On this episode of Exploring Unschooling, Pam, Anna, and Erika talk about when school isn’t working. In the northern hemisphere, many children are going “back to school” and so, we wanted to share some thoughts about what can happen when school just isn’t working for your child.

In our conversation, we talked about changes you might notice in your child, about the choices that we have when it comes to living and learning, and about the value of community during that big transition away from mainstream schooling.

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

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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!

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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.

PAM: Hello everyone! I’m Pam Laricchia from Living Joyfully, and I’m joined by my co-hosts today, Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about what you might do when school isn’t working for your child. But before we dive in, I’d just like to take a moment to invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network.

There is just so much value in walking alongside others on this journey, particularly any kind of unconventional journey like when school isn’t working for our child, because while everyone’s journey is unique, many of us face similar obstacles and challenges. And that is where the power of community shines in feeling seen and heard by others.

In the Network, you can learn from the experiences of other parents on similar journeys, draw inspiration from their a-ha moments, and gain insights from the unique and creative ways they navigate both their own and their family’s needs. To learn more, just follow the link in the show notes or go to livingjoyfullyshop.com and click on Community in the menu. And Anna, would you like to get us started?

ANNA: I would. Oh goodness. This topic has been coming up a lot over the last few months, really this year, and we just thought it was important to create a space to talk about it. I’m excited about today, because the truth is school doesn’t work for everyone.

Instead of the message that people tend to hear, which is, “There’s something wrong with your child. Let’s do X, Y, or Z to fix your child,” we wanted to say, it’s okay. It’s okay if a particular environment doesn’t work for your child. Parents will tie themselves up in knots trying to make it work and make themselves sick thinking that there’s something wrong with their child or that they’ve done something wrong as a parent, when again, it really just is an environment that doesn’t work for everyone.

And when we think about how people are different, which if you’ve been here any amount of time, you know we talk about a lot, it can help so much in this situation. Because we just are so different. Our brains process information differently. We prioritize things differently. We have different sensitivities and capacities and all of it is just fine.

The journey is in learning more about ourselves and what we need to thrive. And often that just can’t happen in a one size fits all environment. And honestly, how could one size fit all? We’re so different. It’s amazing that it works as much as it does, and we know there are a lot of issues along the way, even for those where it “works”.

I feel like when we think about people and how we work, some people need to move to think, pacing around helps them really solidify an idea. Others like music to help calm a busy mind and that focuses them on the task at hand. Some people like to deep dive into a subject and are not coming up for air for weeks to understand all of the nuances. Others like to flit around and find patterns. They’re pulling from different arenas, to get this bigger web of learning and picture for themselves. None of those types are served in a school environment where it’s, “Sit still. Be quiet. Do this now.” Bell rings, “Do something completely different now.” That’s the way they play the game there. And it doesn’t work for a lot of brains. 

And as soon as we turn a discerning eye to it, we can see why they need to do it that way. It often boils down to crowd management. And this is not about teachers. Teachers are incredible.They’re devoting their lives to creating a wonderful environment, but it just can’t meet the needs of all children. I mean, it just can’t.

So, we see then that it’s not about something being wrong with our child, but it’s more about what our particular child needs to thrive and learn. And it just might not be able to happen in a traditional school environment.

The good news is there are options. Whether it’s an alternative school that maybe can address particular needs of a child or homeschooling or unschooling, there are so many different ways to find what works. Because we’re learning creatures. In a safe, affirming environment, we have almost an unlimited capacity to learn.

Here, we talk a lot about unschooling, because it is what worked for our families. And I do believe it provides a great environment for us to learn more about ourselves and what we need to thrive. Then with that knowledge, we can take that into all sorts of environments and find our own unique path.

I feel passionate about this particular thing because we’ve met so many parents along the way on the Network and in other realms and they are feeling so terrible. And I just want them to know that there’s nothing wrong with a child that doesn’t fit in traditional school.

Seeing children shine for being exactly who they are is a beautiful gift that changes that child. And honestly, it changes us, too. And I’m going to even say it changes the world. So, I’m pretty passionate about this. 

ERIKA: I think it does change the world. I don’t even think that’s an exaggeration. This is such a beautiful topic. I would love to pass along the message that there is nothing wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with your family. There’s nothing wrong with your child if you’re finding that school is not a fit. It just makes sense. People are so different.

It makes sense that the one-size-fits-all model is not going to work. At the beginning of my unschooling journey, and I think for a lot of people, there are these huge paradigm shifts. When you’re first starting to just even consider, “Should I, or can I, opt out of this system?”

I remember reading John Holt and reading John Taylor Gatto and really, Gatto in particular is very vehement in his arguments against school. And as someone who went to a lot of school and did very well, I feel like reading those kinds of alternative voices did help me a lot in those beginning days.

They helped me to wrap my head around this huge paradigm shift, realizing I didn’t really think about all of those negative pieces when I was just doing what I was told to do and achieving in that system. My children are what sparked me to do that investigation and dive into those topics.

But it did help me to listen to this podcast, to read Pam’s books, and all of these other voices giving me alternatives to what I had always heard my entire life growing up. And so, I don’t know if scary is quite the right word, but it was a really big moment in my brain. 

I felt like school worked for me. I thought it was going to work for my kids. Now that I’m looking at it, maybe it didn’t work as well for me as I thought it did. I can now see new possibilities for my children and especially when I’m looking at kids who are neurodiverse, who have very particular interests and strong interests. I was just picturing that kind of bustling, busy, loud school environment and just not seeing how that could work well for my sensitive first child.

And the journey began there. But it is fun to know how many options there are. And to me, the way that I view unschooling is it’s like we have every option now. If they do want to go back to school, that’s okay too. Because it’s all about learning, learning more about ourselves, learning more about our kids, and then making choices that feel good and feel empowering to us and being able to shift when things aren’t working. So, yeah, I love it.

PAM: Yes. Love it. Love it. And I think that is a place that we get to too in that, at first, I didn’t even know it was a choice. So, for me, that was one of the reasons when, way back when, when I started writing and sharing a little bit more online.  It was just so people knew it was a choice. That was an a-ha moment. Mind blown. Like, oh, they don’t have to go to school. This was, I was just doing the calculations, 23 years ago. 23 years ago. It is so interesting when you can recognize, oh, it is a choice. It doesn’t have to be that way.

And then you can get to that place of learning, like you said, Erika, that these other choices are valid too, that it’s not a failure. I didn’t fail because this environment doesn’t fit for my kids. And a lot of the messaging still is around fixing the kids and getting the kids ready so that they are ready to fit into this environment, et cetera.

But yes, there are more and more voices now and it’s much more well known that these are options and these don’t work for everyone, each one doesn’t work for everybody. And then, if the kids do come home or you just choose not to go, and like you said, Erika, it is totally cool too if they at some point decide they want to try it. At that point, it’s not about school or not school, it’s about what works for this child? What would this child like to do? What things do they want to try? I like to think of learning as a big buffet table and school is a plate on the table, that is a choice you can make.

But before I learned about this, before my mind was blown, it was the only plate on the table. That’s all I knew, right? But now there are so many plates. There is truly a buffet there, and you’re less tied to a particular choice and it’s more about helping each person, us included, because we don’t stop learning just because we’re adults, right? Seeing what choice we want to make in this moment and trying it out and knowing we still have a choice. We can try something and we’re not getting out of it what we thought we were going to get out of it, or we did for a while and now it’s no longer working. That’s totally okay. We can change our mind or we can say that’s enough of that dish. It comes back to our choices. 

And I came to that understanding and realization for my kids through learning that school was a choice, and coming to the point to see that when school’s not working, it’s not about blaming the child and needing to fix the child.

This environment, like you said, Anna, is set up this way because it’s efficient. Teachers are doing their best with the environment as it is and stretching it. When my kids went to school, we had teachers that worked with us, but still there’s only so much they can do. 

There’s the constrained environment of, these are the hours, these are how many kids are in a class. All those pieces. So, it really was, for me, just getting through that initial tendency to blame or to feel like it was a failure to move away from it and to recognize that buffet table that’s really there and that those choices all have value, more or less, just depending on the person who’s at the table trying to decide what they want to partake of in this moment.

ANNA: I love that, because I feel like it’s an empowering place, to realize that it’s a choice and we get to choose. Because I think environments that are big systems like that, I think of medical systems, but also the school system, they drive off of a sense of urgency. And so it’s very much like, “You have to do it this way.” There’s one way and you’ve got to do it and you’ve got to do it now, or there are going to be dire consequences. So, there’s a lot of language that is directed at parents that feels very intense and scary. “If you don’t do this, it’ll never happen.” 

And that’s what’s so valuable about the Network, but also these podcasts, but other environments as well. But in the Network, you see all of these children who have learned to read and who are pursuing their passions and who are doing all these different things that did not follow that one very narrow course that school lays out. And so, it can help you build confidence. And that’s looking more externally. 

Because I would also say, just look at your child, because look at what kids learn without any help at all. Maybe not any help but facilitation, but learning to walk, learning to talk, all the things that happen before school even comes into the picture. Just ground into, okay, I have this unique child in front of me. Look at how much they love this thing. 

And especially, and I love that you mentioned neurodiversity because, if you have a child that’s deep diving into this passion about dinosaurs or trains or something that they love, you see the learning that’s happening. It just doesn’t happen to be fitting into what they need at school. It’s not across these multiple things. But what we talk about in the network and what you know, being around other people that are living this lifestyle can help you see the web of learning that’s coming out from those individual interests.

The web of learning that child is creating as they understand where the trains go and how the trains are built, and who’s running the trains and all the things. That is actually what learning is. So yes, in a school environment, they need to make it. What’s the word?

Conform? They need to make a system that they can plug people into, but we have the ability in our individual families to create the environment where we each can thrive. And I think even if you just take a minute to think about just the people in your immediate family. Look at the differences there.

I think that, again, will help you see it. Because I can think about my husband who is a very tactile, experiential learner, and he’s brilliant, but it’s different from me. I like to read, I like to take in information that way. I’m not really an auditory learner. And then I look at this daughter and she learns this way and this daughter, and I realize there are so many ways that we can learn and move through the world. I think as soon as you recognize that choice, like you said, Pam, it just opens up everything.

ERIKA: I love that you mentioned that, individualized versus standardized. And I think even in school, they want it to be individualized. If it could be, that would be the dream, but it’s just not feasible. There are too many kids, not enough teachers. You just can’t make everything individualized for every kid. And so, by doing it on our own and just following our children’s interests, we’re able to make their lives a perfectly individualized instruction plan, if you wanted to call it that. 

That looks nothing like school, but is allowing them to dive so deep into the things that are interesting to them. And I know on the podcast in the past we’ve talked about learning and school learning and natural learning. In school they’re really pulling the skills out away from, from the context. That’s something that is hard for many children. If growing up it felt like math is so hard and doesn’t make sense, it’s probably because in school it’s completely divorced from any reason to do it, any kind of context at all.

And so what’s great about taking the learning out of school is that then context is everything. If, if there’s a reason to learn something, then they learn it. There’s a reason to read, which there is in every field. There’s a reason to want to read. And so, then they want to read and they learn how to read.

I’ve seen that happen over and over again with other children that I know as well. And just the feeling that I have from watching my children get to these big learning moments in their own way. In a way that they have ownership of that. It’s just so amazing and beautiful that my kids feel like they have done it on their own.  I don’t think they would say they taught themselves to read because the word taught doesn’t really even make sense. But it’s they did that themselves. They know how to read because they figured out how to read. And of course I have played a big role in it, but that’s not what they remember.

They remember that they figured it out. It made sense to them. And so, when you’re coming out of the school environment or starting to question school, it might be those things like, but what about math? And what about the reading? And I don’t know, my child isn’t meeting these benchmarks and how are they going to do it?

It really is just a complete paradigm shift to realize there’s plenty of time and people don’t need to learn things on the same timetable. Following our interests is a path towards learning these underlying skills that will be necessary, for anything that you want to do in life. And learning them with that context makes it so much easier to learn.

PAM: Yeah, I love that piece because I think when we can recognize that school isn’t working for our child and even look for alternative ways, choose homeschooling, choose unschooling, etc., but so much of that journey away is our work to do our paradigm shifts because. School can often be so ingrained for us.

So even if we take our kid out, we can be looking for learning that looks like school learning. We can be looking for progress that looks like school progress because learning in school feels so linear. So step by step by step and learning in action really doesn’t look that way. It can look like

soaking up like a whole bunch and then looking stagnant for a while as it percolates, processes in the background and builds our web of understanding, our connections, that context.

Or something’s hard right now, it’s just not clicking right now. And then maybe just moving on to something else. And then we are finding the next step is this, and the next step is this and you’ll see them get there, but it will look so different. It can come from somewhere different and then just zoom up. It can be months and months and months, and then all of a sudden, a whole bunch happens, big leaps. So, it really doesn’t look like school learning.

Marks go up and down and people have good, easy seasons and harder seasons at school. It’s not so much that it fits with everybody, but it is the way it needs to be presented because we have so many days and we have so many topics that we have to cover. So, it gets chunked out that way, very linearly.

And we have a big group of kids, so math does look like a worksheet. It doesn’t look like how we use numbers out in the world because we don’t have a lot of time to create those situations. But we can create worksheets where you can practice those skills. 

So it is that shift for us. Not only choosing not to send our kids to school. But also then it comes to understanding that the way we thought learning looked, the way it looks in school, the way it’s marked, graded in school, etc. It looks really different when we take out the school environment or take the child out of the school environment. We need to also take all the school think and school lenses that we’re using and, and find new ones. 

Because when we look to our child and we engage with our child and we watch them in action, we see this learning in action. And it’s not that it’s not happening, it just looks very different. I remember like people fresh from bringing their kids home and they’re like, they’re not learning anything. Yes, I know it doesn’t look like they’re learning anything, but that’s because you’ve got your school glasses on and you’re only looking for learning that looks like learning does in school. But actually, if you try to take those off and look at what they are doing. You can see it. 

It just doesn’t happen to look that way, the way school tells us it will look. It’s so fun.

ANNA: I think looking at ourselves, I loved that you said that Erika, you even took the lens looking back at your own journey because you were super successful in school. Most people from the outside would say it worked for you, but you were able to look at it and go, oh, maybe not.

But it’s interesting, because it reminds me of a story with my dad who was an engineer and he did well in school and did graduate work and all the things, but he was also just so engaged and loved learning. And so when my kids were young and I had all the unschooling books everywhere, all over the house, he would read them and we’d have conversations when they were little and he said, ‘School was fine for me. But I can see that it wouldn’t work for everyone and how different it would be if there were choices.’ Because he had friends that he thought of how different it would’ve been for them to not be carrying the weight of thinking there was something wrong with them because they didn’t fit in the environment.

But he said, we just didn’t really have another way to look at it. And so I loved that he could recognize that because again, some people do fine but others don’t and there’s nothing wrong with them. Those are brilliant minds that just look at things in a different way and that linear path, I mean it’s more narrow regardless. I think people that even do well on the linear path, it’s fine, but if they were to stay there, their life would be a little bit boring. But I think they take it and then they move beyond it, especially after school. But there are some kids that just want to move beyond from the beginning. They look at things differently and take information in differently.

And so allowing that context and for things to make sense and having conversations really understanding how our brain works is just so valuable. I would love for people that are thinking about this to get excited. To think, this thing that I’m looking at, maybe it has been judged as a failure or that something’s wrong. But I can get excited about learning about myself and about my child.

We can find the ways that work for us. So because it really is so fun and amazing, and I think community can be helpful, that is why we talk about the network, especially in these situations where you’re making a big transition because really seeing the thoughtful, amazing, brilliant other people and what they’re learning and what’s happening for their families and what’s happening with their children can just really just bolster and give us this beautiful space to share our own journey with people who understand.

ERIKA: Right, especially if the environment we’re currently in does not have much space for alternative thinking. Finding the people that you can have those deeper conversations with when you’re first doing all of that questioning, I think is really amazing. And of course the network is an awesome place for it.

I was also thinking that it’s a fun little exercise to think back about what you remember from school. Because for me that was a big one where it was like, okay, wait, I could say that it’s so important that they learn all these things, but then do I remember those things and does it matter now?

Just little thinking experiments like that to think about, what are my big takeaways from being in school? And what did I get out of it? I think we’ve talked a lot of times about the unschooling journey and how it just opens our brains up to questioning everything.

And this moment of being curious and wondering, is school really the best option for my kid? It can be that moment of, let me question this and then let me question this. And then everything opens up. And what I’ve found is that in the meantime, the kids just keep on living their best life.

And because they already know what they wanna do, you know? And so if we can support them in the things that they really love to do. And then we see that, okay, when they’re really having fun, they’re learning a whole lot. Um, like that really was a, that was a big turning point for me. 

And I remember having the realization that I could follow their happiness and joy.

We are having a really great life. They are learning so much. If I’m constantly there as the support in helping them live their best, most joyful life, I don’t know, that became my focus, especially when they were young, when I was turning away from the idea of putting them into school.

That was a new thing for me to focus on. And when I saw them, just getting so excited and pumped up about a certain topic or whatever, and then they wanted to learn more and then I could bring something else. Those moments were so fun and really gave me confidence in our decision to not go to school.

ANNA: And just to build on something you said real quickly before we wrap up, kids are learning before they go to school. You can see it. Again, acquiring language, walking, colors, animals, all the things. And we as adults are learning long after school as well. And so when you can just go, oh yeah, I don’t have to go to school to learn something and put yourself into that process of, what do I need when I’m interested in something, what do I do? I gather information, I find a mentor. Whatever the things are, then you start to realize they don’t have a lock on learning. That’s  what our culture wants us to think, that you can only learn in this one type of environment.

But there are so many examples across the spectrum of how we all learn at different ages without that one environment. So, you can let go of that weight and really find what works for you and your family.

PAM: Yeah, and I think what Erika was saying, leaning into our kids, that’s the great next step because that’s what helps us see, like you’re saying, there’s not one way to learn in this age range, right?

Recognizing that we do it before and we do it after, and then leaning into seeing our kids doing it to help us realize and recognize how much learning happens even without school. So, like I was talking about earlier, looking for learning to look like school. We don’t need it.

And when we lean in and watch our kids, we see they have their interests. They’re thrilled to have the time now to dive deeper into things if they’re leaving school. It’s just beautiful to watch and just helps us shift and really open up. We realize what learning looks like and it’s just so beautiful and fun.

ERIKA: Can I share one more thought? I just was thinking maybe we could also put a few links in the show notes to Deschooling, a few deschooling episodes. Because that word deschooling is what we use to describe that process of getting rid of some of those school thoughts. That might be a good next step as well.

PAM: Yes, we will put those in the show notes. That’s awesome. Thank you. And thank you so much to both of you. What a very fun conversation. And as we mentioned, we invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network to dive into these kinds of conversations anytime with other kind and thoughtful parents, and we are very excited to welcome you. To learn more and join us, just follow the link in those show notes or go to livingjoyfullyshop.com and click on community in the menu. Wishing everyone a very lovely day!