before we get started, we want to remind everyone that with this Unschooling “Rules” series, we use the word rules in quotes to draw attention to the fact that there is no such thing. It can feel easier to reach for a set of rules to follow, especially when we’re learning something new, but we want to offer you space to look within to find what makes sense to you and what makes sense to the individual members of your family.

There are no unschooling police. Nobody’s going to drop by your house and give you a failing grade or an A+. Our goal for this series is to explore these apparent rules and cultivate an environment for self discovery, inquiry, agency, and growth.

I’m going to hand it off to you, Pam, to dive into this rule.

PAM: Yay! Thank you very much, Erika. I am very excited to dive into this as well. Because with this episode, what we want to do is explore the possibility that we might be starting off our unschooling journey with a few misplaced expectations.

Because when we’re first learning about unschooling, we can hear the message that when we give our children the freedom to make choices in their days, they will eventually self regulate, meaning understand and manage their choices and behavior. Which, yes, absolutely. Having the space and freedom to make choices helps them learn about themselves, practice with various tools and ways of navigating emotions, and gain lots of experience with making choices and seeing how things unfold and incorporating that knowledge next time. It’s like top-notch learning in action.

But I think the one piece of the puzzle that can be missing for parents, especially early on, is how we define what that self regulation looks like. So, we can be thinking, sure, I’ll give them the freedom to make choices. And eventually they’ll settle into the behavior that I expect. They’ll learn how to self regulate.

The challenge comes when we define what self regulation looks like for another person, because as we say so often, people are so incredibly and beautifully different, aren’t they?

ANNA: Indeed they are. People are just so different. And I think it’s why we talk so much about this being more about the parents than the kids when we’re switching to this unschooling journey.

And I believe it’s our work to understand that we’re all different and how we see and process the world so differently and understanding that the best choice for me in a situation genuinely may not be the best choice for someone else. And I feel like that one can take a minute or many years, but it’s so worth it. And it will help in every relationship that you have.

The beauty of this lifestyle is we have the time, the time to be with one another, to have these conversations, to observe, and to start to really understand how things look through their eyes. Letting go of expectations and leaning into learning about one another is so critical along every stage of the journey.

And I think with this, it’s hard because “self regulation” is kind of this buzzword, like, this is so great and we need this. And unless we start digging beneath the surface level definition, we can really miss the piece of “self” of that and what that actually means. As in what works for the individual.

So, it’s this slippery slope to think that we know what’s best for another and it can cause a lot of disconnection if we’re acting as if we want our kids to understand themselves and make the best decision for their life, but really, what we want is for them to follow this kind of prescribed path where we can feel comfortable.

So, keeping this lens of everyone is different at the forefront and being open and curious helps us not fall into the traps of trying to control another person’s journey.

ERIKA: Yeah. I mean, I love that lens. People are different. It’s such a paradigm shift. And really this self regulation thing is one of my pet peeves, I guess I would say, because when people are talking about self regulation with their kids, so often what they mean is that the child is making choices themselves that the parent would have chosen for them to make. And that to me sounds so much more like obedience than self regulation. It’s that cheerfully compliant to dream child that we may have in our imagination. And so, the words we choose to use can just be so interesting.

And what’s more interesting to me is looking through the people are different lens. So, if you look at any aspect of life, what works for one person will not work for another person. And so, if we can move away from the one right way idea, we open up a world of possibilities. Whether we’re talking about food or sleep, their interests, how much time they spend outside, movement, reading, art, music, really anything, you can find people on such a wide spectrum of choices in the world, and it’s all okay. Only each individual person can tell what is working and what isn’t working for them.

So, maybe it’s more that the freedom that an unschooling life gives a child gives them space and time to more deeply explore what feels good to them and to their unique minds and bodies. And that may lead to a better understanding of themselves. I mean, that sounds really awesome to me, and I do hope that my kids are finding that to be true in their lives. That time and space, though, does not lead to them making the choices that I would make. It really doesn’t make any sense that it would.

I mean, they’re getting to know themselves better, and people are all different. And so, if that’s what anyone is looking for when they’re using that term self regulation, I would just encourage a little curiosity to dig into that idea.

PAM: Yes, that’s what I love to do. I love digging into words. What does it mean to me?

Because we can just quickly latch onto a word and start using that in our conversations. And that’s kind of the lens that we bring to it. But if we don’t take the time to drill down, what really is the energy that I’m bringing to that term or to that idea?

Because one of the things that I think is also missing from this idea of self regulation is that it doesn’t mean alone. That’s that “self” piece. As soon as we start talking, it’s like, oh, they’re going to do this themselves. Right? But with unschooling, our kids’ learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum. We don’t put that expectation on them that they will figure things out on their own and come back to us when they have the answer about all those things you were listing, Erika.

We are a family. We live together. When we choose to not send our kids to school, we’re also choosing to cultivate a welcoming and supportive learning environment for them outside of school. And it’s not just for the school subjects, but for all the other learning that just comes with being a human being. But phrases like “self regulation” or “self directed,” when we just absorb them, they can imply that they should be doing it on their own and that we should be hands off. They’re self regulating. They’re self directing. We shouldn’t be involved.

But for me, that self prefix means that they have agency, that the choice is ultimately theirs. I don’t want to bring judgment into the process, because that can mess up what they’re learning. But that doesn’t mean I need to remove myself from the learning and the choice making process altogether. We’re still together. And depending on the nature of the choice, they may absolutely find it helpful to talk through their options, especially the external processors out there. It can be fun to bounce around ideas and brainstorm possibilities, and they may well be curious to hear my thoughts or previous experiences in similar situations. Same with processing emotions and behaviors, normalizing these things, validating these things. We’re on their team. They do not need to figure it out all on their own.

ANNA: Oh my gosh. That’s such an important point, I think. I really love that distinction of self in these terms as more about agency. I truly believe that all humans want and need agency to feel fulfilled to learn and grow.

But as we talk about so often, our focus is on connection and that’s an active process where we are connected. It’s not hands off. It’s not, go figure it out over there. It is sharing our experiences, helping them process their feelings and their experiences in whatever way works for them. Internal, external, a combination of both. Again, people are different.

My oldest likes to externally process with a lot of discussions. My youngest prefers to pop in and out for connections and thoughts. I enjoy holding space for whatever that process looks like. And to know that through our connection, they do not feel alone. They feel supported in their unique processing and they are able to bounce ideas off of me and to hear my pieces. And sometimes they want to hear it. Sometimes they don’t. Also fine.

It’s much more of a facilitation role, learning about them, being a support as they explore and try different things as they figure out how their body works, how they want to show up in relationships, how they want to spend their time.

And yes, we are all living and growing together. So, they are seeing me figure out things and learn more about my body and food and movement and what type of work feeds me and how I want to be in relationships. And what’s fun is then we can talk about those things, you know, and I can share why I’ve made decisions. They can ask me about it. I can ask them about theirs. It’s this just open communication, with the caveat when I’m talking about my pieces, that I’ve learned it about me, that their experience may be completely different, but it’s still relevant in terms of how humans do things. I feel like that’s the curiosity lens, right? It is interesting to know why you might make a choice differently than I would in a particular situation.

And we can talk about how a particular action would or wouldn’t work for one of us and why. And that’s, again, people are different. Maybe one’s more introverted or extroverted or one feels comfortable walking up to someone and one doesn’t. And so, we can talk about, yeah, that would work for me, but this not so much through through all of that, we start to see how we’re all different and how we can be honored and grow together.

If there isn’t one right path or way to be, then we can really appreciate that we can all do it in a different way. And we may still get to the same point, or we may get to another more amazing point that we didn’t even see from the beginning. And, to me, it’s those differences that makes the world such an interesting place to learn about and explore.

ERIKA: It’s so true. I was thinking that I really do find that the topics that would seem to be about those kinds of self regulation parts of life can be some of the most interesting conversations that I have with my kids, because when they’re noticing that something isn’t feeling good to them, and they want to experiment, try another choice, those conversations can just be so insightful. And I’m always amazed about what they notice about themselves, and really just how different we all are.

And so, in a way, it does feel like they are self directed, because they are the ones having this experience or the discomfort or whatever it is. But I know that my role is so integral to their processing because I can offer observations. I can share my experiences. I can reflect back to them what they’re sharing to help them make more sense of it.

And so, I wanted to give a couple of examples. Recently, my daughter went through a really long phase of pretty intense love of candy. It was a big part of her grocery shopping list. It was just a focus for her. It was an interest and a love. And so, if I was looking at this through my eyes and what feels good in my body, it would just be a terrible thing. I would say she needs to regulate herself. But I remembered when I was young and eating candy felt different for me then, too. So, that helped.

And then recently, she told me she wanted to take a break from it, at least until the holidays. And so, we had this conversation that was just so interesting. She had noticed that it wasn’t quite as exciting or fun anymore as it had been. And she thought that having a break would make the holiday candy feel more exciting and taste better, and so, she just wanted to try that out. And she also said that her body wasn’t craving it like it was before. She would describe, like, I just feel like my body’s craving saltier foods now. And I’m not thinking of candy as much.

And so, this may look like an example where by having that freedom, my child is making what would now be the better choice through the adult’s eyes. But I’m trusting that she is processing each experience and really checking in with how it feels to her. She knows that the candy is still there at the store. It’s an option. And it’s okay to take a break from it too without judgment from me either way. And so, I’ll just give another example that kind of went in the other direction. So, she has also talked to me about her time watching videos on YouTube. And there was this one night where she said that I would be amazed by how many hours she watches YouTube each day. And she opened up the little iPad time tracker. And I was amazed. I actually hadn’t realized how many hours that was.

But then, she told me that having a video going in the background helps her concentrate on all the things she wants to do. So, she said she’s not really watching it all that time. She’s working on a build in Planet Zoo or playing Minecraft or doing a drawing or whatever else she’s engaged in. She just has this video running.

And so, for me, it helps me concentrate to have things really quiet. And so, if I was directing her, I would say, you need to regulate that and make it quiet for yourself so you can draw. But people don’t all agree on this. This is another people are different thing. And so, for her to have noticed this about herself and then to have that space to make the choice that, yeah, having these YouTubers just talking in the background while she’s doing something feels helpful to her brain. I just think that’s amazing. She’s figuring out what works for her. And it’s not about external judgment or trying to do what I think should feel the best, based on my own experience. She’s figuring herself out. And I just love that.

PAM: I do love that story so much. And I feel her so deeply, because that is me as well. I will always have videos on in the background, because if I’m trying to concentrate, what I notice is the silence. That is louder to me. And it’s like, ugh! And so, it is just literally figuring it out for ourselves, because we are so different. And when we don’t bring that judgment piece to it, that it’s all okay to explore and try, to be able to come and just say, I’m changing my mind, I’m trying something different, the freedom to be able to say that without maybe feeling the need to hide it because, oh, I’m not sure they’re going to agree, or I’ll be able to feel their energy, even if they don’t come out and say it.

So yeah, I love that. I didn’t know you could look up your hours watched. That would be very interesting to do. But yeah, I have it on in the background when I’m working, when I’m in the kitchen. There are times, too, when I choose silence and it’s very curious to see the difference. It’s like, oh, why do I want to have everything off right now? This is fascinating. It’s learning about ourselves. I love it so much.

Okay, so what now? I do think it’s worth taking some time to think about what that phrase “self regulation” means to you. So is it an idea you think about? Is it something that you bring into your conversations even with yourself? Do you have an end goal in mind for things? And if so, whose goal is it? All thoughts are okay. All questions are okay. We’re just exploring and having fun and playing with ideas. It’s okay to ask yourself. It’s okay to say, yes, I have an end goal. I really want this. And then you can keep digging into that. Oh, I really want this for this other person. What is the implication of that? It’s fascinating to do.

And thinking back on some of the unschooling rules that we have talked about in this series, are you envisioning your children self regulating around tech use or around sleep schedules or the topics they learn about? Are you waiting for them to announce that they want to learn math? Or that they want to go to bed at 10 o’clock every night? Like you were saying, Erika, sometimes the things that they come up with are more conventional, right? “I don’t want to eat candy for now.” And do I feel a relief with that? Ooh, that’s something curious to dig into as well. “Oh, they want to go to sleep earlier. And look, they’re getting up in the morning before school time or work time,” we can notice, oh, I’ve got these ingrained schedules. Where’s that coming from?

But truly, that is not what self regulation looks like. It does look different for everyone. So, instead of having an end goal in mind for their self regulation journey, just try getting curious about what it looks like for them. It really is so worth exploring our expectations and even how we define success on our family’s unschooling journey.

Especially in those first couple of years, I did a lot of work around what I imagined unschooling would look like and what it actually looked like day to day. So, being able to shift away from judgment and just towards curiosity helped me see that what it actually looked like was leaps and bounds better than what I initially expected, but I needed to open up and just question how I was defining success, how I was imagining my days and to question things. Oh, that’s interesting. Why is that not aligning with what I was seeing?

So, maybe they didn’t go to bed at the same time every night. But what I saw in action was they did consider how tired they were, what they were doing, and what they were in the middle of doing, what the possibilities were for that evening, what the plans were for the next morning, and so many different things. Because with unschooling, self regulation doesn’t look like our kids setting a rule for themselves and following through on it day after day. Oh look, they’re being consistent. They’re self regulating, finally. But it does look like them weaving together what they know about themselves, and about the context of the moment they’re navigating, so they can make the choice that they feel will serve them best. There were definitely times when they considered all the things, and made a choice very different from the one that I would make in that situation. Yet they were definitely understanding and managing their choices and behavior. They were self regulating, and they were doing it pretty brilliantly, I would say. Just seeing them in action, it’s life changing for me.

ANNA: It’s really true. And I have found it so valuable to dig into those cultural ideas. We tend to just accept them at face value, whether it’s about technology or bedtime or what foods to eat. And maybe that’s because of time. It’s a shortcut. We have these standard things that people know and understand. But so, so, so often those ideas do not serve the individual at all. And if you’re listening to this podcast, I feel like something about that conventional path hasn’t been feeling good or hasn’t been serving your child and you’re noticing some rubs or bumps.

And then what we see is that when we step off that kind of tunnel path, that’s being set out for us, there are so many things that could use a second look and just put through that lens of like, oh, is this working for me? Is this idea serving me? And I feel like this is a big one. Understanding that our kids are learning about themselves and what works for them and how to find their own unique path. And they’ll be playing around with all of those hot topics, food, technology, sleep, and learning, and many more, and it’s wonderful that they are, and that they can have the space to do that.

Because when you think about it, as adults, we are often still playing around with those very same topics. So, I’m not sure that it ever ends, but I’ve also seen that mine, who are now in their mid-twenties just have a much better sense of self than I did at their age. They have a clearer sense of what works and doesn’t work for them. And I still see them trying things and pushing out of their comfort zone and experimenting, but it seems to be from a much more grounded place. I felt like it took me decades to really understand my body and what I wanted separate what from what everybody around me wanted for me.

And I really have seen even recently my oldest daughter experimenting with getting up early. We were very much night owls when they were growing up. I have become a bizarrely early, early bird and it’s weird. And so, she and I have talked about it a little bit. We don’t live together. So, I don’t know all of her sleeping habits. And so, recently we had a conversation where she’s like, yeah, I tried for about six months, this getting up earlier and there were things I liked and things I really didn’t. I think I’m just a night owl and I’m like, yes. But there was no energy to it.

There was no judgment that one is better than the other, because she knows I accept both. It’s really just what works for my body at the time. And so, that’s what I love, whereas I feel like I carried judgment with me for longer of like, oh, this is what I’m supposed to do, or this is the path that everybody wants me to do. And so, then I’m having to kind of parse through that. So, I just feel like it’s such a gift we’re giving our kids, a chance to experiment and learn about themselves in an environment where they have our support and they have the time to play around with it.

ERIKA: Yeah, right. I love that about distinguishing between what everyone else wants from us and then what our own mind and body is saying. It’s just so valuable to be able to tune in. And right! This is an adult undertaking for me where my kids are able to do it now. And so, it’s pretty amazing.

I also just wanted to mention something else that came to mind through that people are different idea. And that’s that people have different levels of comfort with routine. So, it is possible that there are kids who will set a rule for themselves and follow through day after day, because for some people that routine feels very secure and safe.

And then for other people, routine feels like they’re being trapped and they need to escape. And so, neither one of these is bad. But I’m just thinking if you’re a parent who feels very comforted by routines, it could feel really dangerous to have a child who does not want to be trapped by a schedule or a certain way of doing things. And so, it might be really hard to see that without just wishing that this child would regulate.

But I just think it feels so nice to just leave space for people to be themselves, just leave enough space for our kids and for us to figure out what really feels good and works for us without all of the judgments and the warnings about this is a better way or this is the right way.

And it’s also okay to have seasons, like you’re talking about, and to change what we want our lives to be like, depending on just the context of the moment or the season. So, tuning into our own mind and body and trusting that our kids are also able to do that for themselves, from my experience, it just brings a lot of peace and a lot of really amazing learning, too.

ANNA: So much. And something that you said really harkened back to something Pam said a bit ago, which was, if you’re really looking at self regulation as a path to a goal, like this stationary point, that that may be the rub too, right? Because what I see in myself, what I see in my adult kids, is that it totally changes in seasons of our lives and how we’re feeling and seasons of the month. And just the days, the different things. And so, I think it’s, that’s a good place to dig in. It’s like, oh, am I picturing this linear path? We come to unschooling. They’re going to have this freedom and then they’re going to taper off to this beautiful, stationary point that feels very comfortable. I just don’t think that’s the way humans work. I feel like we want to try things and things change and our bodies change. And I don’t know. Yeah. I think that’s interesting.

PAM: That was exactly what bubbled up for me, too, while Erika was talking, the importance and the value of being open to things changing. And your story that you were sharing about night owls and early birds. It’s just so valuable to not have the judgment around that so that it doesn’t feel like I’m doing something wrong, like you said, that linear path to a goal and then stationary. I figure myself out. This is the answer. So, I need to keep doing that. I need to keep fitting myself into that, because that’s the answer. That’s who I am.

But to understand that there are seasons. And there are different situations in the moment and that it’s okay to make different choices and to play with them and see. I think that holding things lightly and without expectation just really leaves so much space and energy and acceptance and just curiosity for me anyway about, ooh, I am like feeling a little stuck here right now. What might I want to change up? What might I want to try earlier?

I literally just set an alarm for tomorrow morning earlier than my typical time, because I typically don’t like alarms. But here’s a little season where I want to play with that and I may turn it off as soon as it goes off and like, yep, not trying that anymore, but it’s totally okay. I don’t need to define myself by these pieces that I self regulate to, because I think all choices are me trying to figure out what’s best for me. And to me, that’s the self regulation piece, having the agency that we were talking about earlier to just look at myself and look at what’s going on and look at what maybe I’m trying to accomplish or what direction I’m trying to go and to be able to play with that.

And yeah, our expectations as parents, even as to how we define what self regulation should look like through our lens, because we can find ourselves just making little comments here or there, or making suggestions that always are trying to just nudge them toward what feels self regulated to us, rather than considering who they are as a person and helping them, fully supporting them, not standing back, but fully supporting them to find out or to explore what that looks like for them and what that feels like for them and how that can change over time. I love that stuff.

ERIKA: I love it, too. I’m having a lot of new thoughts that I didn’t know before, right? Like just the importance of context and how amazing it would feel if, when I’m in the mood to stay up late, rather than judging myself, maybe this is just a season of being in night owl mode and that’s okay. And our kids can do that, too. Rather than having this end point expectation of, if I was doing things the right way, or if I was able to regulate, my diet would look like this, my sleep would look like this, and everything in moderation, which is just not the way life is.

And so, a moderate amount of screen time may work really well for somebody. But then someone whose passion is filmmaking and is spending all day editing a video, they’re going to be getting a lot more screen time. And that’s a great life, too. And so, I really think it’s all about dropping the judgment and just tuning in, listening to ourselves and letting our kids listen to themselves, too.

So, this was a very fun unschooling rule to dive into with you both. And for all of our listeners, we would love it if you would join us in the Living Joyfully Network, our online community, where we talk about so many rich topics that impact our unschooling lives. It’s a wonderful place to connect with other families navigating the same challenges and experiencing the same joy of connection. You can learn more at livingjoyfully.ca/network. Thanks again for joining us and we’ll see you next time.

PAM: Bye!

EU354: Unschooling “Rules”: Unschoolers Should Never Divorce

On this episode of the podcast, we’re sharing another entry in our Unschooling “Rules” series.

We use the word “rules” in quotes to draw attention to the fact that there is no such thing as an unschooling rule! It can feel easier to reach for a set of rules to follow, especially when we’re learning something new, but we want to offer you space to look within, to find what makes sense to you and what makes sense to the individual members of your family. There are no unschooling police. Nobody is going to drop by your house and give you a failing grade—or an A+. Our goal with this series is to explore these apparent “rules” and cultivate an environment for self-discovery, for inquiry, for agency, and for growth.

In this episode, we’re diving into the “rule” that unschoolers should never divorce. We dig into where this belief might stem from, how unschooling can help our relationships and communication, and we dive into lots of possibilities of what life can look like without black and white thinking.

This topic was so interesting to ponder and we hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey!

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop

The Living Joyfully Podcast

The Living Joyfully Network

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

Follow @helloerikaellis on Instagram.

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling.

Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

Become a patron of Pam’s work for as little a dollar a month (in a wide variety of currencies) and learn more about what she’s up to!

We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. Our theme this month is In the Flow, and we’re exploring it through the lenses of parenting and living.

So much of what we talk about on this podcast and in the Living Joyfully Network isn’t actually about unschooling. It’s about life. On The Living Joyfully Podcast, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia talk about life, relationships, and parenting. You can check out the archive here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hello, everyone. I’m Pam Laricchia from Living Joyfully, and this is episode number 354 of the Exploring Unschooling podcast. I’m joined by my co-hosts Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. Welcome to you both!

ERIKA AND ANNA: Hello!

PAM: A quick reminder for listeners. Have you checked out The Living Joyfully Shop lately? You’ll find books, coaching, courses including Navigating Conflict, which aligns quite well with the rule we’re exploring in this episode.

But before we get started, we do want to remind everyone that with this Unschooling “Rules” series, we use the word rules in quotes to draw attention to the fact that there is no such thing. It can definitely feel easier to reach for a set of rules to follow, especially when we’re learning something new. We feel like we have to start somewhere, but we want to offer you space to look within to find what makes sense to you and what makes sense to the individual members of your family.

Because truly, there are no unschooling police. Nobody is going to drop by your house and give you a grade – failing, A+, passing, nothing like that. Our goal with this series is to explore these apparent rules and cultivate an environment for self-discovery, inquiry, agency, and growth. And Anna, would you like to get us started?

ANNA: I would. Okay. So, a few months back, we asked the Network members to tell us about any of these unschooling rules that they’ve been bumping up against. And the idea that unschooling families should never divorce, that they should stay together at all costs, came up for quite a few. And so, while I actually never really encountered this one out in the wild, I’m super excited to deconstruct it.

Something we talk about a lot is that there is never one right way. Life is complex and so are relationships. When we get stuck in rigid thinking that things have to look a certain way, it shuts down our creativity and it can also leave us feeling stuck, and that’s not really a place to learn about ourselves or about the people around us.

And I think with this one, there is a lot of outside noise, so there could be cultural, religious, familial ideas at play. And so, it’s important to really deconstruct that for yourself. Are these ideas serving you, your children, your family?

And as for why it’s believed to be an unschooling rule, I’m guessing that part of it comes from it being easier to have one parent more available to the kids, that somehow two parents in the same house is best or better. I think having that can make some things easier, but there are so many creative families out there finding ways to make it work. And not just work, but creating environments where everyone thrives, be it with two working partners or single-parent homes.

And again, our creativity opens up when we get out of that boxed-in, right-wrong thinking and let go of the outside judgment. And I think it’s important to watch for that internal judgment, too, because we can be really hard on ourselves when things don’t go according to plan. But life is about learning, growing, pivoting, and really it can’t be predicted or planned for as much as we might try. A marriage ending doesn’t need to be seen as any type of failure, but it could be viewed as a recalibration based on who everyone is now and what you’ve learned along the way.

PAM: Yeah, that is so true, Anna. I mean, my impression is that at least some of the concern around divorce comes from one parent contesting unschooling in court, insisting their kids go to school. Unschooling can be a source of contention when it comes to divorce. It can be challenging to explain how it works to a judge. The kids may then experience two big life changes out of their control: no longer living with both parents and going to school.

Yet, as you said, Anna, divorce doesn’t need to be seen as a failure, but can be seen as a transition. And if we keep our relationships with our kids at the forefront, focusing on connection and validation, we can help them move through it alongside us, that team again.

We’ve also spoken on the podcast before about how much of the unschooling ethos is about relationships and how even if the kids go to school, we don’t need to change how we parent. All of a sudden, becoming like teacher proxies at home, insisting on homework completion and insisting on high marks and studying all the time. We don’t need to bring school home. We don’t need to judge our children by their grades, even if they go to school. So, when we can release these fears about the future, we can more clearly see our family and our relationships as they are now, and creatively explore new possibilities around what those might look like moving forward.

ERIKA: I think this rule is really interesting and it makes sense that people are looking for a rule and for the one right way, because it can make life feel easier if there’s certainty. But as we’ve talked about with all the unschooling rules, it’s just not true. There just isn’t one right way. And so, context comes into play, individual people who are all different involved in the situation do, too.

And I think another part of this belief about never divorcing relates kind of to our Always Be Happy “Rules” episode that we had. The idea that having two parents in the home with children is the best environment for them, and we should somehow be able to control all of the factors. We should be able to make our relationships great if we can just do everything correctly.

But it doesn’t take much thinking to see that there isn’t a way to control everything. Two parents in the same home is one possibility, but it’s not always going to be the possibility that works or makes sense in every family. I mean, these are real people we’re talking about, and relationships are complicated. And so, I think the two parent expectation really is just one of those cultural images. It’s more like a fantasy vision of a family rather than reality, which has so many more layers and so much more nuance. It’s like thinking that our real lives should look like someone else’s Instagram highlights version of life.

And if we’re comparing our real families to this idealized vision, that’s when all of those fears can come up, like you were saying, Pam. But divorce doesn’t automatically mean that the kids have to go to school. And kids going to school doesn’t automatically mean we can’t have connected relationships with them. There are so many ways for things to work out.

And I love applying the no one right way idea to this topic, because like you were saying, Anna, it just gets us to that more open, creative place. If things aren’t feeling good, what are the options? What could our lives look like? Can we make adjustments? What are all of the possibilities? And there really are just endless ways to navigate parenting and partnership. Responding to our unique context and considering the different unique personalities in our family, we can find creative solutions that work for us, and there’s just not a right answer.

ANNA: Oh my gosh. It’s such an important reminder to not compare our inside to someone else’s outside. That idealized Instagram family isn’t real. Even for the ones that you know and see, that’s just such a tiny slice. Staying focused on the real relationships in front of you will give you the information that you need.

And I think it is a good point, Pam, about parents involving unschooling in custody discussions or court proceedings. And I’ve definitely seen that over the years. And it brings to mind a couple things for me. And one is to focus on validation, really double down. Double down on strong communication so that unschooling doesn’t become a weapon. And, as you said, letting go of the fear around school, because you can still absolutely have strong connected relationships when your kids are in school. And once you’ve released that fear, that set outcome, it again just opens up the creativity. It gives you a better chance at getting to the underlying need of whatever your ex is saying and talking to your kids about what they need. And it leads us to finding solutions that feel good to everyone as best we can.

Because when you’re talking to people about it, you just feel the weight released. Because it’s that fear, but what if we can’t unschool? And that’s where you’re stuck, but gosh, just releasing that fear and seeing that what’s important is our connected relationships. What’s important is having communication. That feels so different and it’s much more in your control, too, like the type of relationships that you can have.

I think it’s so helpful that the same ideas that we talk about related to our kids and relationships on all the podcasts and in the Network continue to serve us even if our relationships are changing.

Understanding ourselves and our differences is key to strong communication and navigating conflicts. Because even if we’re ending our marriage, we are still connected to this person pretty much for life because of the children. So, understanding one another and being able to communicate about the hard stuff is so helpful to everyone’s level of satisfaction and health. And now, that does not mean that there won’t be challenges and upsets and disagreements, but when we use the ideas we talk about, so often, it can truly help us move through even very difficult conversations with a lot more grace and ease.

The Foundation series on the Living Joyfully Podcast is a great place to get a refresher on some of those ideas. Things like understanding our differences and being open and curious. You can just start at the beginning of the podcast, or you can find it bundled in our shop, livingjoyfullyshop.com.

The conflict series also has a lot of gems that can help in improving communication. Things like assuming positive intent, looking for underlying needs, releasing set outcomes. Those are a few that just come to mind and are helpful ideas when navigating a divorce and figuring out the next steps for your family.

I think understanding that with the goal of strong communication, it doesn’t need to mean that the relationship stays the same, can be helpful. Just releasing, again, this expectation or idea. Relationships evolve and some aspects will fall away and others may change, and all of it is okay.

And keeping in mind there can be certain relationships that are so toxic that it isn’t safe. I just want to mention that quickly, because that is a different situation. The safety of everyone in the family is always a priority, but more often than not, it’s just differences. Different goals, different needs. Things have changed. Tuning into who you are and what you need will guide you to your decision, shutting out all of that outside noise, because again, there’s no rule, not from unschoolers, not from the church, not from whatever. That can all be tuned out into who you are and how you want to move through the world. You get to create the family that works for you and that can look whatever way feels best to all of you.

PAM: Yeah. And thank you very much for mentioning the safety piece, because yes, safety is a priority. And alongside that cultural story, that divorce means you failed miserably, and it’s going to be a long and arduous fight, I feel like there’s just so much fear wrapped up in it all that it’s just hard to imagine another way through it.

But even if the idea of divorce has started bubbling up and things are feeling deeply strained, it is worth the energy and the effort to work on our relationship with our spouse, because, as you mentioned Anna, they will most likely continue to be part of our children’s life and by extension ours. So, the better we understand ourselves, each other, and our myriad of differences, the more effectively we can communicate and navigate this challenging season.

And with that may also come some softening. That’s what I feel as you release the fear and recognize that yeah, that fear is about the future and it’s me telling like the worst story possible. But when I can release that, that opens me up to understanding myself, to listening to my inner voice a little bit more, to understanding that people are different, and just letting that in, rather than feeling I need to resist and I need to be hard through it.

I come to recognize that we are less enemies and we really are more just different people. We have different needs and goals and ways of moving through the world. So, maybe that brings us closer and we move through this season more supportively, better understanding each other’s needs, and maybe we discover that we want to stay together. Or maybe we continue on a path that includes divorce, but with more understanding and empathy. Both paths are better off for our newfound awareness. This work helps no matter how things unfold.

ERIKA: Right. Yes. I think when we get stuck in a place of thinking that we are doing something wrong if our relationship isn’t working or that we need to place blame somewhere, then communication shuts down. Even if we’re not on the same page, communication and relationship tools that we talk about in unschooling can help us move towards that mutual understanding. And I think that having that foundation where we have practice communicating and we’ve been working towards these strong, connected relationships, that only helps when things get more difficult.

I know, for me, diving into our personality differences has helped me and Josh so much in our relationship. I know you both have talked before about not taking someone’s personality personally, and I think in many ways I used to do that. His brain is just so different from mine, so I would often feel like, why don’t you think like me? Why don’t you get it? But I think seeing how different each of my kids are and really valuing and respecting that has helped me realize that there isn’t a right way to be. And I’ve gotten better at communicating with all of them about my experience without feeling like they should all agree with me or experience things the same way as I do.

I’m much more curious about Josh’s way of moving through the world than I used to be. Rather than judging him or trying to get him to see things my way, I get more curious about him and try to understand why he reacts the way he does, or why he makes the choices he does. So, in that way, I think unschooling has really helped us have a more connected relationship with a lot less conflict.

And since we really focus on problem solving and win-win solutions, I just have a lot of trust now that no matter what comes up for us, we’ll be able to figure it out. Whether that means we’re staying together or not, it doesn’t feel scary to me, because I know there are always so many possibilities when we’re staying open and curious.

ANNA: Right. And I think that energy that we bring to the situation is so important. Letting go of the fear and tuning into the people involved, including yourself. We can rewrite the story of what divorce looks like, and I really think that can be kind of the final shift. We rewrite the whole story of divorce and recognize that it can be about supporting each other on our best paths, just like we do with our children.

We can offer that to our ex and to ourselves. Once we get out of that win-lose paradigm and have the tools to communicate, even through the tough conversations, we can move to a place of supporting each other, wanting the best for everyone, and creating a new normal. And again, that doesn’t mean it’ll always be rosy, but it can certainly be better than staying in a relationship that isn’t serving you, where you don’t understand each other, and aren’t able to have any kind of conversations.

Our culture really sets up these strange, polarizing ideas that are so extreme. You should stay married forever, or it’s a failure, or you can’t have an amicable divorce. It doesn’t exist. It’s going to be hard. It’s all so extreme, and life is so much more nuanced than that.

In my work with couples, I’ve found that helping couples move through the transition of divorce to be really satisfying. They come in and they don’t want it to be horrible, but they really have no model of that, because our culture just paints this picture. It’s in movies and friends and family, all the things. It’s just all around, these ideas. But it is possible and can work really well and it’s, of course, always better for the children when we can find a more amicable path. And it creates a culture of supporting every family member in pursuing their best lives.

And in those conversations that I have with these couples, there are hard conversations and there are hurt feelings. And I’ve had couples that are trying to do this where one partner has cheated or been involved in other things. And you would think that’s the scenario where it can never work. But it still can, because we can still have these goals of supporting each other and being there for the kids and figuring out a best path that feels better.

But no matter how it’s playing out in your family, trust in your why and in your knowing. There is not one right way. Tune out the outside noise and tune into your body and its knowing. That’s going to lead you to the best possible path for you.

PAM: Yeah. I feel like moving out of that win-lose paradigm and into the story of supporting each other on our best paths, as we do with our children, can be a life-changing paradigm shift.

I mean, my experience is similar to yours, Erika. It was like coming to recognize the difference in my children and recognizing that they’re so different even though they’re all in the same environment. Before my relationship with Rocco, I didn’t have a lot of deeply connected and trusting relationships to understand another person at that depth. So, it was when I had kids that I really started seeing up close how different people can be. And then through learning that, I could bring that understanding to and widen up the relationship with my partner, with Rocco, and not have so many expectations and, “Why can’t you see things this way?” So yeah, I found that very interesting.

And just imagine putting all that energy that’s wrapped up in the idea of winning towards exploring other more supportive paths. I just feel that energy of the resistance and of trying to convince people. When you can release that win-lose paradigm, and it doesn’t mean stuffing down that energy it, it’s moving through it. And now I can take that energy and do something else with it.

It is true that culturally we don’t have many models of different ways to navigate the challenges that can come with divorce. But that doesn’t mean, just as you were saying, Anna, that they don’t exist. We get to choose our path.

ERIKA: I love that so much. It’s possible to completely disagree and still move forward in a way that can work for everyone involved. Remembering that we’re all different, we’re all doing the best that we can in each moment, and that there are endless possibilities, these are just big paradigm shifts that lower the intensity of the situation and give us some space to be creative and look for solutions.

So, yeah, I think it’s just really like so many other topics we’ve explored. When we release judgment of ourselves and of the other person, we release the fears and the cultural messages that we’re holding onto. We’re able to just look at what’s going on and make the next choice that makes sense.

And I know some people who get to a place where they feel like their relationship is pulling apart will have this open, curious exploration of all their options and decide to stay together and others will decide to separate. And those choices will make sense for them and their very unique families and experiences. There’s just no one right way and people are all different.

ANNA: It’s true! And I’m so glad we talked about this and hopefully put it to rest, because I really hate thinking of anyone out there carrying any additional weight around divorce, because that decision is always gonna be weighty and big and involve a lot. You don’t need any weight from anywhere else just because you’ve heard unschoolers shouldn’t divorce. They do, just like any other population. And I would argue that they’re best equipped to move through it in a way that centers the children and finds the win-win solutions along the way. It will not always be easy, but when you’re remembering your why, keeping lines of communication open, and remaining connected, it doesn’t have to be something to be feared.

PAM: Yeah. I love that so much. Thank you both. I really appreciate you, your insights, and your participation in this. I think it is such a big topic. It’s one I have heard for many, many years floating around in the unschooling ethos. So, I really enjoyed diving into it and just picking it apart, because we don’t have to absorb those stories that we hear out there.

And before we go, I do want to encourage you to check out The Living Joyfully Shop, because there you’ll find our courses, which include Navigating Conflict, along with books and coaching options that you might find helpful on your journey. And you can find all that at livingjoyfullyshop.com.

Thank you very much for listening, and we’ll see you next time! I hope you found this episode helpful on your unschooling journey. And be sure to check out the growing podcast archive. The conversations never go out of date. You can find more information about my books, the Living Joyfully Network online community, and the Childhood Redefined Unschooling Summit online course at my website, livingjoyfully.ca.

EU354: Unschooling “Rules”: Unschoolers Should Never Divorce

On this episode of the podcast, we’re sharing another entry in our Unschooling “Rules” series.

We use the word “rules” in quotes to draw attention to the fact that there is no such thing as an unschooling rule! It can feel easier to reach for a set of rules to follow, especially when we’re learning something new, but we want to offer you space to look within, to find what makes sense to you and what makes sense to the individual members of your family. There are no unschooling police. Nobody is going to drop by your house and give you a failing grade—or an A+. Our goal with this series is to explore these apparent “rules” and cultivate an environment for self-discovery, for inquiry, for agency, and for growth.

In this episode, we’re diving into the “rule” that unschoolers should never divorce. We dig into where this belief might stem from, how unschooling can help our relationships and communication, and we dive into lots of possibilities of what life can look like without black and white thinking.

This topic was so interesting to ponder and we hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey!

THINGS WE MENTIONED ON THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop

The Living Joyfully Podcast

The Living Joyfully Network

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

Follow @helloerikaellis on Instagram.

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling.

Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

Become a patron of Pam’s work for as little a dollar a month (in a wide variety of currencies) and learn more about what she’s up to!

We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. Our theme this month is In the Flow, and we’re exploring it through the lenses of parenting and living.

So much of what we talk about on this podcast and in the Living Joyfully Network isn’t actually about unschooling. It’s about life. On The Living Joyfully Podcast, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia talk about life, relationships, and parenting. You can check out the archive here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hello, everyone. I’m Pam Laricchia from Living Joyfully, and this is episode number 354 of the Exploring Unschooling podcast. I’m joined by my co-hosts Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. Welcome to you both!

ERIKA AND ANNA: Hello!

PAM: A quick reminder for listeners. Have you checked out The Living Joyfully Shop lately? You’ll find books, coaching, courses including Navigating Conflict, which aligns quite well with the rule we’re exploring in this episode.

But before we get started, we do want to remind everyone that with this Unschooling “Rules” series, we use the word rules in quotes to draw attention to the fact that there is no such thing. It can definitely feel easier to reach for a set of rules to follow, especially when we’re learning something new. We feel like we have to start somewhere, but we want to offer you space to look within to find what makes sense to you and what makes sense to the individual members of your family.

Because truly, there are no unschooling police. Nobody is going to drop by your house and give you a grade – failing, A+, passing, nothing like that. Our goal with this series is to explore these apparent rules and cultivate an environment for self-discovery, inquiry, agency, and growth. And Anna, would you like to get us started?

ANNA: I would. Okay. So, a few months back, we asked the Network members to tell us about any of these unschooling rules that they’ve been bumping up against. And the idea that unschooling families should never divorce, that they should stay together at all costs, came up for quite a few. And so, while I actually never really encountered this one out in the wild, I’m super excited to deconstruct it.

Something we talk about a lot is that there is never one right way. Life is complex and so are relationships. When we get stuck in rigid thinking that things have to look a certain way, it shuts down our creativity and it can also leave us feeling stuck, and that’s not really a place to learn about ourselves or about the people around us.

And I think with this one, there is a lot of outside noise, so there could be cultural, religious, familial ideas at play. And so, it’s important to really deconstruct that for yourself. Are these ideas serving you, your children, your family?

And as for why it’s believed to be an unschooling rule, I’m guessing that part of it comes from it being easier to have one parent more available to the kids, that somehow two parents in the same house is best or better. I think having that can make some things easier, but there are so many creative families out there finding ways to make it work. And not just work, but creating environments where everyone thrives, be it with two working partners or single-parent homes.

And again, our creativity opens up when we get out of that boxed-in, right-wrong thinking and let go of the outside judgment. And I think it’s important to watch for that internal judgment, too, because we can be really hard on ourselves when things don’t go according to plan. But life is about learning, growing, pivoting, and really it can’t be predicted or planned for as much as we might try. A marriage ending doesn’t need to be seen as any type of failure, but it could be viewed as a recalibration based on who everyone is now and what you’ve learned along the way.

PAM: Yeah, that is so true, Anna. I mean, my impression is that at least some of the concern around divorce comes from one parent contesting unschooling in court, insisting their kids go to school. Unschooling can be a source of contention when it comes to divorce. It can be challenging to explain how it works to a judge. The kids may then experience two big life changes out of their control: no longer living with both parents and going to school.

Yet, as you said, Anna, divorce doesn’t need to be seen as a failure, but can be seen as a transition. And if we keep our relationships with our kids at the forefront, focusing on connection and validation, we can help them move through it alongside us, that team again.

We’ve also spoken on the podcast before about how much of the unschooling ethos is about relationships and how even if the kids go to school, we don’t need to change how we parent. All of a sudden, becoming like teacher proxies at home, insisting on homework completion and insisting on high marks and studying all the time. We don’t need to bring school home. We don’t need to judge our children by their grades, even if they go to school. So, when we can release these fears about the future, we can more clearly see our family and our relationships as they are now, and creatively explore new possibilities around what those might look like moving forward.

ERIKA: I think this rule is really interesting and it makes sense that people are looking for a rule and for the one right way, because it can make life feel easier if there’s certainty. But as we’ve talked about with all the unschooling rules, it’s just not true. There just isn’t one right way. And so, context comes into play, individual people who are all different involved in the situation do, too.

And I think another part of this belief about never divorcing relates kind of to our Always Be Happy “Rules” episode that we had. The idea that having two parents in the home with children is the best environment for them, and we should somehow be able to control all of the factors. We should be able to make our relationships great if we can just do everything correctly.

But it doesn’t take much thinking to see that there isn’t a way to control everything. Two parents in the same home is one possibility, but it’s not always going to be the possibility that works or makes sense in every family. I mean, these are real people we’re talking about, and relationships are complicated. And so, I think the two parent expectation really is just one of those cultural images. It’s more like a fantasy vision of a family rather than reality, which has so many more layers and so much more nuance. It’s like thinking that our real lives should look like someone else’s Instagram highlights version of life.

And if we’re comparing our real families to this idealized vision, that’s when all of those fears can come up, like you were saying, Pam. But divorce doesn’t automatically mean that the kids have to go to school. And kids going to school doesn’t automatically mean we can’t have connected relationships with them. There are so many ways for things to work out.

And I love applying the no one right way idea to this topic, because like you were saying, Anna, it just gets us to that more open, creative place. If things aren’t feeling good, what are the options? What could our lives look like? Can we make adjustments? What are all of the possibilities? And there really are just endless ways to navigate parenting and partnership. Responding to our unique context and considering the different unique personalities in our family, we can find creative solutions that work for us, and there’s just not a right answer.

ANNA: Oh my gosh. It’s such an important reminder to not compare our inside to someone else’s outside. That idealized Instagram family isn’t real. Even for the ones that you know and see, that’s just such a tiny slice. Staying focused on the real relationships in front of you will give you the information that you need.

And I think it is a good point, Pam, about parents involving unschooling in custody discussions or court proceedings. And I’ve definitely seen that over the years. And it brings to mind a couple things for me. And one is to focus on validation, really double down. Double down on strong communication so that unschooling doesn’t become a weapon. And, as you said, letting go of the fear around school, because you can still absolutely have strong connected relationships when your kids are in school. And once you’ve released that fear, that set outcome, it again just opens up the creativity. It gives you a better chance at getting to the underlying need of whatever your ex is saying and talking to your kids about what they need. And it leads us to finding solutions that feel good to everyone as best we can.

Because when you’re talking to people about it, you just feel the weight released. Because it’s that fear, but what if we can’t unschool? And that’s where you’re stuck, but gosh, just releasing that fear and seeing that what’s important is our connected relationships. What’s important is having communication. That feels so different and it’s much more in your control, too, like the type of relationships that you can have.

I think it’s so helpful that the same ideas that we talk about related to our kids and relationships on all the podcasts and in the Network continue to serve us even if our relationships are changing.

Understanding ourselves and our differences is key to strong communication and navigating conflicts. Because even if we’re ending our marriage, we are still connected to this person pretty much for life because of the children. So, understanding one another and being able to communicate about the hard stuff is so helpful to everyone’s level of satisfaction and health. And now, that does not mean that there won’t be challenges and upsets and disagreements, but when we use the ideas we talk about, so often, it can truly help us move through even very difficult conversations with a lot more grace and ease.

The Foundation series on the Living Joyfully Podcast is a great place to get a refresher on some of those ideas. Things like understanding our differences and being open and curious. You can just start at the beginning of the podcast, or you can find it bundled in our shop, livingjoyfullyshop.com.

The conflict series also has a lot of gems that can help in improving communication. Things like assuming positive intent, looking for underlying needs, releasing set outcomes. Those are a few that just come to mind and are helpful ideas when navigating a divorce and figuring out the next steps for your family.

I think understanding that with the goal of strong communication, it doesn’t need to mean that the relationship stays the same, can be helpful. Just releasing, again, this expectation or idea. Relationships evolve and some aspects will fall away and others may change, and all of it is okay.

And keeping in mind there can be certain relationships that are so toxic that it isn’t safe. I just want to mention that quickly, because that is a different situation. The safety of everyone in the family is always a priority, but more often than not, it’s just differences. Different goals, different needs. Things have changed. Tuning into who you are and what you need will guide you to your decision, shutting out all of that outside noise, because again, there’s no rule, not from unschoolers, not from the church, not from whatever. That can all be tuned out into who you are and how you want to move through the world. You get to create the family that works for you and that can look whatever way feels best to all of you.

PAM: Yeah. And thank you very much for mentioning the safety piece, because yes, safety is a priority. And alongside that cultural story, that divorce means you failed miserably, and it’s going to be a long and arduous fight, I feel like there’s just so much fear wrapped up in it all that it’s just hard to imagine another way through it.

But even if the idea of divorce has started bubbling up and things are feeling deeply strained, it is worth the energy and the effort to work on our relationship with our spouse, because, as you mentioned Anna, they will most likely continue to be part of our children’s life and by extension ours. So, the better we understand ourselves, each other, and our myriad of differences, the more effectively we can communicate and navigate this challenging season.

And with that may also come some softening. That’s what I feel as you release the fear and recognize that yeah, that fear is about the future and it’s me telling like the worst story possible. But when I can release that, that opens me up to understanding myself, to listening to my inner voice a little bit more, to understanding that people are different, and just letting that in, rather than feeling I need to resist and I need to be hard through it.

I come to recognize that we are less enemies and we really are more just different people. We have different needs and goals and ways of moving through the world. So, maybe that brings us closer and we move through this season more supportively, better understanding each other’s needs, and maybe we discover that we want to stay together. Or maybe we continue on a path that includes divorce, but with more understanding and empathy. Both paths are better off for our newfound awareness. This work helps no matter how things unfold.

ERIKA: Right. Yes. I think when we get stuck in a place of thinking that we are doing something wrong if our relationship isn’t working or that we need to place blame somewhere, then communication shuts down. Even if we’re not on the same page, communication and relationship tools that we talk about in unschooling can help us move towards that mutual understanding. And I think that having that foundation where we have practice communicating and we’ve been working towards these strong, connected relationships, that only helps when things get more difficult.

I know, for me, diving into our personality differences has helped me and Josh so much in our relationship. I know you both have talked before about not taking someone’s personality personally, and I think in many ways I used to do that. His brain is just so different from mine, so I would often feel like, why don’t you think like me? Why don’t you get it? But I think seeing how different each of my kids are and really valuing and respecting that has helped me realize that there isn’t a right way to be. And I’ve gotten better at communicating with all of them about my experience without feeling like they should all agree with me or experience things the same way as I do.

I’m much more curious about Josh’s way of moving through the world than I used to be. Rather than judging him or trying to get him to see things my way, I get more curious about him and try to understand why he reacts the way he does, or why he makes the choices he does. So, in that way, I think unschooling has really helped us have a more connected relationship with a lot less conflict.

And since we really focus on problem solving and win-win solutions, I just have a lot of trust now that no matter what comes up for us, we’ll be able to figure it out. Whether that means we’re staying together or not, it doesn’t feel scary to me, because I know there are always so many possibilities when we’re staying open and curious.

ANNA: Right. And I think that energy that we bring to the situation is so important. Letting go of the fear and tuning into the people involved, including yourself. We can rewrite the story of what divorce looks like, and I really think that can be kind of the final shift. We rewrite the whole story of divorce and recognize that it can be about supporting each other on our best paths, just like we do with our children.

We can offer that to our ex and to ourselves. Once we get out of that win-lose paradigm and have the tools to communicate, even through the tough conversations, we can move to a place of supporting each other, wanting the best for everyone, and creating a new normal. And again, that doesn’t mean it’ll always be rosy, but it can certainly be better than staying in a relationship that isn’t serving you, where you don’t understand each other, and aren’t able to have any kind of conversations.

Our culture really sets up these strange, polarizing ideas that are so extreme. You should stay married forever, or it’s a failure, or you can’t have an amicable divorce. It doesn’t exist. It’s going to be hard. It’s all so extreme, and life is so much more nuanced than that.

In my work with couples, I’ve found that helping couples move through the transition of divorce to be really satisfying. They come in and they don’t want it to be horrible, but they really have no model of that, because our culture just paints this picture. It’s in movies and friends and family, all the things. It’s just all around, these ideas. But it is possible and can work really well and it’s, of course, always better for the children when we can find a more amicable path. And it creates a culture of supporting every family member in pursuing their best lives.

And in those conversations that I have with these couples, there are hard conversations and there are hurt feelings. And I’ve had couples that are trying to do this where one partner has cheated or been involved in other things. And you would think that’s the scenario where it can never work. But it still can, because we can still have these goals of supporting each other and being there for the kids and figuring out a best path that feels better.

But no matter how it’s playing out in your family, trust in your why and in your knowing. There is not one right way. Tune out the outside noise and tune into your body and its knowing. That’s going to lead you to the best possible path for you.

PAM: Yeah. I feel like moving out of that win-lose paradigm and into the story of supporting each other on our best paths, as we do with our children, can be a life-changing paradigm shift.

I mean, my experience is similar to yours, Erika. It was like coming to recognize the difference in my children and recognizing that they’re so different even though they’re all in the same environment. Before my relationship with Rocco, I didn’t have a lot of deeply connected and trusting relationships to understand another person at that depth. So, it was when I had kids that I really started seeing up close how different people can be. And then through learning that, I could bring that understanding to and widen up the relationship with my partner, with Rocco, and not have so many expectations and, “Why can’t you see things this way?” So yeah, I found that very interesting.

And just imagine putting all that energy that’s wrapped up in the idea of winning towards exploring other more supportive paths. I just feel that energy of the resistance and of trying to convince people. When you can release that win-lose paradigm, and it doesn’t mean stuffing down that energy it, it’s moving through it. And now I can take that energy and do something else with it.

It is true that culturally we don’t have many models of different ways to navigate the challenges that can come with divorce. But that doesn’t mean, just as you were saying, Anna, that they don’t exist. We get to choose our path.

ERIKA: I love that so much. It’s possible to completely disagree and still move forward in a way that can work for everyone involved. Remembering that we’re all different, we’re all doing the best that we can in each moment, and that there are endless possibilities, these are just big paradigm shifts that lower the intensity of the situation and give us some space to be creative and look for solutions.

So, yeah, I think it’s just really like so many other topics we’ve explored. When we release judgment of ourselves and of the other person, we release the fears and the cultural messages that we’re holding onto. We’re able to just look at what’s going on and make the next choice that makes sense.

And I know some people who get to a place where they feel like their relationship is pulling apart will have this open, curious exploration of all their options and decide to stay together and others will decide to separate. And those choices will make sense for them and their very unique families and experiences. There’s just no one right way and people are all different.

ANNA: It’s true! And I’m so glad we talked about this and hopefully put it to rest, because I really hate thinking of anyone out there carrying any additional weight around divorce, because that decision is always gonna be weighty and big and involve a lot. You don’t need any weight from anywhere else just because you’ve heard unschoolers shouldn’t divorce. They do, just like any other population. And I would argue that they’re best equipped to move through it in a way that centers the children and finds the win-win solutions along the way. It will not always be easy, but when you’re remembering your why, keeping lines of communication open, and remaining connected, it doesn’t have to be something to be feared.

PAM: Yeah. I love that so much. Thank you both. I really appreciate you, your insights, and your participation in this. I think it is such a big topic. It’s one I have heard for many, many years floating around in the unschooling ethos. So, I really enjoyed diving into it and just picking it apart, because we don’t have to absorb those stories that we hear out there.

And before we go, I do want to encourage you to check out The Living Joyfully Shop, because there you’ll find our courses, which include Navigating Conflict, along with books and coaching options that you might find helpful on your journey. And you can find all that at livingjoyfullyshop.com.

Thank you very much for listening, and we’ll see you next time! I hope you found this episode helpful on your unschooling journey. And be sure to check out the growing podcast archive. The conversations never go out of date. You can find more information about my books, the Living Joyfully Network online community, and the Childhood Redefined Unschooling Summit online course at my website, livingjoyfully.ca.