Kids and Computers
Each member of our family has a computer of her own which she is allowed to use without any restrictions. This doesn’t mean we spend all our time looking at screens. No, we like to do other things too like…
Why We Should Praise Our Kids
Praise is a tricky topic, isn’t it? Do we praise our kids or not? Many unschoolers and parenting experts warn us to stay well away from praise. We shouldn’t manipulate our kids with our words, should we? And will…
Parenting Without Fear
Last Monday, as I walked into the supermarket ahead of my daughter Charlotte, she stopped and said, “Wait!” She waved a hand towards the flower display next to the shop entrance. “I’d like to buy you some flowers. Which ones…
Time for Some Strewing
Sometimes life provides my children with more than enough learning experiences without any help from me. A bushfire might be burning on our doorstep, giving everyone a unique learning opportunity. At other times, ordinary life provides one question after another for us to answer: We might…
A Beginning of the Year Unschooling Challenge
Hey friends, here’s a challenge that’s from my upcoming new book, The Unschool Challenge! Maybe doing the challenge is a good way to begin a new year of learning adventures! We all know learning doesn’t just happen during the official…
Why This Unschool Mother Doesn’t Care
He who doesn’t care has more power. I heard those words somewhere, scribbled them into my journal, and then pondered them. Are they true? Should we care? Or are there some things we shouldn’t waste our time caring about? One thing I do care about is my son Callum and his passion for cars. Recently, I’ve become very interested in classic cars, not just because talking about them connects me to Callum, but because they are fascinating. The other day,…
The Unschool Fangirl Returns
I’ve been a guest on other people’s podcasts, but I haven’t made a new episode on my own Stories of an Unschooling Family podcast for many months. But that has changed. Yesterday, I plugged my mic into my MacBook and started talking. (Unfortunately, I forgot to check my GarageBand settings, but I think the audio quality is still okay.) What did I talk about in episode 207? Will I make more episodes? What does the title mean? This week, I’m…
Unschooling: A Lifestyle of Curiosity, Flexibility, and Trust
I’m a Lady Fixing the World! Cecilie Conrad kindly invited me to join her and Sandra Dodd for Season 2 of her podcastThe Ladies Fixing the World. We recorded our first unschooling conversation together in November 2024 before life got extra-busy with Christmas, and it has just gone live! The audio version. Here’s the audio version: You can also listen via your favourite podcast app. The Video Version If prefer watching, you can see us on YouTube: The…
Examining An Unschooling Life
I drop a peppermint teabag into my favourite glass mug, add boiling water, and carry it to the living room. Opening the blinds so I can see the sun as soon as it rises, I settle on the sofa with the cat, who keeps trying to sit on my head. I grab my journal and chew the end of my pen while I think of the past week. While my family sleeps, I review my week in the pre-dawn Saturday…
Why I’m Content to Be a Blogger and Not an Instagram Influencer
I deleted IG. What will I do without social media? Can I blog without it? Is it okay to forget my silly dream of being a famous, unschooling influencer?…
How to Beat Time Who Jolts Us Forward Without Permission
Time moves us forward without our permission. If we don’t want to look back with regret, we should stop worrying about the future and focus on the present moment, extracting joy from each unschool day before it disappears.…
Who Would We Be Without Unschooling?
Unschooling changes parents as well as kids. We learn, face life’s challenges with courage, soak up the joys, do things we never expected. We grow and become different people from those we were when we first set out on our homeschooling adventures. Who would we be without unschooling?…
Some Strange and Interesting Bookish Questions
If you could have only half of a book, would you prefer the first half or the second one? My daughter Imogen and I discuss this question after I tell her a friend gave me too much money for a copy of one of my Angels novels: “She gave me enough money to buy three and a half books.” Imogen and I imagine putting three books into a pile and adding half a book. Which half would my friend want:…
My Unschooling Teenagers’ Typical Days
On a typical day, my daughter Sophie (16) gets out of bed soon after 5 am. By 6.10 am, she’s heading out the door…
Can Unschooling Be a Christian Thing to Do?
When a child has been controlled all her life, she just might grow into the kind of adult who says, “Nobody is ever going…
Passing on Our Fears to Our Kids
How do you feel when your children try things out in public with everybody looking on? Do you admire their courage and say, “Have…
How Unschooling Doesn’t Guarantee a Fairytale Life
Yesterday evening, like all Sunday evenings, my kids who live locally came to dinner. Six of us gathered around our dining room table, savouring a meal cooked by my husband while enjoying the usual end-of-the-week lively catch-up conversation. There was a time when we dreamed that all our children would buy houses on the same street as our family home.…
Unschooling Is Carried by Conversations
Dinner tables, car rides, bedtime chats, and café corners are the real places where unschooling lives and grows. Conversations—often unscheduled, informal, and unplanned—can become the central structure of a learning life. Gathering at the Dinner Table In our house, we never met for breakfast or lunch. Those were meals where people ate what, where and when they liked. But we…
Is It Working? Wrestling with Doubt in Unschooling
A grey day arrives that completely blots out the memory of all the preceding good days. We feel overwhelmed, tired, worried and lost. We wonder why we ever decided to unschool. A puddle of doubt about unschooling forms around us. What do we do? Cecilie, Sandra and I are discussing unschooling doubts and sharing our experiences in episode 10 of…
Losing Time
I’ve been reading a book called A Time to Die by Nicholas Diat, who visited eight monasteries to talk to the monks about the experience of death. Here’s something that caught my attention: One monk described how he cares for the old and sick, and how he has to guard against doing things in a routine way, trying to complete…
The ‘Risky’ Business of Trusting Children
Trusting children to make their own choices sounds risky enough when it applies only to education, but what if you extend this trust to other areas of life? Will children decide they don’t want to go to Mass or eat healthy food? Perhaps they will want to watch inappropriate movies or play computer games all day. Some parents decide they…