Exploring Unschooling

In this week’s flashback episode, we’re sharing an interview that Pam had in 2018 with Nick Hess.

At the time of the interview, Nick, also known online as The Unschool Dad, and his wife were unschooling their five children. They chatted about about his family’s move to unschooling, what it was about unschooling that resonated with him, what he found challenging, and surprising, about unschooling as it has unfolded in their lives, and lots more!

For thousands of years, humans learned naturally. When you let it happen and you get there, and you do not force it, you are just there helping them. And I think that is the important part, is that you have to be there. I mean, me and my wife are constantly with our children. You have to be there to help them, and guide them, answer their questions, or help them spell something. And when you are there, and you are just part of your children’s lives, you just see it all. You come together and it is truly a magical lifestyle that we live, it is just amazing.

~ Nick Hess

QUESTIONS FOR NICK

Can you share with us a bit about you and your family?

I love hearing about what unschooling kids are up to. Can you share what your children are interested in right now?

What did your family’s move to unschooling look like?

What were the pieces that resonated with you and helped you feel more confident in choosing unschooling?

What has been the most challenging aspect of moving to unschooling for you?

What has surprised you most so far about how unschooling has unfolded in your lives?

You post regularly on Facebook and Instagram as The Unschool Dad, sharing inspirational quotes as well as pics of your unschooling lives. I enjoy following you guys and I’d love to know what inspired you to start this project.

As an unschooling dad, what piece of advice would you like to share with dads who are considering or just starting out on this journey?

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

Rosie Hess illustrated the book, Bubbles and Puddles: Our Unschooling Adventure, by Kristie Howe

The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Conflict, coaching calls, and more!

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

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

Listen to our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

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

TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hi everyone, I’m Pam Laricchia from livingjoyfully.ca and today I am here with Nick Hess. Hi Nick!

NICK: Hi, how are you?

PAM: I’m good, thank you.

If people don’t know, Nick is an unschooling dad with five children, and I said that because you may know him online as The Unschool Dad. He has an active Facebook page and he is on Instagram as well and it is always fun to catch all of the interesting pictures and quotes and stuff that he shares.

I am excited to learn more about his family’s unschooling experience, so to get us started, Nick …

Can you share with us a bit about you and your family?

NICK: Sure, I have been married to my wife for almost twenty years. We have five kids as you said, and my oldest is seventeen, Rosie, Isabella is thirteen, Nick Jr. who is eleven, Evangeline is nine, and Joshua, who is six.

PAM: Wow…

NICK: We have a lot of kids…

PAM: I would imagine that turns into a lot of fun, right?

NICK: Yes, it does.

PAM: Speaking of which, I do love hearing what unschooling kids are up to; it is always fun to see the kind of things that they are exploring.

I was hoping you might share what your kids are interested in right now.

NICK: Sure, it is mainly a lot of art in our house. I will start with my oldest daughter, Rosie, who is an active artist. A couple of years ago she was an illustrator for a children’s unschooling book, it is called, Bubbles and Puddles: Our Unschooling Adventure, by Kristie Howe. She drew all of the illustrations for the book and she just loves to draw. She was the first one who started drawing and it really led to the other ones sparking their interest in drawing.

My second daughter is a self-taught whale artist. Isabella draws orcas and all kinds of marine mammal life. It is just amazing; some of her pictures look like photos.

PAM: They do, yeah.

NICK: It is pretty amazing.

We just got back from California, actually. We took her to see some live dolphins off the coast. Hopefully she will get some inspiration from that.

Then my third son, Nick Jr., he is a chef; he loves to cook. I share his pictures as well, this kid could out-cook all of the adults I know. He makes everything from scratch and he is very passionate about it, that is one thing that he just loves to do. Most kids want toys and things like that, and he wants kitchen utensils.

Evangeline is another little artist. What is cool is that she started younger than my first two and she has her older sisters to help her out, so I am really excited to see what her drawings are going to look like as she progresses. She likes to draw a lot of original characters and things like that.

My fifth, Joshua, is a video game addict; he loves the challenge of video games, he is very competitive, whoever plays with him knows that he is going to be very competitive; he loves to win. He loves Epic Mickey 2 right now, he can play that game over and over again.

PAM: That is awesome. I remember trying the first Epic Mickey, that was really hard for me.

NICK: He will watch YouTube tutorials, and he works through that, before even six years old.

PAM: That is awesome. I love hearing what they are interested in because they just throw themselves into it! It’s not like “That’s my kids interest.” No, they are just human beings throwing themselves into whatever it is. It is just so fun to watch them, isn’t?

NICK: It is just their passion and it is just like, you see it—the freedom they have. They could be in school all day but why when they could be really learning their passion with things that really excite their soul and the freedom of being a human being just to do what you want, uninhibited.

It is amazing, it is truly magical to watch and I am truly honoured as a father that I am able to see it in my children.

PAM: I love that phrase you used, “excite their soul,” because that is what it looks like, isn’t’ it? I am speechless…

NICK: It is truly magical, sometimes it’s just, “Wow.”

PAM: I know, that is awesome.

I was hoping you could share with us what your family’s move to unschooling looked like.

NICK: Well actually, it is a pretty interesting journey.

I actually started when I was very young, I was in public school, and I was born and raised in Las Angeles, so I was in the California education system. I really disliked school. I was never bullied or anything, I had friends, I grew up with all the kids on my block. I had great friends, there was no problem with that, it just was boring to me, it was just a complete, utter bore. I knew there was always something better for me.

Then, when I was in the fourth grade, my dad wanted to go back east—he was originally from West Virginia and he wanted to go see his family, so he went and asked the school, “Hey, I am taking my son back east for a couple of months, is there any way you guys can put the work together so he can do it?” and they were like, “No, you just have to take him out and go register him wherever you are going.”

So, they took me out, but they did not register me in the new school, so I truly experienced what it was like to be living life without school, and it was amazing. So, from being very small in the fourth grade to realize what school was…we came back and they put me in, they put me right where I had left off, they did not tell me anything, they just put me back in the class like nothing ever happened. That really impacted me young; what the true meaning of school was and from then on it just really resonated with me what the school system was about.

PAM: So, have any of your children been to school at all?

NICK: They have not.

When we first started, we knew we were going to homeschool from the beginning, but we put the oldest in a homeschool program—a charter school that gave us a curriculum. The whole thing with that was that she was in kindergarten and the California state testing came along and she was fearful of the test and we told her, “We do not care what you score, you could write anything,” but the fear that kept coming across really made us think and realize what it was about.

During a homeschool group, someone introduced my wife to Thomas Jefferson Education, a book, and from that, she read a John Holt book, and just realized there was so much more out there than the schooling system.

PAM: That is really cool.

What were the pieces that resonated with you as she was reading John Holt and bringing those ideas into your lives? What were the pieces that helped you feel really confident about moving to unschooling?

NICK: Like I said, a lot with my own personal experience, and especially in high school.

My parents were very supportive of me and in high school I still had the same feelings of not wanting to be there, so I started ditching. I lived in LA, I had a bus pass that would take me anywhere in LA County, so I would take off. My parents didn’t know at first and I would go to the Tonight Show.

There was only one time I got stuck in downtown LA at 11:00 at night and I had to call my parents and tell them because they thought I was at a friends’ house. I am very grateful to my parents; they did not get mad, I had to wait for my dad to get off work and come and get me, but my parents always respected that. They always saw and knew that I was different, that it was a different journey for me, so I was really thankful that my parents were really respectful of me for that.

They let me drop out of my senior year. At the time I had no idea, but my dad got a job transfer to Honolulu. I was going to go register for high school but I did not really want to, I would rather explore Hawaii, and so it was really cool that they did not force me to go. I would surf and they let me get a job, so I got a job in my senior year of high school and I started exploring Hawaii and their culture, and it was really true life experience.

So, when it came to learning about John Holt and I mean, that man is amazing, just everything about what he writes really resonated with everything that we wanted for our children.

PAM: It is almost like a light bulb isn’t it? You knew it internally, but it did not really come out until you read that, and it is like “Well yeah, of course, that makes so much sense.”

NICK: Yeah. At first I thought, this kid would be in school and here I am, a high school drop out, and that there is a piece of a light bulb, there is so much once you realize and you see what life is about, a light bulb goes off and then you can’t look back.

I do not question unschooling. I can’t think of any other way as our family grows and everything about it encompasses our daily lives—it is just amazing.

PAM: And does that help you look back more positively too, on that high school time and your parents being ok with you exploring Hawaii, for example, instead of finishing high school and you getting a job and that kind of stuff? Do you look more positively on that now?

NICK: Definitely. There is the whole self-education movement and it has never stopped me from being who I wanted to be, and it is like many people say that you need to have a diploma, you need to have a degree, you need to have so many things in life to be successful, but to be honest, it has never stopped one thing I wanted in life. That degree or a job I needed, or my business; it has never been in the way. Actually being able to teach myself along the way has helped me more than I think school ever did for me.

PAM: That makes a lot of sense.

So then, what for you was the most challenging aspect of moving to unschooling?

NICK: You know, I think it would have to be family, because me and my wife, we are pretty much always on the same page with a lot of things in life, but our family has been pretty unsupportive, like, “you guys are crazy.”

I think that was a challenge because you are just constantly having a Facebook post trigger somebody, and it is like, your cousin’s daughter is a teacher and she wants to fight with you. So, I think that was the biggest part, and as the years go by when people try to ask me or pick their unschooling fights, I am over it. If people get it, they get it, if they don’t, they don’t. I mean, I can talk to them.

So many people are just like, “How dare you? Kids need school,” and it is just like, I am at this point where I see it in my own life, I see it in my children’s lives, I see the incredible things my children do, it is just the family…it is hard because sometimes people are close to the family and it is just like when you finally get over caring what they think anymore and it is just like, “Hey we know what we are doing, at the end, you will see our kids flourish and everything,” and I think that is the whole point. I think the family was probably the hardest, the most challenging aspect of it overall, all those years ago when we started.

PAM: Did you find yourself, when you were first starting, kind of pulling away for awhile because you found that it was conflicting? I know for us, for awhile that first year we did less family occasions because they were so confrontational because it was new to them. They felt they could change our mind and I was still learning and getting comfortable, because I didn’t have experience yet. I hadn’t spent a year or two seeing my kids unschooling and knowing in my bones that this was awesome. We were just trying it out, so that was one of the things that helped us, did you find that as well?

NICK: I think one of the biggest things that was really helpful is that we moved from California and all of both sides of our families are in California. So basically, we only see them a couple of times a year so that daily thing, besides the Facebook posts, was really moving away to really be us, and really be who we are.

My parents have always been supportive of it and they moved to Arizona with us, and the whole support of that with us, my wife and us as a team, as a family, I think helped and that whole move really helped a lot where it was not this bombardment of it every day.

PAM: What was behind the move, was that something that just happened coincidentally?

NICK: Yes, it was.

PAM: It was a coincidence?

NICK: It was a coincidence. In our business we sell at fairs and festivals, and we were doing a couple of events in Arizona and just the cost of living in Arizona was much cheaper than California at the time. It was about 10 years ago, before the whole collapse of the economy and housing and everything here was just so much cheaper. It just so happened that at that ten-year mark, when the whole school thing was happening with my daughter, we were leaving and we moved here and that is when we really started our journey without school.

PAM: That is really interesting; that is cool how it worked out.

What has surprised you most so far about how unschooling has unfolded in your lives?

NICK: The most surprising thing would be how children teach us.

At first, I did not realize, when you are open and you have an open relationship with your children and you have a good relationship with your children, and you are your children’s friends—I mean, our children are our best friends—they truly teach you about everything.

There are some things that my son will come up to me and talk to me about something in World War II and he is only 11 and it’s like, “Oh wow, thank you for that information.” The knowledge they have, overall it is just amazing; just the facts and the things that they know. Truly I don’t believe that if my children were in school … the art, the creativity they have, I think it would be stifled. Because they would have to come home and do homework and then we would have to constantly be on them. The whole thing just allows them to be creative and let everything flow; just natural living.

PAM: I love that idea of flow, that is something that I was totally surprised by. Because before that, so much of our day is scheduled and organized and you think that being hands off and not having that schedule, you just kind of assume you will just sit around and do nothing unless we plan it, but that is so wrong.

NICK: Yes, definitely.

PAM: And you are right about how much they teach us, because once you are on equal footing as people, as human beings, and everybody is just sharing what they find interesting with each other, it is amazing all of the bits and pieces that they pick up and it is so lovely when you can say, “Thank you, I didn’t know that.” And that happens so often, doesn’t it?

NICK: Every day. Every day is something new, every day is truly about freedom to allow them to access things. To really access technology, to access the information on the internet. My younger kids; the little ones do not know how to read but they can talk to google and ask the little tablet anything they want in the world and that information is at your finger tips.

That is the amazing part, when they are curious about something like the election, we don’t really talk about politics, but they will come up to us and talk about politics or just a million things that you would not even think little kids would talk about, but that freedom and that flow is just so magical. Kids are interested in things, they are interested in the world, they are interested about a lot of things, and when you give them that freedom to explore the world, what it truly is, they explore and they learn and it is truly magical.

PAM: I love that word, magical, because it does seem like that, doesn’t it?

I mentioned earlier that you post regularly on Facebook and Instagram as ‘The Unschool Dad’ and you share a lot of great inspirational quotes as well as pictures from your unschooling lives. I really enjoy following you guys so I would love to know, what inspired you to start that project?

NICK: Actually, that was kind of a mistake. I just created the account one day, ‘The Unschool Dad,’ to share memes I liked, or quotes I liked off the internet, so I would not hurt people; I was tired of arguing with people, like I said.

One day, I had my mother’s cousin’s daughter, who was training to be a teacher, and they were just totally offended and it got into this big heated argument, so I was like, ‘You know what, I am just tired of this; these people just do not get it. I’m going to make a page, and I am just going to share memes that I see on the internet that I like so I can go back and look.’

Somehow one meme got shared and went viral and, all of a sudden, I had 1,000 followers and then 2,000 followers and now I have almost 47,000 followers and it is just word of mouth, I have never put anything into it. I would like to blog, but I do not really have the time. Probably eventually I will start blogging, to share our experiences as a family, but it is just really cool how it has grown.

Sometimes it is hard work to really keep up with it, but the messages I get, “Oh, thank you for showing us that this could be done,” that inspires me to do more to show people there is really another way, to give your children freedom, and I get more positive reactions. Like I said, I get pissed off at the teachers every once in awhile, but it is more positive than anything, just really helping families see another way to live their lives.

PAM: I love that it started because you were posting things on your personal page, right and that was sparking discussion so then when you made an unschooling focused one, you are more attracting people that are interested in that. That is brilliant.

NICK: With Instagram, it is more focused because it is people that want to see you. On Facebook sometimes the algorithms of Facebook share it to somebody that does not want to see it and somebody likes it and they will show it to somebody, a specific family member who goes, “Oh how dare you! What are you thinking? That’s child abuse.”

PAM: Less often?

NICK: So once again, I like Instagram. It is more directed at people that want to follow you; it doesn’t show up in somebody else’s newsfeed, so that helps a lot.

PAM: Very cool, and I loved your point about how sometimes that can be the first light bulb moment for someone, because those memes are like little seeds, aren’t they? They may just pass and pass and then they start to connect in the background for people and then they get more curious. I think it is lovely.

NICK: Yeah, definitely. Even some people have been like, “Oh wow, I never thought of that.” When you incorporate this unschooling and attachment parenting and peaceful parenting and overall just truly respecting children. When they see a child for who they are, a human being, and that is what it really comes down to.

We treat children like they are some kind of oddity, “Oh, you need to do this; for these 12 years you need to go to school and learn all of these things,” but truly, just for the human rights of a child, to see who they are, to really let them blossom, is magical.

PAM: That is so true. I mean, because we start with unschooling, but quickly we get to the foundation, like what simmers underneath that. Unschooling is built on these relationships with our children, and that is human—even if school has to be in the picture, you can still have respectful, trusting, loving human being based relationship with your child, right?

NICK: Yes, definitely. At the beginning of this school year, my children were interested in this online school, my eleven-year-old and nine-year-old. So, they asked us, and we respected their decision and we enrolled them. One of them did not start it; my daughter did not start it, she said forget it, and my son did it for a week but could not stand it. I respected their decision to try it, and they tried it and now he knows that he didn’t like it, but he had the chance to do it and it was just so time consuming.

There was a homeschool part with a curriculum where he had to sit there at least for 5 hours in front of the computer and did all their common core math and he realized what it was about and after a week he asked not to do it. It was truly amazing to let him make that decision about his schooling, not like “You have to do this.” At 10-11 years old that he knows he has the freedom to choose what he wants in life. My happiness comes from his happiness; what he wants to do. Really the pleasure of life is to see them happy.

PAM: Yeah, for me that where my Living Joyfully website came from. Because you realize that when you are pursuing those things that get us excited, that bring us joy, that make us happy, where even the negative things that happen and everything—that is all life. Those are experiences that mean something to us because we are pursuing them from our own volition, because we are interested. When we are pursuing the things that are fascinating to us, that is when we just learn so much no matter what happens in the end, right?

NICK: Yes, definitely.

Like, for example, with reading. I think this is probably a lot of people—it is good that we do not live around family because I never forced my children to read and the desire came from playing video games to chat, it is truly magical.

I think that the whole magical thing about unschooling is watching your child learn how to read naturally. And from being inspired from something they love, with my older two it was a big thing a couple of years ago. They had subscriptions but you had to chat with other people in the group and so they asked, “Hey, we want to read.” It is just truly magical; seeing their desire to learn. Most people are like, “Your kid is 10 and doesn’t know how to read yet,” but it seems like that is the age when my children really had the desire. We never had to force them, we just let it flow, and to see that flow of reading and see it naturally and from a passion, from their desires to learn how to read.

My daughter seems like she can write better than I can, and she never had any kind of formal curriculum on any of this, but I see them write and I see them talk. Especially my oldest—communicating with other people and I’m just like, “Wow, can you teach me?”

PAM: (Laughter) I know.

They are so focused within the curriculum in schools to teach the skill because, ‘this is a skill that you will need,’ but when you have the patience to follow that flow, the need for those skills comes up in life, naturally, doesn’t it? And to see them hit that … for them, picking up that skill is not about the skill, it is about satisfying the need, and they will pick up that skill along the way.

NICK: Yes, when you let it flow naturally, and just all of the things like math and all of the little things—I understand there are some children that pick up reading early, there are some children that want to read earlier—but when you see it and you let it flow through everything in life.

For thousands of years, humans learned naturally. When you let it happen and you get there, and you do not force it, you are just there helping them. And I think that is the important part, is that you have to be there. I mean, me and my wife are constantly with our children. You have to be there to help them, and guide them, answer their questions, or help them spell something. And when you are there, and you are just part of your children’s lives, you just see it all. You come together and it is truly a magical lifestyle that we live, it is just amazing.

PAM: And that is such a good point too, because, like you say, when you are with them, if they are not at a place where reading is going to come together for them, we are there to help them, to read for them, so that you do not hold a skill hostage on them, you know what I mean? “If you want that, you have got to figure out how to read.”

NICK: Actually, we had a problem like that; that is a perfect example.

We had a family member that came over and he has a college degree and he is into engineering and he got my son all of these different little engineering things and he told him (this was a couple of years ago), he said “I am not going to teach you because you can’t read.” We were flabbergasted. It was like, you missed a moment with this child that you could share all of your knowledge with, but you told him that because he cannot read you are not going to help him.

And it was just amazing that people think this way. He could have probably learned way more by you sitting there explaining to him the things, because then you are applying it to something that he is excited about in his life, but instead choosing not to connect with him. It was just crazy to us to think that somebody would say that.

PAM: Yeah, I know, it just makes no sense. Just because it is not something that comes up in our lives. Like you said, it was somebody from the outside coming in and sometimes it surprises you because it has been so long since you have seen that kind of approach or attitude towards kids, right?

NICK: Yeah, that is what has helped in moving away. I mean, 98% of my friends on Facebook are unschoolers, so over the years I have been surrounded and our friends are unschoolers, so when somebody outside approaches, it is just like, “Oh, we have been doing this for a long time, I think we know it works.”

PAM: And our last question, Nick.

As an unschooling dad, what piece of advice would you like to share with dads who are considering or just started out on this journey?

NICK: I think the biggest thing and one of my favourite quotes by John Holt is to really trust children. “To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves,” and, I think, just be open-minded, you know what I mean?

And I know I see this question a lot in groups. I do not really participate in groups, but I see them, or some friend will send me a message, asking like “How do I convince my husband to unschool?” or “My mother in law does not get it.” And I think that the biggest part for dads is to really trust your children and just be open-minded; but a supporter, be a listener.

I know sometimes dads go away for work and they are working a lot, so it is a lot of times the responsibility of the mom with the kids. Really listen to your spouse, your significant other on what is really going on. Be supportive. I mean, children are learning, when you give them that environment of freedom.

So many times our society says, “Not this, not this.” We constantly want to restrict, restrict, but children are very good at self-regulating when you give them the freedom to be on the internet and explore what they want. Let them explore; our future is technology.

Give them the freedom to be who they are, and I know many people, like my example, my passions, when you learn about your passions, you are learning about something new, you learn just like your children will learn. Just overall really trust, respect the child. Just respect and be supportive and unless there is some kind of developmental thing where your child is not learning, they will learn, they will get it as long as you are there, as long as one parent is there guiding them and directing them, they are learning and you are giving them that freedom to pursue what they want. They are going to learn.

PAM: I love that; I think that open-mindedness is so important because it is such a big leap. It is so unconventional at first, isn’t it? But if you can have that open-mindedness and just hold that trust for awhile and let things flow, you will see for yourself; all of these things will happen, won’t they?

NICK: Yes, definitely. Like I said, it is hard for some people to realize, like with that whole school thing, and then coming to something where you let children be free, it is a really hard decision, but it is really well worth it. It is really worth it just to see them and just to blossom into these amazing human beings, these amazing people.

And another thing I think that dads do, they think they need to be this father figure and set these rules in their house. But free your children from arbitrary rules, and just be your children’s friend. I have amazing relationships with my children. Our teenagers are amazing human beings. You see people complain about their teenagers and it is just like, I cannot complain. We are really friends. They are amazing.

When you give them freedom and you respect them, you have to be their friend and they will come to you. When my daughter has a problem, she comes to my wife or I, when she is sad. With any outside influence where they are bothered, they come to you, and that is the effect of unschooling I want, is that they come to us instead of finding some other kind of thing to fulfill their need. When they can know that they can come talk to us we can help them solve the problem or figure something out, and I think that is what the true experience is about.

PAM: Yeah. They know that we have their backs, right? That they are not going to be judged, they are not going to be … punished. I could not think of the word! It has been a long time!

But yeah, when you are on the same team, that does not mean that things are perfect or anything like that because stuff happens in life, things go wrong, but when they know you have their back, like you said, they are going to come to you. They know you have the experience, they know you love them, and they have this comfortable relationship with you to sort through things and to try to figure out a path forward, right?

NICK: I think that is the biggest thing that made my public schooling tolerable was that I knew my parents had my back, like from being very little, I was the youngest; my brothers and sisters were older and had already moved out, and my mom always had my back.

From when I was little, I remember being three or four, and we were somewhere and I was just looking at candy, and the lady said, “Don’t touch that,” and my mom immediately told that lady “Hey, don’t talk to my son like that.” So, from being very little, I knew my mom would stand up for me.

Throughout my school when I knew something was wrong, no matter if I was right or the school was right or if I was wrong, I could go home to my mom and my mom would be right down at the school telling them where to put it. That is very important, especially because I grew up in the inner city of LA; there were a lot of gangs and things like that and I could have been influenced any way, but I knew my parents were very supportive of me. That is true that that is the most important key in all of it, just being there for them, and helping them through life so they know they can come to you and not go somewhere else.

PAM: That is such a great point, Nick, and I think you are right; it boils down to that relationship in the end, doesn’t it? And that relationship lasts a lifetime, not just for the compulsory school years. You are building a life with them.

NICK: Yeah, it is a lifestyle. It is our whole life and a lot of people think this unschooling is an education method for your children, but it is not, it is life. Like my wife and I, when we first started going this way, it helped us question things in life. It made us better critical thinkers of so many other things in life, and we are learning and it is just amazing overall, the knowledge, and the things you start questioning over and over, and it is just like, it is a lifestyle. Everything encompasses your life; learning and growing, and questioning. It is just awesome.

PAM: That’s right. It is awesome.

Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today, Nick. I had so much fun, thank you!

NICK: Thank you for having me. And for having me share.

PAM: Yeah, I loved hearing a bit more about your story, that is great.

And before we go, where is the best place for people to connect with you online if they would like to follow along as well?

NICK: On Facebook, The Unschool Dad, or Instagram, at The Unschool Dad.

PAM: Perfect, and I will share links to that in the show notes.

Thank you so much, Nick, have a great day!

NICK: Bye.

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

How connected we’re feeling to the people in our lives is a helpful barometer of our relationships. Feeling disconnected can be a sign that it’s time to more intentionally cultivate connecting moments.

Anna shares one of the questions that guides her decision-making: ‘Is what I’m about to do going to enhance or harm my connection with this person?’ We also explore the idea of bids for connection, which can be an enlightening lens through which to view our interactions.

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

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Conflict, coaching calls, and more!

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

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

Listen to our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

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

EPISODE QUESTIONS

1. What does connection with another person feel like for you?
2. What are some ways you might connect with the people in your family? What do they love to do? What do you love to do? How might those overlap?
3. How do you typically react when an attempt to connect with someone goes unexpectedly?
4. Would that change if you framed it as learning something new about them?
5. What bids for connection do you notice and are you responding in the way you’d like to?

TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. We are excited you found us, and are interested in exploring our relationships and who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we choose to move through the world. And in today’s episode, we are going to talk about connection.

So, connecting with another person on an emotional level creates a feeling of being in alignment with them, of understanding and appreciating each other in that moment. Regularly cultivating connection with someone builds a stronger and stronger relationship with them. You get to know and understand each other better. You come to anticipate their needs and they, yours.

So, for me, how connected I’m feeling to another person is kind of a barometer of our relationship. If I’m feeling disconnected, I more purposefully seek out connecting moments with them. A connecting moment might be sharing an activity together, from watching a movie, going for a walk, playing a game, whatever feels good together.

But the really important piece for it to be connecting is that the other person needs to enjoy it. This was something that I had to learn along the way. It’s not particularly connecting for me to cajole my partner into going for a walk with me if they don’t enjoy walks. They will likely spend a good chunk of that time looking forward to it being over, rather than enjoying each other’s company. They will just have that in the back of their mind. “Have we walked long enough? Have we walked far enough? When’s it time to turn back?”

So, if I want to connect with someone, whether it be a partner, child, friend, it is helpful to suggest an activity that they enjoy. They will also feel seen and heard by that. “Oh, they know how much I love to go for a walk. Yay!” Or, “to play that game, yay!” etc. That will help them feel seen as the person they are by me, because connecting with another person really is about seeing and celebrating them for who they are, not who I wish they were. That is a subtle but very important difference.

And in that space of enjoying an activity together, often we can both chat more freely and openly, learning more about what’s up in each other’s days, sharing what we’ve been enjoying, and what challenges we may be feeling. That is connecting with them. It doesn’t need to be anything big, doesn’t need to be anything special, but doing things together that we enjoy opens up that space for connecting and conversations and sharing little pieces of ourselves with each other.

So, what does connection look like for you, Anna?

ANNA: You know I’m excited to talk about connection! I keep connection as a lens for just about everything. I often ask myself, is what I’m about to say or do, going to enhance or harm my connection with this person? And if I’m honest about that and act from a place of choosing connection, conflicts are avoided. The lines of communication remain open. Because here’s the thing. So, I’m choosing to be in relationship with this person. I love them. I want us to enjoy our time together, so I want to take ownership of who I am. I want to act from a place of being the person that I want to be. And for me, that person is kind and compassionate and extends unconditional regard to my loved ones.

Do I fall short of that sometimes? Yes. Yes, I do.

But if I keep connection as the lens, if I check in about my actions before acting, I can choose to be that person more and more. And it becomes easier and easier.

The other thing about being connected that I want to talk about is that we’re on the same team. I talk to a lot of couples who are approaching disagreements or meeting their needs as basically this zero-sum game. When, instead, we keep our connection at the forefront, we’re able to approach problems and meeting each other’s needs as a puzzle that we’re solving together. We’re on the same side.

We can give each other that generous assumption, which is basically we love each other. We’re in this together. We want to help each other feel seen and heard. We want each of our needs to be met. Coming from that place leaves a world of possibilities that we cannot see when we’re tunneling in and defending our own needs without regard for the other in this oppositional, volleying back and forth, defend and receive.

PAM: Exactly. Feeling connected with another person really does feel like we’re on the same team. I love that. We are in alignment. We want to help each other get our needs met and work toward accomplishing our goals.

For me, that feeling of being on the same team makes all the difference in our interactions, in our connection. Conflicts, or even just conversations, aren’t that back and forth of offense and defense and winner and loser and how many times have they won and how many times have I lost, etc. It is just a team effort in creatively trying to meet everyone’s needs and wishes and help each other along. That just feels so much better, too.

ANNA: So much better.

PAM: One thing I also wanted to mention is that sometimes our attempts at connection may not land with the other person. They may even go sideways, like, what the heck? That is totally okay. Like really, that’s okay. It is not a failure. We don’t need to take that personally, as an attack on us. Again, like offense/defense.

In fact, same team, when you bring that lens, we can often use that to learn a bit more about them. Oh, what was it about that thing? Was it the activity that they weren’t interested in? Were they busy with somebody or something that’s important to them? Maybe they’re stressed about something that’s going on in their life, like a work issue. Something else has their focus. So, it doesn’t need to be a rejection of us. It’s like, oh, there’s other things going on in our life. And we can really be so quick to take everything personally. I definitely know that I can, but when I can take that moment to remember, no, it doesn’t need to be about me, per se. What else is going on? It is so interesting and so often, that’s really the case. They’re not trying to piss us off or trying to make us feel bad.

None of that.

ANNA: It’s not about us at all usually.

PAM: Exactly. Or in that moment, maybe we can learn a bit about ourselves or maybe both. Right? Maybe we put out-sized expectations on the other person. Maybe we didn’t end up enjoying the activity and we’re the one who’s distracted instead of engaged in the moment. Maybe we were tired, like we just felt like we needed to do this thing and we pushed ourselves to try and connect with them, but in the end, it didn’t turn out very well for us. Life happens. We learn from that experience and we try again.

We are always learning. There is just so much about each other. When we’re talking about relationships, there’s so much to learn, because we are different in each moment. When we’re tired, we’re different in that moment. The things that we can do are different, the conversations that we can have, but being more open and honest about those moments, it is so helpful for relationships.

And it also helps to be open to noticing when your partner or your child is trying to connect with you and try to be responsive in those moments.

If we are stuck in our heads, it can feel like we’re the only one prioritizing the relationship. We feel like we’re the only ones inviting and inviting. But if we can notice, so often, we may not realize what it is at first, but when they invite us to join them, chances are they are looking to connect with us. And it may look very different than how we might want to connect with them, but a connection is just as valuable either way.

And, in fact, it enhances relationship when the connections go both ways. There’s a term that we toss around, we learned about last year or so, was it? Bids for connection. You want to talk about that a little bit more?

ANNA: Yeah, I definitely want to touch on bids for connection. I think the idea comes from the Gottman Institute. The funny thing about them is they don’t always look straight forward like, “Hey, I want to feel closer to you now.” Sometimes it looks like picking a fight or a grumpy comment. Sometimes it looks like asking for something that we can do ourselves. “Hey, can you get me water, even though you have to walk in front of me to go get the water that I’m asking for?” Sometimes it looks like pulling away or getting quiet. And as we learn more about each other, we see the bids for what they are and the underlying need that they’re trying to meet. And then we can check in and respond with kindness and that can open up the lines of communication and avoid a situation where people don’t feel heard.

Love languages can also play a role here. Knowing how we give and receive love can help make sure that what we’re putting out is love is being received as such.

But with the bids, like you said, it’s so interesting, because we’ll be in our heads about, I want to make this relationship better, and maybe that person’s telling us a story from work and we’re actually still in our head thinking, “We’re not doing relationship things,” or we’re not doing the thing the way it looks in our head.

But really, wanting to share that bit from work or the child wanting to share the bit about their game, that is the bid for connection. That is them wanting to bring us into their world. And so, for me, I just want to keep really open to that. I just want to be open, so that I’m seeing that in the people that are around me that I love, and that I’m acknowledging that and I’m responding.

And yes, like you said earlier, sometimes we have capacity issues to deal with. Sometimes there just isn’t enough, or the time is not right, or we’re tired. But I find even in those situations, when I see the bid, I’m able to acknowledge the bid. Even if I can’t dive in fully to maybe what they’re needing for the, in that moment, it’s so much better than brushing it off.

PAM: Yes, when you can acknowledge it and be a bit transparent by saying, “Ah, that’s wonderful. I love that. I can’t wait to join you, or I can’t wait to hear that story. I’m just really tired right now. Can we do it in the morning? Can we do it after I’ve had a nap? Or I’m just going to sit here and have a tea or a coffee for a few minutes,” to acknowledge so that they feel seen and heard in that moment.

And there was one other thing that came up. So, as we’ve been talking this whole time about connection, and you touched on this and I think it’s super important, is the idea that we can have these visions in our head of what being in relationship means. And it can mean all sorts of fancy things in our head. We can have these visions of, we need to go out on a date every week, right? We need to go outside of the house, all these pieces. And the everyday connection doesn’t count. But, truly, in the everyday connection, that is the foundation. Those are the connections that we’re building.

It doesn’t mean we don’t do the bigger things. It just means the relationship isn’t on hold between the bigger things.

ANNA: Exactly. And this is what we were talking about that I said in the first episode that we’re going to keep repeating, it’s that outside voice, because I think we come into it maybe from movies, whatever, that we had this idea of what relationships look like, but it really is the everyday of just sharing the ups and downs and getting the things done around the house and just moving through our days together that builds that foundation, that then we can do all these other fun things and big things. Because the reality is, the big fun things are going to be sprinkled throughout our year. But if that’s what we’re pinning our hopes on, that’s not going to get us through. So, we have to figure out how to keep that connection alive and rich and wonderful in those everyday moments. And it is listening for those bids. It is being available.

PAM: Yes. And just think for a moment, when you have that connection going throughout your days, your every days, you’re already pretty well connected when those bigger moments come. And how much more fun are those when you’re already connected, instead of thinking-

ANNA: We’re going to get it there!

PAM: We have to go and relearn each other for our weekend away. Let’s reconnect, finally.

ANNA: Right. And isn’t that why some of those things go awry? Sometimes, we have this idea like, we’re going to have this amazing date, or we’re going to take this amazing trip and then it ends up falling flat. But I think so much of that is because maybe we haven’t been tending to those pieces in between, and so, we’re pinning our hopes on this big time away or this big thing, and it falls a little bit short.

So, yeah, I think that’s super interesting to watch for and think about.

PAM: Yes. Yes. Okay. So, I have some questions to share for people to ponder as they’re exploring connections, alongside all the ones we’ve already talked about.

So, what does connection with another person feel like for you?

What are some ways you might connect with the people in your family? What do they love to do? What do you love to do? What do you love to do together? How can these different things overlap? It doesn’t always need to be one thing. Sitting on the couch together or playing a game together, those are all perfectly wonderful ways to connect.

How do you typically react when an attempt to connect, a bid for connection that we’re putting out, goes unexpectedly? So, when you offer up, “Oh, let’s sit down and have a coffee together, or a tea together,” and they say no, how do you typically react? How does that feel? Would that change if you framed it as a learning something new about them? “Oh, I didn’t know they were really into the thing they were doing. Oh, I didn’t know that thing went strange at work today, and you’re really worried about that,” because those things going awry are actually opportunities to learn more.

And then, again, let’s think about the bits for connection coming the other way. Just keep an eye open for that over the next little while. I love what you said that the bids don’t always look perfect. As in, “Let’s do this together!” It can be, “Oh, my gosh, I had such a rough day at work. I want to vent about it.” That is a bid for connection. That is some support another person is looking for. And we can learn more about their lives. It can be a child really frustrated about something that went wrong and what they’re trying to do, and they come to you. That’s a bid for connection, for some support in what they are looking to do. Maybe it’s the infamous, “I’m bored,” you know? They’re just looking to chat with somebody for a while.

There are so many possibilities when you just open up and start looking for what might potentially be bids for connections, opportunities for connection.

ANNA: Absolutely.

PAM: Thank you so much for listening and we’ll see you next time. Bye.

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

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

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

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

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

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

The Living Joyfully Network

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

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

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

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

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PAM: Thanks very much. Bye bye!

ERIKA: Bye!

In this week’s flashback episode, we’re sharing an interview that Pam had in 2016 with Lauren Seaver about deschooling.

At the time of the interview, Lauren Seaver was an unschooling mom to 9-year-old River. She first considered the possibility of homeschooling way back when she was in college to become a teacher. Life took some turns, but the opportunity to try out unschooling with River arose and it was a great fit. Pam met Lauren at the Childhood Redefined Unschooling Summit in New York and really enjoyed chatting with her about her deschooling experience!

I think my biggest concern was that our unschooling life didn’t match the picture of what unschooling looked like in my mind. I had these unschooling fantasies about what my own personal unschooling path would have looked like if I were unschooled as a child. Letting go of expectations was so huge for me to be able to really relish what was actually happening in our unschooling lives.
~ Lauren Seaver

QUESTIONS FOR LAUREN

Can you share with us a bit about you and your family and how you first came across the idea of unschooling?

What was the biggest concern that drove your choice to move to unschooling this last year?

What were some of your fears or uncertainties as you began unschooling?

What has your move to unschooling looked like? Pretty smooth? A few bumps? Have you talked to River specifically about it? Or have you found the changes to be more internal to you, with you choosing to change how you respond to River and the expectations you have of him?

Can you tell us a bit about how your definition of learning has changed since discovering unschooling?

Did you find a difference between understanding the principles of unschooling intellectually and living them day to day?

What changes have you seen in River since leaving school?

What’s been the hardest part of your unschooling journey so far?

What has surprised you most about your journey so far?

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Conflict, coaching calls, and more!

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

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

Listen to our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

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

TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hi everyone, I’m Pam Laricchia from livingjoyfully.ca and today I’m here with Lauren Seaver. Hi, Lauren!

LAUREN: Hi Pam!

PAM: Just to introduce Lauren a bit to everyone, I had the pleasure of meeting her earlier this year at the Childhood Redefined Summit in Canandaigua, New York. Her enthusiasm for life is contagious and I’m so excited to dive into her deschooling experience, so let’s get started!

First can you share a bit with us about you and your family and how you first came across the idea of unschooling?

LAUREN: Yes. So I have one son, River, and he is nine years old and he is amazing and hilarious. He is a showman and he loves to dance and rap and ride bikes and play video games and he loves playing with his friends. We live with my boyfriend Aaron and our hamster Chewy. (Pam and Lauren laugh) Chewy is very important here. He really is.

And River also spends about two days a week at his Dad’s and stepmom’s house, so we are a blended family. His Dad and I separated when River was four but we have a really good relationship and River always had a great relationship with both of us and our partners so we’re just really lucky.

I also run my own business and when I’m working River usually is with my boyfriend Aaron or with his Dad. All of us have alternating schedules so it really makes unschooling doable while you’re working. We just feel really lucky.

We also live very close to my parents and my sister and our family is very supportive of unschooling which is so awesome. So that’s kind of us.

And the story of how we came into unschooling actually starts a long time ago, even before River was born. I was going to school to become a teacher so I was in college and as part of that I got to observe in a lot of different elementary classrooms and through that process I learned that not all teachers loved children and some teachers don’t even like children and it horrified me.

I thought, “oh wow, it’s almost like luck of the draw if you get a teacher that really likes children and loves learning,” and this was shocking to me. It was then while I was in college I thought maybe I should consider homeschooling because I love kids and I love learning. Gosh, wouldn’t it be fun to learn with my own kids! So already before meeting River’s Dad I was thinking homeschooling is where we’re going to go. I hadn’t heard of unschooling yet.

So then when I had River around five or six years later I had a home birth which is kind of alternative and with that home birth community there’s the attachment parenting community and all of that sort of leads into the homeschooling community. So it was almost like I had it all laid out for me. Through this attachment parenting community one of my friends recommended the Consensual Living yahoo group, which was created by Anna Brown from your podcast, and Pat Robinson, who are two amazing unschooling moms. And from there I learned of the Shine with Unschooling yahoo group, and the Always Learning yahoo group, and I was just like, “Oh, this is it! This is what I’ve been looking for!” Because I knew from my own experience as a teacher and as a person that we always, all of us, learn best when we are interested and passionately engaged in what we’re learning about and what we are doing, so it just was a no-brainer. Ok, we have to unschool, this is what we are going to do.

So that was the plan and so River was two at that time and I did a lot of paradigm shifting and we really lived in that manner as much as you can when they are so little. We didn’t limit TV or games or food or anything and that just seemed really normal and natural and it just worked. And you know, meeting River’s needs in creative ways and just living joyfully.

So that was great. And then when River was around four his Dad and I actually separated and then later divorced for all sorts of reasons, so everything kind of changed. I went to work full time out of the home and suddenly homeschooling and unschooling no longer seemed to be feasible. River had gone to this unique preschool that was two days a week in a homeschooling mom’s house and I was allowed sit next to him at the table and hang out and be there as long as he needed me. He really loved it so I was like well this wasn’t so bad maybe we can find a schooly option where he can go while I’m working.

We found a local school that was really alternative and their focus was very much on kids learning about what they were interested in and it almost had a democratic slant to it so I was like, “Alright, this could work.” He tried their summer camp for one day with the teacher that was with the youngest kids and he loved it so I thought, “Alright, let’s try it.” He ended up being in that lady’s classroom for two years and he loved it. He would run in every day. He would wake up and want to go to school and he loved it so much and I was like “Oh God, thank God, this is all working out.” Because all that I cared about was that he loved what he was doing because I knew that he would learn whatever he needed to learn as long as he was loving what he was doing.

And he and I are both pretty outgoing and love to be around people so I think that was part of what made this so fun for him. So the first two years were great and I was like, “Alright, this is great.” But then he began his third year of school and it was with a different teacher and this was second grade. He was seven and then turning eight that year. It was totally different. Everything changed. Even though this lady was really nice and the school still this alternative school, he didn’t love it anymore and half way through the year I was dragging him out of bed to get him to go to school. I felt like I was forcing him to go to school and that was against everything I believed in because I so deeply believe, then and now, that we learn best when we love what we are doing. It was clear that if I have to drag you out of bed you are not loving going here. I really felt like we needed a change. At this point I had quit my full time job and had just started my own business that would end up giving me a lot more flexibility and I brought up the idea of homeschooling to River.

He was like “No, no, I can’t. I want to be with my friends, I want to go to school. I really like it, it’s fine. No.” And so through the rest of the school year I just tried to support him as much as possible and kept bringing up the option of homeschooling. At the end of that year, which was, I think it ended in 2015, the school actually closed due to funding issues, and I said, “Ok, your school is closing, do you want to try homeschooling?” He was like, “Ok, let’s try homeschooling.”

As soon as school ended and we started homeschooling it was like, “Oh my god, this is amazing, this is what we have we been waiting for!” And we never looked back. He loved it and I loved it. So that’s our crazy, windy path to unschooling. I was always into it and wanted to do it and felt like we were supposed to, and then our lives were different and we didn’t see it as a possibility. So now we’ve been doing it for probably a year and three months I believe. Because I really count that, I count May of last year. In my heart, we started earlier. So that’s how we learned about it and now finally chose it.

PAM: That is awesome. I really loved hearing about how your perspective evolved through all that, the way you took those unschooling principles, or at least that perspective on learning and supporting each other, and have woven that into not only, as you said, your blended families and your extended family that is nearby, and right through always looking at River to guide you through those choices, right?

LAUREN: Absolutely. And I’m so grateful for that because that has been the foundation of our parenting and our lifestyle from the beginning. And I love that. It’s so wonderful. In all of my relationships, not just with River, it’s amazing. It’s very far reaching.

PAM: That was a wonderful story!

What was your biggest concern that drove your choice to move to unschooling?

LAUREN: So, like I said, River was not wanting to go to school. It changed from running in, to “I don’t want to get up.” The biggest issue I felt was reading. The school he was going to was really friendly and alternative. They have different, positive names for things, but he was basically in a remedial reading group and even though the teachers are kind and gentle, he still had reading homework and he felt this pressure to learn to read. He felt so much pressure way before he was ready and I knew this. I was like, “Wait, why are you pushing this? He will learn to read when he is ready. We don’t need to do this homework. We don’t need to do any of this stuff. It’s not helpful.”

I’m a passionate book lover and I knew that if he was just left alone to explore words and books and text and whatever, in whatever way it interested him, reading would come naturally whenever he was ready.

And I was really sad thinking that this kid who was so excited and awesome and hilarious and talented and enthusiastic was having a possibility for future love of learning squashed out of him by this experience, this emphasis that school was placing on this skill that he was not ready to learn.

I was heartbroken knowing he was feeling bad about himself, feeling bad about his own abilities around the idea of reading. When he would talk to me about it, the message he was receiving was basically you should be able to read these books right now and you are a failure because you can’t.

When I think back to it, I think, “How did I let him keep going to school?” Because it’s so awful. It was not the school’s intention. They were just trying to help him, but they are a school. They were like, “You need to learn this by this time.” That’s just how they think.

He would even say, “I’m bad at reading. I hate reading.” I was just like, “Oh, this is awful.” So that was my number one reason and then the other real reason was that I felt like I was supposed to be doing this all along and then this moment in our lives opened up where I realized, “Ok, now this is a real feasible time, a real possible time for us to do this, so let’s do it.” So that was a huge motivator.

PAM: Yeah, it was something in the back of your mind always and you were paying attention and you saw when those possibilities started to come together. Yeah, that’s cool. And what’s so interesting too is that whole reading piece. That was very much Lissy’s experience at school too. When she came home it was all, “I hate reading. I don’t want to read. I can’t read.” All those messages. And we just made sure to totally back off and it took about a year for her to move through, move past all those messages that she had gotten. She was in second grade when she left too.

LAUREN: The same as River, yeah. It’s amazing. It’s like if we could just as a culture look at people, just let them be. They’re going to get it, you just got to leave them alone. It adds all this unnecessary baggage. It’s so detrimental.

PAM: Yes, it is. You mentioned that you learned a lot about homeschooling and unschooling when River was young before he was going to school.

When you finally jumped into it—a year and three months ago—did you still have some fears and uncertainties?

LAUREN: Well, at first when we started we were literally returning to this homebirth and attachment parenting community. So the first feeling was, “Oh my god, we are home. This is so awesome.” And all these people are so weird like us, well, not like us but just sharing similar values. And seeing my old friends and his old friends and he was like: “I knew this kid when he was a baby.” It was really great. So I wasn’t even thinking of the fears then.

When I think about it, the first few months I think my biggest concern was that our unschooling life didn’t match the picture of what unschooling looked like in my mind. I had these unschooling fantasies about what my own personal unschooling path would have looked like if I were unschooled as a child.

I’m one of those people who throws themselves into whatever they are learning. When I was a kid I was into pioneer days, the mid-1800s and Westward Extension, and when I was into that, that was my whole life.

I had a pioneer dress with a bonnet I wore and I had the American Girl Doll and I read all the books. And all the books I read were about the Oregon trail and that time period. And I played the Oregon Trail Video Game and made food from that time period, all that. So I am the type who throws myself into stuff and it becomes my entire life. Then River and I started this unschooling path and I was noticing, “Wow, River doesn’t learn exactly how I learn.”

You’d think that wouldn’t be a big deal but, for whatever reason, I had envisioned something like it. When he was really interested in tornados and lightning, he didn’t want to be thrown into a world of weather. And I could get all the books out from the library about weather and he was like, “I’m not looking at those. I don’t care.” It was a really big deal for me to learn, “Oh wait a second, just because this is how I learn it doesn’t mean that’s how he’s going to learn, and just because I thought it was going to look this way doesn’t mean that’s what it’s going to look like.”

So I think just letting go of expectations was so huge for me to be able to really relish what was actually happening in our unschooling lives. So letting go of those shoulds and just being there and actually witnessing what was happening was what helped me to see “Oh my god, he is learning so much and look at the way he does it. It’s so fascinating. And what he is interested in.” So that was big for me.

So I don’t know if it’s as much fear as it is just letting go of baggage. I think that’s kind of a key piece in my unschooling experience and in our unschooling experience. Me letting go of baggage.

PAM: I think that’s such a great point, Lauren. Because when you mentioned the phrase “unschooling fantasies,” as parents we are learning about unschooling and we are excited enough about it to want to try it with our families. We build such a picture in our head of what it’s going to look like and truly it’s not surprising that it’s based in our own experience and how we would like to learn if we had this possibility. That’s such a great point.

Something to really pay attention to, to shift the focus to seeing how they like to live their days and how they like to learn, and supporting them. Of course, we are going to start from our own perspective, but to be open like you said to dropping those expectations and seeing what actually comes out of it, right?

LAUREN: I know for me, the shifting my focus from the imaginary child that I had envisioned before I had River, to being like, “Oh, this amazing, complex person in front of me who is his own person and actually just him and celebrating him,” versus like whatever I had expected, has been probably one of the biggest aspects of parenting that has been a growing process. Wow, they really pop out themselves and you just are there to witness them and support them as much as you can and love them. And grow by being around them.

PAM: It really is, it really is. I love the way you explain that. And that leads very nicely into our next question.

I’m wondering about what your move to unschooling has looked like, whether it has been pretty smooth, you know, you talked a bit about letting go of your expectations. Have you talked to River specifically about unschooling itself, the processes or principles behind it or have you found as you have been talking about the changes being more internal to you, so most of your focus has been on how you are choosing to observe River and how you are changing your responses to him and letting go of the expectations?

LAUREN: Yeah, definitely. I don’t think I talked to River much about it other than to support him and living everyday life and he knows we homeschool. I’m sure I used the word unschooling and said: “This is the kind of homeschooling we are doing.” Because there were points in the beginning when he was like, “Wait, aren’t we supposed to be doing something? Should I do some maths?” And I asked, “Do you want to?” And I might write out some questions for him if he really wanted me to at that time. And then he would say, “Ok, I know how to do this, that’s fine.” I think he had a couple of concerns in the very beginning but now he is just totally into it.

I think our foundation of unschooling friends has been very helpful, has helped us ease into this. He has just been loving life and exploring things of interest to him and it’s just better than I could have thought. It has been pretty seamless and the majority of the changes have totally been internal for me. And they continue to be. River is naturally really awesome at doing the things he loves and having fun which is where all of our learning is.

You don’t have to work on this stuff. Where 99% of the process is me again just letting go of my own baggage and assumptions and things that help me to better connect with him and better celebrate him and our lives. And I really think having a community of other unschooling parents locally as well as online to reach out to and explore my own stuff with has been really helpful.

And, like you said, I went to the Childhood Redefined Unschooling Summit with you and Anne and it really shifted my perspective so dramatically. It just really helped me to see things in such a more positive way and I only realized afterwards it had such an impact on me that I felt changed and I acted in a different manner. It’s hard for me to put into words but I noticed that I have a lot of power in our home. I could change the energy of our home with my own choices and the viewpoint I’m bringing into every interaction. That was amazing to me.

I really noticed if I shifted into a more positive, loving, peaceful place where I’m celebrating what’s happening, and what River’s celebrating, and what Aaron is celebrating—everything changes. It is mind-blowing that I really impact this family so much. We all do, but I have a lot of power inside of myself.

I think that’s my work as an unschooling parent: to do that work within myself that allows me to see and celebrate River for being him and his own unique self, and then to support him in ways that are best for him on whatever path that he chooses, and just our connection.

PAM: That’s lovely. I’m glad you enjoyed it!

LAUREN: I can’t explain it. The whole idea of “Oh, I paradigm-shifted back when he was two,” and I was like, “Oh, wait a second, there was way more to do…” (both laughing)

PAM: That’s awesome!

Can you tell us a bit about how your definition of learning has changed since discovering unschooling?

LAUREN: Well, it’s been an evolving process since I was in that teacher training program back however many years ago. I have to do the math for it’s a long time ago. I had a pretty unschooly definition of learning when River and I started homeschooling but when we started I still was making lists of the subjects to keep track of what we were covering for my own records and peace of mind. So if we played Uno or a game with a map I checked off “math” or “geography” thinking “Ok, we covered that today.” (laughs)

After a couple of months, I just dropped that stuff because when you are doing it you just start to see, “Oh my god, he is learning so much and so much more than I could ever write down.” And what really amazed me was our conversations and the depth with which we would explore questions and topics and just how much we were both learning together. I feel like I see learning in such a limitless manner now and that there are no have tos and no shoulds. It’s just choices and options. And there is no not-learning. You are always learning, it doesn’t matter: if we follow joy and try to live in a manner where we are most content, that’s going to be really fun learning. No matter what you are learning.

Something I love is that it’s so not just about River learning. It’s us learning as a family. River has really been into BMX biking for the past few months and that stemmed in part because my boyfriend Aaron was really into it. He was rekindling this passion from his childhood, which I think has a lot to do with our unschooling and I really think he was excited thinking about stuff and looking into his own passions because of it. And then we have an unschooling family friend. Our whole family were good friends with them, they are wonderful. They are huge into BMX biking too. So these relationships inspired a passion in River for it and now BMX biking is a way that he connects with my boyfriend Aaron and this other unschooling family and we all go to skate parks together and we watch BMX videos on YouTube to learn new tricks and he and I go on lots of bike rides and it leads to all sorts of conversations and all sorts of different things depending where we go. It’s just amazing. Learning just keeps happening based on whatever we like.

Another thing he and I are really into the musical “Hamilton” which we learned all about this summer from some people who loved it. So we bought the CDs and we started listening to it and falling in love with the music. River loves rap and he loves music. That really led him into wanting to explore past wars because there are these battle songs that are really awesome and that led us to go to a civil war re-enactment as a family. We are all learning about these different topics in our own ways and I just love being able to witness how our paths evolve from a single interest or question that one of us is exploring and then how they connect. So that whole limitless nature of learning. It just feels like it’s all about choices and following our joy.

PAM: That’s it. Those are beautiful stories.

LAUREN: I love that. It’s so fun! What I know now is that until we did it, I couldn’t know how beautiful it would be or how full and rich it could be. I just couldn’t know. Especially with a teaching background you might come into something thinking “Ok, we are going to learn this set list of things!” but with unschooling and with this idea of limitless learning, there are no boundaries. There is so much more to learn. I love that.

PAM: I love how each of your answers is leading into the next question! But before we get there, I love your phrase “limitless learning,” because that was the huge piece for me. When we started it was all about the learning. It was, “Ok, if they are not going to school I’m going to replace the learning somehow,” But that first year of just watching them and seeing it in action … I tried to journal, tried to write things down, and I would go for maybe a week and then there was just too much to write. It expanded into life. You just see the learning in every minute. Ok, let me read the next question. So that people know what we are talking about (laughs).

Did you find a difference between understanding the principles of unschooling intellectually and then living them day to day?

LAUREN: When I read this question I was like, “Yes, Yes, Yes …” I wrote “Yes” five times because this was a big surprise to me. I think I said this already but since I learned about it when he was two, I did my paradigm-shifting. I got this. We are just going to become unschoolers; this is awesome.

But then I realized I still have lots to unload through the process of doing it. I think for me, the biggest piece that I didn’t realize would be such a huge piece, even though I read all about it, was trust. And that trust is really essential to unschooling is, in a lot of ways, born out of the act of unschooling.

So kind of like the chicken and the egg: you can’t have the trust until you trust, but you develop the trust through trusting. I just feel like trusting him in his own path; I had to live that, in order to build that. I didn’t do it before we unschooled. The amount of trust that is needed and that comes out of unschooling has just blown me away and how that connects us and how he trusts me to support him in his learning about anything and everything.

If he comes to me with a question, an interest, or something that he just happens to say, he trusts that I’m going to listen and respect him and support him in learning more about it and finding the resources that he needs, and I trust that he will learn everything he needs to learn by following his passions and joy. I didn’t know how deeply we could trust each other and I didn’t know how connected we could become before we were unschooling. I read about it forever. That’s the way I learn. I love reading everything about a topic and then maybe I will act on it or maybe not. This was mind-blowing, the difference between actually living it versus just reading it. It was amazing.

PAM: I found the same thing. I mean the relationships just blew me away. I had no idea about the depths of trust and connection that you could have with another person. I don’t think I had that kind of connection with anyone.

Maybe that’s why when I ask in the Ten Questions episodes, “What is the best thing that you found when looking back on unschooling? What has been the most surprising or your favourite outcome of it?” Relationships has pretty much always been the answer because it’s just something you can’t get, you don’t understand when you get started until you develop it, right?

LAUREN: And I was shocked by that. Because we are so close. I’m closer to him than anyone. I just can’t believe how much closer—worlds closer—that we became through the process of unschooling. You just can’t know until you do it. It’s mind-blowing, really.

PAM: It’s true!

I was wondering if you could talk a bit about what changes you have seen in River since he left school?

LAUREN: Yes. He just loves his life. He loves homeschooling and unschooling and he will say to me regularly, “Mom, I love my life.” I’ve just seen him become happier and more confident and more flexible and more understanding, just a lot of changes. He will proudly tell anyone that he is homeschooled. Recently we went to a party and another kid asked: “So, did you go on any vacations this summer?” And he responded with, “Well, pretty much every day is a vacation for me.” He really feels like, “My life is so fun.”

One of the most interesting shifts that I have seen is that he has grown so much socially since we started homeschooling. I love it, I think that’s funny that so many people question about socialization. He gets along so much better with other kids now, which has not always been the easiest thing for him. I just feel like he has become more empathetic and understanding and I think that has a lot to do with all the unstructured play he gets to have with other homeschooled friends as well as friends in our apartment complex. He has so much time to just be with kids in an unstructured manner where no one is saying: “time to do this,” or “you guys need to interact in this way,” or even just someone micromanaging their conversations. He is playing in these unstructured settings, with me there to support as needed of course, but I’ve seen so much growth in those ways.

Another big thing I wanted to mention was the reading. He started reading half way through the year while simultaneously avoiding all books because of his negative school experience. When we first started unschooling, if we weren’t out connecting with friends and we were home, he mostly spent his time playing video games or watching YouTube. He just loved it. He really started learning how to read by doing stuff online that he really liked. He started reading probably six months into our unschooling journey and he would read signs in a drive-through, or read comments on YouTube, or read directions to a video game. He would type in words if he was looking for information, read the words on a YouTube lyric video song he liked. He really is into music. He would even have me pause it so he could read the whole thing and I remember him reading something with the word “champagne” in it and I was like, “Holy crap, he just read “champagne”.” (laughs)

And I feel like this experience of him reading on his own without any support of me besides, you know, I’m with him and I’m reading things when he asks me to, or typing in something for him on games, but without having someone sitting down with him and teaching him how to do it. I think this was super empowering for him after his school experience. And after that he started to go back to the library with me and he would read books to his friends at the library or at his cousin’s house and it’s just like he reclaimed it for himself and to me that’s so healing and so wonderful because that was my biggest concern that this bad experience would sit with him for life. I feel like that has been a major change over the past year. I don’t care that he can read or not. He is nine and he can take forever, I don’t care. But what I care about is that he owns it. And I really think he knows that: “Wow I did this on my own.” And I love that.

PAM: I think that’s a great point: owning the experience. Giving it back to them, to whatever timetable they end up having. But for it to be back in their court so that they have choices and control over it. That’s awesome!

What has been the hardest part of your unschooling journey so far?

LAUREN: This question I thought was so hard because I feel like we haven’t had a lot of hardships with unschooling. Sometimes life can feel hard, but that’s not because of unschooling. We went from a lifestyle where River was in school for six hours and I was working out of the home for nine hours and then we come back home together at the end of the day and it was like we only had the worst of ourselves to give to each other. We were both grumpy and exhausted.

So going from that to a lifestyle where he is home so much more and I am home so much more and we are together so much more and there is no pressure to do stuff he doesn’t want to do and I’m working at a job that I love and we are both really fulfilled and happy. I feel like it’s only made everything better and easier and more wonderful. I think sometimes parenting can feel really hard, and living as a member of a family can feel hard, but unschooling actually makes all of it easier and better. So I didn’t have a good answer.

PAM: No, that’s a great answer! It’s great to hear your perspective.

LAUREN: It hasn’t been hard. It’s been awesome!

PAM: It’s been awesome! (both laugh)

We might have touched on this, but was has surprised you most about your journey so far?

LAUREN: For me especially, I come from that teaching background, and the biggest surprise for me about unschooling has been that unschooling is not really about learning. It’s not about education, and I mean that in a respectful way. I don’t mean to belittle the learning that River is doing and that I’m doing with our lives—we are learning so much more than I ever imagined we would learn—but it feels totally secondary: like a benefit that occurs along the way. To me unschooling is about living and about joy and about our relationships like you said before and that has been the biggest surprise for me.

When I was coming into it, I thought, “Oh this is how we are going to learn the things he needs to learn, just like he would have at school.” But instead, it’s “No, this is just our life and this is how we enjoy living.”

I was in a Facebook conversation with Anne Ohman and she wrote in a comment: “The Learning is a by-product of the Living.” And I was like “Yes, that’s exactly it!”

Just by living these wonderful, exciting lives—and you know we have our own issues and struggles at times, but living through all of life—we are learning so much. But that’s just a piece of it. It’s so beautiful and it’s so wonderful and it’s so rich and it’s so much about just us celebrating being together and our lives together and what we love. It’s about so much more than learning. That was a surprise to me.

PAM: Yeah, first we think of learning as the lowest common denominator. That’s why we go to school. For the learning, it’s for the learning. Yet once we start living it and seeing it in the wild, maybe you see there is actually more. There are roots to learning. There is a foundation of living and relationships and connecting and trust and everything that lies in the foundation beneath the learning. So instead of focusing on the learning, when we focus on creating that strong foundation, the learning is the by-product that just kind of bubbles up out of it.

LAUREN: It is so beautiful and I would never diminish the importance of that learning but it’s, like you said, the relationships. I’m just in awe of how close we are. It’s something I take for granted now, almost, how close we are. But it’s the by-product of unschooling and living this life. It’s so awesome! It’s so much more awesomer than I thought, and I already thought it would be awesome. (both laugh)

PAM: It’s awesomER!

LAUREN: It’s awesomer than I thought it would be, which is so great!

PAM: Oh, that’s awesome. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me, Lauren. That was so much fun!

LAUREN: I know! Thank you so much, Pam. Like I said I’m a throw-myself-in type of person and unschooling has been one of my big, huge passions, so it’s so fun to talk about it and to think about it and to explore it, because I won’t do that with River because it’s not really his big passion, so it’s so nice to talk to other people who are into it.

PAM: I know, that’s exactly it. You mentioned that earlier too. I didn’t use the word unschooling with my kids for a few years. I think when we went to the first conference it had unschooling in the name. Yeah, we are just not going to school, we are homeschooling, that’s that. They figured it out. They figure out life and living and just pursue it and we are the ones who do all the work, seeing how learning can really happen in everyday living.

Before we go, where is the best place for people to connect with you online?

LAUREN: Probably on Facebook, my name is Lauren Seaver. I love Facebook and I’m always putting fun stuff up there what we are doing.

PAM: Yeah, and they can send you a quick message saying they heard you on the podcast if they’d like to connect, right?

LAUREN: Yeah, absolutely.

PAM: Thank you so much again, and have a great day!

LAUREN: Oh, thank you so much, Pam. You have a wonderful day!

For this week’s episode, we’re sharing the first Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Pam and Anna, Priorities.

We are handed a set of priorities by society and our culture, but when we really consider ourselves and our personal values, we can see how individual our priorities can be! When we choose priorities that feel good to us, it becomes easier to make day-to-day choices that align with what is important to us.

We talk about how our relationships fit into our priorities (and—spoiler alert—they’re at the top of our lists!) and how prioritizing connection has become a focus for both of us as we tuned out the external noise and tuned into how we want to show up in the world.

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

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Conflict, coaching calls, and more!

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

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

Listen to our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

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

EPISODE QUESTIONS

1. How can you quiet the outside noise so you can hear your own thoughts? Your inner voice?
2. What priorities make sense to you? Why?
3. Where do your relationships fall in your list of priorities?
4. Are your day to day actions lining up with your priorities? What changes, if any, would you make?
5. Do any of your priorities depend on other people’s actions and choices? If so, is there a way you could tweak them so that they focus on what you can control?

TRANSCRIPT

ANNA: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. We are so excited you found us and look forward to exploring our relationships, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world. So, on today’s episode, we’re going to talk about priorities. And I love this as a starting place for the podcast, because it’s such an interesting topic to examine.

Priorities are so individual, and yet, so often, we’re handed a set of priorities from society. We’re handed definitions of success and where and how we should be spending our time.

And there are these heavy guardrails of judgment that we have to move through if we choose to deviate from these expected paths.

So, it can be really interesting, I’ve found, to dig into those outside voices, that judgment. What’s behind it? What purpose does it serve? And is it helping me get in touch with who I am and who I want to be in the world?

I think about the studies that they do when people are on their deathbed and they’re asked, is there anything that you would change? And consistently, they answer that they wished they had prioritized their relationships over achievements or the next promotion.

For me personally, I came to that realization for myself after our first child had a life-threatening after birth experience. Almost losing her really woke me up to the path I was on and to look at how I wanted to spend my time. And the answer for me was doing things I love with the people that I love. And that’s how I want to spend this time that I’m given. And understanding that has just been a huge guide for me ever since.

So, I’m curious, Pam, what’s it been like for you?

PAM: Well, it was having children that sparked my journey, as well. I found that those first few years were just filled with questions like who I wanted to be as a person and parent. And, having internalized so many of society’s goals and stories growing up, it took me a while, quite a while, to realize just how much choice I actually had.

I didn’t need to just dutifully take on the path and the priorities that were handed to me. I could figure out what I value and make those things a priority in my. And then, as I continued to ask more questions, I came to realize what would always be in my life, and it was my relationships. Jobs, hobbies, areas of interest, while definitely being integral parts of who I am, those would come and go over the years. They had been coming and going over the years. But my relationships with my family would always be in my life. They were and are a fundamental part of just my being in the world.

And so, since that aha moment, I have chosen to prioritize my relationships. And rather surprisingly, because you think I’m focusing on something, so I’m closing things down to this one thing, but I found that my life has been so much richer for it.

ANNA: Oh, my gosh. So much richer. I feel like when we have that foundation of strong, connected relationships, it’s just this really wonderful place from which we can explore the world and learn about ourselves. Because I think that might have been the most surprising piece for me, that as I focused on being in relationship with others, I learned so much about myself. It’s not always easy, but I’m grateful for it.

And so, as I’m thinking about this, we both got to this place where we didn’t want to be taking these priorities that were being handed to us. The next bit for me was realizing that others don’t want me to define their priorities either.

So, when we think about our partners or kids, it was really helpful to think, am I judging how they spend their time, the choices that they’re making? Because that judgment comes between us. We don’t learn why they’re making the choices they’re making. We miss the opportunity to really connect with them and who they are. It’s got this cloud of expectation and you’ll have some people that will buck against that expectation in really dramatic fashion. And then you’ll have others that really try to meet it, even if it’s not in alignment for them. But, either way, the connection is harmed and can be lost together.

So, I try not to be the outside voice that someone needs to shut out, but instead be someone who celebrates and just unconditionally supports the people in my life.

PAM: Absolutely. That was definitely yet another layer to peel back for me, realizing how valuable it was for me to contemplate and choose my priorities, but that didn’t mean my priorities were the best priorities for anyone else. It makes so much sense to me why my priorities are these and in this order, but no, everyone is a different person. And I remember the huge shift in my relationship with my spouse when I stopped trying to convince him that my priorities should be his priorities as well, which had looked like me trying to tell him what to do and when. And I was definitely nice about it. I wasn’t trying to bully him or anything, but as I thought about it, I was trying to convince him that I was right and vice versa. That’s where our conversations went. They were often about convincing each other that our priorities and choices were more right than the other person’s. There was definitely a winner and a loser.

But once I began to share my priorities without trying to convince him to adopt them, oh, my gosh. There was space for him to start sharing his without me judging them. Each of us was more able to be ourselves. We could just share and see how things landed. And then, that in turn helped us learn more about each other as we’d chat about the things that are important to us and why. And recognizing that his priorities are as important to him as mine are to me. 

ANNA: It’s so true. I don’t know. We get stuck in our head, right? We get stuck in our head thinking everybody’s seeing things the same way. And so, yeah, I just love that next layer.

And I think then, I want to talk about, too, as we hone in on these priorities, it’s such a helpful lens to look at the day to day moments. So, in each moment, we have this opportunity to make choices. And understanding my priorities and then keeping them front of mind as I made choices throughout the day was critical to me, actually honoring them as priorities, versus just giving lip service to, “My relationships are important,” or whatever the thing might be.

So, what that would look like for me, it might be stopping what I’m doing to hear my child excitedly tell me about their game. It’s taking a walk after dinner with David to reconnect, because we’ve had some time apart that day. Because, truthfully, I could curl up with a book and get some work done at the computer, but I do want to tend to that relationship, that priority first. And what I found is that that connection serves us both as we move through the evening and through the subsequent days.

And another really big one for me, this was so huge, was learning to say no to outside requests that took me away from the people that I loved. And here’s the thing. Sometimes there are easy yeses and they feed me and they feel great and they feel great to those around me. But other times, what I noticed is that I was saying yes without really thinking about how it would impact me, my energy, what I would have left to give my family, the time it might take away from spending time with the important people in my life, all of those things.

I’m just seeing the person in front of me with the ask and saying, “Okay, I’ll help,” without really checking in. And using that lens really helped me realize that the time with them was what I wanted to prioritize, and so, I really needed to align my actions with that. So, that becomes the work, aligning our actions with what matters most to us.

PAM: Exactly. Yet another huge layer is, okay, I’ve got these priorities. It’s not sticking them on a post-it note and sticking them somewhere where I’ll see them. It’s, how do these weave into my days, my actual days? What do they look like in action?

And I wanted to mention, it is not about trying to guilt ourselves into making choices that align with our priorities. If we find ourselves doing that regularly, I think that might be a great clue just to revisit our priorities. Apparently, the things that I want to do in my day don’t align with what I thought my priorities were.

ANNA: That’s so interesting.

PAM: So, just revisit them. What you really choose to do in the moment, you want to do in the moment, those outer voices, right? Am I doing it, because I think I should? Or is this something that feels good, that I want to choose, that I choose to do, that I want to do? And you want the things that you choose to do to align with your priorities, as well. They weave together so much.

That said, though, it doesn’t mean that the choices are always easy. Like you were talking about, they aren’t often between a good thing and a bad thing, making the choice easy like, “Oh yeah, between this and this? No, no. This is definitely it.” Often, it’s between two or three lovely things, but that’s where knowing our priorities can be so helpful.

So, using your example, which I love, maybe after dinner I could take a walk with Rocco to reconnect, or I could clean up the kitchen a bit, maybe because it feels nice to me to walk into a tidy kitchen, or I could relax and read a bit. When I think about those choices, the first thing I might realize is that, those aren’t actually either/or things, right? I could do them all over the course of the evening. And taking a moment to consider my priorities helps me put them in an order that aligns with them.

So, maybe I have also learned that once I sit down to relax and read or watch a show, I often feel too tired for a walk after. So, there are a couple of solid reasons to tend to the relationship first for me. So, maybe our walk turns into us tidying the kitchen together as we finish up our conversation. And then we can each go to our own thing feeling refreshed and connected.

There are so many ways that things can unfold. And keeping our priorities in mind helps us choose the path that feels more fulfilling to us.

ANNA: Oh, my gosh, yes. And I think that’s such a great point about, if you’re feeling a rub during your day about, I want to do this, but it’s not aligning with these priorities I’ve set out, if you’re seeing that as a to-do list or a checklist and it’s not feeling good, woo, stop! Just stop right there. And revisit and go, “Wait a minute, are my priorities really lining up with who I want to be right now in this moment?”

And the thing is, they can change. Our priorities can change and they will as we go through different seasons of our lives, as we, grow and change and learn more things about ourselves. So, just looking for those little rub spots, I think, is important.

PAM: Speaking of those rubs, sometimes there are emergencies. There are urgent things in life that come up and I may absolutely choose to do those things. And I may choose to step far out of my comfort zone and do some things, but it’s the act of recognizing, oh yeah, this needs my attention immediately, very, very soon. I am going to do that. Priorities, again, it’s not a rule.

ANNA: No. Or a checklist.

PAM: Choice is right there. But priorities, there’s something that can help us make choices that, again, they feel fulfilling. They feel right. They feel good to us. They help us when we come to a point where there are various possibilities for the next moment.

So, I just think they are so valuable for us to recognize, because sometimes, too, our priorities may look quite mundane. Like relationships. “I see these people every day! Of course I’m in relationship with them. They live down the hall, they sleep down the hall.” So, it can feel like, why is it even worth making that a priority? But that’s the fun part. That’s why it’s so valuable to think about it, to think about the kind of person that I want to be, the kind of parent I want to be, the kind of partner I want to be. And when we’re thinking about it, we’ve got it top of mind as we go through our day. As things come up, as things unfold in front of us, we can make the choices that feel better for us, so that at the end of the day, it often feels just more fulfilling really.

ANNA: Right. And grounded, for me, because again, I think it’s interesting. I think they inform each other. The choice informs the priority. The priorities inform the choice. And so, just that awareness, like you said, top of mind, bringing that awareness, that can really help us. It’s a grounded feeling of like, I’m living the life that I want to live. I am being the person that I want to be and those are the things that I like to check in with myself about periodically. So, yeah, I love that.

Okay, so, we are going to leave you with some questions to ponder this week.

The first one is, how can you quiet the outside noise so you can hear your own thoughts, your inner voice? And so, this will be a big one, just thinking about, where are those voices coming from? What does it sound like for you? What does your voice sound like in contrast? So, just give a little time to sit with that and how you can shut those noises out.

The next one is, what priorities make sense to you and why? Because, like we said, it’s going to be different. There’s going to be seasons. There’s going to be things that shift around based on where you are in your life and what’s happening.

But, “Do they make sense to you?” is going give you a big clue as to, “Are they coming from outside voices versus, is it something that’s really bubbling up from inside of you? Where do your relationships fall in your list of priorities? And I think it’s just, again, it’s the mundane in some ways, like Pam was saying. And so, maybe sometimes relationships fall off as we’re thinking, “Oh, we’ve got this career thing we want to do,” or whatever, which are all wonderful things. There’s no good or bad here about what you’re pursuing or doing, but it’s just that check in. Where are they falling and is that where I want them? So, I think that’s just important to look at.

Next one is, are your day-to-day actions lining up with your priorities? What changes, if any, would you make? And that’s what we’re talking about, is you’re looking at the different choices you’re making throughout the day. Does it line up with your priorities? And again, keep in mind that it could be that the priorities need to change, or maybe you want to check in about your priorities as you’re making your choices. So, those, again, work together.

Do any of your priorities depend on other people’s actions and choices? And, if so, is there a way you could tweak them so that they focus on what you can control? And this goes back to what we were saying about nobody else wanting us to put our priorities on them. It’s that same kind of thing, because it’s like, if we are expecting someone else to move along with our priorities, it’s pretty much a recipe for upset or disconnection, because they’re going to have their own path there. So, really tuning into, are my priorities in alignment with me and things that I can control?

And, for me, what that looks like a lot of times is, am I being the person I want to be? So, my priority may be about a relationship that does involve somebody else, but what I control is how I show up for the relationship.

PAM: Exactly. Yeah. We don’t have control of how other people show up, but we can also be a wonderful model, as in, this is how we choose.

ANNA: Absolutely. So, check out the show notes for things we’ve mentioned in the episode, the episode transcript, and today’s questions. We’d love to hear what you discover. You can share your thoughts on a comment on the website or our episode post on Instagram @LivingJoyfullyPodcast. You’ll find that link in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for being here with us, and we’ll see you next time.

In this episode, Pam, Anna, and Erika talk about revitalizing our nests. Our homes are such an important part of our unschooling lives. We can get open and curious and creatively find ways to make the spaces in our home fit the individual people in our family. After all, people are different! We share examples from our own lives as well as offer food for thought as you reimagine your own home with your unique family in mind.

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

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Conflict, coaching calls, and more!

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

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

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

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

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

ERIKA: Hello, everyone! I’m Erika Ellis from Living Joyfully, and I’m joined by my co-hosts, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia. Hello to you both.

And today we’re going to be talking about revitalizing our nest, which was a very fun topic of conversation on the Network a while back. I’m really excited to dive into that. But first, I wanted to encourage you to check out the Living Joyfully Shop where you can find Pam’s books and unschooling courses such as Validation, Navigating Conflict, and Four Pillars of Unschooling, a variety of coaching options, as well as information about joining the Living Joyfully Network.

The shop has resources and support for every stage of your journey. You can find the link in the show notes, or you can visit livingjoyfullyshop.com. And now, Pam, would you like to get us started with our conversation? 

PAM: Yes, yes, yes, I would. I love the lens of revitalizing our nest and maybe even more for those of us who are right now in the depth of winter.

We are at -19 Celsius right now. So, we may be cocooning a bit more inside our nest during this season. As I was thinking about it, one of the biggest shifts for me around this idea was actually realizing that the focus of this nesting wasn’t to make our home into my version of perfect, but that what I actually wanted to do was make our nest inviting and enjoyable for each person in our family.

And all together now, everyone, people are different. So what makes a room inviting for one person may truly be overwhelming to another. It’s not really about making every room work for everyone, but making different spaces that have maybe different atmospheres and different functions. So overall, everyone has a handful of spaces that they love to be in and do the things that they love to do. 

And as I was thinking about it, one of the memories that jumped out at me was just remembering how freeing and exciting it was when I first realized that what was called the dining room didn’t need to actually have a fancy dining table and chairs.

When my kids were younger, I had that revelation and it became the computer room. It had two desks, two computers, and a comfy couch. It actually became a hub of our home rather than the ghost town space it was before. The whole world really did open up allowing us to really make our home our nest. Rather than feeling weighed down by the obligation to make it look a certain way or that I had to take those messages or that when people came to visit, I needed to be able to show these various spaces off for that. Actually, we’re the ones living in it. What do we want it to be? And once that question and that kind of permission opened up to just make it the way we wanted it to be, oh my gosh. It has been fun ever since.

ANNA: That was definitely something I wanted to talk about too, because I think, again, we have these kinds of conventional ideas of what the spaces are used for. But wow. When you can throw that out, it really helps because, we had, I don’t even know if it’s called this everywhere, but a formal living room.

When you first come into the house, it’s this kind of small room to the side. I don’t know, in the old days, I guess you would entertain people there, but we made that the playroom, we called it the front room. It was right when you walked in the house, so everybody saw it and it was often covered with toys. It was so interesting because there was a part of me that was like, Ugh. And then really overwhelmingly the response was, what a cool room, or look at how you’re using that space, or oh my gosh, you can tell they have fun in there, you know? I think it opened up for other people that we can just look at the space and really make it our own.

And I think to that end, I like that idea of destinations and so even if you have a smaller space, it can be a nook in a room or a nook in a hall that you could create and throw a beanbag down or something else, like little spots that, depending on what that person needs you have a space.

Do they need quiet? Do they need stimulation? Do they need the TV? Do they need it to be dark? Really thinking about how you use the space, how your days flow, what the different people like and enjoy doing. I think it can be so valuable because we’re all so different.

We do want this space to serve all of us. And, like you said, we can’t make every room fit every person, but thinking along the lines of, we have a blank canvas of whatever the entire house is, what can we do? We co-slept for a very long time, so it was kind of a sleeping room and then we could utilize the other bedrooms that didn’t have beds for a period of time as more, play areas and places to store stuff.

And so it was just really interesting to open all of that up and think what do we need? What do the four of us need in this space to do, because we’re here all the time. Not all the time, we’re out about, but you know what I mean. We were there every day. And like you said, the visitor that comes periodically, once every few months is not the person I need to be catering to.

ERIKA: I’ve seen the same thing happen. In our house, we have a relatively small space for the four of us. And so, over time it’s taken creativity and just thinking outside the box. How do we make this work for what we need right now? And we had the same thing, where in the beginning when we were co-sleeping.

One bedroom was perfect because then we had only one room that had all that bed space taking up the whole room. That was so great because then I had another room that we called the toy room and that was just for playing with toys and then another room that was an office. In the beginning, it had the TV and everything was in there too.

And so, if someone, a stranger were to come into our house, it’s like, what is this? But for us, it made so much sense, especially in those young days. Then I remember a few years ago, I guess it’s more than a few at this point, when we just needed more space, the kids were getting bigger. We changed our bedroom to the master bedroom. So then it’s the bigger room for sleeping, smaller room for the office. But they still weren’t ready to sleep in their own rooms yet, so I’m like, why? We don’t need to waste that space on beds if they’re not going to be used. So, we just put more beds together in the big room and still had space for the toy room and the office.

And then now at this point, when they really do want their own room, we transformed those two rooms into their own bedrooms. And we have our bedroom, which now functions as an office as well. And so, it really was all these really major shifts that took a lot of creativity and thinking and planning.

But I think one of the things to realize about this kind of thinking about our homes is you are not going to be able to find a solution that will last forever because everyone’s always growing and changing, including us as adults, what we’re interested in doing, what kind of phase we’re in, what kind of spaces we need.

And so, just thinking of it in a really open way. I think it can be really fun. I don’t have to solve every problem for the rest of our lives with my planning, but what would really help us right now, to have what we need to be comfortable, One big thing that I’ve always liked since we had kids was to not have a coffee table in front of the couch, which most houses you go into have the coffee table in front of the couch.

But for me, having the open floor where kids would just run out and crash on the floor, lay out all their toys on the floor. Having that big floor space was so valuable. And so we still have a table, but it’s to the side. We can pull it in as needed. But just little things like that.

When you’re seeing and thinking about, how does my family actually use the house? What makes it more kid friendly or functional? That’s not even to mention all of our different ways of being. Who likes things more organized, who likes to see everything out? And so just kind of taking all of our individual personalities into account and the stages that we’re in, if it’s the little kids who want all that open space to run, that’s a different phase than the kid who wants the table to be working on Legos all day.

PAM: Yes. The Lego table! That definitely had a season. I built it and put edges on it. So that the Lego wouldn’t fall. And I think what I love about using the revitalizing our nest lens is just what you were talking about, Erika. It’s not that, we’re going to revitalize and then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Figure it out, plan it out, do it. It’s more about noticing, are there things that somebody’s getting out and needing to set up regularly? Is there a way we can make, uh, I love the destination idea, Anna. Like make a destination for them so it’s super easy for them to slide in and slide out of an activity.

And that it’s all ages. It’s the same for adults. If we have a little something that brings us joy, that’s a little touch of self care. Like let’s make a little destination or a little spot where it’s easier for us to slide into, especially when the kids are younger and we can only catch a few minutes here, a few minutes there, maybe easily interrupted, et cetera.

So that just makes it easier for us as well. That is something, I love the point that it’s not something that ends either. I still love revitalizing little spaces. My room right here has kind of been my office, I prefer to call it my studio, but now two kitties have entered our lives and now it’s also the kitten home.

Things are always migrating and changing. People are coming, people are staying, people are going. It’s such a helpful lens to just keep at the back of my mind, just to keep our space working for us. Just to notice, oh, like this is feeling a little stagnant. This space isn’t feeling inviting anymore. Nobody’s been to this little destination corner in a while. Nobody’s interested in that anymore. What else could we make it? How could we transform that to be a little bit more inviting? 

So many pieces to consider, not only personalities but we can think of creating an atmosphere. Lighting and sound is something that we consider very often when we’re trying to cultivate a welcoming space for someone. I’ve got a little speaker right here. That I can just put some background noise on, or maybe a little bit of music, whatever works for the person.

Where do you want to sink into and how can we help do that? It helps us learn a little bit more about each other, how we grow and change. Ah, that’s not so interesting anymore. Let’s try this. The lighting is the same. Even smells. Oh, I don’t have it. I had a little essential oil very nearby yesterday.

I was like, oh, that is so nice. Sniff, sniff. All those pieces are part of revitalizing our nest, considering ourselves and every member of the family so that they too have spaces that feel welcoming, that feel like they were made for them, that fit them like a glove for whatever particular activity that they’re interested in doing in the moment.

That make sense? 

ANNA: Yeah, for sure. And I think it’s interesting because a couple things are coming to mind, so I’ll see if I can keep track of them.  That creativity right, of what’s happening, what do we need? But the little niceties, let’s get a new fluffy blanket. Let’s do things that just kind of make the space pop or fun.

And when you were talking, it reminded me of a very old thread on the network called Paints Out. Where we talked about having things accessible. And what reminded me was when you said as adults too, what’s our season and what’s happening for us? And I just remember, I played the guitar at the time, having the guitar out in a stand that I could just easily pick it up.

 And then having a spot where when they were in an art phase, it was super easy to clean, easy to get out, it kind of had its own space. And then like you said, we might notice, you know what, that’s kind of languishing. We don’t have to throw the paints out, but maybe we utilize that space as something else.

Maybe we’re doing a little bit more with games or it’s a puzzle table or it ends up turning into something else. And so keeping an eye on that. I always found that kind of fun. Because I do like the organizational project and so. It was fun to think about what we are into now. And like you said, it’s such a connecting activity because we’re really looking at them.

We’re really in tune with how their day is flowing and what’s happening for them and for ourselves. What do I like to do? Oh, I like to have some kind of peaceful, neat space where I can have my Rasa in the morning or when I’m checking emails. So then, okay, what? How can I create that for myself?

And then what do they do when they get up and what does that look like? I think that’s really fun to think about because sometimes when we’re trying to keep everything neat or organized, it’s all put away and it’s kind of out of sight out of mind. So it was fun to find creative ways that met my need for some order, and for accessibility.

I think that can be a lot of fun. And, also just to take the destination piece. Outside, if you happen to have any kind of outside space, whether it’s small or large, it was fun for us to think about, oh, a sandbox or a water table. We lived in a more temperate climate, so we could be outside a lot of the year.

And so, having those little destinations again made it easy to move towards something. I found with younger kids being outside helped us if things were getting a little dicey inside. And having those destinations to move us towards something, was so helpful. And so I like that idea of we have things to move towards, whether it’s inside the house or out of the house.

That helps us transition. If we’re having a little funky stuff and people are getting grumpy and maybe we need a snack, let’s all go do this. And we have that space that’s kind of carved out for us to have snacks or eat popsicles or whatever. I think it can be a really fun activity, a connecting activity to figure out how we wanna use the space that we have.

ERIKA: Yeah, I had actually written down “paints out” too. That’s funny that we both thought of it. So, this conversation on the network about paints out was so great because it started with the idea of this little toddler having her easel, paper and paints just ready all the time and the mom was noticing how much more painting was happening and then the question became, what are we doing as adults to have our activities ready to go? 

I really do love that and it’s something else to think about for each member of the family. What are the things that you have to just keep taking out again and again and is there a way to make it more accessible? Are there things that you know that your kids are loving to do but they don’t think of it because everything’s always put away. Being creative and brainstorming about how to have those things be more accessible. 

And then I was thinking, as far as the organization goes, with our small space, I always wanted to have things have a place to go so it felt like we could clean it up and it will be organized and we’ll know where to find everything.

And so we used a lot of these medium-sized plastic bins that are clear, that have locking lids on them and we put labels on them. And so it made cleaning up toys really easy. But it also meant that when the kids are looking at their shelves, they see their things. And that helps them with the inspiration of, what do I want to play with today?

It was easy for them too. They’re not huge bins, so they could just take things in and out. We used those for almost everything. And then some of  the bigger toys were in fabric bins. And so, just thinking about what are the things that you would like for your kids to have easy access to, putting kid dishes on a low open shelf.

The things where they keep asking to get to them. If you have the kid dishes up in a cabinet, then every time they want water, they’re having to ask for help. That would be one little clue. Maybe I can make this easier on everyone by having it more accessible at a place that they could reach. Putting their snacks at a low level, things like that.

Noticing if there are things I keep reaching for when I’m doing something. If I’m doing my crafting at the living room coffee table, and every time I need scissors, I have to go over to my office to grab the scissors and bring them back out. Okay, maybe I need scissors to be in this station. So it’s just little things like that, noticing what are those things that I have to keep going to get or that the kids keep asking me to get this thing.

Those might be the little places to try to get creative. I was thinking also in our living room, since I do like that open floor, we’ve really liked having a folding table that we can take out for things like games and puzzles and Lego and stuff, that we could put it away when we’re done and still have that space. But have table space when we need it. So just little hacks like that.

PAM: Yes. I love looking for clues as in, what do I keep getting asked for? If you’re someone who loves organization and efficiency, you can use that lens as part of figuring out how it might be helpful to revitalize your nest because when our kids have that ability to reach things and get things and do the things, that gives them a sense of agency and control over their days that they’re not always being stopped and having to go ask for this and that. I think that is just a super helpful lens when you’re looking at things.

And then the scissors thing, that is something I’ve been hearing lately and kind of considering, maybe I want two or three of certain things to be in those spots where I need them. Because I am easily distracted and if I have to go to another room to get scissors, chances are it’ll be 30 minutes before I get back to where I started and I will not have the scissors.

And I’ll go, that’s why I got up! That was it. Scissors. I’m back on track now. So, yes, I find that just so fun, to use those lenses to look at our days and to see how we can set up our days to flow, because that is just more fun. And when we can stay in our flow of what we’re doing. That’s super fun too.

ANNA: It’s funny with things like scissors though, because they’re not that expensive and yet we’re thinking, oh, do we really need more. Yes, get scissors or things that you notice you’re using a lot. Get the extra pens, get the extra set of whatever if you can, because a lot of times we’re just not thinking how disruptive it is to go get things.

And especially if you have somebody that gets distracted. Who knows what’s going to happen by the time they get back. I love the snack example too. I remember during another thread on the network, we had some really cool pictures of people’s spaces and how they did snacks and specific snack areas and how it solved problems like, opening the refrigerator and felt like it was open too long and not knowing what things were for dinner or whatever, but having specific areas and specific bins and just made it so accessible and easy. 

And just think of the areas that rub, I feel like in the last few pod podcasts we talked about, looking at where does it rub? And then okay, what’s happening there? Where’s the rub coming from and is there a solution that might make that easier? Even if it’s outside the box, even if it’s adding an extra little fridge somewhere or something that you might not think of normally.

So I really love that. And another thing I wanted to bring to mind is the idea of preferences, because we all have preferences, right? We talked about how we’re all different, and these preferences,  maybe for clean spaces or a clean countertop, or maybe it’s to have everything out. I think sometimes so much of what we talk about with people are different is just don’t take someone else’s personality personally. 

Because that’s where we go awry. And when we can recognize that those preferences are often rooted in what actually soothes us, what works for our brain, what makes sense for us to stay regulated, then we’re not judging that they want it differently than we do.

We’re actually able to have a conversation about, okay, you like to see everything out. I need a clean table that calms my brain when I see that surface. What can we do? Then we get creative to meet everybody’s needs. And again, every particular space in a house may not meet everybody’s needs.

But for me, if I had a spot that I could keep organized, if I was starting to feel dysregulated, I could move to that space and have all my calming tools there. And they had their space to play and do, even if it was right next to me, it was still okay. So, it’s not even about a massive amount of space, it’s more just about recognizing that each of those preferences and desires are valid and that it’s important to understand because it’s part of how we understand our brain. How we want to move through the world and what works for us. 

And I think if we have spaces that end up creating dysregulation, we may not even realize that that’s what the problem is. We just think, we’re having behavior problems, or we’re just not getting along. Or there’s so much fighting. But maybe there’s actually some root causes and we can figure out about what helps us feel good in the space. 

I just wanted to bring that piece. And whether we’re dealing with neurodiversity or neurotypical, I think we all have preferences and we all have different brains that need different things.

ERIKA: Yeah, and like you both were saying earlier, it’s just such a good opportunity to learn more about ourselves and to learn more about our family members. And I feel like once you bring them in on these kinds of conversations about how different things feel to them, you just can learn so much about the differences of each person.

I remember commenting or noticing with the kids, it feels like when the living room’s just this open canvas that you get a burst of inspiration and come up with all kinds of ideas of things to play. And so when I would notice that everything’s getting a little messy and crowded and kids seem to not really know what to do, I could suggest, should we just clean everything up?

And then maybe you’ll have that feeling of a new idea of what I could bring into this space. But then, realizing that for me, it might feel better to have everything behind a cabinet door, but if the kids aren’t seeing their things and then not getting inspired to play with their toys, they’re missing out on so much fun and all of their interests by me trying to tuck everything away.

And so that’s why it was important to keep that balance between, we can put it away, but I want you to still be able to see what you have. It also reminded me of when they were little, I heard the advice about putting some things in storage and giving them one type of thing at a time..

But then I realized that my kids love combining all the things. I would’ve missed out on so much creativity if I was giving them a limited set of things to pull from. And so for me, it was worth it to have more to clean up for them to be able to combine the cars with the animals, with the characters. Maya loved packing up all the toys in bags, mixing them all together. 

Each bag will have one of everything, which is just so hard to put everything back away, but so fun for her in that moment and so, realizing even now she says, the more things in my field of view the better. I just love having an abundance of stuff. And so even adults, some adults are maximalist and some adults are minimalists. And learning those differences has been really fun. 

PAM: Yeah. And everything in between. But that brought back some memories. Erika, I love that, that clean canvas piece. I do remember sometimes when they had a big play area and we had the cupboard under the stairs that we had put shelves in and sorted in smaller bins, the different kinds of toys and things.

That was one of the things that they loved. They loved mixing all the things and all the excitement when I said, Hey, you know, after you guys go to bed tonight, do you want me to just clean up and reorganize downstairs and it’ll be nice and fresh in the morning? And they’d say, sure. Oh my gosh. They were just so excited in the morning to come down.

And that was a big piece. Reorganizing the things into their bins because now they knew where to find that car or that character. But things were now sorted and easier to find rather than trying to look through the whole room and seeing where the last time they had put it into a scene or something.

That was also a very fun gift for them and helping them clean and organize their rooms and just seeing how they want to put all this stuff together, or maybe they want their collection of this out so they can see all of the pieces. It’s creativity, learning about each other. There is really no downside to using this lens of creating a nest. Cultivating a nest that works for the people in the family, right? 

ANNA: I love it.

ERIKA: Yeah, so this has been a lot of fun. I just love this topic and we hope you enjoyed our conversation as well 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. You can learn more at living joyfully.ca/network or on living joyfully shop.com, and we all hope to meet you there.

So thanks for listening and we will see you next time. Bye!

We are back with another episode in our Unschooling Stumbling Blocks series and we’re talking about personal hygiene.

Questions and concerns about hygiene come up regularly in parenting circles and, in unschooling communities, this topic can sometimes trigger fear. We wanted to dive into personal hygiene to address some of the most common areas that parents mention and talk about how we can move through challenges or fears while still staying connected to our kids.

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

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

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

The Living Joyfully Network

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

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

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

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

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

Today we are diving into another unschooling stumbling block, personal hygiene, and I think this will be a fun one to discuss. But before we dive in, we want to invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network. There is so much value in doing this deep, personal work that the unschooling journey asks of us in community, because while everyone’s journey is absolutely unique, we all face similar obstacles and challenges.

For example, like navigating personal hygiene with our kids, and that is where the power of community shines. So to learn more and join us, just follow the link in the show notes or go to living joyfully shop.com and click on community in the menu. And now, Anna, would you like to get us started? 

ANNA: I would. So, this is one of those topics that comes up all the time. And I’m guessing it happens because it is kind of layered, right? And we have all of these outside voices at play, and I think we can also come into it, into parenting, into these beliefs with some preconceived notions about what is appropriate personal hygiene, what it is supposed to look like.

But not surprisingly, I am going to say that people are different. And what’s really cool about that related to this topic that we’re talking about, personal hygiene, is that you can find validation for just about any choice that you make out there, because we have the bathe everyday people. We have the bathe once a week people, we have people who wash their hair every time and others who don’t, and some that don’t ever use shampoo on their hair.

And then thinking about how it plays out differently in different cultures and around the world, I think that allows us to shut out the outside noise and tune into the person in front of us to actually find something that works and feels good to them and to us. Because I feel, just from all the many years of talking with unschooling families and just families in general that are not unschooling – I think most children go through an aversion to bathing season.

For some it can be really intense and there can be some serious sensory pieces involved that just makes bathing dysregulating and really feel scary and hard. And for others it just isn’t a priority because they’re having too much fun doing something else. And then I know lots who love their nightly bath and it’s not a big deal. And teeth brushing is not a problem. And it just  works smoothly for them. So I think the big takeaway, and you know, we’re gonna dive into this, but I think it’s just knowing that there’s no one way to approach hygiene.

And so it really can leave space for us to find something that works for all of us. And I’ll talk a little bit more about my piece of that too, because I think that’s the key. It has to work for all of us, it has to feel comfortable for everybody in the family. And so when we can get creative and let go of that outside noise, that’s where it doesn’t have the weight.

ERIKA: Yeah, it is a big topic and it does come up so much, and I think it’s because there’s just so much fear in this topic. For adults and parents, because as parents we’re thinking, this is our responsibility. This is very important. This is, their lives are at stake. It could feel like this very high stakes area, along with maybe food.

These are the things that we think, this is very important. Right? Very important. But I think as we are feeling those feelings and thinking in that way, we have to start trying to see like how, I know you mentioned this all the time, Anna, about where the messages are coming from because I think it may be that we have our own personal fears about things that are hygiene related, but I bet a lot of it is coming from, What are people going to think about how my child’s hair is looking today? Or what are people going to think if I walk outside and they’re like this? Maybe it’s the judgment of our relatives. Maybe it’s just the judgment of strangers on the street. The fear of judgment of others can be really huge in this area.

And so then, like we were talking about in the last episode, that tunnel vision sets in, we’re not able to be open and curious about it. We’re tunneled in on, but it’s supposed to look this way. I really need to make sure my kid does it in this way because this is what everyone says is the safe, correct way to handle hygiene.

And so I think if we can, bring some playful energy to our day, if we can do that with hygiene, it just will help so much with letting us notice all the different possibilities. And then we can also be open to hearing what our children are saying about what’s not working for them, about these different things, about the teeth brushing, about the hair brushing, all the different things that are involved in taking care of their physical body. They know how it’s feeling for them. But if we get stuck on, I have to make you do it in this way, then we’re not hearing what the actual needs that they have are about. What sensory part is not feeling good, what timing of it is not feeling good. 

Just thinking about brushing your teeth, there are so many different tools that are out there for brushing your teeth. It’s not just a toothbrush and toothpaste. There’s all different things. Once you can start getting creative about what doesn’t feel good about it: Is it the taste? Is it the texture? Is it taking too long?

There’s one saying it can brush your whole mouth in 10 seconds or something like that. It’s a whole mouth toothbrush. I have never tried that. But anyway, there are lots of possibilities if we can step out of the fear tunnel vision and into what are some other options here?

PAM: And I think you mentioned it’s just one of the biggest things when we first start thinking about it, or it was for me is recognizing, realizing that so many of the expectations that I had, that I was putting on my kids around this stuff were actually the result of expectations I was putting on myself to not feel judged by others.

If we just think, oh, it’s an at home day today, we don’t have to dress in these particular clothes. We can wear our pajamas. Just imagine what’s the difference between an at home and an outside day? That might be a great place just to start playing with it and playing with what expectations am I putting on myself that I need to do as a parent so that I’m not judged by other people.

For me, that was a big one, certainly at the beginning of the journey. And when I just continue to ask myself questions. We can put these expectations on us as adults as well, right? But we’re talking about our kids now, and these can be big things and they can cause so many rifts in our relationship and we can get that tunnel vision thinking we have to do it this one way.

And it feels like it takes like an hour. It takes an hour to get them dressed in the morning, takes an hour to brush their teeth at night, because it’s just this constant rub and trying to convince them. And I think that can be another great clue if we find ourselves trying to convince our kids, whether it’s a shower or toothbrushing, or to finish their plate or to wear these clothes.

When we find ourselves trying to convince them, those rubs are probably great places to start. And so yeah. Start to recognize, is that an expectation I’m holding? Why am I holding that expectation?

Your conversation, Anna, about the different cultures, how you can find people recommending and saying just about anything. They’re all different. So really can be what actually works for us instead of us fitting into a thing or a way of doing a thing.

What way actually works for us and helps us? Play around with different shampoos, dry hair, shampoos, different toothpaste, different toothbrushes, some sort of funky ten second full mouth brushing.

ANNA:  I know, I’m curious about that now. We’re going to look it up. 

What really struck me was something you said, Erika, just about the fear piece. This comes up a lot in a place like the network. So, this is a little plug for the network too, because someone will come with something that feels really weighty about personal hygiene, whether it’s a toothbrushing or knotted hair. With no idea what to do, “They don’t want to ever bathe!”.

And you can feel the weight, right? You can feel the fear, you can feel, they just feel so stuck. Because I think with fear, it’s the opposite of creativity, right? It completely shuts that down. We’re just so stuck. Stuck is the word that keeps coming to mind.

But what’s really cool about those threads is that then you’ll see this boom, boom, boom of people saying all the creative ways that they’ve fixed the hair, done the thing, made toothbrushing fun, did this or that, and then you feel the lightness come to that person. It’s not that any one of the answers are necessarily the right answer for their family, but the block is gone.

The fear is lifted. Oh, other people have to deal with this. Oh, there are lots of different ways to look at this problem and we can start getting creative. I feel like this relates to the podcast a couple weeks ago about being playful and, and for me it’s like feeling that in your body if you are feeling stuck.

It’s not going to go well, when we feel stuck. Just step away from the problem. If you’re feeling that in your body, step away and figure out how to lighten your energy. Bring some support to yourself. If you’re feeling concerned or worried, talk to someone else. And that’s why it’s nice to be able to talk to people that may also be in a similar situation, because then you’re going to get interesting, creative ideas that may actually work for your family.

But I think the big gift of it is just opening it up and realizing there are so many different ways to tackle this one problem that I thought there was only one way to get through it. And that one way is usually either something we’ve gotten from our family or we’ve read something that’s maybe a bit more dogmatic about washing or not washing.

Because you’re so right, Pam. There are a whole host of people that are like, don’t wash. You’re taking stuff off your skin. That’s really beneficial, and then there’s the other people that are like germs! We have to wash everything and so we can let all of that go and find what works for us and really tune into our kids.

I love that you said that, Erika, because they have things to share, and while baths may be a no-go, what if it is just for one small thing? I don’t like the temperature of the water, or I don’t like how it feels slippery on the bottom. We had that at some point. Just put a towel down. Yes, it gets wet and it’s messy, but if that feels better to them or that might feel worse, or they don’t, maybe like this itchy part, and then we can see the bath’s not the problem.

It was this other little thing that I wasn’t even hearing because I was just thinking we’ve got to do this. And so I love that. Slow it down, tune in and then the creativity comes and we learn, we learn so much more about each other.

ERIKA: I love that slow down part too. Because it’s whenever I’m getting into either trying to rush through or I’m stuck in that fear place, that’s when these things don’t work well.

Basically this is feeling like part two of the last podcast of bringing a playful energy and that is how this stuff gets easier. And, right, checking in with the people on the network about all of these topics is so incredible because anything that feels like this gigantic weight, scariest thing that we’ve ever been through, you type it on there and it’s like, oh yeah, my kids went through that phase as well.

And when you were talking about the kids’ needs again that just brought up that it could be things that aren’t even at all related to the hygiene thing itself. And so that’s why I think just getting completely, open, playful, open and curious mindset is so important.

Because it really could just be, I don’t like the way that you do this particular part of it. I don’t like how we are trying to brush my teeth right after having a drink or the drink doesn’t, water doesn’t taste good after I brush my teeth, so I need to drink first.

It could be just a million different possibilities of what are the things that are bothering them about these particular behaviors that we’re trying to make happen? We are just always learning more about our differences and so with my kids, I like to expand the possibilities and talk about it as in, some people like to do it this way, and I’ve heard that some people do this and I’ve heard that some people do this. Looking at all the different possibilities of what different people do might give them an idea of, okay, like I don’t like the way that mommy does it herself, but here are some other people who are doing things differently.

Just widening our view of what’s possible.

PAM: Yeah, that’s so helpful. And I think going back to that weight that we can feel when I can’t see anything, any possibility for moving forward, but I need to make this thing happen. I think it can often be because we are projecting that into the future.

They’re having a hard time. I can’t get them to brush their teeth the way I want them to brush their teeth now, and that’s just going to be this way forever. I have to solve it today or we’re never going to do it again. How are they going to get a job? They like to wear their pajamas all day.

So being able to release that weight and remembering that people change. This is a season, like don’t sweat the small stuff. Phrasing, like these are just little pieces. Instead of looking at  this day, look at a week, look at a month. Look back at previous seasons. Oh, I remember when they used to do this thing and I thought they would just do it forever, and now I noticed they hardly ever do it anymore. Sometimes looking back to recognize that things often move seasonally, that we grow and change, can help us from getting locked into I need to solve this thing right now, which takes away the playfulness, takes away the seeing other possibilities. Oh, some people do this, some people do this, some people do this. And you know, you might find something that’s totally uniquely you inside that whole spectrum of possibilities. 

So yeah, I think just finding the way that works for you to release the weight around it. That doesn’t put so much pressure on it. It can just be so super helpful in just bringing, again, like we were talking about last time, the creativity to it. Right? And that’s where you can find their need. That’s where you’re now more open to having conversations and finding out what’s going on and where you can actually get playful and creative.

ANNA: Right, because it’s in that place again that we’re going to learn more and I think a piece that we’ve all touched on, but it’s just trusting there’s something there. There’s something there that is bothering them or isn’t working. And I think we can get stuck in, especially if we’re in that needing to check the box and get through the day mode.

When we have that more hurried energy, we can just feel like they are literally trying to thwart us. They’re just trying to do this thing to make my life terrible. When I find myself in that space, I’m like, okay, slow down, slow down. What’s happening? The world is not out to get me.

What can I do? And then again, like you said, Erika, it can be the tiniest thing that’s not even related, and I’m like, we can fix that. We can change that. But when I just have this frustrated energy of, we just have to do that, and I’m pushing, pushing, pushing. They don’t even want to speak up about what the thing is because, I don’t seem open to it.

I don’t seem open to really hearing and understanding what’s happening for them. And when we think of, sometimes I think it’s helpful to think about us as adults. We have these little quirky things that we do, we’ve all found our way that works for us with our hair or with our hygiene, teeth, or whatever the thing is.

And they’re discovering that for themselves and it’s going to be different for them. To give space and to honor that. I don’t know. Sometimes when we can see it in ourselves, it’s easier to go. Yeah, it makes sense that they’re going to have these particular things that they have to find and work through.

And, again, just being open to, tags feel bad to some people. And I know with my oldest, she’d always wanted to wear the softest pants and no tags and no nothing. I mean, really until she was a teen, I thought she’d always wear that. 

The pajama comment reminded me, Pam, because we just kind of went with clothes that were like pajamas. They were super soft, super comfortable because that’s what helped her nervous system be able to handle things. And then she became a teenager and wanted to wear jeans and she was fine. And it switched. And I’m like, okay. And even if she never had, it wouldn’t matter, she was listening to her body, she was learning what helped her feel better in different situations.

And that’s kind of cool, right? So, if I can get out of my head and step back and watch it, then I can enjoy this process of this human finding, what works for them in the world.

ERIKA: I’m trusting that they have the information about themselves and we can be interested in that. 

And I was thinking too, how narration might be something nice to do in this area as well. Because I think a lot of times it’s this top down giving orders in the area of hygiene. But if it could be more like, you know, something I’ve noticed about myself is when I’m more stressed out, I get stinkier armpits. Is that something weird or interesting? And so, just talking about hygiene things like, my teeth feel so nice and clean after I brush them at night or whatever. Just anything that’s my experience of my own hygiene practices. Then it starts to get them to think about how it feels to them. What do I like about it, how do I feel after I take a shower, have a bath or whatever. And so, I think it’s kind of related to sharing other people’s ideas too. But I think especially just for me, rather than talking about I think you should do this, I could say, well, I do this because then I feel like this.

PAM: Yeah. And I think that is such a great place to just start asking ourselves some questions too, like is it maybe that we are trying to direct them to take care of hygiene the way that we do it? Or are there some places that we’re kind of disappointed in ourselves and we have this perfect idea of, we wish we could meet and so we’ll get our kids to at least meet it?

Because then they won’t have the same problem that we have with, oh damn, I wish I had another, a shower today. So, to be able to even think about it as narrating. Has us thinking about it and sometimes maybe giving ourselves more grace around it and recognizing that, again, it’s a journey. Maybe what I’m doing right now is working for me, and then something switches up someday and I change up.

How I process hygiene for myself, et cetera. So understanding and seeing how that has changed for us over time can also help us open it up for our kids as well, and really help them find what works for them versus whatever story works for us. Or that we wish worked for us, and then trying to translate that and get them to follow it. Just recognizing the challenge of that in the whole, people are a different world. 

ANNA: Yeah and the stinky armpits reminded me that sometimes it’s actually, when we’re trying to find a mutually agreeable solution, there are issues, right? So I am hypersensitive to smell. And there was a teen, early teen period where I was like, this is very hard for me to have stinky people that are coming around.

But instead of, you need to do this, you need to do that, it was that narration. I know, I’m so sensitive to smell. This is hard for me right now. What can we figure out. Then they can recognize that’s about me and what’s happening for me. Versus there’s something wrong, me pointing the finger. And so it’s okay to have conversations with those “I” messages about what is feeling good or what’s working or what’s hard. And you know, I also had girls that had long hair and I found it stressful to be combing their hair if they weren’t doing it. It was getting knotted and I could express, this is feeling stressful for me. What can we do? I want to support you and what you want your hair to like, but then you’re coming to me telling me to brush it. So it was, how do we all work in this together?

And that’s where the conversations come. And when you bring that lighter, playful energy to it, nobody’s left feeling bad about it. It’s more just like, okay, how do we solve this so that it feels okay? And I think that’s why we talk so much about checking that energy. So you can see it’s kind of this layered process of peeling away the external voices, really tuning in and understanding about each other and what’s happening so we can figure out what’s actually rubbing.

And then it’s adding some narration about our process and then it’s conversations about are there solutions we can come up with that feel good to everybody? But you can’t rush it. You kind of have to do all the layers, so that you can get down to a light energy and engage in conversation that doesn’t have weight to it.

ERIKA: Right. Not the fear-based place, but the curious place. Because I’m thinking even just with hair, do you like having long hair or has it just gotten long and we haven’t talked about it? You know? And so finding out, is long hair important to you? Does it bother you when it’s getting all tangled like that?

Just giving the information that trimming it can sometimes make it easier to get some of those end tangles out. We could trim off some tangles. They’re not born knowing all the possibilities of things. And so I think that’s just part of our bringing that creativity and ideas to them, but without the “right answer”, without the agenda and the fear.

Then there’s tons of possibilities.

PAM: And then when you can get to that spot where it’s fun to brainstorm possibilities and sharing that without the weight, without the fear, but this is a possibility. This is a possibility. Anyway, thank you so much to both of you.

That was a very fun and interesting conversation, and I hope people found it useful. And remember we’ve mentioned the Living Joyfully Network a few times in this call because these are very, typical, normal kinds of conversations and challenges to run into. You can join us there to dive deeper into any of these kinds of everyday topics.

And we will be very excited to welcome you! Just follow the link in the show notes or go to livingjoyfullyshop.com and click on community in the menu. Wishing everyone a lovely day. Bye bye!

In this episode, Pam, Anna, and Erika explore bringing a playful energy to our days. Shifting to a playful energy can be helpful when we’re feeling stuck, with spinning thoughts, worrying about the future, or focused on external expectations. We can cultivate a lightness and curiosity that helps us get creative and come up with many possibilities to help us face the situations in front of us. Play is also the natural way that children process their lives. So, bringing a playful energy into our days can help us connect with our kids, as well!

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

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Conflict, coaching calls, and more!

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

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

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

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

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

PAM AND ERIKA: Hi! 

ANNA: Before we get started, I wanted to encourage you to check out our shop, where you can find books, courses, coaching, and information about the Living Joyfully Network. The shop has resources and support for every stage of your journey, and you can find a link in the show notes, or you can visit livingjoyfullyshop.com.

Today we’re going to be talking about bringing a playful energy to our days, and I don’t know, I think this is going to be a lot of fun. So, Erika, do you want to get us started?

ERIKA: I do! And Happy New Year to everyone! Yes. I just love this time of year and how it can really inspire me to bring a bit more intention into my daily routine. I really feel like this idea, bringing a playful energy to our days, could be such a fun intention to explore. And, Pam, you’ve certainly encouraged me through this podcast over the years to play with ideas and to play with possibilities. And getting open and curious often feels like being playful.

And so, I did want to start out just by reminding us all that people are different, and one person’s definition of bringing a playful energy to our days is going to look different from another. And so, pretend play, being silly, exploring characters, getting right in there with our little kids in their imaginary worlds can come really easily to some parents and it’s not easy for others. And that’s okay, because we’re not talking about one right way or one definition of being playful. And so, I’m excited to see how many different areas we’ll end up talking about today. 

But for me, bringing a playful energy means really lightening up my own energy about something. So, when I get bogged down by outside expectations or by fears about the future or anything like that, I can get into that tunnel vision mode, which is the opposite of having a playful energy. And so, when I start thinking about all the things that have to happen or what should be happening or what I have to do and what the kids should be doing, that’s just not a light place to be. And so, being open and curious, remembering that there’s not one right way for things to happen, bringing a more playful approach to my days just lightens me up and I can see more possibilities. I can connect more easily with the people around me. I can think, huh, I wonder what’s going to happen next. Or, I wonder what we could do here. Let’s just try something. And that is this light energy that can help me move forward.

Whereas the heavy energy of, we have to do this and I have to figure out the right way to do this, feels like it’s weighing me down and honestly can make me super grumpy. And that’s not even to mention how bringing playfulness into our days can help make things so much smoother and more fun for our kids.

PAM: I am really excited to talk about this. And I think that was one of the things that really brought this top of mind for me, having talked about it for years now, because I found it so helpful for shifting my energy and my perspective and bringing me into the moment. When I’m future-focused and trying to figure all the things out, it just brought me back to my kids.

And then from there, I learned how helpful it was even for me when I’m trying to process and move through my own things because, for me, the shift from having to figure everything out, I just get so very tunneled vision to try and find that one right answer, even if I’m not telling myself there’s one right answer for all humanity. Even trying to find one right answer that works for me can be very tunneling. I’m just so quickly throwing things out. Nope, nope, not that, not that, not that boom, boom, boom. Whereas when I can shift to that playfulness, I can be more open and curious about the thing.

Everything doesn’t look like a no to me. It’s like, oh, I wonder? Or, what if? Or, how might that unfold? I hadn’t even thought of that! And that playfulness, too, lets me bring more things to my kids, to my partner. It’s like looking for a little bit more input and then I start sharing a little bit more, and then it doesn’t look as dire as it originally was for myself.

And, like you said, alongside all the cool things that playfully engaging with my kids brings. That’s a whole other part of this conversation, but we’ll start with how it feels for us. 

ANNA: Yeah. That’s definitely where I want to start. I do want to acknowledge what Erika said, too, about people are different. Pretend play did not come easy for me. So, I do think when people hear this, they’re like, but what if I’m not that playful person that looks like X? I think we will talk about that a little bit. 

But really what I’m more interested in and what resonated for me about this topic was exactly what we’re talking about, how to shift our energy. And for me, I remember just trying to be mindful about if it felt like a difficult day, it felt like something, it’s that quick check-in with my body, like, whoa, I’m feeling a lot of weight. I feel a lot of heaviness. Something’s happening. And then I can just go, wait a minute, where’s that coming from? Look outside a little bit. And then bring in that playful energy.

And I think our kids lead the way. I think if we turn to them, they’re most likely laughing or playing or doing something or enjoying something or can easily be tickled if we just bring in some fun energy, especially with little kids.

And so, I think for me it was more just watching my energy, because I felt like my energy really impacted the whole house. And so, if I was carrying a lot of weight about something and maybe it was even unrelated to the kids, it was still helpful for me to check in with that and go, whoa, that thing is impacting the way I’m interacting with the people in my life. So, I would like to either set that aside so I can have some special time to think about it or address it. But then how do I lean back into the joy of having little kids? 

And I think we get tied up in, there’s a lot of work feeding people and doing all the things. We can get weighed down by that, but it’s pretty amazing when you look at these little beings that are telling us all kinds of things, hopping around the house, so excited about the tiniest things, discovering things for the first time. That really helped me get to that playful energy was just watching their wonder and excitement about things and then recognizing, okay, that’s a choice I can make. And so, that really would shift things for me.

ERIKA: Yeah, I love that. Kids are typically masters of play when they’re young. And so, it really can be so inspiring to see how they’re able to figure out a playful, fun way to do basically anything. And I like the idea that if we’re talking about bringing a playful energy to our days, it doesn’t mean now our days are just a hundred percent fun. It’s not that we have to turn everything into fun. But maybe starting to notice, what are the things that come up in a typical day for me where I start to close in and get stressed out. What are my triggers?

And so, for me, it could be trying to get somewhere at a certain time. I feel this sense of panic, and I’m sure that comes from childhood and having to be in certain places at certain times. But if I think about my life now, if I can logically walk myself through it, these are not emergency situations 99 times out of a hundred. And so, it really is my own trigger, based not on something that’s happening in this moment, but just based on fear from the past. And so, I think those are moments, if I can identify the triggering things for me, those are the best spots to start playing around with it.

What about when that’s starting to happen, I’m going to try to bring in a more playful energy about it? And reminding myself there’s plenty of time and all those soothing mantras. There is space to give this a little bit of room and to be more playful and curious about what could happen.

And so, as adults with a lot of background and baggage that we’re carrying with us to this point, there are a lot of these little triggers through the day. And it could be things like mess. It could be being too tired. It could be cooking. That’s a big one for me. Like, what am I going to serve everyone? And it can bring up panic. And so, those are the spots where I especially want to start thinking about, how could I be a little bit more playful in this area?

PAM: I love the idea of starting with triggers, because it’s like, okay, I’m going to be more playful. Where do you start with that? But where things rub or where things are triggered, those are great places to start. And I remember, for me, I usually start with some internal processing and figuring it out myself before I start trying to bring it to other people. Because I can’t really quite explain it yet or I don’t understand it. Like you were saying, so much of it is tools or reactions or things that we’ve built over the years to survive in various environments that we were in. 

Like you mentioned, when we were growing up, if getting out the door was something that was a stress on the family, I just internalized that and have that with me. But to take a little bit of time to say, oh, the environment we have now is different than the environment then. We are different people. I can understand those feelings and that reaction, but is that something that’s serving me now? And that’s where I can start. 

Now I can bring that more playful approach to thinking about other possibilities. And when I’m in a space where I understand enough that I’m open to possibilities, that’s a great time for me to start bringing it to others, because now I can actually hear it. I’m less putting it through that filter that I was owning and holding so tightly and more open to other possibilities. 

And so many times, having these conversations with my kids, even when they were younger, gave me so many new ideas. We talk so much about how capable kids are at all ages. Even if it seems like something that would never work, oh my gosh, just sitting with their idea for a second can make another connection and another connection. It’s like, oh yeah, maybe it’s the energy that came with their idea. We don’t have to take everything absolutely literally, but just to pull it all together. 

That’s why I love the brainstorming mindset, open and curious, see what happens. It doesn’t literally need to be something that comes up in that conversation, but those ideas connect to something else and something else and something else, and then we can see a new solution. And, for me, playfulness also means trying something and seeing what happens and then tweaking and trying something. 

When I say play with it or when I remind myself to play with, it’s not like, okay, I’m going to play with the ideas until I get that one right thing that seems like it’ll be perfect, and then I’m going to do that thing. And then if it doesn’t work perfectly, I’ve failed. That whole process failed. But no, if I can think of the process as something playful, it’s like, oh, that seems pretty cool. Let’s try that. See what happens. Then you’re learning another little piece about some aspect or constraint of the challenge and then tweak it a little bit more and tweak it a little bit more.

People are different and people are always changing. You’re not going to get like one right answer that’s going to be playful and fun and then we’re going to move on to something else with our lives. Now this is our life and this is how things are unfolding. So,bringing that playful energy to it helps me not put so many expectations on myself and all the people around me, right?

ANNA: Yeah, and I think I love starting with triggers. And I think starting with where things are rubbing. A big one for a lot of people are transitions. And what’s interesting about that, if you have a child that struggles with transitions, it can weigh on you, right? You’re going to the event, the playground, whatever it is, and you’re thinking, this is great and then we’re going to have this terrible transition. And that’s that piece I was talking about before. Watch when you’re carrying weight like that, because you’re creating the story before it’s even started.

And that doesn’t mean that you can click a switch and transitions are easy, but it opens us up to find different ways and to try different things. And it’s going to be different every time. But it can be literally playful, like piggyback rides to the car or we would do a race to tree or we’d find these fun things to move towards. Moving towards something versus, we have to leave this thing you’re loving so much and do nothing, which is kind of how it feels in their mind. But it’s like, okay, let’s move towards something that’s fun. 

But I think we get that playful creativity when we’re not carrying the weight of, this is going to be hard. This is so terrible. We’re so bad at this. You can just feel yourself shrinking in on, we’re going to make a scene and people are going to be worried about it, or whatever’s going to happen. And I think I talked about this somewhere recently, but just when we are calm in that space and bringing that lightness to it, even if our child is struggling in that moment, people are just calmed by that. They’re like, oh, you’ve got this. Yes, we’re a little bit upset about this transition, but you are still there engaging with your child. You are still there finding ways to move through it. 

So, it’s literal play sometimes, but it is that playing with, I’m going to try this this time. Okay, that didn’t work. We’re going to try this next time. But not putting a lot of weight on each of those decisions either, not putting weight on, this has to be the thing that works. Or when we find something that works, it has to work forever. It just doesn’t work that way. 

And so, I think it’s probably a culturally ingrained idea that we’re going to find the right answer and it’s going to work forever. That really limits us when we’re working with other people, because humans are different and challenging and have different things that mean things to them and different things they want to do, different ways they want to move through the world. So, I just love that check on my energy of, what am I bringing to this maybe historical, challenging bit of our life?

ERIKA: If you have a feeling of dread about certain things that happen in your life, those may also be good spots to look at or, or times when your child is always upset or that you’re always having conflict about a certain area. 

And I love the idea that play means, let’s try something different this time. And when you go into that, let’s try something different this time with a playful energy. Then you’re not attached to the outcome of that thing. And so, that’s where you’re able to really just brainstorm, try something that you would’ve never tried before, and then see what happens.

And so I think, as we are getting to know these people, our children who are growing and changing, we’re always learning more about who they are. We’re always growing ourselves and learning about who we are and just getting more information. And so, it makes sense that we are not going to know from the beginning how all of these things are going to play out.

Having that playful energy about the conflicts, about the rubs that we find along the way, I think just helps so much. And I’m thinking it’s from the little things like leaving the park with young kids and they don’t want to leave yet. It’s so hard to validate if I’m stuck in my head telling a terrible story about how awful this is, and I knew this was going to happen, and here we go again and like all those kind of feelings.

But if I can be playful about, you know, what’s coming next and get myself into the place of validating them, it can go so much more smoothly than if I shut down on my side and they have a hard time on their side. 

But then also I was thinking of harder things like, you know, when our teens are having really dark thoughts and really a difficult time. How can I bring play into those moments that are just like tearing my heart out? But it’s true that lightening up my energy is still going to be a better choice in those moments. And it’s not easy to hear your children say things that are really upsetting or that they’re having a very difficult time. But trying to move myself away from the future fear, tunnel vision, that sense of dread and to trust, what’s going to happen next? There are so many possibilities. Let’s try something new. That more playful place is going to help in all kinds of circumstances.

ANNA: Yeah. I’m going to just jump on that teen piece real quick because I think it is so important. And what I’ve noticed, and this can even be with the younger kids, but especially with teens, when they bring us something heavy or that feels really big to them, and whatever the thing is might be really big, they are looking to us to see, is this going to break us? Are we going to say, whew, we’re throwing up our hands. This is too much. Or are we going to stand there with that confidence and knowing and trust and leaning in? Because they’re testing the waters. This thing’s feeling really big. And what is it going to do to this person that I love, who I trust and who tends to lead me through these things in the past? 

And so, I think that is so important to check our energy in those situations. And if we need support outside of that dyad with our teen, then that’s great. Get the support, because whoa, they shared some heavy things and that was hard. We can get validation and support ourselves, but when we can be just much more clear and open with our energy. 

And I’m substituting creative energy with playful in some situations. So, in some situations maybe it’s more just like a lighter creative energy with that trust built in that you were talking about. And so, sometimes, again, we’re literally talking about play and making it fun and laughing and doing, and sometimes it just is bringing that lighter, creative, even more problem solving kind of energy, which still has this playful aspect to it.

PAM: Yeah, that is what came up for me, too. It’s like, oh, maybe we should just revisit the idea of playful for a moment. Because as we’ve been talking about it as this lighter energy, more open and curious doesn’t necessarily, and certainly not always mean jokey and fun in the typical sense of, oh, that’s hard. Let’s go play a game. That’s not what we’re meaning when we talk about playful energy. 

But playful really works for me as a term for bringing that lighter, creative, open and curious kind of energy to a moment. And then it means I’m open to seeing and feeling what the other person in that interaction is feeling and going through, to help get a sense of what direction might be helpful, but yes. That grounded energy in more challenging times is so helpful for us and for the other person, especially a teen. Like, yes, I see you. This is hard and we can do it. We can do it. That energy is just so helpful when somebody is just feeling hopeless or just like, I can’t see a path forward. 

And we don’t need to have the answer or the path to have that grounded and curious energy when we’re interacting with them or even when we’re thinking about it. Because if we don’t, we get caught again in that tunnel vision. Oh my gosh. We need to solve this as soon as possible. Or terrible things are going to happen. But yeah, bringing that openness to it, that curiosity, but that grounded, solid, playful, compassionate, all those terms, it’s so much more helpful than getting caught up in the swirl of things.

ANNA: Yeah. Before we go, I’m going to just bring us around to, just again, playfulness, right? And lighten it up just a little bit, because I think sometimes with kids, we get in the adult mindset of, I just tell you what to do and you’re going to do it. Go brush your teeth, it’s time to brush your teeth. Or, do this. We’re getting in this check the box mode or whatever our personality is. And it really can be fun to bring in actual play, especially for younger kids. So again, this is looking at those rub areas to think, what can I do to make this fun?

And it’s tickle monster or silly toothbrush or the airplane things or the whatever. There are so many fun ways to connect and move through the world, and I think our kids really give us that little check when we’re getting too serious, because they can put on the brakes if we are getting too serious. You see them dig in. And so, it’s just a reminder that that doesn’t mean we have to double down and push harder and try to really force. It can be a little wake up call of like, hey, why are we not bringing a lighter energy to this? Why are we bringing this weight? So, I just wanted to bring it around for little kids too, because the teens are important, absolutely. And so are the little kids, that playful piece.

ERIKA: Right. And I just remember so many times where what it will feel like from my perspective is like I’m getting stuck in my head with what we have to do next and trying to move us towards what we have to do next or thinking about something I have to do. And that’s pulling me out of the moment. And I could notice myself not being able to listen to them quite as much and I’m not quite paying attention to what they’re doing and what they’re saying. And so, being playful allows me to notice that too much thinking is going on. I’m looking back at them, and then once I start interacting with them, that’s how all the transitions got easier.

Transitions are hard when I can’t hear anything they’re saying. We’re doing this, we’re doing this. Let’s keep moving. Like, what you’re doing isn’t important. We just have to keep moving. That’s when my transitions would really go off the rails. But if I could be engaged with what they’re doing, talking to them about it, interacting, asking about the characters, asking about what they’re doing, really getting into what they’re focusing on, then we could get out the door, because they’re happily talking to me about the things that they’re interested in and wanting to do. And so, it really is for me the tool of stopping the spinning thoughts in my own head and bringing myself back into the present moment with the kids who are basically always in the present moment.

And so, that’s really great. I could just look at them and that’s the present moment. And so, I just had so much fun playing around with what could be difficult transitions, but now it really is just fun, like, okay, we’re all exploring this topic or we’re all talking about this funny thing, or whatever it is, playing a game on the way out the door.

PAM: I’m playfully coming up with that. I love the transition example, because that is just a huge piece. And the learning and remembering to go to them and engage. We are part of it. It’s not us trying to manage their transition. We are all transitioning out the door or to a different activity or to people showing up, just a change of circumstance.

And it was just a world of difference to recognize and to be like, oh, okay. I’ll actually come in and join you where you are and engage, whether it’s, like you were mentioning Erika, starting up a conversation that we can continue as we move on. Or maybe it’s like really engaging with them and understanding, sharing in whatever joy they’ve been getting from whatever activities they’re doing as you’re helping them close it down or get to a spot where they feel comfortable stopping. And doing it playfully with intention and full choice rather than, oh, this is another thing on my plate that I need to do to get us there. No, this is life. We’re changing activities. 

So, just being there with them. And Anna, that reminder about literal play, whether it’s brushing teeth or whatever it is. There’s a Pokemon app for teeth. There are just so many fun ways to really figure out like what is that’s a bit of the challenge. It can also be the transition, too, having to brush your teeth, just all those pieces are pieces we can play with and just try things out. For me, that was the biggest thing. Just try a little something out. And see how it goes. And there we’re playing with it.

ERIKA: And just allowing ourselves as adults to actually play the things, too. To play Roblox, play Minecraft, play with the toys, check out the things, see what lights up that inner child in ourselves. I feel like those practices, too, just make our lives more fun and help our kids see the fun in us, which, I think, really helps our relationships too.

ANNA: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Just to wrap it all up, I love how what is weaving into this conversation is the connection we talk about so much and learning about one another. Because when we’re slowing down and connecting and figuring out what the rubs are and finding playful solutions, we’re learning about each other. We’re learning about ourselves, we’re learning about our kids, and that’s what we always talk about. So, I love that. It just weaves all together. And I feel like this was a fun and important conversation. 

So, thanks to you both and thank you for listening. We hope you found it helpful on your unschooling journey. And if you enjoy these kinds of conversations, I think you would really love the Living Joyfully Network. You can learn more about it at livingjoyfullyshop.com and click on the community button at the top. We hope to see you there. Take care, everybody.

PAM AND ERIKA: Bye!

In this episode, Pam, Anna, and Erika dive into consent and autonomy. Moving towards respecting our children’s autonomy and consent is typically an important part of the unschooling journey. In our conversation, we talk about independence vs autonomy, looking for underlying needs, questioning societal messages, and moving from control to connection with our children.

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

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Conflict, coaching calls, and more!

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

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

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

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

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

ERIKA: Hello everyone. I’m Erika Ellis from Living Joyfully, and I’m joined by my co-host, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia.

I’m so excited because this week we’re exploring consent and autonomy, and I really think these are just such deep topics with so many layers, and maybe it becomes a bit more complicated to consider consent and autonomy when we’re in a holiday season or when we are surrounded by our families of origin.

Maybe it feels like there are more external expectations on us and our kids, and so I think it’s a great time to dive into this topic. And on that same note, I wanted to mention that the Living Joyfully Shop has courses and coaching to help you through this time of year, including the course called Navigating Family Gatherings.

There’s a lot to think about when we are preparing to spend time with family, especially during holidays with a lot of traditions and expectations. And some families may particularly have expectations of how children should show up around the holidays, and our unique families might have a different idea of how we want the gatherings to feel. The course can offer you some ideas about how to navigate some of those challenges that come up. You can learn more about that course and all the others at livingjoyfullyshop.com. And now, Pam, would you like to get us started on our conversation?

PAM: Sure, I would love to. And I do love how the ideas of consent and autonomy weave together, and also how this flows from our last podcast episode about weaving our needs into the conversation. So, I think that’s going to be a really fun conversation as well. 

With unschooling, we do prioritize giving our children choices and supporting their autonomy. But what truly lies at the heart of that is consent. In fact, consent lives at the forefront of pretty much every interaction we have with kids. Now, I know as adults we often talk about consent in a sexual context, but when we try on the lens of a child’s consent to do things throughout their day, I think it really can be so eye-opening, and a real paradigm shift.

I notice when I override their consent, what I’m often doing is not giving them the space to consider whether or not they want to do the thing, right? Maybe it’s because I think of it as a given. They’ve always wanted to do this before. We’re just going to do it. Or maybe I’m in a hurry and feel like I don’t have time for the conversations.

It’s not a callous thing. It’s usually more of a, I didn’t even really think about it kind of thing. That’s why it’s interesting to just start using that lens throughout our day. Because it can definitely have consequences if we are not really considering their consent.

One can be eroding the trust in our relationship. It’s harder to trust someone when it feels like they’re railroading you to do things to keep themselves on track. Right? It’s not even asking, leaving the child not feeling seen and heard, because really they aren’t.

Our needs are kind of overriding what’s going on. And another can be that they start to internalize this and think that they’re wrong to want to do the thing that they want to do, the choice that they want to make in that moment. And that can start to dampen down their inner voice. What they want to do in the moment or what they feel about the moment if we keep jumping in without giving them the space to process that and bring that into the conversation and fully consent to what they’re doing.

Well, if my parent thinks that I should be doing this, because they’re saying, let’s go do this, let’s go do this. We’re going to go do this now. What I’m thinking must be wrong. Or I’m wrong for wanting to, or not wanting to do those things that are expected of me.

And then they can lose their voice that way, I think.

ANNA: I think it just erodes that understanding of ourselves because I think that dissonance is actually what causes a lot of stress and anxiety in people of all ages. And we can carry into adulthood.

And that is this, they’re telling me that either what I want to do or don’t want to do is wrong. But I’m feeling it deep inside of me that I don’t want to go do that thing or that I really want to stay focused on this one thing in front of me. It just erodes this trust in our inner voice and our knowing about ourselves.

And I think that is just a really slippery slope. And I know as the parent that’s often coming from a really loving place, like, we’re going to have so much fun, or it’s going to be great, or we want to all be together. We’re not going in there thinking, I am eroding your voice, or I want you to feel bad about yourself.

No, we’re coming in with this love and excitement about the plan. Or maybe a feeling of, I know better than you. I can see this longer picture, but to me, it’s worse having them doubt or question that inner voice because that serves them so much throughout their life to really hear and listen to that.

I think it’s also a safety thing. I think it’s a personal development thing. I think it’s related to relationships and how they show up in relationships later. So to me it’s so foundational, this idea of consent and it was really consent that led me on this path.  I do not like to be controlled. So consent is something that really, even before I had kids, was really important to me.

And so then it was this new area to test and because it’s different with kids, right? Because we do have these ideas, I think we talked about it on the last podcast of – it’s my time. I’m going to be able to do the things I want to do. But then you have this fully formed human that has very strong ideas about what they want to do.

And it did not take me long again, because I don’t personally like to be controlled to go, oh, okay. I don’t want to be the person that’s controlling them and not allowing them to listen to their voice, to not hear them, because I know how terrible that feels. 

The whole idea of consent is so important to me, and it is wrapped up and weaves nicely with autonomy because that is this idea of, what do we want to do? What feels good? How do we want to move forward? I feel like this topic is so vast, though, so I have so many things I want to say, but I’ll see what you’re thinking, Erika, before I just keep going, there’s so much I want to say!

ERIKA: Right. And the more we think about it, I think the more things pop up. I remember the episode where we talked about cultivating our children’s inner voices or  allowing space for that to develop and how important that is to me. 

When I’m thinking about this topic, I’m remembering how it felt to be a kid. It is so powerful to just go back to even four and 5-year-old me, little me. And I can remember knowing what felt good, knowing what felt scary, knowing that I knew for myself what felt right and what didn’t.

And so having the space to express that as a kid is so huge. And then having someone who actually will believe your experience, believe that you could have a different opinion than someone else. And then to tell you that that’s okay. That is just the biggest gift that we could give to someone. And I really think that it is what will help them trust their inner voice.

And from my perspective as a parent, it’s fun because I’m learning about someone who I haven’t met before, which is my child. This person who is their own person through and through, and they know what they want. They know what feels bad and what feels good. And so, just cultivating that curiosity from the parent perspective.

What could I learn about my child today? What are they going to show me about how they want their life to be? Rather than me coming in saying, I know how children are supposed to be, or, I know what I like and so therefore you like it. I know that you do because it’s great 

Talking over their inner voice disconnects them. It breaks that trust they have in us. And, the more that I can hold space, leave space for them to say, I know you’re loving this, but I don’t like it, they just trust me so much more and then I’m learning about them and it’s so rewarding, I think as a parent.

PAM: I like rewarding, what a lovely word. What I find so fascinating is when we railroad over their consent, what we’re really doing too is interfering with their learning, like the choice that they want to make in that moment, what they do or don’t want to do. They will learn the most by having that experience, not by us stopping them from having that experience.

What we’re thinking might be, I don’t think you’re going to like that and you really want to go. That’s going to mean X, Y, Z, whatever story we tell ourselves about it. But you know what, if they really want to try this thing, they want to do this thing. If they can do that, they are going to learn so much in that moment.

It’s like us telling somebody else what we think the outcome will be for them. And you know what? We are not them. Right? And how often have we just taken at face value, something somebody tells us as like, yeah, you won’t like that, or you’ll love this, et cetera. It doesn’t feel good to us, doesn’t feel good to someone at any age.

When we are wanting an experience, we will learn the most by having it, and then we can say, I did not like this, X, Y, Z about it. I really learned that because I have the experience, I now have the context. I’m now making those connections in my own head, building my body of knowledge around myself and I’m gaining self-awareness.

It’s like, oh, I didn’t think it would be this way. Right? Or, I loved it, et cetera. It really helps with learning. So when we’re in that experience, it really makes connections for us. It really helps us understand ourselves and the things we do and don’t like to do.

So, when we step in, even with the biggest heart because we don’t want them to be upset or we don’t feel we have the energy for an overloaded environment or something like that. Those are considerations, but also the more we can help them have the experiences they are looking to have, the more they will learn.

So, not walking over their consent also means they will be learning something that is close to their heart right now because this is a choice that they’re wanting to make right now and that will help them take the next step. Instead of having to keep asking for that step over and over and over, they’re just kind of stuck in their learning at that point because we’re not helping them bring more in around what they’re learning.

ANNA: I love that learning point and I think we talk about consent and autonomy a lot. There’s other conversations, definitely on the network and I think even some other podcasts have hints of it as well. But I think this is just another opportunity to examine, to really look in and think about our thinking.

Because if you were to ask any person, do you want to push through your child’s consent? Most likely the answer is no, because that doesn’t sound good. We’ve all learned that consent is important and we need to understand it. And we have an expectation that teenagers will understand it and that other adults will understand it.

And we see it play out in ways and we are upset about it, where we feel like our consent has been violated. So we would say no. But this is where we can examine, but am I doing it again with this big heart thinking I know best, or thinking that if I just do this, then push them a little bit here or just not worry about that they don’t want to do that there, then it’s going to be okay.

So to maybe flip it on the other side, I think we all want compassionate people, right? We want our kids to be compassionate and kind and this is where it starts, this right here. This one piece to me is so critical in having a world that’s filled with compassion, because when we can slow things down to really hear what’s happening to someone. I’m thinking of 4-year-old Erika who knows what she needs and wants in that situation. What a different world it is when someone says, Hey, I get that. I get that you don’t want to do that, or you’re seeing it differently than I am, or that you don’t like it right now because it’s right now, and she might like it later, so I don’t have to future trip on, oh, she’s not doing this one thing, and she’ll never do it.

I can just say, I want to honor you where you are. Because again, that’s where compassion is born. And then that child wants to offer that to the next person and the next person, and it spreads from there. So I think just pausing and slowing down and maybe a little examining about what it is that we want to be fostering in our environment.

What is it that we want to be learning about, because it’s learning for me too, because it’s hard to live with other people. It’s hard to take everybody into consideration and all of those pieces. But then there’s so much reward to it and so much learning.

That’s what makes it doable for me. Because I think some people think I can’t do that. It takes too much time. Or I don’t have the bandwidth, but when I really think about what are my core values and what am I wanting to foster and create, then it makes that easy.

It makes taking that time easy, it makes spending that little bit of extra energy so much easier.

ERIKA: That’s why the work for us to do is our internal work. And being resourced, being given that time and space in my own mind is enough to leave that room for them to express what they’re feeling about a situation.

It does take intention and it does take patience. And that’s why I think that weaving in our needs from last time is also so critical here because it really is when I feel like I’m in a rush, I feel like I’m doing a million things, those are the moments that I’m the most likely to push through someone’s consent because it’s just one more thing on my plate. That’s what it feels like, you know?

We’re trying to get out the door and now they’re saying that they are worried about going. How do I have time to deal with that conversation? And so that really is the time to remember the why. The most important thing that I could do in this life is this. These conversations with the kids, leaving the space for them to have their feelings and to figure out what feels good moving forward.

And so, yeah, I just think it is all my work to do. And we were probably not modeled much of this as kids and growing up in a really controlling environment of school. And so, it’s just a lot of intention that has to come from me.

PAM: Yeah. I love the way you expressed that, Erika, that this is our intention.

This really is the important work that I want to choose to do in these moments and to feel reasonable enough that you can make that shift right in the moment when we recognize that somebody is feeling like their consent is being pushed on. And, if one of the things we were wanting to talk about that I feel is so important is not only not pushing their consent, but it’s in support of their autonomy, right.

Of them making choices. And like I was talking about before, making these choices is reflecting who they are in that moment and what they’re wanting or not wanting to do, right? We want to give them choices so that they can then pursue who they are and explore who they are and the things that they like to do.

That’s life. But one of the fascinating things is, I remember having those moments and when I’m feeling a little under-resourced too, right? Is that they want their autonomy, they want to do the thing, well then they can go and do it, right? So it’s thinking about autonomy versus independence.

We can easily make that little quick connection. That autonomy means doing it themselves. If they want to make that choice, then they can do it. It’s their responsibility to follow through and do the thing then. But yeah, autonomy and independence are very different things.

We don’t need to have the expectation that they can independently do the things that they’re wanting to do. If we are wanting to support them in pursuing their interests and learning about their interests and learning about themselves. It is for us to help them do the things. And the lovely thing is, when we’re there with them, we can help them process, right?

They have someone to talk to about this. They don’t feel judged about saying, I really wanted to come do this thing and we’ve been here a half hour and I really want to go home now because this is not what I expected. Verses it’s not okay. You wanted to come here, so we’re coming here for the whole thing.

I love the word interdependence. We are helping them explore the things that they’re interested in and as we talked about last time, weaving our lives together, we are all wanting to do the things and it’s about all of us. Everyone’s consent, everyone’s autonomy, and weaving together the things that we’re wanting to do, not wanting to do, and finding a way as much as we can, and without that pressure of time.

So maybe if there is something that I want to do but it doesn’t fit right now. Is it okay if it’s tomorrow? Often it can be, there isn’t an emergency. And that perspective also comes with experience. So, sometimes things feel super urgent for our kids and we can understand that. And help them gain those moments because that’s something that will come with time too.

But anyway, yeah, autonomy and independence are completely different. 

ANNA: Very different things. I know we have a podcast on the independence agenda, and I think it’s important to revisit that too, to recognize that there is really a difference. I think consent weaves in, so it’s so interesting how they’re all so interrelated and how different it feels to have that interdependence than to have either an independence agenda or this control.

The control paradigm of a parent telling a child what to do. I had a client that was recently sharing a story that I think is related, so I’m going to go for it for just a second. She has a strong independence agenda that we talk about a lot. And I was like, tell me where that came from. What comes to mind from when you were younger? 

And she shared a story of how they were very young children and they were told they had to go rake the whole yard. They had this giant yard and they had to rake the whole yard, two young children. And then the parents came out and it wasn’t good enough and said, you’ll do it again.

This was even though it had taken them hours to do. And they were just so devastated and had to do this again. And she’s said, but you know, I guess we learned we just have to do it right the first time and that it was just on us. I said, what would it have felt like if they had come out and said, oh, you know what, there’s still some leaves here let’s all get them up together. 

She just stopped for a second and said, I think I would’ve felt really loved and like I’m not alone. Because that’s the thing, right? What are we valuing? And again, this is may be a ‘people are different’ thing too, but what are the values?

We’ve talked about this before. Maybe independence is a value. But I think it’s worth examining, are there unintended consequences to when we’re putting that on someone else? I think we can want our own independence. We can want our own autonomy, but when we’re deciding for someone else that that’s what they need, that’s where we’re pushing through consent, potentially. That’s where we’re potentially changing the relationship. And so I think it’s also valuable to just slow down, dig in a little bit and see, does this really align with what I’m feeling inside? Or am I just repeating outside messages and then putting it on the kids in front of me?

ERIKA: It’s where the agenda becomes more important than anything else. But is that really what we want? Or is that again, this role of the good parent that we’re trying to fill? I think that’s super interesting. And then I was also thinking, just a note for the parents of young children.

I feel like this consent and autonomy can be the most challenging during those very young years because a lot of the big reactions that toddlers and little kids can have about things don’t feel logical at all. That was a challenge for me, and I see it being a challenge for a lot of parents with little kids.

I clearly see what’s going on and they’re having this big reaction that doesn’t really make any sense logically to an adult mind. And so I don’t know. I don’t particularly have advice, but I’m just thinking, solidarity with the parents of young children. And then also, for a young child, these big feelings are real.

And so I think giving the space for them to have them, taking them seriously,that’s the biggest thing you can do. Because it’s the worst feeling to have a big emotion about something, which I still do have big emotions about some things. And then to have someone say. You don’t feel like that. You don’t need to feel like that. You shouldn’t feel like that. 

It’s so invalidating. And so, doing this work of listening, leaving space, and letting even the littlest kids have their feelings and not pushing through that, I think is such amazing work.

ANNA: Right, because I want to say that, because I have that logical brain too, and it can be hard, why are we freaking out about the blue sippy cup versus the pink sippy cup? Can we just want a sippy cup?

But what I found is that when I could check that and go, okay, but what’s really happening here? It is a big emotion about something. And oftentimes there are contextual pieces or you know, HALT They’re hungry, they’re angry, they’re lonely, they’re tired.

Something else that’s going on, something else at play. And so when we can really hear, and validate that you want this particular blue sippy cup, we need to find it and clean it, even though we have 20 other sippy cups right here. You see that energy comes down because if we stay in our place of, we’re going to out logic over the 2-year-old, it’s not a winning proposition.

It’s just going to, things are just going to escalate. But like you said, we can see it as adults too. It’s like someone telling us, well that’s not logical for you to be upset about this thing or anxious about this thing, or worried about this thing. That doesn’t feel connecting and it doesn’t  help you go, okay, well yeah, I’m not going to worry about it now because you told me not to.

ERIKA: Yeah. Oh my gosh. So I’m just thinking, there could be a lot of times when I’m at a heightened emotion and so if we are moving forward with this plan that I’m feeling scared about or upset about, and we’re going to do it anyway, it feels like my consent is not being respected in that moment. But really all it would take is for someone to hear my concerns. Let’s talk through my concerns, validate that it’s okay, that I’m feeling the way that I feel. Then maybe I really am okay moving forward. I just needed to be heard first.

And so with consent, I think sometimes it can happen where we think my kid doesn’t want to do this, so I guess we can’t do it. And then that’s the end of the conversation. Rather than, my kid doesn’t want to do this. Let’s get curious. What are the reasons? Let’s try to figure it out. Let’s validate. Problem solve, be creative, and then maybe the event actually does happen because everyone feels heard and we’re able to figure out a way that it actually feels okay.

PAM: Yeah, I think those conversations are the most interesting because again, as we’ve talked about so much, it’s not about having the outcome in mind. It really is understanding the context for each person. If something somebody super does or super doesn’t want to do, that is part of the context of the conversation. I can say, yeah, well this was interesting to me, but I’m not super committed and it doesn’t matter per se. and then if I am super committed, then we get curious, we talk about what it is that they’re uncomfortable with or imagining or envisioning, just so that we can get a clearer picture of what it’s going to be and see if there’s a way to mesh them together. 

And then if we don’t find that way, then look for other ways, can somebody else come and stay with them? Can they stay on their own? Depending on their age. There are so many possibilities when we take our mind off the tunnel of this one initial outcome that we saw as the initial path.

And we discover there are so many ways. So many times over the years I found new ways to get to something with my kids because they’ve had these really cool ideas.

ANNA: Right, and we’re not having to give up something. I think this really does relate back to the other podcasts we’ve done, but it also relates to what you said at the top of this show, Erika, which is, the holidays are a good example and things where we don’t have to give up what we want to understand what’s happening for everyone.

But it again, if we tunnel in on this one outcome, okay, we’re all going to march into family dinner and we’re going to sit there and it’s going to look like this because that’s what we do. That may not work. But when we get to each individual’s preferences, hey, I like talking to this person. I like seeing the tree. I like looking at the lights.I like talking to grandma. I like playing the card game. 

Then we can figure out how we can do those things. So it’s not about giving up what we are wanting to do, to honor someone’s consent. It’s really about just weaving all of it together. And again, with very young children, it’s sometimes just giving them space for those big emotions.

And being playful about it. I’m thinking of leaving the park at the playground. That can be hard, you know? And then instead of thinking, okay, I’m going to have to drag them to the car, or are we going to stay here for the rest of our lives because they don’t want to leave. There’s a middle ground of letting them have that emotion and validating.

You don’t want to leave, we’ve had so much fun! We would always race to the tree and race to the other tree and we’d be working our way closer to the car or piggybacks to the car or things like that, just recognize that some transitions are harder for some kids. And I think you said this Erika earlier, and Pam, this is where the learning is.

This is where we’re learning about each other. It’s hard to leave something where we’re having fun or it’s hard to leave something that we’re engaged in. That doesn’t mean we can never do it. It just means that we’re taking time to be heard and seen and it just feels so different. It just really feels so different and so connected.

And again, I believe that then that is what ripples out into the world because now they have this template of,  it’s really nice to feel seen and heard and I want to see and hear the people in my life.

ERIKA: And remembering that everybody’s differences are okay and that’s just so amazing in a family, not writing the story that, oh, because you know, my kid doesn’t want to be in this crowded family event, means they don’t care about family, or they don’t like family traditions or, some big story when it’s really just, it’s a lot of stimulation or it’s a lot of people trying to talk to you and it’s overwhelming. And so, just leaving space for everyone to be themselves. It’s kind of great. 

Well, this has been so much fun and we hope you enjoyed our conversation and maybe had an aha moment like I did, 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’s such an amazing group of people connecting and having thoughtful conversations about all the things we encounter in our unschooling lives. You can learn more at living joyfully.ca/network or on livingjoyfullyshop.com, and we hope to meet you there. Thanks for listening, and we will see you next time.

Bye bye!

We are back with another episode in our Unschooling Stumbling Blocks series and we’re talking about weaving in our needs.

When we first come to unschooling, it’s common to start questioning the traditional roles of parent and child. Maybe we go from seeing adult needs as the priority and then we swing on the pendulum over to meeting all of our children’s needs as the priority and let ours fall by the wayside.

But eventually, ignoring our own needs is a recipe for burnout and resentment. We can work to incorporate everyone’s needs into the family conversation, because we are all different and all of our needs matter.

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

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

Blog post – Are You Playing the Role of Mother?

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

The Living Joyfully Network

Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @exploringunschooling on Instagram.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

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

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

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

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

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

We are going to be diving into another unschooling stumbling block today, which is weaving our needs into our days. And I think this is a big one. I remember this one. And while as always, it’s not cut and dried, it is definitely an important part of just living together as a family and noticing overwhelm, hopefully before it becomes burnout.

But before we dive in, we want to invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network. There is just so much value in doing that deep personal work that the unschooling journey asks of us in community, because while everyone’s journey is definitely unique, we all face similar obstacles and challenges and stumbling blocks, and that’s where the power of community shines.

In the network, you can learn from the experiences of other unschooling parents. Draw inspiration from their aha moments, gain insights from the unique and creative ways that they navigate both their own and their family’s day-to-Day needs. It is a conversation that comes up very regularly. To learn more and join us, just follow the link in the show notes or go to living joyfully shop.com and click on community in the menu.

Now, Anna, would you like to get us started?

ANNA: I would, I’m glad we’re talking about this because you’re right. I think it’s an important understanding and really it’s a paradigm shift when we’re moving to unschooling or more connection-focused parenting, because typically we’re a very adult focused world.

The needs of adults tend to get the most attention, and kids are kind of along for the ride. We hear things like, they can adjust and then their resilience is praised and adults know best anyway. And all of these kinds of pieces that we’ve all steeped in and heard in our own childhood.

But once you open your mind and heart to really seeing children as fully formed humans on their own journey, it brings everything into question. We start to see how often kids are discounted, how their feelings are dismissed, and how they aren’t trusted to know themselves. Letting go of those ideas and seeing children as capable and trustworthy, it’s beautiful. It’s a powerful shift along the journey to prioritizing connection and supporting autonomy. 

I do think we have to be careful because while it’s great to notice and correct for this power imbalance, we don’t need to tip too far the other way because we’re still imbalanced. We’re still actually in that whole power paradigm, it’s just another person feeling disempowered.

So sometimes, that pendulum swing to the other side is necessary to find the center ground that honors all the parties involved. But we don’t need to hang out there too long. And recognizing we’re hanging out there, I think, can be really important to making that shift to everyone’s needs being valued, because when we find the center, we realize that everyone can have their needs met.

It’s not a race, it’s not a competition. We can create an environment grounded in trust and understanding that all of our needs are valid and together we can find a way. I feel like there are a lot of aspects to dig into, but I’m going to stop here. And Erika, we’ll go to you. What bubbled up for you when you were thinking about this idea?

ERIKA: Yeah, I really saw that same pendulum swing idea when I was reading about this topic as well, because as we’re growing up, we don’t have any power. We can’t wait to be an adult because then finally we get to make our own decisions. Our needs will finally be important. We’ll finally get our say.

And so it could be natural to step into parenthood with that view of, now, finally, I’m in charge. My needs are the most important. And then when we start to notice how different our children are from us, how much they already know about themselves, and if we’re curious about giving them their autonomy, I do think it can be a huge pendulum swing to, oh my gosh, I’m just going to support all of their needs all the time, and I’ll just forget about mine because I’m an adult.

I can handle it. So, I do think that can be a recipe for that kind of martyrdom and resentment that can start to come up where we think, I do everything for them and I never get to meet any of my needs. And that really is not the goal of unschooling, to have that feeling that I never meet my own needs.

And so I do think this is a paradigm shift to, we are all humans. We all have needs and we all can get our needs met in this kind of community, in this family. And so, it’s kind of revolutionary and I think it’s a journey to get from, I’m the boss to, my kids are the boss to wait a second, there is no boss. We’re all working together. And it’s just so valuable once you can get to that place.

PAM: I do love that there’s just the imagery of the paradigm and the pendulum swing. Right? And I encourage people to use such loving language for themselves, right?

Not like, oh crap, I went too far, or I’m not doing enough. The way we are using it as something that we’re recognizing, using it as a clue. Oh, okay. This is something that I want to think a little bit more about, that I want to consider some more. That’s one of the things we love about this podcast is just sharing some observations and some stumbling blocks that we have seen along the way that people kind of bump into, stumble over, that are great clues that there’s something more that you can consider here.

And as you guys were talking, something that bubbled up for me, another consideration as we’re trying. I swung really far and I am quite happy with supporting my kids and everything, but I’m starting to feel overwhelmed. I’m starting to feel like nobody hears me, nobody considers me.

I am feeling exhausted, maybe a little bit mildly, like all those pieces, and I want to come and find a way to bring my needs into the conversation. One thing that I think is really important or valuable, helpful to consider at that point is the idea of fairness, because bringing our needs back into the conversation doesn’t mean, well, I did three things for you, so now I get to do three things for me.

That’s another layer that’s just going to interfere with figuring things out. Because now I need to start thinking about, what are my needs? And then you’re thinking about expectations. You’re thinking about those societal conversations like, is it that I need to go to the spa once a month?

But no, it can be, what is it that I actually need? What is it in this particular situation? What is more fundamentally my personality, that I feel like I’ve been dampening? What do I need to bring into the conversation in an ongoing way? Is it certain situations or environments or places that trigger something for me?

We talk quite a bit about narrating, that’s where that can start to be helpful in sharing. So it’s not that I need to bring my needs to the table all the time. It may be that I’m just sharing these pieces of me, so that other people get to learn a bit more about me. Because if I’m just taking care of everybody else’s needs, nobody’s learning much about me, right?

That is part of starting to bring things in but not like tit for tat I did this, now you get to do this. It really has so much to do with people are different and what our fundamental needs are and seasons because there are seasons where somebody might have a heavier load of needs for a while, right?

And it’s not wrong to consider that and make choices with that in mind as well. There’s just so much in there, isn’t it?

ANNA: There’s so much and I love that because fair is not equal. So, watch for those kinds of old tropes that we can bring in, that can end up again being a disconnect. But I actually think that one of the first steps for us in this process is to really tune in and understand what our needs are, be able to articulate them because if we think back and we were children in an environment where our needs were not valued or really taken into consideration as much,how we didn’t even learn to express them. And so what can tend to happen is that it builds up, it builds up, it builds up.

This is regardless of unschooling, and then it comes out as this explosion of you’re not helping me or nobody’s hearing me because maybe that’s what it sometimes took in childhood, the big explosion to get the attention. And so what I love about this is it’s just this time for introspection and learning more self-awareness. 

And recognizing this is niggling a little bit, or this isn’t feeling good. Or watching for some pebbles of feeling more tired, or feeling not as engaged and what do those things look like? And then being able to narrate a bit more. I love that you mentioned that because I think it’s so important because that’s how we learn about each other. 

And then also, again, just to be able to articulate because that’s what this process looks like when you get further down the road is just everybody being able to, casually without energy, articulate their needs. It doesn’t have to be a blow up.

It’s like, Hey, this is what I’m feeling now and this trust that we can develop that these other people care and we’re going to figure it out together. It’s not that it’s one or the other. And so, yeah, I think that’s going to be really interesting. But I do think that’s the first place to go is really, What are my needs and what do they look like? 

And I love the piece that you said, Pam, about, don’t borrow your needs from what society’s telling you your needs are. Things like, you need to have date night, you need to go to the spa once a month. You need to do all of this stuff. Maybe, maybe those are things that feel good to you.

But those two particular things did not feel good to me, so that wasn’t where my needs were. And so, you really have to shut out the noise to tune in and know yourself. I’m an introvert. I need this time. What does that look like? What fits within the context of my life, where it is now and this season?

Which I think is very valid because it changes. We’ve seen lots of seasons over these 20 some years of kids. I love just digging in and learning more about yourself because I feel like sometimes we haven’t really been given that opportunity at all.

ERIKA: Right, right. I think that’s why it’s such a big paradigm shift or so challenging in the beginning because we’re not really tuned in. We may be more in the role of parent than tuned in to ourselves as unique individuals and thinking about how people are different. But I just love that as we start narrating, even for ourselves, telling ourselves what we are feeling and what’s going on for us and just recognizing the context of the moment. It’s just so valuable for us to learn about ourselves. And then it’s little clues that our family is learning about us as well. 

If I can start my saying, I didn’t get great sleep. I’m thinking we need to keep meals kind of simple today. That’s a little thing that I can say in the morning that just gives everyone the idea of, okay, we’re not making the lasagna, but then it’s not a big deal. We will do it on another day when I have more energy. But just giving them a heads up about my context and how I’m feeling.

And then you’re right, that then everyone else starts to learn or say, okay, I can do that for me too. You know what, I’m feeling really grumpy about this. I am not in the mood for that anymore. The more individuals you have in your family, the more complicated it can get. But even with just my family of four, we all thought we’d be in the mood to do this, and then something comes up, someone’s not feeling good, or someone’s feeling like they need some rest or whatever it is, and so just the more we can talk about that, the more I think everyone’s needs kind of weave together. 

And I love that the title of this one is like weaving in our needs. Because that’s what it feels like. It’s not something that we can schedule everything well in advance. Because the context of the moment is what determines what I actually need.

PAM: I love that. That’s beautiful. Okay, I’m going to try and remember the two things that bubbled. Number one in us not even often recognizing our needs at first. And knowing there’s a need and meeting a need, those are two separate things, but I think something we’ve been talking about in the network lately, is our kids as our guides, and I was thinking of the pendulum swing and not being hard on ourselves if we have swung really far.

And I love just that whole power paradigm thing. But if we swung there, I think our kids can be great examples of sharing what they need. Right? So they will tell you, I don’t want to do that, or I need to do this, I need to do this. The language depends on their age and all that kind of stuff and personalities.

But I feel like often they are just more grounded in knowing in the moment what their need is. So sometimes they are just a great example to look to and just say, well, if they can express it, maybe I can express it. Ooh, they know what they’re needing in this moment, and we see the context of the moment too.

And that’s all interesting fodder that we can use to think. And for ourselves, like we were saying to even discover what our need is, there may be a moment where we’re feeling off. We’re feeling a little gnarly. It’s like, oh, is that low energy? Is that because what I’m being asked to do is something I don’t really like to do? There could be so many reasons why we’re feeling off in that moment, and it is so worth understanding because we can’t meet that need until we really understand what it is. If we think it’s because we’re exhausted and we get more rest, et cetera, and then it still bothers us next time. We can keep exploring. Try things, play with things, but what we’re doing is learning about ourselves and that increased self-awareness is so helpful. 

And I too love the weaving in our needs because truly, like you were saying, Erika, we can’t know ahead. We can in general know that we enjoy things and they will fill our cup, et cetera,  and so we can try and find work time, making space and time to do those things. But it doesn’t mean that until that thing happens, I just have to grin and bear it right until the next time I can go to the coffee shop with my friend.

And again, there’s zero judgment on whatever refills our cup or that we enjoy in the moment, anything that brings us energy. But it’s funny at what actually works for us as an individual and then finding ways to weave it into the little things even into our days, whether we have younger kids, older kids, etc.

Maybe somebody’s going through something and there’s lots of heavy conversations. In those times, even especially, it’s important to weave little bits of meeting our needs, little bits of self care, like all those pieces in. And so to not put all this pressure on these bigger things to meet our needs, but rather notice, what if I have my favorite tea or if I go for a walk around the house or if I read two pages of my book? What are the things that just help you ground and recenter and feel a little bit cared for, and then you can share that with the people around. I’m going to go sit and read my book for 10 minutes, then I’ll come and help you with this thing. It’s those narrating pieces. 

Because when you weave it into your day, it’s like an ongoing thing of value, versus, you can do all you want to me, I will do everything. And then once a month I get to go off and do my own thing. That really doesn’t work long term, and really doesn’t help them understand the other person. And the message is they need a break from us. Because we’re a lot. 

But then of course when we’re there, it’s almost like they need more, right? Because it’s like, okay, well I know that they’re there for me. I’ll get them to do all the things. because then they’ll get their escape. It’s just like a different message than just weaving in our needs

ANNA: It’s a very different message. And it was funny because I just jotted the note in front of me while Erika was talking. The pressure that it puts on that time. If it’s going to be this time away. Or this thing, where everything has to be perfect, right? We feel this tension about making it the best we can because it’s going to be the thing that has to refill our cup.

And what we’ve learned so much and talked about so much in the network is that it really is those little moments that actually do so much more for our nervous system and for our ability to be present.  And what you just said, Pam, was important to me. I didn’t want that to be the message, that I need a break from you because that seems to put some kind of responsibility on them too, that they’re too much or there’s something wrong and it’s like, no, I need to figure out how to take care of my needs.

And so switching gears just a tiny bit, going to the practical, I think one of the things that helps with this is to not have that specific outcome in mind. So not thinking that self-care looks like this, or meeting my needs looks like that. So if we take even a specific need, you know, it’s like, okay, there’s different ways to meet that.

This is one you and I have talked about before, Pam, but we both liked writing, and in my head, writing before I had kids was a long block of time with nobody around me. Often it was late at night and it was quiet time and the house was quiet or the apartment was quiet.

Then I had kids and that time didn’t exist. There was a part of me that thought, I guess I’m not writing anymore, or that’s not going to be a part of my life anymore. But it’s opening to actually, what can I do? And it ended up being shorter articles or different things or journaling and I realized, I can fit this in.

But when I was so fixated on it had to look this one way. I ended up feeling disappointed. I probably had an energy about it. It didn’t feel good. And so really letting go of the specific outcome to get into what is it that I enjoy about the particular thing, whatever it is, what is it about it that feeds me?

What is it that I really enjoy? And so for me, it’s playing around, intellectual thought, thinking and putting something down on paper and being able to explain something in a way that makes sense to me and to other people, that’s really fun for me. And so, okay, I can still do that. And so I think that’s a practical piece of it, is to really watch for those set outcomes so that you can get more creative. 

That’s what I love about this process when we’re involving everyone, we’re creating this climate of being creative and solving for these different needs in different ways. And you see it play out with every member of the family, and that gets pretty fun. 

PAM: Can I jump in for a second? Because what bubbled up for me there too is the value of our environment.

So, part of it is figuring out what was it that I liked about the thing. Because I’m like, oh, okay. I really enjoyed this thing. And it was writing for me too, that was a big one. And then it’s like, okay, but what is it that I enjoy? I’m all disappointed because I can’t make it look the way I feel like it needs to look for me.

But once I can move through. Then let’s be a little bit curious, a little bit creative. Let’s brainstorm some ways. And for me, it’s useful to brainstorm as in specifically not discounting every idea I have immediately, before I start to process and discount things. I like to have, I don’t know, at least 10 or 20 ideas in front of me because then they run the gamut, right?

That just kind of breaks the ice for me. I really want it to look this one way. So, that is super helpful for me, the brainstorming piece. Then thinking this way might work. And then it’s setting up my environment to make it as easy as possible for me to pop into that.

Because typically, especially with younger kids, but having kids, your pockets are typically smaller. Like you were saying, late at night or early in the morning while everybody’s sleeping. I remember you talked about Anna, about having your guitar close by.

And I would have my headphones and I had my desk. One of my ideas was I’ll just put my desk downstairs and people will know where I am and they can come. But, oh my gosh, after about a week, that did not feel good. To me, it just felt two separate, too disconnected. So then I popped it up in the middle of the house where everybody was going to be wandering by, and I had some headphones, right?

That way, I wasn’t distracted by every little noise that I heard of somebody playing or whatever, whatever. But they could easily talk to me, they would see me. I would see them walking by and they could grab my attention easily if need be. What we’re doing is sharing our needs. Just by the fact that we’re setting up our environment.

If you want to go write for half an hour, because I know I’m going to be playing away. Our family, our kids want to support us. In the seasons that they can when their needs aren’t heightened or anything, but when they know and when we’re setting up our environment for that it’s obvious, right?

And they’ve got their toys out, they’ve got their things all over the place. Our things can be part of the family too. And then it’s just all of us weaving throughout the day doing the things we want, coming together, splitting apart, maybe a couple over here, just weaving our days together to meet those.

And you know, we feel more seen and heard when our things that we like to do are actually seen by the people and appreciated. Not that we expect them to do them with us or have the same interest, but we can all appreciate everyone’s interests, understanding that we all have things that we like to do. That makes sense.

ERIKA: Anna, when you were bringing up the creativity, it was funny because the note I had written that I wanted to talk about next is that, the creativity that I think this requires in order to meet four people’s needs in a family. We have to be creative about what that can look like.

And it can’t just be one person with the vision of what it should look like with all the ideas and then everyone just follows along, because that isn’t everyone getting their own needs met. And so I think when we talk about everyone’s different needs and meeting them, one thing that can be a stumbling block too, is just the feeling of well, my need is for you to do this.

And so, when we start labeling that our need is for people to do something differently or something for us, then we’re losing the point of the need. Iit is my need and maybe there are people who can help me meet my needs but we can be creative and figure out a way that works for everyone.

That’s not my need, if it is requiring you to do this. I forget what we call that, but basically like it can go from talking about needs to really just trying to control everyone to make the environment the way that feels the most comfortable to us, you know? And so if my need is for quiet, my answer could be for everyone to be quiet.

But really, if I’m creative and if we come up with a family solution that works for everyone, it might not be that they’re quiet. It might be that I find a different place to be or headphones like you’re talking about before. There’s lots of different options. Once we can open up to creative problem solving, rather than just going in with, my need is for you to not need me right now, or whatever might come up in our heads.

ANNA: But I think that’s about not really being able to articulate our needs, not really understanding the process of what our need is and that we’re responsible for it. And I think that’s a practice thing, you know? I think that really, that’s almost that little red flag or reminder that I still have some more work to do to figure out what my actual need here is. Because if it’s to control other people and that’s going to make me happy, you’ll find that that’s a slippery slope that doesn’t really end up working out like you think it will. 

But when we can be real clear about what’s happening, we start to see other options. I think also what’s important about that piece is when we put it on someone else, we can be met with defensiveness or it sets up a dynamic that doesn’t feel as good.

But when I can say, gosh, my head is hurting and I just feel like I need quiet right now because it’s just been such a long day. Then they’re more inclined to say. Oh, I want to help you with that. I can see that you’re hurting or that that doesn’t feel good, but if I’m like, you are too loud, you need to quiet down without giving information about what’s happening for me, then it becomes, okay, wait, you’re saying there’s something wrong with me. You’re saying that I’m doing something wrong or bad, and it creates that defensiveness, or either shame depending on the personality and the child. So just that extra step to really own it is so important. But I think we don’t do that because we haven’t felt our needs were valid.

So, it’s a hard place to go to say, is this need of mind for quiet valid? It’s almost easier to lash out with more of an anger or control piece because that may be what we’re used to seeing. So it’s  cool to unpack that and see what’s really happening there?

ERIKA: Yeah, that was just making me think that it’s part of the pendulum swing too.

When we get too far over, now the kids are having most of, or all of their needs met and we’re ignoring ourselves and trying not to have needs. Then we get that agitation and resentment and then it comes out as, you guys need to do this, you need to stop doing that. Stop being loud, go to sleep, all these things.

I think it’s just kind of getting into that more middle spot on the pendulum where it’s not about controlling the other person, but I’ve been resourcing myself enough that I’m not having those explosions of everyone here needs to change what they’re doing because I have a need right now.

PAM: So often those explosions are out of the blue to them, right? Because we’re trying to hold it back, hold it back, hold it back, and then it just comes bubbling out and they’re like, what the heck? We’ve been doing this for 30 minutes and now all of a sudden it’s bothering you. And then if we don’t give the context, it’s like, oh, is it about me?

There’s just so many mixed messages that can happen there. And yeah, let’s get back to that pendulum swing, and I think what can be really helpful. What I found helpful is as I’m trying to explore and find that middle rhythm, it really was as I’m trying to figure out my needs, it really was bringing that playful attitude to them because it’s like, okay, I think this is my need, and I think something like this will help. 

And then we have that conversation. And like you’re saying, not with a specific outcome, but with understanding. Do you have any ideas on how this can help? That doesn’t mean that’s an answer forever. Whenever we find ourselves in that same situation, like you said,  we just may discover, oh, you know what? That didn’t really help as much as I thought it would. I don’t feel as resourced. I don’t feel like my need was met.

Oh, maybe I hadn’t identified it quite yet, but we’ll be sitting there stewing for ages forever trying, if we wait until we are sure we’ve got to the root of our need. It’s okay to play with it a bit and to bring that lighter energy to it because it is just so much easier to have a conversation about this with someone who is energetically lighter because when the conversation’s heavy, it can feel like it’s a yes or a no kind of thing.

It doesn’t feel like a brainstorming conversation where everybody’s going to be heard and considered. It’s more of an energy okay, we can keep sharing ideas, but until they match the idea you have in your head, you’re not going to agree to it anyway. So why bother having that?

ANNA: That’s my mother-in-law. She keeps asking the question until she gets the answer she wants. So yes, and it’s hard and you can see where she’s coming from, but it’s so hard to have that discussion because it’s not a back and forth. It’s not a, how are you feeling about this? What can we do? There isn’t creativity to it. 

It really can feel fun when we are just figuring it out and sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes there’s high emotions because people are feeling very attached to what they need to do in that moment, or the timelines feel pinched or tight, but there is just this underlying trust of, even if it’s hard in this moment we’re going to figure it out. We’re going to keep at it. We’re going to stretch the timeline sometimes because sometimes we can’t do everything in one moment, but we can do it over a series of time. 

I think sometimes for our needs too, looking at the seasons is important and maybe there’s something I’m interested in doing that doesn’t fit this season, but what else could give me a great feeling or could be fun or stimulating for me that does fit into this season?

So it’s not over attaching to one particular way. That’s what I think you’re talking about Pam. The playfulness and creativity comes into play. And again, that being modeled, that happens for everyone. So, then if you had a child that’s focused on doing this one thing with that as the culture, they may be able to say, okay, I really want to do that, but I guess I can wait till Saturday  when we have more time or your partner’s here, and let’s do this other thing now. 

And because they know we’re going to follow up, we’re going to find a way to do it. And we want to do that for ourselves as well. Just know that we’re not going to keep stuffing the needs down.

We’re going to keep looking and finding those creative ways that fit in our family at this time.

ERIKA: I just want to bring it back one more time to make sure that we’re really digging down though to know that this is our need and not the role of the mom that I’m supposed to be or whatever other kind of external things we might have.

Because I think it could be super distracting to be like, I need to be doing these million things in December to get ready for the holidays because that’s what a good mom would do or whatever kind of ideas we might have in our minds. 

So really tuning into, what do I really love? What do I really like? What really fills me up? And then encouraging everyone else in the family to do the same. That’s when we really get to the real needs. 

PAM: The why behind it. I think that helps. I will remember to link in the show notes, I have a blog post called, Are You Playing the Role of Mother?

It kind of digs into that. It’s really interesting stuff to think about. I love that. All right! Thank you so much for joining us, everyone. We hope you enjoyed our conversation around the value and the importance and the playfulness of weaving our needs into our family’s conversation. And if that’s whet your appetite to explore it more deeply, we invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully network.

Imagine no longer feeling so alone in your family’s choices. Imagine being part of a group of like-minded individuals who acknowledge and encourage, and encourage you as we walk alongside each other on this amazing journey. We are so excited to welcome you. To learn more and join us. Just follow the link in the show notes or go to livingjoyfullyshop.com and click on community in the menu. And wishing everyone a lovely day. Bye!

ERIKA: Bye!

ANNA: Take care!