Exploring Unschooling

Pam Laricchia
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Explore unschooling with Pam Laricchia, Anna Brown, and Erika Ellis. Helping parents figure out how to apply bigger picture unschooling ideas in their everyday lives.

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    EU409: Foundations: Baby Steps

    For this week’s episode, we’re sharing the next Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Pam and Anna, Baby Steps. So often, when we’re faced with a challenge or making a choice, we don’t need to have the full picture or the final answer in order to move forward. By taking a baby step in the direction that makes sense to us or to our loved ones, we can learn more about the situation and see how it feels. One baby step can lead naturally to the next. As we keep communicating and checking in, we can find a path forward that works for everyone. We hope today’s episode sparks some fun insights for you! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE QUESTIONS Does it feel like many of the day to day choices you’re making are urgent? Are they really? If you haven’t listened to episode 8 yet about Anna’s mantra, “there’s plenty of time,” I highly recommend it. Thinking back, can you remember a time when you felt pressured (often by ourselves!) to make a decision quickly yet the better choice wasn’t immediately clear? Can you think of a series of baby steps that might have helped? Feel free to get creative! Is there a choice or a goal you’re considering right now that feels big? You don’t need to know exactly how you’d get there, but can you see a baby step in that direction? Can you do that and see what happens? Are you more of a leap-first person or a firm-footing person? What about your partner? Your children? How can understanding that help you communicate with them about future decisions? TRANSCRIPT PAM: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. We are happy you’re here exploring relationships with us, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world. If you’re new to the podcast, we encourage you to go back and listen to the earlier episodes. We started with some foundational relationship ideas in these first dozen episodes and have really enjoyed how they are building on one another. And if you’ve already been enjoying the podcast, please share it with the people in your life that you think would benefit from contemplating these ideas. It’s super easy to share. Just send them to pod.link/livingjoyfully. From there, they can pick their favorite podcast player and it will take them right to the show in that app. Thanks so much for helping us spread the word. And so, this week, we are going to talk about the idea of baby steps. When we’re trying to make a choice, so often, we don’t need to make the big, ultimate decision right now. This builds on the idea that there’s plenty of time, which we talked about a few weeks ago. These are the threads that are moving through them all. So, maybe we’re not yet sure whether we want to pursue the end goal that we’re considering. When we find ourselves here, what’s often missing is more information or experience. So, taking the next baby step in that direction can give us more information to help us make that bigger picture decision. Sometimes we need to take quite a few baby steps before we get a keen sense of what we ultimately want to do. Or, maybe our partner or child wants to do something that stretches our comfort zone. Chances are, we don’t need to make a yes/no choice immediately. Staying open and curious, which we talked about last week, can help us take the next baby step in that direction and just learn more about what it entails and how it feels. It can also give us a better understanding of why they’re wanting to go in that direction and some experience that can help us better explain our perspective. We’re learning more about them and we’re learning more about ourselves. That deeper level of self-awareness and having a better grasp of the language around their goal, now we can have more meaningful and connected conversations with them. There’s just so much we can learn when we try just that next baby step, isn’t there? ANNA: Oh my gosh, yes. And it really is the natural extension of last week’s discussion on being open and curious. When our partner or child brings us something they want to do, sometimes if we don’t see the whole path clearly, we’ll just shut it down. At the first thought of resistance, we’re just like, “No, that doesn’t sound doable.” But if instead we can ask some questions and start walking in that direction, we learn so much more about each other and also about the task at hand. What does it really mean? What is it really going to entail? We don’t have to commit to that end goal, like you’re saying, right away. Taking that first step helps us learn more and keeps us connected. PAM: Yeah. Yeah. So, I have a story to share about taking baby steps and stretching my comfort zone, that, looking back, I do remember fondly. It’s an example of how we don’t need to make all or nothing decisions immediately, and how choosing the next baby step does not mean that you’ve committed to a big yes right now. So, this happened years ago now, in the aftermath of a big January snowstorm. My daughter was maybe 13 or 14 and we had tickets to see a concert in the city about an hour away. So, that morning, the snow was falling heavily and I was sure they’d cancel the show. People were being told to stay home if possible. I was looking forward to settling in and hanging out around the fire in our wood stove. My daughter had been looking forward to the show and was understandably disappointed. I told her that I was pretty sure they’d reschedule the show. So, she wouldn’t miss it. It would just be postponed. She kept checking the website. And by early afternoon, they announced that the show was going to go on. Obviously, she wanted to go and I wanted to stay home. I imagined all the hurdles in our way. And it seemed like way too much work, yet I could see her immense disappointment and I chose to shift to being open and curious about the possibility. And though I couldn’t yet muster a, “Yes, let’s go!” I did manage to take a baby step to meet her with a maybe. Though the snow had now stopped falling, I explained the obstacles I saw and that I was willing to try the next baby step and see how it looked. If it looked okay, we’d try the next baby step and the next, and she agreed. So, step one was, clean off the car and shovel enough of the driveway to get out by our planned departure time. And we did it, even after the snow plow went by and created another curb of snow at the end of the driveway that we had to dig through again. So, step two, is our local rural road plowed and safely drivable? Once we could peek out and see the road, that was a yes, too. Step three was pack the car with extra hats and mitts and snacks in case we get stuck along the way. Done. By the time we pulled out of the driveway, it felt like we were on quite the adventure. I was rather surprised we’d actually made it this far, but there was no point that said, “Stop,” so we kept going. Step four, as we slowly drove into the city, I reminded her that if the road or the traffic got bad, we would turn back. Even in her excitement, she was fine with that. It turned out that though the roads were snow-covered, they had been plowed, so it wasn’t deep, and traffic was very light. Slowly but surely, we made our way into the city. Step five, we pulled into the venue parking lot. We were both so surprised to find ourselves there. It was almost surreal. I can still remember the feeling. So white and quiet outside. And inside, the concert turned out to be a very intimate show. The band thanked those who showed up and really connected with the audience as they played. It ended up being a pretty magical night. I remember that day vividly because it was a great reminder that, when I’m feeling overwhelmed, when I’m feeling like I need to make a big yes/no choice, taking baby steps and looking around after each one to see what’s up and see how I’m feeling can be a really helpful way for me to move through it. I could acknowledge both my discomfort and her enthusiasm, holding both of them gently in my hands. And baby step by baby step, explore whether we could find a path forward that worked for both of us. And that said, sometimes we don’t have the capacity for that, and that’s okay. Sometimes we start out and come to an impasse. That’s okay, too. But sometimes we find a path of baby steps that works out. And over the years, that happened way more often than I expected. That inspired me each time just to give it a shot. ANNA: Just to give it a shot! Oh my gosh. I love that story. And I think what I want to highlight is that by being open to those next steps and communicating along the way, you stayed on the same side. You were a team. You were solving it together. You were traveling those next steps together. And you could have shut it down with a no saying, it’s just too snowy, which really wouldn’t have been that unreasonable of a reaction. But most likely, it would’ve led to some kind of rupture, even beyond the disappointment. Maybe even a slammed door

    18 min

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    The Childhood Redefined Summit is 10 Years Old! And Retiring.

    Links Learn more about the CR Summit. Join the Living Joyfully Network to access the Summit (free month). Show Notes Hi! It’s Pam here. I just wanted to pop into the podcast feed to give you a quick update about the Childhood Redefined Unschooling Summit online course. Ten years ago, Anne Ohman, Anna, and I released the Summit into the world. And after two amazing in-person events, we realized we wanted to offer these ideas more widely, which led us to build an online course version. Over the years, we have received such beautiful feedback from participants. And while we celebrate its ten years in the world, we have also made the decision to retire the Summit on June 1. With that in mind, we want to give everyone one last opportunity to pick it up before we close the doors. We are offering it for only $50, hoping to make it available to anyone who in interested. It was such a meaningful project for us. If you’re unfamiliar, the Childhood Redefined Summit is a deep dive into the personal work that embracing the unschooling lifestyle invites us to do. We turn inward with an eye to better understanding ourselves and our children. This inner work helps us embody the concepts that deepen our relationships and strengthen our understanding of unschooling—and life.The Summit has more than fourteen hours of video content, which are divided into bite-sized pieces so you can watch and absorb them at your convenience. The content is also available in audio and text formats so that you can engage with it in the way that works best for you in the moment. Everything is downloadable and yours to keep.We shared this announcement in the Network last week and a long-time member shared their experience of the Summit: I love how it’s organized to make sense both sequentially and as a reference. Initially, I watched the videos straight through along with the cohort I was in, returned to specific ones as things came up that I wanted to steep in, then I downloaded the audio file of ALL the talks and have listened to those on and off through the years. It’s divided up thematically with a host of talks on specific topics under each theme. I’ve returned to some of those numerous times over the years, and re-discovered others that again felt more relevant as I or my children reached another stage of development. (Even just now, as I’ve not opened the Summit in many months, as I scrolled through the table of contents, I was pulled in by Anne Ohman’s “IN-tuition” talk, and it was so inspiring to return to!) I’m excited again to re-listen! $50 is a steal! It was well worth it at the original $250 price.(And as I’m typing this I’m remembering that I actually printed up the transcripts of all the talks so I could highlight and annotate.) Anna and I would like to thank everyone who embraced the Childhood Redefined Summit over the years, and who have added their voice to this beautiful movement. You can learn more about the Summit here. And note that the Summit course is hosted inside the Living Joyfully Network. Once you join, we’ll send you the link to purchase the Summit for only $50. Join the Living Joyfully Network here. Remember, the first month in the Network is free! And if you choose not to stay, that free month is plenty of time for you to download all the Summit course content. As I mentioned earlier, it’s yours to keep. Not that we want to encourage you to leave the Network! We think it’s an amazingly supportive community for people who are keen to explore this kind of transformational inner work. That said, we know not everyone is looking for community, and we want anyone who’s interested in experiencing the Summit to be able to get it before it goes away. So, the free month trial works out really well in this situation too. Wishing you a lovely day!

    4 min

  3. 7 MAI

    EU408: A Field Guide: Challenging Our Beliefs About Learning

    We’re back with the second episode in our new series on the podcast, in which we’re working our way through Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. Today, we’re beginning our exploration of the deschooling phase of the journey with stage six: Challenging Our Beliefs About Learning. Deschooling has several aspects, and this is one of the big ones. We may carry many beliefs about the way that school is connected to learning and the way we expect children to learn. In order to challenge those beliefs, we dug into five truths about learning: teaching is not a prerequisite for learning, curriculum is unnecessary for learning, children are always learning, learning is fun, and learning is not hard. Once we start to question our existing beliefs, many of these new truths come to the surface. And they really build on each other until we’re living in a whole new paradigm! We loved diving into learning and we hope you find this episode helpful! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE Pam’s Substack article, “But if they don’t go to school, how will they learn?” Learn more about Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT PAM: Hello everyone, I am Pam Larrichia from Living Joyfully and today I’m joined by my co-hosts Anna Brown and Erika Ellis.  ANNA AND ERIKA: Hello!  PAM: So we are back with another episode in our Field Guide series. We’re working our way through my book, The Unschooling Journey, A Field Guide, which is framed around the hero’s journey and it’s a weaving together of myths, contemporary stories, and just tales from my own journey. In our first episode, if you haven’t listened to that yet, you can go back, we dove into the first phase of the unschooling journey, which was Choosing Unschooling, in which we answered the call to unschooling. We found our guides, which in a fun twist are so often our children. We navigated past various threshold guardians as we crossed the threshold from the ordinary world into the world of unschooling and moved through our time in the belly of the whale where we came to embrace the curiosity of a beginner’s mind. Now we are firmly in the deschooling phase of our journey, which encompasses seven stages and really does represent the bulk of our transformational work. Joseph Campbell calls this next stage the Road of Trials, which through the lens of unschooling, I have broken into two stages because I experienced them as quite distinct from each other. The first focuses on challenging our existing beliefs about learning and then the second one on those related to parenting. In this episode, we’re going to talk about five truths about learning. And if you’re new to unschooling and this is your first time exploring these truths, you’re likely to be dancing with these ideas more intellectually to just understand what they mean and some of their further reaching implications because it’s just mind-blowing enough to hear these the first time and go what, that doesn’t match with what I’ve known so far. Anyway, if you’ve been unschooling for a while and feel like you already intellectually embraced these ideas, now’s the time to peel back some more layers to build more connections and context around them. You’ll be strengthening your web of understanding with your own experiences, because you’ve been doing this for a while, so building your wisdom. And you are moving towards really believing and feeling these truths in your own bones, owning them for yourself.  All right, after all that preamble, the first truth we are going to explore is that teaching is not a prerequisite for learning. And right off, oh my gosh, there are just so many aspects to this one truth, isn’t there? ANNA: It’s true. And I think it’s so interesting, because all of us can think of so many things we’ve learned without being specifically taught in that one way. And, oh my goodness, just look at babies learning to walk and talk without expert classroom instruction. And yet somehow schools have really sold us on this concept that to learn you need to be instructed by someone. And not only that, but learning happens while sitting at a desk. And let’s throw in some power dynamic, loss of autonomy, a little peer pressure for good measure. But even without all of that soup, the idea that we need another person to teach us in a very specific way is just so limiting. But what’s funny, personally, is that I didn’t want to homeschool in the beginning. I was very resistant because I didn’t want to be a teacher. So that statement right there shows you how deep I was in the idea that learning was about a teacher giving information to a student. I think it was just so baked into my experience and what I’d been told for my whole life. And so even when in my own life, there were all these examples of me learning things all the time as an adult on my own in different ways. But somehow those didn’t count now. It was just so interesting to unpack that for myself.  And watching my kids was really what changed that, with a little point in the direction of observing from John Holt. I could see that I couldn’t even stop them from learning. They were just these little sponges, so interested in taking in everything, turning it around, trying to make sense of it, building context, building their own unique web of learning that we talk about so often. And then I started to kind of deconstruct the whole process.  So, even with the most amazing, well-meaning teachers, and there are so many of those beautiful people out there, if a student wasn’t interested, it wasn’t going to work. And I also read a lot about brains at that time and how we don’t learn well under stress. And that’s when I started to think, is school ever a helpful environment for learning? Does it ever make sense? And I’m just not sure that it does. And I think learning can happen there, but it’s kind of despite the terrible environment, not because of it, not as if it’s an optimal environment.  And like you said, it’s so individual. How does each person take in information? I prefer reading. I’m not auditory at all. David’s much more hands-on and experimental. So, long lectures just wouldn’t hold his attention. He needs to be moving at all times.  There are definitely times I turn to people who know more than me about a particular subject. I love that. It’s fun to see how they approach it, how they move through the challenges. But in the end, their approach may or may not work for me, but I can learn more about them, the subject, and ultimately myself as I’m able to move in and out of that type of learning environment.  I think the big thing here is just as we start to question and observe, ourselves, kids, our partners, see all the different ways that learning is happening every day around us. And it really just opens up such a new world. ERIKA: I love that. This idea is so huge. Once I started thinking about it, it’s like, oh my gosh. And it was one of my biggest paradigm shifts at the beginning of my own unschooling journey was realizing this truth. And I had a lot of fun digging into the word “teaching,” which started to not even make any sense to me anymore.  Once I thought about it, it’s like somebody can say, “Well, I taught these kids how to do whatever.” And it’s like, but did you? You could say that you told them about it, but you really can’t say what happened inside of their brains. And so, I really liked questioning the word “teaching” overall and trying to move to the idea of just learning.  Learning does not require teaching. Learning happens inside of the learner. And having someone teach you could be a way of learning something, but those two are not necessarily connected. And just because a teacher says that they taught people does not mean that they learned it. I know that’s true from my own experience in school and my experience as a classroom teacher in high school. I’ve taught more than high school. I taught music classes and some little kid classes as well.  Everyone is so unique, every individual is so unique. And what I’ve seen is that process of teaching, the way that I would teach makes sense to my brain. It’s such a challenge to try to, what they would call in school, differentiate your instruction in order to meet everyone’s brains. But then the thing that’s missing from that is the interest. And so, the way people actually learn is by being open to learning and about being ready to learn. And so the format is less important. And the teacher is just a possibility. It’s not the only thing. And it’s not the thing that makes learning happen.  I really think that having that experience as a teacher probably helped me get there a little bit faster on this part, because I’ve seen it. And so, I know that the classroom experience can be really frustrating for teachers and students. But I think you’re right, it’s not an optimal environment for learning in any way. Because we’re trying to get every

    1 h

  4. 23 AVR.

    EU407: On the Journey with Lucia Silva

    We’re back with another On the Journey episode! We had a rich conversation with Living Joyfully Network member Lucia Silva. Lucia was previously on the podcast in episode 251, Unschooling as a Lifestyle. She is an unschooling mom of two and she came back to share some updates about her unschooling journey. We talked about trusting our children’s learning journeys, Lucia’s inner growth and mindset shifts, as well as her experience in the Living Joyfully Network and how the community has supported her over the years. It was a really beautiful discussion and we hope you find it helpful! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE EU251: Unschooling as a Lifestyle with Lucia Silva We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT ERIKA: Hello, everyone. I’m Erika Ellis from Living Joyfully, and I’m joined by my co-hosts, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia, as well as our guest today, Lucia Silva. Hello to you all! PAM, ANNA, AND LUCIA: Hello! ERIKA: Before we begin our conversation with Lucia, I wanted to invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, which has really been life changing for me in so many ways. On the Network, we have such great discussions about so many topics. Our community has such a wide variety of experiences, and everyone’s really interested in learning and growing and being intentional with their families. It’s really unlike any other online community I’ve found. Being part of the Network offers powerful support, especially during those moments when fears pop up or if you’re new to unschooling and just need a place where people understand what you’re going through. If you’d like to learn more about the Network and check it out for yourself, you can visit livingjoyfully.ca and click on Network at the top of the page. And we’ll also leave a link for that in the show notes. We would love to meet you. So I’m very excited that we get to talk to Lucia today. I met Lucia on the Living Joyfully Network and have just loved getting to know her over the years. And she was also on the podcast back in episode 251 and shared her journey to unschooling in that episode. I encourage everyone to check that out as well. And we’re excited to dive in for an update five and a half years later, which is wild. So Lucia, we would love to hear what everyone is interested in right now. LUCIA: Five and a half years later sounds like, in the scope of kid time, it’s so long. It’s so long. And then thinking, how long have you been unschooling? Five and a half years still seems really new.  So, it’s interesting to think about those elastic times. And it was fun to see how some things are just so similar. I’m sure you guys see that with your kids. But, wow, I can connect where they’re into the exact same thing.  So there’s four of us. It’s me and my husband, Micah, and my two kids. They’re older now. To respect their privacy, I’m not going to be using their names. And I’ll just refer to them with neutral pronouns. They said I could talk about them in general.  My oldest child is still really into ballet. And that’s their primary passion. And that has remained strong, grown, changed a little bit. It’s not what they want to do professionally, but it is just a primary part of their lives. They’re also still really into reading and drawing and making. They have a great friend group. And they do lots of fun stuff. I just dropped them off at the botanical gardens to hang out with friends this morning. And let’s see, there was one other thing I wanted to mention. I lost my train of thought.  My younger child, back when I originally did the podcast, they were really into building and constructing items out of stuff. And I had not really forgotten, even though we still have a lot of that preserved in the garage. But they’re really into building tabletop games, mostly card games. They’re constantly inventing new games.  We’ve brought a lot of them to the table, done a lot of design. We’ve taken them to little fairs and sold lots of them. And we have game tournaments. They’re kind of based around the Wings of Fire lore, because that’s what their friends were into when they started it. It’s turned into this thing where they have this whole group of friends that are waiting for the next booster pack to come out. But it’s kind of amazing to see connections, from that fascination with construction, like moving pieces, how they fit together.  And now it’s, Mom, I have a new game. And it’s this whole fully formed game mechanics and point values. Now it’s branching out to some things that aren’t just trading card games. They’re thinking about what would be a good family game? But mostly card games. So they’re really into that. They’ve gotten really into fencing and chess, which I think are both similar sort of mental games. And they love talking with Micah about probability problems and stuff like that. They’re also really into philosophy and philosophical debate, or debating anything. So that’s that. And I think when we last spoke, Micah, my husband, was a professor at UGA, and he’s now moved into tech. And along that whole journey, so much of what we’ve gone through in our unschooling journey, I’m putting that in air quotes, because it just sort of becomes your entire sort of life philosophy, unschooling. But that has really been so meaningful for him on his journey of just learning the way his mind works, what his interests are, stuff like that. So he’s still in the research, data field, has gotten really into improv and musical improv with a little group here, and plays music all the time. And I am, I think, still doing a lot of the same things. I like to sew, and I’m reading, and I love following little rabbit trails and researching anything and dabbling about here and there. ANNA: So fun. All the things, but how they all weave together, right? You can just picture the household and the weaving together of all the things. ERIKA: I love connecting it back to the old conversation and seeing how that tracks, because we always talk about that, looking back and seeing how those threads connect together. And it just also makes me think, oh my gosh, kids are all so different, the things that they love and are interested in. You can’t predict it.  And it’s just so interesting. PAM: Yeah, I loved hearing the piece of looking back and now seeing how that is weaving into the things they’re interested in right now, because they can seem very different. Yet, when you look back, you can see the thread that underlies the various things together over time. And that is so interesting, just as a piece of knowledge, just a little bit more understanding about who they are, right? I think that is super cool. Did you want to say something? LUCIA: Oh, just as you were saying that I realized that along the way, I feel like that’s given me, it’s a really important reflection to have when they get interested in something that maybe I’m unsure about, like video games, for example, and thinking, what is happening with all this time? And it’s so easy to see what’s underneath for them. How does this work? How do the team dynamics work? How do I analyze these moves? It doesn’t mean that if you’re not doing that, it’s not important, but there’s always something going on underneath an interest unless they’re  not being attended to, right? But if it’s intentional, just like we’re intentional. And seeing that there is that through line and that intention under it. Oh, and then sorry, one other thing about my oldest kiddo, who’s really into working with kids these days. They’re interning at a Waldorf school and they’ve been babysitting a lot too, which is a job, and they assist in the little kids’ classes at our co-op. There’s something underneath it that’s more like a passion rather than just like, oh, I go babysitting. Looking at the intention they bring to that and how respectful they are of the children, their privacy, what they’re going through and what reverence they have for that job. I mean, there’s all kinds of ways to have a job, but also to look at that as we are spending a lot of time doing that because I’m seeing that it is something that is really important to them to do rather than, oh, they’re working or they’re working without getting paid. PAM: All the different stories we can tell ourselves, right? But when we take that moment to actually dive a little bit deeper, so often we can see those threads. We can see the intentionality rather than the surface story that just, oh, I’m taking them to their job. They’re doing this thing. I don’t quite know why they’re not getting paid. Whatever lenses that kind of automatically bubble up, if we take a minute to just dig a little bit deeper and see what else comes up alongside it, it is really exciting. And it helps, as I think back, just helps with the mechanics too. Like I don’t mind driving them to X, Y, Z because I know the impact and what they’re getting out of it. I’m not just a chauffeur or something li

    1 h 3 min

  5. 9 AVR.

    EU406: Foundations: Open and Curious

    For this week’s episode, we’re sharing the next Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Pam and Anna, Open and Curious. Open and curious is a helpful mindset shift for navigating relationships and challenges. In this week’s episode, we dive into Pam’s mantra and some of the many ways that it has proven to be so valuable in our lives. Being open and curious takes us back to beginner’s mind and allows us to see possibilities and question limiting beliefs that no longer serve us. We hope today’s episode sparks some fun insights for you! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE QUESTIONS How does it feel to think about being open and curious about the people in your life? What do you discover through that lens? Try being open and curious while navigating a conflict this week, rather than jumping right to the solution you have in mind. What felt different? Think about something in your life that you’re feeling stuck around. What bubbles up when you approach it with openness and curiosity? What other possibilities exist? Next time you’re judging something your partner or child is choosing to do as “bad,” play with the question “Who would I be without this perspective? What would I do instead? How would that feel?” TRANSCRIPT ANNA: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. Thanks so much for joining us as we explore relationships, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world. If you’re new to the podcast, we encourage you to go back and listen to the earlier episodes. We started with some foundational relationship ideas and have really enjoyed how they’ve been building upon one another. And if you’ve already been enjoying the podcast, we’d love it if you could leave a rating and a review. That definitely helps new people find us. In today’s episode, we’re gonna talk about being open and curious. This is something you will hear us say a lot. I first heard about it from Pam and I find myself saying it daily at this point. When you think about the opposite, it’s being closed and disinterested, so it’s pretty easy to see why we both love it. I don’t want to move through the world feeling closed and disinterested, and it definitely doesn’t help us solve problems or to connect with the people around us. Being open and curious serves us in our relationships on a lot of different levels. When we’re open and curious about our partner, we want to understand them, what’s important to them, why they see things the way they do. We want to set aside any judgment and really lean into connecting with the person in front of us. When I find myself not understanding something they did or said, I can remind myself to be open and curious about it, to not jump to conclusions, to not write a story, like we were talking about last week. That gives us the best chance to avoid a misunderstanding. And part of being curious is asking questions and listening. PAM: Yeah. I love this so much. I have found open and curious to be such a helpful lens to bring to my relationships. For me, it’s a quick way to get to beginner’s mind, which is a place where I don’t feel like I have to know the answers, and I’m just curious to learn more. I often feel a sense of wonder and a childlike energy when I can get there. And it’s not childish. Childlike. There’s a big distinction. So, when I’m open and curious, I’m attentive and I’m interested in hearing new ideas and new perspectives. I want to learn how the other person is seeing things. I want to learn what they’re interested in and why it lights them up. And, of course, that doesn’t mean forgetting about who I am. To me, beginner’s mind is about understanding that the world is richer than just my story. My story, the one I tell about myself, is definitely a vibrant thread, but it also weaves alongside the stories of the other important people in my life. And it reminds me that their story is theirs to tell and I want to listen. I want to know them, not my version of them. And to take that metaphor just one step deeper, being open and curious reminds me to explore the tapestry of my life, which includes the people I love and care about, not just the thread of my story, thinking it’s the one right way to move through the world. It’s a tapestry of unique people and stories that weave together to create the bigger picture of my life, which leads us nicely into the next aspect that we wanted to talk about, doesn’t it? ANNA: It does. Because being open and curious also really serves us when there’s a conflict. So often, when we find ourselves in a conflict, we have in our mind the right answer, how this needs to resolve for me to be satisfied. And unfortunately, It just rarely works out the way we plan. If we come into the conflict pushing our agenda as the only way, we put the other person on the defensive and we end up spending a lot of time defending ideas back and forth, really rarely hearing the other person’s perspective at all. And if we come into the disagreement with this open, curious mindset that we’re talking about, we aren’t abandoning our ideas, like you said, we’re just remaining open to hearing the other person’s perspective. That energy is felt by the other person, and then they are so much more likely to join us on the journey to understand and figure out options. We’re going to be committed to finding something that works. We’re going to get there faster by remaining open and not tunneling in on our one perspective or idea or what the fix should be. PAM: I know, for me, when I first heard the advice years ago to listen to my partner, it made so much sense. So, when we were navigating a conflict, I listened. But eventually I realized I was still holding tightly to my right answer, and my listening was mostly focused on picking up the pieces that aligned with my solution, right? Everything else just kind of flew by. I truly wasn’t hearing their perspective. I wasn’t hearing their story. I was only taking in what I thought I could use to support my agenda or my solution, that tunnel vision that you mentioned. And unsurprisingly, we often ended up at an impasse that way. Each person trying their best to defend and convince the other that their interpretation of the situation and their proposed solution is a right one. Our conversations were energetically draining and steeped in a power dynamic that definitely strained our relationship. So, once I came to recognize what was happening, I chose to instead try to bring an open and curious mindset with me into our conversations. How are they seeing the situation? What parts of it feel important to them? What parts feel especially challenging to them? Does that make sense alongside what I know about them as a person, all the things we talked about way back in episode three that make them the unique person they are, their personality, their strengths, their weaknesses, sensitivities, all those pieces? And in these more open conversations, with defensiveness down and curiosity up, there was space for me to share my thoughts and perspectives, not with the energy that this was the solution, but as more information to consider. And without that grasping and no longer feeling like the only choices we have are their initial solution or mine, we could often find a third or a fourth or a fifth path forward right through the situation that took each of our perspectives and needs into consideration. So, it turns out that open and curious mindset not only gave me the space to learn more about what was going on, it also gave me more space to get creative in finding a solution that worked for everyone involved. The process is like a muscle that gets stronger with practice. With each experience, where shifting to being open and curious helped us creatively navigate a challenge or a conflict, it became a bit easier to shift the next time, and then the next. Over time, I found myself shifting more quickly from defending myself to trusting that we could find a way through together. Being open and curious just helps me in so many ways, in so many situations with so many people. ANNA: Oh my gosh, yes. I see it in so many different ways and I feel like it’s one of those tools we can cultivate that gives us something to do instead of taking things personally when we’re in a conflict. And that is so key when we want to navigate those conflicts with more ease and connection. And this idea is also really important if we find ourselves stuck or with some limiting beliefs. Often this involves outside voices or some cultural constructs that maybe aren’t serving us. And if we bring that open and curious mindset to it, we can start asking questions. Where are these ideas coming from? Are they serving me? Who would I be without them? What other options can I find? But we can only get there if we open up our minds beyond the parameters that are being applied to us by forces that don’t know who we are or what’s important to us. This allows

    16 min

  6. 26 MARS

    EU405: A Field Guide: Choosing Unschooling

    Welcome to a new series on the podcast that we’re calling A Field Guide, in which we’re working our way through Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. We’re using the chapters of the book as monthly themes in the Living Joyfully Network, which is bringing everything top of mind for us, and got us excited to share our thoughts here on the podcast as well. The book, framed around the hero’s journey, is a weave of myths, contemporary stories, and tales from Pam’s unschooling journey. The monomyth of the hero describes an individual who somehow stumbles upon clues to a truth that lies outside of conventional belief, and begins a quest—physical, spiritual, or both—to understand and eventually embody that truth as their new way of life. Sound familiar? Unschooling unquestionably lies beyond today’s conventional wisdom around learning, parenting, and childhood. And through our journey to understand unschooling, we will learn and grow and change as we come to embrace this new lifestyle. It’s an inner, or spiritual, journey and, by the end, we will see our ordinary world in a new and extraordinary way. And while no two journeys are the same, there are similar stages and characters that you are likely to encounter in some form on your unschooling journey. This is where a field guide shines. In this first episode, we’re talking about the initial phase of the journey: Choosing Unschooling. We talk about the initial call to unschooling, which looks different for different families. We also explore what it looked like to find our guides along this path, describe the threshold guardians we may meet as we cross the threshold into the world of unschooling, and share what it was like to find ourselves in the metaphorical “belly of the whale.” It was a fun conversation and we hope you find it helpful! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE Learn more about Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT PAM: Hello everyone, I am Pam Laricchia from Living Joyfully and I am joined by my co-hosts Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. Hello to you both. And today we are starting a new series on the podcast called A Field Guide. So that means we will have these episodes being released alongside our ongoing foundation series and our journey conversations with other unschooling parents and any other ideas that bubble up for us along the way. We definitely like to go with the flow that way. For this series we’re going to be working our way through my book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. We’re also working through it in the network, our online community, which is bringing everything top-of-mind for us and got us excited to share our thoughts here on the podcast as well. So the book, it’s framed around the hero’s journey. It’s a weave of myths, contemporary stories, and tales from my unschooling journey. The monomyth of the hero describes an individual who somehow stumbles upon clues to a truth that lies outside of conventional belief and begins a quest, physical, spiritual, or both, to understand and eventually embody that truth as their new way of life. So, I think that probably sounds familiar to most of our listeners. Unschooling unquestionably lies beyond today’s conventional wisdom around learning and parenting and childhood. And through our journey to understand unschooling, we will learn and grow and change as we come to embrace this new lifestyle. It’s an inner or spiritual journey and by the end we will see our ordinary world in a new and extraordinary way. My body is full of goosebumps right now. Anyway, as I explain in the book, we’re calling this series a field guide. That’s in the title because while no two journeys are the same, there are similar stages and characters that you are likely to encounter in some form on your unschooling journey. In this episode, we’re talking about the initial phase of the journey, which I call choosing unschooling, and the first stage is the call to unschooling. So our journey begins in the ordinary world. I think most of us grew up absorbing the conventional messages around learning that kids have to go to school because that’s where the trained teachers are and to learn something they need to be taught. The call to unschooling is the moment when we catch a glimpse of this new and mysterious world, that world of unschooling, and all of a sudden our ordinary world looks a little bit different, maybe a little less tolerable. And what I find interesting is that it doesn’t mean that we’ve never heard of it before. You may have heard the term unschooling or homeschooling in passing, but this time for some reason something has caught our attention and we are curious to learn more. That’s the call, the individual call to unschooling. ANNA: I love the reminder that each journey is so unique and really each calling to unschooling is so unique. I think sometimes it can be this really organic thing that just kind of unfolds and other times a crisis point brings us to a place of looking around and seeing that message that, like you said, maybe had passed by our view before but we thought it didn’t apply, and now it does.  I think for us our call came very early on when we realized school would not work for our oldest. She was a deep diver from the start and we could just see that she really wouldn’t be served by kind of going backwards into this slower linear progression that someone else defined as learning.  We had never planned to homeschool. I was aware of it. It was big in our area, but it just wasn’t our plan. And as I started my own deep dive, I found all these different methods. I can’t even remember all of them. There were so many books that I read at the time and there were bits of each of them that I thought were interesting, right? But they didn’t really seem to line up with the child I had in front of me.  And then I read John Holt’s book, Learning All the Time, and it was this full-body yes. Not only did it validate what I was seeing in our daughter, but it felt deeply true to me on another level related to David and me and how we learned all the time and how we like to engage with learning in the world and how unique that was, even between the three of us, that ultimately became the four of us. Our priority was this child who had been through so much, medically, already in her very, very short life because this was probably around three. So, stepping out of the well-worn path really wasn’t an issue for us. Our focus was just on her, on her survival, her thriving, and ultimately it helped us to create an environment where all four of us could thrive, which was, just it was really beautiful. ERIKA: Yeah, I love thinking back to that beginning when I first heard the word, first heard of the idea. And it’s been fun to hear people on the network also share how they got that first call. I just remember, when Oliver was a toddler and a young kid, when he would see other kids playing, he would avoid them. He wanted to be off to the side looking, to have some distance for safety. And then, if all the kids are going to do this one thing, or everyone’s doing this, he would go the other way. I was just like, okay, that’s going to be really challenging in school where the whole thing is to get everyone excited to be doing the same thing. If everybody was doing the same thing, he didn’t want to be there. That has kind of changed over the years. But that was my first little peek into thinking that I don’t know that this is really going to work. And I had this vision of people judging him as not doing the right thing, when to me, he was amazing and perfect and doing everything he needed to do. And so that was where it began for me. I really was just looking around, in a way that I hadn’t before, for alternatives. And I remember learning about different kinds of homeschooling. We didn’t know quite as much about neurodivergence at that point either. But I understood that I can’t make him do any particular thing, it just wouldn’t work. And so, I was trying to support his interests. And then when I heard about the idea of unschooling, it was like, oh, okay, people are doing something that’s completely different than anything that I had experienced as a kid. But also that just made so much logical sense to me. And I thought, this kind of life is something that could really work for him. And then when Maya joined the family, we were already kind of thinking that this was the way we were going to move ahead. And so, it’s interesting to see a lot of us get to some of the same thoughts, but from different angles. I really like that part. PAM: Yeah, for me thinking back to when my kids were young, I did not even know homeschooling was a thing, that it was legal. So, I was deep in trying to help my eldest work with school. I was actually doing a lot of research around neurodivergent and stuff. And there was not as much as there is today. But that’s where I was exploring and trying to work with the schools to try and create an en

    48 min

  7. 12 MARS

    EU404: Foundations: Stories

    For this week’s episode, we’re sharing the next Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Pam and Anna, Stories. Humans are storytellers. We choose the stories we tell about our lives. In every situation, we can come up with a number of ways to tell the story of it, and they’re all a version of the truth. But we get to choose which version resonates the most with us, which one feels better to us, and then that informs our actions moving forward. Getting curious about the stories we tell can be an amazing form of self-care! We hope today’s episode sparks some fun insights for you! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE QUESTIONS What stories are you holding on to about yourself, your partner, and your family? Where are the stories coming from? From your parents during your childhood? The outside voices of society? Somewhere else? Do you see the story in your self-talk? How else might you tell that story? How does it feel to realize that you get to craft your own stories? TRANSCRIPT PAM: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. We are very happy you’re here exploring relationships with us, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world. And in today’s episode, we are going to talk about stories, both the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we assign to other people, meaning what we think they’re thinking. And yes, it can get very messy. Now, this episode is a bit longer than usual, but we think it’s worth it. Stories are intricately woven into our relationships with the people that we love, and that’s because humans are storytelling animals. It’s how we make sense of our world. In the book The Storytelling Animal, How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall, he wrote, “Story is for a human as water is for a fish – all encompassing and not quite palpable.” I love that so much, because story truly is everywhere. And the language we choose makes a profound difference, because the stories we tell ourselves become our self-talk. That is why we want to be intentional about the language that we’re using. And what’s really fascinating is that for pretty much any situation, we can come up with a number of ways to tell the story of it and they can all make sense and all could truthfully tell the story of that situation. And the thing to realize is, we get to choose which one resonates most and feels better to us, which then informs our actions moving forward, which calls back to our conversation in episode seven about how every moment is a choice. Stories and choice are woven together so well, aren’t they? ANNA: Oh my gosh. So much. For me, truly understanding the role of story has been so pivotal. That awareness allowed me to step back and observe, so, where’s this story coming from? Does it feel real to me and who I am in this moment? Is it serving me? And if I’ve held onto it for a long time, why? Why have I held onto that story? And who would I be without it? That’s one I love to think about. Who would I be? What would it feel like? Because there’s an energetic feeling to that. What do I feel without this story that I’m telling about myself or these people in my life? And those questions really can only come about once you take off the veil and realize that everything is a story. Then I get to dive in and have these questions. And through the questioning, I can hone in on what is really working for me. And then I can start to change my story to be more reflective of me as the person I am now, the person I want to be moving forward. And I could see the role of story more clearly and use it as a tool instead of being held hostage by it, which is kind of how it felt before. And for me, like you said, language is such a big piece of that. I try to be so intentional about my language that I use, whether I’m defining some kind of big event or a very simple task in front of me, because in that language is choice. I’m developing the story that informs my day and tells others who I am. And so, that piece is so critical to me, just seeing it for what it is. And then, how do I want to create my narrative? What language do I want to use to describe it? I like thinking about it.  PAM: Yeah. And once you see the scope of it, it’s incredible, because it’s not only the stories that we’re telling ourselves, but it’s understanding that the stories we’re telling others about ourselves and about our lives is the picture that they’re going to draw from. That’s where they’re going to meet us. So, first, let’s look at our self-talk, at our inner voice. Sometimes we don’t think we have control over our self-talk. It just appears in our head, the words over and over and over when we’re spiraling over something, right? But we truly can change that over time as we make intentional changes to the language that we use and the stories we tell ourselves. It is worth taking the time to listen to our self-talk a bit more objectively, to just ask ourselves, is this a helpful story for me? ANNA: Right, because we have the self-talk, and we don’t think we can change it. I think that’s something I believed when I was younger. It’s hard to change or we’re given this story that it’s hard, but I think we may assign it more importance than perhaps serves us. So, I love the idea of really diving into that, because self-talk is just an aspect of our story. It’s no different. It’s no more powerful. And it’s not this boogeyman that it’s kind of made out to be. And sometimes our self-talk is the stories that have been handed to us, perhaps by our parents or past relationships. And what’s so important there is to realize that the stories they told, even if the story is about us, is their story. It’s not ours and we don’t have to take it in and own it. It’s about them, where they were at the time, the stories that perhaps they were handed. And so, that’s the thing, right? We can just keep continuing to hand down these same stories or we can take control of our own narrative. We can look at who we really are and what’s actually in front of us, and then write a story that lifts us up, because that helps us be the person that we want to be and it will inform our next steps in a given situation. And I think that’s what’s so important about it. That’s how insidious stories are. When we carry these stories from someone else, they change our energy and then they inform our next steps, and it keeps us on this same narrow path. But at any moment, we can take back the reins. We can examine the stories that we’re clinging to and we can make choices because yes, Pam, it’s always about choices with me. We’re going to keep bringing that up. PAM: Yes. Definitely. I love the point about realizing that the stories other people are telling about us, especially the stories we grew up with, are just somebody else’s perspective. It’s their story. So, maybe we’ve absorbed the story that we’re too sensitive, or we’re scared to try new things, or we’re very shy. That isn’t our story. It’s their story about us. And we get to choose our own story. Speaking of, it’s also helpful to realize that goes both ways. So, for example, take a moment to consider the stories we’re telling our partner about our day. Maybe we’re more likely to take it as an opportunity to vent. “I am so tired,” or, “So many things went wrong today.” Is that what I want to convey? What will their view of my day look like from my story? Maybe that I’m so tired because I was busy having fun playing with the kids, or deep in the flow of working on a favorite project or knocking a bunch of those tasks off my to-do list. Maybe more things unusual went wrong today precisely because I was working a to-do list that was filled with those iffy jobs, and I got them done in the end. But how will they see my day through my venting words? Probably not as the ultimately satisfying day that I saw. So, understanding that the stories I tell, big and small, live on in the world reminds me to be more intentional. Now that doesn’t mean not venting, but maybe prefacing it with a quick qualifier. Like, “My day was great. I just want to vent about a couple of things.” It means considering who I’m speaking with and choosing my language to better convey the meaning of my story. Is what I’m saying true? Is it how I want to be seen by others? What do I need or want from the conversation? Because stories are the lifeblood of communication. ANNA: Yes. And I think it’s interesting, too, thinking about that. What do I want to get from this story? Because if we do come at our partner with all the things that have happened in the day and then they come back trying to solve things and really we’re like, “Wait a minute, it’s just a story we’re telling about how we had these tough things,” you know? So, keep all that in mind. It’s the lifeblood of communication. I don’t think that’s an overstatement. I think that’s really so true. And so, keepi

    30 min

  8. 2 MARS

    The Unschooling Summit, 2026

    We are so excited to be participating in The Unschooling Summit again this year! We participated last year and it was such a wonderful event that we want to make sure people know it’s happening again this year. To that end, we asked Summit hosts Esther Jones and Melissa Crockett-Joyoue if they’d be up to join us to talk about it! The Details Join other parents from around the world for three days of inspiration and community at The Unschooling Summit. This free virtual event will feature 90+ unschooling experts and advocates. You’ll have access to interviews with some of the top experts and advocates in the field of unschooling and self-directed learning You can take part in live roundtables with seasoned unschooling parents discussing some of the most important topics that come up for unschooling families (teens, neurodivergent children, self-care, community etc) You can attend live, interactive workshops  You can connect with other parents in community networking sessions You can join a closed Facebook group and connect with other parents from around the world who are exploring a different path with their children Whether you’re curious about how unschooling could work for your family, looking for support on your journey or keen to delve into how unschooling can be a tool for social change and personal growth, there will be plenty there for you! The Unschooling Summit takes place online from March 20th-22nd, 2026. You can get your free ticket here! Note that that’s an affiliate link and you help support Living Joyfully when you use it. Thank you!

    16 min
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À propos

Explore unschooling with Pam Laricchia, Anna Brown, and Erika Ellis. Helping parents figure out how to apply bigger picture unschooling ideas in their everyday lives.

Informations

  • Création
    Pam Laricchia
  • Années d’activité
    2016 - 2026
  • Épisodes
    447
  • Classification
    Tous publics
  • Copyright
    Copyright © 2026 · Living Joyfully
  • Site web de l’émission
    Exploring Unschooling

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