Dare to Unschool - Rewriting the Rules
Time to create something that will REALLY work for you and the kids!
Sometimes it takes a while to get to the point where you try something really unconventional - like unschooling.
Time's ticking though - the kids are getting older and doing what's familiar
doesn't seem to be working for a lot of people.
You DO have options!
Read along, listen to the podcast - or watch the YouTube video!
Sue Patterson shares how she went from a suburban mom who's kids weren't enjoying school - to 100% confident in the unschooling approach.
She didn't do it alone and you don't have to either!
Join her
Creating Confidence Membership group to get the support you need.
You'll be so glad you did.
You really don't have to duplicate what's familiar.
You can truly individualize the education - and the Life! - that you and the kids want!
I’m Sue Patterson, welcome to the Unschooling Mom2Mom podcast.
If you’re new here, these podcasts are my little unschooling pep talks for you!
I talk about all different aspects of how to create a confident life unschooling with your kids.
Not that I’m some big expert - but I’ve seen a lot. I’ve seen what works, and what doesn’t. I’ve seen HOW people have overcome their obstacles and created an environment where their kids could learn what they needed AND the family could be connected and enjoy life together. I did that with my own three kids, who are now grown.
I learned, all that I know because I surrounded myself with people who knew a little more than me.
Well, not only that, because sometimes I learned from people who DIDN”T know as much as me.
You know when you watch someone and you think,
“Wow, that’s how NOT to do that.”
You learn from them too. They help you clarify some things.
Or you see someone who is doing the same thing you did a year ago, and you have the opportunity to say,
“Hey, watch out for that sharp turn, it’s not marked, but it’s coming.”
Helping other people can sometimes solidify those things that you’ve been learning along the way. Plus, it keeps the ideas at the front of your mind, as most of society is pressing on you to get back in line.
That’s what I want to talk to you about today - how you can develop confidence as you walk away from the conventional approach to education and parenting. It’s not an easy task - but I’m no rocket scientist.
I’m just a mom from the suburbs who found that school wasn’t working for my kids.
It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t inspiring.
They were getting bored.
They were getting in trouble for doing things like
...not reading in unison off the chalkboard.
or
...talking when they had to wait in line
or
...getting up to use the bathroom without raising their hand first.
Just being regular kids with questions and energy.
Cooping them up in a classroom where they had to sit for hours seemed like - not a Good Plan.
Sure, it was familiar to me. It was certainly how I had grown up. But couldn’t it be better?
Couldn't there have been a little progress since then?
As little preschoolers, I had read about meeting kids where they were, playing with them at their level, fueling their curiosity and interests. And then at 5, why did all that have to o stop? That didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I had no idea anyone else thought like I did.
Was there a way this school approach could be better? More inspiring?
That’s when it all started for me, this gradual Big Reveal.
It was like I was cleaning a lens and seeing things differently. More clearly. More honestly. More reality-based.
School wasn’t working. Did I HAVE any options?
For me, this started back in 1996...my kids were 7, 5, and 2. I know a lot of you listening were very young yourself at the time! But people were doing this before me. I may look like a pioneer at this, but I wasn’t. There weren’t the numbers that there are now. Or the resources - this was the time of communicating through Phone Trees and with flyers at the grocery store bulletin boards. It’s funny to think about on that! We have certainly made progress on that front - in how we can communicate with each other.
At the time, I knew only one family who was homeschooling and she had teens. They made eye contact, they were funny and nice to be around. I was even at her house one day and poked my head into her kitchen. They were doing the dishes and pushing soap bubbles at each other - for me, this passed the litmus test for “normal kids.”
So I began picking her brain. I wanted to know how they’d learn what they needed?
- Did she have to know everything?
- How did they make friends without going to a school?
- How did she manage her own life without the built-in child-care of school?
All the regular questions, right?
I had no idea that parents were talking on AOL message boards, sharing answers to these same questions. At the time, I hadn’t even heard of the word, Unschooling...because she was
not doing that. I was just interested in taking a more creative approach to spruce up the regular subjects.
How hard could 2nd grade be, right?
I hadn’t yet learned that you didn’t have to duplicate the school approach… that would come later, as I expanded my circle of knowledgeable people, parents who were in the thick of it.
I was on a coaching call yesterday - and we were talking about the differences between back then and now.
Some things were different, but some things are still the same.
Things like:
- Parents don’t want to screw up their kids’ chances for success.
- Parents don’t like what they see, but their own personal experience is coming up short on what to DO next.
- Some of us really learn best by picking people’s brains, talking with others on the same journey.
Back then, we did this at Park Days, and potlucks, and getting families together to hang out while the kids played or hiked or somehow tapping into the community resources. All those resources you don’t really have TIME to use when your kids are off to school and then recovering from it in the afterschool hours - or signed up for the fun stuff they want to do, squeezing it all between 4 and 7 pm!
But when you hang out with people who are approaching life differently, you see more options.
You see what could work for you and your kids?
You learn from other families - what to do and what not to do.
What could work with a little modification on your part.
And you begin to create this really individualized life.
You start rewriting the rules.
Not all at once...
Remember I didn’t even know anyone who did this thing called Unschooling until we were almost done with our first year of homeschooling. Which, I must tell you, doing curriculum, forcing my kid to do the school approach was not fun. Not what I had envisioned at all. It’s what made me continue to look around.
At first, I was looking foranswers to my question:
“How do you make your kids do these things?”
And then that led me to some parents who said,
“we don’t.”
But if we had surrounded ourselves with parents who DID make their kids - and they were definitely out there - we wouldn’t have known we had options. I was entering the homeschooling world at the same time all that Dugger family stuff was happening. I didn’t know them, but I knew people like them.
And I knew I wasn’t doing it like THAT.
I wanted to let my kids be part of the real world. To learn how to navigate.
To see the world as an AWESOME place to explore and have adventures - not to wall them off and create some patriarchal nightmare pretending to be education and not giving the kids what they needed.
I wanted the opposite of what they were doing.
So that pushed me toward those parents brave enough to re-imagine what all this could look like.
And that’s how we stepped toward unschooling.
Fast forward to now, my kids are 34, 32, 29. They had great childhoods filled with adventures, and learning, and opportunities. They got into colleges and trade schools, they own businesses and homes, they have families and young adult lives. They integrated into adult life without a problem - mainly because they lived in the Real World all along, exploring and playing with their interests, with my husband and me, right there offering the scaffolding they needed. So when it was time for them to launch into adulthood, they were prepared and ready to go.
I learned so much along the way. Some was trial and error. Some was because I had a hard time letting go of some of the ideas that were familiar to me.
But I could see that THIS life, this UNschooling life was all about TRULY individualizing all of it.
For me, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. I learned from other people who were also on this journey. Some ahead of me, some behind me. Some doing things in the same way I wanted to, some doing things I didn’t want to do. We had monthly “Moms Night Out” where we’d talk about ways to learn and how to cope. We’d read books together and people would bring the curriculum they had found so we could look at it ourselves.
So for probably the first 3 years, I was on a quest to pick the brains of as many people as possible. I knew that my personal first-hand knowledge was coming up short - so I had to learn from these other people.
And that’s what I did.
But back to my coaching call the other day, we were talking with parents of younger kids about how different the landscape looks now. Lots of places don’t have park days. Or they have so many park days or options, they don’t feel the same connection to people that I felt back in the 90s.
So after my kids had grown, I created a little mini-course to help parents get more confident in this unschooling approach. I think it lasted for a couple of months. We’d talk about different topics like rude relatives or finding learning, or tapping into the community resources. We’d get together on weekly zoom calls and they’d ask questions and we’d all share ideas and answers. Then the course ended, and they wanted to know if we could keep it going somehow. Could we do book clubs, and topics each month - and basically recreate the park days and Moms Night Outs but online?. They were scattered all over the world and having trouble FINDING other people near them.
I said yes, and this was the start of my
Creating Confidence Membership Group.
It’s evolved over time, as I kept making more PDFs, or recorded topics and ideas.
I still do the zoom coaching calls - now it’s twice a week. Parents get coaching from me, hear about resources and examples from each other. We make plans together for the week on Mondays and come back for a more Q & A opportunity mid-week. They get the inspiration for how to do this very unconventional - but wonderful thing with their own families.
And we even have a real life get together happening in Houston in October! That will be fun! Like the old days! But we’ll be hanging out by the pool!
My situation - and because we weren’t as well-versed in the internet yet - made me a slow learner.
It won’t take YOU three years to figure this out or see that leaving curriculum and the old ways behind is a good idea. You have way more resources at your fingertips. I had to wait for the monthly Moms night out or hope that someone I wanted to talk to, about a specific thing was going to show up at the park day. And then hope that we could actually complete a sentence, as kids were all around playing and needing us too.
We’ve had a big wave of DIYing our way through life in the past 20 years or so. The internet has helped with that too! Even with unschooling, you can DIY it - you can listen to this podcast, watch videos at YouTube, read blogposts at the Unschooling Mom2Mom webpage, follow people on social media.. I’ve made a TON of resources to help people figure this all out.
But the other day, someone who joined my membership group said that they had been patchwork quilting their way through the last 2 years. They were stopping and starting, trying some other curriculum that maybe didn’t seem too bad… only to have their kids resist that too. She had tried every curriculum approach - maybe you can relate - but she wanted to try them all BEFORE she went with Unschooling. Lots of us do that, right? For some reason. We want to keep SOME pieces of what’s familiar before we toss it all. Lol
It’s such a faulty construct though. It doesn’t have to be an either/or thing.
Because the thing to remember, all the time you’re wasting trying everything BEFORE you dive a little into unschooling, your kids are getting older, habits are forming. Frustration is growing.
AND, as you try all the other approaches,, forcing them to do just one more paper or one more workbook, that’s digging a rut in the road you’re going to have to fix later on.
And I guess my big question to you, right now, is,
“Why do that?”
Why not start learning about unschooling and implementing the parts that seem logical.
What would WORK for you and your family easily? Start there.
Don’t let Fear keep blinders on you so you don’t even look.
Nobody is going to ask you to drink any Kool Aid. I promise.
See what it’s like to be surrounded by people who want to explore more of this non-traditional way. No one is going to say, you’re not doing it enough. There are no Unschooling Police in my group.
We’re all on a journey toward INDIVIDUALIZING our learning and our LIVES with our kids.
We’re all learning how others may do things differently - some parts that could work for us, and some parts, maybe not… yet. Or maybe never.
But after being with others who are so invested in maintaining the status quo - this will be so refreshing for you! Yes, you’ll have to look at some internal motivations you have… but they’re quietly back there running the show. Woudnl’t it be nice to see your intentions clearly. And make decisions out of logic instead of simply because it’s familiar? Maybe you have some Fears to look at - to see which are rational and which were used on you to keep you in line, and now you’re doing that to your own kids without even realizing it. Or maybe you realize it, but you think it’s what you’re SUPPOSED to do.
I’m not saying all your ideas have to go - I’m just saying “Choose them consciously.”
That’s the kind of information you’ll find in our membership portal. We have 2 coaching calls every week, where parents bring questions or I talk more about how to embrace unschooling. These are recorded and available if you ca’nt make it live. We have recordings from past calls, past guest speakers, book club discussions. All the Unschooling Guides are available to you in there, plus the ebooks I’ve done. We have PDFs and worksheets to help you to tackle your obstacles. Maybe its how unschooling works, or how deschooling matters. Maybe it’s how to deal with critics or technology, learning to read or learning math. Maybe it’s about how to connect with your teens or how to get your little ones to bed.
Unschooling is kind of like bringing attachment parenting principles to bigger kids. We seem ok with it when they’re 2, but what about when they’re school age? I have so many resources to help you tackle all the parenting obstacles that are getting in your way. Yes, they’ll learn. Yes, they’ll get into college if they want to. Yes, you can figure out how to talk to your relatives about all of this, without everyone melting down.
And yes, you can have the home life you’ve wanted.
Lots of new members come in saying,
“Wow, I knew you had a lot of resources in here, but I had no idea how much!”
After a few weeks or months, they feel so much calmer. They’re beginning to grow their own confidence.
And they often say,
“I wish I had done this sooner. I’d have less to undo.
We could’ve skipped all that stuff that seemed so important but wasn’t.
I didn’t realize what was happening.”
So that’s what I want for you. I want to invite you to come to the membership group. See what it feels like to be with people who want to make some changes. See what it’s like to feel supported as you choose a truly INDIVIDUALIZED life for you and your kids. Just like me and my little Moms Night Out, you can do this in a community. You don’t have to be alone. The other more schoolish approach - whether it’s traditional homeschooling or the local school, it’ll still be there. Ready for you if you want to go back to that.
But, what if you had some adventures with your kids?
Whether this is your Gap Year, or your new way of life... it’s all up to you.
Your choices. What works for YOUR family.
This month, there’s no sign up fee, and you can pay month by month. Leave any time. Or you can decide, I’m going to give it a year, and see what happens. Pack in all the adventures. Relax into prioritizing connection within your family. Let everyone heal from some not-great experiences. Revisit it all in a year. Kind of like stepping off the conveyor belt for a while, and writing your own rules.
Sounds kinda good, right? I want to support you in this. It IS good. I think you’ll like it.
Let your life happen at the speed you choose - not because someone says:
“For the next 12 years, one size fits all.”
We know that’s not true.
I’ll put the link in the notes for you to hop into the group this month - for a month, for a year, for however long you’d like the support. Some people have been in the group since 2016 when we started! Parenting can be hard - no one gave us a manual. And even if they did, we know more now days. We don’t really want to duplicate the old ways any more. We can all learn from each other.
As we wrap up August, I wish only wonderful days for you and the kids. I want you to build a life together exactly the way you want it to be. You might surprise yourself!
Happy unschooling, I’ll be back again soon...
