Pam Laricchia's Blog, page 7

EU345: Unschooling “Rules”: No Bedtimes

This week on the podcast, we’re sharing a new episode in the 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 don’t have bedtimes. And although it’s true that most unschoolers move away from arbitrary bedtimes set by the clock, we still all sleep! And because people are so different, what a family’s bedtime routine looks like can be unique—for different families and also in different seasons of life. We talk about some of the worries and fears that come up when thinking about sleep, as well as what sleep has looked for us over the years.

We had a lot of fun diving into this topic and we hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey!

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram, Facebook, and check out her 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?

Submit your question for a future Q&A episode, and, if you’re a patron, be sure to mention that.

Become a patron of Pam’s work for as little a dollar a month (in a wide variety of currencies) and help keep the podcast archive freely available to anyone who’s curious and wants to explore the fascinating world of 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 A Typical Unschooling Day, and we’re exploring it through the lenses of perspective and engagement.

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. Listen to The Living Joyfully Podcast here, or find it in your favorite podcast player.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Welcome! I’m Pam Laricchia from LivingJoyfully.ca and today I’m here with Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. Hello!

ERIKA AND ANNA: Hi.

PAM: So, 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 is going to drop by your house and give you a failing grade or even an A+. Our goal with the series is to explore these apparent rules and cultivate an environment for self-discovery, inquiry, agency, and growth.

So, with that, in this episode, we’re diving into the rule that unschoolers have no bedtimes. That can seem a little out there when you’re newer to unschooling and first come across it, but I will say, it’s a pretty distinguishing feature for many unschooling families. And that said, it doesn’t really mean what it sounds like at first.

Through the lens of conventional parenting, it sounds like chaos and tossing bedtimes out the window in a family used to relying on rules and needing the kids to be up early for school would most likely end up that way, absolutely. Yet, through the lens of unschooling, most unschooling families truly don’t have fixed bedtimes, yet their lives aren’t forever sleep-deprived and chaotic. So, what gives?

Well, it’s about the lifestyle the parents choose to embrace with their children. It’s less about control, about adult power over children, and more about connection, living and working together as a team. As we gain experience with unschooling, we come to question hard and fast rules like bedtimes dictated by the clock. We tend to prefer to consider the context of the moment, like, is there an activity we want to do tomorrow that necessitates getting up early? And the needs of the person, are they actually tired right now?

Yet not having a rule to pull out doesn’t mean we’re all of a sudden not involved in helping our children navigate the situation. We don’t leave them to run wild until they drop. Instead, there’s a helpful perspective shift that we can make from rules to routines. So, what does that look like with bedtimes? Well, people do get tired. What if you thought of bedtime as more of a routine to help your child get to sleep when they’re tired rather than a fixed rule based on the time on the clock? Does it seem reasonable to help them listen to their bodies and follow their cues rather than try to control their bodies based on outside factors? There is so much rich learning in there and a deeper sense of self-awareness.

Another helpful aspect of thinking in terms of routines rather than rules is that, for many kids and adults, there’s comfort in routines, in knowing what to expect. And routines help with transitions. A relaxing routine to get ready to go to bed when they’re tired or a routine to get out the door so things aren’t forgotten and people aren’t rushed and miserable. Having a rule like a bedtime actually encourages us to not learn the nuances of the people we love. We just pull out the rule and insist they follow it no matter how they’re feeling or what’s going on in their lives. There’s no critical thinking, just obedience.

Not having a specific bedtime rule is about getting to know and understand our children and ourselves. When do we feel tired? How do we like to ease into sleep? We can figure that out alongside our children, which we talked about in the last episode, as well. We don’t have to know the answers. We can figure this out. We’re finally getting the chance to question these things. We probably grew up with a bedtime. We’ve certainly heard the messages that “children need bedtimes” that surround us. So, it’s really fascinating to just take a rule like bedtimes and then just start questioning it. Like, what if we didn’t have it? It could be just something fun you play with in your mind at first when you think, what the heck? That seems a little unnerving to me. What are your thoughts, Erika?

ERIKA: Oh my gosh. This rule is a really fun one to dig into, I think, because it is one that seems just so wild at first. It’s one of those that’s like, well, I would never do that. But then now, the idea of enforcing a certain time for sleep just seems so strange to me.

And I remember having a really hard time falling asleep as a child myself, and I do think I could have benefited from this kind of approach of learning some of the calming tools that we talk about now, having some sort of a relaxation routine to help me and learning how to listen to my body instead of just looking at the clock.

So, I found that the transition from when my kids were babies to now has been this gradual process of learning and growing. I observed them, saw what they needed, saw when they were tired, and how they like to fall asleep, and so on, and just used their cues as the guide. And over the years, the timing of their sleep, the location of their sleep, what helps them fall asleep, all of that has changed and fluctuated.

So, what I find so valuable about this approach and looking at sleep as this physical need rather than a prescribed schedule, is that we all learn so much more about our bodies. We get to really feel how our bodies tell us what we need. We talk about what makes sleep feel easier or harder, which is actually different for different people.

And I’ll give you a couple of examples just to think about. So, some people actually have a really hard time sleeping when it’s pitch black, while other people want to have complete darkness. I have friends who feel the safest and most comfortable falling asleep in the daytime when the sun is coming through the window. So, light is one aspect that can be different for different people.

And then there’s sound, some people fall asleep best in silence, but for many, having a sound machine or a fan going can help us fall asleep more easily. I love to have a heavy blanket over me, because it makes me feel safe and cozy, and it’s not even cold where I live, so my husband gets so hot that a heavy blanket is a terrible idea for him. So, I have my little blanket zone that’s just for me. And there are more aspects like what activities you do before you sleep or what you eat or you drink before bed, how many hours of sleep feels really good for your body, and so on.

And I just wanted to share some of these differences just to emphasize that, like with everything else we ever talk about, there is no one right way to sleep. And by opening up the possibilities and getting creative, we really can figure out what works well for us as individuals and also as a family. And so, I think that in some unschooling families, it will look from the outside like they’re enforcing a bedtime, because everyone’s falling asleep at the same time each night. But it’s just because that’s what’s working well for them at the moment.

And so, to me it’s not a matter of just like, who cares? Stay up to whatever time you want. I’m not going to help you get any sleep. It’s about thinking about the context, like what you were saying about what do we have to do in the morning, what do we need to do with our time? What do we want to do with our time? Noticing how we like to sleep and what makes us feel good. And then my role is trying to support my kids and my whole family to meet all of our different needs. And when we aren’t meeting all of the needs, then we can have conversations and try to problem-solve together. Just try something different and play with it. So, it’s always a work in progress and it’s constantly shifting as the kids are growing and as our needs change. Anna?

ANNA: Oh my gosh. Yes. And I love the reminder about how we’re all so different, you know? Because as you were going through the differences, I was thinking about my own preferences. I prefer pitch black. I also have a sound machine. I like a blanket, but I have this thing called Bed Jet that cools our heats depending on the time of the year. So, I’m a little bit of a princess. But I’ve seen these people that can just sleep anywhere. Right? But that is not me and it wasn’t my kids either.

When I think about it, part of my journey as an adult was learning to listen to and love my body, because I feel like I had a lot of messages when I was younger that really dissociated me from those cues. And I knew that I wanted my children to not lose touch with the wisdom of their bodies. In babies, we see this clear communication of being hungry or tired, and yet somewhere along the way, conventional wisdom tells us that we need to apply this strict, somewhat arbitrary schedule really, to these growing humans. So, I guess in fairness, some people do that with babies, but developmental psychologists and medical professionals agree it is really important to listen to a baby’s cues. And if you’ve been around a baby, you see they know how to communicate those cues.

And so, what it looked like for us was, we were eating when we were hungry, we were sleeping when we were tired. And as you’ve both touched on, though, that was in the context of our family of four, what made sense for the life that we were creating together.

And in the early years, David was working outside the home and needed to get up early. So, that was always a part of the consideration. Noise levels, energy, time of the night. We had this gigantic, huge, family bed, and thankfully he was a deep sleeper, but we still needed to find ways to be creative to meet the needs of everyone involved. And we did often like to go to bed together. I just have really fond memories of that time in the dark, thinking about our day, sharing the ups and downs, reading a book. That was just really precious time that I think about often, but it also meant that I wasn’t getting alone time in the evening. So, as an introvert, that was a little tricky for me. So, I would make adjustments like getting up earlier than they did, or taking time when they were playing with David. Also, just looking for ways to fill my cup throughout the day.

It just never really felt good to me to think about sending someone off to bed who wasn’t tired, just because I needed to have some alone time. I wanted it to work for all of us, and I found that, as we worked together and really caring for and honoring each other’s needs, allowed us to be creative and come up with the solutions that felt good for us all. And, like you said, Erika, it changes. There are bumps and changes along the way. But we can just kind of keep that attitude of, we’re going to figure this out.

And just kind of an aside about this, because it always comes up in these kinds of discussions, is the idea if they don’t have a strict bedtime that and get up in the morning, they won’t be able to have a job. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that from people and it does always make me chuckle, but it comes up. I get it. We have these cultural messages. My girls, and really, all four of us back in the day, tended to be night owls. So, if something was coming up that required an early start, we would talk through what we wanted that to look like. And I found over and over, they were able to show up for the things that were important to them. Sometimes it was going to bed earlier the night before. Really more often it was leaving extra room on the back end to maybe go to sleep early that night or sleep in the next day.

And my youngest, she’s 23 now, and she has worked at a lot of different jobs over the years, some that go very late into the night. Currently, she has one that has her starting at 6:00 AM most mornings, and she has no trouble adjusting. And says she has actually been enjoying the early shifts because it frees up her afternoon and evening to be with friends.

And so, I guess my point is when we listen to our bodies and learn about the nuances of how we handle things, we make adjustments that we need to do the things that we want to do. So, I think walking through any fears anyone has about that can help you pinpoint the underlying issues. Is it fear of the future? Is it not getting a alone time, not getting couple time? Whatever it is, walking through that will give you more information. And then once you’ve identified that root issue, you can find creative solutions that feel good to everyone as opposed to just, we’re going to put down this arbitrary bedtime instead of digging deeper to what’s really going on here. So, I think that kind of introspection can be really helpful.

PAM: Yeah, I just want to go back to that question of, how will they be able to get up for a job? Because you don’t have to train for years to be able to wake up. And that’s the other piece, too. They’re choosing this job or whatever the reason is to get up by a particular time, whatever it is, it’s something they’re choosing. So, it really is, I guess, surprising when you first introduce the idea, but not at all surprising soon after. They’ll figure it out.

ANNA: Right. Once you start thinking about it. And then I think the other thing I want to throw in is they’re young, so Raelin will work these really late nights and then have an early shift the next day, and I’m just thinking, I would die. She’s totally fine. So, when they’re doing things they want to do and they’re young and not our age, they have this ability to adjust and move through things when they’re tired and those pieces, but they’re learning so much about what works.

And she would say sometimes when she was younger, sleepovers, she knew they weren’t going to get sleep at the sleepover and so she didn’t want to plan anything for two days afterwards because she wanted to rest. But I love that she had that insight. She still wanted to do the sleepover, because it was fun being with her friends, but she was learning things all the time, versus if I was imposing something, she’s not learning anything except what bedtime I think is a good idea.

ERIKA: It’s kind of reminding me of the don’t borrow trouble idea, too, because you can really get caught in kind of a tunnel vision mode when it comes to things like this, especially if it is triggering the like, I never get to have time with my husband alone, or are they going be able to wake up for the things 20 years down the road, all those future fears or the fears of like, it’s going to be like this forever. And so, if we feel like those kind of fears are popping up, I think that’s a good time to step back and remember that there are seasons. Everything’s always changing.

Every time I felt so trapped in whatever the sleep situation was that was going on, it would change the next day. Like as soon as I voiced my concern of, it’s never going to change! it changed the next day. And so, remember that things do change and there are difficult seasons of sleep, but yeah, it’s all a process and a journey.

PAM: Yeah, I think that is a really cool piece, too, because we’re all learning. As you were saying, Anna, they learn, and again I’ve experienced with my kids as well that they learn what their body needs and what they like. I know I can have an extra late night and an early morning once, maybe twice in a row, and then I will need to accommodate at some point with an earlier night or a sleep in or something like that.

But they’re learning how their body ticks and how it works with sleep and what feels good and they’re gaining experience with how that changes over time, because I feel for myself anyway, I remember when I was younger, when you mentioned that, Erika, it would be bedtime. I’d go to bed and I would lie there looking at the clock. And I’d be just like, okay, I don’t want to look at the clock. I need to be asleep by a certain time. And then I’d look and that time had come and then I’d be like, oh my god. Oh my god, no, I’m going to have a horrible night.

We absorb that and we set ourselves up for feeling bad about it. I could have woken up in the morning. And been perfectly fine, but I was thinking I did not get much sleep last night. I’m going to be cranky all day. And I kind of set myself up for that. So, that was a long season when I remember looking for it to 10 o’clock. Oh my gosh. Or hearing my parents go to bed, because you went to your room and you just laid there till you go to sleep. Or I’d put my radio on for like the hour sleep timer and if it would go off, I’d be like, oh no! And you’re dealing with that all by yourself.

So that’s when we’re talking about supporting our kids and helping them, and maybe they do want to go lie down and they get to learn that rest is okay. You don’t literally need to be asleep all the time for recovery. Sometimes just some quiet time is reinvigorating. So, all these different pieces of learning about themselves and listening to the cues that their body is giving them and how it doesn’t mean that we need to be like perfect is the first word coming to mind. Like, oh, I’m tired, therefore I’m asleep, or anything like that. We can try all sorts of, I am tired and I really want to do this thing and I’m going to get more experience learning about, how do I deal with that?

So often, we discover when it’s something we really want to do and we’re excited about it, we do not feel tired while we’re doing the thing. We may be extra tired after we have our two days of recovery, after a super big event is over, things like that. So, it is just so fascinating.

And just in the interest of sharing, because you guys shared how you like to sleep, I do like some light on. So, I have some colored lights around the window in the bedroom here. I do like sound. I have some sleep headphones that I wear and I listen to an audio book. I like to have talking in the background.

ANNA: Interesting!

PAM: It’s just so fascinating and actually, here’s a case where it’s sometimes easier to do for us, but for kids, we need them to do it like the right way. Dark, quiet, this is the way you should sleep. I need all these extra accommodations. But no, no. We are all individual, unique, fun people and whatever helps us do the things that we’re wanting to do, like get some rest, get some sleep. Absolutely. Okay. So much fun to play around with.

ERIKA: I love that so much. And I love that the focus is so much more on what do our bodies feel like rather than, I mean, that’s exactly my experience as a kid too, Pam, of just looking at the clock and being like, I’m doing this wrong. I can’t turn off my brain or whatever. But having no tools to help me through the spinning thoughts. No thought about what would make this room more comfortable for me. None of that was a consideration. And so, just thinking of it more as what is my body feeling like? It’s just such a nice place to start.

PAM: Yeah. It’s so considerate. All right, thank you so much. I really enjoyed diving into another one of these unschooling rules with both of you. And I hope our listeners find our conversations helpful as they navigate sleep with their family. Wishing everyone a lovely day. Bye.

ERIKA: Bye.

EU344: Q&A Deep Dive

In this week’s Exploring Unschooling podcast episode, we’re diving deep into a listener question submitted by Julie in Ontario. She writes,

How would you encourage parents to best unschool themselves? I’d really like to be a better example of someone who follows their passions. My husband would love to do a job more suited to his passions, but feels stuck. I feel hypocritical with my kids, because we encourage them to do what they love and talk about one day how it could lead to a career. But we aren’t living this out fully ourselves. Help! Thanks for this podcast. I love it.

As always, our Q&A conversations aren’t focused on giving anyone the “right” answer, because there isn’t a universal “right” answer for any given situation that will work for everyone. Instead, our focus is on exploring different aspects of the situation and playing with the kinds of questions we might ask ourselves to better understand what’s up. We’re sharing food for thought through the lens of unschooling and cultivating strong and connected relationships.

Submit your question for a future Q&A episode, and if you’re a patron of the podcast, be sure to mention that.

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Pam’s conversation with Missy on her podcast, Let ’em go Barefoot: The Unschooling (Hero’s) Journey with Pam Laricchia

EU342: Helping Kids Find Their Passion

LJ012: Baby Steps

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram, Facebook, and check out her 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?

Submit your question for a future Q&A episode, and, if you’re a patron, be sure to mention that.

Become a patron of Pam’s work for as little a dollar a month (in a wide variety of currencies) and help keep the podcast archive freely available to anyone who’s curious and wants to explore the fascinating world of 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 A Typical Unschooling Day, and we’re exploring it through the lenses of perspective and engagement.

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. Listen to The Living Joyfully Podcast here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player.

CALL TRANSCRIPT

ERIKA: Welcome! I’m Erika Ellis from livingjoyfully.ca and I’m here with Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia. Hi to you both!

PAM: Hello!

ANNA: Hello!

ERIKA: So, in this episode, we’re exploring a listener question. And before we get started, we just want to remind everyone that our Q&A conversations aren’t focused on giving anyone the “right answer,” because there isn’t a universal right answer for any situation that will work for everyone. So, basically we’re just sharing food for thought through the lens of unschooling. Anna, do you want to get us started?

ANNA: I do. So, this question is from Julie in Ontario, Canada. Julie has five children, ages 10 and under, and she writes, “How would you encourage parents to best unschool themselves? I’d really like to be a better example of someone who follows their passions. My husband would love to do a job more suited to his passions, but feels stuck. I feel hypocritical with my kids, because we encourage them to do what they love and talk about one day how it could lead to a career. But we aren’t living this out fully ourselves. Help! Thanks for this podcast. I love it.”

Okay, so, thanks, Julie! We really appreciate you writing in. And this is such an interesting question.

And I would say what first came to mind for me is, “There’s plenty of time!” And I say it all the time. But most of us have a lot of deschooling to do and we can get there, I feel like, faster for our children than we actually do for ourselves. We’re really focused on that piece of it. But I found that the longer we lived this life, the easier it became to bring that this life to me, to my husband, to all of us, to really understand how it can fit in our family.

So, I am a scanner. Some people call it a multipotentialite. Basically, I want to do all the things, so I pretty quickly fell into this lifestyle alongside my children. And I will say that when my kids were young, one of my main passions was actually parenting and unschooling. So, that was a big focus area for me in terms of my personal learning and how I wanted to spend any extra time I had. I didn’t really want to do things that pulled me too far away from that or from my children. So, I would look at our environment and see what could easily fit into our life that would kind of spark my interest. I did a lot of gardening. I kept chickens and bees. Those were things that I would end up sharing with our community down the road. They were just easy things I could do alongside my kids.

We also did a lot of art and nature projects that I could easily scale to be of interest to everyone involved. New art things were interesting to me. And I learned to just play, play games, video games, board games, otherwise. What I realized is that I don’t think I ever really allowed myself to play games when I was younger in this way. I was too busy checking other people’s boxes.

And my husband, on the other hand, naturally fell into this lifestyle. Sometimes I think it was really him who led the way, so when he had a chance to leave corporate America, he did and has never looked back. He loves adventure and he really wanted to be around for our girls when they were young.

So, I think it’d be interesting to check in with your husband about what’s feeling hard for him about changing directions, because that would give you a clue if there are things that you could do as a family that would help. What’s making him feel nervous? Or again, what’s feeling hard? I like to ask that question, because that gives us a really good sense of, are there things we can change? Are there some system pieces we can do differently? Is there a different way to approach this problem?

And I like to look at things like that as a puzzle. How can we move towards this thing that we want that feels slightly out of reach? What next step can we take, which kind of reminds me of the Baby Steps episode we did on the Living Joyfully Podcast. But what step can we take towards this?

We don’t have to jump and leap there. We can just start to align our family with moving towards this place. But I also want to say that kids will still thrive in this environment, even if we’re still figuring it out for ourselves. There will be opportunities along the way to discuss everyone’s needs and work together to find ways to make this happen.

That, in and of itself, has so much value. Them seeing us learn and process and figure out new ways, that has so much value. But again, there is plenty of time. It’s not a race. There’s no perfect path, and what I’ve found is that the learning just continues all these decades later. Erika?

ERIKA: Hi, Julie! Thank you so much for listening and for your question. I did find it really interesting, too. And I love Anna’s point about there’s plenty of time, because that is so true. And I also love that you’re noticing something. You’re noticing that something doesn’t feel good and you’re open to exploring the possibilities and really figuring it out.

So, a couple things bubbled up for me when I was thinking about your question. The first was just maybe a lens shift. So, I think sometimes when we realize that things are not feeling as good as we’d like them to, we can get in this long-term view. And from there, it feels like what’s needed are these huge changes and that they need to happen now. It feels more daunting and less doable. It feels like this big, important, scary thing. Like, we just need everything to be different. Or even worse, like we need to somehow be different people in order for things to be better. And of course that feels so challenging, maybe even impossible, like where do we even go from there?

But what if the lens was just this smaller lens of, what fun thing could I do today? What fun thing does my husband like to do with me or with the kids? It could literally just be an intention to do something fun. It’s about lightening the mood and adding some playful energy. Kids are naturally mostly in that zone anyway, but adults could forget to go there.

And maybe that one fun activity could lead to another idea of something else we might like to do, and that could lead on and on to so much learning.

It could be fun, too, to just notice, like Pam was mentioning in her Helping Kids Find Their Passion episode that was on recently, to just catch yourself when you feel that little bit of curiosity about something and just comment on it. Like, “I think I’m going to go look that up.” Or, “I’d like to know more about that.” Just those little tiny examples, narrating what it feels like to follow tiny threads of curiosity. Our kids can see us doing that and see some of the ways that we can learn about the world.

I do think it could be valuable to dig into your husband’s feelings about his work. Are there ways to make his life feel better without changing jobs? Are there other ideas he has about how to use his time? There are just so many aspects of working and time management and money and all of that to dig into in order to figure out what feels the best. But there are always, I’ve found, more choices available to us than we’re usually aware of at first. And so, being really curious about what’s possible can lead to new opportunities.

And that’s not to say that it’s not challenging. It certainly can be. But I’ve found that having an abundance mindset and really trying to keep myself open to possibilities has helped us find ways to make our lives fit us better over time.

And I guess I would also just add that if trying to focus on fun or getting open and curious all feels really difficult for anyone who’s listening, if that feels very difficult, you’re not alone. There are definitely situations in life and phases in life that are just really challenging. Having a lot of young kids is challenging. Health issues can cause stress. Work stress that seems difficult to address, can be just so hard to deal with. And so, for times like those, focusing on stress management or maybe working in some somatic tools to reduce stress and anxiety, things like that, that’s where I would really want my effort to be.

And like Anna said, kids will still thrive even if we’re still figuring things out. And so, when things feel stressful and hard for me, I can allow the kids the space to do their thing while focusing my energy on caring for myself or caring for my husband when he’s stressed out, trying to reduce the impact of those stressors in our lives. Knowing that there are challenging seasons of our lives that we will move through can help put it into perspective as well.

But in any case, I think it’s always valuable to show ourselves compassion and kindness, and then doing that can help us find that next baby step that feels good.

And can I just say that I love how you used the phrase unschool ourselves? I think that’s just so beautiful, because it reminds me to include myself in the fun and the exploration of unschooling and to accept myself and my husband just as we are, the same way that I’m trying to do for my kids. So, I really loved that. Pam?

PAM: Yes. Hi, Julie! Thanks so much for submitting your question.

It has been really fun to think about. And I would like to just start at the end. You wrote, “I feel hypocritical with my kids, because we encourage them to do what they love and talk about how one day it could lead to a career, but we aren’t living this out fully ourselves.”

First, I want to encourage you to be kind and compassionate with yourself and your partner. It’s completely understandable that you don’t yet feel like you’re fully living this lifestyle, because it’s not an on/off switch. It’s a journey. It’s deschooling, as Anna was talking about. Neither one of you had an unschooling childhood, I suspect, which would’ve been filled with years of exploring things you find interesting, gaining experience with how interests ebb and flow over months and years, learning how you prefer to learn new things, finding ways to embrace your strengths and navigate your weaknesses, learning the value of not judging yourself harshly when things go sideways or even just more slowly than you were hoping.

So, that’s why we talk so often about the unschooling journey for parents. For unschooling kids, it’s really just their childhood, right? They’re just figuring this stuff out along the way. But when we come to unschooling as adults, as parents, we are just starting to explore all these things now. We do need a lot of time to work through so much of the conventional wisdom that we’ve absorbed as truth growing up, which is why, as Erika just mentioned, it’s so cool that you framed your question as ways to encourage parents to unschool themselves. Because that’s the heart of it, isn’t it?

And for me, encouraging parents to unschool themselves is about encouraging them to question what they think they know about life and learning, which is definitely no small task, which is why it can feel overwhelming. There really are so many things to question. Where do we start?

Now, I think we can get a sense of what questions to explore next by just noticing what’s starting to rub. What’s not feeling great right now? What questions are taking up a lot of real estate in my head and making it harder for me to be in the moment connecting with my kids?

Now, pretty often, when we first come to unschooling, it’s questions like, how do I know they’re learning? What about math and reading? I encourage parents to embrace beginner’s mind, because when it comes to unschooling, we are beginners. It’s really helpful to release what we think we know and instead bring that open and curious mindset as we explore the questions that come up through the lens of unschooling.

And for you and your husband, Julie, the question that’s rubbing right now is around the idea of following our passion. You wrote, “I’d really like to be a better example of somebody who follows their passions. And my husband would love to do a job more suited to his passions, but feels stuck.” So for yourself, I imagine you’re trying to get a sense of what it looks like when somebody is following their passions and first, I would encourage you to use the word interests rather than passions. Not because there’s anything wrong with the idea of passions per se, but that the energy of the word can sometimes trip us up. Passion seems to be like a super interest, giving the impression that we need to find the one or two things that make our soul sing, and that is a lot of pressure to be putting on ourselves.

So instead, let’s just take it down a notch and think in terms of interests, because interests are cool. We learned so much about the world and ourselves through exploring them. And maybe eventually, we might become passionate about some of those interests, but maybe not. And either way, we’re learning a lot and having fun along the way.

And as Erika mentioned, share what you’re doing and learning along the way with your family. For me, that was a big one because I think that’s something you’re seeing right now, Julie, that your kids are doing this thing and you guys as parents don’t feel like you are. And as Anna was saying, you’re gonna be learning it alongside. There’s plenty of time to do that.

So, it’s really interesting to see when we can share a little bit. And maybe it’s just that, “Oh, I think I’m going to go learn a little bit more about that,” just embracing those little moments when you’re starting to see a little something. “Oh look, I am curious about something. That’s interesting.” And just sharing that with your family. It helps also the kids to see that this isn’t just for kids. It’s the process. It’s not about the destination, “I have a passion.”

And what that can do also, because you talked about being a better example, Julie, what that feels like when you’re living your lives alongside each other and when everyone’s diving into their own interests and sharing their excitement with each other along the way, that’s when we can realize that we don’t have to share the same interests, but we can definitely connect with each other around that shared excitement and joy of doing something that we really like to do.

And I love what Anna shared about how her interests changed over the years to align with her family’s needs. That’s another thing. If we’re really trying to find a passion, something that makes our soul sing, that doesn’t take into account the context of our family. We can find things that are interesting for us and they can change over the years. So, when her kids were younger, your kids were younger, Anna, and needed you to be close by, you dove into things that didn’t take you away physically, things that the kids could enjoy doing with you if they were interested. Because again, there is plenty of time. This is what life looks like. It’s not like our life is on hold while we figure out what our passion is. This is life. Exploring interests and finding passions, and seeing how it all weaves through our days.

And then I just wanted to mention, as for your husband, I think it’s really the same idea. It doesn’t need to start with anything drastic. I loved the way you put that there, Erika. When you’re looking to the future, all of a sudden, I need to make big changes now to make some really drastic future change happen. So, quitting his job is not something that he needs to decide right now, but you can help him lean into exploring what he finds interesting. As his curiosity and his creativity begins to just open up more, maybe he finds some interesting aspects of his work now that he can lean into.

Maybe he comes to see work as just something he does for money to support the family when everybody, including him, pursuing their interests. Maybe he finds other ways to supplement his income that are more interesting to him, growing that and winding down his current job. There are just so many times over the years that I’ve experienced new opportunities serendipitously appearing once I have something top of mind. Once I’m now thinking, “Oh, what would I like to do? What would be fun? What am I curious about? What am I interested in?” When those questions are bubbling around in your head, you start to notice so many things around you that you really didn’t notice before.

So, the point is, if he’s feeling stuck at work right now, you can focus on making the rest of his life more fun and interesting. Let his interests weave through the family, too. Celebrate it alongside everyone else’s. Lighten and loosen things up. And then just kind of see what happens, because that’s the thing. Instead of looking to the future and trying to make a path, really, you create a wonderful path by focusing on the moment that’s in front of you. Just look for what is striking your curiosity. What are you interested in? What is your husband interested in? And do those things. Play with those things. Bring your kids along. Invite them to join you in those things.

But even if you’re doing these side by side, everybody’s doing what they enjoy and it becomes a lifestyle that we all live together, versus this is what the kids do and this is what the parents do.

ERIKA: Yeah. I feel like as you’re talking about it being a journey and so much maybe more difficult or more work for parents to unschool and deschool themselves than it ever is for the children, I was just thinking about that we have all these societal messages maybe to deal with and some beliefs that we have kind of created over the years, or been given over the years. So, maybe there are things like, am I even allowed to do something that’s enjoyable for me? Can I make these choices? Because we could end up with feelings of, but there’s these things I should be doing or I have to do. A job has to look like this and my time should be spent doing these things.

The role of the mother is that I’m supposed to be doing these things, so can I really dive into something that’s just fun for me? So yeah, starting to question all those things. 

ANNA: And I think what that leads to mind for me is something that you mentioned also, Erika, which is the abundance mindset. So, I think instead of trying to solve the specific problems of how he does this or how I do a passion, it’s bringing that abundance mindset into the every day. Because you can hear this kind of deficit focus of, he doesn’t like this, we’re not sure about this, we’re not doing this. Like this not, not, not, which is the cultural message, right? That’s the message is always look at the deficits. Here are the things we needs to fix.

But it is, let’s add things. Let’s find what sparks. Let’s just enjoy these moments together. Let’s just delight in everyone else’s excitement about what they’re doing, bringing that energy of abundance and connection to each of those moments. I think that’s what opens the doors. That’s what then, like you said, the serendipitous opportunity appears and then suddenly we’re open to it.

But I think when we’re kind of tunneled in on what’s not working, we miss the magic, you know? So, I think that’s really something tangible that can happen right now is just bringing that abundance mindset to every moment for everyone in the family.

PAM: I love that. I love that. Because yeah, just as you were talking there, it was the tunnel vision. It was like, oh yeah. When there’s something we need to fix, even if it’s something with ourselves. We do. We get so focused on it. How can I fix this? How can I improve this? How can I make it better? And we definitely just get tunneled in on, I need to fix this and I need to fix this fast.

I don’t want to sit in, “Something’s wrong,” because that’s bad. All those societal judgments that end up on our plate and focusing us in, and then yes. Oh, we miss so much and we miss so many opportunities. I can just have fun watching a movie with my family. Or we can go and draw some pictures or grab the paint. And it’s just getting more and more fascinating to me how that just that shift of opening things up makes things feel lighter and looser as we were talking about a bit earlier.

And for your husband there, who’s maybe not enjoying his work, when you’re so focused on that, even outside of work, that that’s what you’re thinking about, oh my gosh. If you’re instead having fun and doing other things, that becomes a smaller portion of his day. The stuff that he’s not enjoying is a smaller portion, so it doesn’t feel as heavy. It’s a little bit lighter. He can start to pick out little things like, oh, you know, I don’t really mind this. Rather than saying, I hate my job. It just lightens things up so that we can look at things a little more closely with a little less judgment, with a little less fear. There’s probably the word.

ANNA: I just got one quick thing that came from that thing. I’s the examining our why. Just like we talk about with the kids. So, instead of this like, okay, I hate my job. It’s terrible. There’s a reason that he’s choosing to stay in it. And it may be because it’s providing the money that he needs. It may be that it’s close to the house so he doesn’t have a long commute. There’s something about it.

But if we can revisit that, it’s like, okay, I am actively choosing to do this job. I may not do it forever. It may not be meeting some of my needs, but let me think. Let me revisit why I’m doing it, because that has such a different energy and then that translates into this energy we’re talking about in the home that’s more abundant and more focused on what we can do. And again, that’s where I’ve seen just over and over again, opportunities open up from that more expansive place.

PAM: Now that you hit that why, when you’re thinking about your why and you’re opening up thinking about work, what occurred to me as you were talking about that is, you realize that work doesn’t have to satisfy so many things.

ANNA: All the things.

PAM: It doesn’t have to accomplish everything. All my life doesn’t need to be fed or validated from this work. I can open it up and get all sorts of needs met in different ways. That doesn’t have to satisfy all my needs.

ERIKA: Yeah, that, that made me think, I mean, both of you, that made me think of it’s the story we tell about it as well. So, if the story we tell about my husband’s work is it’s providing us with this and he can do this. He can’t do this. But he could do that at home, just find a way to reframe it that feels lighter and that makes everyone feel better moving forward. So, anyway, thanks again for your question, Julie. We obviously had a lot of fun diving into it. And if anyone else wants to submit a question for an upcoming episode, we would love to read it. I don’t remember the address though, Pam. Do you?

PAM: I think it’s livingjoyfully.ca/question.

ANNA: Yay!

PAM: It will be in the show notes, too.

ERIKA: Okay. Good. So, we would love to hear it. And have a wonderful day, everyone!

PAM: Bye!

ANNA: Bye!

EU343: Bringing It Home: Navigating Lessons

This week on the podcast, we’re diving into another Bringing It Home episode. We’re looking deeper at our last Unschooling “Rules” topic, that unschoolers don’t use curriculum, and exploring what it can look like to navigate lessons and adult-led activities with our unschooling families.

Unsurprisingly, there is no one right approach. It’s so much about seeing through our children’s eyes and making choices that feel good to them. A world of possibilities exists when we are open and curious!

We hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey!

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

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Become a patron of Pam’s work for as little a dollar a month (in a wide variety of currencies) and help keep the podcast archive freely available to anyone who’s curious and wants to explore the fascinating world of 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 A Typical Unschooling Day, and we’re exploring it through the lenses of perspective and engagement.

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. Listen to The Living Joyfully Podcast here, or find it in your your favorite podcast player.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Welcome! I’m Pam Laricchia from LivingJoyfully.ca, and today I’m here with Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. Hi to you both!

ANNA: Hello!

ERIKA: Hi!

PAM: In our last Unschooling “Rules” episode, episode 341, we talked about the idea that unschoolers don’t use curriculum. And yes, it can definitely be very helpful when you’re starting out unschooling to steer away from curriculum and organized adult-led activities, because when we first come to unschooling, our vision of how learning works is so often tightly wrapped up in what it looks like in school. So, staying away from that environment for a while encourages us to explore the many other ways that learning so beautifully happens.

And eventually, we realize that we don’t need a curriculum or a more structured, adult-led environment to inspire learning, because learning is always happening, at which point the need to actively look for learning begins to fade. And instead we concentrate on cultivating what we’ve discovered lies underneath, connected and trusting relationships, and supporting them in following their interests, however they want to explore them. That’s the solid foundation of unschooling.

So, if you haven’t yet listened to that episode, it’s a great lead in to this one. So, I encourage you to listen to it and then come back here.

Okay, so with this follow up Bringing it Home conversation, we want to talk about an aspect that comes up pretty regularly in unschoolers lives and that’s navigating lessons or more broadly, adult-led activities as an unschooling family. So, maybe it’s music lessons or dance or karate or so many, many, many other possibilities. It’s one thing to get comfortable with unschooling in your own home, but it can be another whole kettle of fish to bring that learning mindset with you out into the world.

And this is a topic I’m pretty passionate about, so I have three aspects I want to mention, but then I’ll turn it over, I promise. Before we dive into that, just a quick reminder, something we talked about in the “Rules” episode, which is that lessons or organized activities aren’t the only way to pursue an interest. And they aren’t objectively better than the other ways. They’re just a different way. But depending on the child, they might be a great way for them to explore their interests.

Okay, so the first aspect I want to touch on is finding a good match between the activity and the interested child. The more conventional response when a child asks to join an activity or take lessons, assuming the parents agree, is for a parent to find the closest location and sign them up. End of story.

From there, the child is expected to do the work to fit into the environment. Now, for unschooling parents, our foremost focus is on supporting our children’s learning. So, instead of expecting our children to adapt, we are willing to do the work to search out an environment that meshes well with how our children like to learn. Understanding that the atmosphere surrounding many activities is dictated by the individual adults who run them, we look for a good fit between the group’s atmosphere and the child’s personality and goals.

So, let’s just take karate as a quick example. Some dojos focus on attendance and progress their students through the belts based on the time invested. Some focus on skill development and progress their students based on proficiency displayed. Some dojos insist their students compete in certain tournaments. Some avoid tournaments altogether and so on. The big question is, what are your child’s goals? That is a great conversation to have with them as you’re approaching an activity.

And then on top of the activity itself, there’s also the teaching methods and personalities of the teachers or coaches. Do they demand obedience and cultivate a strict hierarchical environment? Do they encourage questions and cultivate a supportive atmosphere? Are they somewhere in between there? The knowledge and skills of the instructors being relatively equal, there is still a wide range of possible learning environments. Some your child may fit into like a glove, while others may turn them off the activity itself for years to come.

So, if your goal is to help them explore their interest, your best bet is to help them find the studio, dojo, group, league, or teacher that is a good match for their personality. Instead of choosing a location by geography and expecting your child to conform, take the time to explore the options, including those that may be a bit further afield, and try to find one that is a great fit for your particular child.

Okay, so the second aspect is getting ready to leave for the activity. Participating in an activity likely means a fixed time for lessons or practice or games. And this can be challenging, especially for younger children who may have a harder time transitioning to leave if they get caught up in doing something at home. And on top of that, it can also be challenging for newer unschooling parents, because they may feel like they are coercing their child to leave. What do they do if their child says they don’t want to go this week?

So, if going to an activity is becoming a struggle, take a moment to look at how you’re setting it up. If you find yourself saying something like, “It’s Wednesday. Your karate class is today. Are you going to go this week?” Just take a moment to rethink that. By asking your child each week whether they want to go to class, you’re basically asking them to revisit their decision each time. And that is a lot of work, especially for younger children.

So, in my experience, it’s easier to assume your child wants to go, because they wanted to sign up in the first place, and to do your best to help them get there. Make it as painless as possible for them.

“Hey, your karate class is today. I have your gi clean and I put your bo by the front door. We’ll get changed and leave right after dinner.” By bringing it up during the day, you have time for conversations without the added pressure of trying to get out the door. And by making sure all the supporting things are in place so that your child can just go to the activity, clean outfits or uniforms, working and available equipment, transportation and timing, all those supporting things, then they can focus on the activity itself.

Are they enjoying it? Because that’s the real question, which then leads to the third aspect I want to mention, and that is choosing to quit. When our children express an interest in an activity, it can be easy for us parents to get all caught up in the idea that, ooh, maybe they’ll grow up to do this for a living. We want to encourage them to continue.

Sometimes we’re afraid that if they quit, they’ll get behind and the opportunity to develop their interest into a career will be lost and they’re eight years old. There are a couple of things to consider here. First, if it’s not catching their interest so much that they are excitedly dedicating many hours to it on their own, then the chances of a professional career are pretty slim. Certainly, the chances of enjoying a professional career are slim. And second, quitting is not a forever decision.

When you’re doing things for enjoyment, there is no “behind.” There is just where you are. At the dojo, there are white belts of all ages. There are adult beginner ballet classes. There are adult recreational hockey leagues. And there are public swimming times where people of all ages and abilities can enjoy the water.

Or maybe we’re worried that our children wanting to quit means they will always give up when things get challenging. First off, challenges that aren’t motivating and inspiring for your child are probably not the right kinds of challenges for them, and that is great to know. But also, the choices they make today don’t define all the choices they will make in the future. The choices they make today are helping them gain experience with making choices. Over the years, they will gain lots of experience with wanting to try something, with choosing ways to try it out, and with seeing how well those paths meet their goals.

They will discover things they enjoy, things they don’t, and get a better feel for the clues that help them decide when they want to step up their game and when they want to quit. And even after they choose to quit something, for now at least, they’re still learning. How does that choice feel? Do they miss the activity? How much do they miss it? What do they miss about it? What are they doing with the time that quitting freed up? Are they enjoying that more than the activity? Less? So, so much learning.

Okay. Okay. I know I went on for a bit, but I just love how we can bring our unschooling approach to conventional lessons and activities in ways that continue to actively support our children’s learning without needing to revert to control over the way they choose to participate.

So, Anna, any thoughts? 

ANNA: Oh my goodness. I love all of your insights and I think taking that time to find the best environment for your particular child really is so critical. And it can be challenging, because most classes or instructors are geared towards school children, and they tend to kind of cater to the parents versus the children.

And I remember when my youngest wanted to take piano lessons, it was so interesting to explain to the teacher that this was her experience. She wanted to be there and she was the customer. I wasn’t going to be forcing practicing, and I didn’t need him to be doing things for my benefit. And that was a very new experience for him. And it took a bit of adjustment, but we got there and she had this great experience. So, it was worth that kind of time and investment and that conversation at the beginning.

And we also ran into classes or activities that just didn’t dig deep enough and I think it’s one of the big reasons we ended up avoiding so many of these type of things. Both my girls enjoyed nature and animals and our life had a lot of experience with both, and I remember attending this nature event with a park ranger. We thought it was going to be so amazing, talking about snakes. And Afton had to correct half of what he said and it ended up just being this lecture where Afton’s correcting him and he’s saying things and I was just like, ah! Because we were getting far more hands-on and deep diving just in our backyard.

So, that really led me to realize that things that are geared towards adults but that allowed children was actually a better fit for us. So, for example, my youngest was having a deep dive into rocks and a recreation class geared at children would have been really boring for her and way below her interest level, because she was really deep diving in pursuing this. But attending the Gem and Mineral Club downtown, which is a club for adults, was perfect.

First of all, they loved having her there. And they were talking at a level that gave her new information, which she was really excited about, and they were so happy to answer her questions and share their love of the subject. And in this case, gave her a lot of new rock specimens that she just was over the moon about.

And I think it’s just so wild to see how most things designed for children just really dumb it down. Sometimes it feels like they’re trying to make it as boring and painful as possible, which I hope is not the intent, but I did watch for it, because I really wanted to facilitate their curiosity, and not have it squashed by arbitrary waiting and crowd control.

And as we mentioned last time, I always wanted to look at my motivation. Were we pursuing an outside adult-led class to facilitate their journey or because it looked better to the grandparents or checked an arbitrary box for me? And so, really honing in on what we wanted out of the experience and what things offered us the best path for that exploration and my child’s goals, like you were talking about, Pam, was so helpful in deciding what things we wanted to try.

And so, I don’t know. I learned so much about this whole world of classes from a whole different lens, because I went to school straight through and just did all those things. But what I love about what you said, Pam, is again, it’s just, take that time to really find something that works for your child and maybe scratch beneath the surface of what might normally pop up if you Google horseback riding lessons or whatever the thing might be.

So, anyway, lots to think about. But Erika, how about you?

ERIKA: Oh my gosh. I was laughing about that. I’ve had that same thought, like, are they trying to make this as boring and painful as possible? And I’m sure that’s not the case, but it is true that most people are approaching activities for children from a much different perspective than I would be. And in my area, most extracurricular activities are really marketed with language about school readiness, regardless of what the activity is. It could be ballet or karate or whatever, they will market it with what types of school skills are going to be included in these lessons.

And I’ve watched two- and three-year-olds at soccer classes at the park where it’s mostly about waiting your turn. And I totally get that. Practicing waiting your turn could be helpful if you’re going to use that skill in school. But it’s really boring for these little tiny kids. And I think now, there’s the risk of them thinking that that’s what soccer is, that soccer is boring, you know?

And so, what I love about approaching adult-led activities from an unschooling perspective is that we know there’s not just one way or one path to learn about an interest. There’s no right way to approach it. And there’s no requirement of how deep they dive or how much they achieve. It can all be so individually tailored, and that means we can also tailor our choices to each child’s individual personality.

And I know some children and some adults experience a lot of anxiety if they feel they’re being controlled or expected to do something in a certain way. And so, overly-directed activities just might not feel good to them. And that’s a big part of why my kids have not been interested in signing up for adult-led classes generally. They don’t like to be directed in that way.

But even given that, we have so many options available to us. We could do open gym sessions at the play gym instead of classes. We can do YouTube tutorials instead of taking a class with a teacher, learning by doing, learning from friends, observing an adult doing a class from a distance and just watching what it’s like for the kids in the class. We’ve done all of these things and they’re all valid options and we can learn in so many different ways. It just feels like we have this whole world of possibilities at our disposal if we’re not narrowing it down to, there’s one way.

And if we can’t find a good fit, we could even create what we’re looking for ourselves. Homeschoolers and unschoolers in my community are always putting together lower-pressure alternatives to the typical lessons and getting small groups together to participate. And so, if you can’t find what works for your child, it’s worth seeing if there’s a way to think outside the box to create something new. Just communicating what you’re looking for, what you’re wanting and needing to the dojo, to the instructor, or to the studio, that might give them the opportunity to really meet those wants and needs.

You know, saying, “We don’t want to require our kids to practice. We don’t want them to be taking home homework,” or, “We don’t need for you to be trying to impress us.” And some people in the community get so excited to be able to do it in a different way that’s not so school-skills-focused and we really just have to ask for what we want.

I also had a thought that this episode is reminding me a little bit of the Not Bringing School Home idea that was shared on the Living Joyfully Podcast recently. Like you were mentioning with that piano teacher, Anna, we don’t have to enforce practicing or homework or add any pressure to the activity just because that’s what other people are doing. We don’t have to add that urgency of progressing at a certain speed or meeting a certain bar.

Our children can determine for themselves the goals that they would like to meet. And with some activities and for some children, that will be this full-immersion, quick progress, working at it like it’s their full-time job. And for others it’s just a fun interest and they take their time and do what feels good. So, there’s not a right and a wrong about exploring our interests. And if we notice we’re looking towards a set outcome or feeling this external pressure or feeling like we’re on a certain timeline, that could just be a clue to step back a bit.

And finally, I just wanted to say, as an adult who is a scanner and I’m interested in doing all the different things, it’s been important for me to be careful not to commit myself to activities that the kids might enjoy, but also they might not enjoy. And it’s definitely happened to us in the past where now, I have people expecting me to help lead a class or run a group, and my kids were just done with it or not interested in it, and it’s really just not a good feeling. And in those cases, we worked through by just trying our best to meet all of our needs.

But there have definitely been times where I’ve regretted committing to something for myself because I would’ve been better served by being more available for what my kids wanted to do instead. But that’s just one of those things, I think, where you live and you learn. But I just wanted to mention that, as well.

PAM: Yes, live and learn. It’s fascinating. We talk a lot about how much we learn about our kids, just giving them the space and the opportunity to just make choices, but also think about how much they’re learning about themselves, the things that they love, that they enjoy, but how they like to enjoy things, how they like to pursue things, all the different possibilities. You touched on a number of them Erika,  there and it is amazing. There are so many possibilities, so many different directions we can take when we’re curious about something.

I mean, the famous ballet example. I remember when Lissy was younger. “Do you really want lessons? Is lessons the thing you want to do or are you super happy to pick up a pair of ballet shoes?” You know what? You can go to a dance wear store and pick up tutus and shoes and tights and all that kind of stuff, and dance around in the living room, maybe watch YouTube videos. There’s so many ways you can play with something that is just as valid as showing up to the class.

And I think it was you that mentioned, Anna, is that class more about, okay, now I can tell people that she’s taking classes now? That is a feeling that can come up for us, certainly, in the beginning.

ANNA: We may not even recognize that. And the point that you made too, Pam, about, but are they going to push through challenges? I think that’s important to revisit, because what that’s a clue of is that I’m projecting out into the future really nothing that has to do with the class in front of me or the child in front of me.

And so, recognizing that, yes, when something matters to humans, we find a way. And so, if they’re not pushing through what you’re seeing as maybe a challenge with the class or something else, that’s really a good clue. And like you said, so much of what I wanted from these experiences for my girls was learning about themselves. How they wanted to take in information, what things sparked the interest, and I wanted them to be able to move on if it wasn’t. Because I’m also a scanner and I felt like I lost so many years being in school, doing what everyone else was telling me, that I was kind of excited they were going to have this time to really dive into these different things. So, always watching for those tapes in my head that might be projecting out and writing some story about the future that really has nothing to do with the child in front of me.

PAM: Yeah. And just one last thing to bring up again. You mentioned, Anna, the looking at activities geared for adults that might go to the depth, also the level of interest of the child. Because adults are choosing to go there. I mean, there’s oftentimes, too, where you go to rec activities and the kids are there because their parents signed them up. “I want you to take these lessons. You can have three activities a term and these are the best ones. School skills. These are going to get you the school skills that the teacher says you’re lacking.”

So, often the kids can be in activities that are geared to kids, they’ve got that lens on, that kids aren’t that capable, so we’re going to kind of dumb down the material to what grade level are they at? What words do they understand, etc. And then also the way they speak to them, the whole deal. And so, just opening up our view that it doesn’t have to be, “Okay, my child is 10. What is out there for 10 year olds?” No, what is out there for a person who loves these things a lot.

ANNA: Right. But I think, Erika, your point, you’ve said this before and so it stuck with me, this piece of, they are trying to teach these school skills. That’s why they’re doing it. Because, to me, I was just baffled by it. I’m like, why is this happening? Why are they making this so hard? Why are they making it not fun? Sit here. Don’t move. Line up here. Do this. But they’re selling it to parents as these school skills. And I’m like, oh, okay. These are not skills that I’m interested in.

ERIKA: Right. And that’s why it doesn’t make any sense, but it’s making me think of what a spectrum there is as far as how parents are approaching activities with children. Because I’ve heard plenty of parents say, “I want my kid to develop this. I’m going to put them into this activity.” And so, really, when you are doing those activities designed for children, there are plenty of children who have been just placed into that against their will, because of what the parents hope they’re going to be able to develop. And so, of course, in that atmosphere, you might feel that energy of, I don’t know, people don’t really seem to like this. It feels like they’re having to force the children to do these activities.

And so, I don’t know. I love, I guess, it’s like a lightness or a free feeling that we don’t have to buy into it. There’s not the one way, and so, we don’t have to just accept, well, I guess this is what soccer lessons are like. That’s just what it is. There are so many possibilities if we get open and curious about like, who could come help us? Who could do this in the way that would feel really fun for these kids?

ANNA: And so, right. And your point about just asking, because what I found with several people that had a specific interest that my girls were interested in, they loved not having to worry about those school things. They wanted to talk about the guitar or the art thing, or the whatever it was, from their passion perspective, so that that was a big piece of it.

But that piece that you were talking about with the kids there that didn’t want to be there. So, that, for my oldest, was a huge trigger, because she was there because she was super interested in the topic.

And so, this chattering over here, or this not focused because they didn’t want to be there, oh my gosh. She would get so upset about it, but I had to just tell her, I’m like, “Afton, they don’t want to be here. They’re just not interested in it as you are.” And so, then we would keep searching. But that’s the thing.

Bring some lightness to it. Know that there’s lots of options. Yeah. I just love that.

ERIKA: That’s where the adult groups would be a much better fit, in that case. Because all the adults are choosing to be there.

ANNA: Right, exactly. And super interested.

PAM: I love that. All right. Okay. This was so, so much fun. There are so many interesting aspects to consider when we’re approaching these kinds of activities from an unschooling perspective.

Thank you so much for the conversation and wishing everybody a lovely day. Bye.

ANNA: Yes! Take care.

ERIKA: Bye!

EU342: Helping Kids Find Their Passion

This week on the podcast, we’re sharing a talk that Pam gave at the 2022 Canadian Online Homeschool Conference, Helping Kids Find Their Passion. Following our children’s interests and passions is one of the joys of unschooling. And truly, humans are born curious. As parents, we can give our children the gift of encouraging that curiosity, which in a conventional setting can definitely be snuffed out. And there are as many interests, and as many ways of pursuing interests, as there are children! Keeping an open and curious mindset as we support them can really help us all enjoy the adventure.

We hope you find the talk helpful on your unschooling journey!

Watch the video on YouTube.

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Join Pam’s newsletter and get a free copy of her intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

Submit your question for a future Q&A episode, and if you’re a patron of the podcast, be sure to mention that.

Become a patron of The Exploring Unschooling Podcast for as little a dollar a month (in a wide variety of currencies) and help keep the podcast archive freely available to anyone who’s curious and wants to explore the fascinating world of 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 Learning About Our Family, and we’re exploring it through the lenses of beginner’s mind and trust.

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 through the lenses of connection and curiosity. Check out The Living Joyfully Podcast here or find it in your your favorite podcast player.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hi everyone! I’m really excited to be part of the 2022 Canadian Online Homeschool Conference. And I’m happy to welcome you to my session, Helping Kids Find Their Passion. I’m excited to dive in.

Introduction

But first, a quick intro. My name is Pam Laricchia. My three kids left school back in 2002. I soon discovered unschooling and we never looked back. They are all in their twenties now.

Over the years I’ve written and published five books about unschooling—soon to be six.

In 2016, I started the Exploring Unschooling podcast. I continue to create new episodes every week, with more than 300 episodes now in the archive. It’s a treasure trove of conversations with unschooling parents from around the world about their experiences, as well as conversations with grown unschoolers.

And in early 2020 I started The Living Joyfully Network, a private, online community for parents where we have candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling.

If it isn’t yet clear, I love talking about unschooling!

Enough about me, let’s quickly go over what we’re going to talk about today.

First, we’re going to dive into the value of helping our kids follow their curiosity and dive into whatever catches their interest, to whatever depths they want to go, and how that helps them find their passion.

Then we’re going to talk about quitting and why it’s okay to let our kids quit things. In fact, it’s even better than okay.

Next, we’ll talk about scanners. Have you heard of scanners? If not, that’s going to be extra fun! This will bring a bit of a twist to our premise, but in a good way. It’s about how our kids are wired and helping them lean into that. Do we all really have one true calling?

Then we’ll dive into the importance of finding and following your interests. Unschooling isn’t just for the kids! We’ll talk about all the wonderful reasons for being open and curious, and for learning alongside your kids. It’s hard to encourage our kids to be lifelong learners if we, as adults, aren’t happily learning too.

And finally, we’ll connect the dots, weaving together a lovely picture of ways to help our kids find their passion, or passions, that hopefully makes sense and inspires you to live and learn with enthusiasm alongside your kids.

Unschooling in action!

So, let’s dive in.

Follow Their Curiosity

With unschooling, we choose not to direct our children’s learning through using curriculum. Instead, we follow their curiosity.

Not only is following their curiosity definitely more fun, it also deeply nurtures their learning. Curiosity and learning are intimately connected.

I love Eleanor Roosevelt’s quote: “I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.”

Following a child’s interests truly does create a uniquely-tailored web of learning connections and knowledge that fits them so beautifully.

And truly, humans are born curious. I think the real gift we can give as parents is to not continually discourage their curiosity because it can definitely be snuffed out.

How might that happen?

Young children are insatiably curious about their world yet, as they become more mobile, we begin to dissuade them because their curiosity makes our life messy: cupboards emptied, food squished, puddles splashed, toys dumped.

They are drawn to participating in whatever the adults around them are doing because they are curious about their world. But as their excitement and exploration bumps up against their parents’ exhaustion and wish for some peace, their days gradually become peppered with noes.

“No! That’s not a toy.”

“No! Don’t make a mess.”

“No! Don’t touch that.”

Children continue to be deeply curious about their world, yet now we seem determined to stop them. And when we do this, the message we’re really giving our children is to stop being curious.

And it doesn’t get any better as our children get older. The mess becomes a bit more focused—less whirling dervish—yet we continue to shut down their curiosity and exploration.

“No, you can’t watch another episode, it’s bedtime.”

“No, I’m too busy, I can’t drive you to insert fun activity.”

“No, your friends can’t hang out here, they’ll eat all our food.”

The pull of curiosity weakens each time they aren’t given the opportunity to ask a question, to follow a thought, and to end up somewhere new. Most children ultimately get the message: their questions, their interests, their explorations, aren’t important. And eventually they stop asking. Sooner or later, they even stop asking themselves.

That’s how it can happen.

Let’s take a moment to explore what following their curiosity might look like if we don’t actively discourage it. If we choose, instead, to be open to the possibilities.

Let’s follow a few of my daughter’s interests and see how things unfold. Back in 2004, she was passionate about all things Harry Potter.

She’d listen to the Harry Potter audiobooks over and over and over, doing arts and crafts while she listened. Repairing PJs. Making pillows. Knitting. Creating vignettes of scenes from the books.

Then she picked up reading and branched out to Harry Potter fan fiction. So much reading!

There was a fan fiction author she enjoyed who began each chapter with song lyrics, which sparked an interest in music. She wanted to hear these songs.

This is probably around the time she also began getting interested in photography and taking pictures.

Her interest in music continued to grow and she wanted to see her favourite alternative bands live at shows. She was around age 12. We went to lots of shows over the years.

Alongside the shows, her interest in photography, specifically fine art photography, grew. When she was 18, she got an O-1 visa and moved to New York City to work as a photographer. She continued to go to small, alternative shows and meet musicians.

Over the next few years, she discovered she really enjoyed working with musicians as clients and her photography work began to lean in that direction.

And over the last couple of years her style has developed to mix various arts and crafts mediums into her images, like watercolour painting, stickers, and cutting out image elements to recombine them.

It’s no wonder we describe unschooling learning as a web, right?

There were many points along the way I could have discouraged her interests. So much fabric and yarn supplies for her creations. Going to shows in bars at age 12? Going to lots of shows? Travelling to see bands she liked? Moving to New York City on her own at age 18?

Yet now, looking back, we can see how those threads of interests have woven together in her current passion and joy photographing musicians for publicity shots, covers for song and album releases, and more.

But I had no idea where her interests might go at the time.

That reminds me of something Steve Jobs said in his commencement address to Stanford students in 2005 about connecting the dots. He shared a few bits and pieces from his life and how they connected, then observing:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Steve Jobs

Part of helping our kids find their passion is developing this trust that dots will connect in the future. This trust that encourages us to be open and supportive and patient as our kids create their unique collection of dots over the years.

The dots—their interests—often aren’t their passion. Maybe they’re fleeting curiosities, or month-long deep dives, or interests with longer staying power. Maybe they’re part of a winding path to their passion. And even then, as with my daughter, none are an end point, it’s part of their ever-evolving story.

And we can’t lay it out the path for them, or even guess what it might look like. If we try, those guesses can quickly become expectations that get in the way of their exploration. Of learning about themselves.

What we can see looking back is the connections they’ve made over time. Over years. How their interests and passions have woven together to where they happen to be right now. For now.

It might be for you take a few minutes this week to think about your child’s interests over the last six to twelve months.

What threads do you see connecting them?

Is there a common denominator that sits in the foundation of their various interests over that time?

What interests have fallen by the wayside?

And this seems like a great time to talk about the idea of quitting. Remember how I mentioned that those dots may be fleeting curiosities, month-long deep dives, or interests with longer staying power? It doesn’t matter which, they’re all good. They all have value. And it’s totally okay when they realize that an interest has waned.

Choosing to quit an activity is as much a learning experience as starting it.

That may be a pretty unconventional perspective, but let’s dive in and explore it.

Conventionally, quitting is akin to failure.

I love what Anna Brown shared on my podcast in episode 262 around this idea. She explained:

“We have this idea of, “But you’re on the team! You’re gonna let your team down!”

But I just want to remind everybody that we have all been on teams and in groups where members did not want to be there. And it was kind of the worst, you know? I find it’s way more of a disservice to people who actually want to be there, who are actually passionate about that team or that activity or that idea, to hang out when we aren’t happy and don’t want to be there. Because I don’t know if it’s possible to give your all to something where you really don’t want to be.

So, this idea that you’re serving the team by toughing it out is just really not the whole story.”

Anna Brown

Another one is, if you quit something before the official “end,” you have failed to finish it. Parents have been known to explain to their kids, “I paid for ten lessons, so just finish them and then you don’t have to sign up again.” It seems like a reasonable compromise. At least on the surface.

Well, consider our human tendency to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy, which is the tendency to follow through on an endeavor if we have already invested time, effort, or money into it, whether or not the current costs outweigh the benefits. The money is already spent, so we can take it out of the current conversation altogether. Right now, is it worth the cost of your child’s growing dislike?

It’s definitely worth taking a moment to revisit your goal. If each week the lesson is an actively unhappy time for your child, is your insistence that they attend worth it? Is your goal to turn them off ballet or swimming for the indefinite future? If you’ve paid $200 for a series of ballet lessons and they’re only half finished, might you consider that last $100 as an investment in preserving their enjoyment of dance?

One of the wonderful things about unschooling is that the children have time to explore the world, including a variety of activities. But if we continue to insist that they “finish what they start,” they will more likely learn to NOT try out an activity unless they are very sure they will enjoy it: the fear of being stuck there will outweigh their curiosity to explore something new. Less exploration.

Less dots.

Or maybe we’re worried that our children wanting to quit means they will always give up, rather than rise to a challenge. Again, that’s fear talking—the choices they make today don’t define all the choices they will make in the future. The choices they make today are helping them gain experience with making choices. Not to mention, challenges that aren’t motivating and inspiring for your child are probably not the right kinds of challenges for them. That’s a great thing to learn!

Over the years unschooling children will gain lots of experience with wanting to try something, choosing ways to try it out, and seeing how well those paths met their goals. They will discover things they enjoy, things they don’t, and get a better feel for the clues that help them decide when to step up their game and when to quit and move on.

And each time they choose to quit, they’re still learning. How does that choice feel? Do they miss the activity? How much? What do they miss about it? What are they doing with the time that quitting freed up? Are they enjoying that more than the activity? Less? So much learning! And quitting is not a forever decision. Now that they better understand the environment, they may choose to go back at some point in the future.

Children who have the freedom to explore a variety of things and discard those that don’t catch their prolonged interest do not feel like failures when they choose to drop something.

More dots.

And not only that, these experiences help them better understand what they like and what they don’t like—whether it’s the activities themselves, the environments like big groups or small, highly organized or more free-flowing, and so on. All of which helps them figure out things that will be a good fit for them.

More dots help them home in on their passion.

And speaking of environments, moving on from an organized activity needn’t mean an end to learning about it. It doesn’t have to mean no more dots.

What if they just really don’t like swimming lessons? If your wish is for them to enjoy swimming and be safe in the water, instead of lessons, find the ways they do enjoy the water and explore those for now. The adventure of water parks? Playing at the beach? Jumping off the dock into the lake? A wading pool in the backyard? Lots of baths? Open your mind to the many ways there are to enjoy water beyond swimming lessons.

Joining and quitting activities is more about helping our children explore their world—the activities and environments that spark their curiosity and bring them joy. That’s where the learning is.

If they discover a passionate interest, they will doggedly pursue it, even through many challenging moments. You don’t need to teach this kind of unwavering commitment by requiring it in everything they do. Instead, help them find things that they enjoy so much that their dedication and learning flows naturally.

See how that works? Quitting is actually another way we can help our kids find their passion.

And not only that, what a great skill to bring into adulthood! How many adults do you know who feel stuck in in situations or jobs they don’t enjoy, not willing to leave because that would feel like a failure? I’ve seen it lots of times.

It’s empowering to know they have agency over their lives, at every age.

Having More than One Passion: Multipotentialites or Scanners

Alright. Now that we’ve talked about the immense value of helping our kids follow their curiosity wherever it takes them and quit things when their interest wanes in support of helping them find their passion, let’s step back and question our premise.

I know you want to help your child find their passion, but is there just one singular passion for everyone?

Is everyone meant to be a specialist?

What if they have multiple interests? Multiple passions?

What if they don’t want to choose just one thing?

In her book, Refuse to Choose: A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything that You Love, Barbara Sher identifies a person she calls The Scanner?someone who frequently has a multiplicity of interests, but finds it hard to create a life they love because their passions and abilities are taking them in so many different directions.

Contrary to popular wisdom, Sher tells Scanners that theirs is a unique ability, not a liability. And that they can do everything they love, they don’t have to zero in on one pursuit at the expense of all others.

Is your child a scanner? Are you?

That’s amazing too!

If you have a scanner in your family, I think you’ll have an a-ha moment or three listening to Emilie Wapnick’s TEDx talk, Why some of us don’t have one true calling.

She makes a great point in her talk that “the notion of the narrowly focused life is highly romanticized in our culture. It’s this idea of destiny or the one true calling, the idea that we each have one great thing we are meant to do during our time on this earth, and you need to figure out what that thing is and devote your life to it.”

While Barbara uses the term “scanners” and others use “polymath” or “Renaissance person,” Emilie prefers “multipotentialite.”

She has been writing and speaking with people about this idea for a while and has landed on three multipotentialite superpowers that I want to share with you.

The first is “idea synthesis,” which she describes as combining two or more fields and creating something new at the intersection. That aligns so well with our unschooling process of connecting the dots, doesn’t it?

The second is “rapid learning.” In her experience, when multipotentialites become interested in something, they dive in fast and deep.

Interestingly, I think that’s something we see often with unschooling kids because they get to choose whatever they dive into. I think the “slow learning” that she’s seeing in comparison probably has more to do with the school environment. It’s hard and slow to learn something you’re not interested in, but kids—people—who are free to choose what and how they want to learn about something learn pretty quickly!

And the third multipotentialite superpower is “adaptability,” the ability to morph into whatever they need to be in a given situation. Having had many different interests over the years, they have lots of experience with trying new things and stepping out of their comfort zones. And they bring what they’ve learned across various topics with them every time, so they’re rarely starting from scratch.

She goes on to explain:

“It is rarely a waste of time to pursue something you’re drawn to, even if you end up quitting. You might apply that knowledge in a different field entirely, in a way that you couldn’t have anticipated.”

Emilie Wapnick

More dots!

And see, through a completely different lens, quitting is still okay. In fact, it’s more than okay! Just because they quit something doesn’t mean they forget what they’ve already learned about it. Maybe that amount was just right. Maybe it’ll connect beautifully with something else they dive into in the future.

That’s the incredible mystery of life we embrace with unschooling.

Circling back for a moment, as Steve Jobs reminds us, we can’t connect the dots looking forward.

Looking forward is about trust.

However your child is wired, help them embrace it. Whether they choose to explore their world in pursuit of a singular passion or they prefer to embrace multiple interests—all at once or in quick succession—what’s important is helping them figure out how they tick and supporting them as they explore their interests and passions.

And what’s fascinating is that no matter their wiring, how we as parents support them on their journey is the same: help them follow their curiosity and let them quit when they’re ready to move on.

It’s that simple. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s always easy.

Definitely, sometimes it will be easy, like when we share our child’s interest, or when the learning that’s happening is obvious to us. But sometimes we’ll be dancing at the edge of our comfort zones, trying to move beyond feelings of judgment and exploring ways to grow.

If you find yourself stuck here, I think you may find Roya Dedeaux’s book really helpful. It’s called, Connect with Courage: Practical Ways to Release Fear and Find Joy in the Places Your Children Take You. Roya is a Marriage and Family Therapist and an unschooling mom with three kids.

I spoke with her on the podcast about the book in episode 286, if you’d like to check that out.

Find Your Interests

And last, but not least, it’s important for you to find your interests.

Often, we start down the unschooling path for our kids, but soon enough we discover that unschooling is really a lifestyle for the whole family.

How will our children absorb the value of lifelong learning if the adults around them aren’t also learning?

So, let’s be a shining example of being curious and continuing to learn whatever our age.

Are you exploring your interests? Asking questions and seeking answers?

If you find yourself mostly indifferent to the world around you, it’s time to find and fan that spark of curiosity. You needn’t start with an earth-shattering question, nor a big, passionate interest—that’s way too much pressure.

Just quiet things down for a while and listen. Underneath the noise, you’ll start to hear the whisperings of your inner voice.

As you go about your days, notice what catches your attention. And, rather than dismissing it, roll it around in your mind for a moment. Get curious. Is it connected to something you already know? Is it something new to you? Why do you think it caught your attention? Might you enjoy knowing more?

What questions come to mind?

When something catches our attention, instead of judging ourselves negatively, let’s lean in.

Here’s a story. When my kids were much younger, sometimes they’d watch Food TV with me. I still clearly remember one night when we were laying in my bed and watching a special on reverse engineering popular foods and they showed how to make Reese’s peanut butter cups at home. Joseph was the only child still awake by the end (I just looked at my printout of the recipe and it was the year 2000, so he was 8!) and I said, “What do you think, should we try that tomorrow?”

His answer was a happy “Yes!”

They were awesome and to this day I still make them—they are now a family classic.

That is what’s so exciting about being curious and following your interests—you never know what you might discover. With an open and curious mindset, you will see so many more opportunities for fun and connection bubbling up around you than you will by walking around judging and worrying, mostly closed off from exploring life.

I understand that, especially when our kids are younger, we don’t often have large swathes of time to dedicate to solitary deep dives, but we can find a few minutes here and there.

Maybe we read about our interest, sitting nearby our kids as they play.

Maybe we enjoy painting, or arts and crafts, and we keep a basket with our current project nearby to bring out to do alongside our kids. Maybe we also have some supplies at hand for them in case they want to join us.

As my kids have gotten older, it’s been so interesting to see how our interests and joy intertwine, sometimes even in the most unlikely ways.

Like rediscovering my interest in alternative music through Lissy’s music interest, or better understanding Michael’s passionate interest in karate through my own passionate experience with ballet growing up, or re-igniting my love of stories through Joseph’s passionate pursuit of them through all facets of storytelling.

If you’d like your kids to live an engaged and curious life, then live an engaged and curious life yourself alongside them.

Unschooling is a gift for us too.

Which means that, as we explore our interests, we can share our excitement and enthusiasm with them without any expectations that they’ll want to join us and learn the same things.

In fact, learning new things reminds us what real, engaged learning feels like, which can help us connect more closely with our children around the process.

Learning new things reminds us that learning can sometimes be challenging, which may give us space for more empathy for our child next time they get frustrated trying to figure something out.

Learning new things also reminds of how fun it is and we may be more apt to celebrate our accomplishments along the way, and those of our kids.

Even if we don’t love one of our child’s particular interests, we can still meet them in the feelings of wonder, frustration, and joy—the common threads that weave through pursuing our interests.

Giving ourselves the space to follow our interests can also be a great lens through which to explore cultural messages like, “you need to be productive,” “don’t waste your time,” and “it’s only valuable if you’re going to monetize it.”

Are these the only reasons to pursue something? No!

In his book Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It, Ian Leslie describes the essence of curiosity this way:

“The most fundamental reason to choose curiosity isn’t so that we can do better at school or at work. The true beauty of learning stuff, including apparently useless stuff, is that it takes us out of ourselves, reminds us that we are part of a far greater project, one that has been underway for at least as long as human beings have been talking to each other.”

Ian Leslie

Think about that for a moment. Being curious is a deeply human thing and so many of us have lost it.

Let’s recapture that sense of wonder we see on our children’s faces.

Let’s approach our days being open and curious.

Open to new possibilities over stale patterns we follow without thinking just because that’s the way we’ve always done things.

Maybe that’s efficient, but does efficiency always need to be the goal?

What about being creative? Curiosity often leads to creativity. How else might we do this?

And it’s so fun to contemplate!

When we cultivate a welcoming, non-judgmental space that’s free from deadlines and expectations, we give possibilities time to percolate and unfold.

As Ian says, that’s the true beauty of learning stuff.

Connecting the Dots

Okay, let’s try to connect the dots we’ve scattered around today.

You’re curious about how to help your child find their passion.

One valuable aspect of that is helping them follow their curiosity.

That means rather than judging or discouraging their interest in something—in anything—try to say yes more.

We can only connect the dots of their interests looking back, so, looking forward from today, we need to trust that the dots will connect somehow.

An important aspect of following their curiosity is letting them quit when they realize an interest has waned.

Quitting isn’t failure, it’s more learning. It’s homing in on their passion.

Maybe it’s just that particular environment they’re not enjoying, don’t be too quick to toss the interest. Instead find another way to explore it.

If you make them stick it out, what they’re really learning is not to try something new they’re curious about unless they’re super sure they’ll enjoy it. Less dots.

If they discover a passionate interest, they will doggedly pursue it, even through many challenging moments. You don’t need to teach this kind of unwavering commitment by requiring it in everything they do. Instead, help them find things that they enjoy so much that their dedication and learning flows naturally.

And then we talked about whether everyone is meant to have one singular passion. To be a specialist.

Maybe your child is a scanner, or multipotentialite. That’s cool too!

The idea of one true calling is highly romanticized in our culture, but not everyone is wired this way.

In her TEDx talk, Emilie shared three multipotentialite superpowers: idea synthesis, rapid learning, and adaptability.

She shared that it’s rarely a waste of time to pursue something you’re drawn to, even if you end up quitting. More dots in your child’s web of interests and learning.

And lastly, we talked about the immense value of pursuing your own interests—of living and learning alongside your kids. Unschooling is not just for the kids, it’s a family lifestyle that celebrates lifelong learning.

Fan the spark of your own curiosity and share your enthusiasm with those around you—without expectations.

No matter how a person is wired—whether a specialist, a scanner, or some beautiful mix—how we help them find their passions is the same: help them follow their curiosity wherever it leads and let them quit when they’re ready to move on.

Look at all these dots of info for you to connect in the ways that make sense to you! All because you’re interested in unschooling and supporting your kids. It’s your web of learning in action.

And as we wrap up our time together, I want to pull up into the bigger picture.

Let’s go back to the quote from Ian’s book, Curious:

“The most fundamental reason to choose curiosity isn’t so that we can do better at school or at work. The true beauty of learning stuff, including apparently useless stuff, is that it takes us out of ourselves, reminds us that we are part of a far greater project, one that has been underway for at least as long as human beings have been talking to each other.”

Ian Leslie

This isn’t just about helping our kids find their passions. There’s no endpoint.

This is about the true beauty of learning stuff.

About being human, in a world of humans.

It’s life.

Thanks for joining me today to talk about helping kids find their passion!

EU341: Unschooling “Rules”: Don’t Use Curriculum

This week on the podcast, we’re sharing our second episode in the 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 use curriculum. It can be really helpful when you’re starting out unschooling to steer away from curriculum and adult-led activities, because, when we first come to unschooling, our vision of how learning works is so often tightly wrapped up in what it looks like in school. But eventually, our focus on what they’re learning shifts to focusing on cultivating connected and trusting relationships with them and the choices they make about what activities they want to do and how they want to follow their interests just flow naturally from that connected place.

We hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey!

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram, Facebook, and her website.

Follow @helloerikaellis on Instagram.

Join Pam’s newsletter and get a free copy of her intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

Submit your question for a future Q&A episode, and if you’re a patron of the podcast, be sure to mention that.

Become a patron of The Exploring Unschooling Podcast for as little a dollar a month (in a wide variety of currencies) and help keep the podcast archive freely available to anyone who’s curious and wants to explore the fascinating world of 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 Learning About Our Family, and we’re exploring it through the lenses of beginner’s mind and trust.

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 through the lenses of connection and curiosity. Check out The Living Joyfully Podcast here or find it in your your favorite podcast player.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Welcome! I’m Pam Laricchia from livingjoyfully.ca, and today I’m joined by Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. Hi to you both.

ANNA AND ERIKA: Hello.

PAM: Now, before we get started proper, 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 sometimes 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 even an A+. So, 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.

So, in this episode, we’re diving into the “rule” that says unschoolers don’t use curriculum. And I think this is going to be so interesting to explore.

Now, when I started thinking about it, it is very similar to the first rule we explored, “Always Say Yes,” in that it makes sense as a guide for people new to unschooling. It can be really helpful when you’re starting out to steer away from not only curriculum, but also more formal adult-led programs for a while, like local rec classes or online classes, things like that. And that’s because, when we first come to unschooling, our vision of how learning works is so often tightly wrapped up in what it looks like in school. There’s an adult teacher who knows the subject and the order in which it’s best to learn it, and students who soak up the knowledge as directed.

Sure we have likely chosen unschooling because something in that process didn’t make sense to us. So, maybe our child didn’t mesh with the classroom environment of sit quietly and listen. Or maybe the high student-teacher ratio makes us uncomfortable. Or maybe we buck at the amount of seemingly arbitrary rules needed to manage a classroom of 30-odd kids. Yet, and this was definitely the case for me, I didn’t know what I didn’t yet know about how learning happens. I thought I knew how learning happens. I’ve been learning for so many years in my life.

So, the encouragement to steer clear of curriculum when we were starting out was helpful for me. Without that curriculum-based structure to fall back on, I had a little choice but to ask myself, “Well, how would my kids learn instead? So, I ended up more intentionally watching them in action, playing with them, chatting with them, hanging out together. And over time, I came to see how much they were learning as they went about their day following their interests.

Because, with unschooling, instead of following curriculum, our kids are following their interests. And if we don’t first take curriculum off the table, there’s a pretty good chance we’ll just naturally jump to that style of learning whenever our kid expresses an interest in something. “Dance? Okay. I’ll sign you up for ballet lessons.” “Soccer? Oh yeah. Let’s join the local soccer league and get you on a team. It’ll be so fun.” “Science? The Science Center has a six-week summer program. I just signed you up. Yay!” And that’s because we still think these more formal adult-led settings are the best way to learn.

But really, they are just another way to engage with an interest, not objectively better than dancing around the family room or kicking the ball around the yard or making slime at home. And the more we sink into that, peeling back those layers, the more we discover about how human beings are wired to learn, how they will naturally play around with things to figure out how they work, how human beings are just so curious.

And eventually, our focus on what they’re learning shifts to focusing on cultivating connected and trusting relationships with them. Because we know in our bones now that learning happens all the time and in the bigger picture, we can better support their efforts when our relationship is strong. And it is here that this role can start to rub. It can start to feel a bit restrictive.

If we continue to stick with the story that people like us, unschoolers, don’t use curriculum, we are apt to take interesting possibilities off the table, just because they’re curriculum-based. Instead, now that we no longer feel that learning directed by an adult or teacher is any better than learning that they pursue themselves, we can now add those bits to the big smorgasbord of learning possibilities to choose from. None is better than another except to the individual who’s interested in learning about something.

How do they like to learn? What are they looking to learn? Where might they find that kind of information? Where might they find other people who are as interested in the topic as they are? Maybe they’ve loved dancing around the house and now they want to try a class with others who also love to dance. Maybe an online class that dives into a book series they love looks interesting to them, or joining a sports team to up their game, or chemistry class, or whatever strikes their fancy.

At this point, the fundamental difference is that they are choosing the more formal environment or curriculum because they’re interested in the information that they’ll find there. It’s not about the grades. It’s about what they want to learn. And if they find the environment isn’t a good fit after all, they know they’re free to leave and try another way to dive into their interest, without any judgment. And at this point, we know and we feel how this applies to our whole family. We are a family of people who pursue our interests and aspirations in whatever ways we’re curious to explore, no matter our age. Now, we’re really unschooling! So, Anna, what are your thoughts around this?

ANNA: Oh my goodness. First, I really do love this series, because I feel like picking apart this idea that there are these hard and fast rules is so valuable, because it gets us to our “why” and all this thinking that I like to do and pick apart and see the nuances, because it really is just so unique to each family. And if we keep connection at the forefront, it makes it so much easier to navigate all these things as they come along.

So, in our family, my girls never went to school, but I did. So, I had certainly soaked up what learning was supposed to look like in a school setting. I am also a scanner though, and so I just love learning new things, and so I had that going for me. I knew that I could learn whatever I wanted to and dig to whatever depths I wanted to, so I had that experience that I think helped me along the way.

In some of the very early days, I was really attracted to the nature-based curricula and new school supplies were super fun for me at school. That was probably my favorite part. And I definitely enjoyed getting the art cabinet fully-stocked and having all these tools at our disposal.

But what I learned pretty quickly was, I was drawn to the nature based curriculum because it was what I liked. And interestingly, my girls also enjoyed nature when they were very young, but they didn’t like a book telling them what they were going to do each day. So, we had a really cool backyard with the creek and all kinds of nature and flora and fauna, and they just really preferred that exploration, being led by what was in front of us and what was happening in their lives and where their interest was drawn throughout the yard.

And then I think about the flip side, we also learned so much about bugs and fish through Animal Crossing, which is a video game that we all enjoyed as a family. We each had our own. And I found cool ideas from all kinds of different sources over the years. When I used them in a way that flowed with our days and our organic interests, everyone enjoyed it.

So, for me, it’s never been that that curriculum doesn’t have a place. It’s more about who’s driving it and how it’s used. I want to look carefully at why I felt it would be helpful. And oftentimes, when I dug in there, it was because of maybe how it would look or I can say, we’re using this. Or it would take some of the responsibility off of me, because then I’m not having to plan activities or think or follow their interests as much. We can just sit down and do the thing.

But, in the end, I found, even when I tried to find curriculum-type resources, they felt so short of what my children actually wanted to learn. It was very surface level. And what I found with mine is that they like to dive deep and learn all the things about whatever their interest was in that moment.

And so, in the end, it just really didn’t add much for us. But I do think every family is unique and every child unique, and so, it is worth exploring.

I guess I do want to add, too, this is just a personal aside, that I don’t believe that kids need worksheets to learn. I think humans like to know how information is used and how it fits in the world, and I think worksheets tend to dissociate from that. So, that was actually something we didn’t have around. We had tons of books and games and watched shows and found resources that enhanced the things that we were interested in. Our halls were lined with posters from snakes to a giant timeline of the presidents. They liked logic games and different computer games, and Raelin went through a geography phase and we found all sorts of resources for that.

There are just so many amazing resources out there, and I think probably even more now than there was when our kids were growing up. For me, it’s just really about staying connected and in tune with what might help them along their chosen path. And I think that’s the important piece for me is, they’re really seeing that path and I’m right there with them facilitating and learning alongside of them, but I’m not carving the path for them. Erika, what are you thinking about?

ERIKA: So, I thought this was a really interesting one, too, and like with that “Always Say Yes” rule, I’ve definitely seen this idea cause issues in both directions. So, on one side of the pendulum swing, parents might actively reject anything that reminds them of anything that anyone has ever done in school, which potentially limits what their children have access to. And then, on the other side, parents might value curriculum or learning that looks more schoolish and subconsciously, or even purposefully, encourage their children to make those kinds of choices.

And really, in either case, it’s not as much about what the kids are drawn to or what feels the best to them, and more about judgments of the parents and what the parents want their life to look like from the outside. So, I think for this rules episode, it’s fun to just consider where you are on that pendulum swing and what kinds of reactions you have to the types of interests that your children have.

I remember at the beginning of my unschooling journey, I was drawn to the idea of curriculum, because it seems fun to have a plan and to have activities to do, and it’s appealing to me to check off boxes. I also love school supplies, and I do think curriculum is also appealing in that same way that Anna was describing, that handing off responsibility piece, because if we’re following a plan that someone else has created, we are less responsible for the outcomes. And if we’re on that prescribed path, there can be a feeling of security that’s tied to that.

And, depending on our children’s personalities, there will be more or less push-back about doing adult-led activities. And in the case of my kids, there was just no way to direct them to do activities of my choosing. They are very focused on the things they’re interested in. And so, I recognized that very early on and focused on supporting their explorations rather than trying to direct them.

And every once in a while, we would try out a nature program or a story time or an art activity at the park. And really my experience with my kids, with all adult-directed activities is that they don’t like the feeling of being directed. And I know my kids are not the only ones that feel like that.

But some kids do like their Outschool classes or their co-op classes and their reading practice books. And some kids, we hear, oh, they love doing math worksheets. And so, I guess in those cases, I would just want to dig into a couple of questions for myself. Am I giving my kids any indication that choosing those adult-led activities is better than something else they might be interested in doing? Or am I suggesting classes and curriculum ideas, like Pam was saying, as the first thing that pops into my head when they express a new interest? And if that’s the case, maybe it would be worthwhile to expand the possibilities, give things a little more space to blossom, and get curious about what that particular child really would want to do if they were free to make a choice.

There’s definitely not a right way when it comes to learning, and so, I’m just grateful for space and the chance to give things time and for my kids to truly be able to choose what makes sense as the right next step for them as they’re following their interests.

ANNA: I think that’s such a core piece though, right? Is when it happens that, okay, they like this. They like that. Great. We’re supporting that. We’re supporting their interest in the class or the worksheet or the whatever. But I think those questions are important, because we’ve seen it. I mean, I feel like we’ve just seen it recently with some friends, too, that are just so excited about the classes that are starting up! And kids sense that, right? They see that, okay, this is really valued. And we’ve been hearing, oh, we’re just sitting around all day and oh, we’re just doing this. And so, what is that energy, and what is our body language, and what are our words conveying about learning? I think it’s just interesting to kind of explore.

ERIKA: And if it’s a certain kind of kid, the kid will see that excitement and want to do it. And then if it’s my kind of kid, they’ll see that excitement and never want to do it. And in either case, they’re not really listening to themselves.

ANNA: Right. To themselves.

PAM: Yeah. And I think it that is so interesting for us to dig into, too, because I feel there may be occasions when we get super excited about how a class or something sounds. It can be, why? Let’s dig into that. Is it because it’s something that’s interesting to us. That’s cool. And maybe we could take the class, then. But also, most of us have grown up going to school and we have that school experience and when that’s still what we reach for as learning, but now it’s in like maybe a more open environment, it’s less restrictive than the experience we had. So, that’s another piece that can be exciting for us, because it feels more open to us. It’s more open. It’s something they’re interested in. This is awesome! Yay!

But we won’t notice until we kind of dig in, because it’s just something we haven’t had much experience with until we give ourselves the ability and the choice and the space to just think, ooh, what am interested in? It could be really interesting just to think, what is something that I’d like to learn about? What am I curious about? And then, whatever pops to mind, how would I like to learn about that? And it would just be so curious to write down 10 ways that you might learn about the thing that you’re curious about learning and just look at them. It could give you a really cool snapshot of where your mind is and how we learn things, how human beings learn things.

And maybe you’ll go, you know what? I’m going to try out number seven on the list, because that might be a little bit outside of my comfort zone, but that could be cool to experience. Because that’s the thing is, when we don’t have judgment, when we’re not worried about grades, when it’s really just about us and our learning and the way we want to learn things and the things that we’re interested in learning, we can try it out. We can try it out for a couple of weeks. It’s like, oh, this doesn’t feel good, but when we have these experiences about ways to learn, we can bring that to our conversations with our kids. It helps us release some of the judgment. It helps us see the value in, “Oh, they’re ‘just’ playing.” That was in quotes, right? It is fascinating when we can start playing with it for ourselves, because now we have more experiences and we can see new things in our kids that we might not have when we had a little bit more of a tunnel vision around how human beings learn.

ANNA: Right. And I feel like we don’t even know that we have that though. So, I think the exercise you’re talking about is really important, because when you just realize, oh, I need a class, I need an expert to tell me how to do that. Oh, I need to go do it this way. It’s just so ingrained in us. It’s just so hard to even begin to question that.

But I think when we turn our eyes to our children, actually, we see all the learning that takes place in a given day as they’re physically moving objects, as they’re asking questions, as they’re exploring the world.

And so, I feel like, for me, that’s what really opened that up was just seeing how much they were learning just organically living their day. When I was trained and taught that that’s how you learn is to sit there and listen to the expert telling you. And while there were pieces of me that bucked against that, I didn’t know that we really could do it another way. And so, I think it is more ingrained in us than we think. And it’s really fun to let it go, I’ll just say, now, 20 years down the road. Oh my gosh. The power that we have to just learn anything that we want in so many different ways is such a unique time in history I think as well. So, it’s really fun.

ERIKA: Yeah. It’s exactly that. I feel like when we have the tunnel vision about the one way to learn and we’re directing them into this kind of chute of, here’s the next step, then we’re missing what we talk about so much, which is like what they actually like about the thing, too. And so, the more they get sucked into, this is the way everyone learns about this thing that you’re interested in, the less chance there is for them to take the offshoots of what they actually really are curious about.

And so, I think it’s such a special environment for a person to be able to actually be following the little threads of their own interest. I think there’s a better chance for finding new things or finding something that just so perfectly matches with who they are. That’s really exciting to think about, actually.

ANNA: I love that, because I think, like you’re talking about, it’s these different webs and there’s backtracks. So, I’m interested in dance. But I like the music. Oh, but I’m going to come back here. And, oh, I like the costumes. And, oh, I’m going to come back here. But it’s like the ballet class for the five-year-old is just going to be the ballet class for the five-year-old. You’re going to be learning these few feet positions and put a tutu on, but we have the ability to provide a richer environment where all those aspects can be explored to the depths that maybe just a quick shallow or a very deep dive that’s so unique and so much more, I think, how humans learn.

PAM: Yeah. I love that so much. That’s such an interesting thing to think about, because you’re right. When we get a topic and we want to be helpful and supportive, it’s like, okay, let’s go! Let’s sign up for the lessons, let’s do this. But when you start doing that, you’re guiding them, because in that environment, they’re told what the important part of the thing is, right. So, it’s like, oh, okay. So, I don’t get to wear a costume until maybe the end of the year when we have our performance, right?

So, they just absorb the message that, oh, that’s not really an important part of it, even though, for me, when I watched some ballet or I see a ballet, that was what I loved. And I love ballet! And, “Okay, let’s go to class.” And that gets lost and it gets pushed down. Not even anyone saying anything, but those messages come through.

So, giving the space for a little while, just to like dance with them, to see what they’re drawn to. Put ballet dance videos and all those things on and see what they do with it. See where they take it. That can give us so much more information than quickly setting them in an environment that is presupposing what their love of the thing is all about.

ANNA: Right, and I’m going to take it back to the topic, just really quick to even wrap it up. Once we’ve cultivated this environment where we’re able to explore and go and come back and do and create the web, then a curriculum doesn’t have any power. It may have use. So, then you bring in that more conventional tool that maybe is an expert or maybe is a written curriculum or is maybe some type of class and they know it’s just one option among many. They don’t weigh it any more. They get what they want to from it. They don’t feel bad about themselves if it doesn’t fit them or it doesn’t feel good.

And so, I think that’s the beauty of creating this environment. It’s not about no curriculum, no classes. It’s about the whole environment. Is everything valued and is our own unique learning path valued?

PAM: Oh yeah. I love that. I love that. When you get to that point, then everything’s an option.

Life is just so much bigger and beautiful. Oh, thank you so much to both of you for joining me. That’s a really fun discussion and I am really, really loving this series.

ERIKA: Me too!

PAM: Yay! I hope everyone else listening is as well. And remember, you can come and comment on the episode on the website where we’re sharing it on the YouTube video, on Instagram, all the different places. We would love to hear your thoughts as well. Have a great day, everyone. Bye!

ERIKA: Bye!

ANNA: Bye.

EU340: On the Journey with Nora McDonald

This week, we’re back with another On the Journey episode. Pam, Anna, and Erika are joined by Living Joyfully Network member Nora McDonald. Nora is an unschooling mom of two living in Costa Rica. She shares her journey to unschooling as well as two major a-ha moments she has had in the last year.

We talk about getting to know our children better by dropping expectations and really listening to them as well as how valuable it is to drop our sense of urgency when it comes to getting through difficult moments. Nora writes so eloquently on the Network about her big realizations, her thought processes, and her challenges, and it was so fun to bring some of her insights to the podcast.

We hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey!

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

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 curiosity and connection. Our theme this month is Being Intentional, and we’re exploring it through the lenses of curiosity and presence.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram, Facebook, and her website.

Follow @helloerikaellis on Instagram.

Join Pam’s newsletter and get a free copy of her intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

Submit your question for a future Q&A episode, and if you’re a patron of the podcast, be sure to mention that.

Become a patron of The Exploring Unschooling Podcast for as little a dollar a month (in a wide variety of currencies) and help keep the podcast archive freely available to anyone who’s curious and wants to explore the fascinating world of unschooling.

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 through the lenses of connection and curiosity. Find the podcast in your favorite player here: The Living Joyfully Podcast.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Welcome! I’m Pam Laricchia from LivingJoyfully.ca and today, Anna, Erika, and I are excited to speak with Living Joyfully member Nora McDonald. Welcome, Nora!

ANNA: Hello.

ERIKA: Hi!

PAM: So, to get us started, can you give us a bit of an introduction to you and your family?

NORA: Yeah, sure. Okay. I’m Nora. I’m British, as you may hear. And I am married to a Costa Rican man called Luis. And we have two kids, Ruben who is eight, and Liam who is five. And me and Luis met in Costa Rica and we’ve sort of gone back and forth quite a lot, but we’ve spent more of our relationship in Cambridge, in the UK, but actually at the moment, we are in Costa Rica as of seven months ago. This is my third time living in Costa Rica, Ruben’s second, and Liam’s first. So, it’s a bit complicated.

So, I was going to say about how we got into unschooling, because I always like hearing about that. So yeah, I was sort of thinking about, it feels like a gradual journey towards it. I discovered gentle parenting and that kind of thing when Ruben was a baby. So, that made me feel like I was doing something slightly alternative. But that was kind of it.

And then, when I was going to have Liam, we went back to the UK from Costa Rica at that point. And so, we actually had the same doula that we’d had with Ruben. We had the same one with Liam and she is a home educator, I think still. And so, we ended up having much more conversation with her about home education than we did about babies. And so, we looked into it after that and ended up home educating and I didn’t really have a philosophy for a while. I was kind of exploring things.

Ruben has always been very anti-being taught things, so we were pretty relatively laid back. But the big dive into unschooling happened about March 2021 when Ruben was really kicking back on the very, very strict rules that we had about tablets and TV and stuff.

And so, I was kind of aware of unschooling and I was like, that always seems to make sense. So maybe I should go and see why lots of unschoolers don’t have these really strict limits. And I distinctly remember being like, “I’m never going to go that far, but at least maybe I could go and see what the thinking is.” And luckily, I had an unschooling friend, Lorna, who sent me loads of links and told me about the podcast and she was in the Network on here. So, I think I listened to two episodes of the podcast and then I was like, “Yep, this is for me,” and joined the Network.

So, yeah, I can’t believe it’s only been like a year and a half since that happened, because it’s been quite a journey and I’ve just been sinking deeper and deeper into it. And it’s completely changed my life, as I like to tell people, because it’s been so many great skills about being in relationship with other people, communicating, identifying where my beliefs come from, challenging everything, saying, is this working for me? All of this kind of stuff that we talk about has been amazing.

But yes, so, to fast forward to now, the kids are super into tablets and video games and YouTube and it’s a huge interest for both of them. Lots of Minecraft, lots of Roblox happening. And it’s actually really nice, because Liam, I think quite recently, has got up to Ruben’s level with Minecraft and Roblox, so they’re playing together loads. It’s really cool. And Ruben’s also been playing with a kid from a Network family in South Africa, so that’s been really nice.

And they also like swimming, bowling, any kind of physical fighty play, wrestling or acting, Minecraft, or any of that kind of thing. It was funny, because I was thinking about this and I was thinking about what they enjoy doing and they have a lot in common, but they’re such different personalities. So, Ruben is very sweet and caring and likes the same things and the same people. But once he likes something, he really likes it. So, he’s completely delighted if one of his favorite people would join him in one of his favorite games. He’s really into his interests.

Whereas Liam is the comedian. He has this amazing comic timing. And also, he really knows how to enjoy himself. I just so often look over at him and think he’s just the embodiment of the phrase, living your best life, because he’s great at just like chilling out and he just seems to know how to have a good time, I think.

And then I am a stay at home parent, thinking about maybe trying to do some work, but I don’t know what to do with my life. So, we’ll see. Since the kids both really like being at home, I have got quite into podcasts, which has been really fun. So, obviously the two Living Joyfully podcasts, but also anything about psychology, human relationships, history. I used to really love history and I’ve really been diving back into that, which has been super fun. And I like reading and cooking and eating. I’m quite excited about that one, because my cooking mojo totally disappeared during lockdown and it’s finally coming back. So, I’m getting back into baking stuff, which is cool.

And Luis is super into maths and science and engineering, that kind of stuff. And he just loves building things and taking things apart. And also swimming and water polo is big. He’s going back to his water polo team here, which I think he’s really happy about. And he just says he likes learning stuff when I asked him. Which is really great, because it means he’s really good at listening to me telling him all the stuff that I’ve learnt, whether it’s unschooling or any other podcast. He’s a very patient listener to the summaries that I give him. So, that’s us.

PAM: That’s the best! It’s so fun. I love that that he is a good listener, too, because that is a part of our process sometimes, is synthesizing it for ourselves so that we can share it with others. So, that’s a fun piece as well.

And I loved hearing just a bit about that technology journey. It is a pretty common one. Absolutely. Because it’s so unconventional. Even though, we’re starting to hear more stories about tech not being as vilified conventionally. I love that, because I remember when I first started reading about homeschooling and the kids first came home. I was just hearing those bits about unschooling, it’s like, okay, that sounds really curious. I mean, “I’m not going to go all the way,” but when you start learning more about it and it starts making more sense, that’s it. You don’t have to make the decision right at the beginning, right?

You don’t have to decide, “Okay, I’m doing full on unschooling. Let’s start. I’m going to go learn about it.” No, it can be, “You know what? I’m curious about this. I’m going to learn some more and learn some more.” And it’s like, baby step by baby step, I can just say, “Oh, this feels good. This is looking good.

What else you got to offer?” And then I take another step, right? Did it feel like that for you, Nora?

NORA: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, with the technology thing, it was kind of interesting, because I also did a webinar with a British psychologist called Naomi Fisher. And so, my unschooling friend Lorna was like, “Don’t do anything really suddenly,” but after I’d watched this webinar I was like, “No, I can’t. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t enforce it.” So that did happen quite quickly. But it was because I was so convinced. But there’s definitely been lots of baby steps to get to where I am now and lots to come, I think, as well.

PAM: Forever.

NORA: Yeah.

ERIKA: I love that so much. It reminds me, too, of the beginning of my journey, too, where some things were just like, “This is it. Jump right in.” And other things were like, “Well, I’ll never get there.” Then you realize it’s just this journey and it just naturally happens.

So, I have really enjoyed a lot of the a-ha moments that you share on the Network. I feel like you’re so great about sharing the process as you’re realizing things and taking us through the realizations and then how things used to feel and how they feel now. And I just think that’s so valuable for everyone. There was a story that you shared around shedding the sense of urgency that you had about like pushing through things, getting through a car ride, and other examples like that, and just how transformational it was to drop that sense of urgency. And so, I was hoping that you could tell us about that here.

NORA: Yeah, sure. Okay. Basically, we had this big change, because in Cambridge, in the UK, we didn’t have a car. I don’t drive. So, we had this wonderful cargo bike that I really miss or buses or walking. But we are in San Jose in Costa Rica, which is not the most walkable city, and there’s not much public transport that takes us where we want to go.

So, we’ve had to do cars a lot more. And the kids were even less happy about this than I was. They really hated it. We’re sort of getting there now, but especially at the beginning, they really just did not want to be in the car. And so, my first instinct was just, we have to do this. We’ve got no choice.

We’re just going to have to push through. They’re just going to have to hate it. All we can do is go as fast as we can and hope that there’s something nice at the other end. And that was how I was expecting things to go.

But luckily, because I’m in the Living Joyfully Network and there’s so many conversations about being creative, about different people’s needs, and respecting their needs and everybody’s needs being important, and probably loads of other kind of useful mindset shifts, “There’s plenty of time,” luckily, I was able to just stop and go, “What on Earth am I thinking? I can easily make this better for them.” And it just took 30 seconds for me to think, do you know what? We’ll just stop whenever they say they need to stop. So we just stopped worrying about being late for things, which in Costa Rica is fine anyway, which helps. But also I’d rather we arrive happy and slightly late and just prioritizing us being okay.

We just decided we were going to stop and we also always get an ice cream now whenever we go anywhere. So, it’s just these really simple, basic things. We’ve done stops that are like a five-minute stop at a park that we happen to be going past. And we’ve done a stop that was like an hour in a little town getting an ice cream and having a wander around. Ice creams are often involved, but it seems so simple, but it was amazing to me that I just was on this autopilot of, “We just have to push through. We just have to do it. Bad things happen and all you can do is push through them,” both for me and my kids, I think. And it was just amazing how revolutionary it felt to me to just stop and go, “Okay, no, we can think creatively about this.” We can improve the situation as much as we can. And obviously there’s a limit. But it makes such a difference, I think, as well, just the kids knowing that we are trying everything that we can to help them feel better.

And, yeah, I feel like I probably still am working on making this automatic, but I’m definitely trying to make it a habit.

So, the other example of this that I thought of was trying to get the kids comfortable going to the dentist and we found this very lovely dentist. But what I’m hoping that we’re going to be able to do is, rather than just say, okay, we’re going to go, we’re going to do everything we can to get their mouths open so she can see, I’m going to contact her and be like, “Can we just pay your fee for an appointment and then just hang out? We’ll teach you to play Minecraft. They’ll get used to the room. They’ll get used to you.” We don’t have to just push through everything.

It feels so simple now, but it’s been like this huge life mindset change for me.

ANNA: Oh my gosh. It makes such a difference though, right? Because we can just really tunnel in on, okay, this is what we’re supposed to do, have to do, how it has to look, and let’s get it over with, this bad stuff. But we can change all of that immediately, like you said, and it really just takes a few seconds to think about, okay, we can now start brainstorming and think about the different ways.

And I do love the Network for that, because I do think we’re kind of steeping in that creativity. We’re steeping in all these different ways that people have done it. And so, it really is. I think it’s easier when we have that community around us.

PAM: It really is. It’s so surprising, like you talked about the moment where you were like, “Hey, I don’t have to do that.” There are so many things where we feel like, okay, you know, life isn’t perfect. There’s going to be some things we dislike. Let’s just get through it as fast as we can.

That is just such a normal way to see something, first approach to something, and that little switch that says, “Oh, but hey, what if we didn’t?” It’s like that’s a little thought experiment that I love to play with myself. When I’m feeling stuck with something, no matter what it is, it’s like, what if it was the opposite? What if I wasn’t stuck? What if I thought that this was great. What if we could have the most fun ever on car rides? What if we love this dentist? How would I be acting then? That’s what opens it up for me. We’d be stopping when we saw something fun or we felt like an ice cream. We’d be bringing fun things to do in the car. We’d be laughing, chatting, or headphones on, whatever it is for us as individuals.

But that thought experiment is that quick shift for me that just helps me realize, oh, there’s another way to look at this. There are so many more possibilities that we can play with. I love it.

ERIKA: Yeah, I was thinking how it is kind of that mainstream paradigm thing of, there are just things we have to do. There are things we have to do and the kids better get used to that there are just things we have to do and you have to just push through. And for that to be like a lesson to teach a child, this lesson of push through. But right. I feel this kind of lightness in my head if I can just kind of open it to, but wait a second. Like you were saying like, wait a second. It doesn’t have to be this way. In any situation, there are so many different places that you could be looking for a different way to do things, something to switch up.

And so, I think being in that adult position of, but I should just be able to say the thing and they have to just push through and maybe it will somehow be more convenient for me as an adult if I could get the kids to just push through, but then if I actually look at reality, pushing through is so hard. It’s so hard to do with kids. It actually makes my life a lot harder if I don’t try to address the different needs that they have and the places that they’re uncomfortable. So, I just loved that. 

ANNA: Yeah. It’s so fun. Okay, so another huge shift that you shared on the Network was around how, with the best of intentions, your priorities, the direction, leading your kids towards ideas, fun ideas and what you thought would be great, was really stopping you from knowing them and how they wanted to spend their time. And so, we just thought it’d be cool to have a discussion around that, because there’s a lot there with that piece.

NORA: Yeah, no, this felt like a really huge, multi-level a-ha moment for me. Because, as I said, I started off when Ruben was a baby, getting into gentle parenting and positive parenting and conscious parenting, whatever. There’s lots of versions.

And so, I remember getting into unschooling and reading about it and feeling like respecting and honoring your kids’ interests and doing what they want and saying yes to them and all of that, it all just seemed fine. Like I was like, yes, yes, I’m on top of that. That’s easy. That’s fine. That’s done. I know them. I know everything they were going to want to do. I was at home with them the whole time, so I was like, I know these kids.

Yeah, it took me a long time to start realizing that actually, my head was so full of these ideas of what we should be doing as a family, what children should be like, what parents should be like, what childhood should be like, what activities are better than other activities. I was totally signed up to, we should be reading, we should be outside, we should be going to groups, we should be going to museums, which is all great if that’s what your kids want to do, but really, my kids didn’t want to do any of that.

So, this sort of big realization, I think of it as a two-stage process. So, the first little a-ha moment was back in Cambridge. So, Cambridge has quite a few nice museums, so every so often I would drag the kids to a museum, because this was educational and good, but still fun. But they were never very interested in them. And so, it always felt like a bit of a flop as an activity.

So, then one day, I guess I’d been kind of reading about unschooling and processing it all, and one day it just suddenly occurred to me that there is a museum in Cambridge called the Fitzwilliam Museum, which has a room full of weapons, like swords, crossbow, armor, lots of sharp, pointy metal things. And I just suddenly was like, that’s where Ruben would like to go. That’s what Ruben’s interested in, because he really loves all kinds of fighty computer games. He likes cutting out weapons of increasing complexity by eye with scissors and with paper and just playing with them. I was like, he likes weapons. Why am I not taking him to the weapons bit?

And we actually never ended up going, but he did express interest, but it just felt like this real moment where I was like, oh, I’m starting to see these, these options more from his point of view, thinking about what genuinely interests him, not what I think kids should know about.

And then, the second a-ha moment was in Costa Rica. A few months ago, I actually walked past this bowling alley. And I was like, oh, I should suggest bowling to the kids, with zero expectations, because I did not think they would be interested. And they were both like, “Yes, we really want to go!” And I was really surprised. I thought, “Okay, fine. We’ll give it a try.” Worst thing that can happen is they don’t like it. And they loved it. And this was in a place, really loud music, loads of people. You have to wear weird shoes, it’s competitive, but it’s so competitive that you can see who’s winning. There’s a big screen telling you who’s winning. And I just never in a million years would’ve thought that they would like that. And we’ve kept going. They still like going. We’ve sort of tweaked the competitive element, so we kind of mess about with who goes when and everything, but still they keep wanting to go.

And that felt like an a-ha moment, because that was not something I would’ve thought that they would want to do. That was not something I would’ve thought they would enjoy once we got there. So, it just made me realize that I was getting so much information from that about who they were, about what they wanted to do, because I had stepped out of the way. And I’m probably still working on it, but I had mostly dropped my expectations, my ideas of what should be happening, what we should be doing. So, I got this information that they wanted to do bowling.

So, it just made me realize how much all of this noise in my head had been stopping me from truly both seeing my kids based on what I know about them, but also just giving them the chance to lead and teach me about more about themselves and give me more information. I still don’t really know why they like the bowling, but also just the difference between seeing them going and doing something that they actually wanted to do, how much easier it was to get them out of the house as well. There’s so much information that I just would not have had if I had still been like, “Okay, Monday we do this, Tuesday we do that.” It just was so useful and so now, if they surprise me, I’m delighted, because it means that I have stepped out of the way. I have given them the chance to show me something that I wasn’t expecting. And then that gives me more information to then be able to say, “I think you might like this other thing.”

And so, still doing the weapons room-type stuff. So, still saying, “Okay, I think you might like this.” And still being able to look at it from their point of view based on the information I have. But it’s like a virtuous circle where, if I’m stepping out of the way, I’m way more able to offer them stuff that they’re genuinely going to want to do. So, yeah, that’s been really fun.

ANNA: Oh my gosh. Go ahead, Pam.

PAM: Yeah, there’s so much in there, Nora. So, I’m going to start with, I love the nuance that you’re talking about of dropping expectations. So often when it’s like, yeah, you know what? It’s not helpful to have expectations that we as a family or they as a child should enjoy this, or we feel like this would be good for them, all those expectations. But there’s the piece, too, where when we can drop those expectations and stand aside and have a harder time for a while not sharing other possibilities. You know what I mean? Like, I don’t want to put anything on them. I don’t want to have these expectations, so I’m just going to let them lead and I just kind of stand back.

Yet, passing the bowling alley and going, huh, that’s really off, but it’s here by us. We could go there. And mentioning it. It’s that nuance of not having any expectations when we share something. So yeah, absolutely, knowing them, we can think of the things we think they might be interested in, and then also sharing random possibilities that are actually around in our lives as well. Not as in, oh, I need to share something every day, and they need to like say yes, no, whatever, but to bubble our lives with these other possibilities that give them the opportunity to surprise us, to choose. “Right now, I do want to try something totally new.”

It’s so different when we are more with them. And we can share things without the expectation, like not letting not having expectations have us stand back a little bit. Does that make sense? But we can lean in more without those expectations and just bubble away and discover so much more about each other. 

ANNA: Right. I mean, for me what stuck out was just that attachment that we can have to, it should look this way in childhood and all of these pieces. And, like you’re saying, there’s so many nuances within this piece, but I think it does come back to the expectations and attachments.

And I love the piece about the bowling, because I think we can also fall that direction into kind of boxing our kids in a little bit. Like, oh, they’ve never liked big crowds or loud things, so I’m going to steer clear of that. And that’s, again, with love and great intention, because we’ve seen that. But I just think kids change and grow and when it’s something that sparks their interest, who knows? Maybe they saw a YouTube about bowling or one of their favorite characters was bowling. So, they’re just like, I want to see what that’s all about. And even if they hated it, they still got that information.

So, I think it is just that stepping back, but yet staying engaged, that seeing through their eyes like we talk about, because it’s just all these nuances. But I think we can easily see, for any of us, how we can kind of get on this path, and then we’ve lost sight of the children that we’re there hoping to facilitate.

ERIKA: Right. It feels like you’re just giving this space to them to be able to just be who they are and that they get to decide who they are. Because my kids surprise me all the time, exactly like how you were describing. And sometimes I’m like, what? It really can throw me.

But that’s part of the fun of our lives, being able to give enough space for them to change their mind and do something different and surprise me. And I really got so much out of when you were describing the feeling of, we all want to do this activity. That reminded me of those moments. And they can be few and far between sometimes, because the kids are so different from each other. But where we all are like, “A hundred percent we want to do this thing together,” how easy and fun those types of activities are. So, to look for those. I loved that story, too.

ANNA: And that reminds me of something, I think you said it in the Network, too, Nora, but it’s just kind of expounding on what you said, but how different it felt. You had told a story about, well, it’s hard to get them going anywhere because they like to stay in the house. So, it’s this process of getting them to go and making it fun and doing all this.

But then when you saw this delta of, when they’re leading the way, it wasn’t hard at all or it was so much easier. So, I thought that was really interesting, a thing that we can kind of watch for, you know, those energy shifts.

PAM: Yeah, I do think that is a huge shift. It was for me. The realization, when we talk about commitments and things, it’s less about figuring out a fun way to kind of cajole everybody to the place where we think they should be, for whatever reason. And then that ties in with letting them quit things when it’s not interesting to them, because what we’re really looking for is those things that they’re super excited about, where it is so much easier to do, because it’s theirs. It’s something that they want to do. It’s like night and day. Yet, we can get so attached to the things that we love or that we think that they should be doing.

NORA: Yeah, no. I was just going to say, yeah, I wrote a whole thing in the Network, a post in the Network about, “It’s so hard to get my kids out of the house. What can I do?” And I had this whole story that it was this really stressful process and I’d just spiraled into like, “This stresses me out. So, I’m stressed. So, I’m making it stressful,” on and on and on. And yeah, it turned out that mostly my kids like being at home and also, Ruben especially likes being at home, but he will dash to the car if it’s something that he genuinely wants to do. But because I’d never given them that chance to tell me what it was they would dash to the car for, then I didn’t know that it was possible. So yeah, it’s been a fun journey. 

ANNA: Yeah. That’s amazing. I love it.

PAM: Yeah. I want to say thank you so much for taking the time to join us today, Nora. We really appreciate it. It’s so fun hearing little snippets of the journey that, when people think through them and can see and can communicate what their process was, I think that’s so helpful for people to hear. So, thank you so much, Nora.

NORA: Thank you for having me. It’s been super fun.

PAM: Yay! Us too! Have a wonderful day.

NORA: Bye!

ERIKA: Thank you.

ANNA: Take care.

EU339: Q&A Deep Dive

In this week’s Exploring Unschooling podcast episode, we’re diving deep into a listener question submitted by Jessie in Colorado. She wants to explore a quote from Free to Learn that took her off guard, which is:

One proviso, though. Unschooling won’t work well if you actively avoid having your family interact with the world, with life. Shutting out the world rather than embracing it will limit your children’s opportunities to learn, maybe to the point where school is more connected to the world than home is. Inhibiting their exploration of the world around them is not helpful or supportive of learning.

Free to Learn by Pam Laricchia

Jessie wonders if being introverted or neurodivergent makes unschooling a poor fit, since social interactions can be draining. She worries that she doesn’t have the ability to provide enough interaction for her daughter and is curious about the meaning of the quote.

As always, our Q&A conversations aren’t focused on giving anyone the “right” answer, because there isn’t a universal “right” answer for any given situation that will work for everyone. Instead, our focus is on exploring different aspects of the situation and playing with the kinds of questions we might ask ourselves to better understand what’s up. We’re sharing food for thought through the lens of unschooling and cultivating strong and connected relationships.

Submit your question for a future Q&A episode, and if you’re a patron of the podcast, be sure to mention that.

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Pam’s book, Free to Learn

EU120: Unschooling and Autism with Erin Human

EU221: Unschooling and Neurodiversity with Tara McGovern Dutcher

EU246: Unschooling and Neurodiversity with Michelle Morcate

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram, Facebook, and her website.

Follow @helloerikaellis on Instagram.

Join Pam’s newsletter and get a free copy of her intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

Become a patron of The Exploring Unschooling Podcast for as little a dollar a month (in a wide variety of currencies) and help keep the podcast archive and transcripts freely available to anyone who’s curious and wants to explore the fascinating world of 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 Being Intentional, and we’re exploring it through the lenses of curiosity and presence.

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, through the lenses of connection and curiosity. Find the podcast in your favorite player here: The Living Joyfully Podcast.

CALL TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Welcome! I’m Pam Laricchia from livingjoyfully.ca and Anna Brown and Erika Ellis are joining me today to explore a listener question. Hi to you both.

ERIKA: Hello.

ANNA: Hello.

PAM: Now, before we get started, I just want to remind everyone that our Q&A conversations aren’t focused on giving anyone the quote “right” answer, because there isn’t a universal right answer for any situation that works for everyone. So, basically, we’re sharing food for thought through the lens of unschooling. And, Erika, do you want to get us started?

ERIKA: I do. So, this question is from Jessie in Colorado and she writes,

“My little is still a toddler, but I recently learned about unschooling and I haven’t been able to stop reading more and more. I’m currently delving into Pam’s book, Free to Learn. There is one caution in the book that took me off guard and has me worried about whether I can unschool. Pam writes,‘One proviso, though. Unschooling won’t work well if you actively avoid having your family interact with the world, with life. Shutting out the world rather than embracing it will limit your children’s opportunities to learn, maybe to the point where school is more connected to the world than home is. Inhibiting their exploration of the world around them is not helpful or supportive of learning.’I’m wondering if you could delve into what this means a little more, and if unschooling is likely to be a poor fit for folks who are introverted or neurodivergent in a way that makes socializing hard. We certainly go on lots of adventures, hikes, parks, library, etc., and going out can be fun, but interacting with new people is exhausting.We have a small friend group and I struggle to find the energy to engage with people and organizations that I don’t know well, in a way I’d want to model. The idea of reaching out and making a lot of new connections is overwhelming to the point that I do now wonder if my daughter would do better in school. I know that the socialization that happens in school isn’t ideal, but I would like her to get to interact with lots of kids and adults, and I worry about my ability to provide that. I have considered sending her to tuition-free preschool just for the experience of interacting with others without me (Sudbury schools and other paid groups are not accessible to our family, both in terms of location and money), but unschooling sounds so much better.”

So, hi, Jessie, and thank you so much for your question. I’m really excited to hear Pam and Anna’s responses, too. We’re all introverts, so I know we all have a lot of experience navigating this topic.

A lot of thoughts came up for me when I read your question. First is that personality difference that you mentioned. There are just so many ways to be a human, and for someone who is introverted or who is sensitive to sound or who is overwhelmed in busy places, being out all the time in active places surrounded by people is not going to feel good. But living in alignment with that is not the same thing as shutting out the world at all. My family is introverted, but we figure out what feels good for us, the frequency of outings, the number of friends, the places that we like to go. And the key for me is listening to my kids to determine if their needs are being met.

I have a friend who is also introverted like me, but she has an extremely extroverted child. And so, that can be more challenging in moments, but there is so much learning there. They’re learning about each other’s personality differences. She can push herself out of her comfort zone at times in order to meet his social needs. And she can communicate with him about her needs, as well. And there are just so many possibilities for meeting his needs that can still feel good to her. School could be one of those possibilities. But there are also co-op classes and homeschool groups and park days, play dates at friends’ houses, online gaming, spending time with extended family, having other people take him out to do activities, and so on.

So, rather than getting caught up in a kind of nebulous future fear of, what if it’s not good enough? That’s that borrowing trouble, like Anna says, instead we can ground ourselves in trusting that we will figure it out as the needs arise. In my experience, unschooling doesn’t take away possibilities. It just gives us space and time to figure out what would feel good. And there are just endless possibilities if we stay open and curious.

And your question kind of reminds me of a recent Q&A, too, where I was talking about staying in the present moment and focusing on the current needs of your child where they are right now, rather than getting pulled into worrying about the future. Over time, I’ve found that future worry is really unnecessary, because the most pressing needs are clear. They’re the ones that are right in front of me. And my kids will let me know when things aren’t enough or they’re bored, or they’re needing something different.

For example, Oliver will say, “When’s the next time we’re going over to my friend’s house?” Or Maya will say, “I feel like we’re not going to enough places.” Or I will ask, “Would you be interested in going to the homeschool park day this week?” We just check in about what their social needs are and figure out the best way to meet those.

And I bet it could be hard to imagine what it could look like while your child is still a toddler. But online gaming with friends has been such a powerful way to meet a lot of our social needs, mine included, because the kids are free to jump in more often when they need more interaction and then to pull back when they need more quiet time or solitary time. And it has just been so helpful. I mean, we’ve had some months-long phases of, I don’t need to be around friends at all. And then when they want it, they can jump back into that world and it’s just worked so well for us.

And it can also be helpful to remember that you yourself don’t have to be the one who solves all of the problems and meets all of the needs by yourself. Solutions can come from all kinds of places, like play dates and day trips with other family members and friends. Maybe your child will become very interested in a certain activity like drama or martial arts that has kind of a built-in social circle for interaction. So, there’s plenty of time to see how it plays out and what her needs and interests will be.

And I guess I would also add that socializing with a lot of people and being out exploring the world are two separate things and people will have differing needs and desires for each of those things. I think the bottom line for me is, if I’m listening to my kids’ needs and bringing that yes energy, figuring out ways to meet those needs, then we’re good. And their lives are not going to be nearly as full of people and activities as mine was when I was their age, but what we are doing is more aligned with their personalities and how they want to spend their time. I didn’t have that option when I was growing up to find environments that fit with my personality. And so, I think we’re lucky in that way. Pam?

PAM: Oh, I love that so much, Erika. Thank you. And yes, I do appreciate your question so much, Jessie. I love the opportunity to dive into this more, because first, when I talk about interacting with the world, when I was writing that, for me, it means so much more than physical, in-person engagement.

In my mind, inhibiting their exploration of the world might look like filtering or blocking their access to information or not actively helping them as they seek out information or experiences they’re curious about.

Just like Erika was saying, there are so many possibilities to do that, but when we’re not open to that, open and curious and helping them do that, that’s more what I was talking about for not interacting with the world. It was a more esoteric definition of world, rather than physical, face-to-face exploration, because none of that is literally dependent on leaving the house, right?

For me, keeping their world small is definitely a separate thing from exploring and supporting all the ways and the frequency in which each person in the family wants to be out in public and interacting with other people, socializing. And that’s the other piece that you’ll find, as Erika was mentioning, as well. Everybody’s needs are taken into account. The family example Erika shared where the mom’s more of an introvert and child’s more of an extrovert, we can work with that. We can figure things out. We aren’t the sole responsible person for this. There are so many ways that we can pull things in. So, it’s really fun to get creative at that point.

And yes, my family includes both strong introverts and all sorts of neurodivergence, and it was so worth giving everyone the space to explore what that looks like for them and also, how the experience of that can change over time. You know, like you were saying, Erika, for months, it’s like, this is all I need, you know? And then it’s like, okay, I’m ready for a little bit more or a little bit more of this, or less of this, etc.

And, again, how we can stretch for exciting things. Sometimes we are happy to jump out of our comfort zone for bit or push on the edges of it. Because I found it was much easier for me to stretch when it was in service of something that one of my kids was super interested in doing. And that was because I could focus on their joy. I didn’t need to be seeing all the other things that might be overwhelming. I could focus on that piece. And then, we could also build in the recovery time and the relaxed time afterwards. And again, it was different depending on the child. It was different depending on the activity, where they were in the seasons of things. But that level of self-awareness is just so valuable for everyone, adults and kids alike.

When we had that or were able to pick up some of it along the way, we could bring that to the table as we figured out plans, figured out ways to move through things that worked for everyone. So, in that way, I feel like unschooling is an absolutely wonderful lifestyle for introverted and neurodivergent families, because each person is celebrated for who they are, rather than trying to change them to fit into this more conventional box.

So, I did want to mention there are a few podcast episodes where we dive into unschooling and neurodivergence that I think you’ll enjoy checking out. Episodes 120, 221 and 246. And we’ll put the links in the show notes. Anna?

ANNA: Okay. So, obviously you guys hit a lot of the points that that brought up to me, as soon as I was reading it, and I definitely identify with the question in terms of being an introvert. And it’s not really easy for me to reach out to strangers. I don’t love big, loud, crowded environments. But what I found was it was so much easier to do those things in small doses when I was facilitating my children, like you said, Pam. When you’re seeing your child light up about something, it’s the best. So, it really just makes it so much easier.

And there’s a connection that we have with our children, and that connection helps us find the ways to meet each other’s needs, even when it involves stretching our comfort zones a bit. I think the understanding that we had of each other just helped it flow, because we knew we’d figure it out. So, we could have this, okay, hmm, how are we going to do this? This part feels hard, this doesn’t. We want to do this. They just had a trust in me and I had a trust that they would also hear me and my concerns and how I was feeling about it.

And the piece, I think maybe you both mentioned it, but remembering that I don’t have to meet all the needs, as well, that helped me ground into, okay, there’s other resources available to help meet these needs. And even if it wasn’t something that David could do, maybe it’s a grandparent or a friend or someone else. And so, just being open, I found that those opportunities arose for them to be involved in all kinds of ways that I could not have predicted ahead of time.

And in terms of the school kindergarten, preschool thing that you were talking about, I really don’t believe that toddlers need to be with other toddlers, especially in a classroom environment, because there’s really not enough facilitation and it really isn’t an interest for the toddler. Toddlers aren’t interested in that. Their interest is to explore. And at that age, you’ll see a lot of parallel play and also a lot of upset, because toddlers are not so sure.

I think children want to be with their parents and learning about the world around them. And it sounds like you’re already doing that, Jessie. You all are already exploring the world. And I love Pam’s point about that quote was not about necessarily physically exploring the world. I think it was just shining a light on, we can limit our children in a lot of ways, and that limiting often happens at at home, not because of home, but because of not sharing certain resources or devaluing certain ways they want to explore things. And so, yeah, just open up that idea of what we’re talking about when we say exploring the world, because you’ll find that you just learn and grow together.

And I definitely wouldn’t be borrowing trouble about years down the road, because I truly believe and have seen, if we focus on the connection and the relationships, we’re in the best place to solve all the problems that life throws at us. And so, I just would look at your child. Are they happy? Are they enjoying life? Are they asking for something else? Are you both enjoying this time together? Things change really quickly and at each point you can pivot, make adjustments. That connection will be what helps you kind of tune in to who they are and what would help them do the things that they’re interested in.

PAM: Yeah.

ERIKA: That reminded me, too, about how it’s not a forever decision. Any decision isn’t a forever decision. So, there’s no reason right now to decide whether unschooling will work forever or not. It’s not even important to think of that.

PAM: That’s a really good point, too. We don’t need to decide now for forever. And I really liked your point, Anna, when you’re mentioning like how things will bubble up, possibilities will bubble up and that happens more when we are in that open and curious space, rather than in that smaller space where we’re not scanning, not noticing the things. And it’s not that we need to be in that space all the time, but if our child is curious about something and we’re not quite sure how we might meet that, we find so many possibilities when we just pay attention and not literally have to leave the house to be paying attention to it.

But I remember there were seasons where, when the local paper showed up, I was reading that, or I was going online just to see some things that were around us. Or if they had an interest in something, I would do some research on my own and I could find maybe a video that I could show them or a show or we’d go to the library and get some books. There are just so many possibilities.

And just being with them. I love the point of being with them and being in the moment right now, because this is what we can help with. And when you’re in the moment with them and noticing times when they’re, I don’t know, the word “bored” comes to mind, but there’s a whole conversation around that. What it does is, we can help them in those moments. We can work together. It’s not even so much us helping them as in, we have to come up with a solution. “Okay, you’re bored. Here you go, do this thing.” It’s conversations. It’s sitting with that. How are they feeling? Did they want to try something new? At those times, maybe what they want is comfort things. A show that they are very familiar with, when they’re feeling at odds and not sure what they want to do next.

There are just so many different ways to go, but when we can be with them in the moment, we can learn so much about them. We can help them move through that moment. And when you’re doing that, there’s so much less chance that you’re going to be blindsided by something coming up. “Oh my gosh! Not going to school was just a horrible choice, because their whole world was too small!” It is much more of a mindset, much more of a way of engaging with your child and just helping them pursue and enjoy the things that they’re interested in.

ANNA: Right. What that really brought to mind for me was, when we get into this thought process of way down the road, we’re so out of the moment that we really are missing the cues. We really are missing what’s happening. And so, once you get a little bit more time under your belt with your child, you’ll see that, as you stay connected, it’s this gradual growth. You’re gradually growing together, you’re learning more about each other and how you work well together and what works for how long and those type of things.

And so, then it just naturally unfolds and grows. But it’s like, if you jump way ahead, you’re just thinking, I can’t do this. But it really pulls you out of where the actual learning is about each other, which is in that moment, because that’s all that we have. And so, just watch for that. Like, “Hey, I’m getting way ahead of myself. I’m really sitting in my head and disconnecting from my child.”

Because, as we always say, we’ve said on the podcast so many times, when you start feeling that, just lean back in, lean back into the child in front of you, and then you see like, oh yeah, we’re doing great. We’re having a great time. Look at all that they’ve learned in the short two years that they’ve been on the earth.

ERIKA: Right. And when you’re thinking so far ahead, I feel like the only way to really do that is to be thinking of this kind of generic person who’s going to require these different things. Like a teenager is going to have this many friends and will have learned these things and gone to these places, or whatever it is. And so, that really is not about the child at all and the individual. And so, focusing more on the excitement of learning who this person is and how cool that is.

Everyone is so different, and so, school doesn’t make us think that everyone is so different. And I think that’s kind of a mindset shift to really realize how different every person is. And so, when you have this very young child in front of you who’s kind of just starting life, how fun and exciting is it to look at them and think, each thing that we do, I’m going to learn, Oh, they like that! They don’t like that. Ooh, this is really exciting for them! Who knew that they were going to be interested in that? And then that’s where life just gets more and more fun.

PAM: So much more fun! There was one little thing also that bubbled up for me, as you were mentioning leaning into your child, Anna, there will be seasons moving forward where the question does come up. Am I doing enough? This is what this feels like now as we dive into the question. And so, not to be afraid of that question, not to take that question as judgment. It’s like, oh, I’m failing. I’m failing unschooling. I’m failing parenting. Am I doing enough for them? But to use that as a reminder. For me, that was often a reminder that, oh, I’ve kind of drifted away. I’ve kind of disconnected a little bit, because I don’t have this hands-on experience and connection that is always telling me I’m doing enough when I’m helping them do the things that they are interested in doing. That’s just such a valuable question, because people can use that as, as such a judgment and beat themselves up over time, “I’m so worried about this,” but when you can use it as a cue, oh, you know what? Am I? Let’s go see! Let’s go talk to the kids!

ANNA: Let’s go see! Right. Let’s go see! And I love your point too, Erika, about learning about this child, because I think we do often hold this generic child in our mind, and it’s from our own experience or from how we are or from what we’ve seen on TV or whatever the thing might be.

But when you really lean in, I mean, these kids are so unique. I guarantee this child at two has strong preferences and things that really light them up and things that they just want to keep following, whether it’s trains or dogs or whatever the thing might be. And so, just really being open about that and just getting excited about it, I think just really leads the way.

And, like you said, Pam, then when those questions come up, you have, first of all, a background of connection and then you can go, okay, you know what? I do want to just lean in and see where are we now and what are they interested in now and how can I facilitate that now? And so, I love just all of that thinking, because the questions are going to come up. They just do.

PAM: They do. They really just do. And when we can not take those on as weight, but to take them on with curiosity, it leads us in so many super cool places.

Thank you so much to both of you for joining me today. I super appreciate it. I very much appreciate your question, Jessie. That was lots of fun to dig into.

If anyone hasn’t read Free to Learn yet, there will be links in the show notes or just go to books2read.com/freetolearn and you can pick it from your favorite online stores. And thank you so much, everyone. We’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

ERIKA: Bye.

ANNA: Bye bye.

EU338: A Conversation with Lore Blancke

This week, we’re sharing a conversation Anna Brown and I had recently with Lore Blancke on her podcast, Intimate Breath. Lore came across unschooling and the Exploring Unschooling podcast and was intrigued by the similarities she found with her work as she listened. And while she’s not a parent herself, her enthusiasm was apparent when she reached out to ask about having a conversation with her on her podcast.

It was such a delightful conversation that I asked if I could share it here as well!

We dive into what unschooling is, questioning rules and social conditioning to live how we want to live, the power of feeling free to make choices, moving from power and control-based relationships to consensual and intimate ones, what it can look like to prioritize relationships, and creating a culture where it feels safe to make mistakes and to quit if something doesn’t feel good.

Lore’s website, Intimate Breath

Find Lore on Instagram or Facebook

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram, Facebook, and her website.

Check out Pam and Anna’s new podcast, The Living Joyfully Podcast.

Join Pam’s newsletter and get a free copy of her intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

Submit your question for a future Q&A episode, and if you’re a patron of the podcast, be sure to mention that.

Become a patron of The Exploring Unschooling Podcast for as little a dollar a month (in a wide variety of currencies) and help keep the podcast archive freely available to anyone who’s curious and wants to explore the fascinating world of 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 Being Present, and we’re exploring it through the lenses of expectations and joy.

EU337: Bringing It Home: Yes Energy

This week on the podcast, we’re sharing our first Bringing It Home episode. In this series, we’re going to dive even deeper into the topics that we explore in the Unschooling “Rules” series, with an eye to showing how these concepts come up in our real lives and the many possibilities for how to approach them.

Today, we are sharing more thoughts about the idea that unschoolers should “always say yes” to our children, and looking at the value of having “yes energy” instead.

We hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey!

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram, Facebook, and her website.

Follow @helloerikaellis on Instagram.

Check out Pam and Anna’s new podcast, The Living Joyfully Podcast.

Join Pam’s newsletter and get a free copy of her intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

Submit your question for a future Q&A episode, and if you’re a patron of the podcast, be sure to mention that.

Become a patron of The Exploring Unschooling Podcast for as little a dollar a month (in a wide variety of currencies) and help keep the podcast archive freely available to anyone who’s curious and wants to explore the fascinating world of 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 Kindness and Compassion, and we’re exploring it through the lenses of stories and wholeness.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Welcome! I’m Pam Laricchia from livingjoyfully.ca, and today, I’m joined by Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. Hello to your both!

ERIKA: Hi.

ANNA: Hello.

PAM: So, in our last Unschooling “Rules” episode, which was 335, we talked about why people may find themselves trying to always say yes as part of the paradigm shift to unschooling. We discussed how always saying yes may lead to frustration, disconnection, and resentment, and I shared one of my guiding questions, which was, “Why not yes?” That helped me lean into the yes, but also consider the whole context of the situation. We also dove into a few examples of how conversations and focusing on working together to meet everyone’s needs, can cultivate valuable learning for the whole family, for everyone who’s involved.

So, with this follow up Bringing it Home conversation, we want to talk about an aspect of leaning into saying yes that we’ve seen trip people up in various ways over the years. So, what if we can’t make it happen? There are definitely times when our kids have a request that we can’t meet immediately or on the timeline that they’re looking for.

Previously, we talked about the value of having conversations about the reasons behind it, but we wanted to dive into what might those conversations actually look like, because even in those moments when we’re not able to say yes right away, we can still bring yes energy to the conversation.

So, maybe they’re asking for something that’s overwhelming or not possible in a practical sense. “Mommy, I want to fly to the moon!” Or they want to build a rollercoaster or dig to the center of the earth. They are imaginative. Or maybe it’s a resource or a time constraint that makes the request just not doable for now.

When that happens, we can feel the urge to shut the conversation down because it seems nonsensical or because we are feeling a little bit bad that we can’t make it happen for them right now and don’t want to dwell on that. We want to move on. But instead of shutting things down by saying no or changing the subject, we can join them in their excitement and wonder with the energy of yes. We can meet them where they are and see their requests through their eyes. We can get curious. What about this idea or this thing is lighting them up so much?

Maybe we say, “That sounds amazing. What would you like to do on the moon?” Or, “That toy looks so cool. What do you like most about it?” We can have wonderfully engaged conversations with them about the thing, fully validating their interest in it or in doing it, and sometimes that is totally enough for them. Sometimes that helps them move on. Sometimes it’s less about actually doing or getting the thing and more about feeling seen as a person who would be excited about it. “Ah. They get me. They get me. They see me.”

I think we can fear that joining them in their excitement about the thing will be interpreted as, “Yes! Let’s do it. Let’s buy the thing right now.” I know that was what I was reticent about early on, but it’s not been my experience. That yes energy can lead to printing a picture of the thing that they’re wanting and making concrete plans to save for it. It can be brainstorming various ways to experience some of what they’re curious about. Say we watch some documentaries about space travel, or we check in on astronauts that are living on the International Space Station right now. Or maybe we go to the science center and see and feel a moon rock. When the answer feels like no at first, if we can get curious and bring that yes energy into the moment, we learn so much more and have a lot of fun getting creative about the possibilities for now and for the future.

It just takes that mindset shift to not feel like, oh man, I need to shut this down. Or, I feel bad about it. I need to change it. We can really dive into it and there’s so much fun in there. Anna, what do you think? What are your thoughts about that?

ANNA: Right. So, I would say our experiences were very similar. And that yes energy for me is really about connecting in the moment, not getting in my head about what we couldn’t do or why it won’t work, or what kind of an idea is this? But lean in and ask the questions and get excited. That was such a key point for us. And we would do this a lot at the store, if we saw something that they were interested in, but it wasn’t really an option for that trip, for whatever reason, I would just ask questions like, what do you love about it? What’s your favorite part? And then I would get excited. “I love this one! Look at this. And I love how cool the colors are and that’s the cutest face on that little dog that’s a part of that set.” And they loved me seeing what they were seeing with that excited energy and those excited eyes.

And, for us, oddly enough, and I know it’s not this way with every child, but a lot of times that conversation was enough to then move on to the next one. And it was actually sometimes I felt like a bid for connection, even, because we’re in the store and we can kind of be in our heads and it’s a little bit busy, but it’s like, we would connect over these different toys and talk about them, so that was enough to move on.

But if it wasn’t, we would do, like you were saying, put it on the list and let’s check different places as soon as we get home, because sometimes we can get a better price than we can at the grocery store or at Target. And if birthdays or holidays were coming soon, then that might be an option. And if not, then we talk about, okay, how can we bring some extra money in? What are other options that we have? Sometimes we’d realize that we did, right now, we needed it, like this was something we needed and that we could make adjustments elsewhere. But those were conversations that were again, just kind of open and curious, how can we get through this?

And it was another reminder for me that I didn’t have to have all the answers, that things come into their life from a lot of different sources and we’re good at finding used items or big sales or someone that’s getting rid of something that they’re interested in. The key piece was that they trusted that I heard them and that I knew how important it was, and that we would find a way. There was never a doubt about that with them. They knew that if this was something they wanted, we would keep cracking at it until we could figure it out, even if we couldn’t get to it that first time.

And I feel like that’s really how we cultivated that yes energy. It just boiled down to that trusting that all of our needs and desires were valid and we would put them into the context of our life in that moment and we would figure it out together.

But this leads me to some thoughts that bubbled up since the last podcast about this, and it’s related to context and understanding our own needs, and I think it’s an important piece of this puzzle. So, I do want to dive off to the side just a little bit here.

I’ve found that children naturally know how to advocate for their needs. The infant who cries when they’re hungry and needs a diaper change, the toddler who wants the blue cup, they just know. But if a child is systemically overridden and told their needs or desires are wrong or not important, they disconnect from those cues. It becomes about pleasing the people around them, especially when the people hold the keys to survival.

So, this can play out a couple of ways as adults. Because their needs have been repressed, they can lose touch with what their needs are. They can feel the distress and know something doesn’t feel right and it can even cause them to be snappy or grumpy, but they don’t really know why. They feel put upon, but they don’t know how to access what their actual need is or how to articulate it.

And so, this may continue along the path of people pleasing, not understanding their needs. And so, they’re never even brought into the equation of these conversations at the store or these other pieces. Or they may stumble upon that boundary language that we’ve talked about before and it just feels really appealing. Like, I just want this feeling of uncomfortable to stop. And I’m going to throw up a hard boundary. But the thing is, setting a hard boundary isn’t actually being in tune with our feelings. You don’t dig into the why of it. Why is it rubbing? What is the underlying need here?

And it’s hard, because if we’ve been told that our needs aren’t valid our whole lives, how do we start to tune into them? And that’s why we talk so much about self-awareness. Being able to identify and articulate our needs and feelings is so important. And I think if you come into unschooling without a handle on your own needs, and you’re faced with a child who is quite clear, the pendulum can swing to the side of not getting your needs met and it only being about the child, and you’re following this, just say yes idea without any context or putting your own needs into the equation.

And honestly, it’s just a disservice to you both and to the whole process. Children want to understand the world and they want to be given information. So, as you develop self-awareness, you can articulate your needs and you can deepen the conversations about the context. Conversation and collaboration just becomes kind of the MO, like I was talking about before. That’s just the trust. We trust that we are capable of stating our needs and working towards a solution. Children are capable of understanding more context than we give them credit for. But it comes from that environment where we’re all doing that, that’s where that trust develops that, okay, if mom’s saying this doesn’t work right now, I know she’s going to hear me and I can hear her.

And cultivating a yes environment that actually feels good to everyone is contingent upon understanding and being able to articulate our needs. And we don’t have to do that perfectly. There’s always going to be growth and fine tuning, but for it to be sustainable, all parties need to be heard. So, I feel like some of these factors come into play when people are grappling with the Just Say Yes idea. And when we get the feedback that it’s not working, or these conversations aren’t working, and something’s not happening that way for them at the store or in these other pieces. So, I think digging into that a bit can open up some areas that possibly need healing or development. And we can learn those things alongside our children, because as so often, they do lead the way when it comes to this. And so, I just wanted to put that in there as people are grappling with this idea of just say yes and how it’s working in their families.

So, Erika, what did you think?

ERIKA: I am so excited to dive more deeply into this idea. My mind has been coming back to it again and again as things are coming up for me at home and as I’m hearing stories from people on the network.

And first, that yes energy that you were describing, Pam, has worked so well for me and my kids. They really just want someone to be excited with them and to understand what they’re interested in, to imagine all of the possibilities with them.

Oliver used to like watching YouTube videos of Lego sets and minifigures that he didn’t have and that met a need for him. We did print out pictures of minifigures he loved and he has a binder full of them. But, for me, understanding his excitement and bringing yes energy meant not just saying no to that expensive, discontinued minifigure, but getting excited with him and putting the most important items on his wish list and looking up all the details and finding pictures. And it’s just so much more fun to connect from that place rather than the place of, that’s too expensive. Forget it.

I don’t want to shut down my kids’ creativity, and their excitement, and their ideas, their interests with no energy. And sometimes it happens. I mean, the context of the moment sometimes includes me being overwhelmed or maybe having an intense hormonal time. But I can try to remind myself of that good feeling that comes from just connecting with them about what excites them and letting my eyes light up when they tell me about what they want rather than trying to shut it down. It just makes such a big difference.

And then, Anna, what you were mentioning about being clear about our needs as adults and those valuable conversations that can happen, I just think that’s so, so important. It’s exactly that pendulum swing to, I’m meeting all of the kids’ needs with no thought of my own needs, and that can get us into so much trouble. I see this happen more with my husband, Josh, with my kids, because he’ll definitely push through his feelings at times, because the kids are so clear about what they want. And he just doesn’t want to have an argument. So, I try to notice when he really is pushing through his own tiredness or if he’s not in a good mood or whatever it is, and I see him pushing through, trying to meet all of their needs regardless. And I try to help, have a conversation between the kids and him to help him communicate his needs.

And I try to keep that idea that we’re all on the same team at the forefront of that, because we may have conflicting needs at times, but we can figure out what to do. We don’t need to be adversaries in order to meet our different needs. It’s like the abundance mindset. There’s plenty of time, there’s plenty of resources. Even when things are hard, there’s plenty of possibilities and we can problem-solve together.

But I had one other aspect of this that I wanted to bring up, just because I couldn’t believe how perfect it was. So, in the Network this month, we’re talking about kindness and compassion, and in our book club, we’re reading the book, Radical Compassion by Tara Brach. And in one of the first chapters, Tara talks about saying yes to our feelings and to our current situation as a way to show compassion to ourselves and to move through difficult moments. And I just thought it was an amazing connection to what we’re talking about here.

Bringing the energy of yes to myself and my feelings and my experiences means that I’m not judging myself when I’m having a hard time, which I can tend to do. If I have that yes energy, I’m not shutting down in the face of difficulties. I’m encouraging myself to stay present, to stay open and curious, to accept things as they are as the way of moving towards what would feel better. And when I’ve practiced saying yes, since reading these chapters, I’ve noticed the physical feeling of that. The tension around my heart feels like it relaxes. My body feels less contracted. My mind feels clearer and more spacious. I feel more loving towards myself when I’m not saying no to my feelings and trying to shut my feelings down. And so, for me, this, yes, energy is like, even more helpful than I had even realized. It’s so helpful in so many areas.

I can give yes energy to my interactions with my loved ones, even difficult interactions when they’re having a hard time. I can give that kind of same energy to myself when I’m having a hard time. Even just thinking the word yes in a hard moment can bring some lightness into that moment.

ANNA: Ooh. I love that!

PAM: Bringing the yes energy into feelings and emotions. It’s not all about, I want to buy the thing or I want to do that thing, right. It’s also, I’m feeling this thing. Yes, you are feeling this thing, or yes, I’m feeling this thing, and just acknowledging that. Oh yes, the lightness that comes with it, even if we don’t know the next place we want to go with that. Just like, oh, I don’t have to fight it. I don’t have to resist it. This is how I’m feeling in this moment. And when we’re not resisting it, we’re not telling ourselves no, which is the, shut it down, I don’t want to have this conversation, I don’t want to have this feeling, when we shut that down, we don’t learn more about ourselves. Like that open and curious that you were talking about, it’s like, oh, there are possibilities to move through this. This isn’t an end point.

And I think sometimes with feelings, for me anyway, that resistance is there, because I cannot see a possibility where I would go next with it. So, I’m stopping it here. So, when I can say, yes, you’re feeling this, or, yes, this is hard, that encourages me to take the next step to be kind and compassionate to myself. And it’s like, okay, what do things look like from here? It’s okay.

ANNA: Right. And that’s cultivating that trust and yes energy for all of it, for the whole situation, for the whole family, that we can have these feelings and we’re going to look at the context when things come up. And that, if you’re having a big feeling about this, that’s okay. We’re going to figure out space for that. And again, it may be about, figuring out how to get to the moon or do the thing or whatever, but it is just creating this environment of like, it’s okay. We’re all in this together and we’re going to figure it out. So, that’s the yes piece to me, that team piece, that, we’re in this together, piece.

PAM: I really loved your point too, Anna. I know for me it was so much of learning about myself alongside processing this with my kids. I definitely did that swing, like, it makes so much sense to say yes because they’re learning and all these things and I don’t want to negatively, control, et cetera. And I didn’t have words to bring my discomfort into the conversation. So, it was just like, okay, yes! Which, I mean, it felt good. But it builds up over time. That’s the whole pendulum swing. You can get to burnout or just to overwhelm from saying lots of yeses that really are just about the yes, not about the context of the conversation. So, it’s not to shame anyone who is in that spot, because so many times we have been in that spot.

But it is a great clue or a great reason, motivation, to start understanding ourselves. It’s like, oh, now why is this rubbing? Why am I feeling more involved in this moment? And it’s also watching and seeing how all those yeses unfold, because sometimes it is completely and utterly amazing and sometimes things go sideways. I’m gaining more experience with things that I’d never had experience with before, because I had not said yes this often. And it wasn’t even that I was taking my needs into account per se. It was like, ugh, I’m too tired. No. Or that’d be too messy. No. Not digging into like, how tired am I? Is tired a factor in this moment?

ANNA: But that’s the boundary piece, right? You’re like, it’s too messy. No. But you’re not digging into what’s the underlying need there? Okay. So, is it too messy? Maybe it is in this room, but maybe it’s not over here. You’re stopping the conversation with those, I’m too tired, it’s too messy. No.

PAM: Yeah. Because at that point I couldn’t bring anything else. I didn’t think to dig deeper to find those underlying needs so that I could then bring those and be creative. It’s like, oh, I don’t want a mess in the kitchen, because I’m just about to start dinner. But if I had dug deep enough, it’s like, oh, can we do that in the basement? Can we do that outside? All those other pieces. We can be so much more creative when we really understand ourselves. That self awareness piece is so valuable to bring all these yes conversations.

Anything else anybody wants to add? We can go on with this forever. And everybody, you can bring your pieces of the conversation, too. Comment on Instagram or on YouTube or on the website. We are very happy to continue this conversation, because having had time to think about it for a couple more reasons, I like having this second follow up episode. We’re going to be able to bring so many more pieces that bubble up to us over time. So, I am really enjoying this.

ANNA: Yes, I think it’s great. And like Erika said, it just seems like since our last talk, it keeps bubbling up in all these places and we hear it on the Network and we hear it in these other realms. So, I was so glad she brought those pieces in.

PAM: Yeah, no, that was perfect. And being able to say yes to ourselves, even to feelings before we get to the doing and the things, et cetera, like being able to meet ourselves there. That’s brilliant, too. All right. Thank you so much for joining me today, both of you. I really appreciate it. Have a wonderful day.

ANNA: Take care.

ERIKA: My internet was acting up when we recorded this call, so I just wanted to take a moment to add something else that bubbled up for me about this Yes Energy. What came to mind is the idea of both/and. I think if I’m stuck in a spot of either always saying yes or in the opposite place, seeing myself as a gatekeeper and doling out yeses and nos, lots of no’s, then I’m missing the nuance. I’m in a place of either/or, instead of both/and.

And so, I think Yes Energy can also be about accepting and acknowledging the complexity of situations and people and feelings. Maybe it’s a child who wants to go to the park but also seems to not want to go to the park. Or maybe part of me is excited about the possibility of my child’s activity of choice and another part of me has a lot of fears and concerns. In a more mainstream paradigm, I may be putting pressure on myself and my kids to have the one answer, to make the one right decision. But in real life with real emotions and real context, it can be both/and. There is more space to feel all of the different feelings that come up and to brainstorm with that open and curious mindset all of the possibilities of our next steps.

So, I just think that focus on Yes Energy can help us not rush into decisions and not try to shove everything into this yes/no, right/wrong, do it this way/don’t do it at all kind of place. We can say yes to all of our feelings as well as our children’s and create this environment of openness, curiosity, and problem solving as a team.

This topic has been so much fun to dive into for me personally and I just can’t wait for the next one. Take care, everyone!

EU336: On the Journey with Josh Ellis

This week, we are excited to share our first episode in our new On the Journey series!

Anna, Erika, and I are excited to bring guests on the podcast to share their experiences. We’ll be talking about paradigm shifts, a-ha moments, challenges they’ve faced, and realizations they’ve made on their unschooling journey.

In this episode, Erika’s husband Josh Ellis is joining us to talk about his path to unschooling, which he realized started when he was in school himself. He also shares how he’s been able to weave unschooling principles into his work as a college professor in the field of film production. We dive into many common themes, including “kids are capable,” deschooling, and connection. Josh’s enthusiasm for his work and his family life shine through in this fun conversation!

We hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey!

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram, Facebook, and her website.

Follow @helloerikaellis on Instagram.

Check out Pam and Anna’s new podcast, The Living Joyfully Podcast.

Join Pam’s newsletter and get a free copy of her intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

Submit your question for a future Q&A episode, and if you’re a patron of the podcast, be sure to mention that.

Become a patron of The Exploring Unschooling Podcast for as little a dollar a month (in a wide variety of currencies) and help keep the podcast archive freely available to anyone who’s curious and wants to explore the fascinating world of 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 Kindness and Compassion, and we’re exploring it through the lenses of stories and wholeness.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Welcome! I’m Pam Laricchia from livingjoyfully.ca and today, Anna, Erika, and I are excited to speak with Josh Ellis. Welcome, Josh!

JOSH: Hello.

ANNA: Hello.

PAM: So, to get us started, I was hoping you can give us just a bit of introduction to you and your family.

JOSH: Okay. So yes, my name’s Josh. I’m married to Erika.

ERIKA: Hi.

JOSH: We met in film school, in graduate film school, in Tallahassee, Florida. I’m actually from Seattle, so I originally started off in that corner. And then in graduate school, we met, but we weren’t together until we moved out to Los Angeles, and then we became a couple in LA. And then, several years later had started to have children. So, a couple years after our oldest Oliver was born, we started to just think about what his future was going to look like in school and that kind of thing. And of course, we had gone to tons of school, all the way through grad school. Erika even did extra. She was going to get extra education, training, all this stuff.

And so, school was a part of our decades of life at that point. But then, just started to think about, listening to him, and watching him and being observant and thinking, I don’t know if school makes sense for the way that he is, which was, I think, kind of a leap for us anyways. Looking back, kudos to us for even acknowledging that, but it kind of hit us pretty simultaneously. And then Erika, as she usually does, did an incredible deep dive into just looking up everything and anything, articles and blogs and books and the whole thing. And then I would kind of get like the cream off the top and be like, Okay, read these five things and then talk about it.

And that kind of transitioned to maybe homeschooling to maybe project-based learning to unschooling, what does that mean? And kind of getting to that point. And obviously now we’re fully into that type of mentality, not just in kids, but just in life in general. And it feels excellent. It feels perfect.

But in terms of where we’re at right now, I mean the kids are so into many things, kind of like us. We’re into a million things, too. I know that I’ve always been into movies and video games pretty much since I can remember. And so, probably just upon demonstrating that some of that probably just wore off on the kids to some degree anyway, so they’re being exposed to it constantly.

So, Oliver really likes Legos and he really likes video games and he likes Lego video games and just starting today, we’re start getting into holiday movies again. We all really like holiday movies. We’ll watch Home Alone on repeat for the next couple months. But all four of us love that. And so, that’s something that we’ve always bonded with. Some movies are part of our lives as well and it’s a big part of my life, because that’s what I do professionally. And he plays lots of Roblox with his friends and that kind of stuff, too. Swimming is a big thing for Oliver, too, as well as Maya. Maya really likes swimming a lot, as much as possible. It’s so hot now. It’s kind of like, I almost don’t want to go outside, because it’s so hot. But this is probably the perfect time to go swimming, so we probably should get out there again very soon.

Maya likes anime. There’s a lot of anime shows that she’s really into, and I’ve never really been into that, but now I’m like, I will do anything with you, because I want to watch things with you. I want to listen to things. And so, now I’m kind of getting into that stuff, too. It’s kind of fun. Like Demon Slayer, and My Hero Academia, a bunch of these different anime shows are really interesting. And then she’s really into animals, always been a big part of her life. She has a couple video games where you design zoos, which she calls animal sanctuaries, but that’s kind of a big thing for her.

We’ve recently got a dog, a long-term dog as part of our family now. And so, taking him for a walk is a big part of her daily routine, and that’s a big thing that she’s always wanted to do. So, I try to do that with her as much as possible. I don’t know. That’s kind of a snapshot of what we’re doing day-to-day now, I guess.

PAM: You know, one thing that really jumped up for me that I love, Josh, is that shift from engaging with our kids and their interests because we want to hang out with our kids and learn more about our kids and see it through their eyes, rather than, “Oh, I don’t like those kind of shows, so you go watch that. I’ll go do my thing over here until we find the thing that we like together.” As you said, like holiday movies, like there are things that we enjoy together as a family, but we’re also unique individuals, too. And there are things that we like as a person.

Then when we can set that aside and choose to join them because we’re interested in them, so it’s not so much about the show, it’s more about them. It’s more about connecting with them. It’s more about having shared language like that we can understand when they’re sharing the next cool plot twists that happens two weeks from now or whatever. But we learn so much more about them, which makes our life just feel, for me anyway, just so much richer, because there are so many things bubbling up in it. Individual things and shared things as well, right?

JOSH: Absolutely. And I kind of have a standing rule for myself that if a kid wants to watch anything, I’m going to watch it with them. I think that I just kind of announced that to the world. And it kind of goes together with I’ve heard on the podcast a few times about trying to say yes as much as possible and trying to listen as much as possible. I think it kind of falls into that category and I kind of buy into that a lot.

But I also just want to expose myself to other content, too, so why not expose myself to things that they’re really interested in.

PAM: I have learned about so many things that I have ended up being interested in.

JOSH: Oh, totally. Yeah, absolutely.

PAM: So much of the world. We say it all the time, that our lives feel so much richer. Things I wouldn’t have gone to or looked at without them being interested in them first. But like, yeah, there’s still music that I listen to from when my kids were interested in it.

JOSH: So many kinds of music. Absolutely. 

PAM: Even now, I’m diving into video games much more just because that interest has been bubbling through our days for so long. But anyway, yes, it’s beautiful.

ERIKA: I was just thinking, it’s so interesting, because I think that was one of the things I hadn’t really realized going into parenting, like how different they were going to end up being from the two of us even. It was like, but we’re going into this with so many interests, between the two of us, and so much excitement about life, and we do so many things. And yet, here they are with even more things and different things and just a completely different way of being in the world. And so, yeah, if you’re open to that, I feel like I learn so much from them.

ANNA: I was going to say, too, that I think, being our scanner personality that likes to learn all the things, that was how it was for us, too. It was just like, ah, they’re bringing in all these things I hadn’t even thought of. And I want to learn all about it. I love that.

PAM: Yeah, and because we want to lean into connection with our kids, it gives us so many more pieces, so many more threads that we can connect through. Like, holiday movies really only become a thing for a couple of months a year. There are seasons for interests, too, which reminds me, so when we see an interest, an interest of our child’s might have a season. It might come in, peak, and it might be two months, six months, two weeks, whatever. But when we, as you said, Josh, choose to engage with them around it, choose to watch the new thing that they’re watching, and we learn that little piece.

And then like six months, a year down the road when something else comes up, we can see the threads and the connections looking back, which just helps us better understand how unschooling works, how human beings learn. That wasn’t like a start and stop, and I’m never going to think about that again. It may have waned, but it bubbles up in different ways moving forward.

So, it really helps us understand the richness and the form of how human beings like to learn, Doesn’t it?

JOSH: Right. Because you never know what information you need at any given time. There’s no way to pre-plan that. You just have to stumble into it. And then if it gets lodged into your brain somewhere and becomes significant later, then great. You can file it back and you’re like, Whoa, that really is now really important information that I have, and I can build on that or save it for later.

PAM: And it helps us choose new things to bring into their lives that, that they might find interesting, too, just because we have a little bit more experience, a little bit more perspective of what’s out there.

If we have two or three dots along the way and we say, ooh, that looks like it might be leading in this direction, without expectation, we can bring in some new things that they may find super, super interesting too. 

ANNA: This might be a tiny tangent, but it reminds me of Oliver’s piece with LEGOs, like how that has changed, from him wanting you to make them to now he’s into this piece, and so I love how you all have kind of fostered that environment for him to explore in a way that works for him at the different stages of it.

ERIKA: Yeah. At the beginning, he wanted me to do all the building and was only interested in building minifigures. And then, lately he has come to me and said, “You know what I love about LEGO sets is building them all by myself.” And I was like, really? This is new!

JOSH: Alone in a room. Don’t talk to me. I’m doing this LEGO set. Right.

ERIKA: And then just feeling so proud about it. But he had not been interested before, so it’s his own path through even something like that, that seems like, well, isn’t this just how you do LEGOs? Not necessarily.

JOSH: If you really go back, too, it started with just LEGO heads.

ERIKA: The helmets.

JOSH: And helmets. It was so specific. And then it slowly transitioned into minifigures and then Star Wars characters, and then obviously full sets now. It’s really amazing.

ERIKA: It’s fun.

PAM: What I love about that story is how meaningful that is to Oliver and how, as part of the shift to unschooling, how we can think, okay, this is the LEGO set we’re giving to them, and LEGOs are all about building. We can get stuck on encouraging them to build it themselves and like, oh my gosh, why do you even like LEGO if you don’t want to build it? We can tell ourselves so many stories in our head about it and feel like we should be pushing and encouraging our kid to do the thing. But if we can give it that space to unfold in the way it makes sense to them, oh my gosh. It can be very different than typical, but it is so beautiful and it so beautifully, uniquely speaks to who they are as a person too, doesn’t it?

ERIKA: Yeah. I’m thinking about how hard it is sometimes to buy the $120 LEGO set when he only wants this guy in it, you know. And so, yeah, the building is a fun new component to this .

PAM: Oh, I love that. Okay. You mentioned a little bit, Josh, about how you guys first were like, oh, I don’t know if school’s going to work for Oliver. How that question started just started to bubble up. So, I was hoping you can share a little bit more about your early journey of how you got to unschooling and what the deschooling or getting used to it or understanding how it works more, what that looked like for you.

JOSH: Right. So, again, it just started with the question of what would be best? Does this make sense for us? And obviously, part of the equation too, LA is always interesting, because people start freaking out really early, like at preschool, kindergarten of like, you have to get in a list like four years in advance. So, what school do you want them to go in five years from now? And it’s like, I don’t know who he’s going to be like in five years. Like, how do I even think about that? And so, that started us down this path of thinking about how he’s going to grow as a person and what does he do? And then that means you have to listen to them and observe them more and those kinds of things.

And it started to all kind of gel into, school is not what makes sense right now for that person and that brain.

And so, then as we started to think about these other topics, when we eventually did come to unschooling and once I started to know what that definition was and what that was about, then you start to compare it to your history, like my history, especially since we had so much school. And then, one thing that really was kind of shocking to me is that I was rethinking my experience in middle school. That is when you started to get lots and lots of homework, like you’d start getting piled up more and more. So, it’s like six, seven hours at school and then like a couple more hours at home. Yeah. So, it’s like 10 hours a day of like school. It’s like crazy.

And I just had this epiphany in middle school and I was like, you know what? No more homework. I have made the decision that I will do homework at school during other classes. I will just figure out a way to get it done, maybe even lunch, whatever. When I go home, that’s my time. I get to do whatever it is, it’s reading, it’s playing with friends, it’s playing video games, whatever it was.

I made that decision early and I did it all the way through high school. I never did any homework and I still did good enough in school that like people left me alone. I wasn’t getting terrible grades. I figured out enough to play within the system that I could still do what I wanted, which for me meant kind of ignoring counselors saying, oh, you have to take these college prep classes. And I’d be like, you know what? I want to take two gym classes, or I’m going to take the extra Home Ec class. And they’re like, you don’t need that! And I was like, well, that’s what I want to take. And luckily, I got support of my parents saying, if that’s what you want to take, then you should take that. And so, it was great.

So, somehow, I stumbled into college and I had good enough grades out of high school to get into a college. But then, in college it’s also like, this is the curriculum for this degree. You have to take these classes and half the classes, I’m like, I don’t want to take those classes. And then again, I was lucky enough in college that I was at a college that allows you to make your own degree. And so, I would pick and choose, like, these are the classes that I’m interested in. And Erika always teases me, you kind of minored in sports, because I liked taking those classes. I took volleyball and I’d take advanced photography. Those are the classes that I wanted to take. And so, I kind of invented a degree.

So, all along this time, I’m like, you know what? I was kind of in charge of my own learning from the beginning, because I just kind of did it. And is there a way we can give our children and at that time, my son, an opportunity to do those things, too, without having to like fight against the machine that is school and all the stuff that’s part of that? And unschooling was like, well there it is. I mean, that’s clearly what that is.

And so, it wasn’t until I chose to go to graduate film school where I was like, okay, everything they’re saying is what I need to hear right now, so I’m going all in on it. And it was totally different than me having to take a bunch of gen ed classes for things that I had no interest in, a bunch of math and history classes that maybe at some point in my life I’d be fascinated by, but at that time I’m like, I can’t even hear what you’re saying right now. I’m thinking about this other thing that I want to do.

But film school fit for me. And so, now, I want to give the students that I’m with on a day-to-day basis the opportunity that I had by discovering that passion and that love to do that in my day-to-day job now. But again, it came from this like lightning strike of like, I’ve been living my life like this anyways, I just didn’t know how to describe it. And so, it really made a lot of sense when we started to explain to each other what that meant to us.

PAM: Wow. I love that story. That’s a little bit rare. And, as you said, you know, your parents said, oh, if that’s what you want to take, that’s what you take.

JOSH: Yeah, they were very supportive. That was great.

PAM: Yeah. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. 

ANNA: I think what I love about that story that I want to highlight for everybody is that, so in middle school, you’re what, 12? 11-ish?

JOSH: Yeah. About that.

ANNA: Yeah, and look at the agency and autonomy that he wanted. That is what all our children want. All our children have that ability to know what they want and to have agency and want to do things that interest them. And yet, they’re shoved into this machine that doesn’t allow that. And so, I just love that reminder. So, now we have this adult that’s reflecting back like, yeah, I knew what I wanted to do. And it wasn’t that.

PAM: We talk so much about how children are capable at young ages of knowing and doing and understanding so much more than we often give them credit for conventionally. So, that is a shiny example of that.

JOSH: And one thing that comes up a lot is, people will, especially during deschooling and stuff like that, is think kids will veg out and watch videos or movies or TV or whatever it is, you know, that they see it as something that’s maybe a negative. But then I could think about my experiences and I used to watch movies on repeat for just days, like staying up all night and I didn’t know why I was. I mean, when you’re doing it, you don’t know why, and then 10 years later I was like, I was studying those movies. I was trying to figure out how this movie was made. I didn’t know, as I watched Terminator 2 for the 45th time why, but I was tearing it apart in my head and I was studying it.

And so, at some point, when people are watching content, especially on repeat, there’s something in there that they’re trying to get out of it, and they probably can’t even put it into words, especially when you’re younger. You’re just drawn to it like a magnet. And so, if you need it, then they should do that. That’s great.

PAM: Yeah. I love that. That is such a great point, too. Even for ourselves, sometimes as we’re starting to do something or we’re pulled, we want to do something, it is hard to explain exactly why. I want to.

JOSH: Right!

PAM: And it feels like we need to justify it as adults, but then kids need to justify it to their parents. You’ve watched this like 10 times. Let’s put something else on, or whatever. Because those messages of being productive and being able to show your work right now are so strong, aren’t they? Oh, I love that.

ANNA: Or that things have to be such a linear path. And it’s like, even while in some ways your path was linear, because now you’re so into film, it was specific aspects of it. And so, for another child, it might be the music or the art or the way they’re putting the comedy together or the way all those pieces, and it’s like, it’s not this linear path. It’s like we always talk about it, it’s the web, it’s the threads that then lead us down the road to have this information that we need for this next thing we want to do. 

JOSH: Right. But just, you need the time and the opportunity to explore it. You just, you’ve got to have it.

PAM: That’s what I was thinking. Goosebumps. That is one of the things I love most about unschooling is the space and the support, like your parents, Josh, not stopping you from making these choices, to follow our interests as in what we’re drawn to. We don’t need to name it. They don’t need to be to name it. We don’t have to explain it to other people. None of those things. But the space for our kids and eventually ourselves, too, to just follow where we’re being pulled, is so valuable.

It’s so rich, because, like you were saying earlier, Josh, we don’t know where it may go, and Anna, we don’t know what piece yet might connect with something. But like you said, like something sticks and that thing may bubble up in another context like, like a film degree later on, but without the expectation, which is why, again, back to what we were talking about right at the very beginning of connecting with our kids and seeing the things that they’re interested in in the different seasons, in various moments, just so we understand them better. It doesn’t mean we can explain. It doesn’t mean we have an answer to anything. But we see another one of the seeds and then another one of the seeds. And then how they begin to thread together over time.

I remember there were fun times when my kids were interested in something and I said, oh, hey, you remember like a year ago when you were doing this thing? How similar is that? And we would just have big smiles and fun conversation about it, but just to see it’s like, ooh, this is me. It helps them feel seen and heard. When we can put those pieces together. It gives a little bit more meaning to those pieces when they aren’t disparate little things. When we start to see the patterns, it’s like, oh yeah. I’m moving in a direction that’s really about me, even if I can’t define it.

JOSH: And especially when everyone’s happy, you know it’s working. You’re not fighting against something at this point, just because you’re getting the time and the space to be who you are. And especially when you’re younger, you’re still figuring that out. I mean, we’re still figuring that out, but I mean, especially when you’re younger, you have no idea and you couldn’t put into words if someone asked you of course. And so, you just need the time.

And so, again, you still have to have to fight instincts and so, like, I’m going to bed and it’s late and I’ll mention to the kids maybe like, oh, it’s getting late or whatever. But she’ll be in the zone playing a video game of doing her zoo thing and it’s like, I’m not going to mess with that. Because she has no interest in stopping. Why fight that? Like, get out of the way. Do you need anything? Do you need some water? Whatever. And just let her stay in that space that she needs, because maybe she’s going to have this big moment that’s going to have an impact, or not. I don’t know. But I shouldn’t get in the way.

PAM: I love that. Not getting in the way of it. That’s a big thing, too, because we can bring so much of our adult framework on top of it. Like you said, she’s in it right now. It doesn’t really matter what the time on the clock is, especially now. They can sleep as long as they want and whenever they want or need to. There are so many things that seem like, oh, we have to do this, we have to do this, we have to do this, but if we take a moment and just think about it, it’s like, Oh, well, nope, maybe they don’t have to. Maybe they can just continue doing.

JOSH: There’s infinite ways to tackle any issue. And so, yeah, it’s part of just also just learning to be a problem solver in general. Never too soon to start practicing that.

PAM: So, you alluded to this a little bit earlier and I’d like to dig into it. As a professor, how do you find unschooling principles weaving into your work nowadays?

JOSH: Yeah. So, it was kind of at the same time where I started teaching that we were also learning about all this. And so, that was kind of interesting. So, when I started teaching for the first time, you first start with what you know, which is, this is what I’ve experienced. You kind of regurgitate in another way, or this is how someone else says to do it. Great. I just need to do something.

And so, a lot of that was the formula you think of, like quizzing and testing and the kind of stuff you think about when you think of school.

So, as soon as I started to think about reevaluating it, I was like, well, that’s gone. Like, that’s not about the individual. That’s about the test, not the person. But what can I replace it with that’s going to be helpful to the students? And this is still ongoing, this is still me trying to figure out a way to do the best possible. But I think recently, and I was just talking to Erika about this, it was about creating as many opportunities to have one-on-one conversations with students when it’s a good time to talk to them.

So, for instance, I do film production, so it’s a lot of on-set production. They’re on set, talking to actors, working with equipment, doing that thing. So, it’s observing them to know when to stay out of the way, because you’re like, I should not jump in right now. I’m going to ruin something. They’re figuring it out themselves or they’re helping each other. That’s awesome. Like just watch or maybe even don’t even be there, because sometimes my just being there messes it up, because they’re looking over their shoulder to be like, is this right? That kind of thing.

So, it’s trying to find that cadence of when do they need me? And then being available when they need to have a conversation, to get them out of a bind, or they’re lost, or they just need to hear encouragement or whatever it is, which is listening, which is exhausting, honestly. And it’s kind of the opposite of, again, traditional school, which is like, sit down, shut up, and here’s some stuff, and then in a week we’re going to quiz you on it.

But now it’s like, I have to listen to them, their needs, their wants, what they’re trying to achieve with their projects. And then see if there’s any way that I can be helpful and if not, get out of there, but always being available, which again, it’s just, it’s a lot of energy.

And so, then coming home and trying to do the same for your kids, too, is also hard, because I don’t want to shut it off. When they come in and they’re like, I want to tell you about this new show! I can’t be like, I can’t listen to it right now. It’s like, okay, give it to me, tell me more stuff. But it’s just trying to be okay with that and like, that’s what I needed. That’s what they need. That’s what my students need. And so, trying to give everyone that space, but then obviously knowing that I need to make time for myself, my own brain to reset as well.

But you find those opportunities and as you get older you figure out a way for you to make your own systems to do that. And for me, it’s been getting up really early or going outside or whatever it is, and kind of reset. And you figure that out. But I think, in school in particular, it’s figuring out ways to talk to them in smaller groups as much as possible and giving them opportunities to teach each other as much as possible. And knowing when to just stop talking. And that’s hard, because as a teacher, you’re taught that that’s your primary role. But now I see my primary role is to watch and know when it’s time to talk. And sometimes there is, or sometimes it’ll be like, okay. You guys need this info. Here it is. I’m going to try to make it as efficient and as clean and as fun as possible and get out of the way again.

And that’s been a big part from learning about unschooled principles. 

PAM: Wow. That really, just imagining a room full of students and the energy. Yeah, no joke. The energy that that takes to be just feeling it out, feeling your way through it, being in the moment to get a sense of where they are and when it would be helpful to step in, pull back, how much to share. That takes a lot. But I can imagine what a huge difference it makes to the students themselves in that course. They must just feel so engaged and have such agency, even within the confines of a class or a course, right?

ERIKA: One thing I’ve noticed a lot is, he’ll tell stories of when the students first come. So, a lot of them are fresh out of high school. They get into these college classes, and so, they have that attitude of, what do I need to know? What do I need to know for the test? What do I need to do in order to pass this? And really, really focused on that. And then, he just will turn it around and be like, what do you want to do? What do you want to learn? What’s important to you? And they’re just like, mind blown, like a little confused.

But yeah, each person, even in the same program, has different goals and different interests and you know, like in a film program there’s so many different areas that you could be interested in. And so, it’s like Josh’s job to figure out, what does this person want to get out of this program and it’s a lot of individual tailoring.

ANNA: Right. So, two things came to mind for me. One, just because I have some inside knowledge, like how well loved he is, as everyone can imagine. His students think he’s amazing and the endowed chair and all the things that he’s done. And so, I had to do it, Josh! He’s bringing his passion to this position and it’s working, for him, for the students, for the school. And so, I think it’s just a really good reminder of like, we don’t have to box ourselves in, in the way that it’s always been done. We can succeed and have this life that we love by really finding our core principles and by living those core principles.

But then the other piece that popped out, we talk about it from a parents’ point of view, or I talk about it specifically, like I didn’t want to have the conflicts. So, for me, it was worth doing the work of, collaborating and whatever, because it just feels better. But I feel like it’s probably the same for you too, Josh, like yeah, you could give them tests and do, and maybe there would be some things that would be easier about just handing them and they regurgitate it. But it’s like, for you, I think it’s got to be so much more energizing and fun to have this collaborative relationship. And so, I love that piece of it, too.

JOSH: Yeah, absolutely. Because I think one of the things I kind of miss from working in film production like professionally and not teaching, is that it’s purely collaborative. It’s high energy. It’s all these leaders together creating new works. School is kind of not for that, but I can create that environment in my classes and so, I can still be in that every day. So, I kind of get to do my first and second loves simultaneously. It’s perfect. And so, I’m very lucky in that regard.

PAM: I think that’s such a great point, too, that we can bring our full selves, as you were saying, Anna, we don’t have to say, oh, this is the school framework, this is the way it goes. I need to kind of shut down those other pieces of me to just do this thing the way it’s expected to be done. Yet, when we can bring our full selves, yes, it takes a lot of energy, but it’s in service of something that I love and enjoy and I get to feel fulfilled. Is that the way you feel? I’m sure exhausted and all those pieces, but it also seems like it would be fulfilling, like you said, to cultivate that environment that you enjoy, so that they can experience an environment that is more similar to when they go out in the world to do that work.

JOSH: Yeah. And I think, demonstrating the joy of what you do is important, too. Because especially, what I’m training them for and what they’re doing at school, this career is crazy, right? It’s very entrepreneurial. You’re very independent contractor-y. You’re on your own in a way. And when you finally get on a show, you’re working like 80, 90-hour weeks. It’s crazy.

And if you don’t absolutely love it, you’re going to be miserable. So, I’m trying to show, the enthusiasm I have right now, we need to be at that. And so, I’m not going to tell them that, but I’m going to demonstrate it, because if you’re not at that level, you’re going to burn out in like a couple years. You’re never going to make it. It’s just too intense.

PAM: Yes. I’m just thinking about Michael and yes, the film sets are just intense, long hours and unexpected. Show up tomorrow, 6:00 AM, let’s go. It’s fascinating. It’s a world unto itself, and yet to be able to just demonstrate, show them with your enthusiasm, that that’s kind of the level of love, like if you don’t love it this much, then you have to try something else. If this just feels like, ugh.

Because that’s it, especially if they’re fresh out of high school, it may not be, but what you’re giving them is an experience that helps them see if this really is a good match for them.

JOSH: Right. And for some people, like I’m teaching them how to make movies, like that’s what we’re there to learn about. But then after taking a semester or two, they might realize, you know what? I just wanted to get better at making webcam videos. And that’s fine. But they discovered that by being around things. And so, if I can help that, that’s fantastic. I’ve had lots of those conversations of like, actually I’m thinking about this other thing, but it’s still related to media in some way, which is why I was drawn to this as a word, because some counselor said the word film and I ended up in your class. And we do also have people that become directors and cinematographers and that thing, too. We have all of those, but again, it just becomes listening to them and trying to help them as much as I can if they need it.

PAM: That’s so beautiful. So beautiful. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us, Josh. I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts and your experience. It was so interesting to hear.

JOSH: Yeah, it was great. I listen to these all the time, so it’s funny to be on the other side.

ANNA: We’re glad to have you.

PAM: Thanks so much, Josh. We very much appreciate it. Have a wonderful day.

ERIKA: You, too.

JOSH: Thank you. Bye.