There are so many ways to homeschool, with each specific variant as unique as the individual families who choose to follow them. And this is the beautiful thing about homeschooling! You get to tailor your child’s educational journey to one that will best fit the specific needs of your family. Maybe you’re a family who leans towards a Charlotte Mason educational philosophy or a Montessori, or a Reggio Emilio one. When you’re first starting out, it can be hard to decide what feels right. A lot of families who choose to homeschool feel like a traditional school model wasn’t the right choice for their family, but they don’t know what else to try. 

Researching about homeschooling and different educational models can certainly help. While it absolutely matters first and foremost to think about what works for your family and your individual learners, I can also assure you that it can help to get a sense of what other people who follow your homeschool philosophy do so you can learn from their experience, perhaps problem solve as things crop up, and gain insights from their own journey. 

So today, let’s talk a little bit about unschooling. I’m not going to write an entire post about the pros or cons of unschooling or even get super detailed about what it is, as there are countless articles out there about what it means to be an unschooler. If you haven’t heard about unschooling before and would like to read up on it, here’s a quick introductory article that includes some links to deeper dives on the subject. 

Briefly, however, I can share that most folks who follow this educational philosophy will highlight that it is child-led, interest driven, and involves a shift in mindset in which the adult is seen as a “learning facilitator” rather than a teacher. In other words, it becomes the parents’ job to get the child around the resources that are interesting and important to them, rather than trying to funnel education strictly through a top-down approach. 

To help better illustrate how unschooling can work, I’m going to share a bit of a conversation I had recently with my friend, Crystal Bowron. Crystal is a mom of 3 kids, one of whom is grown and working in his chosen career, another who is about to head off to college, and a third who is still homeschooling. All three have been unschoolers for nearly the entire time they’ve been home. 

Crystal shared with me that she feels like she’s on the “other side” of things now, with two kids who have already gone through homeschooling. Her oldest child graduated from The Farm School, took the ACT and did well, and he took a few dual enrollment classes in his later teen years when he was interested in pursuing a career in psychology. Ultimately, he decided not to go to college and is now working – and thriving – in his chosen field as an auto mechanic. Her middle child also earned a diploma through The Farm, took his ACT and SAT and passed with flying colors and is about to go to college to major in electrical engineering. Her youngest is still home with her, enjoying being a kid.

When I asked how the older two figured out what they wanted to do, Crystal shared that it honestly changed a lot over the years, as their interests shifted quite a bit. One prime example is that her husband used to try to get the kids to work on cars with him, but her oldest hated it as a kid and actually resisted doing that work. She’s certain that if she had forced it and made him go out and tinker on cars with his dad, he would have hated it. Instead, he used to go out and work on his own things in tandem with his dad, in a form of parallel play.

Ultimately, her oldest moved through all manner other interests before settling on deciding to become an automotive technician instead, and he was definitely exposed to his current chosen career just by living life with his family. But honestly, the bigger interest of his at the time he was growing up was in video gaming. She found that by letting it go a bit, he was able to pursue all of his interests without shame. This relaxed, open, loving foundation for an education has led him to a fulfilling career doing something he loves.

Her middle child also loved video games and building computers, and all of his varied tinkering led to his ultimate decision to major in electrical engineering. 

One question that comes up a lot for families who unschool is how to handle high school. So how did she build a diploma for them if they weren’t taking dedicated, formal classes? For her first child, he figured out after trying dual enrollment that he wasn’t going to go to college. So they built a diploma by looking at the state standards and tailored their records and his exposure to things in life to what the state would want to know so that if he ended up deciding to go to college after all, he would be prepared and equipped. For her middle child, he definitely knew that he did want to go to college and that he would need formal math classes in order to do that. Even then, he decided to start on the formal Khan academy classes in what was technically his junior year, and by then, he had figured out what he wanted to do and what he would need in order to get into the colleges of his choice. As a result, he ended up feeling very self motivated to excel in his math classes. He soaked up English by living with an older brother who was also learning things, and then he ultimately passed his SAT with flying colors and is in the presidential honors program as he enters college for his first year this fall. 

Crystal says that she knows a lot of homeschoolers will prepare a portfolio for college admissions boards, but she also felt as though most colleges wanted to know what their SAT or ACT scores were, to see a transcript, and then just move on with the admissions process. Some families who want to look into more prestigious schools or Ivy League colleges may benefit from the extra effort it takes to build a portfolio, but in her experience, it just wasn’t necessary. 

I asked Crystal if she felt like it would be possible for parents to work full time and unschool. She shared that in her experience, absolutely, a lot of families choose to work and unschool in large part because it is such a wonderful balance for the entire family. If you’re working a full time job and following a structured curriculum that your child is resisting, it can be really hard to find the time to pull it all off. On the other hand, with unschooling, a child is going to be naturally motivated to learn the things that are interesting to them, allowing a parent to work and earn an income while also ensuring their child is gaining a deep and enriching education.

Crystal’s definition of unschooling is giving the kids access to the things that they are interested in when they’re interested in it. This doesn’t always mean that they’re going to be able to have all the things they’re going to want to do, meaning that not everyone can realistically afford to travel the world or attend expensive camps or workshops, but perhaps some of the time, there can be creative solutions so that the things that are interesting and fulfilling are prioritized. These could be things like music lessons for a child who wants to pursue an instrument or road trips as a family, for instance. But this also means giving them the autonomy over themselves and trusting them that they are going to be able to get what they need when they are going to need it. For instance, when her middle really needed math, he buckled down and learned it.

Looking back, she feels as though everything has really worked out fine. As Crystal so wisely shared, getting an education is a life long process, and there’s no time limit to what we are going to learn. We have conditioned ourselves to think that kids are supposed to learn everything by age 18, but they will ultimately learn the things that are interesting to them, and that will lead them to what they want to do with the rest of their lives. 

To her, it’s wild that we live in a society where we’re all supposed to be interested in everything and know everything. It’s literally impossible to hold it all. So while it’s a great idea to give everyone an exposure to all of the skills or interests out there, it seems impossible to ensure that learners are going to excel in absolutely everything. So, she asked me, to let go of the stress about that, doesn’t it make sense to let them learn through their own lenses and interests?

Of course this doesn’t mean that they have completely abandoned the idea of a formal curriculum or classes. As I’ve already mentioned, when her middle child was preparing for the ACT, he had to learn math and therefore used a lot of Khan academy. And he’s still using it now to study pre-calculous because he’ll be going off to college and will need to take calculus. He skipped around to lots of different curriculum and kept coming back to khan academy because it felt like the right fit for him. 

Crystal uses lots of various things like nature based science curricula or the Brave Writer curriculum with her youngest child to help them dig in on things that are interesting to them. They have lots of curriculum at their house, but they might take a long time to get through it because they start and stop as things need to shift around. A lot of the curriculum they have is just an assortment of really good books because there are so many things you can learn just from reading. But most of the time, her kids wouldn’t really stick with any one thing for very long, but they would go really deeply into it for a period of time.

In fact, Crystal shared that it seems like every fall, she would get really into making sure everything was extremely planned out, buy the curricula, and her kids would basically make fun of her that every year, she turns into a traditional homeschooler in the fall because of how hard she tries to implement structure and routine and make sure all of the bases are being covered, and then by spring, she’s right back at the relaxed, happy, child centered unschooling lifestyle they all love. She has absolutely practiced “strewing” by getting something like a science kit or craft supplies and leaving them out to be discovered, but she has also realized that it seemed like the kids could almost smell it if she was trying to force learning. So she definitely couldn’t push anything. But she still has bookshelves full of all kinds of materials that the kids will go pull something out from because they know to look for things there. 

Getting to see your kids grow up is just such a treasure.

I asked Crystal to share a parting thought with me, and she told me that she regularly encounters moments where she feels like her children have learned something so well that they’ve mastered it and can now teach her about it. They still have family dinners all the time because her oldest still lives with them, and their conversations blow them away, as parents, sometimes. Her oldest two will get to talking, and she says she can just sit back and listen to them talk about things like history or science, and the thought process that happens for her in those moments is two fold.

First of all, she’ll think to herself something along the lines of, “oh my goodness, I didn’t know you even knew anything about that,” but they just know so much and continuously blow her away with their knowledge. And she knows she didn’t teach it to them, not directly. These moments show her that she did a good job of fostering a love of learning because they just keep learning so many new things.

And the second aspect of the thought process that shows up in those moments is that, sometimes in these conversations, she gets to really hear about their values, and being on this side of everything and hearing how her adult children feel about things is just awesome. They’ll share things with her that make her say, “I knew you were a good person, and I knew how you felt about things, but this is really deep. And now I really, really know how you feel.” And that’s just lovely. As Crystal said, getting to see your kids grow up is just such a treasure. It’s sad sometimes and also a little scary, but in her experience, it’s really pretty cool.

diverse. inclusive. community.