It's Not All Sunshine and Rainbows in Unschooling
Are we still good parents if our kids will only eat chicken nuggets? Or the educational equivalent?
Welcome! I realized this week I can barely keep up with one email list, nonetheless two. If you signed up on my website (formerly Nurturing Neurodiversity, now Wandering Brightly), I’ve consolidated down to one newsletter here on Substack. I write every one to two weeks or so about topics related to neurodivergence, giftedness, and self-directed education.
There are many beautiful stories of home education.
“The book work they want to do takes just two hours a day, and the rest of our time is free for bike riding, board games, and homemade scavenger hunts!”
“Worldschooling! My kids help choose where we go next, buy the tickets, handle the budget, eat all the food, and spend hours playing with local kids while learning a new language!”
“There’s so much time for [sports, art, horseback riding, rock climbing, all the cool things] and we just listen to hundreds of audiobooks while driving all over the place and do our math in the car too.”
“We learned so much math while building our chicken coop from scratch and now the kids run a roadside egg stand all by themselves.”
If any of these stories sound like one of yours, congrats. I mean it when I say these are awesome ways of living and learning with kids and we need these stories out in the world, of growing without schooling. I even have a good number of similar glossy home education stories I share sometimes, of the wild forest child variety.
But they aren’t the whole story of home education. In working with families now, I regularly hear the other kinds of home and unschooling stories.
“My kid won’t leave their room…”
“We haven’t done any kind of ‘formal learning activity’ together in months, not even a podcast…”
“I spent hours creating this fun activity and my kids totally rejected it.”
“I just don’t know how to help them.”
I also have plenty of these myself, though I don’t often share them. I’m trying to figure out how to do so though, while still respecting my kids’ privacy.
Home/unschooling isn’t all sunshine rainbows. It’s not a panacea. These kinds of experiences are also totally valid and need to be normalized for home educating parents. Kids (and adults!) go through big developmental shifts.
We may have periods of smooth sailing, where everything feels more or less aligned. The things each kid wants feel manageable and in line with what we can and are willing to provide as a homeschooling parent.
But also, there will be times of disequilibrium, when our adult ideas, expectations, and offerings are not in synch with what our kids want and need - even when we are child-centered.
Some of this is developmental growth. Transition ages when young people are changing, shifting, becoming something new, and the old patterns just don’t work anymore. Transitional periods happen many times throughout childhood, both for internal and external reasons. This is pretty universally observed in teenagers as they go through a “cocooning period” during which they leave behind childhood interests and may flounder for a bit, before slowly starting to find new passions and self-confidence. We can also look at this through the lens of Positive Disintegration, which is a fascinating theory to dive into, if you haven’t yet had a chance!
Disequilibrium can also occur because of personality conflicts. When they were little, two of my kids would eat anything I put in front of them. This was a general metaphor for how we went through life together - I tried to offer them delicious and wholesome things of all kinds (stories, experiences, activities) and they generally enjoyed them. I was secure in my knowledge that I was a good parent raising good kids.
And then I had a kid who did not eat what I put in front of him and that was a metaphor for everything in our lives. Are we still good parents if our kids will only eat chicken nuggets? Or the educational equivalent?
It was easy to feel like I was winning at homeschooling when our routine each week was full of clubs, nature play, field trips, and just a little bit of book work. We saw the same friends multiple times each week and had ample high quality social time built in.
I’ve had to work much harder to examine what it means to be a good parent and home educator in times where our life doesn’t feel like it’s all holding perfectly together. Sometimes one kid wants to be out everyday, while another barely leaves the house. It can feel impossible to find a read aloud book that works for everyone. Siblings can have trouble just being in the same room with one another. Some days I’m Just. So. Tired. Or we all are.
I wrote here about the ebb and flow of community in unschooling. There’s also a natural ebb and flow of family relationships and rhythms. As the parent of a teen, a tween, and a spitfire, I often reflect on the huge changes I’ve seen in these young people over the years. There are so many dynamic developmental forces at play as small people grow towards adolescence and adulthood. And with multiple kids in a family, they are always bumping up against each other in new and sometimes bewildering ways.
I let go of the idea that being a good home educator meant that my kids did their daily math pages a long time ago. My main standard for judging success these days is whether I was able to slow down, focus, and facilitate a real connection with each kid at least once a day.
I keep hoping for a read aloud book that will bring all three of my kids back to a shared space for a little while. But instead I’ll settle for the fact that right now they need something more like a box of donuts to sit around a table together, and for a few minutes at that.
There is a common misconception that unschooled will learn all the same things as conventionally schooled kids, just in different ways (and maybe even at different times). They’ll learn fractions from baking, reading and spelling from Minecraft, and history from watching documentaries. All those things can happen and often do. But that’s not the goal of unschooling.
Unschooling is more radical than that. We aren’t trying to get to the same schoolish goals through a different channel. We’re choosing entirely different goals and a lifestyle that is aligned with achieving them.
One of my personal values in unschooling is that my kids know not only how to say “yes,” but also how to stand strong in their “no.” And here’s where it gets tricky.
I very much want my kids to know how to say “no.” I consider it foundational. And it’s still frustrating to be told “no” over and over again, as I’m offering interesting things from the great bounty of the world’s knowledge.
But children are not small adults. They have different values and ideas about what makes for a good life. Eight-year-olds are much more likely to be interested in pokémon or perfecting their handstand than writing a well formed paragraph. And that is totally valid!
So instead of mostly trying to get my kids to join me in the things I value, I started to focus instead on how I could join them. I made a commitment to practice saying “yes” whenever possible. Yes, I will stop what I’m doing to play your new favorite video game. Yes, I will draw with you, even though my skills start and end with stick figures. Yes, let’s play shop, where you have all the money. Yes, I’ll find the LEGO pieces for you, while getting in a tiny bit of reading for my grad class.
The rest can wait.1
I’d love to hear from you in the comments! For those who are unschoolers, how do you think about your own periods of equilibrium and disequilibrium? How do you fit in moments for your own pursuits, when home ed is a more than full time endeavor?
If you are at all curious about the theory of Positive Disintegration, and the idea that growth can come out of challenging times, I highly recommend checking out the work of Dr. Chris Wells at the Dąbrowski Center. You can also listen to this episode of the Positive Disintegration podcast, where I talked with Chris and Emma about self-directed education. Though I wish I had answered one question a little differently - even for people who can’t or don’t wish to unschool, there are always ways to bring more autonomy and self-determination into kids’ lives!
I’m stopping here even though I just spent an hour mulling over that last sentence, “The rest can wait.” It’s not that our adult pursuits should always wait. I’m a big advocate for Awesome Adulting and for home-educating parents making space for their own interests. And after all, life-long learning and pursuing our passions applies to adult unschoolers just as much as kids!
I regularly make choices that mean my kids don’t have quite as much of me as they’d like - for example, being in a doctoral program. I am enamored with doing qualitative research (on SDE!) lately and I would love to have time to more fully immerse myself in it. I’m fact, with my monotropic brain, it’s kind of painful not to be able to 100% dive in.
But, I also have the feeling that (knock on wood) research and other possibilities will still be there in ten years, while the small people in my life will no longer be small. So I seek balance, with perspective.
Thanks for sharing this Marni. There is a whole undercurrent of “don’t worry, unschooled kids learn all the same things!” And well, I agree that that is simply untrue for many kids. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to believe that given that school curriculum is to an extent arbitrary - why would they want to learn the same things if they’re given the chance not to? We are definitely in the place you describe.
Thanks so much for sharing this! I wish I (and others who need it) heard this message more often. With kids who struggle and who are often bored or not interested in "learning" and other activities I often feel like unschooling isn't working for us or that life would be easier if we took a different approach. But we've tried other approaches which are not easier and I really appreciate your reminder that unschooling isn't going to produce the same result as conventional school and we wouldn't necessarily want it to. I definitely need to spend some time reconnecting with my goals for unschooling to remind myself that as hard as it is for us, we are (maybe) on the right path.
It looks like the most recent episode of Tilt Parenting Podcast is about positive disintegration. Off to check it out!