How much?

Unschooling doesn't need to be expensive, but anyone choosing unschooling simply to save money is making a mistake. If parents don't want to spend any money on games, toys, museums, out-of-town trips, books, or whatever it is the kids might be interested in, then unschooling will not work at their house.

One doesn't need to be rich to unschool, but it takes dedication and focus, creativity and resourcefulness.

SandraDodd.com/unschoolingcost
photo by Jihong Tang

A changing environment

Many parents want to change the child, instead of changing the child's environment by (in large part) changing themselves.


SandraDodd.com/being
photo by Chrissy Florence
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Stages, and stars

The first stage is all the fear and uncertainty and angst.

Then comes deschooling and noticing how much of one's thoughts might be school-based and how easy it is for adults to belittle and discount children. That will take a year or so.


After school starts to recede it will be like the stars showing on a clear dark night in the country. They were always there, but you couldn’t see them for the glare of the sun or the city lights. So now you'll start to see that they're not all the same, and there are patterns, and a history, and there's science, mythology, art, and then the moon comes out! And then you hear coyotes and owls and water moving somewhere… what water?

It might be like that, or it might be exactly that. But until you stop doing what you were doing before, you will not see those stars.

After a few years of reveling in natural learning and the richness of the universe, if you or your children decide to take a class it will be an entirely different experience than you would have had when school loomed so large in your vision of the world.

That's all of page 37 (or 40) of The Big Book of Unschooling,
which leads to SandraDodd.com/stages
photo by Sandra Dodd
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This is repeated from a July 2012 post, to which someone responded "Beautiful. This is one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing on unschooling."

Longterm love

Young love was fun. Longterm love is different—different things are fun. Familiarity. Having a good woodpile. Memories. Projects. Grandchildren.
. . . . Sometimes we start to recite one of our repeat arguments, but we remember it's a re-run, and jump to the end, or trail off. They're about feeding cats (how to), or putting tools up (one of us is too short sometimes, and figures "on the bench" is close enough), how to do laundry (mostly we do our own now, and it pisses me off that his isn't totally ruined for his not following my instructions).

I guess the trick is to know it's about cats, tools, and laundry, and not about the soul of the other person.

—Sandra Dodd, 2018

Originally on facebook, now at the bottom of SandraDodd.com/spouses (slightly longer there)
photo by Rachael Rodgers

Figuring out what helps

Pam Sorooshian wrote:

Think about how you feel when you are "out of sorts." What will help you? What do you want from your family? I doubt it would help you for your husband to threaten, "If you behave badly again I'm going to take away your cell phone." You WANT to feel better, happier, nicer, right? What you need is support for doing what you, deep down, want for yourself.

Same with your kids. Lots of times that means to help them have the chance to be alone to recenter themselves.... Your kids don't KNOW yet what helps them—your role is to help them figure it out.

—Pam Sorooshian

Attentive parenting
photo by Julie Daniel

Rational perspective (cool!)

Deb Lewis wrote:

My mom was a kind person, but she was a negative person. Something was always wrong, something was always going to bring about the next big war, the end of the world, the destruction of human kind. As she saw it, we were all about to be thrown into chaos every day I can remember from my childhood. It wasn't good for me. I can tell you that it hurt my relationship with my mom, and made me resent, and mistrust her. Don't do that.

Even though you know there are worrying things in the world, even if you're sure you're right, every time you laser focus your attention on whatever those problems are, you're super heating your worry, and chances are you're losing rational perspective in all that steam.

—Deb Lewis

SandraDodd.com/indignation
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Doing and being

They don’t live to grow up. They’re living in the present. They don’t relate to questions about what they will do later or be when they’re grown. They’re doing and being now.

SandraDodd.com/sustainable
photo by Colleen Prieto