Author: Christina Kauffman

Bowen and his beautiful ways. We woke up this morning with him wanting “cozies” and milk followed by watching cars on my phone. He loves staying in bed long after we awaken. It was earlier than usual and I was tired, so I stayed in bed while he played quietly at the lego table. I could hear his little hands and mind at work, while drifting in and out sleep. It was heaven.

Later in the day we took a trip to get a couple overdue vaccines. He and I were fortunate that he fell asleep early for nap. When he woke up it was time to go. I told him calmly that we get to take a car ride to the doctor for shots and he was keen on the whole idea. He asked for a diaper change and patiently waited for me to get his shoes on. He was excited about the ride, and marveled at the outside world as we drove through town. When it was his turn he sat in my lap and nuzzled tightly into my chest. He was completely still, and I felt the trust he had for me in that moment. I could feel that he understood I was taking care of him. It melted me. What an incredible person.

Today Rhys showed me how to forgive easily without resentment. Finn had gone too far with a joke and it made Rhys feel powerless. After Rhys was given a little space, he quickly received his brothers attempts to mend. They were back to silly laughing in no time.

Finn is teaching me how to be in that place where you know you want something new, but you’re not quite sure what it is. I see him trying to expand his interests with art or play. I can see it’s a stretch out of his comfort zone. I tam curious how this will unfold.

Bo is constantly reminding me how to be in the moment. He’s so involved with his whole self in whatever he is doing. It is beautiful to witness.

I surprised myself, when I heard my kids’ disagreement intensify, voices raised, and whole bodies moving quickly to get a point across. As they headed into ful argument mode I thought: “Oh interesting, how are they going to get through this one?” A couple seconds later I realized what I had just thought. At that moment I knew a powerful shft had happened for us as a family.

To be totally honest, I had the opposite response not long ago. In my conventional parenting days my kids fighting was of top concern to me. I was worried they’d hurt each other, or it would grate on my nerves. Sometimes I was too tired to break up a fight. The anticipation of seeing how they would navigate a fight on their own terms was not something i thought would be a perk of Unschooling! I’ve had several interesting little insights about what I look forward to now from an Unschooling perspective. Here are a few:

1). Whatching my kids navigate and grow through having disagreements with each other. Also my husband and I are learning and growing in connection with each other too!

2) Dropping everything to be available to my boys through a meltdown. Understanding over time what contributes to my kids’ spiral to the point of melting down, and helping to take care of those needs throughout the day. When each kid has had plenty of food, rest, attention and cuddles, they in turn rarely hit that point of exhaustion or overstimulation. And if they do reach that point, that’s okay too.

3). Taking our time leaving the house. We leave plenty of time to get ready if we have somewhere to be, and if we don’t have a time commitment, then it takes as long as it takes.

4). Having time with each of them at bedtime. I now look forward to the opportunity to have one on one time with each of my kids, even if its for just a couple minutes.

5). Watching them delight in a favorite show or videogame. Their enthusiasm is contagious!

I surprised myself with each one of these insights. None of them happened overnight, but I did notice the shift when I went from disliking most things on this list, to celebrating, as each one is an opportunity for connection.

I figured my kids’ interest would change over time, but I didn’t know how or when that would be exactly. It’s been temping for me to steer their interests when they seem endlessly engulfed by their current computer game, or favorite YouTuber. Then a small shift happens, they are into a new game, and I settle into a cadence of supporting their new interest.

We got into this cozy rhythem for awhile. This was most of our first year of deschooling. I came to an acceptance of videos and computer games being a big part of our life. I started to like the predicability of what to expect from my kids. So when Seven pumped the breaks on video games and YouTube, I have to admit, I was a bit panicky. I had spent a lot of time working on being okay with this! Now he wants to move on?!

Seven declared one evening, after playing on the computer, that he was going to stop watching his favorite gaming videos and playing so many computer games. I’m honestly not sure what prompted this, but I’m trying to go with his flow.

He’s made some interesting observations during his self imposed break, for example: YouTubers act crazy and do wacky things, and they really care about how many people “like” their channel. They often overreact to get viewers excited, and he’s also been wondering if they are acting that way because they are bored. I think it is interesting how he focuses his attention on who the artists are as people, and wonders about their motivations. I love hearing their thoughts and observations.

He’s trying to get into different things, like cooking or soccer. He said he wasn’t ready to learn how to play soccer when we had him on a team a while ago, but now he’s feeling like he’d like to learn. I’ve been enjoying his insights he’s been sharing. I feel the way I did at the beginning of our unschooling days: excited, but also anxious about what’s to come. And maybe Seven is feeling the same.

Ohhh, I fully embrace the deschooling journey now that I’ve spent time in it. At first, I saw deschooling as a probation period before we could really start Unschooling. I saw it as a list of issues I needed to learn how to let go of ASAP so we could get on with our Unschooling life.

Not only was I not able to do this, neither were my kids. It takes time to adjust. We’d try giving more freedom, I’d let up, then feel the urge to clamp back down. When we started deschooling, my oldest was in a part time theatre arts program, and we found it impossible to completely deschool. That, and a couple other reasons kept us one foot in our conventional lifestyle, and the other in deschooling. I, quite frankly, could not let go until we had a place to cocoon in, to have a place to completely retreat to and to hold our process. And that place finally came when we were able to move back into our newly renovated home that we moved out of for close to a year.  Moving back into our home, coupled with our states stay at home orders during the Covid pandemic has been the perfect recipe for deschooling success for us.

So, back to my own question! What is deschoooling? When described by other unschoolers, it is generally seen as a concentrated time at the beginning of starting out this new parenting/learning style, to give parents and kids a chance to pause and reset. In parents and adults, it manifests as questioning our beliefs, asking the tough questions about why we think, believe, act in a certain way, particularly around education and learning. For kids it tends to look like a lot of down time. For both it can be uncomfortable and unsettling to not have a framework to automatically fall back on when interacting with the world.

When I first started deschooling, it felt like a big to do on my list, that I felt pressure to get right. So, what a perfect opportunity to deschool my beliefs around that! Why did I have it in my head that in order to get to stage B, I first had to complete stage A? Because that’s how our educational system works, right? In order to read big words, you have to start with smaller words. Before 2nd grade concepts you have to start with 1st grade concepts. Before you learn multiplication you have to know addition. You can see this pattern over and over the way classes are taught in grade school, and most college classes as well. And there are some good reasons, I’m not disputing that. But what happens when we create a learning environment where the timetables for school subjects become arbitrary? What if there were no subjects?! We see natural learning unfold!

Learning and life in general is not linear. But boy, are we taught to believe this in so many ways. Likewise, deschooling is not something to check off a list; it’s a way of being in the world that softens our beliefs enough to let in other possibilities. It’s as individual as you are, as your kids are, and as your family is. There are general ideas about how long this intense deschooling time might last, and that’s a month for every year of schooling. That’s a lot of months for us parents who likely made it through all 13 years and maybe more. I’m halfway through that typical timeline, and recently I decided to ditch the idea that I am halfway through deschooling, because I know they’ll always be aspects of deschooling happening throughout the rest of my life. Might as well embrace it and enjoy the view while I’m here.

At one point early on I was already fretting about how I was deschooling. Was I doing it right? Should I be doing more? Less? And what took me so long to get here anyway? I was hard on myself. I had to deschool around the process of deschooling. I like to imagine deschooling as the coziest, plushiest lounger you can possibly imagine. You’re in the perfect position where your whole body is able to relax without feeling the stress of tight muscles or everyday anxiety. Once you are in a state of calm, the information can come in and you have a comfortable place to watch thoughts and new possibilities unfold right before you. It’s not always this straightforward, but I feel like I can move through my “stuff” easier if I can get to this comforting place.

Deschooling is a challenge. And the rewards are immeasurable. The education piece for was much easier for me to make the mental shifts towards Unschooling. It was the mind of my upbringing and educational experiences that have required a lot of focus and energy of me to unlearn and relearn this new Unschooling paradigm.

School was not easy for me. I remember struggling in the younger grades. By middle school I was kind of figuring out how to manage the whole endeavor, and soccer helped me a great deal. High school was another disappointing time, but sports and the options school I went to for my junior and senior years were the highlights of my public school education.

After graduation, I had no idea who I was or what I wanted to do. It was a feeling I felt alone in, as my peers seemed more at ease with the heading off to college routine. There were a few people I knew that were taking a break after graduation, but that option felt just as unsettling as going to college. I panicked and enrolled in the first school that accepted me. My first year was miserable. I thought maybe I had failed at figuring out life while also attending hours of school and a heavy load of homework.

It took me years to realize that my experience in school was not a failure on my part. That’s where the deep digging in into this knowledge, and working to re-write the narrative on how learning comes naturally for everyone. We are all born with an innate curiosity. And how we puzzle through it is unique to each person.

So if I know learning is natural, and I am not invested in my children having academic success, then why is deschoooling hard? Because it takes a long time to unlearn and relearn the fundamentals I have been carrying around for years. It is one thing to know my children are born curious and trusting the process of lifelong learning. But to really feel, in my bones, that allowing kids to follow their interests, no matter how “silly” or “trivial,” well that takes work on my part.

I’ve been mulling over joy in the face of difficult times, and wanted to share. Since being sick with covid, I have been feeling deep gratitude for the big things that may get taken for granted, like being alive, or not having severe (although lasting) cases of the virus. I’m seeing the magic and joy with almost an urgent awareness that each moment is sacred.

Joy is found in the undercurrent of our days. I’ve been finding myself kind of swimming in that space just above the current, where the water is moving, but more slowly and a little unpredictable. I’m reflecting on difficult times in my past, and have found a constant: it’s life’s challenges that have brought about the most growth in me. I think a key element has been losing control in a specific way that has motivated me to do something completely different than I would have done otherwise. My best example is when I sustained a temporary brain injury. I felt completely helpless, and during that time I found Reiki and energy healing. Out of desperation to try anything, I signed up for an energy healing school, and learned quickly that I was going to be dealing with my shit, as the saying goes “you can only heal others to the extent that you have healed yourself.”. Much of the program was inner work, and I worked hard at healing childhood/family wounds. It completely changed my life in ways I didn’t know were possible at the time. The realization that difficult situations can produce the most change has helped me re-story this chapter in my family’s life.

So much good has come out of this time- my husband is spending more time with the kids, and it is amazing to see him sink into unschooling more fully than ever. I feel like our flow is bringing us all closer. I’ve been getting back to healing techniques I learned years ago and they give deep reassurance. I’m resting a lot, refining my ability to be in tune with my needs. The kids are flourishing and continue to amaze me with their insights or complete silliness. I’ve been stepping back a bit, and I’m seeing so much more that has always been in front of me. What a gift: to be able to tap into the love and connection that is already here.

Boredom can be hard. It is equally easy to avoid the benefits of boredom with technological distraction all around. I’ve been working on putting my phone down more, usually at night when I’m tired. I’ve become more aware of my inner life as a result, and it’s lovely to reconnect to this part of myself.

Boredom has crept my kids’ vocabulary. Their favorite go-tos are not as fun for them anymore. Seven was has made attempts to branch out, but he’s quickly been drawn back to what he knows. His brother Five usually follows.

Yesterday Seven wandered in the kitchen and exclaimed: I wanna make something.” What it was he did not yet know. We’ve done some baking in the past; more a set up of the grown-ups involved. Lots of rule following and steps.

So he wandered a bit, then said “I know! Can you get the eggs out?” I took a second to remind myself I need it to let go of the outcome if anything productive for my kids was going to happen. So we brought out the eggs and I let go of an agenda, while the boys went to town.

They experimented with herbs and spices, and different containers to put the eggs in. They figured out how to crack eggs and separate the yolk on their own (which included tons of egg everywhere), I showed seven how to use the microwave when he was getting impatient with me not being able to help him straight away. The result was them being ecstatic about their new egg concoctions. And being the taster, I have to say they found some creative ways to make the egg yolk so it was perfectly soft, but not too runny. My favorite.

When their dad got home they immediately crowded it around him and excitedly told him about their egg adventures. At that moment I really understood how important it is to almost always, if possible, let the children lead the way.

Seven continues to ask to cook, because it “makes the boredom go away.”. I hope to draw back on this experience when my kids are in a funk and I start getting concerned about how to help them out of it or what fun thing could I introduce them to. Instead, it’s okay to take a pause and see what happens.

When I am in tune with my family and myself, I notice all the little changes that have always been happening, but now I am more aware. Once in awhile a big change comes, seemingly out of nowhere, but my kids have been working and learning along the way, although this may not have been obvious to me. And then poof! Out of my child’s mouth comes some knowing wisdom, leaving me both speechless and so happy to be there to witness these changes.

Tonight, after my littlest was asleep, I came into my orders’ bedroom to hang with them. When I came in Seven said: “mommy, maybe during my free time in the day I can make YouTube videos, or spend time with you.”. I was like yes, I love it! He proceeded: “I’ve just been really tired and I need to get to sleep, and I know you like spending time with me, so I’m like yeah! But then we stay up and I just don’t fall asleep until it’s way later. I need to sleep now.” (The nights I come in we do stay up later, and eventually his dad comes in and he falls asleep then. He feels safer with dad after watching scary Halloween videos). So we called his dad back in and the four of us snuggled until the boys fell asleep.

He came up with a solution to a thing that was no longer working for him, and he recognized my feelings, but also needed to take care of his needs. And he recognized his tiredness! These are the real life skills I can only hope he is learning through making his own choices and being treated with respect. All those times I respectfully acknowledged his feelings, or communicated my needs clearly, he had been paying attention and learning, whether I realized it or not! I love watching their growth in real time.

There are many moments in a day that are so precious to me. I feel like unschooling has helped me see how special this time actually is. When I see my children directing their own learning and growth, I feel giddy and peaceful at the same time. I know that trusting them to lead the way is the best thing I can offer to them on this path.

The moments I love are when I drop what I am doing to take Two for a walk to see “Chimas yights!” after dinner or when I rush over to see a funny part of Spongebob, relishing my children’s spontaneous delight. Or when Seven has been playing a game for hours, and I finally get a chance to sit while he shows me what he has been working on. When Five wanders over to the stove to tell me his thoughts on the binoculars he wants for Christmas, and then asks what I want.

I enjoy the sounds of our home slowly coming to life in the mornings, as Two has a big smile and hugs for his brothers, first thing. Or the sounds of whispering in the bathroom after Two is asleep, and the olders asking each other “would you rather” questions while they brush their teeth.

I used to be afraid that these moments were fleeting; now I understand them as part of the continuity of our life long relationships with each other. Which helps me cherish them even more.