You’ve explored your options, you’ve read the books and blogs and listened to the podcasts (or not), and you’ve made up your mind. Unschooling is the best thing for your child.
… now what?
Unschooling can be difficult for folks to imagine starting because it’s kind of explained best by describing what it’s not. Usually used to describe a type of homeschooling, but sometimes practiced in other learning programs, it means to allow children the freedom to learn on their own without externally motivated factors like tests, required activities, or assignments.
In a nutshell, it means your children are left up to their own devices and given the freedom to choose how to spend their time.
In a way, therefore, starting unschooling is the easiest thing in the world — you just don’t tell your kids to do anything. In a more real way, though, making it work can take a fair amount of effort and investment from parents.
Trust, deschooling, and letting go — the mental preparation
A key component of unschooling is the premise that children learn naturally on their own, through play and exploration of the world around them, and that structured, adult-led activities are unnecessary for, or can be downright harmful to, healthy growth and development. If you have not yet read anything about how the process of learning works for unschoolers, I would highly recommend you read Peter Gray’s book, Free to Learn and Kerry McDonald’s book, Unschooled. They offer insight into the theoretical/psychological (Gray) and practical (McDonald) side of unschooling.
For parents who went to school themselves, figuring out what unstructured learning looks like and how to get the ball rolling can be daunting but really, it’s pretty easy because it mostly means stepping back and appearing to do very little at first. You just let your kids do what they want and there you go, you’re unschooling!
The harder part than actually starting, to be honest, is being able to let go and trust your kids are learning. In fact, if I had to sum up unschooling in two words I would say “freedom” comes first but “trust” is a close second.
If you don’t trust that your child is learning when playing video games or rewatching the same videos on YouTube, then you most likely will want to limit that behaviour and/or redirect it to something “more valuable”, which goes against most of what unschooling is about. Trusting a child’s natural inclination to learn and seek out the stimulus they need means letting them do so, it means watching them watch that video over and over and asking yourself what it is they’re getting from it rather than dismissing it as simply wasting time or “rotting their mind”.
So when talking to parents about where to start as unschoolers, I would say that the real place they need to start is in themselves — they have to decide what they want and feel comfortable with in regards to truly letting go and letting their children dictate their own educational experiences.
The word “deschooling” is used to mean different things but most unschoolers use it to describe either the process by which kids who have been in the school system decompress and adjust to learning without the structure and/or the process by which parents let go of their school-based assumptions and attitudes about learning. Both topics are big enough that I can’t tackle them fully here but if these are new concepts to you I suggest you do a bit of reading about them as part of starting this journey — both can make or break a family’s sense of success and ability to continue with unschooling.
When talking about parental “deschooling”, for a lot of parents this means a significant shift in expectations and definitions — you will need to question what ‘success’ looks like to you, how you define a “learning activity”, and what counts as “acceptable” skill development and knowledge acquisition.
Unschoolers do not, by definition, learn according to external schedules or curriculum. Which means they may be later learning to read, they may never learn their times-tables, and they may never choose to memorize provincial capitals or how to diagram a sentence. This doesn’t mean they can’t write brilliantly, learn a great deal of useful and personally meaningful information about their country, or accomplish advanced math skills — it just means that they learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it (usually when the need for said skill/knowledge presents itself organically in their life).
Unschooled kids sometimes do take courses, many families purchase traditional academic learning materials to have available as one of many optional activities, but the key feature in unschoolers using traditional learning activities is that it is the child’s choice to do so. This might look like having some math worksheets a six-year-old can complete if they feel like doing some math or a high school student enrolling in an online course to meet university requirements for their desired program of study, as long at the motivation to take on the learning in this manner comes from what they child themselves wants and not the result from arbitrary external pressure or expectations.
Books and toys and adventures and friends — planning the experiential environment for the whole family
When starting your unschooling journey, it is important to ask yourself as a parent, what do you think your children will want/need from you and your environment this year? Do you want to plan lots of outdoor adventures for a highly active child? Do you need to sign up for family library cards to make sure you have access to lots of varied reading and research material? Is your teen interested in a mentorship or volunteering placement to support a passion or interest? Are there art or craft supplies you need? Would access to STEM activities or building kits be a great option for your unschooler to consider? Make a list and discuss it with your co-parent and kids. “Not-back-to-school” shopping for unschoolers can mean buying new baking pans, investing in a new drill set or buying the latest update for a favourite video game. Don’t feel like you need to fill your house with a million different “educational” options, it’s ok to wait and see what is actually desired/needed and don’t forget that most unschooling comes from natural life experiences rather than kits and specialized materials, but thinking ahead a little can help avoid feeling like you’re stagnating or limited in ways that you don’t like.
Getting out into the world is a huge part of most unschoolers’ daily life. From volunteering at an animal shelter, getting memberships to local museums or galleries, tramping through forests and fields, to weekly meetups with other unschoolers, there are tonnes of ways to open up your unschooler’s world and help them connect and access a variety of experiences. Thinking ahead, talking with your kids, and picking some outings that you can do safely with the current health situation in your area can be a big help as you head into the new “unschool year”.
Next, I would recommend asking yourself what you need as a parent to feel successful in this new adventure. Will you do better if you can establish a support network with other unschooling parents? Do you need to talk to your kids and set up a daily schedule that will allow you to complete any work you need to do while still supporting their needs? Would it be helpful to give yourself a schedule, even if the kids have more freedom, to make sure you check-in with yourself and stay focused on your goals as an unschooling parent? If you don’t look after your own needs, you won’t be able to support theirs so don’t forget to check in with yourself and plan for everyone’s success, including your own.
Teamwork makes the dream work — egalitarian communication and sharing
Along with trusting your kids’ ability to learn comes a shift from our societal views on learning and adult-child relationships — it requires a more egalitarian approach that respects the individual child’s interests, needs and abilities in a way that the school-based model does not. When starting out with unschooling, I recommend parents begin embracing this kind of egalitarian individualized relationship with lots of communication.
Talk to your kids about how you see this unschooling journey unfolding, discuss areas that you are concerned about, let them share how they feel and what they may be worried about. Talking about areas of concern can help you establish mutually agreed-upon limitations for specific activities or expectations surrounding communal sharing of time and space (i.e. how will screen time work? who is responsible for cleaning up after an art activity? etc.).
Radical homeschoolers generally do not set these kinds of limits but if you do not want to embrace that approach fully (or want to ease into things for now), sharing and discussing concerns so they are understood and everyone has a say in how to solve the problem they present, is important.
Maintaining open and comfortable communication in which you seek mutual solutions and compromises as much as possible (there may be obvious situations in which you cannot compromise and that’s fine, just be clear about them and why they are not up for debate), will create an environment in which your children feel comfortable and truly free to do as they please because they will understand what limits there are and, more importantly, why those limits exist rather than accepting them blindly as expressions of adult dominance.
Breathe. Have fun. Enjoy the journey.
Watching children learning through life, witnessing the beautiful organic unfolding of the universe of knowledge and understanding, is a wonderful experience of human capacity and ability and connection and sharing. It also creates messes in the kitchen, fights over Lego pieces, forgotten library due dates, and lots of carpooling and organizing of activities and playdates, which can mean parents easily get caught up in their day-to-day responsibilities and lose track of the wonder of their children’s learning.
Along with deschooling your ideas about how kids learn, as a homeschooling parent you are offered the chance to restructure your expectations for how quickly laundry gets put away, how clean the living room has to be, and how late you’re allowed to be when meeting friends. You don’t have to give up your own standards but don’t feel like you have to stick to what doesn’t work for your family. You’re undertaking a unique and intense re-creation of your family and yourselves, don’t hold onto things that don’t support your broader goals and dreams.
And finally, letting children set their own learning activities and goals and interests doesn’t mean you can’t be involved. Get in there. Ask about what they’re doing, sit with them and witness their effort. Read to them. Build with them. Explore with them. You’re not their teacher, you’re not there to point out or ‘“add” learning to what they’re doing, but you’re part of the homeschooling too, don’t be afraid to join in.
Originally published at https://livinglearning.ca on September 2, 2020.
