Calm Parenting Podcast - Considering UN-Schooling? A Practical Framework

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

Considering UN-Schooling? A Practical Framework This is an opportunity to customize your child's education around his or her natural gifts, passions, curiosity, and learning style. But there is no single path because each child is different. You will ALWAYS feel like you're not doing enough. You will get judged and second-guess yourself. In this bonus podcast, Kirk provides a helpful framework for your un-schooling adventure. (If you want to talk to Kirk about this personally, email [e-mail] with the word Unschooling in the subject line). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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no multiple step protocols, just simple scientifically validated solutions. The secret is One Skin's proprietary OS1 peptide. It's the first ingredient proven to switch off the aging cells that cause lines, wrinkles, and thinning skin. OneSkin is the world's first skin longevity company. By focusing on the cellular aspects of aging, OneSkin keeps your skin looking and acting younger for longer. Get started today with 15% off using code Kirk at OneSkin.co. That's 15% off at OneSkin.co with code K-I-R-K. After you purchase, they'll ask where you heard about them. So please support our podcast and tell them we sent you. So some of you are considering unschooling. This isn't homeschooling. I've done plenty of podcasts on homeschooling, but this is unschooling. Some of you are already

in the process of homeschooling, or if you have a child and you've realized, man, this child just doesn't fit within the school structure. Maybe we'll do something very different. You've looked into unschooling. And if you don't know what that is, well, you're only listening to this because you probably do know what it is, but there's no great definition for it. I would call it following your child's natural gifts, talents, passions, learning style, curiosity, right? And it's going to look different for every family. So I wanted, I just got off a phone consultation with a couple, and I've been doing this actually quite a bit lately, of helping them structure it and figure out,

okay, how can we actually make this work? So I wanted to provide, this is a short podcast, with a little bit of framework to help you think about this in different ways. And the unschooling path is ultimately the path we took with Casey after trying literally everything else. He went to public school. He went to a private Christian school. Disaster, very strict.

He went to other private schools. He went to Montessori school. Guess what? Montessori didn't even work for Casey. So eventually, we tried homeschooling and eventually kind of eased into unschooling. And I have zero regrets about that. I don't think I changed. The only thing looking back that I think we would do differently is that we would not have spent so much time fighting over things that literally did not matter to our son's future success.

And this is for everyone. There are so many things we do as parents and teachers and in a society that have nothing to do with good character formation, with preparing our kids for life success. We're basically trying to get these kids to be good at being kids and doing kid stuff. And you have to realize you don't have that kind of kid. And if you did, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast. These kids are great in the adult world.

They're made for the adult world. They're awesome at all kinds of other things. But doing normal kid stuff, not really their thing. So the only regret we have looking back is that we wasted a lot of time fighting over worksheets and arbitrary things that just didn't matter. Now, if you choose to unschool and homeschool, it's going to be really uncomfortable because there's no clear guide and each child is completely different and each family is different, right? So the person who's going to be in charge of this primarily, well, it's got to be a good fit for you as well. So you will always feel like you're not doing enough. Always. Because there's always more you could be doing.

You will get judged. You will second guess yourself all the time. Are we just, this kid is not doing, done normal school week in three days or three weeks or three months. Uh-oh. Is he or she behind now? Have we messed him up? Have we sabotaged our child's entire future by doing this weird venture, right? And all the other parents are going to talk about their child going to school and the report card and honors classes and all these other things. And they're going to be like, oh, what is your child doing? You're like, uh, he's making stuff. He's taking stuff apart. He's got a job down the street, right? He set up a lemonade stand. He's doing all these other things,

but he's not always doing traditional schooling type things and it's uncomfortable. So just know that going in. The first and most important part to me is just knowing your child. What are your child's natural gifts and passions? What does your child naturally gravitate toward? What is your child curious

about? What do they love doing? How do they learn best? Observe your kids and how they do things, the questions they ask, what do they gravitate toward? And no, this doesn't include my child just lives sitting on video games all day long doing nothing. You've got to dig deeper than that. That may have happened after your child shut down because school was just too difficult or he felt or she felt so different in school and so they shut down. So don't take it off of that. It's just when they were younger,

what did they just naturally get into? Are they into science experiments? Did you find your child making a mess all the time, breaking eggs and seeing how the yolk ran off the counter? Are they big into reading? Are they building? Do they see in three dimensions? Well, all those things. The beauty of this is all about customizing your child's education for your individual, particular, specific child. That's the beauty of it, right? And here's how I learned about this.

I'm super curious. I love old Russian history for some reason. I don't know why. I'm just curious about it. And so curiosity, my two favorite traits in life are curiosity and compassion. And so I, my two favorite traits in life are curiosity and compassion. And so I'm curious. So I started reading this book about Peter the Great, and I've now read it three times. It is like an 800-page book.

He was a fascinating character. And guess what? His father was the czar of Russia. And often the czars didn't educate their children really well because they didn't want competition. It was wonderful. And so he did have a tutor, Peter the Great did. Before he was Peter the Great, he was Peter the Nothing. And so his tutor would allow him to just do what came naturally to him, what he was interested in.

And he lived his whole life like that. If you read about Peter the Great, he was fascinating, fascinating character, right? And human who, while he was Tsar of Russia, traveled incognito to the Netherlands to learn how to build ships. Why? Because he was fascinated. Because one time he was with his tutor and they're just going out in the countryside and he wandered into this guy's barn and shed. Why?

Well, he's the Tsar's son. He can go wherever he wants. And he found something called a boat. Well, boats weren't known that well in Russia because before St. Petersburg, they didn't really have a good port, warm weather port. That wasn't a great warm weather one, but it gave them access to the Western world. It doesn't matter. I could talk all day about Peter the Great. I love this story. And so guess what? He finds this boat and he's like, I want to find out how to sail a boat. And it set Russia, this country, on an entirely

different path. And it was all because he was kind of unschooled. And so anyway, begin with your child. Just know your child. The other part is you have to know yourself. How flexible are you? How flexible is your schedule? How are you at being judged by other people? Are you and your spouse on the same page with expectations? You've got to make sure because you're going to have to pull together on this in a big way. What are your natural gifts and talents? What do you bring to the table so you can kind of customize this education for your child? I'd also define what

you really value and what's important. And by the way, while I'm saying this, I'm realizing this is just really good for every parent. This is where you should start when your child is two, to begin laying out their life of how am I going to raise this particular child? Because kids are different. So define what you value and what's really important. Our overall guiding principle with Casey was this. We want to raise a curious kid who loves to learn. And so every decision we made went through that prism. Hey, are we raising a curious kid who loves to learn? And then we expanded the definition of how learning takes place far beyond worksheets and regular schooling. What are all the different ways that you can learn? You can learn

by starting your own business. You learn by playing. Actually, play is such a critical part of this. Just going outside and running around the neighborhood, experiments, messing up, failing at things, helping other people, volunteering down at a homeless shelter. It was a big part of our life with Casey was volunteering in different places, animal shelters, homeless shelter, in all kinds of different places because guess what? You learn about human nature. And if I had one thing that I would teach kids more than anything, it is learning to understand human nature because relationships are the most important thing in your whole life. We make it all about schooling and education and your degree. How many people do you

know that have PhDs and advanced degrees and their life is a complete mess, right? So I want to teach the kids about life more than anything else. Here was our other focus. Our major academic focus for Casey was number one, learning to enjoy reading. Now that wasn't hard because we are avid readers. And so that was a natural part of our family DNA. But reading is really important. One, because it's about curiosity and learning, but you also learn about grammar by reading. Because when you start to write, because you've read a lot, you can tell if something sounds good while you're writing it. And so we expanded the reading. See, in second grade, there was an assigned reading list for Casey to read. Well, it happened to be created by, this is not being sexist, but most teachers,

when I do teacher training, and I do a lot of teacher training across the country, it's 90% women. And so a lot of the books that are chosen tend to be more along the lines of things that girls like to read. Again, not being sexist, just this is human nature. Casey wanted to read about trucks and bombs and things blowing up and bloody stuff. So we got to ditch all that and just go to Barnes and Noble and let him just look around and say, huh, that looks interesting. Boom. I don't care what grade level it's on. Just start reading. As it turns out, Casey was reading at an advanced level. And he was the one that got me actually into Russian stuff. He's the one who started reading Dostoevsky. That's not easy to read.

And so anyway, it, so reading was a big part and then learning how to write really well was a huge focus for us because I've seen it in, when I was in the business world, I see it in what I'm doing now. It will set you apart, any child apart who knows how to, to put his or her thoughts together in writing, especially now with texting and everything else. It's made people really horrible at it. Casey is a fantastic writer. In his side job as a general manager of this catering company,

he sends emails and proposals to the president of the company, and he will copy me on them. And I'm like, that's really well done. Like you could have killed it in the corporate world, putting your thoughts together like that in a concise way, in a very powerful way. So here's, we focused a lot on reading and being writing really well. And again, you can write about anything, write to Kellogg's cereal company, because the last cereal box you had didn't have enough cereal in it, and then ask for a refund. Write to politicians. Write to movie stars. Write to whoever you want.

Write to your grandmother. Write about anything that you're curious about. You have a lot of freedom in that, and that's paid off a lot. So now here's what we did know. Casey was never going to be a scientist. Now, he was really into the weather. He's really into psychology. But we knew from a young age, he just didn't have that natural bent toward being a scientist. So we didn't put a lot of effort into science. Now, he learned science and physics by partly by just listening to us as we were interested in things, listening to podcasts and such. That was a great way for him to learn. Math wasn't a big focus. Why?

Cayce was never just great at math. If you ask him now to ask him some simple multiplication, he'll probably fumble a little bit. And you'll be like, well, aren't you worried about that? No, because in everyday uses of math, he's perfectly fine. He doesn't have to know trigonometry, but here's what he can do. He can budget and manage his finances like a beast. He knows how to invest. He knows self-control. Look, all these other things of self-control, understanding how to listen to people. He learned that a lot in putting him in situations. I traveled with him a lot. We went on the road. You know what else we did? We took vacations when everybody else was in

school. It's cheaper and less crowded. We did a lot of experiential learning in the real world. And we took advantage of all that flexibility, right? The whole thing of like, oh, they're going to have problem with social skills. No, they're not. Only if you like put them in a basement where they never get exposed to anyone. Casey had exposure to all of his friends because he played hockey and we lived in a neighborhood. And because Casey didn't have homework, he could go out every afternoon and play. He could stay out later at night. Why? Because we didn't have to wake up at 6.22 in the morning to hop on a school bus at 7 a.m. So the social skills thing, he's great at social skills. He was also exposed to talking to

a lot of adults. Well well where do you spend most of your life from age 18 till the day you die in the adult world so look i i hope that gets you started down the path i think it's a pretty exciting path it's a scary path i'm not recommending that everybody do homeschooling or unschooling. Some kids thrive in public school. Some kids thrive in a smaller private school. Every child is different. Just what I most want is if you have the flexibility, time, income, all the resources to do this, look at each of your kids and know how they're made, know how they're created and wired,

and customize as much of their entire upbringing, right? I'm not going to go into this, but we discipline kids in slightly different ways, right? With a compliant child, discipline isn't that hard. You just look at them like you're unhappy, and they're like, okay, I'll go do it. With a strong willed child, it takes a different path, different tone of voice. And so I'm going to educate them in a different way as well to get the optimal result. Look, if you ever want to talk about that, email us, email Casey, C-A-S-E-Y at celebrate calm.com. Just say unschooling in the subject line. Tell us about the situation i've got a i'll send you information if you want but if you want to do a phone consultation i'll send you a couple options

for doing that so that what i'm doing with most families is we do an initial kind of brainstorming session and then after that uh they walk away with a lot of questions they come back and say okay here we've answered these questions here's what we at. Now, how do we put this into place? And then if we do multiple calls, then we do a lot of emailing in between answering questions because look, I just want to help. I'm on the back end of this stuff. Hopefully I've got a lot of wisdom in these areas. I'm terrible at a lot of things. I can't come to your house and fix anything, right, that you've got wrong. I'm not a handyman. I'm not especially great at a lot of things, but this I've got some wisdom with. So if I can help you and save you some headaches sometimes and fight with your fights with your spouses, I'm happy to talk to you and help out with that. But hopefully

this is a nice framework to begin thinking this through. Hey, we love you. We want to help. If we can in any way, let us know. Thanks for listening to the podcast. Thanks for sharing it. We'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.