We are back with another episode in our Unschooling Stumbling Blocks series and this time, we’re talking about how it’s not the unschooling!

It can be really common for newer unschoolers to blame unschooling for the things that come up in their family lives. Unschooling was a big new change in their lives, and so it can feel like any problems that arise are probably due to that big new change. For conflicts about screen time or bedtime or food choices or communication, it might feel easier to blame unschooling, because then there’s something to change, something to fix, so that maybe the problem will go away.

But often when parents really dig down and are honest about what’s going on for their families, they will often find that it’s not really about unschooling. And so, examining this area can be really helpful when we come up against challenges or have areas of discomfort. In our conversation, we talked about how to approach the issues that come up in our lives regardless of whether our kids go to school or not, and the potential benefits of just forgetting about the word “unschooling” for a while!

It was a really fun conversation and we hope you find it helpful on your unschooling journey!

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

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

The Living Joyfully Network

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

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

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

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

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

Before we get started, I wanted to encourage you to check out our shop where you can find books, courses, coaching, and information about the Living Joyfully Network. The shop has resources and support for every stage of your journey.

You can find the link in the show notes, or you can visit LivingJoyfullyShop.com. Okay, so today’s episode is called, It’s Not The Unschooling, and I’m really excited about this one. But Erika, do you want to get us started?

ERIKA:  I do. I think it might sound a little funny on an unschooling podcast to have an episode called, It’s Not the Unschooling, but we actually had a monthly theme in the Network by this name a while back, because it can really be a helpful lens when we come up against challenges or have areas of discomfort.

So, I thought I would just introduce the idea. Basically, it can be really common, especially for newer unschoolers, but definitely not exclusively newer unschoolers, to blame unschooling for various issues that come up in their family lives. I mean, unschooling was this big new change in their lives, and so it can feel like any problems that arise are probably due to that big new change.

So, for example, conflicts about screen time or bedtime or food choices or communication when kids are making decisions or the family’s making decisions. It might feel easier to blame unschooling because then there’s something to change, something to fix, so that maybe the problem will go away. But often when parents really dig down and are honest about what’s going on for their families, they will often find that it’s not really about unschooling.

After all, unschooling, the way we describe it here is just living life. And so whether children are in school or not, whether you’re parenting in a more mainstream or authoritarian way or not, parents and children will still be figuring it out. How to manage screen time, what to eat, when and where to sleep, what decisions they’re going to make.

And so unschooling isn’t what causes those issues to exist, and we all will grapple with them in some way at some point as a family. And so often if I just play around with the thought of, would my kids being in school or would me being a strict authoritarian parent make this situation any easier? The answer is an easy no, it would only add more layers of difficulty. 

And so what I love about what I learned through the network and through my own unschooling journey is that it encourages me to focus on how my relationships I have with my children are feeling and it actually makes navigating some of those more challenging parts of life easier.

Easier sometimes feels like not quite the right word, because it’s sometimes not easy at all, but I feel more supported and feel better moving through the issues because of the relationships that we have. And so I could feel good about my choices when I’m prioritizing my relationships and treating my children the way they want to be treated.

PAM: I love that very much and I am very excited about this topic because it was something that I experienced quite a bit as we moved to unschooling, because my kids were a little bit older, they were in school when I discovered unschooling. And I think one of the big pieces as I was playing around with it was recognizing that what unschooling did was open up so many more choices for me.

The first one, they don’t have to go to school. They don’t have to do this. I, as a parent, don’t have to do that. It opened up so many choices just through discovering and exploring what it meant.  

It was the discovery of unschooling that opened up my eyes to the fact that this could be a choice, that there wasn’t just one right way. So it was easy for others looking in and just blame the unschooling. But what I realized exactly as you were saying, Erika, when I asked myself, but if they went back to school, how would this be different?

Because I realized it’s one of those cases where my eyes were open and I couldn’t just go back and close them because I changed something else. Even if they go to school, I know it’s still a choice. Now, I will forever know that that’s a choice. Same with all the other issues. It was for me, the unschooling journey that opened my eyes to so much of it, to the relationships, to even more consensual day-to-day living.

So, even though I could kind of point to unschooling as the catalyst, it wasn’t the fault of unschooling, things wouldn’t go back. I would not be comfortable going back to life before discovering it, even if at this point. At that point had they ever chosen or wanted to go back to school or life circumstances changed and they needed to go back to school for a while or, you know, whatever came up, I was now a changed person. I couldn’t go back to who I was before, but it still meant it wasn’t the fault of unschooling, right? Even if they went back to school, I would still need to make those parenting choices and have conversations with my partner and now conversations with my kids, et cetera, et cetera.

ANNA: Yeah, I think it’s so interesting. Why I am excited to talk about this is what we’ve seen, especially on the network, but really even back in the day of the Yahoo groups, when people came with we’re unschooling and this is terrible. This thing is terrible and we kept thinking, okay, but that’s not really the unschooling.

But what we noticed was that it was a place to get stuck. Right? It was a place where they lost all creativity and as soon as we all would start talking, it happens on the network too. We’d just start talking, well, have you talked to them about this? Or What does that feel like? Or, how’s that relationship going? Or what are these other contextual pieces that are happening in your family? Then you see them just open up a little bit. Because it’s not about the unschooling. We can just start talking about what’s working for our family, what’s working for each individual, what it does it feel like when we have these conversations. And so we kind of challenged people in that month to just kind of let go of the word unschooling, which again, like you said,  Erika, it seems that people are going, wait a minute, isn’t this the unschooling podcast?

But it really is about life and relationships, at its core. I think if you find that the word is causing problems in your discussion, whether it be with your spouse or your mother-in-law or someone else, let it go because there isn’t one way to be an unschooler. And I think that’s another big piece.

I think when we are looking at that, where we’re kind of blaming the unschooling, we’re putting unschooling ahead of our connection with our kids or what’s actually happening for the individual people. And that’s what we want to be cautious about. And interesting. Pam, you and I have talked about this before, that unschooling wasn’t something that I talked about with my kids, it wasn’t like a day-to-day conversation, especially when they were younger. It really was just like you said, Erika, we’re living life and we’re figuring things out about each other, and we’re being in relationship and we’re exploring the world. 

And so I think it’s so interesting to just let go of something that might be causing you to narrow in your focus. And so that’s why I’m excited to talk about it today too. Because I think especially if you’re finding there are some rubs with your partner or with people in your family, see if that’s at play because a lot of times it is.

ERIKA: I love that. And it kind of feels like two things. So, one is this word unschooling, is the word a trigger for someone in your family? Is the word a trigger for yourself? Does it bring up a lot of feelings of, I have to do something a certain way because that’s a sign that maybe there are some other layers wrapped up in there.

And then the other part is just reaching for what was familiar, reaching for what I knew as a kid, or the control, right? Because we’ve seen that when things are stressful, when you get overwhelmed, you want to grab for control. That’s just like a human impulse. What can I control to get a handle on this situation? 

And so maybe you’ll find yourself thinking things would just be so much easier if I could just make my kids go to bed at eight. Would it help me make my life better if I could just control them in some way. And so it can feel like a solution when it first pops into your head that the solution might be, I just need more control.

But then if you really start thinking about what that means, it’s really about I’m going to stop listening to my kids. I don’t care what they say anymore. This is damaging my relationship with them if I go down that path of thinking control will make my life better. 

It just feels like a possible solution if I’m getting super overwhelmed. And so I think reaching for that familiar, well other parents just tell their kids what to do and they have to do it. And that makes life easy. If I follow the full thought process of what that means, it means disconnecting from my kids.

It means going against the things that I believe about the world, that everyone knows what’s best for them and I want to support them in learning about themselves. And so it’s separate from even the word unschooling. Those are two different things. Either the reaching for control or the blaming, this word, this scary word of unschooling when you first get to it.

I think it’s really interesting and digging down beneath, what’s really going on for me? What’s the context that’s causing me to have this kind of strong response to the idea of unschooling?

PAM: And I think that’s just such a beautiful and important stage of the unschooling journey. 

And as I was thinking about it at the beginning, because this was a bigger thing at the beginning of our journey, because everything seemed to point to unschooling like I was talking about before. And I loved your idea, Anna, about just not using the word, try to have conversations for a little bit without using that word because it kind of becomes a catchall.

But if you can get underneath it, to really better describe, it helped me with conversations with my partner because unschooling was often coming up, but it was like, oh, but it’s grown kind of beyond that. And I think another thing that can trip us up, and we have had a whole series on the podcast about unschooling rules, but sometimes we can pull up the, oh, if we’re unschooling, we do this right? And that can really trip us up too, because that’s us conflating so many of the ideas that kind of come with unschooling. So, parenting styles and relationships and all those tools and different aspects of life.

We talk about them, in a way that helps unschooling thrive, which is really just learning through living this life. That’s where you eventually get to. But I do think at the beginning you can want to do unschooling really well, want to be a great unschooling parent.

What does it mean? I have those check boxes, right? And then unschooling gets into our minds in every aspect. And then it is so tempting to blame the unschooling when we start to get frustrated. Why if I just, if they just listened, I’d have this perfect solution and everybody. This would go so much more smoothly if we just all did this one thing, which is that kind of slippery slope.

If you’re valuing relationships, if you want to make that a priority in your life, which is part of choosing unschooling, right? It’s really hard to have an authoritarian, relationship or parenting style with your kids and have unschooling thrive. So, really just trying to not use the word unschooling for a while can help you get to the foundations of what does this actually mean to me?

And yeah, go back and listen to the unschooling rules podcasts, too. Because it’s not like they’re wrong, it’s just that they don’t have the context. If we just jump to unschooling says we don’t have a bedtime. And then you just take that in. There is just so little context for you to get your feet wet and really understand what’s going on.

So for a while, just not using that word I think can be really helpful to recognize how much of it really isn’t the unschooling.

ANNA: It’s true. I want to go back to what you were talking about, Erika, because I think that was an important piece for me. Because we can go to that quick snap judgment of, well this wouldn’t be a problem if we did this, or this is why this is a problem.

Taking that extra time, slowing things down, and actually walking through what it would look like helped me understand where I wanted to spend my energy. So, if we look at just school to take an example. Well, if they were in school, then we wouldn’t have whatever this problem is or this sibling fight during the day or this, whatever thing’s been going on.

If I walked through that, I recognized we’d be bringing a whole host of other things into our life. And so did I want to be at service of this other institution, making our days and weeks and years rotate around that schedule? Did I want to be worrying about whether they’re going to do homework or this or that?

Or did I want to figure out this problem in front of me, which has nothing to do with school, or not school, which is just basically, maybe we need something. Maybe I need to be hearing what’s happening between my two girls, or we need to figure out something else in our life. And so for me, it was about where do I want to spend my energy? 

Which speaks to what you were saying, Pam, and I want to spend my energy on creating strong relationships. I don’t want to spend my energy fitting into another system necessarily. And if my child said I want to go into the system, absolutely be there to support them, that feels very different.

But if I’m just getting frustrated and saying, oh, it’s because we’re unschooling. That’s why they’re staying up all night or doing X. And it’s interesting because I think when you’ve been in other worlds, we have unschooled all along because it just happened naturally for us. But in the early years, David was working in a corporate environment.

And would just hear about the nighttime frustrations and all the things that were happening with very mainstream families, choosing all the conventional paths. And so it really does help to walk through it. 

That’s where it gets us stuck, right? It gets us stuck on, it’s the unschooling, when in fact these are broader issues when we’re talking about food and sleep and parenting and sibling relationships, and all of that has really nothing to do with unschooling.

An unschooling environment can actually make some of those things easier, but it’s not a cure all and it’s not the cause. So, watch for when your thoughts are being limited by that, to just say, is this really a problem that would exist if we weren’t unschooling? And what would it look like and what other things might it be inviting in if we did?

Because I think it just, and for me, that’s always, I always talk about just slowing it down, just giving myself a pause, thinking a little bit more about it, walking through some of those scenarios, how would I feel in those different scenarios before I just run with the snap judgment and say it’s the unschooling.

ERIKA: Yeah, I had a thought when you were talking about the belief that unschooling means everything’s always going to be easy and great. That also might be a barrier here. Where we’re thinking, if I am having a problem, it’s definitely that we’re doing unschooling wrong, or that unschooling is the issue.

Because we’re not supposed to have any problems anymore. I found unschooling, now it should be easy. And so that could be another little place where we could get stuck and just have to think through, do that thought experiment that always works for me. Would it be an easier or a better life for me and my kids if we did this, if we sent them to school, if whatever.

It just opens up so many thoughts. And then I also feel like what you were talking about went back to Pam’s thing about the unschooling journey changing us. It’s about opening our minds to all of the possibilities. 

I know you’ve talked about this before Anna before, that kind of comfort and safety that comes from being in the system and not being responsible for the different decisions that you’re making. And so there could be something about those mainstream parents that David was hearing, where it’s like they don’t really feel like it’s on them though.

They’re having the bedtime struggles, but they’ve heard what you’re supposed to do and they’re doing what you’re supposed to do. And if it’s not working, it’s just, not my fault, nothing we could do. It’s just really hard and we can complain about it, but I think the unschooling journey opened my mind, like you were saying, Pam, to just all the choices.

These are the actual choices, and we don’t have to be doing the one way. There is no one right way. And so now that I know that, there isn’t really a way to go back to trusting the system to make all of the decisions for me, or believing that there’s a right way and trying to find it, that’s just not how I can think of it anymore.

And so, in that way, unschooling is to blame, but only in that, now I know about all the choices. I do think that part’s interesting.

PAM: Yeah, I love that it really does just kind of open your eyes to so much. At first I thought, especially since my kids were leaving school, okay, we’re not doing school so how are we going to learn instead?

But then through unschooling that first year, it just opened up a whole world of new choices and curiosity. Hopefully, I don’t forget. There were two things I wanted to mention. One is when we’re doing this processing, I always go back to the beginner’s mind. When I tunnel in and I hear myself saying things like, but what’s the right way?

What’s the best way? Is unschooling the best way and everybody should be doing it? If I’m using language like that, it’s a clue. I don’t have to tell myself I’m wrong at all, but I want to open up to more possibilities because then I’m looking only for the things that match the one thing that I think is the right answer.

And that just throws me off. I’m not going to really understand the context. We talk about context so much. I’m not really going to see the people, the actual real people in my family. Which kind of leads to the other point I wanted to make. 

When you’re hearing those different stories from other parents. I think often the thought is, I’m following all the recommendations, doing all the right things to get them to go to sleep, et cetera, and they’re not going to sleep. Then they can start blaming their kids for being wrong. They are not doing this. There is something wrong with them. I’m telling them, you go and you lie down and you listen and the lights off and you’ll go to sleep.

And not seeing the thing that we talk about so much, that people are different. I remember trying to help my kids go to sleep before when they were in school. That whole kind of evening thing, trying to help them individually and how they liked to get to sleep.

But so many of the recommendations were like, you say goodnight, turn off the light, close the door. They’ve had their snack, they’ve had their drink. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And so then you really think that I’m doing all the right things. My kids are just not performing correctly.

It’s a fascinating piece. And yes. Think we just lost Erika there for a second. 

ANNA: I know. So I’m hoping she’s going to, she’s going to pop back in, but I’m going to keep talking. Okay, good, she’s coming back to us. Something she said I thought was really important and there was one little nuance I wanted to add to it that got me sparked when she was talking.

So basically that piece of, sometimes it’s easier to hand over our responsibility to the system, right? Well we’re doing all the things we’re supposed to do, so then I’m not responsible. If they don’t get educated at school, it’s the school’s problem. It’s not here. 

So I think it’s interesting to think about. I want to ask myself, am I wanting to offload some responsibility? But then another nuance to that is what’s so beautiful about what we describe and talk about is that it isn’t all on me. We’re each on our own journey and it is about helping and facilitating each other. 

So it’s not like this one thing needs to have all the answers. And then if I’m going to let go of that system, then I have to have all the answers. Me, Anna, the mom, the whatever, you know? No. We are exploring this together. We’re figuring out what works together. And that’s why for me, whether they choose to go to school or not go to school is really irrelevant.

It really is just, are we supporting the path that we all are wanting to take and exploring things in the way that we want to explore? So I think watching that piece was helpful for me. Am I trying to not have the responsibility and then, okay, if I take it on am I taking on just my pieces or am I trying to take on everybody’s pieces thinking I’m the only person that can solve it, fix it.

Thinking I’m ultimately responsible. I think parents are handed that a lot in our culture, right? That you’re responsible for raising your children. I guess what I learned for myself and my core beliefs are just that again, we’re all humans on our own individual journey, and I love being there to walk with my kids, support them, and facilitate things. But in the end, I’m not responsible for their life. That’s really up to them, the choices they make, and I can provide information and I can support, and I can give them the context of what’s happening around. But ultimately what I see is that they’re quite capable of making those choices for themselves.

And so I think there’s some interesting pieces to explore there. If you find yourself wobbling a little bit to go, okay, wait, am I taking on too much? Am I wanting to give it away? Because what’s interesting is when we give it away to a system, we’re kind of giving away other people’s power as well. So is there a discussion there? I don’t know. That is just what sparked when you were talking, Erika, so I’m glad you’re back. 

ERIKA: I don’t think I have more to add about that, but I do love the things we talked about, just noticing those little things where it’s rubbing or where I’m reaching for control, reaching for a solution, or the one right way. Any of those things, I think that is kind of a sign to start digging a little bit deeper. 

PAM: I would take that and then not using the word unschooling for a while and see what you discover. I think that will be super interesting to see. Well, how else would I describe it? Because so much of it is just life and relationships and who we want to be.

ANNA: Yeah, absolutely. So, thank you both so much. And to everyone listening to this conversation. I really enjoyed it and I hope you did as well. And I hope you’ll consider joining us at the Living Joyfully Network. We love to dive into these kinds of topics and think about it in all the different ways, and we have such amazing families there that are into these discussions as well.

So we would love to welcome you. To learn more and to join us. Just follow the link in the show notes, or you can go to the LivingJoyfullyshop.com and click on community in the menu. Thank you again for joining us. And thank you, the two of you. It was great to see you.

PAM: Thanks very much. Bye bye!

ERIKA: Bye!