A Day in the Life Without School

It's back! Once a month-ish. This is what it looks like, for us. Also, the zoom link for the February Call (scroll right to the bottom for it).

Hello lovely people,

this is my Friday Post, finding its way to your inbox on Saturday! (I figured I would wait a day between my last post and this one so I’m not flooding you with writing.)

On Thursday, I wrote about holidays and struggle and needing a break from a break - if you missed it.

I’m going to do something a little different today. Instead of my regular weekly post, I’m doing a Day in the Life post.

We were chatting on IG this week about putting our children online, and how we all work to reckon with this. I used to do a weekly Day in the Life on instagram, but I don’t really feel comfortable with that anymore.

So for now, I’m going to offer monthly DITLs on here and partially paywall them for privacy (I’m saving them all under DITL on my Homepage).

This DITL was yesterday (Friday), and I wasn’t really planning to do it at all, but figured it was as good a day as any!

The past few weeks, I’ve been reckoning with how tough the combination of demand avoidance and the need for predictability are, when combined. All three of us experience both, to various extents.

The way unschooling plunges you in a world of “you can do whatever you want” is frankly, terrifying for us. And it often ends up meaning we just reach for whatever is familiar, don’t necessarily move out of our comfort zone, and end up feeling a little bit lost and unmoored. Sometimes it means utter paralysis. Other times it absolutely works in our favour because it opens up so many ways of being and doing and learning. It’s a double-edged sword, basically.

Enter the need for a degree of rhythm or structure. I have slowly recognised this helps us anchor our days, and I’ve also come to terms with the fact that it often needs to come from me, even though I might resist it, or I might be wary of making decisions that aren’t co-created with my children.

So we are always trying to balance a degree of structure, with the ability to also be very autonomous. Sometimes structure is needed IN ORDER to be autonomous! It’s counter-intuitive but it works, for us. (Also, there is a conversation to be had around how much structure is an adult need, or is a need we are seeing through an adult lens - but perhaps this is for another day!)

So our Friday went a bit like this:

(For those new here, my children are P (12 years old), and L (9 years old). We have been living outside of the school system for 4 years now.