EU363: Deschooling

Exploring Unschooling

Deschooling is a bit of a buzzword in homeschooling and alternative education spaces at the moment. So, let’s dive in!

Pam, Anna, and Erika talk about the definition of the word, what that transition to unschooling can look like for parents and adults, the importance of letting go of expectations, some of the paradigm shifts that happen during deschooling, and how deschooling is something that we revisit over time as we reach new seasons in our children’s lives.

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

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

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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 seasons—in unschooling and in life. Come and be part of the conversation!

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

PAM AND ERIKA: Hello!

ANNA: Hello! Before we get started, I wanted to encourage you to visit the Living Joyfully Shop. There you’ll find all of Pam’s books, our growing catalog of courses, and you can join our online community, and also book coaching calls with us. We are really having fun creating this one-stop shop to support you as you navigate relationships with your loved ones and deep dive into your unschooling journey. You can follow the link in the show notes or just go to livingjoyfullyshop.com.

So, today we are going to be talking about deschooling. It seems that lately it’s kind of popping up again and it’s a word that’s maybe reaching a bit of a wider audience as people start to pull away from traditional schools for a variety of reasons. But people have questions about it. So, we thought it would be helpful to talk about it again. And I know we’ve talked about it before, but just keep digging in about what it looks like, what it can help us with, how it’s an ongoing process. So, I think we all have a lot to say about this. But Erika, would you like to get us started?

ERIKA: I would, yes. So, I think deschooling really has become kind of a buzzword in homeschooling and alternative education spaces, as people are really looking at the ways that school isn’t working for their children. This word comes up. Most of the time, the word “deschooling” is referring to a process of examining schoolish assumptions and beliefs and questioning those. So, getting out of a school mindset, as well as decompressing and healing from any time that has been spent in school.

And I’ll give you a couple of examples of schoolish assumptions and beliefs that you might start to question during deschooling, so that you know what kind of things we’re talking about. So, like believing that learning can only happen in a classroom, or that reading has to be happening by a certain age, that children need to be around a bunch of other children their same age, that mistakes are to be avoided, that grades are the most important thing, that everyone should be following the same educational path, that you can’t be successful without college, that children have to be made to do things that they don’t want to do, and that there are certain topics that they need to learn at a certain age, or even that children need to be taught in order for them to learn. And so, you can see just by listening to those, that these are major mindset shifts that are happening.

Deschooling is a mental and physical transition away from school for us as parents and for our kids, and all of the thought processes and choices that are wrapped up in that transition. And I know that today, we want to dive into a few important points about deschooling. First, that it looks different for children and parents, and we can explore what that can look like.

And we also really want to emphasize, like Anna was saying, that this is not a one-and-done, checklist kind of thing, where you could check it off. Anytime a belief comes up or a new phase in our child’s life comes up, more deschooling can happen.

I heard a question recently that was something like, is it okay if I feel like we need to go back to deschooling? Is it okay that our life is still looking like this? And I think the mom was really referring to the amount of time it seemed to be taking for her child to decompress and heal from his time in school. It seemed like he wasn’t interested in the usual things, which is just so common. And so, I think it’s valuable to envision deschooling not as a phase with an end point, and to really sink into allowing that transition to take the time it does and be ready to question your beliefs and give plenty of time and space for healing along the way as things come up for your family. And I know you both probably have a lot to say about this topic, so I’m excited to see where our conversation goes.

PAM: I will say, a million things bubbled up while you’re talking there, Erika. It’s like, oh my gosh, yes.

Maybe I’ll start from the kids’ point of view, since I’m the only one who had kids in school going through this deschooling process for them. If I had to put a timeline on it, at least a year of deschooling. My kids were only in school for a handful of years. My eldest was in grade four or five, I don’t even remember, but one of those. But yes, the messages that they came home with were strong.

My daughter who enjoyed school, I was actually a little bit surprised when she said, “Yeah, sure, I would prefer to stay home. That’s great.” But she had gotten the message that she wasn’t a very good reader. And so, when she wasn’t being forced to read, it’s like, “I don’t read.” And don’t put books within 10 feet of this poor girl for those first months, because it’s like, “Oh, I don’t have to do that? Okay, I’m going to step back from that.”

I wrote a whole article, we’ll link to that, about her journey with reading. To watch her step back from that and then to come to it herself was super fascinating and interesting, to the moment when she’s like, “I’m a bookworm!” She declared that. You could just see the connection she’s making to like, “A year or so ago, I hated books. I hated reading. I would swear I couldn’t read,” all those pieces, but to give her the space to come to that, a lot of deschooling in there.

Same with my son, his challenge was writing. And I remember when he picked up a pencil. It was at least a year after he left school, he was like, “I haven’t written by hand in ages.” And it was a choice to finally pick it up, but so much trauma and crap all wrapped up in that from his school experience. Those were a little bit more obvious to me, but there is the whole host of other stuff about the environment and stuff that we might not know about. So, to give them that space to just decompress.

And we’ve got lots of stories in the archive of the podcast, even young adults talking about, “I laid on the couch for a year. I just needed to really decompress entirely,” and for us to judge, like, “Oh, your experience wasn’t that bad. Why haven’t you recovered this quickly?” It takes as long as it takes.

And that was a fascinating thing for me that ties to what you were saying, Erika, that there is no timeline. “Why is this coming back up? Why do I feel like we still have some more deschooling to do?”

For me, and I talked about it in my first book Free to Learn, which is my five biggest deschooling a-ha moments or paradigm shifts that were most valuable for me, but the light bulb moment of my initial deschooling phase was when I didn’t really care if I was done deschooling at all. It’s like, oh, this is just part of life. Stuff comes up, I’ve got another layer to peel back. Oh gee, this has been my work all along. And it’s like, oh, I haven’t really had to peel back a lot of stuff lately. I think we’re unschooling. We’re just jumping right in there. All is good. But it no longer was that checklist, another school mindset to work through. It’s like, oh, we need to do this and this and I can say I’m an unschooler when my deschooling’s done. All those messages. That’s what you’re going to be shedding for the next little while.

For my kids, because they were a little bit younger, nine and seven, and my youngest had only been in for a few months, it was really diving into play, because they had so much time at school that they had missed engaging with the things that they really liked to do at home. And I call this in my journey book “the belly of the whale transition,” because we really cocooned at home for probably at least six months to a year, just regrounding ourselves, just decompressing from all the, “We’ve got to be out there, we’ve got to do things on everybody else’s timetable.” Just exploring what our timetable looked like. I thought we’d be out doing all these things, because we can now. But no, really just to decompress and just sink into the things that we love to do while I was also peeling back all these layers.

I didn’t even realize how many questions, things that I had just absorbed of, this is the way things are. I know we have all, I’m sure, suggested many times when you come to unschooling or you decide, you know what? I want to try out this thing, to really give it that window, give it that six months to a year. Nothing’s going to happen that after a year, year and a half, five years, your kids can’t go back to school. Not to think of it as, this is a lifelong decision that we’re making to take the kids out of school. This is just something we’re trying out, but give it that window. Give yourself and your kids that window to decompress, to do some serious deschooling and just explore what does life look like instead?

ANNA: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s so huge. So, my kids never went to school, and so I would say what my experience with deschooling is much more about me, but I think it really fits for everyone, whether you’re taking your kids out or not. So much of it is about our own journey, because I was in school for a very long time and really I didn’t have a bad experience and I absorbed these different things from it. But like that checklist you went through, Erika, it’s just like, there are so many things that we don’t even realize that we’ve absorbed and taken in as the one way, the only way.

And so, while I was able to see my kids really just exploring learning, I found, for me, there was layer after layer after layer that would bubble up for me. And a lot of times it would be maybe a transition age or some kind of milestone that passed that looks a little bit different when you’re not in school and you’re not in certain environments that I would be like, okay, what’s bubbling up for me here? And have to do that work to pause and lean back into my kids. Look at what they’re doing, look at our life as it is versus how it’s comparing.

And so, I think that’s such a big piece of it, is just really understanding that it’s going to keep bubbling up, because we have been trained that this is the one way that it works and the one way that it can happen. But wow, when you can open that up even just a little bit, you see your kids healing, you see your own healing, you see generational trauma healing. It’s just so powerful to give that space, like you said, Pam, just don’t put anything on it. Just give it some space.

ERIKA: Yeah. I think it really sinks in how individual this deschooling journey would be for each child and each parent. If we’re thinking there’s a right way to do it, that’s going to be frustrating, you know? And so, for kids, you can look at that same list of beliefs and see, if a child’s been in school for a while, they’re going to be picking up on a lot of those beliefs themselves, but from their angle, from the student angle.

And so, it could be things like you were talking about of, I’m not good at this, or even as terrible as, I’m stupid or I’m not good at things. And those are really heavy messages that they may have internalized. And so, when there is that space now that they’re not being controlled, not being told to do all these things, it’s just space to start asking, who am I now? And that’s big stuff. That’s really big stuff. And so, it makes sense that it can take time. It makes sense that it might look like doing nothing. And I think that panics some parents at first, because they’re used to the school schedule and all of this activity happening and so much, where it’s so busy, never time for anything. And deschooling could look really like the opposite of that. It could look like we’re doing nothing. We’re just sitting here. They just want to watch TV.

But if you can think of it almost from a trauma lens of like, this is a healing that needs to be happening, then maybe it’s easier to give more space to that and just know that not every child is going to have that response to this transition, but some will. Everyone is different.

ANNA: And we’ve seen things in the network where people’s children, I mean four years down the road, will start remembering things or things can happen. So, it is so unique, that journey. And I think I want to just speak also briefly to, if you haven’t pulled them out yet, but you’re in this situation where something’s rubbing, which may have brought you here, to listen to this.

This is really just a call to trust yourself, because there’s some messages. Because I think all of us for different reasons, even though my kids never went to school, I thought they were going to, I got hit with these messages of, something’s not right here, something’s not going to work here. This doesn’t feel good to progress along this path that I thought was going to be okay.

And for you, Pam, I’m sure there were messages along the way. And so, I think, too, part of this is just really starting to trust in that voice inside of us. I think that’s part of the layers of deschooling too, is just getting to, you know your kids. You know them way better than any teacher, any school, any institution. You know what feels good to your family, and so that’s starting to build your why when you’re going to make a big decision to pull them out or not put them in, because sometimes it’s that, right? It’s this preschooler that I don’t think I can put them in, or they don’t want to go, or they go for a bit and then it feels terrible and they’re crying and we’re being told, oh, just leave them. They’ll be fine later on. It’s like, no, if your heart’s telling you something different, part of this is just setting aside those outside voices to really tune into what you know.

PAM: That really sounds exactly like my journey and it took a while before I discovered even the word homeschooling. I would tell my kids, sorry, you have to go to school. Let’s try and make this as fun as possible, or whatever. But for me, the root of it was, to speak to what you were talking about, Anna, was, when something didn’t feel right to me, I would just continue to question the premises. Why? Why do we have to do it? So, if the context, the constraint, is that school has to be part of our lives, how can we work with that.

So, I was working with schools, I was giving presentations to teachers, I was talking with principals, just doing all the things there. Trusting ourselves when something is not feeling right and just being, for me, open and curious. It even goes back then to why isn’t this working? Why isn’t this a fit? What’s up here? How can we play around, as we were talking about on the last episode with Kendel, how can we play with the environment?

And it was in that constant research, that constant trying to find how this might work for us, that I came across an article that mentioned homeschooling and I’m like, what the heck is that? And is that legal? Because that sounds awesome. And oh my gosh, it was not long before I found out it was legal.

It was not long before we said, let’s try this. Because that’s the piece. Just follow what you’re feeling, trust what you’re feeling, and start asking questions, because it’s okay to ask questions. We’re not going to be arrested for our thoughts. We can question those fundamental things that just feel so true, like that we only learn when somebody teaches us something. How are we going to learn something if somebody doesn’t teach us something? But my gosh, we could spend an hour talking just about that question.

But ask yourself questions. Just be open to the fact that there may be other answers than the one that we’re so used to, the one that we’ve just absorbed growing up, or the one that we were explicitly told, you have to go to school because you need to learn these things. It can really shake our foundations to start asking these kinds of questions. But, oh my gosh, it is so valuable.

It’s baby steps and it’s playing with things. Is that a possibility? We played with, oh look, yeah, we can bring them home. We can see how it goes. Rocco and I talked about that in an episode a long time ago. But that is the really interesting thing, when something doesn’t feel right, just keep at it. Keep trying to figure something out. When something’s not working for anyone in our family, for any of our kids, just keep diving into that and learn more and just grow your own web of understanding about what’s going on. It is a very interesting journey and I love the call to adventure. What is it that’s just not sitting well for us, and what can we do about that?

ERIKA: Right. Yeah. I like how you describe yours as being playful and taking these little steps. Because for me it felt more like just whooshing along, this knowledge explosion and all the big mindset shifts that happened for me in maybe the beginning year when I first started reading about unschooling. And so, it didn’t feel slow in my mind or like I was taking baby steps, but that’s why it’s the unschooling journey. It might be a different thing that gets us to start thinking about it. And so, in my case, it was that feeling of, I don’t think I can put this child in preschool. That’s step one. What happens next?

And so, I think that deschooling phase, if we can think of it like that, if we can give ourselves space to be learning without worrying about all the little details, like how’s it going to turn out and what do I need to be doing? And getting ourselves worked up in that question that I hate, which is, is it all going to work out? And just trying to stay in the moment with our process and letting our kids have their own process, so much goodness can come from that deschooling phase. So much learning, so much more connection, so much more trust. But it’s going to take putting your worrying, thinking brain, all of that stuff, to the side a bit to give all of the family members space.

ANNA: And I think acknowledging, too, that it is a big step. It’s a big step to step out of the norm, because when you said that, and I don’t like it either, is it all going to work out? kind of thing, we don’t know that about school either. And if you’re getting messages that something’s not working for your child in school, it’s probably leaning on the side of there’s going to be problems down the road.

But I think why people stay is, well, but that’s what I’m supposed to do. There’s maybe some safety in thinking it’s not all coming to us. And so, that’s part of the deschooling, too, to realize they’re on their own unique journey like you. It really is about keeping focused on the moment and what’s in front of you and what does this child need in this moment? And what do you need to heal and to reconnect?

And for us, the priority is always the relationship. So, we’ll always come back to that when we’re talking about it. But I think just give yourself that space and not walk too far down that road, because like you said, Pam, it could be five years and then you go back into a more formal environment of school or something else. And there’s no right or wrong way, no one path.

But I think the more you tune into your inner voice, that’s going to lead you and your child, again, to keep that connection strong, to get the most out of whatever the experience is. So, just listen to those niggling pieces.

But I do just want to acknowledge, I get it. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we have a Network that supports people, because it is a little scary to step outside of the norm, more so for some people than others, depending on your whole family situation, and the support you have in your life. So, it’s interesting to think about and just baby steps and taking the leap. Sometimes, it’s taking the leap. Either way, it’s okay.

PAM: Oh yeah. It depends on what lens or framework you’re thinking about. Because it does feel like a huge leap. Okay. So many things! Let’s go back to that question. I remember one of my big a-ha moments or paradigm shifts while I was deschooling was from that question, is it all going to work out? to, oh, if I focus on this moment in front of me and we work through this moment in front of me and then we have another moment and we work through that moment, it’s like, oh, but we are just compounding a bunch of moments in which we worked through things. So, we will just continue to do that however long into the future I want to worry about it. So, that really helped me get back to the moment, rather than tripping into the future. If I want everything to work out in the end, well darn it, I better make this moment work out.

Another piece that bubbled up is, I remember so much the journey of deciding to take the kids out of school. And how, oh my gosh, finally when I took them out, it felt like, okay, phew. We finally decided. We made this big leap and it felt like that was the end. We’re done now. But literally, that’s the start of the deschooling. It is like, oh my gosh, there is actually so much more. This is actually the call to adventure, okay, we’re homeschooling now. Again, keeping it light enough that it’s not like, oh my god, I have committed to my kids being home with me for their entire educational career or however you want to frame it at that time, but when you can take that pressure off and the weight of expectations that we can put on ourselves. Even though we feel like, oh, we’re done. We finally decided we did the thing. Yay. We can live now. It’s actually the beginning of the journey. I think that was another realization along the way. So fun.

And then the other thing I just wanted to mention that I learned when I was home with them and deep in this deschooling was how valuable it was to look to my kids, because they really were my guides on this journey. Yes, I talked about some of the messages that they had absorbed and that they were deschooling through, but with this space now to be themselves, to choose what they’re doing, so much of that I saw in action with them, eventually I was like, oh, but I could do that, too.

So, I was giving them all that space and then I was like, Pam, you need to do this, this, this. Get all that stuff. How am I going to fit it in? Nope, you’ve got to get this stuff done. To realize that I could look to them and see the way they were approaching their days and it’s like, oh, what a beautifully human way to go at their days. When they were doing something that they enjoyed doing, I could see that mistakes were no big deal. They were just, oh, that didn’t work. I’m going to try something else. That would’ve been the end of me. I was, okay, I can’t do that. If I’m not going to be good at that, let me go slink over here and do something else.
Because obviously, as you mentioned, I had many more years of school where I had absorbed that message in that long list you were talking about, Erika, that mistakes are bad. And so, there were just so many things that I could learn through watching my kids that really helped me in my deschooling journey. Just to notice and to realize, to open up that these things were actually questions. They weren’t definitive. They weren’t, kids can do that and adults have to do this. To realize that, oh, it’s just about being human and we all have these choices on our plate, and how cool is that?

ERIKA: Yeah. It feels like some of these beliefs are almost a little barrier between you and the person or the connection or between you and the reality of the present moment. And questioning some of them feels kind of like removing that barrier. And I feel like that can happen when the kids are still in school. If you’re feeling like your connection with your kid is not that strong connection, I feel like these beliefs might be putting these barriers in between. So, when you can notice those things and think, what am I believing right now?

It’s almost like the role of mom and the role of student/child and all of these different rules that we have internalized because of our time living in the culture. It’s like, once you realize, oh, I’m believing that learning only happens in a classroom, and so, that’s why I’m treating my child like this, like it’s the most important thing. I really like how much it increases connection and strengthens the relationship when you start questioning these beliefs.

ANNA: Okay. And something you just said there made me think about the roles. I feel like we’re handed a lot of fear or this belief that we can’t do it and that we can’t handle it, especially if our kids maybe have special needs or have some special things going on with them. No, the experts. The experts. This is just something that’s drilled into us in school and our culture.

And so, again, I think the call for me is, I am with this child 24/7. I know. And I can get resources and I can bring other things in, but I just always watch for if someone’s trying to separate you in that way. Trying to say that you don’t know your child or, oh no, they can push through that, because they need this thing. And so, just watch for that messaging. Because I think it’s so strong.

And so, a big piece of this deschooling, I think, is owning our agency, taking back that agency, like, wait a minute, I do know who I am. I know who my child is. And I’m going to advocate for them. And again, whatever that environment is, whether they stay in an environment that’s in school or not, it can really change things.

But like you saw, Pam, you can go into that environment and try to advocate, advocate, advocate, but it just has its own set of rules. And if you don’t fit right into that, it can be really hard for kids.

PAM: Yeah, it’s its own set of constraints and that’s why I spent years. How can we inside these constraints, try to make this manageable? So yeah, very interesting.

And I’m still back to the kids as guides. And another reason why, when you choose to try this out, commit to it, I think that larger window is so valuable. We say at least six months, but a year, like give really a year, like as you’ve heard us all saying about a year. About a year, just as what our experience was, not as in that’s our recommendation, but through experience that seems to be at least the minimum span.

But what it does, like you were saying, is it gives us the opportunity as we’re observing our kids and connecting with them and hanging out with them to see how learning unfolds. Because so often, we’re deschooling, as in, our kids are not going to be in a classroom. I know how they learn in a classroom. They’ve got a curriculum and a teacher who tells them. Okay. How else are they going to learn?

But we need that space to see the natural learning unfold, to give them the time to dive into their interests and the things they’re interested in, and to see the connections, to see the next interest and what they brought from that, to see like all the different things growing and how their lives are unfolding. And through that, you just see the learning that’s happening. So, you need the space for that. It helps you trust the process. It helps you understand the process.

In the last episode, Kendel talked about it, too. You can read the books and you can understand it intellectually, but what a world of difference when you actually see it unfolding with your own children. That is just a deeper understanding, because you’ve got more connections now. I had these three things that made sense from the book or from the group, wherever. But then to be able to add context to that from your own life, it really solidifies it. It becomes a truth. That is part of the deschooling process as well. Like, okay, this all makes so much sense to me and I’m going to embrace this and jump in. And now let’s actually see how it unfolds for our family.

Because that’s the other really fascinating thing is in a classroom, everybody needs to adapt to the classroom process. They have their procedures, they have their methods, and we need to adapt to that. Whereas when we’re unschooling and we have that space, we don’t have 30 kids. We’ve got our handful of kids. And all of a sudden, we see how different each child is.

And that is another beautiful part of the deschooling journey is to see what learning looks like. How do they like to learn something when they have an interest? How do they dive into it? How do they deal with frustration? That’s a fascinating thing. I think you mentioned, Erika, they won’t do hard things if we don’t make them do things. Oh my gosh.

When your kid has the space to do the things that they are actually interested in, you will see them hit hard things. You will sometimes see them move on to something else completely. You will sometimes see them push right through as hard, through tears and frustration and anger and all the pieces and still go at it. It is just beautiful to see how different it is for each child. And again, then you start to apply that to yourself, too. It can look completely different for me, my partner. It just opens your eyes to humanness, I think.

ERIKA: It feels more like seeing and getting to know your child as who they are, rather than seeing them through this school lens or student lens or the deficit focus and all the things that going to school makes us focus on. And just thinking about like the fun of all that.
I was thinking, deschooling also can be super fun. I know sometimes you talk about, when they first leave school, to just think about it as summer vacation, extended, to just keep going with that kind of mindset, because it’s like, if school didn’t exist, what would you do?

What are the things that are fun to do together? What are the things that would make you feel more connected? What are the things that your child has been just waiting to be able to do and hasn’t had the time to do? So, all of that can actually be really fun. There’s the healing and there’s all this thinking work that happens. But there’s also just the fun and love of getting reconnected and actually just doing the things that you all love to do.

ANNA: That just reminds me of maybe what you were talking about with the woman who asked the question. Sometimes we’re kind of like, is this okay? We’re having too much fun. Is this okay? And it’s like, yes, it’s okay. So, I do think that’s a piece of it.

PAM: Yeah, that’s exactly it. I said we were cocooning and for many people, that image would be somber and, oh, they’re not going out and doing things. Oh my gosh, they need to recover quickly. Yet, holy bananas. That was a lot of fun. We had so much fun. We learned so much about each other. We just had fun doing things together.

And yes, thanks for the reminder. Why it was that extended summer vacation camp was because they left in March break. So, it was a school holiday. They were home and I’m like, okay, if we’re going to do this, they don’t even need to go back. Why do they have to go back and finish this school year?

And Rocco was like, yeah, that’s true. So, we went and asked them and they didn’t. And then that’s what helped me. It’s like, okay, think of it as an extended summer vacation. We don’t need school stuff or anything, right through to the fall. I’ll worry about back to school season when that time comes around.

But that was a long enough stretch that yes, we were in it. We were enjoying ourselves. Even if it didn’t look anything at all like what I thought it would the day that I went around and ask them if they would rather stay home. “I just learned that you actually don’t have to go to school. Would you like to?” “Oh yeah.” That was a really helpful way for me to frame it.

Another way, and I think I’ve got a blog post about that, was thinking of it as a season of Saturdays. Because Saturdays are often the days when we’re not trying to get our kids up and we’re not like, oh, they’re sleeping in. They should be up doing things. Like, okay, now they’re not going to school, but they should be up doing things. So, if you had months and months of Saturdays in front of you, what would you do? And that helped me get to, as you were talking about, Erika, what are the fun things that we like to do?

We ended up going to the parks a lot in our cocooning, but it felt like a cocoon because we weren’t in the midst of a whole bunch of people. We just took our cocoon with us and we went out to the park and would just spend hours by the creek, looking at the trees, walking around. We could play at the playground in there during school hours. There was nobody there, but we could stay as long as we wanted. And we left when we wanted to leave, instead of looking at the clock and saying, okay, now we have to go.

So, whatever metaphor works to help you just release the expectations that you’re putting on yourself, and then, through that, putting on your kids. Because when I was worried and looking for things, I wasn’t as able to observe them and see what they were doing. Because I had that lens, that barrier between us, that I was looking for what I thought it should look like. I was looking for them to say, oh, I want to learn some spelling words. I remember that was when I was like, oh, what about spelling? Oh my gosh. But that all worked out. But that’s when the pieces come up for us.

But unless we’re watching them in action and we’re seeing them writing when they want to write … So, for my son, my eldest, it was not handwriting, but oh my gosh, he learned to type really fast, really quickly when he wanted to communicate online. But if I was always looking for the handwriting, because that was an issue before, so I need to take special care with that thing, I would not have noticed and realized, oh, communication’s the important thing, not whether or not he’s handwriting it. Look, he’s able to chat with people. He’s getting his ideas across. He’s picking up things from others who are writing to him, etc. I could open up my view, because I was looking and able to look at them more clearly and just see what they were doing.

ANNA: I think it’s that piece of letting go of the expectation, so that’s a piece we can watch. Like, do we have an expectation or even a vision of what it’s going to be like? Letting go of that as well, because then you can see it unfold.

But there was another piece about understanding that with reading, handwriting, some of these specific things that maybe the child is having a problem with, these are often very environmentally specific. They need you to be able to read directions in school. They need you to be able to communicate in a certain way. Because maybe now everybody has computers, but back in the day, you didn’t have computers in elementary school to communicate. And so, recognizing so much of the deficit focus, like you mentioned, which is so important, is really about the environment. So, when we change that environment, those are no longer deficits and the gifts can really rise to the top.

PAM: Totally. Gifts are the perfect way to think about it. Instead of going in with that, oh, what is it that they are having a hard time with? And I need to focus on helping them, versus looking for the strengths and the gifts and back to people are different, kids are different, the different ways that they still do things, still are totally capable of doing things. They don’t need those specific skills. Those were very much environmentally-related.

ERIKA: I think one of the tricky things about deschooling is if you’re constantly looking, like you were talking about, Pam, looking for them to ask for the activity that looks like school again. Like, I’m just waiting for things to just naturally start looking more like school again. And so, if we can look for different things instead, that would be more fun.

ANNA: Definitely. I love that. Thank you so much, both of you, for diving into this. It was fun to just take a look back and to just see how it still applies to so many things. And we just appreciate everyone that’s listening today and hope that you found it helpful on your unschooling journey or just your journey in general.

And I do want to say that if you enjoy these types of conversations, we love talking about it in the network, the Living Joyfully Network. When you’re taking that leap and it feels a little scary, it is nice to have a community around you of people who have done it, who are maybe a little bit ahead of you on their journey, who are right there with you. That can just feel so good to be around people that understand the words that you’re saying, understand what you’ve been through with your kids. So, we just really encourage you to check it out. We have a lot of fun there and I really enjoy it. So, you can learn more about that at LivingJoyfully.ca/network. We hope to see you there and just appreciate everybody. Thank you!

PAM AND ERIKA: Bye!