Exploring Unschooling

For this week’s episode, we’re sharing the final Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Pam and Anna, From Control to Connection.

Power and control are pretty insidious, seeping into so many corners of our lives. We talked about dropping the need to be right, considering the context of the moment, and the value of transparent communication. Reaching for control is often a red flag that shows where we might want to dig deeper, to figure out what’s really at play. Moving towards connection helps strengthen our relationships and makes navigating conflicts so much easier.

We hope today’s episode is helpful for you in your own relationships!

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

* * *

We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us.

Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more!

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

EPISODE QUESTIONS

1. Next time you’re talking with your partner or friend about what to do next, try adding “for me” to the conversation. Like, “The right thing to do, for me, is X.” How does that feel? How does the conversation flow from there?

2. Do you notice yourself grasping for control more often in moments that have a sense of urgency for you? Can you remind yourself that there’s plenty of time? Does that help?

3. Do you feel resistance when someone else tells you what to do? Why? Does it feel like they’ve taken away your choice? Do you purposefully avoid doing that thing now, even if it seems like it might be helpful?

4. Turning that around, do you feel resistance from your partner and/or children when you tell them what to do? What does their resistance look like from your perspective? Now shift and see the situation through their eyes (see episode 387 for more details).

TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. We are so happy you’re here exploring relationships with us, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world.

If you’re new to the podcast, we encourage you to go back and listen to the earlier episodes. We started with some foundational relationship ideas in these first 14 episodes and have really enjoyed how they’re building on one another. And if you’ve already been enjoying the podcast, we would love if you could share it with someone in your life that you think would benefit from contemplating these ideas. It is super easy to share. Just send them to pod.link/livingjoyfully. From there, they can pick their favorite podcast player and it will take them right to the show in that app. Thank you so much for helping us spread the word.

So, back in episode two, we talked about connection and how connecting with another person creates a feeling of being in alignment with them, where each person feels seen and heard for who they are. Yet the cultural and conventional wisdom that surrounds relationships is steeped in power and control, which is almost the opposite of connection.

Now, granted, I think many people would answer that they prioritize connection over control, especially in their closest relationships, like with their partner and children. But what’s interesting is that what that looks like day to day can be a lot more nuanced than we first think. Power and control are pretty insidious, seeping into so many corners of our lives. So, this week we want to talk about what the shift from control to connection might look like in our relationships.

For me, one of the most impactful paradigm shifts, as I moved away from using power and control as a relationship tool to focusing on connection, was a shift away from needing to be right, which to be clear is not the same thing as being wrong. That’s one of the societal frameworks that keeps us stuck in control-based relationship dynamics, that one person is right and the other is wrong. That right and wrong, black and white thinking is overly simplistic, particularly when it comes to the complexity of being in relationship with another human being. Not needing to be right means not needing to be universally right. It means recognizing that people are different, which we dove into back in episode three.

What I can say is, “This is what feels right for me.” We aren’t in competition with the people we love. It is not us versus them. When I don’t feel the need to judge the other person’s choices or interests as right or wrong, I am so much freer to connect with them as the unique person they are and to show up as the unique person I am. For me, releasing the need for the other person to agree that I’m right weaves together nicely with the idea of being open and curious that we talked about a few weeks ago in episode 11. I can know what’s right for me and I’m curious to discover what’s right for them.

ANNA: Yes! I think our culture sets up competition and black and white thinking pretty much from the get-go, especially in school. And while leaning into that paradigm might serve us in that environment, it does not help with our relationships at all. We want to cultivate an environment where we’re learning about each other, not pushing a particular agenda. And understanding we’re not universally right about all the things is a big step.

And if I’m having trouble finding that energy, I’ll use my mantra, “Be kind, not right,” because at this point, I’m usually looking at the choice of being right and harming the relationship or being kind and staying connected. And I just always want to stay connected to the people that I love, because it’s from that place that we move with the most ease through our days and through any issues.

And over the years, it’s been interesting to see how, when I can refrain from jumping in with my idea of what’s right, I can learn so much. Because we are all so different. We really can see the very same situation completely differently. And when we leave space to see through another person’s eyes, we find that maybe things really weren’t as black and white as we originally thought they were.

PAM: Yes. Choosing to give that space to listen rather than jumping in with my two cents was a pivotal shift for me in cultivating connected and trusting relationships. There was space for me to learn so much more about my partner and kids and about the situations and how they saw them. So often, situations were, and are, so much more nuanced than I first thought.

So, another valuable shift that has helped me move away from control and focus on connection in my relationships has been recognizing that so much of life isn’t as urgent as we’re led to believe. We first talked about that in episode eight, “There’s Plenty of Time.” And I really do love how so many of these foundational ideas weave together. That’s why they feel foundational to us. You’ll hear us mentioning, oh, this one and this one.

So, when something feels urgent, it makes sense for us to be tempted to fall back on control tactics. Because we feel like we need things to happen quickly. We need to solve this fast. But so often, that urgency isn’t real. It’s ingrained through societal messages like, doing things faster is better. The first person across the line wins.

But truly, when it comes to relationships, it’s not a race. And doing things in connection is better. So, sure, it can take longer to have conversations and come up with a plan that works for both parties, rather than just telling them what to do and expecting it to be. Yet the resentment that builds in the relationship as a result will eventually need repair. So, I think it’s more like a tradeoff, right? The time upfront to prioritize the connection or the time later to repair the connection. So, for me, the relationship is just much more enjoyable and fun when I prioritize the connection as much as I can versus the ups and downs of control, repair, control, repair.

Enough things, when you think about it, really do come up in a relationship that need repair. I don’t need to create more by stepping in and trying to control other people. Because I sure don’t like when they try to do it to me!

ANNA: Right! For me, it’s really an energy thing. Like, where do I wanna spend my energy? Because I can tend towards controlling things in the environment, but it’s like, do I want to spend all that energy trying to control humans that don’t want to be controlled? Or do I want to have that connection? Do I want to do that upfront work with those conversations. And for me, that just felt better in my days. It just felt better with my kids. It feels better with my partner.

And I don’t know if we can ever mention the culturally embedded sense of urgency too much, because it really is this state that keeps us from tuning into ourselves and to others. And letting go of it is so liberating. When something’s a true emergency, we’ll know, and we’ll act on it right away. Every other time, we can take that pause and tune into the people around us to really understand where they’re coming from and also tune into ourselves so that we can communicate our needs in a way that isn’t pushing through someone else’s consent or running over top of their needs.

That self-awareness piece is so critical, and it takes some time to develop, because many of us did not have our needs acknowledged as children. So, it’s hard to even know what we want or why we want it. Teasing apart the cultural shoulds and have tos from our true inner voice takes practice, especially if we were discounted as kids.

But as we learn to listen to ourselves, we’re then able to communicate from that place. And it’s more honest and it’s more understandable. When we’re throwing shoulds and have tos at people, shoulds and have tos that we may not even fully understand or buy into, it’s just a recipe for misunderstanding and disconnection.

But when something truly means something to us, we can explain the why. And then we leave space for the other person to do the same. We can have these more interesting conversations where we’re learning about one another and where we can find solutions that feel good to both of us. And that begins with the generous assumption that there may be more than one right way, our way, to look at a situation.

PAM: Oh, it’s so true. Developing that level of self-awareness where we better understand and can communicate our why is pretty key to moving from control to connection in our close relationships, and I see it as a wonderful spiral.

As we better understand ourselves, it opens us up to recognizing that others have that depth as well, which helps us give space to learn more about them and connect more deeply with them, which in turn inspires us to dig deeper ourselves and round and round. Because there is no need to wait until we think we perfectly understand ourselves and give ourselves an A before opening up these conversations.

I think that’s one thing I can promise. There are always more layers. Always, always. It’s an ongoing journey.

All right, so, one other thing I want to mention is that when we’re feeling the urge to reach for control in our relationships, sometimes what’s underneath that is fear rather than judgment. Controlling the other person feels like the safer choice to us. When that happens, it’s also worth digging into seeing where that’s coming from. It is always worth digging.

So, maybe it’s something we’ve absorbed about relationships growing up. A really simple example might be if growing up our parents were adamant that we, that’s that royal family we, must always be sorry after a disagreement, whether or not we felt it. That message was ingrained in us, and now we’re an adult, and if our partner doesn’t tend to apologize automatically, we may find ourselves trying to convince, in other words control, them to do so. The perfunctory apology feels safer to the relationship for us, because that’s the message we absorbed growing up.

But is it really? As we become more insistent, they may well become increasingly resistant. Few people like that feeling of being controlled at any age. So, it’s worth digging deeper to discover where we’ve picked up messages about being in relationship with others that lead us to reach for control, and then taking the time to ponder whether they actually make sense to us now. We’ve got an experience now. We have real people in front of us that we are in relationship with. Is it working? How is it working? How is it feeling? It’s so worth taking the time to dig into that.

ANNA: It really is. And I think control is pretty much always hiding something. And I think you’re right that it is often fear and judgment. And it’s so helpful to dig into that, because then we can understand the fear. I feel like it’s rare that fear can stand up to shining a light on it, when we really call it out in front of us. It tends to lurk back in the recesses. I think insecurity can also be tied up in it as well. And if we’re unwilling to look at where that’s coming from, it can cast this huge shadow on the relationship.

I’ve worked with couples where one of them looks to control to help themselves feel safe. But what that looks like is saying things like their partner needs to delete Instagram or change their communications, or stop doing X. And even if the partner agrees in the moment, it’s this very shaky foundation to build upon, because trust is one of the most important elements of relationship. We build trust through conversations and owning our own pieces, through hearing our partner, and offering that generous assumption.

So, we can look and talk about what feels scary about Instagram, we can walk through it, own our pieces, and keep having the conversation. Because no one wants to feel controlled, and a coerced mind is not a changed mind. So, at the first sign of trouble, those shaky agreements are thrown out the window and then feelings are hurt. We need to understand the why behind actions for them to have meaning. That only happens through really listening to one another and finding a path forward that works for everyone.

PAM: Yes. I love that so much. A coerced mind is not a changed mind. Just thinking for myself, for me to change my mind, I do need to understand the why behind it. I need that bigger picture. It needs to make sense to me. And pulling it back to being open and curious, I want to be open to learning more and to changing my mind, because again, I’m not clinging to my perspective, my right answer, as the right answer for everyone. I’m curious to learn more about it. It just all weaves together so beautifully, doesn’t it?

ANNA: Oh my gosh. It really does. And we also talk a lot about context, and I think it’s important to think about context as it relates to control, as well. If we find ourselves grasping for control in our relationships, or we see our partner trying to control us or our children, look at what’s going on in the wider context. Because I’ve seen over and over again that if work feels out of control, we clamp down at home. And if home is feeling out of control, we clamp down at work. And that leaves the people impacted really reeling, having no idea where it’s coming from. And it can lead to some pretty big ruptures.

So, owning when things feel hard and out of control and realizing that trying to control others won’t change that. It just ends up disconnecting us from the people who could actually be providing support during the challenges. And when we see it happening, that’s where I think some narration can really help our partner. “I’m feeling a lot of pressure at work and it feels like we might not even have jobs next week, and it’s making me feel freaked out and snappy.” That helps our partner know what’s happening in our mind, helps them not take it personally. And it keeps us honest.

We don’t need or want to take things out on our partner, but when we’re operating on autopilot, we often will, and it just never feels good.

Context includes a lot of things, not just work and home life, but smaller things like sleep and have we eaten and hormones and visiting relatives and bigger things like death and major changes like moves or a new job. Even when it’s something positive that’s happening, it can still be adding to our sense of overwhelm and triggering that need for control. So, being honest with ourselves and really taking responsibility for how we’re showing up can help so much. And if we see it in our partner, we can gently hold space for them to view the larger context, to try to make sense of the behaviors that are causing harm or disconnection.

I really believe our natural state is to want to be connected. So, given the opportunity to be seen and heard, we’ll choose to find a way back to it. If we trust our partners and our children in that, it will create an environment where we’re helping each other and finding solutions, and then we see there’s no need for power over.

PAM: Yes, there is no need to exert power over others. We really can instead work together as a team. And while it is absolutely not an easy button, my goodness, it feels so much richer and vibrant and real. Feeling seen and heard and understood just makes a world of difference for everyone at every age. And that happens through being in connection with another person, where we can share that this stuff is going on right now, or, “I’m having a hard day.” Even when we just feel like we’ve been beaten down a bit, we are snappier. We just jump to the answer, because we don’t have time, or we don’t have the capacity to think of all these other options. And you don’t want the other person to think, oh, that’s weird. They’re acting strange.

ANNA: What’s happening there? But it’s really the connection that would help us through those T tumultuous times when we tend to reach for control. So, it’s like, use it as a red flag, create a culture where you can talk about when that control starts to seep in. Because really what’s happening is we need more connection, and so, just understanding that can really change things in a home, especially if there’s just a lot of tough stuff going on.

PAM: Yeah, that is such a great point, because not only if we can express what’s going on in our heads, it doesn’t have to be a big, long explanation of all the things. It’s like, “I’m feeling overwhelmed right now.” Then not only did they not take it personally when we’re feeling snappy, like you said, their support is then yet another benefit. It’s like, “Oh, is there anything I can do? Would you like to go take a little break? I’ll look after this for you.”

So, not only are we not making them feel bad about themselves, not creating a disconnection, we’re also getting the support alongside it so often. So, it’s just good. Connection is so good in so many ways.

All right. So, here are some questions you might want to ponder as you explore the idea of choosing connection over control.

Next time you’re talking with your partner or friend about what to do next, try adding, “for me,” to the conversation. Like, “The right thing to do for me is X.” How does that feel? How does the conversation flow from there? Just opening up the possibilities. “The right thing to do is,” like how closed down that feels. “For me, it’s this.” That just invites someone else to say, “Well, for me, I’m kind of feeling Y. Is there a way we can put X and Y together and then we’ll all be happy?” That’s just a great baby step to take in that kind of situation.

Okay. So, question two, do you notice yourself grasping for control more often in moments that have a sense of urgency for you? Can you remind yourself there’s plenty of time? And does that help? Why or why not? Is there more to dig into there?

ANNA: Right. But it’s that red flag. Just know that control is the red flag. Start looking at the other pieces and the context, the sense of urgency, the other things that could be happening. It just gives you a lot of information.

PAM: Yeah. Okay, so question three. Do you feel resistance when someone else tells you what to do? Why? Does it feel like they’ve taken away your choice? Do you purposefully avoid doing that thing now, even if it seems like it might be helpful? I’m definitely guilty of that. It’s so interesting to dig in and just to see, because it can happen. In our world, it often happens. Somebody’s just telling us what to do, right? To take a moment to just see how that feels can be so valuable.

Question number four, turning that around, do you feel resistance from your partner or your children when you tell them what to do? What does their resistance look like from your perspective? Now shift the situation and see through their eyes. You can listen to episode number four for more details. And what does it look like now? I find it fascinating to think of, what does their resistance look like? Because it’s often not a shouted no in your face or, but all of a sudden they may be in other rooms.

ANNA: That withdrawing or it comes back a little bit later. Just watch how, when we’re trying to control other people, how it impacts all the energy of the house, even when it’s not someone that we’re even directly controlling. There’s just so much to be aware of there, and it’s usually, again, just hiding some other piece, that digging in that we talked about that’s so important.

PAM: Yeah, exactly. Because when we can take that time to dig in that little bit, then we can shift to the conversation that we’re always talking about. That conversation brings that connection. So again, it’s not like we’re stuffing down the things that we’re feeling and seeing, but we’re being open to learning how other people are seeing it and to understanding what it looks like through their eyes.

Okay. Thank you so much for listening to us chat again. We are so excited to be having these conversations with you, and we would love to hear about how you are engaging with the questions, and we will see you next time. Bye!

ANNA: Take care.

We’re back with the fifth episode in our series in which we’re working our way through Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide.

Today, we’re continuing our exploration of the deschooling phase of the journey with stage nine: Accepting Our Nature. This stage is all about the temptations from our old life that may lead us to abandon or stray from our unschooling quest. Our lives have likely changed quite a bit since we were living in our ordinary world, but, chances are, there are times when our new reality doesn’t match what we first envisioned our unschooling lives would look like. It is in those moments that we can give ourselves grace and accept ourselves exactly where and as we are.

We hope you find this episode helpful on your unschooling journey!

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

Learn more about Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide.

We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us.

Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more!

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

ANNA/ERIKA: Hello!

PAM: And we are back with another episode in our A Field Guide series. We are working our way through my book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide, which is framed around the hero’s journey and is a weave of myths, contemporary stories and tales from my own journey. We are deep in the de-schooling phase.

In the last episode of this series, episode 417, we dug into the idea of accepting the value of all experiences. As we continue our journey on the road of trials, in this episode, we are exploring the idea of accepting our nature. If you’re newer to unschooling, and this is your first time exploring these ideas, you’re likely dancing with them more intellectually to understand what they mean, and maybe even discover some of their further reaching implications.

If you’ve been unschooling for a while and feel like you are already intellectually embracing these ideas, and have actually been bringing them into your family’s lives, now’s the time to maybe peel back some more layers to build more connections and context around them, strengthening your web of understanding with your own experiences. As we’re chatting, thinking about how this relates to things that you have had going on in your world, and building your own wisdom around it, as you move towards believing these in your bones as your own truth, a version that works for you. And all that’s to say, welcome to stage nine.

This stage is all about the temptations from our old life that may lead us to abandon or stray from our unschooling quest. Our lives have likely changed quite a bit since we were living in our ordinary world. But chances are, there are times when our new reality doesn’t match what we first envisioned our unschooling lives to look like.

There can be times when the stories we tell ourselves and the movies we play out over and over in our heads are more about what we think our lives should be rather than what they are, or what we envisioned when we first heard about unschooling. Maybe that just sounds amazing. All our lives will be perfect, things won’t go wrong, we’ll just do whatever we want.

I found it so interesting just to recognize that around this point in our journey, we are far enough away from our old lives, that we might feel a twinge of almost nostalgia for maybe the seeming relative ease of doing things the same way as pretty much everyone else, with parents in control and kids learning conventionally.

And when things got challenging, sometimes I’d experienced the pull of temptation to step off the path. And so maybe the trigger is sibling arguments, or time spent on an activity you’re uncomfortable with, or just worry about your child’s learning, they’re not learning X, Y, or Z and, and other kids their age are learning ABC, etc. At first, we might try to kind of ignore our growing frustration, right?

Oh, no, no, this is our choice. This is the way it goes. We’re just going to ignore it, keep ourselves busy with other things, bite our tongue, because I’m not supposed to do that if we’re unschooling. Then maybe we start to feel a bit exposed, sure that others see the same challenge, and we fear being judged a failure on this journey, to oh, man, school didn’t work out. This is feeling hard right now. Am I a failure at this, too?

And soon, we’re kind of looking around for someone else to blame. I don’t think that was only me. But do these frustrations and fears really mean that we aren’t cut out for unschooling? And hearkening back to our last field guide journey episode, maybe, maybe not. The point is, we are definitely not alone in these fears. Because there is literally a stage for it in the hero’s journey.

This inner work in story language, battling with our inner demons is hard stuff. I feel like one of the important insights in this stage is the realization that even though we may try to blame others for our discomfort, our frustrations are really about us, not them, whatever they are. And they’ll just keep confronting us until we no longer ignore them.

So maybe we’re tempted to exert a bit of control, like just cajoling your child to do a worksheet or two to prove that they’re learning. We may fall prey to these temptations. But that doesn’t mean our journey is over. It’s worth the effort to figure out what happened and make our way back to the path. It’s living and learning and growing.

And this stage is a great time to remember to look to our guides, our children. When I paid attention, I saw them wrestling with challenges, with fears, with temptations to quit on their learning path. And it didn’t take me long to realize that those moments were all valuable aspects of their journey, not things gone wrong.

Does that sound familiar? And eventually, I was able to extend that kindness to myself. I realized yet again, that the point wasn’t for me to get strong enough, so I would never be tempted again. I need to understand, I need to believe in unschooling enough that I’m never tempted or worried about it again. But to understand that these moments are part of life, to compassionately recognize the challenges, the temptations to quit, were messages for me and about me, so I could do the work to move through them, which in turn helped me come to accept all facets of myself.

Oh, all these parts of me exist, the confident me. “Yeah, let’s do this thing.” The fearful me. “Oh my gosh, what if X happens?” The tempted me. “If they would just listen to me, things would work out so much better.” And just not judge them as good or bad again, but accept them all as part of my nature. That’s part of me as a rich, real human being.

ANNA: What came to mind for me here was kind of the idea of quieting the outside noise and recentering, maybe revisiting our why’s, which are things we talked about a lot. If I found myself wondering what things would look like on a more conventional path, I would just slow down, like we talked about last time as well, walk through what it would look like for the individuals in my family. And it didn’t take long to remember why we were here exploring this less traveled path.

The conventional path just didn’t fit. And when I was honest, I’m not even sure it was an actual path, but more of an idea of a path in my mind and the vision that we are sold about this path. And that vision just wasn’t a reality, certainly not for us, and maybe not for anyone. In general, I don’t feel like this was an area where I struggled. I had plenty of struggles. But this wasn’t it for me.

And I’m wondering if it’s more intense when you’re leaving a conventional path. So you’ve had that experience and the delta and even the community around that other path so that pull, I think, is probably really strong. We were never a part of that system, because everything kind of happened as a cascade of events after Afton’s birth.

Our community was outside of the system. So there wasn’t a temptation to go back because there really wasn’t somewhere we’d been. But I think we all had brief curiosities about this path that we could see, that we were hearing about, because we would hear about it from other people, and see it in the media, of course.

But I think we were really lucky to have so many people locally and far away in our life that were making similar choices, that those were just little data points versus something that had been a part of our lives before. And so it’s interesting, because looking back now, I wonder, should I have questioned the path more? Because I really didn’t at the time.

But then I remember what it was like, and what we were doing, and how in tune we were with each other. And we were doing what was serving us best in those moments. We were super intentional about our choices. And we all knew that we could make any choice or change our mind to what felt in alignment at any time. For me, it was never really even about the unschooling, it was always about the relationships and living our best life kind of wherever that took us. But it is interesting.

Now, I’ll get more caught up in that than I did in the moment where I was. I think I was maybe just being so much more intentional to live in the moment. And now I don’t have that, maybe I need to work on that. Now I’m looking back thinking, should I have thought more about that? But really, I did not. We were so in tune in the moment.

ERIKA: I think it’s a common experience to have doubts and feel pulled or to question what you’re doing, especially when it’s outside of the mainstream. I feel like it was that questioning nature in myself that led me to unschooling to begin with. So of course, it’s still there.

I’m gonna keep questioning everything. But as you both have mentioned, I feel like the outside voices are stronger in some people’s lives who are making different choices than it was for me. I was lucky that my extended family didn’t try to exert themselves, by reacting negatively to our choices or pushing judgments on us. If they had any, they didn’t really share them with us. So that’s nice.

But I have heard other people share about really difficult struggles with close friends, judgmental family members, who are really pushing and those voices can definitely cause us to wonder and to worry.

And so, in my life with my kids, moments when I feel like things are harder than they, in quotes, “should be,” I do start to wonder if I’m doing things right? Would it be easier for them if they were in school?

But, like you were saying, Anna, if I play out that scenario in my mind, the answer is no, it would not make things easier. But I do relate to having those momentary thoughts if anxiety is “at the wheel” in my mind.

And other families live in places where unschooling is a more legal gray area, or it’s just outright illegal. And that can cause a whole bunch more anxiety and worrying about all of the decisions that we’re making.

And I think, when I’m looking at this idea of temptation away from a path, it’s really is about moments when I consider abandoning my core beliefs in order to get to match what other people are doing. So if I have a vision of, I should become more authoritarian, this might make it a lot easier if I am telling them what to do and they have to do it. Push through my children’s consent to get them to do what’s expected, and so on.

So, the path that I’m tempted from is not about school or not school, it’s more like the type of person that I want to be and having connected relationships with my kids. So whenever anxiety is at the wheel, and I’m getting feelings like, let’s just buckle down, and I’m going to become this type of parent that I would never want to be, that’s going to be the solution, then I know that’s my red flag. I am straying from what I truly believe in. And the connected relationships with my kids is what grounds me. Coming back to that relationship, knowing that together we figure things out, focusing on that connection that we have, brings me back to that calmer, more confident feeling. And there’s no way, if I look at them and think about our relationship together, that I would want to be pushing through their consent, or becoming this strict and mean parent.

PAM: Yeah. And just as you were saying, for me, whenever I would feel a wobble, (I don’t like to say always or never, because you don’t know,) but in those years, it was always looking back to my kids that moved me through the wobble. Remembering why we’re doing things, imagining what it would look like if we did something different, if I changed my parenting style, if we brought school into the picture, what would they look like? And that’s the difference is that this is coming from me. Right?

It’s not about my interactions with my kids and my kids wanting things different or wanting change, etc. That is something completely different from what we’re talking about here. These are temptations that are so often those outside voices making us wonder, what should I be doing?

So, the next aspect we want to explore is living mindfully. And the point isn’t to expect to get to a place where we’re never tempted to quit again, or to change things up again. But with time and experience, we can learn to recognize these moments of temptation more quickly so we can start moving through them sooner, with less of that swirly impact on both us. It’s not fun to sit in discomfort and anxiety. So if we can have some tools, it can help.

For me, the most useful tool was and continues to be the idea of living mindfully. To me, that means things like being curious and paying attention to what’s actually going on around me, not what I’m interpreting or envisioning. Letting go of expectations and the need to control things because that just tunnels me in even more, becoming more comfortable with that discomfort. So I’m not like trying to exit as soon as possible. I want to notice my feelings of resistance, what am I resisting? And why? And appreciating the many things around me that I’m grateful for, big and small.

When I stopped judging myself for having these moments of fear or temptation, stopped trying to push them away or stuff them down as wrong, eventually, I was at least more often than not able to sit with my discomfort for a while.

There’s a quote from Pema Chodron that resonates for me here around this idea. She wrote, “Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom.”

And Maria Popova expanded eloquently on that. She wrote, “Holding one’s imperfection with gentleness is not the same as resignation or condoning harmful behavior. Rather, it’s a matter of befriending imperfection rather than banishing it, in order to then gently let it go rather than forcefully expel it.”

So, sitting with my discomfort often meant discovering the roots of the stories that I was telling myself that were at odds with my experiences with the people that I love. And then gently letting go of the bits that I no longer wanted, the ones that didn’t mesh with the person and parent that I wanted to be now. But I needed that space to literally do the work to get to that space to understand why that was showing up for me and what particular part of it I wanted to release that isn’t feeling good because of that. Oh, now that makes sense. And now I kind of understand why I want to release it, versus, oh my gosh, I shouldn’t be feeling this. I need to stuff it down. Or, oh my gosh, I’m feeling this, I need to fix everything.

ERIKA: I think that’s a really important distinction. When we are analyzing our thoughts and digging into them, it is so important to remain compassionate to ourselves and kind to ourselves.

Mindfulness is a really important practice in my life. And to me, it feels like it’s about keeping things in a bigger perspective. And then in combination with not judging myself, and what you were just talking about, just makes me think of, when we can question our thoughts, notice our thoughts and our stories, and ask ourselves who we would be if we didn’t believe that or we didn’t have that story, or who could I be if that wasn’t my thought right now?

I think of things that our kids are interested in, maybe, that trigger us. And so, we have that discomfort of like, this is a scary interest or you know, this is something dangerous or, or things like that. But there are people in the world who don’t believe that. And so how would it feel? And I know, Pam, you mention things like this all the time. What would it feel like for me if I didn’t have that belief? And so, I really like realizing that our thoughts are not us. They’re separate from us. And the stories that we tell in our minds about things are not the whole story.

Mindfulness, I think, is becoming aware that you have thoughts and then getting some separation between who you are and your thoughts. And so, when I get too attached to a story that I’m telling, it makes it harder for me to shift when things are changing, it makes it harder for me to solve problems. Presence in the moment and open awareness is a much more powerful place from which to live. And I try to practice getting to that place.

I would say one of my warning signs that will remind me to go back to that practice is when I start spiraling and panicking about something. Because clearly, at that point, I’m telling a certain story about what’s happening, and I feel so certain about it.

But in the discomfort of that panic, I’m like, I need to feel better. That reminds me to come back to curiosity, accepting what is, openness to possibilities. And so, it feels like mindfulness is something that I will always get more opportunities to practice again. Because no matter how much we learn, things will always come up that trigger that tunnel vision panic. And mindfulness is the key there, I think.

ANNA: Yeah, cultivating mindfulness and presence was such a big part of my parenting journey, because I did tend to run ahead in my mind and actions and would create this huge disconnect with those around me. And so, bringing that curiosity to the moments that you talked about, helped me connect not only with my kids, but really with myself too.

And I would say that’s where my discomfort usually was when my own stuff would come up, and I needed to figure out where my reactions were coming from and why. And was I ready to let it go? And I got more and more comfortable with that process. But it was always a lot of work and could be exhausting at times.

I definitely remember thinking many times, “no more lessons, I don’t want to peel back any more layers, I don’t want to learn anything else about myself.” Because it can be exhausting, but it does get easier.

My kids were really great guides for not judging and really being with their emotions, so that they can move through you, so that those emotions can be experienced and that they can pass through. And that wasn’t really modeled in my family of origin. And it felt really good to be creating a different environment where we were all learning the skill together.

And gratitude, that I think you mentioned, Pam, and just noticing those glimmers was such a helpful tool to bring me back to the moment, to feel my way through the trickier times. I found those glimmers were always there. Even when things seemed the most grim, there was something, a spark of light, a bird, a little thing, whatever it is, that is almost like that little mindfulness bell to bring myself to what’s actually happening around me when something feels so big or panicky.

And I think there’s just a lot to be gained from just noticing when something comes up about the journey or situation and allowing ourselves to feel through to the other side. I’ve come to see that that’s really where the learning is right in these moments in living life as uncomfortable as that may be at times.

And it’s funny, I was thinking about just jumping back a little bit to this idea, Erika, when you were saying, I could try on being this authoritarian parent. But really, I think the biggest thing is, and it’s kind of like when you walked through it, when you have children who live in an environment where they’re empowered, that’s not going to fly, right? They’re just going to call you on it. So, to some extent that ship has sailed once you start opening up to, we’re all human beings and we all have a right to express ourselves. And I actually love that, because I think it can be a trap to think, well, if I just fall back in. And for me, it’s not even just parenting, just everybody doing what I want them to do would be really nice.

But when you’ve cultivated that environment of being able to speak your mind and say your needs and with kindness, you can’t really go back. I think that’s why we always say, look back at your kids. So, in some ways I think people think that to mean like, oh, observe them, they’re cute, look at them, that’s so great. But it’s also just, they’re going to lead the way in what as humans we need for interaction. Anyway, that just came to mind for me.

PAM: I love that. They really are. I remember I wrote so many years ago, like one of the moments, like when you’re looking, am I done deschooling, right? And really, if you’re asking that question, you’re not.

But one of the things that you’ll notice that will be like a little clue that you’ve moved through the bulk of it is when you can’t answer, “Because,” to your kids anymore. That’s exactly what that reminded me of.

So, the next aspect to explore is this piece now of sitting with discomfort to discover what we want to let go. And back to the Maria Popova quote about holding one’s imperfection with gentleness. In the Unschooling Journey book, I spent two full pages, two full big pages describing how this process unfolded for me around an uncomfortable, stuck feeling I was experiencing while being overwhelmed and exhausted with three kids under 10 now at home, while also feeling uncomfortable with the messages I often heard aimed at moms. “You gotta take time for yourself.”

So, for me around this, sitting with discomfort is about giving myself some time and space to hear the various messages that bubble up, and get curious about where they seem to come from. Notice how they bounce off each other because it’s not wrong when you can have the opposite ideas bubble up. That’s just being curious. Like you said, Erika, we are not our thoughts, right? It’s just so interesting to see what comes up.

And certainly at the time I wasn’t literally “sitting” other than maybe a couple minutes in the bathroom, but it was about letting my subconscious toss things around. So, sometimes bubbling up a thought here or another question into my focus. That’s curious. And then consciously pondering those bits. Well, maybe I was washing a few dishes or making some sandwiches or pushing someone on the swing or playing with Legos, pulling apart Lego pieces.

There were actually times during my day, if I just watched out for them, that would flow into my lap. But eventually I found the root of this particular issue for me, which was I’ve been thinking about my life as kind of divided into two slices, right? Time with the kids where I met their needs and felt like I basically ignored mine and then time without the kids when I met my needs and I can ignore theirs for a while. And I kept looking for time without the kids so I could finally meet my needs without actually leaving the kids, because that didn’t feel right to me either. So, of course that wasn’t going to work.

From there I could figure out what was really true for me. What did I think about this? What kind of parent did I want to be? I didn’t want to be a parent that feels like she needs to escape her kids to be her true self. I didn’t want to view “mother” in quotes as a role that I play. Like, here I’m turning on being a mother and now I’m turning it off to be me, right?

Mother is an integral part of me, a fundamental part of me. And my needs, the things that nurture me, are also an integral part of me. So that meant the thought that wasn’t working for me in the end, the one that I gently let go of, was that I needed time without my kids to meet my needs. That was the thing that wasn’t working.

I thought I valued my work as a mother before this stage. I left work, I came home, all these pieces that were very valuable to me. But now I understood it at a deeper level. Once I decided to bring my full self to each day instead of feeling stuck, all of a sudden now I saw so many more possibilities. I rediscovered the joy of being just wholeheartedly with my kids and ways to weave my needs into our days. I was no longer desperately looking for alone time to replenish myself. And when I did want some time alone, because there’s nothing wrong with that, I could arrange it not as an escape from them, but just as part of me and I want to do this.

I don’t need to push others away to do something that I wanted to do. So that’s just one example of the many, many, many times I’ve sat with discomfort over the years and continue to do so, right? We’re talking about human beings here. And remember that this isn’t often a one and done process. This isn’t a battle to judge over power and eliminate parts of ourselves. We’re not trying to perfect ourselves.

It’s about accepting that these ups and downs are part of our nature. It’s holding ourselves with kindness, compassion, exploring what works for us, because, all together now, people are different. And no matter the choice that we make in the end, we are experiencing the process, learning that with self-awareness, with finding tools that work for us, like sitting with discomfort, we can move through these uncomfortable moments with more care and more grace and just more.

ANNA: Yes, moreness. Moreness. Oh my goodness. I would say sitting with discomfort historically has not been easy for me. I tend to want to find a solution and move forward. But what’s interesting about this is that it is in the slowing down that I learned so much, because if I’m feeling uncomfortable, then most likely I’m wanting things to go a certain way and they aren’t. So, recognizing that gives me something to examine. It helps slow me down. I could start to look at, what is my expectation here, remembering that expectations are pre-planned resentments, but why was I holding onto it? Why were others seeing it so differently? What story was I telling myself about this situation? Just being able to ask the questions, it’s kind of like you were saying, Erika, it’s that little bit of separation from the thought.

And so, my first thought is to run out of this uncomfortable situation. And then it’s like, oh, I can slow down and just examine these thoughts as they’re going by. And that was super helpful to me.

I think the rush to solve often has us reaching for control and it can have very little self-examination. So, if mine is like, I just want this to stop, I want you all to do these things to make it stop, I’m not learning anything about myself in that situation and I’m harming our relationship.

Part of my commitment to myself and my own growth was that I wanted to try to own my stuff and to not let that spill out on others. Because I had that experience in other relationships in different places. And yes, this is definitely not a one and done, but a practice. And sitting with discomfort is really such a great first step in learning what my triggers are and then peeling back some layers to find out where they are coming from, to understand them a little bit more, versus being controlled by them.

What I realize now is that’s that first reaction. But if I slow down, I can recognize the process that’s happening. And invariably it’s about me. Even when I may be saying I’m uncomfortable with my child’s behavior or my friend’s behavior or my spouse’s behavior, it’s an opportunity to learn more about me. And once I’ve done that work, I’m more open to understanding the other person. Why are we seeing something so differently? And it leaves space for a conversation if the behavior of the situation is really impacting me.

Because it’s never about stuffing down our feelings. These are clues and information, right? It’s really about giving them space. It’s kind of the opposite. They’re valid, but if left completely unexamined, they can lead to challenges in our relationships, because we’re not having that awareness.

So, giving space and kind attention to those feelings, they can really reveal the root of what’s happening and allow us to open ourselves to have those conversations and to learn more about each other. So again, I think sometimes people take this, maybe especially depending on personalities, but like, oh, I’m not supposed to have needs. If somebody’s impacting me, that’s all mine. And it’s like, no, but there is a piece that’s mine. And so then, how can I own that? Which then allows me to communicate more effectively with that person that may be impacting me and we can find a solution easier than if I’m coming in with a real defensive posture towards them.

ERIKA: Yeah, that makes sense. I agree with what you were talking about there about expectations, because when I think about when I’m sitting with discomfort, it’s almost always that my expectations are not matching reality. But reality is the real one. So, obviously the expectations are what I need to release. Maybe I’ll have a vision of how my child should be treating their friends, or what their friendship relationships should look or feel like, or maybe what their interests should be, what they should like to do and how they should spend their time, how they interact with adults. Or maybe I just want them to move through their upset more quickly. That can be so uncomfortable. It’s such a common one, especially when they’re young, like, why is this so hard for them? Or why is this such a big deal? And just wishing things would be easier. And that feels so uncomfortable for us.

And, and I love that you’re talking about how we can then notice like, why is that triggering? Why is that particular thing triggering us? And it’s always something else about us to learn, which is really fun.

And I know we’ve talked about this so many times too, but I’ve seen it happen over and over that as soon as I slow down and start feeling comfortable with whatever the discomfort is and start to accept reality as it actually is, things can begin to shift. If I’m holding on to expectations and not like staying too tight about it, that is where we all get stuck.

And so, I think getting comfy with how things are seems to be this vital step in that growth process for me. And it’s so interesting that it affects others too. My energy about it is affecting my kids’ ability to move through something.

And so, I think the key for me is realizing discomfort is not the same as failure, which I learned about in school. That kind of failure does not really exist, but life has plenty of challenging moments, seasons that feel really hard, but that’s not because we did something wrong. We should have known how to avoid this, whatever that self-talk can be. And so, I don’t have to spend time being mean to myself about what I think I did wrong to get us to this situation. I can go straight to compassion, kindness, acceptance of where we are. Not all the time, obviously.

As we’ve all been saying, we’ll have more opportunities to try this again, but eventually I can get there. And I think more quickly than I could when I was younger, because yeah, I’ve just had so much practice now.

PAM: So much more practice, so much more experience. And yeah, I find the language, the self-talk is usually one of my first clues. If I’m being mean to myself or like, why didn’t you figure this out? Or why did you do that? We just notice it a little bit more, a little bit sooner, right? It’s like, oh, that’s my clue. Something is up here. And then moving to the tool. Oh yes, I know I need to sit with this for a little bit. I can be kind and compassionate to myself and understand myself and just feel out more of what’s going on here.

Okay. So the last aspect to explore around the idea of accepting our nature is discovering an undercurrent of joy. So, in this stage, we’re learning to accept rather than fight our nature. We move beyond judging ourselves so we can mindfully move through moments of temptation and discomfort, learn what we can, and continue on our journey.

What I found really fascinating about this stage was that in this deeper acceptance of myself and the resulting freer flow of our days, I discovered an undercurrent of joy running through our lives. That was the phrase that came to me to represent it. It felt and continues to feel like a subterranean river flowing beneath all our experiences and through all of my different states of mind. It’s yet another aspect of the flow of time that we talked about in the last stage. Another aspect of the nature of being, I think.

I realized that most uncomfortable or distressing moments aren’t as dire as they first appear as I make them out in my mind. I found I could be more present with both the happiness and the disappointment in those moments without taking a huge internal roller coaster ride up and down. Because I no longer equated the deep longer term sense of joy that I felt with the emotions of the moment I was in. That was interesting for me, not seeing joy so much as an emotion.

I discovered that my joy was rooted in knowing more deeply that I was in control of my life. I was free to make the choices that made sense to me without judging myself. And since writing my book, I came across a great quote from Sebene Selassie that speaks to this feeling for me. It was so fun to discover it out in the wild. She’s using the lens of belonging in her book, and I think that’s another great word to describe this feeling, this undercurrent of joy. She wrote, “Belonging is our capacity to feel joy, freedom, and love in any moment. As the late Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck said, ‘Joy is exactly what’s happening, minus our opinion of it.’ She made a distinction between joy and happiness. Happiness has an opposite, unhappiness. Joy is not about happy or unhappy, liking or disliking. Joy is accepting each moment for what it is without contention. We belong to any moment simply by meeting it with joy. This is freedom. Love is the ultimate expression of joy and freedom. Joy, freedom, and love could be considered synonyms for each other and for belonging.”

I just really love that piece. That was a wonderful another layer explanation of just what joy was feeling for me and how it was an undercurrent that could flow through all the moments just by simply meeting it with joy. We’re here. We’re here. Hello.

ERIKA: I love it. It’s such a deep explanation of joy. I feel like it’s inspirational. It makes me feel like getting present, like just being there in the moment, meeting each moment, like this moment is how it is. How that connects to the idea of belonging is really cool too. The undercurrent of joy is so powerful.

I feel like, for me, remembering that or staying connected to that helps me get more playful in the moments. It helps me access creativity. It helps me stay more present. It helps me stay tuned in to who I really am. It allows me to give others the space to be themselves too. It takes away judgment. It has that feeling of awe for me, just being amazed that we get to experience life. And the experience of life has all sorts of feelings as a part of it.

For me, the undercurrent of joy feels like gratitude and awe and presence and non-judgment. I just want to be able to access that as often as I can.

ANNA: I love the feeling of that, because awe isn’t about judging anything. It is just this experience of that moment, just really taking it in. I love that. I love the sound of just the undercurrent of joy and that subterranean river. I think it feels really good.

I do feel like this was a huge shift for me, because David is the one who enjoys life and finds this joy and always has. I feel like in our 20s, we both felt a bit bogged down with the realities or now I would say even what we thought were the realities of adulting. After everything that happened with our oldest’s birth and the medical challenges, everything really shifted. We were so much more focused on those moments, the joy that could be found in the tiny bits of things in a sea of all these other pieces.

The striving, the productivity above all else really felt like such a sour note and kind of missing the whole point of life. It was as if my eyes opened to awe. It brought me to a place where I could experience the awe.

Over the years, I feel like that awareness just kept growing and that undercurrent of joy was more recognizable and more accessible. I love how you said, Erika, just staying connected to it. That’s a practice, I think, staying connected to it. As you know, kids will lead the way here as well. They naturally flow with life, the ups and downs, not really getting stuck in any place too long. Feeling it all without judgment, especially in young kids.

I think, partly as a product of school, we put so much weight on everything. Mistakes are catastrophic, setbacks are devastating. When we get to that place of flowing and not judging but experience, we really do see the gifts in all of it. We can remain open to what comes from any given situation. We can feel it all, because it’s not about a surface-level happiness. For me, it’s this deeper level of appreciation for being human, for being able to feel the feelings and see the things, for being present in the moments.

My kids definitely taught me what that looks like and helped me create that practice. I feel like it probably shouldn’t be so hard, but it was for me for a long time. I feel like now I’m much more tapped in, but I think we have a lot of things that pull us out of that, a lot of things that disconnect us from that piece.

It’s really interesting seeing my kids as adults now who do get pulled by some of these messages, but I also see this deeper trust and knowing. I think it comes from their childhood. They’re definitely on their own unique journey, but I’m super grateful for the life that we created together and that that awe and presence and flow was such a deep part and foundation for them. When they hear the outside noises, they don’t feel as intense, I think, as for those of us that were raised in school and families that maybe had that and then all these other outside noises in our 20s.

I was trying to think about words I like to use, because this is a very energetic thing for me. It just has this energy. Peace, acceptance, surrender, contentment, appreciation just all helped me recognize the flow, you know, moving with this current of life, not against it and watching for when I felt that I was moving against it and moving away from this connection with that undercurrent.

PAM: Yeah, I think we’ve talked so many years about flow, so I think that’s why my vision of that energy was more of a flow, an undercurrent, a river versus something a little bit more static, but yeah, it really is. It really is an energy that comes and yes, I love that, Erika, reaching for it, touching it, bringing it closer, I think that’s a great way to think about it and it’s definitely a practice.

So, thanks so much everyone for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this dive into the fourth stage in the deschooling phase of our journey as we explored the idea of accepting our nature.

We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network to continue the conversation. It’s a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents, a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these more unconventional unschooling ideas and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. Your first month is free so you can get a sense of whether the community is a good fit for you.

We are excited to welcome you and to learn more and join us, just follow the link in the show notes or go to livingjoyfully.ca and choose Network in the menu. Wishing everyone a lovely day. Bye!

We’re back with another On the Journey episode! Pam, Anna, and Erika talked to Living Joyfully Network member Nora McDonald, who was also on the podcast a few years ago.

Nora shared an update about her family and spoke about how her unschooling journey has progressed. She also dove deep into a topic that she’s spoken a lot about on the Network, which is cultural differences. Nora is British and she currently lives in Costa Rica. Many of the expectations we take for granted in our home countries do not exist in other cultures. It’s a fascinating angle to consider as we question paradigms and realize that people are different. It was a really interesting conversation and we hope it resonates with you!

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

EU340: On the Journey with Nora McDonald

We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us.

Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more!

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

ANNA: Hello everyone, I’m Anna Brown from Living Joyfully, and I’m joined by my co-host Erika Ellis and Pam Laricchia, as well as our guest today, Nora McDonald. Hello to you all.

I’m so excited to welcome Nora to the podcast again. She first joined us in episode 340 in January of 2023. Nora is a longtime member of the Living Joyfully network and she brings the most interesting discussions. She loves nuance and to toss around ideas and process all the pieces. And that is definitely my happy place. So I’m thrilled that we can bring a bit of that to the podcast audience. So, Nora, to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about you and your family and what everybody’s into right now?

NORA: Yeah, sure. My name is Nora. I’m British, but I have now been in Costa Rica for four and a half years. And I’ve sort of been back and forth for nearly 20 years because my husband is Costa Rican. So we have two kids. Ruben is 12. Liam is about to turn 9 next month.

I’m super into food, cooking, and baking. I have joined a cookbook club here where every month people sort of choose a theme and bring all different food to share on that theme. I also sort of accidentally started something similar, kind of on a smaller scale. So I’m doing a lot of cooking at the moment, which I’m really enjoying. I also like making British food as well, a little link with back home.

I also really love history. I’ve been sort of rediscovering history, having really liked it as a child. I spend a lot of my time listening to history podcasts and reading history books. Everything history at the moment, which has been super fun. I also really like board games, which has slightly fallen by the wayside because of all the cooking. But I have discovered that playing online with friends is a really good way to stay in touch with friends and family at home and play some fun board games. So that’s me, I think at the moment, those are my main things.

Luis, my husband, is, I feel like I’m the humanities one and he’s the kind of science and tech one.

I currently refer to him quite a lot as the IT department. He’s very handy. He’s very into computers and engineering and electronics and taking things apart and putting things back together again. He’s also super into water polo. So he goes and plays water polo with people that he has played with since he was at university several times a week. He’s super into that. That keeps him busy.

And then Ruben and Liam are very into the same kind of things. They’re both big gamers.

They love Roblox. Not really any specific trend. They go exploring everything that Roblox has to offer and lots of YouTubers talking about Roblox and different things. And then apart from that, they don’t have the kind of hobbies with a capital H. I was thinking about all the things they like and it’s these sort of little things. So they’re really into the reboot of She-Ra recently, which I do super recommend. But also they really like going to the beach. They like going to the pool.

Ruben’s got certain books that he’s really into. He’s really into the Dogman ones. There’s a series called Hundred Things to Know About Money and Food. He loves those so much. Ruben really likes it when it rains and he can snuggle up on a rainy afternoon, which is good because it’s the rainy season. So, there’s just a lot of different things going on, I guess, with them.

And then Liam is really into any kind of transport and so buses and trains and planes and helicopters, which I really like because he used to be really into them. He used to be really obsessed with level crossings. And then he sort of lost that a bit and was like, oh, no, no, I’m much too old for toys. And now he’s come back into it. And he’s constantly wanting to look up what toy he can buy. Like an airport or train tracks. And he does Roblox games as well. So he’s doing a lot of flying planes on Roblox recently. So that’s really a multi-platform interest, which is fun to see. So, I think that’s us.

ANNA: I love that. It’s just always fun to get that glimpse of everyone and just what’s happening because it’s so unique and fun. I love it.

ERIKA: I love it. It’s reminding me of something we were talking about earlier, which was how parents are also pursuing their own interests and how that can just be so cool to think of the whole family as we all are doing the things we’re interested in and kind of inspiring each other in that way.

PAM: And for me, I love the reminder that capital H hobbies doesn’t need to be a thing. So often people are like what’s their passion? What are they super interested in? What’s their big hobby?

And to be just reminded that it doesn’t need to be one thing. You said they don’t really have hobbies. And then you list it off a whole bunch of stuff for each of them. So I thought that was great.

Now, I wanted to ask since it has been almost four years since you’ve been on the podcast and the kids are getting older now, I can’t believe when you said he is about to turn nine. I’m wondering what has surprised you the most or how things have changed since we last spoke.

NORA: Yeah, it was really interesting. I was reading the transcript. One of the things is I’d forgotten how hard it was to go anywhere in the car because that has totally changed. They’re still not super big fans of long trips. But it was amazing to read back and be like, oh, my God. That was a huge part of my life.

And so it is really nice when you see, OK, that has really got easier. So there are little things like that. The other thing I was thinking about is I’ve done a lot of research into neurodiversity. And so I think I have a different understanding of my family, myself.

I think there’s a lot of neurodiversity happening, which has been really helpful just in terms of seeing different advice, the way that brains can work differently, all of that kind of stuff. So that’s been helpful. We haven’t felt the need to get any diagnoses as yet, but it’s still been really, really helpful.


And then the other really big one that I’ve posted about a lot in the network is as I was working through my process was sort of changing where I feel I stand as a parent in terms of unschooling and realizing that I was sort of expecting a certain type of child to materialize as I unschooled. And I know there is not one way to unschool. And I know that everybody’s different.

But I had just sort of encountered enough stories of these sort of certain types of unschooling kids where they’re very, they take the initiative. They want to do a deep dive in something. They want all the materials about one topic or they want to do one big capital H hobby and do all of the stuff.

And they will ask you these sort of deep questions as they’re going to sleep or as you’re in the car and they approach a lot of interesting learning that way. And my kids just never became those kids. And I really appreciate being in the network because I was sort of seeing everybody else’s stories and stuff. I was OK. This is not my parenting. This is who these people are. I’m not making a mistake and making that happen.

But I do think I needed to work out what I actually want my approach to be. Because I think for a while I really really really stepped back and just sort of thought OK. I was sort of seeing it as me being in charge. And then I started unschooling was like OK well I’ll just put them in charge. Because I tend to pendulum from one side to the other.

But I do think that was actually a really important part of the process for me because it meant that I could release my agenda, release everything I thought we should be doing. I could be focusing on observing them, getting to know them on a whole other level, understanding what worked what didn’t work. But at a certain point I felt a bit like I’m trying to be a butler. I’m bringing you the snacks and doing the things and doing all of this but sort of be nobody in the corner. And then I was like, I don’t think this is the parent I want to be. I didn’t think it was really working for us as a family.

Because yes and my kids are not really take the initiative type kids. They will just stay at home and play Roblox and go on YouTube and be there and seem very happy. But then they will get grumpy, and I noticed that actually it wasn’t really working for them either to be doing this.

I think it was even this week that one of their favorite things to do was to go to the mall and go to the food court and get food and get lunch and there are other things too but that was the constant one. And I realized that we haven’t done it for months and they haven’t said a word. They don’t even think of doing it. So I sort of was like OK I need to be a bit more proactive.

I need to be kind of making things happen. I need to be slightly more pushing them but it’s pushing them towards things that I genuinely think they will like that is super informed by how well I know them. So another example is that they really like going to this beach.

It’s called the beach house. It’s just like a flat that we’ve been to a few times. The first time they did not want to go. Absolutely not. We’re not interested. But I chose somewhere that was the closest beach, somewhere with really good Internet, somewhere with air conditioning.

It’s like this close to the beach, just a couple of meters to the beach and a couple of meters to the pool. There are showers. So, I organized around them even though they didn’t want to go. And now we can’t hear the end of it, they are just constantly asking when we are going to the beach. When do we get to the beach? He just totally loved it but he would not have chosen to go there. And so it’s been like this really interesting, it feels a bit like a tightrope.

I really don’t want to be that kind of controlling parent who’s making the decisions. But actually I do need to kind of be a bit more of the initiator. And I think they do have struggles with transitions. And I do need to be sort of a little bit of a cruise director sometimes being like come on we’ve got to get out the door but you choose. I do need to do that.

And I find that quite exhausting because I’m trying to do it as well in a way that is not sort of laying down the law and I’m trying to do it in a way that is friendly and maintains a good relationship and feels OK but it’s a lot of effort for me.

But yeah, I’ve found I need to do that. So, that’s been a big thing, and just bringing my own stuff into it and being OK with that as well. Because I think a lot of the time what I try to do is think about OK, what am I like in my relationship with my husband or my kids. I am there saying, especially with my husband, I read this thing or I listened to this podcast. Did you know this? I’m sharing it. And so it’s the same with my kids.

I really like reading. So I worked really hard to find books that Ruben likes and I will read to him. I made that effort because that is important to me. Liam is not interested.

I would love to share this but with Liam I can be like OK fine it’s not his thing and let it go. So it’s this tightrope between bringing who I am. Trying things out being like what about this? What about that? What about this? And it’s also just complicated because they like things that are familiar.

Even She-Ra that they are both obsessed with. They objected to it for three episodes about how it was cringe. I think maybe they thought because it was a cartoon it was for little kids. So, sometimes I just have to be like let’s keep watching it let’s see what it’s like. And then they end up loving it. And it’s been kind of complicated for me. But I do feel like I’m in a good place with it. But it feels like it’s still trial and error. Like does this work? Does this look OK? How much I know I’m going to meet some resistance but like how much resistance. And also just trying to understand I’ll get information in ways that are not as clear as, this is what I thought of this. So both of them are not great at telling me. I don’t know this sort of negotiation beforehand or the sort of thinking about how it was afterwards. I don’t really get that.

But I will be able to see how long they lasted, how much fun they are having. Often I will say OK we’re going and then they can decide to come back whenever they want and they will stay. So how long they want to stay, how happy they are.

Ruben is really helping me because he’s developed a system where he wants to wear his favorite pajamas after particularly good days. So, I’m getting some really useful information from that in terms of what he feels like is a good day. Sometimes it’s a really good day because something really amazing has happened on Roblox. The other day he finished Doors which was big. And so that was a good pajama day. Yeah. If you know you know.

But some days, I’ve taken him to do something that he didn’t seem that keen on. But he ended up having a really good time. So I’m having to gather information from different sources.

And because a lot of the negative stuff will come straight out of their mouths immediately. And it took me a long time to realize that is just what is happening for them in that moment. It’s 100 percent true. But it’s not forever. So I think I sort of put a little bit too much emphasis on believing that bit. And I missed a lot of other stuff as the whole story.

ANNA: Right. That’s not the whole story of their experience. I think what’s so cool about, well a lot of different things that you said, but how important the pendulum was because I think especially for coming from a more controlling place. I don’t know that you can get to that nuanced place without really letting go. Because I remember that time when you were doing that where you were just learning so much about them and it kind of surprised you, the things that you were learning when you weren’t directing in front of them.

And so I think it’s cool to see that was needed to get to this place. But I’m a huge advocate for everybody being in the equation because how else can we live and sustain life and enjoy things? We all need to be in the equation. But it’s that awareness that’s so critical to keep the relationships and for everybody to be enjoying themselves.

And yeah we’re all going to have outings that we don’t enjoy. I do plenty of that. But there’s pieces of it. I’ll stop talking. But I love that.

PAM: Oh for me what I love is the image of the tightrope. But the way you described the tightrope, I often use the metaphor of the dance. And so I think those are very similar.

It’s that dance of being present, of being there, of sharing ourselves and noticing right how it’s received and taking that as information not as judgment.

I think that’s why the pendulum. Anyway I was going to say we can be so taken aback when they feel safe and free enough to express what they’re feeling. But yeah it can definitely cloud our vision as to this is the result of the thing that we did so let’s not do that again I guess.

But instead recognizing the piece of that dance or that tightrope that you’re balancing on like oh yeah that was a moment. Oh yeah I can totally see why that moment isn’t working. And oh yeah noticing later on. But it’s so hard to notice the other pieces when we’re feeling overwhelmed by that initial negative dump on us right. It’s like OK let’s get out of here as fast as possible and not do this again for six years until they’re much older or whatever. Right?

So I think that was such a beautiful piece. And the other piece that really stuck out for me was the pajamas. I love that because it’s our kids, people, human beings can communicate in so many different ways. Some people just aren’t talkers. So you are observing for reactions, noticing what PJs they choose. There are so many ways that our kids are communicating with us. But it’s opening up to see them and notice them and to respect them as valuable as a conversation or as words that they share with us.

ERIKA: It was so cool. And I just really appreciate you describing what it looks like now, because it’s like getting to that place is not where we would expect to be. I’ve had the similar experience with my kids, where there is a certain amount of pushing involved but it’s not what I would have thought it would have been from the beginning of parenting. And so, I love the description of that pendulum and releasing. And what happens in that space is they start to trust that you are taking their needs seriously. You’re hearing them. You’re learning about them. And that builds this kind of environment that then they trust you to say, I have this idea for you. And here it is. And they won’t just reject it outright. Or if they do it’s still just different.

I mean it’s different than it used to be with my kids as well where they are. They know that it’s based on all of this kind of shared history and what I know that they like and everything. And I just think a lot of us find ourselves in that place with our kids. And so I think that’s going to be super relatable and helpful for people to hear.

PAM: Love that piece Erika. Oh sorry, just to riff off what you were saying there. It’s like that energy shift. They can feel that the things that we’re recommending or suggesting for them are because we’re thinking about them. It’s not that we’re recommending or suggesting something that we wish that they’d like to do or something that is about us, what we like without regard. You know what I mean. We’re really suggesting it because we’ve thought of them. We’re thinking about the pieces.

ANNA: I liked how you said it’s air conditioning, the Internet, because maybe the heat doesn’t feel good to one of them and the Internet feels important in those wind downs after you’ve done things. And so I think and again I think this is for adults too. It’s like when we’re thinking about the other people in our life, oh, she likes this kind of food. We’ll make sure there’s a restaurant like that or oh I’m thinking about, she doesn’t like the cold or this and that. This is how relationships work right to be thinking about each other and it kind of sets that stage. So I think that is such a beautiful piece to bring into something as simple as I want to go to the beach. I think we’d all have fun at the beach. Let’s make sure it works for everybody.

ERIKA: Yeah. I love that. So for my question, something you’ve brought up many times on the network which has been so interesting is this lens of cultural differences and how that helps us understand that there are so many different ways that people do the same thing or the meaning that something has for different people is completely different. And so I would love for you to share a little bit more about how things we think are ‘have tos’ or think are just totally normal are really culturally specific.

NORA: Yeah absolutely. I think I might be a frustrated anthropologist because I love this stuff so much. And it’s so fascinating and it’s really interesting because this isn’t my first time living abroad. This isn’t my first time living in Costa Rica but this is really the longest time. I just feel like I’m reaching a new level of studying this culture and also through understanding my own culture. And yeah, the whole people are different thing has been so massive for me and it is so useful to just be somewhere where people are doing things differently, everybody around you is doing things differently. And you sort of have to work out what you think about it and sometimes you’re like this is bananas and then you live here for like four years you’re like oh okay.

So for example, it’s very normal here to get up at what I think of as very early, so five or six in the morning. And I never really got it until I realized that the daylight is very consistently six to 630 in the morning, and till six to 630 at night. So if you get up at nine, you’re missing a lot of that daylight. And also in the rainy season, it rains in the afternoon. So you sort of organize your life around it.

When there are all the things you want to get done in the morning when it’s not raining, it just makes way more sense to go to bed early and get up early. I mean, I haven’t started doing it, but I get it.

So there’s been loads of things like that where a lot of it so much of its climate as well, in terms of things like that. But yeah, in terms of understanding that we put meaning on a lot of behaviors, especially with kids and seeing the way that these the same behavior can be seen very differently in two different places.

We had one come up because we returned to the UK for the first time in July. And it was very striking how much people care that you say please and thank you. Whereas in Costa Rica, they don’t care that much if you say please and thank you, but they really care if you say hello and goodbye. When you arrive somewhere, you have to go up to each person and give them a kiss and say hello. Especially close family, you have to go around to everybody and say goodbye. That is not the case in the UK. And so this idea of “politeness” is completely different.

And then yeah, there was a really interesting conversation in the network about food and having a kid that like, scoops up all of the brownies or whatever. And just goes and eats all the food. And whether or not that would be seen as impolite or sort of people putting even a value judgment on that is a greedy kid.

That the kid that is not leaving enough for everybody else. That is a kid that is not considerate, or that is not thinking about whether other people are getting enough or whatever, which is absolutely how it will be seen in the UK. You have to sort of perform consideration a little bit, you have to sort of make sure that you’re not the one taking everything because it’s all about being polite, right?

Nobody’s gonna say, hey, leave some for me. So you have to sort of preempt that by leaving things for other people. And I mean, I was always the person that was like, I’ll have the last piece of cake if nobody else is going to so I feel like maybe I’ve moved to Costa Rica for a good reason.

But here, especially with kids, if you eat all of the food, the grownups are delighted. And like you, they are being hospitable. And they are giving you food because they want you to have a good time. And they’re, sort of to me a little bit over concerned, whether kids are eating or not, that seems to be much more of a worry that the kids will just not eat enough. And in fact, even in my own home. I think this is just occurring to me now that we have a bit of a cultural difference there, where Luis is much more concerned about whether they actually eat. That is a really big worry. So if a kid goes in and just eats everything It’s fine, the other kids will just be doing the same thing.

But it’s not seen as rude. It’s just seen as this is a kid that’s appreciating what we have to offer. And so it’s so interesting, these sort of value judgments.

And there’s a whole thing here about, I think of the UK being a rigid country, with rules that you need to follow. And I hadn’t realized until I came here, how much I walk into every situation, looking for the rules, like, what am I supposed to do here? What is going on? What can I do? What can’t I do? And then I moved to what I would call a flexible country, and realized nobody cares, nobody’s doing that.

So there’s a completely different attitude to rules. I feel like in the UK, if you break the rules, just the act of breaking them is a problem. So, if you break a rule, you’ve committed two crimes, you’ve done the thing you weren’t supposed to do. But also, you’ve broken the rule. Whereas in Costa Rica, it’s much more like, oh, you caught me. And the other person is like, oh, you tried.

But you know, fair enough. Well, wouldn’t we all but you know, now you have to stop because I’ve caught you. Even kids I find here are very like that.

And I struggle with it sometimes, because I feel like they will do what they want until they’re told not to. But it’s just a completely different sort of way. If I come into that with my British brain, I will be like, that kid is naughty. And that kid is trained enough to kind of supervise themselves. They’re not supervising themselves. They’re just going crazy doing whatever they want, because they’re expecting somebody to come and supervise them.

So, I would see that as a problem. And I do struggle with it genuinely still. But then there’s a freedom to that. There’s flexibility. And that’s how the society is. So yeah, it’s really been helpful for me in terms of, not of just realizing how much judgment we put on kids behavior but that it’s cultural. It’s like you could see that exact same behavior in another country and it would be seen in a completely different way. So you can just sort of get rid of that layer of judgment over it, I think. It’s definitely helped me do that to just be like, okay, I don’t know, this doesn’t mean what I think. I don’t have to think that this means this thing. So yeah, that’s been very helpful, actually. But interesting as well.

ANNA: Yeah, I think it’s so cool, because I think it’s exactly that. It helps us bring curiosity to it. And I think whenever we get in this rigid story of there’s one way to move through the world it’s disconnecting. I think that is something that’s great about the network, because we even see it with people responding differently, because we have people from all over the world. And it’s like, oh, you know, this isn’t a big deal.

We come in thinking this thing is this really big deal. And other people are like, wow, that never even occurred to me, we do it completely differently. And so it’s so fun to see that range of cultures there.

Now I really think we even have microcosms of it in any country, right? In families, there’s a family culture, there’s these different pieces. And so recognizing what’s okay, just not bringing that judgment layer, I guess, is the piece that I think is so helpful.

Because then I think it allows me to get curious. And then I’m able to think about, does this serve me? Is this cultural idea serving me?

PAM: I think it’s really, really, I mean, I’m going to say fun, because when I could release that, the judgment pieces that I came to see, as you’re going through something that we have our own kind of judgments, and etc. But to discover the ones that are more cultural it opens things up. Instead of, that’s the way things work. Those are the rules of things.

To be able to start playing with that, and just really get curious about what they’re doing. Because then we’re starting to see through their eyes, like you said, Nora, even now, it’s still sometimes challenging when other kids are just doing these things.

So to be able to wonder what the heck is driving that? What’s behind that? To just get curious about that. I think it is so very helpful. And then it just brings, I was gonna say, it brings a new set of eyes when I’m watching my own kids. But really, it’s kind of like taking off the filters and the glasses, because they’re not any different.

They’re not acting. I am seeing differently what it is that they are choosing to do. So in that way, I just learned so much about them.

But yeah, I can see so much. And when you’re talking about some of the Costa Rican culture, it sounded very familiar to some of the Italian culture in my husband’s family. And it’s just fascinating, like the going up, the hellos and goodbyes being super important that way.

And, interesting, because you kind of mentioned the briefing and debriefing piece, but that was something we would talk about as we were rolling up in the driveway. It’s like, oh, hey, we’re going to say hi to Nona when we get in there. We’ll all go in, we’ll all say hi. And then you can go and play and do whatever and whatever we brought, or whatever they were looking forward to doing.

So, it was very helpful that way, for understanding the culture, helping them kind of understand it, just say, yeah, she really just wants to know you’re here and say hello to you, etc. And it would be very interesting to kind of navigate that tightrope or that dance, like if somebody’s kind of not in the mood or whatever, and working for, how can I agree? How can I help Nona be happy that these people have come to visit? So it’s super interesting to use that cultural lens as well. Just to see people in a new light, I think.

ERIKA: I love that, helping our kids learn about the differences, how people are different and pointing those things out. This may not matter that much to me, but I can see to her, this is really important, or whatever it is. I love that. And I like bringing this lens just to look at anything that comes up that I feel like, well, that’s just wrong. They should know that’s wrong. And they shouldn’t do that. That’s, everyone knows that’s wrong.

And so how true is that really? Does everyone think it’s wrong? Is it wrong in every situation? Kind of digging under when we have that strong feeling of judgment towards what someone is doing. It can just be interesting to kind of dig under that and see how true that really is. And is our feeling about it really ours? Or is it just something that we learned, an external message from when we were younger?

PAM: So often these are kind of cultural, they’re cultural norms, but they’re shortcuts for our brain. Because as you were saying, Nora, it’s been a lot of work, right? To figure out how to engage with your kids, how to support them without using tools that you weren’t comfortable using as a parent.

And so often when we go into these situations, a lot of these are shortcuts. And it’s like, yeah, this is the way we do it, blah, blah, blah. And so you’re going to learn to do it this way too.

So it is more work, I feel, but it’s also what we’re choosing, the kinds of relationships that we want to have, the way we want to engage in moments, even for ourselves. I mean, I spend a lot of time working for myself, as you were saying, and noticing the difference in the cultures and, and it’s like, well, you know, why are you doing it? My brain, my personal unique brain just kind of really loves to know why we are doing that.

And then I can be all in. But if I don’t understand it, it makes it much more challenging, because then it feels performative. I don’t feel like I’m showing up in the moment, I feel like I’m performing whatever I’m supposed to be doing. It’s so understandable. Why the different cultures, they’ve just absorbed this over their lifetime. And this is the way we do the things.

But it’s so valuable to get to that beginner’s mind questioning space, so that we can even just have these conversations with our kids, but also to open up our eyes to, is this something that we want to be doing participating in? I still love the air conditioning, the internet, like all those pieces. Like, yes, okay, we want everybody to go to the beach, but to take that extra time, you know, to understand the people that are going to be there with you and the things that will help them feel comfortable and enjoy the time as well as much as we’re anticipating enjoying it for the beach itself. That is just so valuable in developing that trust that we’ve been talking about this whole time, that trust in the relationship, so that the back and forth that we have with our kids is literally trusted by them, that we’re not trying to manipulate them, we’re not trying to take away their agency.

We’re just really interested in doing this thing. And I think that you could really enjoy it too. And I’ve thought about this, this and this and like, let’s go try it.

And as you said, they know they can leave if they’re really not enjoying it in that moment. So they’re, they’re not losing that agency, they’re not losing that control. But like you said, helping them with the transition to the actual activity.

ANNA: And I think it’s that piece of holding everything a little bit more lightly. Like, I’m curious, and maybe Nora, you can answer this, like maybe in Costa Rica, the beach experience is no AC and no internet, because you’re thinking the beach is right there, right? But you’re making it work for your family and the people that you’re bringing to it.

NORA: I mean, I really need the AC. And the showers, the shower next to the beach is a big for me, I really hate having sand on me. So actually, a lot of times our needs overlap.

But yeah, there was a famous time when I accidentally, when my sister was visiting, and I accidentally booked an Airbnb, not the beach, actually, but somewhere hot, and it didn’t have air conditioning. So everyone’s dripping. It was so hot.

So I think also, just being able to be comfortable. I also want to be comfortable. And it’s interesting to think about because the flat that we rent, I don’t think I would have rented that one sort of pre kids, because it was sort of in this big development. I would have wanted to be somewhere with lots of fancy restaurants, or, you know, somewhere a bit more, I don’t know, more traveling rather than tourism. And this is definitely more tourism, and you’re just in this big development, and we don’t really leave it. And there’s this big pool.

But it’s so nice, just to be like, I’m going to just make sure we’re all comfortable. And I think even the podcast that we did many years ago, I was sort of talking about not pushing through and being like, I don’t have to put up with this rubbish situation, I can find a way to make it better. And I think that is still carrying me through because I’m just like, I want to go and see this beautiful country that we live in. I mean, I’m not even that fussed about the beach, but there are beautiful beaches here.

But I was like, I want to go somewhere. And actually, yeah, I think the beach is best for them. They don’t want to go and do hikes through rainforests or whatever. Because they really don’t like bugs. So even the choice of the beach is part of the decision. But it’s also like, this is if they’re comfortable, and I’m comfortable.

ANNA: Everything is just making it easier, right? The shower outside makes it infinitely easier than chasing down sand on everybody or everybody being uncomfortable. So right, I think it’s looking for those pieces.

But I think this whole cultural lens, again, it just allows us to, I don’t know, relax a little bit or let go of some of these, like you were saying, Erika, these rigid ideas of what we think is the only way to do it. And I think many countries have this, certainly parts of the US have this, it’s like, there’s one right way. And there just isn’t one right way.

And it’s so liberating to realize, because then you’re really able to sink into what is the way for us, what is the way that works for me? What is the way that works for my family? And that is very liberating.

So but it’s growth. And I feel like all of these things are bringing that awareness and allow us to grow.

NORA: I think just as you said that I was like, Oh, yeah, Costa Rica is just better at the idea of there’s not one way to be. It’s just a flexible country. I really thought about this for it is just a bit more like people are just not quite expecting everybody to live the same, in the way that people in the UK are. I don’t know, it’s really complex. It’s not quite that simple.

But there’s definitely an element of in the UK, there’s this standard. And there is, I don’t know, I think it’s this sort of optimization. You have to sort of do everything better, you have to improve better, whereas Costa Rica is much more relaxed. And so I think that really helps as well.

So yeah, I think Costa Rica is just generally a better place to be like, you do your thing.

ANNA: Yeah, right, really taking in that flexibility piece, because if you’re in a culture, that’s really so much more rigid in that way, it would be harder. But all countries have different pockets, I’m sure. And I have some familiarity with Italian culture as well. And there are so many things that they’re very light about. And it’s very different. And when I’m there, I always think, Oh, this feels so different.

And yet I see why they love it and how it leads to these different types of relationships with these different types of experiences. I think it’s such a cool lens to take to anything we’re feeling, I don’t know, rigid about or ouchy about, when it comes to our kids.

Well, thank you, Nora, this was so fun. I really appreciate it. I know we have much more to talk about. We’ll come back with another episode, because there are just so many nuances of all the things. I just really appreciate you being here. And thanks to everyone for listening. We hope you enjoyed this conversation.

And before we go, I want to invite everyone to join all of us at the Living Joyfully Network where we can have some more fun conversations. It’s a warm, welcoming online community of like-hearted parents in a non-judgmental space where we can steep in these unconventional ideas and explore what they might look like day to day in you’re uniquely wonderful family.

We do have a free month that you can try to see if it’s a good fit. And we would just love to see you there because it’s so fun. Again, the more people we have to talk with and from different places, I think we all just learn and grow so much from being steeping in that environment where there really isn’t judgment.

We’re really not judging anyone else. It’s just learning and being curious. So I love it.

And I really appreciate you being there, Nora, and also here. So thank you. Thank you so much.

PAM, ERIKA: Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much, Nora.

Pam and Anna interviewed three former teachers who are all unschooling parents and members of the Living Joyfully Network. Erika Ellis, Jen Hollis, and Michelle Kren shared their experiences becoming teachers as well as their thought processes as they chose unschooling for their own families. They talked about their changing views of education and how their roles as teachers helped shape their ideas of parenting.

It was a fascinating window into a very common phenomenon – teachers becoming unschoolers! We hope the conversation sparks some insights for you.

Watch the video on YouTube.

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us.

Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more!

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hello everyone, I am Pam Laricchia from Living Joyfully and today I’m joined by my co-hosts Erika Ellis and Anna Brown, as well as our guests Michelle Kren and Jen Hollis. Hello to you all.

So, today’s episode is a panel style featuring teachers who became unschoolers. And Erika is joining Michelle and Jen as we explore aspects of their journey and reflect on this very interesting perspective. So, I’m very much looking forward to our conversation. Anna, would you like to get us started?

ANNA: I would. So, first, thanks for joining us. I’m kind of excited about this one.

I think it’ll be an interesting conversation because it is actually really wild how many teachers turned unschoolers I’ve met over the course of these last 25 years. And it makes sense, right? Because teachers deeply know what’s happening in education. They’re passionate about it. It’s something that’s important to them. So, it really makes sense.

But I can’t wait to hear about each of your unique journeys. So, this first question will just be, tell us briefly about your journey to becoming a teacher. What drew you to the field? How did it unfold for you? What did that part look like? And I’m going to start, Erika, with you and then we’ll kind of move around to the rest.

ERIKA: I’m excited about this too. It’s something that honestly at this point I don’t think about that often, but I also have met a lot of teachers. And so, yeah, it’s just very curious.

I was only a teacher in public school for two years before I had children. When I left school, I was planning to be in film production, which I did for several years. But that field out in LA is mostly project by project.

And when we were thinking about having children, it seemed a little bit risky for both me and my husband to be finding job by job what we were going to do next. And so, I was looking for things that I could do that would be more steady and just know what I was going to get paid for the year, basically. And so, that was kind of where I started.

But many years before that, as a kid, I wanted to be a teacher because I loved school. I loved being a student. I loved curriculum. I loved tests. I just loved everything about it. And so, it wasn’t far from my mind as a possibility of something that I could do.

But then, of course, as we grow, we learn and change our minds about things. And so, I hadn’t thought about it until I was really just looking for some more stability. And the way my mind works is like I’m a scanner.

I am interested in many, many things. And so, there were always things I could pull from, like I was in film production, but my undergrad was in biopsychology. So, I was like, I can teach science.

I could do different options. And so, when I was thinking about a stable job, something I would be able to do in the area where I was, I thought about getting a teaching credential and teaching high school science. And that whole process was actually really easy for me.

It seemed like a good fit as far as the pay is pretty good. The union in LA for teachers is really great. And so, I got good benefits. And it just drew me in that this would be good for our family financially. And I just, I love learning. I love science. I love kids. There were lots of things that I was like, this is gonna be great. But I never knew how long I would stick with it because I also envisioned myself being a stay-at-home mom.

I really wanted to devote myself to really focusing on connection with my kids. And so, since we knew we were planning on starting our family, I didn’t know what the whole journey would look like. And so, I told my husband, Josh, that from the start, you’ve got to be ready for this to last two years or 50 years. I just don’t know. And I have figured out the math. It’s going to work either way. But is that fine with you? If I put all this effort into it and then I walk away from it, is that gonna freak you out? And he’s like, no, we always figure it out.

I definitely went into it not sure how the whole process was going to go. But there were things I loved about it. I loved the topics, I taught integrated science. So that’s a little bit of biology and a little bit of physics and a little bit of chemistry and a little bit of earth science. And so, that was very fun.

And the kids, of course, were amazing. And I don’t have to get into all of the details of what happened later. But I just, I definitely learned a lot about, what even, what is this? I started questioning things a lot more than I did when I was a student in school, because I could really see the whole picture of what we’re asking of these kids. And I definitely started to change my mind about how much I loved school at that point.

ANNA: Yeah, oh my goodness, I can totally imagine that. So Michelle, let’s go to you next. And then we’ll go to you, Jenna.

MICHELLE: Okay, it’s funny that Erika got about two years of teaching in because that’s the same amount of time of teaching that I got in. Like her, I did want to be a teacher for forever since probably about second grade. I loved my teacher. I loved to play school and everything. And I was pretty good at performing in school. I loved to babysit. I loved kids. So it just kind of made sense. So, I worked well in school so that I could get a scholarship so I could go to college so I could be a teacher.

Go on the path, do the things. And I really felt like I wanted to help kids at a foundational level, that I wanted to be in on the ground floor because I felt like as students got older and if they weren’t supported in the early years, that the problems just kept compounding. And that whene they got to high school, you have this kid that’s hated school for all these years, it felt like they’re doomed now.

So I really wanted to be in on the ground floor. I did my student teaching in second grade and enjoyed that experience. I actually, in one of my phases, got to be in a classroom that was first and second grade. It was kind of nice to have the youngers and the olders just to have that little bit of a different dynamic where it’s not so based on age. There’s a little bit more flexibility in that.

I got married right out of college and moved to where my husband was and I couldn’t quite get a job right away. So I did substitute teaching, which I enjoyed. I enjoyed the flexibility. I enjoyed the variety of it. Like, I don’t know what grade I’m going to be in today and what the kids are going to be like and all of that. I liked coming with a teacher bag of some books I liked if we had a few extra minutes to read to them before recess or whatever. I liked that part.

But then I did end up, once we moved again, working in a small Hebrew academy. That’s where I taught for two years. The only availability was to teach fifth grade my first year. And then it was fifth and sixth grade my second year. And so that’s what I did, which was really interesting because the fourth grade teacher, as I was coming in, I was thinking, oh, she’ll be able to mentor me and help me. She’s got so much experience and she can help me, give wisdom to me.

She told me, oh, this class was the best class. You’re going to love it. These kids, they’re all great students and everything. And they were, they were great. But then we had a couple other students get added to the mix very shortly after. And that just kind of threw everything upside down. And I’m trying to adapt for all the different needs of all the different children and everything like that.

It was quite challenging, I just felt a lot of burden or pressure, just trying to rack my brain on how can I meet the needs of this kid? And this kid and this kid. This kid can read college level and this kid can read like second grade. And how am I supposed to meet the needs of all these kids? So, yeah, that’s kind of my journey to becoming a teacher.

ANNA: Okay, thank you. Jenna.

JEN: When I think about this question, it’s sort of like, where do I begin? Do I take it all back to my early childhood years? Which, you know, always looking forward, things don’t tend to make sense. So I find it really interesting that we as parents and teachers get so fixated on the child’s future. When you look back at anyone’s life, could anyone really say that? Yes, I knew that I wanted to be this and my path was this clean sequence of events.

And so when I think about my path into becoming a teacher, I actually didn’t want to become a teacher. I never really thought about it. I actually wanted to be a chef at one point. And as I was going about my experience, I realized, well, that was probably going to require me to work late at night. And I’m just not a night owl. I’m early to bed, early to wake.

And then so, the kinds of conversations as you’re getting towards that back end of your high school years, all the adults in your world are starting to ask those questions. What’s the plan for after school? And so, of course, I had to have a plan.

I was like, OK, being a chef wasn’t going to quite work for me. And I think I must have just plucked it out of thin air. What if I explore being a teacher? Once I made that decision, I really committed to my studies and ended up doing really well. I got into uni, started my degree as a primary school teacher. And when I did my first prac, I ended up coming home from that thinking, I don’t know about this.

All of the teachers just seemed really unhappy. And for me, it was like, if I’m going to do anything, it’s got to be something that’s meaningful. And then I’m going to enjoy it because we spend so much of our time at work. That was a non-negotiable for me. Anyway, I was having a conversation with my mom saying, I’m not sure about this. It just doesn’t seem like anyone’s happy in this industry.

And at the time I was working in a sales company. I was just doing some telemarketing and I saw these salespeople going out and selling. I think it was an alarm system door to door. And I thought that was a really great other option. I really was looking at it, I really don’t want to do this. That seems like a really good idea could start to generate some decent money. And my mom was like, absolutely not. You have worked way too hard to get here. Choose another degree. And I’m like, okay.

And so then I moved into early childhood and I absolutely loved that degree. And the difference was I found primary school teaching was all about subjects, whereas an early childhood degree was focused on the whole child. And so I really, really loved that study.

And so as I’m going about it and I started to do my work placements, I didn’t absolutely love working in the industry, but I loved the study of the whole child. And so then I did my final year of uni and ended up going to the Cook Islands for a whole month to do my final prac, which is pretty cool. I came back, got a job in an early childhood center, which, you know, again, it was okay. I really loved connecting with the parents, really loved connecting with the children.

But that didn’t last very long because I discovered that I wasn’t being paid properly. So then I approached the owners of the center and they validated. Yes, you haven’t been paid correctly. And please don’t tell the other staff. And that was my red flag to go, okay, here’s my resignation. And of course, I let my friends know who I was working with that you might just want to tune into whether you’re being paid correctly.

And so down that path was letting the parents know, they were all really upset that I was leaving and I was upset to be leaving them. But what came about was that one of those parents was a teacher. She was actually an assistant principal at her school and she was going on maternity leave towards the end of that year.

And I was saying to her that, I’m just going to go and do some casual teaching back in the primary school system. And she’s like, oh, you know what, actually, would you like a job? And so one thing led to another and I ended up starting that position towards the end of the year.

And I absolutely loved it. I loved the structure. I loved the conditions, compared to the early childhood conditions of work. It just was like a breath of fresh air. I had two hours a week of planning time as opposed to working 10 hours a day needing to work out when I was going to do any of the planning. On top of that, better pay and all the rest of it.

And so I really loved the structure of it. And so for the next sort of four years, I really dived into that world. And because I was based in a really small school, I got all these amazing opportunities. I became the reading recovery teacher. So we really got to understand the mechanics of reading or what I thought were the mechanics of reading as it was being delivered to me. And I was also in class at the same time.

So I had a class that I was responsible for and I was doing reading recovery, which was a massive load. I literally felt like I jumped in the deep end and learnt so much in such a short period of time. But as my husband and I, we got married, and we started to think about a family, we ended up having our first child.

And I had every intention of going back to teaching because like I said, I loved my job. But as time went on and it got closer to that point, I was just like, I can’t leave my baby. I can’t leave my baby to be raised by someone else while I go back into a profession that demands so much of my time and energy.

And I just couldn’t see the possibility. It was like, how could I be the teacher that I was before I had children as well as be the mum that I wanted to be? And so at that time, my husband had his own business and it just made financial sense as well for me to be at home, for me to help out with the admin and really prioritize raising our family.

That’s basically where my teaching journey started to taper off. I always had this idea that I was going to go back. But as time went on and I started to experience life as a parent, teaching just didn’t make sense to me anymore.

It didn’t make sense. I have complete admiration for those teachers out there that are doing both because it’s such a demanding job. Personally, and I am a person who likes to do well at everything that I do. And I just knew that for me, that was not going to happen. I do believe I probably would have ended up sacrificing my family big time to be that teacher who I really wanted to be.

But when I think about the time that I did spend in teaching, I was really focused on engagement. How can I really engage these students? And I think a lot of that came from my own childhood experience of being in school and feeling completely disengaged, feeling like I was more interested in watching human behavior than what the teacher was delivering.

It’s just interesting when you do reflect back at your own journey, so much of it makes sense when you’re looking back. But this whole idea of being able to look into the future and have it all figured out, it kind of makes me think like, gosh, we put so much pressure on ourselves as teachers and parents to have these children’s lives figured out when they have so much to teach us. But yeah, I’ll stop there. Otherwise I can talk forever.

ANNA: No, no, I appreciate it. And I think you’re right, we have this idea that we can control and have this linear path. And yeah, it just doesn’t work that way. But gosh, do we see the connections when we look back and how it’s gotten us here? So I just appreciate all those stories. So amazing.

PAM: And I’m just super excited now to take the next step because you’ve been looking back and putting the story together for yourselves. So it will be very interesting to hear how you then came to decide to unschool your own kids. And do you feel that it was easier to make that choice because of your teaching background or did that make it more difficult?

And also curious to know about whether you had a lot of pressure from external voices, like friends and family who were also in education. I feel like they kind of come in bunches too sometimes. So I think this will be very interesting to hear.

And Michelle, would you like to start this one?

MICHELLE: Sure. So for me, I feel like the decision to unschool my kids was a very organic unfolding type of thing. My husband and I have five children.

Right now, their ages are from 19 to 10. And so basically, I was having a child every two years. And so as my first two were approaching school age, the bond that I had with my children. I essentially didn’t want to give them up.

And so while I can’t really remember the conversations about, are we going to homeschool our kids or not? But I remember it just unfolding. People around us are homeschooling. So that feels like, okay, we’re not alone. There are other families doing this. And also the fact that my first two sons both taught themselves to read at very young ages. So the oldest was four, and his brother was two.

And it was kind of like a party joke, not a party joke, like party trick. Oh, look at my two year old reading. People would do that, and ask, do you know this word? Do you know this word? And because it was so baffling, like, are you kidding me?

So, with your first two children teaching themselves to read, which that’s why we go to school, right? To learn to read and write. So if that part’s already taken care of, then what’s my kid going to do in a school anyways?

I wanted to learn alongside my children. I saw them learning already. And to me, you’re learning all the time. You’re learning from all sorts of things, and ways. You are learning how to be in relationship with people as a family. That was always something when I was having another baby, I couldn’t imagine all the other siblings having to go off to school right now and not be able to be with the new baby.

I did start with a curriculum for my oldest just because I thought, well, let’s try that. It was like a unit studies thing. And I liked that it was every six days because you are always rotating. It wasn’t like Monday through Friday, right?

So because it was six days, it was always rotating and that helped it feel like you were never behind. So, I liked that aspect about it. And because I’m a learner, I love to learn. I’m a very curious person. I was looking into different people’s homeschool things and philosophies and things like that.

So I came across some different people like Julie Bogart. She’s been in homeschooling for a really long time. And she is very open to unschooling and has talked about it, doing a little bit of it herself with her five kids and such. Sally Clarkson is another person that I had looked to and then I found Pam back in those early days. So I’ve been listening to the podcast for a really long time and actually reached out to a guest that was on the podcast, Amy Martinez.

She and I are friends now and have been for numerous years. I looked, it was 2019 that I reached out to her for the first time because she had five kids and she was further down the road. And that’s one of the things that I think is so beautiful about this community and homeschooling in general is just the helping. It’s the education, but it’s also the parenting.

It’s the whole picture, right? Unschooling is learning without school and pretending like school doesn’t exist and things like that. As far as it being easier or harder though, I was kind of torn on which I thought. It’s a good question. I just, I’m not quite sure if I think it’s easier or harder.

I think that my instinctual ideas about learning fit really nicely with unschooling, and things not being arbitrary. I really did not like that about school, you have to learn this because you’re this grade and you’re this age and all of that.

That was something that did not sit well with me. And so, I wanted a lot of time to not feel hurried and rushed. I had these school experiences. I had my own growing up in school. I had teaching in school. I had all these different experiences. I kind of got a little smattering of each of the different types.

And so then it was like, well, I get to pick which one I think is best out of all of these because I tried them all. I did also approach it as like, this is an experiment too. We are taking this one step at a time and if something’s not working at some point, we can pivot, we can try something else.

So, just organically making our way to let’s keep learning the things that are in front of us, the things that we’re interested in. I think about my five different kids and just what they’ve been interested in over the years. I couldn’t just, oh, yeah, we’re learning this science curriculum. And I just didn’t want to go that way.

PAM: Oh, that’s beautiful, Michelle. I love that piece, too, you know, that, like you said, that it’s not like a forever decision that you can keep trying things and keep learning. You said you’ve always been interested in learning yourself and figuring these things out.

And the point about, especially with a large number of kids, the number of interests that I’m sure would weave through, continue to weave through your home is super numerous. So yeah, to try and fit that all into some sort of curriculum-y schedule, I can imagine would be very difficult. Erika, would you like to go next?

ERIKA: I feel like in one way, my teaching journey is completely separate from my own unschooling journey. But certainly, it must have informed it, but I view my unschooling journey as really just me listening to my kid, my oldest, and it kind of naturally flowing from our relationship that was growing as he was growing. When he was a little kid, he was kind of scared of other little kids.

And I also saw that he was, he was slow to speak. I just could see these things that I’m like, this could be a problem for someone in a school setting. But to me, it didn’t seem to be a problem. I could see him learning and communicating and all these things. But I could see if his behavior at school was similar to his behavior on the playground. It could be a problem in school.

He’s running away from other kids. He doesn’t want to do what anyone else is doing. He’s very specific about what he wants to do and very clear about it. But, and also just so sensitive. And so I was just putting together this image in my mind of what that would look like for this little guy to be in a school setting. And it just didn’t feel good to me. And so that really was my reason for looking into other options.

And I did find project-based homeschooling first. Which could work. But any kind of adult-imposed ideas just have never been okay with either of my children, really. And so in order to really facilitate them learning about things, it had to be their decision of what the thing was going to be.

And so it made me think about something I’ve heard about teaching, which is that teachers are kind of like taking away the most fun part of learning when they pick the curriculum and plan all the activities. So, if an individual child is choosing what to learn and how to learn it, there’s so much more that they can get out of it than if somebody comes in with that already pre-planned. And plus, as teachers, we know that part’s also really fun. It’s our most fun part. And the kids aren’t getting to do that. We’re just coming and putting it on them.

And so I really thought a lot about that. I had heard that somewhere and it made sense to me. And so I do think it probably was slightly easier to choose unschooling given my teaching background, just because I had become aware. I had the rosy view of what I could imagine school was like kind of eliminated over my experience as a ninth grade teacher.

I was in a title one school in LA. It was great. We had such a nice atmosphere as far as a real safe place for kids. And the teachers seemed to all be there for the right reasons. And it had a nice, I don’t know, it was a nice community. And at the same time, I was like, these kids don’t need to learn earth science right now.

This is literally the last thing they need and they’re not interested in it. And so I just felt horrible giving them anything in addition to what they were already carrying, the loads that they were carrying, taking care of their younger siblings, working jobs. They were like 15 years old, but they had to work because their family needs that additional support. So they were already, in my opinion, it seemed like they were already young adults having to shoulder so much responsibility.

And it just felt ridiculous for me to say, and now do this homework because this is the most important thing. I just couldn’t do it. And so I saw teachers who really did in their core believe that this was the most important thing. And for them, that worked, they could do it. And I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t make myself believe it, just based on what I had heard about, what my kids would tell me about, what was going on at home and what was going on in the neighborhoods.

And it just didn’t feel right to me. And so I ended up never giving homework. It was always just review what we did in class, you know?

So then for those few students whose parents were like, I know you have homework, they could do something. But for the kids who were overwhelmed already, I was not going to be a person who would add to that for them. And so I do think having that experience made me question it a little bit more.

And then definitely as I started diving into unschooling and learning more about that, then I started really looking back to my own experience as a kid in school and questioning all that had happened as well. Because I did love it. And you know, in some ways, and in some ways, it was terrifying.

All the things because you’re in this kind of super controlled environment, lots of rules, lots of expectations, and I wanted to not get in trouble and all of that. So all of those kind of things, I started reflecting on later. I don’t really remember pressure from external voices at all.

But I’m kind of immune to that, for the most part, just personality wise, like I’m going to do the things I want to do. But yeah, I think people probably looked at my decision as like, well, she knows what she’s doing. So they assume that’s the best choice. It’s been interesting for sure.

PAM: I can feel like you having that teacher’s experience is kind of one thing that can show people when you make the choice to teach your own kids, that you tick a little box for their acceptance versus the how on earth are you going to learn how to do that? You’re not a teacher.

So Jen, how about you? What’s your experience?

JEN: Homeschooling was never on my radar. I don’t even think I really even thought about it, probably because no one around me was doing it. And for the most part, with my eldest son school was a pretty good fit.

And then, like I said, I didn’t really think about homeschooling as such. But as my second son came into the world, and I watched how he learnt from the world around him, I started to question how school was going to work for him. He’s pretty much like what Erika was saying, he really is quite immune to other people’s ideas for him.

He just pretty much runs his own show. He was a very hands-on learner as well. And so I could just see, I think I intuitively knew that it wouldn’t work. I just wasn’t sure how school was going to work out for him. Anyway, we just kind of went about raising our kids the way that we knew how. They started off in an early childhood setting. So, they actually joined the prep program that was part of the private school that we had decided to send them to. And that was quite beautiful. The teachers that had both my eldest son and my second son were amazing.

They were very whole child focused, very play based as well. But then as my second son was starting prep, I started to notice even things in prep started to change. There was less focus on the play side of things, and things started to become a lot more structured.

But thankfully, I had an amazing teacher that was in that space. And she was very much relationship based, she really put a lot of focus in connecting with the children. And so that was a really beautiful experience for Hayes. I often would talk to her about how I’m really concerned about how Hayes is going to go moving forward into this more structured approach to learning. But like I said, we just sort of continue down that pathway that we knew. And as he went into kindergarten, he actually had the same teacher that my eldest son had.

And she was an amazing teacher in that she was very academic, like you could just see that she knew her content. But the piece that was missing was that connection piece. I felt like there was this big focus on academics, but it didn’t land because she did not have that connection with the children, she didn’t have children herself.

I can appreciate that when you have gone through the system, and you go on to uni, and you do really well at uni, and it becomes all about the academics. And so that was a real missing piece. And so I started to see Hayes not gelling with that classroom environment.

But again, just continuing on with what we knew, it wasn’t a big problem. But it was sort of then that I was starting to question things. And then as he went into year one, Blair, my third son, had started prep.

And again, I started to see this change in the system where they were taking primary school trained teachers and putting them into prep. It was like they were shifting towards even more structure. And so, and then what I started to see too, was this whole diagnosis approach, like, we need to get these kids diagnosed early, get them connecting with the right services, so that we can basically get rid of those problems that get in the way of our approach to teaching, so we can get better results.

And so at that time, I’d actually had my fourth son. I had just had my fourth son. And I remember having the interview with Blair’s prep teacher. And she was suggesting that I needed to take Blair to go and see an OT, an occupational therapist.

And I’m like, freaking out thinking, Oh my God, what have I missed? I’m just seeing this beautiful child. And she is seeing this child who can’t sit still on the carpet for a session. And me just having had my fourth child, just feeling really overwhelmed, self doubt through the roof. And thankful, thankfully, as I was going through that experience, I lent into really focusing on my child instead of what I was being told.

And I just started to, to really ground in that. But at the same time, we just continued to do what we were doing, because it still didn’t enter my mind. It wasn’t until Hayes, my second son, was moving into year two. And he had the most amazing teacher, as well as he was in a class of all of his friends. But I just started to see this light dim in him. And at the same time, Blair was in kindergarten, and he would pretty much cry every day.

The anxiety was through the roof. And I had this new baby. I had this baby, I had Blair in kindergarten, who was really struggling. And then Hayes in year two, who had all the conditions right, amazing teacher, friends, but was just completely unhappy.

That’s when I started to really look at other options, more so for Hayes, because I felt like back then, Blair was just kind of, I had this idea that he just needs to get used to the whole school thing. Anyway, so then come towards the end of year two for Hayes, I thought, okay, let’s try the Steiner school.

So we did that for a little bit, which was a massive ask, because it was like half an hour there, half an hour back. So it’s two hours of driving every day. And at that stage, my youngest was only two. And then I started to see that that was still sort of the same thing.

It was a different idea, but it was still an idea that was placed upon a child. And so then I started to explore the homeschooling route. And as I was exploring that, I came across the Living Joyfully podcast. And it just spoke so deeply to my heart that I just couldn’t look away. I listened to so many episodes. When something just really resonates with you, that it’s like, it just, you feel this whole weight lifted from your shoulders because it just feels so right. And so that’s what gave me the courage to really jump into homeschooling because I knew which direction I wanted to head.

And as far as being a teacher, does it help, did it help me or did it make things harder? It was kind of a little bit of both. It helped in terms of other people outside of my family going, oh yeah, that makes sense. You’re a teacher because they’re naturally thinking I’m doing school at home. And I often say to people, if I had those kinds of children who really resonated with that approach, that would make my job so much easier. Like, okay guys, let’s sit down and we’re going to do x, you know, I could do that really well, but that’s not why I moved to homeschooling.

I could see that environment did not work. It did not work for most of my children. And I could see that it did not work for a lot of children. And so, it took a lot of courage to go down this route because I didn’t know anyone who was doing it. I started to discover more families who were homeschooling, but very rarely did I come across a family that was unschooling. And so I kind of felt like I was doing something naughty.

Like I should have still been trying to do school at home. But for me, I’m like, if I was going to do that, my kids would be at school where all the other kids are because they loved the social aspect of school. But so far as whether it was easier or harder, it was kind of a little bit of both.

It was easy because I had the insights from my teaching experience. I also had the insights as a parent. I could see how the system was changing. I could see how it was moving from this really play-based approach, which I feel like even when I think about my own schooling experience, a lot of that was still play-based. And now I could see this shift towards more structure and more control. And we’ve got to box children in and identify all of these problems that really are not a problem if you have the right environment.

As far as the pressures were concerned, I didn’t really have that outside of my family and friends. And I think that kind of blindsided me a little bit because I thought my immediate family would really appreciate it, like, oh, okay, she’s got all the skills in the world. She’s a teacher.

I had been diving deep into the world of personal development and I feel like I’m an awesome parent. And so it makes sense that I’m going to have my kids at home with me and we live life together. But that was not the case.

My family found it really hard to understand and appreciate my decision purely because they couldn’t see outside of their own world of how that could be possible. And so as I became more and more grounded in myself and I started to unpack a lot of my own, I guess, my own conflicts with this way of doing things, it just became kind of irrelevant. I just was able to then build that stronger shell where I had compassion for other people’s ideas without feeling like I had to take them on. So yeah, I hope that answers that question.

PAM: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s brilliant. It really does.

And I mean, it’s underneath all of your answers. It is so much of our work to do, right? Our own processing, there’s the word, processing our own experiences. Even you had talked specifically about that too, Erika, like looking back at our schooling now with this new lens. And because I feel like I did that too, kind of paint it over to make it a positive experience for myself while I was going through it. It’s like, oh yeah, rah, rah, I can do this, blah, blah, blah. And looking back, it’s like, oh, I put up with a lot of shit without even really realizing it at the time. So yeah, that’s very interesting.

ANNA: I was kind of struck too by your story, Jenna. So you’re talking before kindergarten, this kind of pre-program, they’re already making it this more structured academic. And we really see that here in the US too. It’s just earlier and earlier and earlier. Whereas I feel like back in the day, there wasn’t any of that until so much later. It was kind of fourth grade things kicked in.

And so you had this time of really just learning about yourself and how to be around other people and all of those things. And we really have lost that. So I thought that was interesting.

But yeah, I just love how each of you brought those insights from that time, but also just listening to your kids and seeing who is in front of you and listening to your heart. Because I really feel like all of you had, there’s just this call to be with your kids, this is so important. So I think that was really beautiful.

JEN: I was just going to say, on that note, Anna, we’ve also needed to appreciate that with this more structured approach that the education system is still moving towards, we need to understand the pressure that that puts on teachers.

ANNA: Yeah, absolutely.

JEN: There is no space for relationships. There is no space for connection. And so I appreciate where the system is trying to move towards, but it just puts so much pressure on so many layers within that, that it ends up just extracting all of the good pieces from the teaching profession. That again, like when anyone is in a stressful environment, no one is going to benefit from that.

And we see that time and time again, that teachers are under incredible stress, incredible pressure.

ANNA: Well, that whole system, right? I feel like that whole system is having this pressure of, we need these outcomes, so we’re going to put pressure on this system. But when you drill down to the individuals there, I mean, every teacher I know, again, has the biggest heart, right?

They’re there because they love kids. They love learning themselves. They want to be a part of something, like you said, Michelle, these foundational pieces of like, if we can reach these kids.

And so there’s just, there is so much heart there, but you see this incredible pressure coming from wherever, governments, larger community, whatever that puts such pressure that makes it this boiling point. And I think it’s the kids who suffer and really the teachers too in those systems. It’s so hard.

Okay. So my question is, it’s similar to what we’ve been talking about, but can you share any mindset shifts that have happened on your unschooling journey? Maybe shifts away from schoolish ideas or the way you thought it might be.

And I think we’re all, we talk about this a lot on the network, we’re all learning all the time, but just some of those shifts for you that have been like, oh, I thought it was going to be this way, but really, my kids have shown me another way. So I will go to Erika first.

ERIKA: Yes. I mean, there’s been so many, but I feel like one of the biggest things I had taken away from all of my schooling was that there is a right way for everything, one right way, at least a better path compared to a worse path or, different ideas like that.

And so I think that left me as an adult kind of trying to figure out what’s the best way to do this and what’s the right way to do this. What’s the best way, there’s got to be a correct way for me to parent and there’s got to be a right, best way for my kids to do X, Y, Z. And so that has been gigantic for my mindset to realize that there’s not a right way and that we can’t know. I think we’re promised a lot in school that if you do these things, you’ll get a good outcome.

And now I know that’s not true. And so I feel like that has taken a lot of pressure off of all of our individual decisions. It’s opened my eyes to the great lives that people are having that I would have judged as not a good life back when I was in school because they didn’t do it right, or I don’t know, it wasn’t prestigious enough or something like that. And so I would say that’s probably the biggest mindset shift. I also feel like I had kind of an immature view of the expectations of school being like making sense or being easy when I was younger, that now I don’t feel like that at all.

I understand deeply now that people are different. Back when I was in school, I had a lot of empathy and really cared about how other people were feeling and doing, but it didn’t make sense to me why they wouldn’t just do it though. Like, why don’t you just do the work and then it will be okay and you’ll stop getting yelled at and you’ll stop being in trouble and you’ll get good grades. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around that this is harder for some people than it is for others or that we have different strengths. And so that is something that I am so grateful that I know now, just how different people are and how different everyone’s experience of every single thing is from everyone else.

It’s been interesting if I ever do have a chance to talk with someone from my school days, how different our memories are of the same things. Something that stuck with me forever that shook me to my core at that time. I’ve had people be like, oh, I don’t remember that that happened. So really even back then everyone was having a completely different experience.

But I didn’t recognize that at that time, of course, because I was young. And so that’s something that as a parent, I think, and as an unschooler on this journey in particular, I think I’ve had a lot of space to dive into really questioning those things. And I’m so grateful.

ANNA: Yes, those are big ones! Okay, Jenna, I’ll go to you next.

JEN: Yeah, with mindset shifts, it’s almost hard to pinpoint what exactly they were once you’ve made the mindset shift, right? Sort of like, oh, what was my mindset like back then? And I think one of the biggest ones was moving from this mechanistic kind of approach to raising children.

And when I say mechanistic, I’m referring to if you’ve, well, I know you beautiful ladies have read it, because that’s how I discovered it. Alison Gopnik’s book, “The Gardener and the Carpenter.” This whole carpenter approach where you are trying to mold or build something specific. And so you’re making decisions based on, if I do this thing, then I’m going to get this outcome.

What that shifted to was really this gardener approach, which is really interesting, because we’re now as a family, we’re now going down the road of regenerative agriculture, so everything that I’m learning about regenerative agriculture, I’m looking at it through the lens of unschooling. And it’s really this whole idea of understanding the nature of things, understanding, what it really takes, it needs to start with observation, right?

You need to really take that step back and see the child in front of you, which is really impossible to do when you have that mechanistic kind of approach, that carpenter approach where you’re trying to mold them into something specific. I don’t believe that children are this blank slate for us to just do with what we like. I believe that every individual is their own person.

And like Erika demonstrated, two people can have the same kind of experience, but they experience it very differently. And so really moving towards this gardener approach, it’s all about creating the conditions that allows the nature of that thing to really bloom.

We see it in schools, the kinds of conditions that we create in the education system, how it really stifles a lot of children. I know you’ve spoken about it, Anna, that you work with a lot of adults who are in their forties, fifties, and are really just learning about themselves now because they’ve kind of lived this surface level life where they’ve done all the right things. They’ve followed the directions that well-intentioned people have been kind of steering them on, but feel out of alignment with the life that they’re living.

And so I think for me, one of the biggest blessings, and even though I would have my mom back in a heartbeat, losing my mom at such a young age helped me to see the depth of life. I started to question everything when that took place, that I started to really understand. I started to dive deep into what the meaning of life was. And so through going on this unschooling journey, like I said, I felt so called to it that I couldn’t not do it.

And that was really the birthplace of me making decisions from my heart and appreciating that children know how to do that best. They really know how to follow that inner voice within them. And from my perspective, coming from that really mechanistic approach to living life to this gardener approach has allowed me to see the magic that unfolds as we are living life.

Why would we want to set outcomes for other people? It just makes zero sense to me now that, like Erika said, I just feel so grateful that I have come across this way of living life, because there is just so much more connection. There’s so much more depth to the way we’re living our lives that no amount of planning could ever create that.

And it’s just like, why would I want to? There’s just so much magic that comes from being in the present moment and following what we’re drawn to in any given moment that, to me, curriculum just makes zero sense. And particularly in this day and age where the world is changing so rapidly, I always say to parents, like, what are we actually planning for?

What are we planning for when, I think I heard a statistic like by 2030, 85% of the jobs that will be around in 2030 don’t even exist. And it’s like, what are we planning for people? Whereas by really following what a child is interested in and being so in tune and present with where they’re at in that particular time, not worrying about what their reading ability is, or their writing ability is, or do they know how to do this, or how to solve this mathematical equation.

I’m seeing this now, with my youngest. I’ve really been on this pathway pretty much from the get go with him. And just seeing all of these skills just naturally organically evolve has been really beautiful. And he’s not, if he was to go into a school environment, which he has entertained and played with that idea, because this pathway is not about whether you go to school or not. It is so much more about what is that, what are those conditions that are really going to allow this child to be more of who they already are. And so he has gone back into the school system. And it just doesn’t make any sense, because it’s just this surface level stuff, filling this worksheet.

And I actually showed Leeton a couple of months ago, he was doing something, he was playing a computer game, and he needed to work out which V-Buck bundle he was going to purchase. And watching him navigate that, it was just like, oh my goodness. And then I, as a teacher, documented what that looks like, pen and paper form.

And then I said, mate, what you just did then, that’s what that looks like at school. It doesn’t make sense whatsoever that just filling in a worksheet is going to bring about that depth that you get when you learn things in context.

And so I think, from a parenting perspective, does it make sense to just know how to do something on a worksheet? Or does it make sense being able to solve problems as you’re encountering the problems in everyday life? And I think really every parent would agree that’s way more meaningful than filling in, showing that you know how to solve this mathematical problem through this teacher method that the teacher has delivered.

And even my eldest son, who has been at school for the most time, and did pretty well at school, then started his electrical trade, had to do an early entry exam where they had to do a numeracy and a mathematical one. And he even said, he’s like, mom, I’ll be lucky if I got, he was kind of being smart about it. He’s like, I’d be lucky if I got zero.

I’ve learned all of these things, but do you think I could remember how to do it? And it’s like, yeah, mate, because when we don’t learn things in context, we don’t grow the depth. And going back to what I was saying with the gardener and the carpenter, now understanding more about regenerative agriculture, it’s about what’s happening beneath the surface that drives what happens above the surface.

And so that’s where my mindset has shifted probably the most is understanding that when we learn things in context, we’re actively learning them. We’re growing those roots that allow us to then take those concepts and apply them in all different contexts. And so, I often talk about this whole idea of, well, most people in my world drive a car, but I guarantee hardly any of them know how the engine works.

Like we know how to drive a car, but we don’t need to know all of the intricacies of how the engine works to actually be able to drive that car. What I feel education is trying to do, it’s trying to really teach all of the intricate pieces, whether they’re related or relevant to what the learner is interested in or not. And so I just feel like we lose, we lose the context, right?

ANNA: We lose that context.

JEN: Yeah. We really do lose the context and we get bogged down in all of this detail. But when you think about how we learned to walk and talk, no one sat there and said, right, okay, now you’re going to put this leg forward.

We didn’t explicitly teach that. And somehow we get this idea that once we hit the age of five and even earlier now, everything needs to be explicitly taught. And it’s like, no, everything is implicitly taught.

And this is the thing about even going back to the creatures. Even going back to that gardener and carpenter approach. When we’re taking a carpenter approach and we think about how we want our children to be, but the beautiful thing is we don’t need to do anything to our children. We just need to be it ourselves. And we see it, we see it in our children.

They’ll do something. And I’m like, oh man, I used to do that like early in my parenting days. And I’m like, oh man, that’s coming back to bite me in the bum now. They learn so much more unconsciously than what they do consciously. But yeah, I feel like I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent there.

ANNA: That’s okay. I really appreciate it. Because all of those things are wrapped together, right? All those ideas and all those are the shifts that this journey teaches us. That is part of our implicit learning, right? Of just being able to be there and be a part of it. So yeah, I love that. But I’ll go to you, Michelle, and see what your thoughts are about that.

MICHELLE: So as I was listening to her, I was thinking about how a lot of my thoughts and chewing on these questions were similar. Like the gardener situation, I’ve been thinking about children, my children in particular, whether it’s about flowers or animals, the environment mattering very much. And so for example, different flowers, obviously they need different environments to thrive.

With animals, I view it in a sense of how much is the school environment asking a tiger to swim or, I don’t know how well tigers swim actually, but okay, have the fish climb the tree, right? Yeah. That I think that’s what school is actually doing in a lot of senses is trying to take a child who, if left to the beauty of exploring the world in the safety of their home with their parents and family, that they would be able to thrive and blossom.

It makes me upset that so many children get labeled in certain negative ways that they think something’s wrong with them, instead of recognizing that it’s the adults that are trying to fit them into a particular box that is never going to work for them. Even as an adult, they might struggle and as an adult, still trying to fit into that box and everything. So I don’t know if this mindset shift per se, but something that does bother me is the use of the word behind.

I feel like it’s not a helpful term to say that a child is behind. Behind who? Behind what?

That’s not helpful for the child. It might be helpful in your system and such. But if the whole idea is to nurture and teach children and help them to learn and enjoy learning, critical thinking, all the things that schools want to put out as, oh, we’re helping them to be critical thinkers and things like that.

But then the way that you’re going about instructing them doesn’t work. It doesn’t fit together because you want them to conform. And I just think that, well, I wrote down, it’s sad to have kids jumping through hoops.

I know from my own experience of being a child and wanting to get good grades. That was so important to me was getting those good grades. And I felt like as I got older, I didn’t learn anything. I just was really good at regurgitation.

And then I got the golden stars and everything for that. But as far as my actual understanding of things, the way I view things now is mastery and enjoyment are available to us. So to learn something because you want to be able to do a thing, that’s the reason why you learn.

So when people, teachers, parents, whatever, want kids to learn by a certain age, learn how to read by a certain age, it’s for their purposes. It’s not for the child to be able to enjoy what comes from being able to read. All five of my children taught themselves to read at different ages in different ways, but they were just in an environment with their parents, their extended family. There’s so much around us that how can you not in a sense take it in. You’re just going to be able to eventually understand. It clicks at different times. One day you couldn’t as an 11 year old you just haven’t gotten it yet. And then all of a sudden, you’re reading big long sentences. And we have so many homeschooling, unschooling stories of this.

It just really makes me sad for kids that are stuck in the system that have those labels. But also the fact of just kids being focused on grades, what comes from that, whether the teachers or the adults realize it or not, is the question, will it be on the test? And so then, if it’s not on the test, I don’t care about it. Why would I spend my mental energy? I could be doing other things with my life.

It makes the learning not enjoyable. You’re just regurgitating and missing all of the beauty and wonder of being able to learn about anything you want. I mean, the world that we live in now, as far as the access that we have to the information and school is like a fake world.

It’s an imitation. I remember when I was in third grade, my teacher set up a whole big portion of the room that was a store. And we had a cash register and we could buy things. But at the end of the day, that’s fake money. That’s, it’s not real money. It’s not real world learning about, budgeting or whatever.

I feel like because of who I am that all these mindset shifts may have happened just naturally anyways, but definitely being on the unschooling journey. I don’t even know how to end that sentence, but yeah it’s part of it.

ANNA: But just tuning in with your kids. You just really brought those things that were deep inside of you to the surface. Because I think that’s the beauty of our kids just really showing us these things that I think we have inherently known. But a lot of us that went through that system, it’s kind of been pushed down. And something you said reminded me, do you, Pam, do you remember Animal School? I’m going to try to find it.

It’s an old video. I feel like it’s probably been 15 or 20 years. Maybe it’s still out there, but it’s this exact thing about what you’re talking about. And it just brings you to tears. The fish is at school and he has to stay out because he doesn’t know how to climb the tree, but the monkey gets to go climb the tree and then he has to stop that to learn how to swim. And, oh my gosh, recognizing that these environments don’t mean anything.

And I think that’s what I love about when people start questioning is because we just don’t question it, right? We don’t question, does this make the most sense? Is this the easiest way or the best way or the most efficient way even to learn about something?

And so I think it’s cool when you open that up, because again, I think so many people in that environment, they want that. And they have a lot of constraints around what that can look like. And so when we have the privilege and the ability to be able to try different things. For kids to really guide their own learning, find their ways. It can be really beautiful.

PAM: Yeah. And I think for me, through this whole conversation, really what shines for me as one of the big differences is, and you alluded to it, Michelle, is the, how in the system we come to put value on learning that happens there over all the other learning. Why can’t I learn while I do this other thing that I love, at which I’m learning a ton. So for me, I feel like you’ve been able to see within your lives and within the system, just the huge difference in how one just defines learning and the fact that, okay, not even define how we value, that idea that there is learning that is more valuable.

There’s learning more valuable to the system for the system’s reasons, but not to the individual, right? Things that are important to them in the moment are just beautiful learning experiences.

Well, thank you all so much for joining us. It’s been such an interesting conversation. I have loved how much you guys have thought about this and processed it, and I really appreciate you sharing with us.

And we invite everyone listening to join us in the Living Joyfully Network to continue the conversation with all of us. It is a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a nonjudgmental space where you can explore these more unconventional ideas about learning and parenting and these wonderful gardener and carpenter metaphors, and what they just can look like day to day in your family, because as Erika said, people are different.

Your family’s different from our family’s. Your child’s different from a sibling or from another family’s child, but that doesn’t mean we have to twist these ideas, right? They fit for individuals, for people, just as the human beings they are.

Anyway, your first month is free so that you can get a sense of whether the community is a good fit for you, and we are very excited to welcome you. To learn more and join us, just follow the link in the show notes or go to livingjoyfully.ca and choose Network in the menu up top. Wishing everyone a lovely day.

Thanks so much, everyone. Thank you. We appreciate you joining us.

We’re back with another On the Journey episode! Pam, Anna, and Erika had fun connecting with Living Joyfully Network member Julia Triman. Julia was on the podcast with Pam back in 2021, when she talked about her unschooling stories. It was really cool to hear how things have changed and how they’ve stayed the same in her family of four.

Julia shared about her family’s latest passions and what has surprised her the most about her unschooling journey. She also talked about her interest in quilting, how she followed the threads of her new interest, how it grew into a business, and how it all ties into the paradigm shifts she’s made through unschooling. It was a really inspiring conversation and we hope it resonates with you!

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

EU264: Unschooling Stories with Julia Triman

We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us.

Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more!

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

ERIKA: Hello, everyone! I am Erika Ellis from Living Joyfully. And I’m joined by my co hosts, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia, as well as our special guest today, Julia Triman. Hello to you all.

I’m very excited that we get to talk with Julia today. I met her right when I joined the Living Joyfully Network in 2020. And I’ve had so much fun connecting with her over the years. Julia was also on the podcast back in February 2021, when her kids were just three and five. I encourage everyone to check out episode 264 if you would like to hear more about her unschooling journey.

And we can’t wait to hear an update five and a half years later. So to get us started, Julia, can you tell us a little bit about you and your family and what everyone’s interested in right now?

JULIA: Definitely. And I’m so excited to be back. This is really fun.

So, we are similar to what we were five years ago. We still live in Frederick, Maryland in the US. We’re not terribly far from Washington, DC. And we’re still a family of four humans and two cats. Our cats are getting a little older. They’re aging a bit, but they’re still very much part of the family every day. So as far as what we’re interested in, I’m going in the same order I went the last time.

Starting with Dan. Dan and I have been together for many years. And he loves being outside, trail running, open water swimming and biking. He is a triathlete and he also does each of those activities by themselves. He absolutely loves to read in his spare time. One of the things I love is he’ll just go, so I’m a library person. When I go I want this very specific book and I get the hold for that specific book. Dan is a browser. So he’ll go to the library and he will come home with a backpack completely full of books.

But for me, it’s a thrill because then I get to see each book and see all the things that he found, all these little treasures that he’s interested in. And the last important thing to note is Dan absolutely loves good food. He likes cooking and also eating and finding delicious tasty foods to eat. Going to our farmer’s market is another personal hobby of his.

Cody, which is kind of amazing to even say this out loud. But Cody is 11 now. And he right now I would say is very into animation, both watching different animated shows and also making his own animation. He’s also still very into music. And the biggest game he’s playing right now is called Terraria. And he and a friend have been working through that quite a bit in the last couple weeks and really enjoying that game.

And Nora is eight. So she’s eight at the time that we’re recording this, but she is very soon gonna be nine. So by the time it comes out, she will be nine. Her absolute biggest thing she’s into now is connecting and playing with her friends 100%. She also loves and she has for her whole life, like creating and making things. And right now that’s investing a lot of time in beading and also very recently bedazzling. That’s the newest most exciting thing that’s happening on our porch these days.

But she also combines those things. She likes making things to gift to her friends. That is probably her top occupation the last week or two or three is just using these things that she loves to create and gifting them to friends. It’s just a big thing for her right now.

And then the last thing I wanted to say about Nora, she also has recently really been enjoying when we travel or go on a day trip, anytime we’re exploring or seeing something new. She’s very into that these days. And when we do travel and stay at a vacation home or a hotel, she just loves every single one from the moment we walk in the door, she just loves exploring a new place to live in a way.

And so that’s just been a really fun thing that I would say more recent than maybe the last time we chatted. So the three of us are also deep into the Percy Jackson book series right now and all three of us are loving it. One of them will say we need to read a lot tonight. We need extra time because we’ve got a lot to get through.

And I’m excited, we’ve decided we’re going to do book one, season one, book two, season two. There’s a series I think on maybe Disney plus that we haven’t watched yet, but we’re going to do that soon too.

So, I looked back and I was thinking about it. As for me, I don’t think I was a quilter. The last time we recorded a podcast which, just like the kids’ ages, is mind blowing to think about because quilting has just become such a big part of my life now. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that later. But I absolutely love quilting. And what it’s become for me now is a creative outlet, a way of expressing myself artistically and creatively. But I’ve also very recently become a quilting teacher.

And so one of my hobbies these days is coming up with new creative quilting workshops, just like how can I come at it from a different angle, and a different topic. I just get a little zing of a thrill just making up new quilting workshops. And I do have at least a few other things I enjoy besides quilting. Hiking and yoga are still really big.

And I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about the philosophy of creativity, which kind of stems from my quilting and art interest, but it’s also a separate passion or interest.

The last thing about us is we’re also joining our first ever homeschool co-op this fall, which is something I’ve always kind of been curious about. And I’m excited that the timing and the co-op we’re going to try just hit everyone at just the right moment. I’m excited to just see what that might be like for all of us to have like a regular group that we’re meeting up with every week.

ERIKA: Yeah, that was awesome. I’m so excited hearing all the things and all the things that have changed. And just picturing all that you’ve gotten to do since we talked to you last time. I just feel like that’s really cool. And that you could have such a big part of your life as quilting, in such a short period. We never really know where our journeys will take us. But yeah, that’s super inspiring.

ANNA: Yeah, that’s what struck me about the quilting too. I’m thinking, oh my gosh, we may not even know what’s going to be our main passion five years from now. And that’s the same for kids too, right? There may not be a well worn mapped path of how we get there. Things just show up. That really struck me too. It’s amazing.

PAM: It is. I had fun. I tried my hand at Terraria as well.

It was just fun to hear and have an idea of how much they’re figuring out as they’re working their way through it. I think that is super cool. That’s why I love hearing snapshots. And then snapshots from the same family over time. Because yes, unschooling kids have a wide range of interests.

And also an unschooling child can often have a wide range of interests. And I don’t want to leave out the ones who have a lifelong passion about something, but the window changes over time, and the different ways they approach it, the different ways that they’re diving in because a passion can just be a window to so many different things.

JULIA: It’s always so fascinating to hear that. And that’s funny that you mentioned those two things right next to each other, because we were having a conversation recently about Cody’s interest in Terraria and how he and his friend had tried the game. I don’t know if it was a couple of months ago, maybe even a year ago, and it didn’t really click at that time.

And so some period of time later, it is that window. It is just the right time for several reasons. And it’s fascinating for both of them right at the same time. So that’s been really cool to talk with him about, sometimes you might try a game and maybe it is really interesting, but it’s just not the fit for that time.

PAM: Mm hmm. And sometimes you’ll see games or any interest, but just using games as an example, how something will click and you’ll play for a while and that was really cool. And then you move on. And then you’ll find it’s circling back a few months, a few years later, and there’s a completely different aspect. And that’s what they’re diving into and exploring. So many games are rich in that way that they don’t have just one thing, especially a game like Terraria. It’s very much a sandbox.

JULIA: It’s got so many different aspects you can play with. It has such a unique style too. We were talking recently, or I was sharing rather about how there’s almost a retro, like it looks if you just look superficially at the gameplay and the style of the game, it definitely looks like an older game, maybe from when I was a kid even, but then there are some elements they throw in that are very much of the sort of 2026, or it wasn’t made in 2026. But you know what I mean.

The era that it was made, which was not in the early 90s. So anyway, it’s just interesting how each game we play and how there’s so much to each one. We can have all these rich conversations about all these different aspects of every single game that they might play. I love it.

PAM: I know, I love it. And that’s one of the things with unschooling we talk so much about, is that when we engage with them, in whatever it is that they’re interested in and playing, we’re not just saying, oh, they’re playing a game, right? We just know so much more.

And we can then have those rich conversations. And that’s where we see and just learn so much more about them and see what is catching their interest right now, which bit of it and then we can make their world richer. Anyway, that is beautiful.

I love that piece. And it kind of leads nicely into our next question, which is, we’re just very curious to hear with this window now that we’ve had more than five years since you’ve been on here speaking about things. What has surprised you as to how things have shifted and changed what your unschooling looks like nowadays? I would just love to hear your perspective on that.

JULIA: So I just love this question so much, because I maybe had a different thought when I first saw the question. And then as I sort of pondered it more, so much started coming out in my mind and from my experience. So my first response, and this was my gut instinct was, well, everything is different. And everything is the same. It looks nothing like it did. And it also is exactly like it was.

Which is a non answer, but my initial thought. So, as Erika mentioned, the last time we recorded, the kids were three and five, so quite a bit younger. And when I was thinking back, I mean, I was in the thick of big sensory play. I would say I was very physically responsive, physically present with the kids, almost every minute of the day.

Very hands on, lots of exploration, lots of creation and destruction and huge messes and just like playing together all day every day. Now, we’re still together, we’re still connected. But it is really different the ways that we connect.

So how I would describe it is my involvement and interactions with the kids these days are a lot more cerebral. And I think that probably is tracking their individual development and their development as humans, in terms of how they want to relate and the types of topics we might get into. But I was thinking about it.

And I think I maybe oversimplified what I do at first. I was like, all right, Julia, I’m doing more than that. So the big thing I would say I’m doing is listening. And I want to talk a little more about that.

But I was like, you’re doing more than that. So now I would say I remember talking with you, Pam, about how they really helped me focus on the present moment. And they absolutely still do.

But we’re also a lot more future focus these days in certain aspects. I will do a lot of work to schedule meetups with friends, schedule activities, coordinate and plan these logistics. Whereas before, we spent a lot of time at home. And we might go out once a week to do some big adventure.

Now it’s like, at least one of the kids would prefer that we be out of the house every single day doing something. So it’s a lot. That’s a big part of what I’m doing now is listening and then responding to those requests. A lot of sourcing and finding materials and technical things.

But what I remember when they were younger is it would be Julia figuring it all out myself. And now it will be like, I want this thing, or I’m curious to explore this. And it’s very collaborative.

We’ll be together, either internet researching, going to the library, whatever the need might require. So that’s still a big part of what I’m doing. But it’s so much more in sync with each person, each kid, and exactly what they want, or what they’re looking for.

And we do a lot of just brainstorming. I want to do this thing, but I’m not sure how. And so just a lot of back and forth around, what will we want? How can we make this thing happen?

Or this even just like an outing, there’s an outing today that doesn’t really fit in the schedule. So it’s like, okay, well, let’s just sit together and think of how we can make it happen. Like, could we do it later at night? Could we do it tomorrow? Could this person come with us? So anyway, a lot of brainstorming, I would say definitely every day.

Also, we’re moving things around, and setting up new spaces and taking down old ones to kind of support as their interests grow and change. Maybe we need a chair here. Maybe we need a whole room switched.

Whereas before it felt like maybe an open play space where just everything happened all the time. But now their needs are getting more specific, and their interests are getting more specific. So they’re maybe wanting a desk for some purpose, maybe needing a dedicated place for a certain type of art creation.

And sometimes, they still invite me to play games with them or create things. Sometimes Nora will want to show me, she’ll want to kind of help me understand how to make a particular beaded project. So she will give me a little cup with what do you call it? A kit, she calls it a kit.

So I’ll have my kit with the beads that I need to make the thing. And then she walks me through it step by step, which is also so interesting, being a sort of arts and craft teacher. And then just experiencing that through a different lens with her is extremely fun.

So yeah, I was gonna say about the last piece I wanted to share was just about when I say listening, what do I mean by that? Because obviously, or not obviously, but in my experience with them, listening is what I always wanted to do from the very beginning. And maybe it wasn’t always listening to lots of words, but listening to who they are and what they want to do.

And I don’t know if it surprised me. But it really has changed, how and what I’m listening for. So they might work on something like an animation or an art project, and then they want to show or share that with me.

Or they might do something on their own or with a friend. And then they want to, at length, tell me about things about it, just verbally explain, this is what happened. These were all the pieces, maybe even show me something on YouTube, it looked like this.

And these conversations, again, we’ve had conversations their whole lives, but they are just becoming so much deeper, and rich and varied. And I just am learning so much from them every day, they ask so many challenging questions and have really deep insights. And as we were reviewing for this, I have notes that I’m occasionally glancing at to make sure I’m staying on task, which I’ve already kind of gotten off task once or twice.

But as we were reviewing this, one of the things the kids told me was there were just a few words that didn’t resonate with them. And actually, the word resonate was something that I needed to explain. But in explaining to one of them, what I meant by the word insights, it was so fascinating.

And it was, I think, just a perfect example of what I’m trying to explain. They’ll come with a question, what do you mean by insight? What does that mean in this context? And then I was explaining, well, you’ll ask a question, or we’ll be talking about a topic.

And then something new is revealed that maybe neither of us knew before, or one of us, one of the four of us in our family will know something the others didn’t. And so that gives us new information. So it’s just like the coolest thing to be learning more about humanity and language and all of these things, with just the most, sometimes they’re very simple questions, but then it gets really deep.

But the other piece I will say about listening, is I’m also challenged in a lot of new ways that I wasn’t before. And I mean, I think as a parent, there are challenges always along the way. And I don’t necessarily mean challenge in a negative way.

But they question what I do a lot more. And they’re interrogating my opinions. And they happily let me know when something I say or do doesn’t resonate.

Which I think, again, you know, being nine and 11, I think it’s pretty common from what I understand from other parents that I know. So yeah, I feel like I’ve probably covered most of what I want to say about that. But listening for those, I’ll call them critiques, and understanding why the things I do or say, may not resonate.

I feel like that’s kind of one of the biggest learning and growth moments for me right now.

PAM: I love that one, Julia. Yes, I love that you focused on listening and how that is changing over the years. And absolutely, that shift in the depth of the conversations. But also it’s so fascinating and there’s definitely work to not take feedback like personally, maybe words we use or things we’re sharing or things we’re choosing to do, like there, you use the word critique, information about their perspective.

And it’s so fascinating, if you can bigger picture that rather than taking it as a knock on who you are as a human being. It’s really telling you so much about them, isn’t it? It’s like, oh, they’re noticing this.

Now, this is something that they really didn’t see happening. It was just like part of the background of the day, part of the background of another person. But it is so fascinating to see the pieces that they start to notice when they start to notice. And, just what they as a human being are thinking, how they’re seeing it, what that it really is, It’s so helpful in seeing through their eyes and the lens of the particular action or words or whatever, and how they’re seeing it.

I remember a long time ago, Lissy had a couple of words like that. She liked to say show, not concert. We had conversations about it, and what that meant to her. And then she didn’t like if people talked about kids going through a “phase”, they’re going through this phase, because if you call it a phase that presupposes that there’s an end to it. And for her, she felt like don’t call it a phase when I’m deep in the middle of it, because maybe I’ll be this way forever.

And so it’s just so fascinating to have those conversations rather than feel defensive about it. Or thinking, I have to change, there’s something wrong with me.

No, to actually have those conversations. Of course, you try to use the language that resonates for them as well in the moment. But now when you understand the perspective, it’s so much about them. And it’s all about them, and how they’re seeing things. But as a family, and as a relationship that we want to develop, and keep connected and trusting, to learn that and work with that, I think it’s just beautiful. So I love that you brought that up.

ERIKA: I totally love that, too. And I thought challenging or challenge is such a good word for it because sometimes it can feel hard for me when it’s like, but this is how we’ve always interacted, or I’ve always said that, or you’ve always liked that, or, those kind of feelings of, I thought I knew you. And now you’re telling me that you’re different.

But it happens so much now that I’m used to, that’s just the new normal is they’re different. And they’re going to tell me about the things that are working and not working for them right now. And it’s not how it used to be, and so to not take that personally, and really see it as kind of a positive challenge, like a way that we can all grow together in our conversations, I think has been really cool.

And right, I can totally imagine how much has shifted in the way you communicate with them over these really important developmental years.

ANNA: Yes, so much. And I love the don’t take it personally piece because that’s huge. But what that allows is what I love. I get lots of insights into Julia’s process and things because we’re close, but I love what you’re describing because I think it helps people see how these conversations really just flow in our natural day to day. That’s not resonating for me. Okay, let’s figure out something else. Or, hey, I’d like to do this.

There’s such an openness about it. And I think we can get kind of stuck in defensive postures or in thinking there has to be one way. We’re speeding through, there’s the sense of urgency, whatever things kind of stop us from giving things that space. I think you’re really just very beautiful in allowing the space. And that doesn’t mean that there aren’t bumps, right, that sometimes that’s hard, or we are pushed up against timeframes and deadlines.

But when we cultivate that sense of openness, and hey, we’re going to talk about this, and we’re going to have space for this. And we’re going to be aware and watch for those other nonverbal cues. It really changes the energy of those experiences. And I think that you’ve just really beautifully explained that.

ERIKA: I think it’s giving them a chance to be someone different, to grow.

JULIA: And I would say, it’s doing the exact same thing for me. Because while I totally agree, it’s helping me see through their eyes. It also in a really powerful way, at times is revealing to me, or I wrote down that they’re catching me in my stories.

And in my tapes that are in my head, even just this is something so simple. But the other day, one of the kids asked, Why do you say my dear, why do you say, well, I love you? Blah, blah, blah, blah, my dear.

And I was like, Oh, I think it’s probably because that’s what grandma always said to me. It’s not something that I think a lot about. And it’s nothing personal.

That’s another thing is there was a time within this stretch of time since we’d last chatted, that one of the kids was clear that they did not want me to use any of the nicknames that I was using for them anymore. And we’ll just say for those who don’t know me that I am affectionate and effusive to a fault. And this child had probably more nicknames than any child has ever had.

So that was really a process for me. And I remember telling them at the time, I’m committed to this, I’m going to mess up, I’m going to make mistakes. But it didn’t take terribly long until I wasn’t using the nicknames anymore. But related to the my dear piece, that was just one little nugget that I was like, Oh, I have these tapes in my head, these stories, these ways that I think that are so ingrained, or the ways that I speak even, that are so ingrained in the way that I am as a person.

And we’ve talked a little bit in the network about, maybe questioning that. How strongly do I want to hold on to the story of what Julia is, how she speaks, how she’s effusively affectionate, like all those things like. So these encounters with them, and these things that have come up, have really helped me see the ways in which I might reevaluate that for myself. And that applies to so many other interactions with people too, not just with my kids, but it starts to take me in new directions.

To just look at it with a different lens, or look a little closer at my interactions. This is relevant to a conversation Anna and I have been having recently about listening, like the different ways that we might listen when someone’s talking. I have that choice, I can make a choice to use a different style when I’m listening to Dan, for example. So anyway, it’s just really interesting.

ANNA: It’s like catching us on the autopilot stuff, right? Because I think we and it’s partly just our brain trying to be efficient, right? We just get in these autopilot modes of speaking and doing and moving through the day.

But I love that about kids because they absolutely call us out on those things and make us question it. And that doesn’t even mean we have to throw it out. It’s more like, oh, am I intentionally choosing this? That’s what I loved about it. I felt that was a big thing for me. It brought so much more intention to everything I did, having kids around me and that we were having these conversations.

PAM: Yeah, exactly the intention, because what it does, just like you’re describing, Julia, which is brilliant, is that we just, it’s a moment for us to question ourselves, right? And like you said, it doesn’t, it’s not dependent on stopping doing something. It’s just shining a little light and like, oh, I get to think about that. Is it an automatic thing I do? Where did it come from? And in that processing, we might decide, ooh, I really love that part of me.

But then we can explain it to others. The explanation is not, oh, I’ve always done that. And then we can say, oh, where it came from, why we do it, how we feel when we do it, when we say it, and then that’s where you get those deep conversations, right?

And they say, oh, but I see it this way. And it feels like this for me. And then maybe we come up with a third thing that’s completely different, it’s not start or stop.

It’s just something different. Right? But that’s how you get to those deep conversations, right?

ERIKA: I feel like having the older kids is such a great way to learn about how people are different, because they’re going to tell us the things that I’m like, but this is so fun to me. And they could be like, it’s not to me. I don’t even understand that at all.

And so that just shows us even if we thought they were going to be just like us, they’re not. And then we can learn about the ways that people are different.

ANNA: I love that. Okay, so I’m going to go on to our next question. I’m excited about this one.

I have really enjoyed following your journey as you first started talking about, I want to do some work outside the home, what does that look like? And I love how you brought this unschooling mindset into it. And then just how it’s come from this deep, oh, I don’t know, just passion inside of you, how it’s grown.

And so I thought it’d be cool for you to just share a little bit about that journey and the process of doing it and where you are now. I’m just excited because it’s a cool story.

JULIA: I’m excited too, because I talk a lot about quilting and teaching quilting, but not usually to an unschooling audience. And so I was like, it’s so exciting to think about this conversation, because you all are just going to immediately know what I’m talking about for certain aspects of it. And I feel like my interest in quilting, so I am a deep diver, and I have been for my whole adult life, as long as I can remember.

But I really feel like, let’s say it was five years before I started quilting with the kids. Having young kids absolutely influenced kind of like the permission that maybe I gave myself to fully dive into this interest in quilting. And it wasn’t really super logical. I wasn’t like, well, now I’m giving you permission, Julia.

It was like, well, I started one project and just felt so good. It was just like, some people in the world probably do just make one quilt, but most quilters you talk to, you make one and you just don’t stop, because it’s just so satisfying and fun. There’s a mindfulness aspect to it.

It’s meditative. It’s satisfying to just create something. And at the time they were so small, it was something that I could piece together that wasn’t going to be immediately torn apart.

So it was like, I have the ability to create and to make things. So I started out quilting mostly other people’s patterns. But over the course of a couple years, I really started moving towards more creative expression. But I wasn’t thinking at all. It was never like, I’m going to start quilting so that I can become a quilting teacher. That was never in my mind.

And I think the last time we recorded, Pam, I think I might have said something like, I couldn’t ever imagine teaching. I had been through this. I had completed my PhD and finished that and discovered unschooling at the same time.

And there was just this huge dissonance. I could not imagine continuing to stand in front of a classroom with a curriculum that perhaps not all of the students were enthusiastically consenting to for various reasons. So in my mind back in 2021, I couldn’t teach. I couldn’t see how I could do that. And now I’m a teacher. So it’s been the most amazing turnaround for me.

I feel like when I started teaching, it was 2025. And it started super small. And very similarly to my quilting journey, I asked a friend, hey, what would you think about me teaching a quilting class at your sewing studio? And the answer was yes. And I taught one workshop and it was over. It was like, this is amazing. I love this. What am I going to teach next?

Like I mentioned, coming up with new ideas for creative quilting workshops is a separate hobby, which is something that I absolutely love.

But from the very beginning, having all this experience living and learning collaboratively and consensually with the kids, I wasn’t imagining myself, a lot of quilting teachers, amazing quilting teachers will teach sort of a project or a particular skill. And the goal of the class might be to make that thing just as the instructor made it, which I have absolutely taken classes like that, loved them, they’re beautiful. But that wasn’t going to be the approach that I wanted to take as a teacher, because it just wouldn’t fit my sort of philosophy, I guess.

So from the beginning, I wanted my teaching to be open ended and allow for people to make their own choices and create their own things. I didn’t want to teach a project with answers that they had to figure out. I wanted each person to have the freedom to make what they wanted to.

So in my first couple workshops, I played with the structure and in inviting people in, often, you do need a hook, you need something like not just like, I’m going to teach you nothing. So sort of playing with that, finding a class or a workshop idea with some sort of broad idea. Like, for example, this summer, I taught a mini map quilt series.

So we’re all going to make a map quilt. But what each person’s map quilt will end up looking like is and was completely different. So, it’s been an interesting journey playing with how to create a class that people want to actually take that has things that are interesting, but also has so much freedom and flexibility.

So now that I’ve taught, I’m almost at about the year mark of having taught probably 12 to 15 different workshops. Now I’ve got this small group of students who just want more. And so at the end of a class or series, they’ll literally say, well, what are we going to do next?

And I’ll say, well, what do you want to learn? And so it’s this incredible dynamic now of I am creating new classes and series that they are specifically asking for. So it’s a really cool interchange in that sense.

But the ultimate example of this is something I’m calling Creative Quilting Studio. And this grew out of two of my students in the spring. Both wanted to work on their own original creative quilt ideas.

And so we were like, well, why don’t we just come together, just a few of us, and we’ll make this little class, Creative Quilting Studio, and I’ll just help you with your projects. It was fascinating how many other people then also joined to do things that I could never have imagined that they might need or want help with. So to me, Creative Quilting Studio is like the ultimate combination of my passions of unschooling and quilting because it’s an open studio style situation where each person comes in with a project in mind or a goal that they want to work on.

And I will sort of have one-on-one time with each of them, and then we all work sort of in a group. Everyone’s learning from each other’s projects. But it is so enriching, and I am loving the ability to have this class workshop situation that is truly collaborative and consensual with every single student.

And it’s low commitment, so they can either come for a single session or for multiple. And it’s fascinating. I think my favorite part about it is the challenge of, and this is true with the kids too, the challenge of every day, every session, I don’t know.

I don’t know what’s going to come up or what they’re going to bring. I do survey them the week before a session and say, hey, what do you think we’re going to work on? But sometimes they might come, and I’ve had this happen with a student, and say, I don’t feel like working on that today.

And I’m like, great, what should we do instead? Truly, whatever they want to work on is what we do. I’ve even had a situation where a student just wanted to talk about possible design ideas.

We just looked through a bunch of ideas they had, talked about technical issues and what they might consider. So it’s just so satisfying and interesting, and it’s, I think, the direction I’m hoping to head and just grow even more. I’m even curious about how I might do something like that online or digitally.

I’m not quite sure. It’s still very nascent. But it’s definitely hitting that sweet spot of just being the perfect combination of all these things that I’m loving.

ANNA: I love it so much, because I think, again, we have in our head this idea of what teacher and student means. We’re this and that. It’s this top-down, this authority. And I get why you were bucking against it as you were first discovering unschooling and seeing how it was to interact with your kids.

But then this is the thing, right? We can bring this lens, this mindset to everything we do. And I know how excited and energized your students get, because I think they can feel that energy too.

This difference of getting to tap into what they love, to not having to make it conform to someone else’s idea. And I know there’s times where you’re like, okay, I’ve not done that, but let’s figure out this. We can help you figure this out.

And that, again, it’s this empowerment that you give them and just this person that can be with you as you’re figuring something out. So I love that. And I love the idea of maybe figuring out a way to do it to a broader audience.

We’ll share how to get in touch with you on your website and your newsletter, because it shares these cool ideas about things. And so even if they aren’t local to Frederick, there’s going to be things that can grow from that. Because your passion for it is so infectious, and it just makes me excited.

Oh, and people that are watching this on YouTube can look behind me, and I have a beautiful quilt that was made by Julia for me. I have a triple spiral tattoo, and she hand-stitched the triple spiral in my favorite colors of green. So I’m glad that’s there, and I’m glad I noticed it.

ERIKA: Yeah, I imagine something really amazing about a group like that is that it’s so much easier to learn the exact thing that you need to know right now, rather than kind of trying to generalize on some other project, right? I mean, obviously, I could go to a craft workshop and learn what they teach. But if I already know 95% of that, you’re not getting the exact thing you need, where if you’re choosing the project you want to work on, and you know exactly that edge where you’re like, but I don’t know how to do this yet, and you can come in and do that. I think that’s so amazing. I just love that idea.

PAM: Yeah, that’s literally what we’re talking about with unschooling, right? That’s the idea beyond the curriculum. What am I super into right this moment, right?

And what am I trying to figure out right now? You are meeting them right where their brain is just thirsty to learn this one piece, and then the light bulb goes off. And even if that takes them back and forth and back and forth, and that’s where your expertise comes in, right?

And your openness to there’s no one right way to solve this problem. The openness, the way I explained that didn’t make sense to them. I’m going to try explaining it in a different way.

I’m going to try explaining it a third way. Oh, I’m going to show it and see if just physically seeing it unfold in front of them is helpful for them. So you can connect with them in the way that they can hear you. Back to the listening piece, right?

I think that is just so fascinating. And that’s how you manage to bring this whole new kind of unschooling lens on learning into this environment about something that you love.

That, for me, that’s just a huge difference. Because the people who are coming, yes, they’re coming with different things. But there’s like a shared interest. Whether it’s just the creativity aspect that you’re diving into right now, right? Is it the creativity that people are loving? Is it more about the quilts?

But back to when we were talking about video games, how many different aspects are, like, you were saying one wanted to talk about design ideas, and didn’t even want to pick up the tools and actually get started yet. There are so many aspects to the whole process of quilting as well. So being able to meet someone again, where they are in that moment is just brilliant.

JULIA: Now I’m thinking about it. It’s really helpful to reflect on it, how it emerged, because I have these amazing students who keep coming back. And they basically asked for something that looked like this.

If last August, when I first started, I said I want to make an unschooling quilting class. And this is what it’s going to look like. It wouldn’t have been responding to these particular students and their particular needs and interests.

It would have been Julia’s vision of what that might have looked like. And no one knew me, right? It wouldn’t have worked out, I don’t think.

I also don’t think I could have done this back. I mean, obviously, I wasn’t a quilter in 2021. But I don’t know, I think everything had to line up just at the right time.

Because when I imagine jumping right into something like this, or what it would have looked like if I had been like, I’m going to become a quilter and start teaching quilting classes right after I had been in academia for decades. It would have been different. I needed time, my brain needed that time. I needed all of these years of building trust with the kids and seeing how they learn, watching how they dive in. My mind is so totally shifted now into like, embracing a very different view on education and educational philosophy that, I just can’t credit the kids and my time with them enough for how I’m now sort of envisioning my professional life unfolding, which is really, really special.

ANNA: That’s so special.

ERIKA: Well, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much, Julia. And we hope everyone enjoyed our conversation and maybe had an aha moment or picked up some ideas to consider on your own unschooling journey.

And if you enjoy these kinds of conversations, I think you would love the Living Joyfully Network. It is such an amazing group of people connecting and having thoughtful conversations about all the things we encounter in our unschooling lives. And all four of us are there.

We invite you to check it out and see if it fits with our free month offer. You can find the link to the network in the show notes or you can visit livingjoyfully.ca and the link is right at the top of the homepage. So thank you for listening and thank you all for being here.

JULIA: This was awesome. Thanks for having me.

Thank you, Julia.