The Ebb and Flow of Community in Unschooling
How do we find our people? And what does that look like for PDA kids and families?
For many years as a home educating parent with young children, I felt deeply rooted in homeschooling community. There were regular weekly park days and field trips. I organized several co-ops, including a play-based forest school.
My best friends were the parents of my kids’ best friends. We saw them multiple times a week, ran into them at the library, and attended the same community events. In the summer we camped, hiked, and played together.
Homeschooling and unschooling can be deeply connecting. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it can also be deeply isolating.
Sometimes this happens naturally as kids grow and family dynamics change. Many of those small people who played together all day in the mud are now six-foot-tall teenagers. The ways they need us have changed. Mainly, home educating parents of teens and tweens seem to do a lot of driving! Especially when there is more than one kid to get to different activities, the home educator’s role can suddenly become mostly chauffeur, rather than community participant or facilitator. It’s a shift.
I don’t feel isolated exactly, because I have so many deep connections with friends from years of shared homeschooling. We raised our kids together and grew into different people ourselves, so even if it’s been months since we last talked, it’s easy to step right back into those comfortable friendships.
But I do sometimes feel a bit lonely or out-of-synch, because I know what it’s like to see your “village” regularly in-person in the course of just going about your week, and I don’t have that anymore. I know I’m still lucky to have been able to create that village at all, and to have people to reach out to.
I talk to lots of homeschooling parents who haven’t managed to find community, through no fault of their own. In fact, when I surveyed homeschooling parents in our local facebook group about what they would most like to hear about at an upcoming conference, the top request was about how to find and foster community.
Who struggles to find homeschooling and unschooling community?
I used to think it was easy to create an awesome homeschooling community, because it was easy for me, for awhile. When kids are small, and if they are fairly flexible, unschooling can feel like a grand adventure full of easy-to-find opportunities and new friendships around every corner.
While it is true that my energy and intentions made those gorgeous years possible, I now see there was also a fair bit of serendipity involved. Creating tight-knit, long-term homeschooling friendships can require a version of family dating, to see how all the different family members interact and check for compatibility.
Does everyone in the family actually like being in groups? Does each child have someone they like to play with and do they like playing in similar ways? How long do they like to play together? Do the parents get along? Do we have similar parenting values and approaches? Do we like to do the same things? Do we live close enough to each other to get together regularly? There are a million variables to adjust and try to find the right social connections and possibilities for ongoing collaborations.
In addition to these considerations that apply to any family trying to figure out how to create community, some people hold marginalized identities or have other life factors that can make it additionally challenging.
These may include:
neurodivergent families, particularly those who have kids with “big, baffling behaviors”1
BIPOC families
LGBTQIA+ families
parents or children who are disabled or experiencing chronic illness
low income families
single parent families
families with two parents working full time
those living in rural areas
secular families living in areas with mostly religious homeschoolers
families in which a dad (or other male presenting person) is the primary homeschooling parent
families living in a different place than their country of origin
anyone else who feels out of synch with the local culture in the area in which they live
I’m sure there are many other groups that could be added to this list.
I’m going to write further about the first group, neurodivergent families that have kids with big, baffling behaviors (and more specifically, PDA kids), because that’s the group I have the most experience with.
Not all neurodivergent kids have big, obvious, publicly “different” behaviors. Homeschooling families (usually) design their environments around the preferences and needs of their specific kids. As a result, a lot of homeschooled and unschooled kids are pretty darn happy with the structure of their days and the places they spend time in. That isn’t to say it’s all smooth sailing, but for the most part, they are well matched with their daily lives. When something isn’t working, homeschooling families switch things up.
In fact, most of the homeschooling kids I’ve known over the years have turned out to be neurodivergent, once I had that lens through which to understand them.2 And most of them have been thriving with friends and a variety of hand-picked activities that fill their days.
But some families encounter greater challenges in forging a harmonious family life, and even more difficulty in "finding their people."
PDA in Unschooling Families
The families I personally see struggling most are those who have children with a PDA Autistic profile. These are kids I hadn’t been aware of, until I had one of my own. I’m not going to focus on the challenges PDA kids and families commonly experience in this post. Suffice it to say that having a child who experiences very high anxiety combined with a survival drive for autonomy creates dynamics that most people will never have considered.
Many PDAers aren’t out in the community doing all of those lovely connecting things I detailed above. They might be doing other lovely things, but a lot of PDA kids prefer to be doing those things at home. This makes sense in terms of what PDAers need in order to feel safe - autonomy, and plenty of it.
The PDA kids I know are often creative and delightful, with deep interests. They’re curious and quirky young people who represent a side of unschooling that I haven’t seen a lot written about - what self-directed learning looks like when it’s done more independently and in a family setting, instead of based in a broader community.
When these kids love something they go all in. One child we’ve connected with spends hours immersed in fantasy play with LEGO minifigs and other figurines, creating elaborate scenes and stories. A young tween I know spends many hours a day writing fan fiction related to the Disney show The Owl House. Another young PDAer loves woodworking and spends the majority of his time outside crafting furniture. Many PDA kids gravitate towards screen-based interests like building intricate creations in Minecraft or watching videos related to their interests.
People have all sorts of opinions on screen-based learning and of course certain safety precautions are in order when providing children with internet access. But at the end of the day, this kind of learning is often more accessible for kids with a PDA profile. They control what, and when, and how much they want to learn.
As adults supporting PDA kids, our job is to join them in their interests as much as possible. I’ve played countless hours of video games, as well as sword fighting on the trampoline and running around with Nerf guns. At the same time, we have to recognize that we can’t possibly spend as much time on those interests as they would like. Finding other friends and mentors they can play with is an important, though sometimes difficult, task.
Community looks different for families with PDA kids. Instead of attending big group gatherings like park days, they tend to arrange one-on-one get togethers at home related to the child’s interests, if they can find families that are a good fit. Lucky PDA kids may have friends of different ages and prefer spending time with caring adults more than they do with other kids. Or they may have friends that are mostly online. They also tend to spend more time alone than our culture tells us is healthy. Maybe there’s room for more flexible, inclusive spaces and opportunities there. And maybe that’s just one more thing we can push back on as advocates for self-directed living - all of these ideas about how childhood “should” be.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how communities broadly (and unschooling communities specifically) could better support families, including those with PDA kids. There are no easy answers, but as a start I’d love to see so many more SDE centers around the world, especially ones that would welcome parents to stay and be part of the community as well to the extent that they want to.
Flexibility is Great AND Always Trying to Optimize Everything is Exhausting
As unschoolers, we have an extraordinary flexibility to create environments for our kids that fit them just right, and that’s a beautiful thing. It can also feel like a huge weight when we are struggling to create the perfect environment and it just isn’t coming together in the way we hoped it would.
When people in a family have different needs, the complexity of those conflicting desires can be impossible for a home educating parent to resolve. I often hear about one child wanting to go out daily, while another mostly wants to stay home - and this is my life these days, too. Sometimes, there’s no easy solution, and we just have to keep doing the best that we can and trust that it will be enough. And bring in extra help when we can. As Caro Giles recently wrote, “we were not meant to do this alone.”
In an essay entitled School isn't always the solution to homeschool struggle… And sometimes it is, Fran Liberatore shared: “We are in what is beginning to feel like an extended period of not-quite-rightness, punctuated by fleeting moments, sometimes whole days, of fullness and joy.”
I appreciate this framing of “not-quite-rightness” interspersed with joy and can so relate! It's interesting to note that an ebb and flow can be observed in schooled kids as well, who also have their good and bad days, in addition to entire years when things go smoothly and others when everything feels turbulent (hello adolescence!). In fact, this is an experience that continues into adulthood. Life having ups and downs is, in the end, just life.
This reminds me also of the concept of Tidal Homeschooling by Melissa Wiley.
“[T]here is a rhythm to the way learning happens here; there are upbeats and downbeats; there is an ebb and flow. We have high tide times when I charter a boat and we set sail with purpose and direction, deliberately casting our net for a particular type of fish. On these excursions I am the captain; I have charted the course.… And we have low tide times when we amble along the shore, peering into tide pools and digging in the sand, or just relaxing under beach umbrella. The children wander off in directions of their own choosing; they dig and poke and ponder.”
I have more thoughts about this and what it looks like when we stay in low tide for more extended periods of time, living a low demand unschooling lifestyle, and how can we stay rooted in our children’s inherent wisdom to make good choices for themselves. But I’m going to save those for another day.
I’d love to hear in the comments about your experiences finding community in unschooling, how it has changed for you over time, or anything else this post brings up for you!
-Marni
“Kids with big, baffling behaviors” is a phrase borrowed from therapist, author, and podcaster Robyn Gobbel. If you aren’t familiar with her work, it’s worth checking out. https://robyngobbel.com/
In fact, since “neurodivergent” is not a biological term but a term that describes social dynamics, it’s interesting to consider whether being home/unschooled could in itself lead someone to become “neurodivergent.” In Neuroqueer Heresies, Dr. Nick Walker talks about meditation and psychedelic use as experiences that can lead to acquired neurodivergence. Spending your childhood days engaged in self-directed play, instead of adult driven work, could certainly lead to that child having different brain and body based experiences of and understandings of the world.
We have been hmmm, hybrid unschooling? for forever... As the younger ones get closer to middle school were discussing self directed learning all the way, because the ROI on the schooling is making the "un" increasingly difficult. (That is to say, we spend most of our time baffled at what they're learning in school and tend to be relied on to keep their classrooms in line. Setting them up to coast through life is not how we want them educated...)
Your early community days sound like a dream! My now 11 year old has been 'baffling' since birth, and his younger sister has been affable since birth, heh.
She does all the things, he relies on her for most of his social stimulation. But she's a natural extrovert and will ditch him (kindly and appropriately mostly) in a heartbeat to go play with anyone who stops by. The other day a neighborhood kid says "Z is NOT invited!" Then is overheard saying "Does he even have any friends??". Z quips back: yep and I'm glad they're not like you. Oof. He has some buds at school, but is rarely invited to things and most of his people are teenagers or me.
He's acutely aware that he's different, even amongst the other autistic kids in our community. It really does cause friction trying to *do* things. That said, he's building his own resilience and does have me for an advocate (another human who doesn't vibe with most people deeply for more than a few minutes at a time... I also prefer to do my own thing and create systems and channels that suit my particular design and so does my husband, but not his dad 😂)
We're just taking it day by day, thanks for this post. As I gather resources to convince their dad that this is likely the best, least damaging path (while I enthusiastically maintain it is one that will actually serve our family's needs with nimble consideration) this type of post is exactly the sort of narrative that can potentially bring ease into folks' understanding of the struggles- and that community looks different for different folks ❤️
Whoa, note number two is a fabulous theory that sounds entirely plausible. I would love to read more about your thoughts on that in the future.