Unschooling in Practice: A Beginner's Guide Part II

What it actually looks like, for us.

Unschooling is a practice. We can talk and write about it all we want, but ultimately it comes down to what we actually do in our homes and beyond.

I wrote a little about what unschooling is or might be here, and this post is going to be my version of what it looks like in practice. I will attempt to be brutally honest, because we need more of that!

Unschooling is not a utopia, and my home isn’t either.

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Been going through old pictures. This one was perhaps 2017.

We put consent and noncoercion at the heart of everything

In practice, this means we have been talking about things like bodily autonomy, asking for permission, making mutually sustainable agreements, learning to say no and to accept no, and what it feels like to be pressured into something even if it’s not outwardly obvious, for many years. All of this and more is an ongoing conversation,

There have been so many moments throughout the years when I felt I overstepped or wasn’t aware enough and perhaps used manipulative tactics to get my children to do things, and equally there have been moments when I felt I should have been more grounded in my own values, should have expressed my own opinion more strongly.

All we can do is try. As I head into the teen phase with my children, I’m realising how flawed of a parent I actually am, and how okay that has to be. It’s deluded to believe we can apply perfectionism to something that eludes all attempts at ‘doing it right’, at success, at a perfect outcome.

We don’t really have any rules or limits, but we do make agreements

This is a common question for unschoolers: how do you live without rules?! I actually don’t think it’s that interesting of a question, or that strange of a concept. We all exist in society, and so of course our own freedom is bound by the freedom of others - I suppose you could call this a rule, but really it’s just a feature of being a free(ish) person in the world.

My freedom ends where yours begins, and this is no different at home. There is an understanding that we cannot harm others and that the way we exercise our freedom is not in opposition to the freedom of others, but in communion with it.

In practice, this can be really really hard, because many of us are raised to believe that the way we get free is individually. And perhaps this is why people assume homes need rules that are set in stone - because otherwise how do we reign our children in? Won’t they just do whatever they want? (The horror!).

So no, we do not have top-down, blanket rules other than the understanding that all of us are people whose freedom is bound together and therefore must be co-created.

I don’t necessarily talk like that to my children, and definitely didn’t when they were little - but I explained this more in terms of everybody getting their needs met while also not harming others. This is the goal, even if it’s not always the reality.

Sometimes we make agreements, but they are always negotiable

We have made agreements around certain things, because it’s tough to be re-negotiating everything all the time, and wildly inefficient not to mention unpredictable and dysregulating.

Typically I might come up with an idea to make things run more smoothly, and they will agree to go along with it. Sometimes the idea comes from them, but if I’m honest it’s more likely to come from me. Some of the agreements are: we all bring our dishes and cups to the sink when we’re done, on cleaning day we all help out to the degree we are able to on that day, we turn off our devices at 9pm latest so we can wind down for bed, teeth get brushed every day, we tidy up our mess.

These are some current things we agree to do, but they have changed a lot over time.

Do these things always happen? Hm.. no. But we do regularly sit down and discuss why it might be a good idea to have a shared understanding of what our day might look like, and what that might entail.

Everything is negotiable

Nothing is a rule because everything can be discussed and re-negotiated if we’ve tried it for a while and it’s not working.

Real talk: some things I will push back on, because I too have needs. But I do always listen to my children’s concerns and when something is bothering them or they’re unable to do it, we will agree to drop it or change things. The reality is that this is WAY easier with older children, in my experience. If you have little ones or children who aren’t yet able to stay regulated long enough (often this isn’t really an age thing, but more a developmental/neurodivergent thing!) to have a conversation about difficult things or pain points, it’s ok - I actually don’t think it’s our children’s job to make ALL decisions collectively, and as the caregiver I think it’s absolutely okay for us to make a bunch of unilateral decisions if our children aren’t able or willing to yet.

P and me circa 2018.

Connection comes first

I promised myself I would always put maintaining a connection with my children above anything else.

Is a certain project harming our relationship? We scrap it.

Is unschooling/home ed/school actually making our home less joyful and calm? Have we tried to make it better with no success? Not worth it.

Is my ego getting in the way of just having a fun, loving connection to my child? It’s my job to work on that.

Is my insistence on them learning or practicing a specific thing making them hate it/me? It’s just not worth it.

There are no ‘subjects’ and there’s no ‘school work’

This has evolved with time and taken different forms but in principle, we don’t really talk about subjects and we don’t do any work that could be identified as school work or table work.

This is how our unschooling evolved, it did not start this way. I was WAY more structured in the early days. We spent a few years having a project time in the mornings, and we had periods of doing regular maths work or regular writing practice.

As of right now, my children are 11 and 13. Everything they do is because they have chosen to do it. P (13) takes Math classes, is in a book group and takes ASL classes on Outschool. She has always done the bulk of her learning through reading books, and it continues to be this way. We read Curiosity Chronicles together for history, and we watch documentaries. She learns a ton from Youtube about movies, musicals and theatre, and she’s active in our local theatre. She takes an art class with her SDE centre, where she also does a bunch of other things. She loves to bake and is always looking up and trying new recipes.

L (11) always has one or two deep interests he is spending most of his time pursuing, and frankly it’s hard to get him to do anything else. His absolute priority is play, and a lot of the writing and calculating and learning he does is part of his play - and by play I mean anything from video games to golf to imaginary play with friends to lego. He listens to a lot of podcasts and sometimes audiobooks. (He is working on his own podcast, in fact, all about Ninjago, which i will shamelessly plug). If I’m honest, I wish he would allow me to guide him a little bit more in terms of learning because I can see he has really deep interests in things that could be nurtured more deeply if he wasn’t quite so demand-avoidant! I know there is time though.

Most of this does not fit into a school framework of curriculum and subjects, but it is a life that is full of rich experiences, figuring things out, and learning how to exist in the world and in community.

Instead of school work there is..

I know it’s hard to believe learning can happen through just life, but it does. Instead of structured academic work, or unit studies, or even planned projects, I’ve noticed my children learn in a variety of other ways: reading is a big one, listening to podcasts is huge in our house, and big conversations is another. The kids do a variety of both online and in person activities. If we’re curious, we look things up and watch videos or read wikipedia or find resources online, which is actually a great way to work on media literacy and discernment.

Watching Youtube is big and I don’t always feel super comfortable about it, mostly because I’m not really a Youtube-watcher. But I have to admit how much they learn from short videos they find on topics of interest. And I need to ask myself: why is learning about singing techniques or physics or poetry from a curriculum taught in a classroom more valuable than learning the same exact thing from a Youtube video?! It simply isn’t.

Why is a test to ‘demonstrate learning’ (debatable whether tests actually do this) more valuable than quietly processing what you’re learning or observing, or having a conversation about it, or telling someone else about your interest? It’s simply not.

I support but I don’t direct

There is a fine line between being a cheerleader for your child, between noticing they need support and offering it, and taking over their interests and using them to manufacture learning.

It is the same hold/push that Akilah S. Richards writes about - the sense of when to encourage, when to offer more, when to shepherd them through something tough because we know they will find something good in it, and when to step back or hold still.

This, to me, is such a huge part of my role as an unschooling parent. And possibly one of the most elusive things, rooted in a felt sense of what our child needs and can handle at any given moment.

We are always talking about screentime

This is the actual reality. I know ‘screentime’ is kind of a meaningless word, but the truth is that my kids spend a fair bit of time connected to some device or other, whether it’s messaging friends, playing video games or listening to a podcast. And while that is fine, I also do worry that we are too plugged in and that it encourages isolation and passive consumption.

I believe there is a balance to be had, and it’s my role to support them in finding it. I also believe there are seasons in life when we are more cocooned and seasons when we are out and about so much we forget about our little magical screens.

We have always had some form of agreement around laptops, ipad and video games, and I think this is totally okay as unschoolers. I also think it’s okay not to have any agreements. It’s very personal. As the kids have gotten older this looks more like having a conversation rather than agreeing to something ahead of time and sticking to it.

It’s still so tricky. I personally kind of resent this little device I need to bring with me everywhere, while also recognising it has brought so much good to my life. My children don’t have phones so I’ll need to update you all when that happens! So far my teen has no interest in social media, but she does have several group chats, text chats and a discord she’s in with friends. She chats daily with her friends online - either ones she has made through her online program or ones she made through our travels. These connections are so important to her, and I recognise that.

And yet.. there is always something a little uncomfortable nagging at me about my own dependence on tech, and ours as a society.

I prioritise community

My kids and I aren’t always in agreement here, but I put joining or building small communities, taking part in activities with others, meeting up with friends or having a group of friend over to play/chat at the centre of what we do.

They are probably sick of me telling them that most of life is better with other people, but I feel like it took me decades to learn this and now that I recognise it I have to at least put it out there!!

I realise it’s tough to find like-minded community, but honestly I also think half the battle is just getting out the house and turning up. I loved this piece about just that.

Get out the fucking door

Be the unschooler

I try my best to model the values I wish to impart to my children, and to embody self-direction and consent-based-ness.

I think I have demonstrated that we can learn new things and take up new skills all the time, that it’s okay to not be very good at things but to still enjoy doing them, that it’s okay to start something and not finish it (this I’m particularly good at!), and that it’s equally okay to push through the discomfort to get something done that we have either comitted to, or want to complete.

I hope that I show them ways I put myself out there and do things that feel super uncomfortable, but that I’m ultimately glad I did. I hope that they are watching and that on some level, what I do with my life will stay with them and perhaps they will draw on it if they ever need to.

I feel like this is more powerful than any lecture we can give, any rant we go on (and trust me, I do love a good rant), and anything we try to directly impart.

Throwing spaghetti at the wall

I once saw a tik tok critiquing unschooling by saying that it was a bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping some of it would stick. Her point was that it just isn’t an adequate education because we’re leaving the learning up to the child.

I happen to think this is pretty accurate, and also not a critique at all. I happen to think this is what learning in school is like too, this is what learning and living in general is like.

We start off believing that teaching will directly translate into the child learning the exact thing we intended to teach, in the exact way we hoped they would learn it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Transmission of knowledge, culture and experience is not neat and direct - it IS in fact like throwing spaghetti at the wall. All you can do is cook up a bunch of stuff and offer it, but you have very little control over what will stick, and what it will look like once it has stuck.

So I choose to focus on what I cook, and on offering it up (Charlotte Mason’s feast! Probably one of the best metaphors for learning) - the rest is up to my child.

I hope this helps! Any questions, pop them below. I’m pretty sure there’s a ton of things I didn’t mention!

Fran x