14 April 2017

Our Unschooling Story

Imagine if you visited us. You’d knock at our front door. We’d invite you in. We’d sit around our kitchen table. Sip coffee. Eat chocolate muffins. What would we talk about? Lots of things! You’d tell me about your family. I’d tell you about mine. We’d probably chat about unschooling. Maybe you’d ask about our unschooling story.

In this week’s podcast, episode 93, I tell you about our unschooling story. I share stories about how we started as unschoolers but drifted away and tried other things. But we did find our way back again. How did that happen? Would you like to hear?

As you listen, imagine we’re sitting together around our long wooden kitchen table…


Show Notes

Behind That Cream Front Door

Undercover Homeschoolers

Doing Our Own Thing

Time to Unschool



So how did you hear about unschooling? Have you always been unschoolers? Maybe you’ve drifted from one educational method to another just like us? I’d love to hear your story!

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Sue Elvis

I'm an Australian blogger, podcaster, and Youtuber. I write and speak about unschooling, parenting and family life. I'm also the author of the unschooling books 'Curious Unschoolers', 'Radical Unschool Love' and ‘The Unschool Challenge’. You'll find them on Amazon!

7 Comments

  1. Hi Sue, I loved podcast 93. Your unschooling story. I went through a lot of the same experiences you did on our homeschooling journey with our 4 children. I was often unsure of myself and I think I wasn’t brave enough until my 4th child Nathan that I could unschooling him. I had often thrown around the idea but never brave enough to try. Also because my 2 youngest Emily and Nathan are on the Autism Spectrum, I was scared. I’m glad Nathan and I dove into this Unschooling method a year ago. He absolutely couldn’t learn the traditional way. I belive that the Lord brought unschooling back to my mind when traditional did not work for him. We are a Christian family belonging to a nondenominational church , so faith is a significant part of our lives. The Lord has guided my steps. Nathan is thriving with unschooling as he is my last child to school. Because of the special needs he has ,he is 18. I will unschool him till he is at least 21 but possibly even 25. Because of his learning disabilities he feels far from comfortable moving on to any type of college education. He wants to wait till he feels prepared. he enjoys the safety of unschooling apart from judgemental eyes that would wonder why a very bright boy of 18 isn’t preparing for college yet. Thank you Sue for your kind and encouraging words and for giving this veteran homeschooling mom of 12 years the courage to once again follow a new path for a very special child. Happy Easter to you and your sweet family as well. Nancy

    • Nancy,

      It’s so good to hear that you have the confidence to ignore outside expectations and give Nathan the time he needs before moving on to something like college. Different children have different needs but not everyone sees this. You are so right: It does take courage to walk a new path. I’m glad we can do this together, encouraging and sharing with each other. Thank you so much for listening to my podcast and then stopping by to share your own unschooling story.

      Happy Easter to you and your family! May God bless you!

  2. That was really delightful, Sue! My youngest is turning 10 next month, and my oldest will be 20 this summer. It is hard to believe they are so old!

    I had big plans to do classical home schooling, but it was clear, well before my oldest was 5, that classical schooling, for me, was much more about my superior home schooling skills than about helping my little boy grow! Ah well, we did a lot of unit studies and themed weeks based on what the kids were interested in. Well before we had special needs diagnoses, I realized pushing on a schedule was bad. God really used it to break down a lot of my ideas about what success meant. I got more and more relaxed as I went along, but I also had to learn a lot of specialized teaching techniques because of the different special needs my kids had.

    About the time the oldest was nearing high school, I was in a co-op with a lot of classical home schoolers who were really into “rigor.” I finally realized that I just didn’t care about the academics. I just wanted them to be good and loving people.

    And then two things happened: the first was that I discovered that my kids, in doing their own thing were academically ahead of the others, and the second, sadly, was that most of the parents got tired of constantly pushing their kids to work, put them in school.

    I still don’t consider myself an unschooler, because I feel I have to do things with my special needs kids in a structured way, but I get a lot of encouragement for my way of home schooling from your blog1

    • Wendy,

      Thank you so much for sharing your homeschooling story. Oh yes, when our kids do ‘their own thing’, they thrive. I spent a long time trying to impose a method of education on my kids before I realised that kids are naturally eager to learn if they are free to do it in their own way.

      “I feel I have to do things with my special needs kids in a structured way..” Seeing to the needs of our kids and helping them learn in the way that suits them best is what it’s all about, isn’t it? It doesn’t really matter about labels.

      Thank you so much for listening to my podcast and for your kind feedback. I always love chatting and mulling over ideas with you!

  3. Amazing podcast Sue. We are a traditional catholic young family of four from Sourthern Spain. My husband is working but I haven’t had a chance to do it since I got married four years ago and pregant very soon. My little girl is almost 3 and baby Marcos is just 10 months. We return a year ago from Oxford where we try a working experience and before of that eight months we were living in Santiago de Chile which has given to us an open-minded personality.
    What do you think as a catholic about kids sexuality and unschooling? About self-regulation?
    We have been going to an alternative space of respectful accompaniment of children and family development with an awesome environment full of materials that we do not have at home for far, nature and some people to share with: parents and diferents age’s children that do not go to school (More because of my necessity of socialice than my kid’s). They almost all are Mother Earth people, naturalists, even muslims…Summer has arrived and some of the kids (the older is 7) are used to going innocently naked.
    My kids are still very young, but I do not want them to see that as normal.

    What do you recommend me? Do I continue going there, where we grow and enjoy a lot appreciating everything very much, but they have risen the share considerably and I’m too worry with our necessity of earning money…so much that we have been thinking about taking Teresita and Marcos to a school and nursery on September? Here we do not have many chances or activities for unschool as we do not have much money to live at the country and in the city everything is closed for children during mornings because they all are at school…
    Well, thank you very much anyway….and congratulation for your lovely family history!!

    • Teresa,

      I’m glad you enjoyed listening to my podcast!

      It must be difficult balancing the need to earn money with the need to look after and educate your children. Yes, we have to look at all the possibilities and see what suits our families the best.

      Unschooling doesn’t necessarily involve a lot of expense. And we can unschool anywhere country or city. There are always lots of learning opportunities for our kids wherever we live. Because your children are so young perhaps you are concerned about finding suitable friends for them, places you can go together for social occasions?

      It can be hard to find a group of like-minded people that we feel comfortable with. Our family has belonged to a number of groups where people are very friendly and welcoming, but they are different from us in many ways. We haven’t even found any people just like us in Catholic groups because none of our Catholic friends unschool.

      Other people we socialise with might have different ideas to us about such things as sexuality. Is this a problem? I have found that my kids, even though we are unschoolers and we don’t make rules or force our opinions on them, choose to live their lives in line with the Church’s teachings. They appreciate the reasons and the love behind those teachings. Unschooling isn’t really about having the freedom to do what we like. Rather, it’s about having the freedom to choose to do what is right.

      Of course, when we love our faith we want our kids to love it too. We can’t, however, force them to love it. All we can do is strengthen our family’s bonds by loving each other unconditionally, living our faith, showing our kids how much we love it and how important it is to us, inviting them to share it with us…

      We can be friends with people who are very different from us. Despite not being the same, we can still share and learn from each other. Unschoolers all share such things as respectful parenting which binds us together regardless of such things as religion. I guess you might be worried about your children observing what other people do in your group, and thinking it is okay for them to do the same when it might not be in line with the Church’s teachings? I wonder if the same problem will occur if your kids go to school. I’m not sure what the answer is. However, I do think your children will be most influenced by your family’s beliefs and lifestyle. You are the most important people in your children’s lives.

      Teresa, thank you so much for sharing your family with me. It’s been good chatting with you!

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