S3E7 | Unschooling: Obsessions, Interests, and Letting Them Be

AUTOGENERATED TRANSCRIPT

S3E7 | Ladies Fixing the World

Cecilie Conrad: 00:00
Welcome to episode seven, we just agreed, on the third season of The Ladies Fixing the World, a quite arbitrary title of the podcast. I just realized trying to explain it to someone last week. I'm Cecilia Conrad, and I have to come up with a new way to introduce this podcast. As I have said good morning, good evening, good afternoon, good night, too many times. Because I'm here with my good friends who are on two different continents for me, both of them. Welcome, Sandra Dodd.

Sandra Dodd: 00:31
Hi, I'm the one with the American accent. I'm in New Mexico.

Cecilie Conrad: 00:34
So that aligns American accent in America. It's not hard, this podcast, actually. And Sue Elvis, welcome. Hi, Cecilia. Hi, Sandra. Sue is in Australia. That should also go with the it also goes with the accent. So it aligns. I'm in Denmark at the moment, and I'm from Denmark, so that also aligns. I'm nomadic, so sometimes I'm not. Often I'm not in Denmark, but actually right now I am. I do not know about the accent, whether it still is inside my English. I think I sound very European. Anyways, that's us. We are today going to talk about focus and interests in the context of unschooling our children and unschooling, deschooling ourselves, how that works. And I don't know if any of us has a talking stick to grasp to hold on to. Anyone want to start? We forgot to talk about that before. Sandra? Or you just moved your hand?

Sandra Dodd: 01:36
It was Sue's topic. I was, I I thought she might have an opening statement. I don't know. If she doesn't, I will.

Sue Elvis: 01:43
Well, I don't mind you having the talking stick, Sandra, but I did suggest the topic because I had a number of questions that I listed. I thought that it might be interesting to answer. Like, how do we encourage our kids' interests? What if our kids have interests that we don't value? Uh, what if our kids are focused only on one thing? And I like your word obsession. What if they seem to be obsessed with something? What if our kids don't seem to have any interests? They're just sort of floating along. Uh and I wonder if we could talk about our interests as well and how having interests for parents, how important that is. There's probably other questions, but I'm going to pass it on to you, Sandra.

Sandra Dodd: 02:35
Through the years I've been involved in moderating and organizing discussions of unschooling, and there are always new people coming along, and they will say things like, I'm really worried that my child has no special interests. And I see other unschoolers have hobbies and you know, a focus, some favorite activity, and mine don't, and I'm really worried about it. How do I get them to have that? So I think it's while it's really good to talk about a focus, a focus that a child might have a special interest, it's worth encouraging and soothing parents whose kids have not found some solid hobby that's theirs. And I know one thing that Sue had mentioned earlier when we were discussing this was that we might remind parents not to take over, not to label a child, this child is interested in space, and always will be, and so will be an astronomer or an astronaut. So don't take possession if your child does have a hobby and don't be afraid if your child doesn't, because sometimes what a child's interest in is doesn't show. One might be collecting dinosaurs and books about dinosaurs and wanting to go to all the dinosaur museums in the world, and another might not have any special collections or museum desire. But that doesn't mean that they're not both making connections with other things. So I want to reassure people that it's it's not the focus or the hobby that makes unschooling work. I think it's the parental support and acceptance and appreciation of that child's interest and assistance, the things that the parents can do to help that child find resources, supplies, toy dinosaurs, whatever it is they're wanting.

Sue Elvis: 04:26
Do you think that sometimes parents don't actually recognize that their kids have interests because the parent doesn't regard certain things as worthy of the title of interest? For example, I had a reader once asked me, well, she told me, that her teenage daughter only spent her time shopping for clothes and buying makeup and trying makeup out. She wasn't interested in anything. But that wasn't an interest the parent thought was worthy, that it didn't count. That was just something teenage girls do. Her teenager didn't have any proper interests.

Sandra Dodd: 05:17
Sometimes another aspect or facet of all of this is the idea that the parents will either ignore or jump on the idea that something could be a uh profession and make money. So someone, if if you were to defend that girl and say, well, she could become a fashion designer or a makeup artist, she could work in film and do hair and makeup, then the parents might go, okay, good, then I'll press her to do that. It's like, no, no, no, don't press them to do things. Um but I have a granddaughter who's a teenager now and she's been doing nails, her own, some friends, her aunts. And so I've been I've been helping, you know, buy supplies for her, and I see her order stuff that comes through the Amazon, and you know, I see, oh, that's pretty cool what she ordered. And she's doing her own nails and they're beautiful. So I had sort of had the vague idea that now she'll want to go to school to learn to do this. No, she wants to become a nurse. So she's all intent on going to nursing school. And that it kind of took me aback because I was just watching her grow up. I've known her since she was four. And my son adopted her when she was little, so she's been around. I've known her, you know, most of her life, and I've seen her go through a lot of interests, and they were almost always art-related, cake decorating, and now you know, nails and uh computer art. And the thing that she's thinking of doing as a profession isn't thought of as an art, it's thought of as science as science and medical science. And so it's interesting that even though I have experience and have seen lots of kids come in and out of interests and hobbies, I still had that thought in my mind, like, oh, that's probably what she'll want us to send her, you know, pay for her to go to whatever cosmetology school or something. So uh I know the most extreme example I know of this is a boy who was young teen, 13, 14, and he was learning magic and he was good and he had done performances. He traveled to another continent to be around magicians and do magic, and so he was away from his parents. The mom was so proud, so excited, she was elated that this boy was learning magic, and she knew a magician local to them and had introduced them, and she was so jazzed. And when he came back from this overseas trip, he said, Yeah, I don't want to do magic anymore. And the mom was crushed. He was good because they'd invested money and time and wishing and hoping, and she, without meaning to, without any malice, had sort of owned it. I have it became her identity. My son's gonna be a magician. My son is a magician, he's already a magician, and so that's an awkward thing when you there's an identity, and then you just go, not a magician. And now the mom's changes to so I I I was staying with them when this was all discovered. I was at their house and I had had known them for a while, and I so I talked to her. It was harder to soothe her than him. But for him, I had an example of a friend of mine my age, who's an artist, and who had gone through several phases in his late teens and early 20s, where he would learn something. He was carving boxes out of one piece of wood so that the top and the bottom, it was just he would cut it, but not all the way through, so that there's a lip. I saw his process. He made all of his friends a box. I still have mine somewhere, and then he did bead work, which is a big jump from boxes, and then he was doing carving with a dentist drill on metal, and he would do it till he was really good at it, give everybody a present. Like this is how he knows he's done because he's made one for everybody, and then he quits and goes to something else. So from the outside, it looked like why did he learn all that bead work if he's never going to do beating again? How he's not carving wood anymore. But from his point of view, he was learning about all of these different media and becoming more of an expert in art. And and knowing, I know as a musician, if you've played an instrument for a while and you decide that's not the one you want to play, still for the rest of your life, when you hear someone playing that instrument, you know things. You have some basis of judgment of how good they are or how brave they are, how creative that other people who never mess with that instrument don't know. And it's the same with art.

Cecilie Conrad: 09:43
Well, it's the same with any learning, isn't it?

Cecilie Conrad: 09:46
That well, I my experience and kind of motto we have in our families that you can never learn anything in vain. Yeah, it will always be useful. Whatever you learn, it will be useful. I think we're we're touching on maybe the big topic, and maybe potentially the largest problem in this theme here at the very beginning, how we the parents can sometimes jump at the children's focus, obsession, interests, hobbies, and see them as a career path. So we're we're obsessed with where's this unschooling taking us? What's the outcome? And there's also a problem with the sheer jumping at it. Of course, we are supposed to be supposed to be, it's a good thing to be supportive, make sure that there is a space and there are the materials, and to the extent that we can afford them, make sure that they have what they need to explore what they want to explore. Sometimes we also need to leave them a little bit alone and not be obsessed with pushing kids to do the things they yesterday said they wanted to do. But I think it's a worse problem this pushing to continue with the hobby or interest because we think we see a career path. Should we explore that problem a little more? Where does that come from in us and how can we work with it? It's quite the pressure for a child, you know. You take an interest in nails or guitar or whatever. You're interested in the Roman Empire, you read about that and watch movies, and your parents suddenly want you at university studying the history of the world or whatever.

Sue Elvis: 11:39
And it's always a lovely p time in a family when kids are running with an interest. There's a lot of magic going on, a lot of coming alive, a lot of joy and enjoyment. And what you were saying earlier, Sandra, about the parent who's or parents who say, My kids haven't got any interests. And when a kid does have an interest, maybe we like not we, but parents in general like to think, well, they've found their one big thing, and now I don't have to worry about it. I don't have to keep on strewing and encouraging and wondering what what my child will be doing. I can see, look, they're all alive and they love this interest, and and before we know it, we've they've we've um envisaged them as an astronaut, a nurse, whatever. I just give a um before we started recording, I was going to say that we all have different stories, but I think that I'm the queen of failures, of stories where I've gone wrong. I I have I think I have the most stories about mistakes I've made. So I've got one of those. But my son Kelm, he he uh was belonged to John St. John Ambulance. He was an officer. He began as a cadet when he was quite young. He went worked his way through the ranks. He was really passionate about a first aid and going out on duty. He became an adult, he became an adult officer, he started training the younger cadets, and then somebody suggested that he might like to go into the medical field. And I thought, oh wow, this is wonderful. Um, I can see him as a doctor or a nurse. And so he applied to uni and he got into a Bachelor of Nursing. That's what he decided to do. And then a year and a half down the track, he came to me one day and said, Mom, I think I've made a mistake. I don't really want to do this. And talking you talking, Cecilia, about our identity, or was it Sandra? Our kids' interests become part of us. And I was the mother of a future nurse, and he was gonna be a paramedic, and oh, I I had it all planned out. And I thought, you can't do this, you can't just drop out. What about me? Now I'm gonna have to start thinking again. I'm gonna have to start from uh scratch as to that feeling, I think, that when your kids careers change, but the initial career, and you think, wow, they've got a job, they're happy, I um I've done it, I've guided them successfully through the childhood years, and now they're at uni, he's gonna be a doctor. And then all of a sudden I thought, well, no, he's not. What do I do? So I wonder if that is a point, Cecilia, uh, that however much we want to let go of control and be relaxed about it all, is there something within the parent that does feel a little bit of a stress, a little bit of a burden? We want the best for our kids, we want to guide them. And when we it is obvious what their interests are and we formulate a plan in our head for them, it's almost like our work is done. Though I've I've I have um come to the conclusion it's never done, and that was false. But there was a time when I believed that, and I wonder if other parents feel this has I felt at that time.

Cecilie Conrad: 15:33
I think we all worry about, maybe not worry to the point of worrying, but we are thinking about and we are interested in how our children will manage life. It's pretty overwhelming, life itself, and part of it is to pay for it, and we usually do that by something we call a career. We find something we're good at, and and then it we create some value by doing it, and someone's willing to pay for that value we put in somewhere, somehow. And somehow it's it's part of completely normal parenting to make sure to want to see that element working for our children when they are well old enough that you would expect that. So that thing, I think, I think it's it is what it is, it's part of the job. And I also think we we I don't know if you say this in English, we say in English, you shoot yourself in the foot. Um that we do that a little bit when we choose to unschool. We take our children out of the context where mainstream idea is that if you put them there, they'll be on a path, and that path leads to a job in the other end. They do the education and then they do the higher education, and then they go out and they get a job. And now we don't do that. So maybe we we should be slightly more worried, or we we need to stop and think a little more about so then then what? But I think it creates an unhealthy dynamic when a nine-year-old starts to build fancy cars with his Legos. He's not necessarily going to be a car designer, he's just playing with his Legos. He's nine, leave him alone. So that dynamic, I think we need to talk about that. How do we these how do we work with this worry and how do we get over ourselves? How do we stop ourselves? And I think Sandra might be good at talking about that.

Sandra Dodd: 17:43
Well, I guess when a kid's in school, you don't the parents at home don't have to worry about what how he's doing, you know, the trajectory of what he's doing. You get the report card every nine weeks or 12 weeks or whatever it might be. And then you, you know, yeah, you want a pizza. You know, I mean you're a little removed from that. And at some point when the kid's 16 or 17, you might say, So, what does your counselor think you're good at? What do you think you might want to study university? It's like, it's like we're separate from that. But once you take upon yourself to be everything to that child, you know, now you're the lunch lady and the counselor and the principal and everything. They don't have those other sources. Now you're the one who's supposed to pay attention to what they might be good at and to advise them. I don't know that kids need that. I really despise that when people bug kids, what do you want to be when you grow up? What are you gonna do when you grow up? Don't because that tends to cause the child to identify or feel like, well, I said I'm gonna do this, maybe I have to. And they're like six or eight, and it's too soon. And and it's too soon sometimes when you're 25. I'm not teaching anymore. You know, I taught for six years, I went to school for four years to so I could do it, and I did it for six years, and I'm done. So even with adults, there's some adults, the most interesting adults I ever met are people who change jobs wildly all through their 20s and 30s, and have been truck drivers, and one was had a truck driver, a cook, a rodeo clown. We talked about that in another episode about what rodeo clowns do. Um, he had done all these toy just like a pinball machine, not things that were related. It's like Sue's son, who was going to study to be a nurse and now is driving big mining equipment. That's cool. It's not similar, it's not related. And for him, there will be related things. He knows more about first aid than the other drivers, probably. He could see the symptoms of seat of heat exhaustion in another driver, probably. You know, but everybody has things that they know. And the more hobbies, I think the more interest that a child has gone through, the more connections they're able to make. The more three dimensional their image of the universe is, what they know about the world. And but that I would not disparage a kid who was interested in nothing but Lego for 15, 20 years, because. That touches on other things too. There's the whole math and engineering and spatial reasoning aspects that people can see. But maybe what he's doing when he's playing Lego is thinking about the history of Rome. We don't know that. If a kid's not really interested in Rome, I hope the parents don't say, gosh, we're going to save all our money and take the whole family to Rome so this kid can see the Coliseum. Because that kid might really prefer to go to Disney World. You might want to ask him.

Cecilie Conrad: 20:27
Because all the money is better spent on more Lego. Lego is really expensive these days. Yeah, yeah, it always was. That was good.

Sandra Dodd: 20:34
It is, it's still good. So yeah, encouraging them to explore whatever they want to explore is good. I have it. I brought a quote. There's a mom named Leah Rose. She lives in Pennsylvania. And she just wrote the coolest thing one time. I made a whole page to put it on. I'll collect other things. She wrote, I've been thinking about that saying, all things in moderation. Next time someone says it to me, I think I might just ask them, Do you mean we should have joy in moderation? Should we have peace in moderation, kindness in moderation, patience in moderation, forgiveness, compassion, humility? Honestly, I used to think it sounded like a very wise and balanced philosophy. Now, the more I think about it, the less sense it makes. So one way a parent can mess kids up is to say, well, you know, that's all really nice that you're interested in in, you know, where the Vikings went, and you have a map in your in your room of in what century they hit St. Petersburg or whatever, you know. But that's not gonna be your job. And so let's move on to something else. This is too much Vikingship art and too little math. Two things that parents can say to uh I started to say to ruin everything. It doesn't ruin everything, but it does some damage to a lot of things. And one is to say that's stupid. Any parent who has the urge to say that's stupid, I should seriously rethink and rephrase. Or if they say that's enough. A parent to tell a child that's enough. You don't know what's enough. You don't know if that child is through thinking about that, or is through with that Lego set forever. Maybe they'll never make that thing that's on the box again, but they need that Lego, they're gonna make something else with it later. And so for someone from the outside to say, you are not interested anymore, your interest has gone too far, and now you're wasting your time and energy and thought. It does damage to the child's self-esteem, it does damage to his joy and enjoyment, which Sue mentioned, that's a really huge aspect. But the most damage it does is between the parent and the child. Because when you say that's stupid, you're saying, and you're stupid because you thought it wasn't. And if you say that's enough, you're saying, uh, you went past my limit, and so now I will make you stop. I don't think that's healthy for unschoolers. It's standardized. There a million parents would go, oh, good job, good job. You tell them it's too much, you tell them everything in moderation, you tell them it's stupid. I advise against it.

Cecilie Conrad: 23:07
So here's a question for you, Sandra. What about all the situations where parents think they see something being too much to the point where they are worried about they see a child not thriving and they think part of what the child is doing or not doing, because it's doing the other thing all the time, is preventing thriving from happening.

Sandra Dodd: 23:34
Uh give it another three or four months. Otherwise, the parent is being micromanaging and could easily be guessing wrong.

Cecilie Conrad: 23:42
So I get this question when it's so it could be we talked about food a few episodes back. So my child is eating only pasta with ketchup and apples, and I am really worried about his health. That's a question I could get. It sounds like a solid diet for me, though, but whatever. Or it could be my child only wants to watch monster truck cartoons on the iPad, doing that 10 hours a day. We can't go for a walk. I can't, I there's no, I can't make my child stop and do something else. Those kinds of questions. It's micromanagement, yes, to say, hey, pasta, ketchup, apples, and carrots, please. Or something else just once a day. It's also micromanagement to say monster truck videos, not 10 hours a day, eight hours a day, two hours for something else, please.

Sandra Dodd: 24:42
Why? It's arbitrary. No, I mean, it's arbitrary. Um it's arbitrary, and the parents might be wrong. So I don't care if parents do that. I can't stop the world. You know, the you name the podcast Changing the World. I don't want to change the world. I want to make it easy to do. I didn't. We're fixing it. Okay. No, no, no, whatever it was. I don't want to, I don't want every family to take their kids out of school. I want those who want to have the tools and the warning signs where the cliffs are and the, you know, like shoots and ladders. I want them to know when they can, if they start here and go this way, they can slide a long way and do really well and improve their relationship with their child. So uh sorry to be like I am, but I have no interest in soothing people who want to continue to control their kids. I have no interest in encouraging people to say, oh yeah, yeah, that's fine. You can tell them eight hours and not ten. Why? Then say two hours and not ten, have five minutes and not ten. Throw the leg on I'm asking you. It's a slippery slope, and parents who want to control their kids and tell their kids no, can and should, but they should not try to be unschoolers with that. It's not gonna work.

Cecilie Conrad: 25:51
So, how do they manage their worry?

Sandra Dodd: 25:54
If they aren't doing better unschoolers, more de-schooling. They start looking, yes, more de-schooling. Look at learning, look at look at your child's joy and enjoyment, look at your child's happiness at playing whatever video game they were playing. There are a couple of reasons. Joyce Federal used to say if a kid is just watching TV without paying attention to anything around him, maybe the show's really good, or maybe he's using it as an escape. And an escape like that in a child who's not allowed to leave the house, you know, an adult can just get in the car and go if they want to escape, go for a long drive, go to some other town, get drunk, spend the night. There are a lot of things that adults can do to avoid what's what they're where they live and what they're dealing with. Young kids have no way to do that. And so if a kid comes home from school and is stressed and doesn't want to talk about it and sits in front of the TV and just watches whatever's on, that could be the most healthy option he has. Could be great. Because he has zoned out in a safe place, he's on his own couch, his parents know where he is, he's not hurting anybody, he's not wandering around town with a can of spray paint. You know, he's home on the couch. And unschoolers don't usually need that kind of escape, but what if they do? So I maybe that game is awesome for that kid, and he's really learning a lot. Maybe he's trying to beat his own speed. I there's a game I've been playing for years. The grandkids really like it. They come look over my shoulder and say, Let's play that game. It's Plants versus Zombies. Not a recent one, but one of the original the second versions, the HD version. It's just so clean and so well designed, and there are no ads and any, and I like I like it. But I still play it. Partly I'm building up points so when the little kids play, they can buy things. But within the game, feed their plants and stuff, buy more plants. But partly it's just to to try a different way. It's a puzzle. Can I do it more elegantly? Can I do it with 8,000 points left at the end of the game? Or am I going to spend all my points saving my little garden? And it's something that while I'm doing it, I'm either listening to a book or music or thinking. And someone could easily come and tell me, you've been playing that game for years, get another game. Well, I've played a lot of other games and I haven't found one that's better. And sometimes when I'm playing that game, I just think of how well designed it is and how pretty the art is. So that's like looking at a painting a lot of times, or reading the same book, or listening to the same music. That it doesn't seem any different to me. So when I see a kid like that who really likes a certain game or to play Lego, to make the same sorts of things with Lego, maybe they've already made all of the pictures that were on the boxes and now they're just making airplanes or cars. I think they should be allowed to do that. I think part of de-schooling is learning the value of choices and options and of saying yes instead of no. And I've never had families come back who unschooled for years and said, Man, I'm so sorry that I didn't limit them more. I'm so sorry I didn't shame them more. If I could only go back, I would limit the time that they spent on their hobbies. That's not what people come back and say. They come back and say the opposite. They say, I really wish I hadn't been so uptight and I hadn't told them what to do and taken stuff away from them. And so I I don't want to go off topic. The thing I started to say.

Cecilie Conrad: 29:25
I mean, everything is connected here.

Sandra Dodd: 29:27
Yeah, that's true. That's true. Well, the last thing we were talking about was what was the last talk called? It was um typical unschooling days. About days, yeah, which is kind of like this because a lot of typical unschooling days are kids messing with their hobbies. But we were talking about uh exposing people to more things, places, ideas, sights, sounds. And I defended the term expose exposure. And then I after we were done, I saw that I just had Light and Stir post, I put out a daily blog post that I had already scheduled for yesterday. Um sting my days up, maybe today, probably this morning, was about had the word exposure in there. And I thought, I didn't pick this after we talked about that, it was already scheduled to go. And so I think it's it's a legitimate thing. So sometimes parents are worried that if a child is only interested in, seems like a child is only interested in one thing that he won't be exposed to other things. And there was one mom years ago who wrote, My child only cares about World War II. All he cares about is, you know, anything that he's interested in has to go back to World War II. And I said, Yes, but if he knows, and I made a long list of stuff that I can't recite now at the time I was on a roll and I wrote it all out, but you know, he will know, he can generalize that to any other period of history or war. How did they get those guys to want to go, to want to join up? How did they get food to them? What was the technology that made it different from the war before? How did they move the troops around? Da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Where did they stay? And so if he if he can answer those, if he sees that there are answers to those questions about the one he cares about, then he can look at something else and know what questions to ask. And I think she probably thought he should study all the wars, probably in chronological order, you know, to be more balanced, to be more well-rounded, to which leads.

Cecilie Conrad: 31:32
It's not the ones in Africa. We don't care about the ones in Africa. It's only the European and American story, really. Yeah. I think my problem with the word exposure is the same as my problem with these hobbies and interests, or just a little, I have this little alarm light bulb flashing. I've heard the word exposure too many times in this phrase. How do I make sure my child is sufficiently exposed to enough different material? So here I feel that I'm talking with a checklist that matches a school system. So I have to make sure my child is exposed to math and geography and history, and so only the hard the hard academic ones, languages, how do I make sure my child is exposed? And it has this school mindset, and this, and that, and that might be all good and fine. The school is part of our culture, and well, it's there. Uh, the the idea of academics and the idea of a general education, but it has a stress behind it, it has a fear behind it because we're unschooling, because we took our children out of the school where that exposure would have happened, and now we kind of want to just make sure we didn't screw it up to use a little bit of foul language. And it's the same thing with the hobbies and interests, where you're like, okay, so now I'm not doing the school thing, I'm doing the unschool thing, which means the path must be the child finds its way, but I have to make sure that I'm not doing it wrong. It's a little bit like the question we had, I think, last time, the unschool question. So, how do I do this? And part of doing it is to see the hobbies and interests and make sure we support that. And there's this pressure of the fear behind it, we have to go back and own the choice of not schooling them, unschooling them. And I think we just have to, when we work with these things, with hobbies and interests and with the idea of exposure, just to make sure that we we don't let that fear slip through the things we do. Just stop and think for a little while. So, what part of this is me being afraid of my child not making it in life? Am I worried about my unschool choice? And therefore, I want this working with making beautiful nails or being interested in history or whatever hobby. I want that to be a lifelong passion and something to make money off. Can I stop myself having that emotion or can I work with that emotion? It's a good option every time for us, the parents, to just stop and feel it a little bit. It's okay to just be interested in World War II. Doesn't have you don't have to be a high school teacher or a war strategic or anything that has anything that is clearly linked to this passion for maybe 12-year-old. Could be something completely different. Could drive trucks or become a nurse or and race cars, race cars. Yeah. And and don't forget, you can become a lot of different things during your life. It's not one thing any longer.

Sandra Dodd: 35:02
Sue, I have a story for you about a bad decision I made as a mom. It wasn't a decision, it was a reaction. So my oldest Kirby worked at a gaming shop from the time he was 14 till he was 18. And that was a real job. And because he wasn't schooled, he could work hours that, you know, during school hours. And they it had nothing to do with video gaming. It was all board games and miniatures, but they sold card, you know, magic cards and chess sets and all this, you know, whatever games you play at tables. And then he worked at a pizza place for a while. I don't know if it's like that where you are, but if people work at restaurant chains here, sometimes there's a sort of a bounty. If you you get a bonus if somebody comes to work because you talked them into it. So all his friends would go, if you come work here, I'll get $25. Like for $25, you're selling your soul for a year. But anyway, so went to work at a pizza place and it was nice for him. He got attention, he got written up as a good example, blah, blah, blah. So that was so for me, you know, I'm telling you, even I'm telling you now, years later, I was such a good mom. I was so proud of my son who did so well. Yeah, blah, blah. So after that job, he thought he would go and work at um Olive Garden. He was teaching karate, I think, maybe still in those days too, but not for money, just for his own, like for him to pay for his karate lessons, that sort of thing. The service, service job. And then he was going to work at Olive Garden. He did the training, which lasted a week or two, memorize the menu, learn all the tricks, learn how to work the kitchen. And then the day that he was supposed to go be a waiter, I think they'd already paid him for the training. He just didn't go. So I'm at the house and I went in his room and I said, Why are you here? And he said, I decided I didn't want to do that job. Now, I had been so proud of my kids up to that point for being so responsible and honest and true and good, and that made me good. And I was so mortified that he just ditched out on something he said he would do. He didn't call him and say, I don't think I'm gonna come, he just didn't go. Within a week, I think, he had gotten uh uh hit up by somebody else who needed to find some other co-workers for something secret, for something confidential, though I didn't know it was confidential because he came home and told me what it was. And I went online and told some people, and he said, Mom, take it down, take it down, take it down now. Because somebody else he was working with had put on social media that he was doing this particular job, which was being a game master for World of Warcraft. And Kirby loved that game, and Kirby has already now been in his other gaming job, been work running Pokemon League and Magic tournaments, like at hotels, like they would rent a place and do a big tournament for you know the state or the region or whatever, and he would be the one who was organizing that and being one of the judges and blah blah blah. So he had experience with games at a large scale. He was really good at teaching games and was sort of a games lawyer. He would read the directions once and know all of the rules. So now he's going to be, although it's confidential, a game master for World of Warcraft. Everybody who was able to know that was like, oh, that's cool. That's wonderful. What's cooler than working at Olive Garden, but it was secret. So it was hard for me. After a while, he ended up, they took all of their, they had sort of contractors doing game masters in various places, and they took them all to Austin and set up a facility where they all worked in a building. And so he moved to Austin to do that and was there for eight years altogether. And he was a manager of a team of 25 people. There were two managers. The other manager was the hiring firing hours, that sort of HR stuff. He was the manager of let's go team and have fun. If you don't understand how to do it, I'll help you. If it's too hard for you, I don't mind doing it. He was that raw-raw cheerleader manager, which was good for him. And he liked it. There were people on his team who had college degrees because that's how life is. And so that helped him not worship the idea of needing to get a college degree. And now he has a job for a government contractor, he has a security clearance and no college degree. They waived his college degree because of experience. Anyway, he's not involved in games anymore, but he's helping people with computers. So when I when I was so mortified about Olive Garden, I didn't know that he was pretty smart and was about to get in a really cool job that would last him almost 10 years. So parents can't always tell what's a good or a better idea or what direction a kid is about to jump. And the kids don't know either, and the adults don't know either. You just have to make your the best choices you can. Make in the moment. When Marty was interested in police work, I was encouraging Marty in an interest about police work when he was 13 or 14. And my husband was uns unhappy with me and said, Why are you encouraging him? It's dangerous. And I said, Oh, he might not end up doing it. He didn't end up doing it. Although he does work for Albuquerque Police Department, but not as a police officer, but as an analyst. He does statistics and maps. Sorry, Sue.

Sue Elvis: 40:27
No, no, I interrupted again. I'm good at that. I was just thinking about what you said about being proud of our kids. We do get proud, but what if, and you said it all worked out with your son and he knew things that you weren't aware of. But what if it turns out that our stories aren't quite as good as we hope? Like, for example, we're we're all we're all bloggers, and people want to hear good news stories. They want our children to be poster children for unschooling. Tell me about your child, and you say, well, you have to trust them, you have to let go of control, it will all work out. But what if it doesn't? What if they make a mistake or go down? It will all work out. But at some points in their lives, our kids do make mistakes. Uh, they're not always, and I think sometimes I wrote a blog post about it once, trying to process my feelings and my thoughts about it. My kids don't have to perform so that I look good on my blog, so that I'm saying, hey, look at my children. Uh, we unschooled them, and look, they are absolutely marvelous. All you have to do is unschool and don't worry about control, don't worry about the interests. Uh, it will all work out. And that's a big burden for a mother to sometimes life isn't as perfect as that.

Cecilie Conrad: 42:09
I think it's also sorry, I think it's also a big burden for the children to have to be these posters for the lifestyle. We're all bloggers and podcasters and we talk about our children. I think it's a real problem that there is this attached to outcome problem where I mean we can still say things to soothe other parents and even ourselves. We can even we can still we still tap into the same value system. It would be so much easier if our children became, let's say, doctors and and um they started a company, and that company has a thousand employees and they make a lot of money, and that's all good and successful. And another one is maybe working with the Royal Ballet, and you know, it's all these crazy success stories in the mindset of success of mainstream, that makes it easier to come out the other end and be an unschooler and say, look, all my kids became all this. And but I think that has two problems. One is we're still in the mainstream idea of what success is, and the other being all the other unschoolers think so. If my child wants to work in the local supermarket and basically just uh dab down there, it takes two minutes to walk there from their home, and and they have nice colleagues and they actually enjoy organizing the cans and chatting with the customers, and they're also willing to put in the hours that are less fun just for the ease of it, go home with the salary and do whatever they feel like doing. That's not the story you put on the first plate page of your blog. My my child became a, I don't know, even know the word in English, someone who sits at the counter in the supermarkets. There's no prestige in that, there's nothing to be proud of. It's not fancy. But what if that's the choice of that person? What if that makes him or her happy? Someone has to sit there for a while still, I hope. I don't like the self-checkout thing. I hope we still can have people to interact with when we leave our homes. I mean, it's just all the wheels in society that have to work. And if someone happily chooses a job that has less prestige, it's fine. So I think we we have to work with ourselves in a in some way, also as unschoolers. And and can we be chill with our children not being mainstream success children? And can we also manage that there might be rough times in their lives when they're at I only have one quote unquote real adult. She's had her rough years, she's made her choices, and she's had times where it was not fun. I mean, but I'm 25 years older than she is, and and uh I've had years in my life that was not fun. It's completely normal.

Sandra Dodd: 45:25
Yeah. I think we're not leaving the planet. When people decide not for their kids not to go to school, they still, at the when they're 18 or 19, they're still back into that world one way or another. Or not back into that world. When I was trying to encourage Holly to take, because of some of her interests, to go to college, and also I thought maybe she'd meet a better class of boys. I don't know what my problem was. But I was just telling her some things that that they did at the university that she might be already easily good at and would enjoy. And she said, Mom, I've been fine without going to school. Why would I want to go to school now? Why are you pressing school on me? I'm like, Yeah, sorry. So I quit mostly lately. I was saying, you know, there are medical specialty jobs, you only have to train for two years. She doesn't settle on stuff. In Europe, there's uh in the UK anyway, lately there's a job, and I'm not thinking of the name of it, but it has to do with helping old people, being a professional at assisting the elderly, one way or another. And Holly's really good at that, and she charges real money and she will help older people. It started with one guy at her church, and then it was other people at her church, and then it was their relatives and her neighbors. And she does all kinds of stuff from yard work to reorganizing closets to clearing out offices, you know, deciding what to keep, what to save how. And she's she's gotten good and efficient at how to make piles and partly from me being a pack rat and having a lot of stuff. You know, what what's really important to keep? Is this a good way to keep it? Will you remember where it is? Whatever she's doing with them, sometimes it's something physical, weeding or painting or cleaning, and sometimes it's that sort of almost counseling stuff about what's important to you. If this is stressing you, we'll do it next week. Um and that's a thing that doesn't have a name, and she's not working for someone else, so it seems like not a job, but she can make real money at it, and they give her stuff and they like her, and she's learning a lot, and that gives them someone to talk to, which is really valuable for old people too. And so I I see the value in it for her and for all the people she's working for and with, and it's hard to brag about, it's hard to say, oh, Holly helps people with their yard work and their floors, but that's not exactly what she's doing. You know, there's not an we don't have a name for it in the United States yet. And I don't know if that's if that's what they're doing in the UK either, what that job really entails.

Cecilie Conrad: 47:51
I'm close to people, UK, but I I don't know. I can't answer the question.

Sandra Dodd: 47:55
Yeah, well, I don't know what it is, but people can train for it. I know an unschooler who did, who trained for that and now has a certificate and is that, whatever it's called.

Sue Elvis: 48:04
But we're not our interests and our careers anyway, are we? We say my son's a doctor. I don't have any sons who are doctors, but people who do, my son's a lawyer. And but that's not really who they are. It's just their job. Sometimes we get defined too much by our career, and people think of us in a certain way because of how we earn our money. Yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 48:31
That's not that's natural though. That's not unusual. I think at any level of of society, any type of society, people have named roles. That there's uh like some sort of division this way, who's doing physical work, who's doing mental work, religious work. But it's also it works up a lot of your time. And this way, it's who who's rank, who ranks? Who do we have to listen to? Who can we ignore? I think that's normal of humans.

Sue Elvis: 48:59
But what what if your career changes? Like my husband was uh sales and marketing manager, then he went back to uni, and now he's the school teacher. And he's the same person. It's just he has learned different things and he relates to others in a different way, earns his money in a different way. But Andy the school teacher was once Andy the marketing manager, and it's funny how sometimes at school he uses skills that he he got when he was doing marketing and managing teams, and the his people at school don't acknowledge that or understand where that came from. But it's all just accumulate uh accumulation of skills. I don't know. It's just I feel sometimes if we talk about our kids, oh this is my son, the doctor, and then we say, Oh, this is my son, I don't know, um, something else. This the sales assistant at the sh at the checkout. Do we pass on the message to our children that they're different because or not quite as good or not quite as worthy of our uh worthy of our what? I don't know, that we're not so proud of them because of their career. They're just our children, aren't they? Uh you don't we're more I just think we're more than our jobs. And jobs can disappear so quickly or change.

Sandra Dodd: 50:31
Just today, there's an unschooler that I've known, she's in her 30s, she's probably the age of my oldest, and she grew up in northern New Mexico, and she was not unschooled in my ideal unschooling way, but she was. And she was um her older siblings went to school, she didn't, and then now she's a veterinarian. So that that's a higher education situation here. It's a degree in biology, usually, and then I don't know how many three years, three more years of school. I'm not sure. And so she's married, and she's everybody went to her wedding as another story because the GPS all failed. People who were depending on GPS couldn't find it, and only people who had printed on a paper map could find it. It was fun. So she's been married for a few years, had a baby, and she showed pictures of that baby today for the first time. He's two weeks old. And in another post that she had put up just before the baby was born, she said, When I look at my student loan, I'm so frustrated and uh, I don't know what she said, just dismayed or something. So I'm just thinking, I'm glad my kids don't have student loans. Um, Marty Marty did get a college degree, but we just paid cash for it, and it was an in-state tuition, and he was living at home. So it wasn't it, he didn't, it wasn't very expensive for him to get it. And uh student loans are terrible. In the United States, they can run up into the price of a house pretty easily. And so she has an expensive student loan for being a veterinarian, and now she has a baby. She may not want to continue to be a veterinarian. Uh, you know, you all know sometimes when a baby's born, the mom transforms into, oh my gosh, I'm never letting this baby out of my lap. Sometimes not. Sometimes they have the urge, but they can't actually pull it off because they have to work. There is a whole range of that. But I to see someone I knew who grew up who is doing something that sounds good. You know, her mom could say, My daughter is a veterinarian. She now her mom, her now her daughter's a mother. And that may change everything. And about the people, I don't know what they call in Australia, but here they would call it a grocery checker, the person who checks you out at the check stand at a grocery store. That's right, livelihood, working in a grocery store and making sure that people have food that they that's not too far from their house, that they can get home on their own and stuff like that. The Buddhist idea of of that being a virtue, that your job is is useful and honest and actually needed to be done. That I talked to my kids about when they were younger. I said, and so um the example of someone who manages a company with a thousand employees might be light right livelihood. What are they providing? What are they doing? Might not be, might just be who knows what, grafting corruption, you know, they're doing PR for politicians in a bad season. You know, there are a lot of things that even though the paycheck might be high, it's not a necessary service for the function of humanity. So there's that too. Is it something that you can go to sleep with a with a clean conscience about? Because I think that's an important part of jobs and activities and hobbies.

Cecilie Conrad: 53:46
I just had a very interesting conversation yesterday with a friend about values, and I think this is one of the big things about being unschoolers, that we can have these conversations with our children as they grow up. As you say, you know, this is a value-based conversation to have about career choices that you've had with your children, Sandra. Did the job need to be done? Is it honest work? Uh, maybe also did it make you happy? Did you have a good day? And these are values. We talked about this, you know, pushing your children. This is another unschooling mom I talked with yesterday, but also with the understanding of a world where there are other cultures with other types of parents who see it as the right thing to do and as a valuable thing to do to push all of your children to get very, very fancy educations and and quote unquote good jobs with a high paycheck and a lot of options to get even higher paychecks. Those are different values. And in we consider community, happiness, peace, inner peace, honesty, good friends, stable family lives as very, very important elements of a good life. And in the culture that I'm from, this is a very big deal being part of something, being honest, trusting your neighbors, feeling safe, not that we feel unsafe, but assuming that we live in a world where we can, we don't lock our houses, we don't even lock our cars, we trust that people around us will be helpful and forthcoming and nice to us. And we have good days, we trust our colleagues. And so that kind of thing is just a different value, something that could be very important about a job situation rather than the paycheck and the prestige. Those are different values. And I think growing up, allowing for my children to grow up in an unschooling context ensures that I have time to talk with them about these things. My husband, I have not read it, but my husband read the book uh Pseudowork. It's by two Danish philosophers, but it's translated into something 40 languages. And he's talked about it so much, I feel like I've read it. But it has to do with this thing that a lot of work that is done these days is actually not work, it's planning for planning for doing yearly reports. No one's ever going to read on things that are not even slightly necessary. Lots of that kind of work is done. And do you want to have a job like that, writing emails about things that are actually not making the world a better place? Are you putting your hours into well, anyways? We've had a lot of talks about that, and I think growing up, making choices about how you want to spend your time, and eventually, how do you want to spend your time while you're making the money that will pay for your life? How do you want to feel while doing it? And what are the values behind it? It's not just interest-based, it's also there's also maybe a moral code to it, as you said, Sandra. Is it honest work? Did it need to be done? That those are good questions to ask yourself.

Sandra Dodd: 57:14
Well, it's also kind of hippie shit because honestly, if they're if it's not going to make good money and stuff, then what are those kids going to do when they're 40, 50 and their freaky parents who didn't even send them to school told them it's okay to just be happy and then they can't buy a house? You know, I understand that this can can it can looking backwards look like a child was not, I'm stuck for a word, shunted, um, driven toward a goal. But when parents are going, oh, but what if my kid doesn't do this? And well, what if I because I'm from India or South Korea or Japan, the only option is that my that their grandparents will accept are doctor, lawyer, engineer. And um, at least in India, women will get a master's degree just so they can have an arranged marriage. They're not gonna do that job, but they're not gonna be able to marry this guy who has a really good degree if they don't also have a good degree. So it's just, you know, there are some weird side issues for a lot of unschooled that can't be helped. And we can't help that. So the best thing I can usually say in any as a philosophical point in any of those people come up against that wall and they're jittery and they're going, ah, I'm fat, I'm panicking. I go, what is it? Is it better than school? Would school guarantee that they get one of those jobs? If they were in school, would they be happier? School is pretty much training people for jobs that don't exist anymore. Because if you start when you're six and start going to school and there's a curriculum lined up in front of you, they're training you for jobs now, for the jobs that existed when you started school. They're not training you for the jobs that will exist 10 years after you're out of school because they have no idea. They don't know. The schools can't predict that they're gonna be, you know, repair for phone video services or whatever, you know, repairing cell phones. No one would have even, if my kids had been in school, they wouldn't have been training them to repair cell phones, it wasn't happening yet.

Sue Elvis: 59:15
And that's well, nobody trained us to be bloggers or podcasters or authors or any of that. Did it's all things that we've picked up later on and learnt after we became adults. And so um there's you know you were saying about entrepreneurs and there's a lot of people making a living on online from things like podcasts and gaming and all kinds of things, which just weren't around when we were younger, but they weren't around when uh people who are younger than us were younger. It's a relatively new, and I I think it's very exciting because we don't know what's ahead. And There's still yeah, the people talk about oh the the we're gonna lose our jobs here because I'm I've been reading about AI recently. AI is gonna take all our jobs, but I wonder what else is ahead though? What other things is AI gonna allow us to do? And the world just keeps on changing. I could never have imagined that I would be a blogger or a podcaster uh when I, you know, even 20 years ago. And when I was just talking earlier about our our identity being what we do. And sometimes I think, well, I'm close to becoming an ex-blogger and an ex-podcaster, but then who am I? Who am I? And it's uh in a way, it's a scary thing. This is what I this is who I am, this is how people see me, and to rediscover that I have that's not fundamental to me, that there's other things I'm hoping that I will learn, I will do. Yeah. I was just um reading this book. I haven't read it all, so I can't tell you all about it. But it's called Tiny Experiments. I don't know if either of you have heard about it. Uh it was written by, I'm not even sure the name lady's name. Anyway, I didn't think we're gonna talk about it. So she used to be in uh some high up in Google. She had one of these prestigious jobs, earned a lot of money, and then one day decided she didn't want to do this anymore. And she writes in her book about how society is very much goal-oriented, that we were brought up to fulfill a goal. We have something that we're aiming towards. And she's talking about very much, I feel in line with unschooling, that life should be more about tiny experiments, trying things out, uh, setting yourself what she calls a pact, finding out about yourself first, uh, taking like some field notes, she calls them, about what makes us happy, uh, what skills we have, how just about ourselves, and then deciding to do little experiments. I might write a blog post twice a week on this particular blog, or I might decide I'm going to paint um every week, whatever the experiment is, and then you do it for so many weeks, and then you re-evaluate, and you learn a lot about what you like, what you don't, who you are. And I as I've been reading, I've been thinking, well, this is what our kids are doing all the time, or as unschoolers. They're trying things out, they do it for a certain amount of time, they might get really passionate about it, they might it might lead on to something else, or they might suddenly say, Well, that's the end of that one. I'm gonna try this. And when I was reading about it in this book, written by a non-unschooler, I thought, and this happens quite a lot. I think the ideas that our kids are brought up with, the ideas that are foundational to our lives, other people are discovering them later on in their lives after living the other way, and then realizing that that doesn't bring fulfillment, however much money you're making. That it yeah, I have to finish the other half of the book. I was always um good about sharing some ideas out of a book, but I can't tell you the end of the story because I haven't finished the book. But yeah, just this um very yeah, that's the one. And Laurie LeCumph, Tiny Experiments, but it's a very interesting read.

Sandra Dodd: 01:03:58
And the subtitle is How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World, and I can't pronounce her name. Anne Lorie Le Kumpf, maybe, and it says Neuroscientist and founder of NES Labs.

Sue Elvis: 01:04:09
Yeah. But um, if anybody's interested, I think the whenever I find unschooling ideas in the biggest world, it always makes me feel like justified for what we're doing. It makes sense. Other people are discovering it in different areas of their lives later on. And those tiny experiments are just very much what our kids are doing. These experiments with their learning things and then drop them, modify, try something else. And it's all about finding out who they are, what they're interested in, and not closing off that pathway and saying, well, I'm gonna be an engineer or something. I think we need engineers and I think we need doctors and we need lawyers. So I don't think any of those jobs are um we shouldn't encourage kids to do them if that's what they'd like to do. But not just for the sake of the reason that they are high prestige jobs, that they everybody's gonna give us a bit of a clap when they find out that, you know, all our kids went to uni and now we've got all these highbrow jobs, and they're gonna be set for life. Yeah, they could be set for life, and then some people that's for fine, but it shouldn't be the goal for everybody. It shouldn't be what we're pushing our kids towards.

Sandra Dodd: 01:05:35
Sometimes this is I don't know if this is fair or negative or what, but sometimes some people said, but doctor, but a doctor, but a doctor. My best friend, when I was growing up, her dad was a doctor and ended up in prison for prescribing alternatives to heroin, to heroin addicts. And um without any other treatment, he was just pretty much giving them methadone prescriptions and ended up being in trouble for that. So uh that's it's not a guarantee of glory and success necessarily. He he was in prison a long time, but still he touched it, you know, he was in for a year or two, maybe. Um, and I think everyone knows of lawyers and doctors who are alcoholics and very unhappy in their jobs, who didn't want that job, didn't like that job, and now they just go out and they're cranky and resentful at people who need to go to the doctor. So it's not a guarantee. And and asking people to reconsider, like, okay, if your child, not in it, not a not an ideal or a hypothetical child, but your own child human person you know, had been in school, would everything be better? If so, put them in school. You know, stop whinging at us. There's a school right near you. They might send a bus right to your house. Go. So sometimes I'm just impatient with people because they're like, yeah, but yeah, but talk to me for the next two years while I ignore my kid because I'm really worried and I don't know how, and I'm afraid it won't work. Like, okay, okay, stop. Go be with your kid, go see how learning works at your house. Play with it, run around, run around with it happily, excitedly. You need to do that. If you can't do that, put your child in school because I don't want to hear you whine for two years. I want to help you do it. Yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:07:17
I think also we we could touch upon the thing that learning. So I said it before in this episode, I'll say it again. Nothing we ever learn will be learned in vain. It will be useful at some point. Sometimes it's very clear, sometimes we realize, oh, the thing I I was learning back then, and then I didn't continue with that. Now suddenly I'm in a situation, I need all that skill. It's fun because it's a completely different situation. I couldn't have seen it coming. That has happened to me personally many times in my life, and I've seen it happen to other people, that everything we learned at some point comes in handy. It's never learned in vain. It's part of how how we can think and what we can do, and how we can solve problems and how we can be happy. So that it's never wasted time. Also, I think we need as unschoolers to trust the mosaic of learning, which is a different style than a curriculum-based planned go in this one direction learning, which is where we can discuss how much is learned in this context, especially if it's not voluntary, but it's just a different way of collecting skills and knowledge, absorbing things in life. So whenever we feel, oh, they did that for such a long time, and now they're led, they're just putting it behind them and they're never picking up that violin again. And I put all this time, money, and effort and hope into that violin. And that violin is not in vain. It's never in vain. It could be some academic thing, it could be jumping the trampoline, it could be hiking, it could be anything that they were into for a while and then they let go. It's just we if you look back at your own life, honestly, you probably have a lot of that in your backpack, anyways. So I think it's just important to remember that this just becomes complex, beautiful, mosaic of a person with a lot of different skills and a lot of different kinds of knowledge, a lot of different style dots that you can draw lines between and a lot of lines drawn. That's how unschooling works. That's what comes that's what comes out on the other end. So, yeah, I think that's important. And a completely different thing. I don't know. Do we want to talk about a little bit about different cultures, different societies and politics? Because I mean, with Sandra, I'm not sure, but it's just because you said before, Sandra, that you have this friend and she just had a baby, and now she's really sad about her student loan, and maybe becoming a vet was not the right choice because well, it didn't leave her with the freedom of choosing, I don't want to work anymore, I just want to be with my child because now there's this debt, and you have to Well, that a lot of that was my extrapolation. She didn't say all of that. I know she didn't personally say it, but this is an argument that often comes up in unschooling in an unschooling context. You know, you don't have to go to college, you will come out with a lot of debt. There are many other ways, and there are. It's just it happens to be, I'm actually sitting in front of a little flag. I'm not very patrio uh what's the word patriotic? Patriotic. I'm not it's not like I think my country is the best country on the planet at all. It's just very different in some ways. One being that we don't have free education, we have an education we pay for by paying a very high tax of 50% at least, all of us, all of our life. But at the point of entry, it's free. And at the point of exit, it's free if you well, you can take student loans, but you don't need to because you get a salary. The education itself is free, and you get a salary for the first six years of studying, and all of the educations are in the six years, so if you just do it, you come out, no debt. So basically, everyone who can and everyone can take an education of any sort can do so for free. This is a different situation, and I'm just wondering if there's so much talk about how higher education is not necessary and we don't need that because of the debt, because of what in other countries you have so the price tag is really hard on the individual in the US. Where in our country the price tag is really hard on the community, but the outcome is that we probably have more people who go through higher education. And and you don't feel trapped on the other side, maybe. I just no, you are not. I have a higher education, I have no student loans. I'm as free as I was when I entered. I spent 10 years at university and I didn't pay for it personally. I paid for it with the tax I've paid whenever I work.

Sandra Dodd: 01:12:15
In the US, it's very different, different places. New Mexico just lately made it free for residents to go to university for the first undergrad at least for a while. For a while, it was if you went to high school in in New Mexico and you go straight to college that next year, like we don't have a gap year tradition, but if we did, they would be saying without a gap year, and then they would pay for it as long as you kept your grades at 3.0, which is C or better. And my kids didn't qualify because they didn't graduate from high school. Holly had a boyfriend who got an art degree on that program, so he didn't have student loans. And so in meaningway, New Mexico's changed it now so that you can go not only if you just got a high school, but even if you've been out of school for 10 or 20 years. If you want to go to a state university in-state, it's there's no tuition. So that's in California, has some junior college situations like that. It's going to be different, different places. But like my friend who became a veterinarian, there's not a veterinary school in New Mexico. So she ended up going, I don't know where she went, Nebraska, Arizona. There are only a few. They're not everywhere.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:13:26
I just didn't want to. I think there's a big difference between unschooling the years where schooling would be a very involuntary thing pushed on children by parents and argued for with the idea, you know, everyone has to go to school, you have to learn these things, you have to obey it, you have to, whatever, you have to all these things, and you're under 15 years old, and you you have no choices. As you said before, Sandra, you can't even leave the house, especially if you're somewhere in the US, you there's no bus, you don't you're very trapped, and now your parents are telling you to do this thing for 10 hours a day, and you kind of have to do it. That kind of mandatory education, involuntary education. I think it's very different from being an adult choosing to go to university, wanting to dive deep into whatever, becoming a doctor or a lawyer or understand everything history. I think it's a very, very different situation. And I think it's great. I had a lot of fun educating myself at university. And I think whoever wants to go to university, I would just hope for the planet to have free education for everyone. Actually, you know, there's a lot of free education. There are not many free exams, but there's a lot of free education out there now online for everyone.

Sandra Dodd: 01:14:44
Yeah, what's more available? But I don't think that when I said trapped, I meant once someone has a big student loan, they pretty much have to keep working to pay it off. I and I don't think that unschoolers should keep their children at home against their will. I think the kids should always have the option to go back to school, or else they're as trapped as school kids are trapped. That's not healthy and that's not good. So I know not all parents agree with me because a lot of people are homeschooling because of their own parental political views. And I'm not interested in supporting that either. If the kids don't have a choice, then the parents are doing something and the kids are doing nothing except whatever they have to do, whatever the parents make them do. So again, I'm back to let's unschool in in some peaceful, open, honest way that supports the relationship between the parents and the children and doesn't harm it.

Sue Elvis: 01:15:34
Oh, but what about delaying sorry, what about delaying going to university? Like we get this idea. Well, I have a lot of people who are worried about time. So that I we have to prepare our kids or help our kids or encourage our kids so they know what they want to do when they're 18. But here in Australia, it's easier to go to university as a mature age student. And that doesn't mean you have to be odd like me. I think it's something like 20-something instead of 18. It's mature age isn't very old. But that gives that gap for kids to maybe decide for themselves what they really want to do if they want to go. Not it's not just the next stage, but this is why I feel that I have to, like I did, I feel I have to go to university because it's the next expected stage. But if um my husband he went back to uni to do his master's, I don't know, in his 50s, and he paid for his course outright, so he didn't have a debt. And I know it was substance, I can't get my word tongue around that word. He got it cheaper because um teachers are needed, they needed more teachers, so his course wasn't as expensive as it could have been. But because he had already been in the workforce for a long time, we have money to he paid off his debt as a up front. So even if kids don't have the money when they start, or maybe they don't have the money, they don't have not even as sure what they'd like to do. They're not even sure they want to go to university, but it's not too late. You can go to university when you're 70, 80, you you can get a degree anytime. And maybe joining the workforce first might be a good step step, might be a good first step. I just I guess I'm talking about how sometimes as our kids get older through the teen years, then parents start to worry that time is running out, that uh the kids don't know what they want to do, if they're going to go to university, where are they going to go? How are they going to afford it? What are they going to study? But perhaps it's time just to go to the work into the workforce and become work in the the supermarket, or my kids all worked in cafes, which was turned out to be remarkable, a very good experience. And that feeling that you have to do things by a certain stage. You don't. That there's always opportunities ahead.

Sandra Dodd: 01:18:20
I think a lot of unschoolers are more relaxed about the good the idea of graduation and 18 and all of that. But there are still families around me who tell their kids, when you're 18, you either have to go to university or get a job or move out. We're not going to support you anymore. You can't live here anymore. You're out because you're 18. I've talked to young adults from Mexico who are appalled at that. They cannot believe that any human parent would throw a child out because they just stay home until they get married, and their relatives will give them a job. They might become a lawyer, doctor, or an engineer, but if they're 19 or 23 and they're still at home because they're not married, they can work for their uncle. You know, that that's how the work for that's how the intro to the workforce tends to be is working for relatives at first, and then deciding later if they want to do something else. So that does seem healthier, and I see a lot of unschoolers do that. Provide or find a job for their kids almost like like 18th and 19th century apprenticeships, but not formal like that, but just you know, jobs that the parents know about or jobs that the parents create or their friends have, and they help their child get a not a job for life, not a career, but something to do for a while to make some money and to learn some things. There are jobs when we were talking about things that schools do and don't prepare people for, they're preparing people for the past. And they're there's some jobs that they absolutely ignore. I've never heard of any school offering anything that would help people sell antiques. And yet there have been something like Like antique salesmen always. People who deal in antiquities or art or interior decorating or just flat out collection of old sewing machines and typewriters that they sell to people who want a sewing machine or a typewriter. That sort of sale these days now is Etsy shops. And people don't have to live in a town where a whole bunch of people want to buy this thing. They need to have a good collection of them and know enough about them that people know to come to them. And then they can sell all over the country or all over internationally, maybe. And that's not something school thought about.

Sue Elvis: 01:20:38
I was that reminds me of a few months ago. I had this idea. I was having these ideas that I try out. I do my little tiny experiments. And I thought it might be rather cool to get a manual typewriter and to send people little notes with on a typewriter rather than print something off from a computer. I was going to sit, I I can't type touch type, but I was going to sit there and type on this typewriter. So I went looking online for typewriters. Oh, I fell down a rabbit hole. As you said, Sandra, it's there's loads on Etsy that people are selling. People are collect them and that's what they specialise in. But I found out that they actually made typewriters in cursive writing. So then my desires increased. I wanted a cursive writing typewriter. And then not only that, I thought, oh wow, look at the design of these ones. That you could just get so much pleasure from having a good-looking typewriter. Not just one that's serviceable, but one that actually was a beautiful object that did a good job. And oh, I had all these big dreams, and I thought if anybody else asks me what I want for my birthday or Christmas, I'm going to say a typewriter, and I'm going to say a cursive typewriter. And I thought, wouldn't if I had more money, because I don't have money, I don't earn anything much, I would buy lots of these typewriters and have a typewriter collection. And I would use them, but I would also just enjoy them. And yeah, it's just um, as she said, people uh people curate typewriters, they know about them, they're knowledgeable. Yeah, I don't know what else I was going to say about that. I just uh just felt so joyful when I was thinking about these typewriters and doing all this research and looking at all the pictures and thinking, wow, I wish I could have one of these typewriters. So you never know. Somebody somewhere wants the service that you also are passionate about.

Sandra Dodd: 01:22:48
My friend Brie Jauntry, she's an unschooling mom. Her daughter's grown now and doing EMT ambulance stuff, but she has lived in Pennsylvania, Israel, Alaska, and then and New Mexico, now New Mexico. So when Marty was moving to Alaska, she knew lots of things that would help him, lots of advice. But her she took up with her high school boyfriend after all these years. She was married, divorced, and her high school boyfriend and she got together. So they're they don't live very far from here, and we're friends, and he loves typewriters and collects and repairs and sells and gave Holly one. And it's it's an interesting hobby. That's not what he does. That's a it's a side job. He's a driver, he does courier work, like like direct deliveries, sometimes of medical testy equipment, or I don't know what all, but he just mostly drives around the state and takes something into an office and hands it to a person. It's a cool job. So he gets to he gets to see things that when they go on vacation, they go somewhere that when he was driving, he saw something really cool and they go look at it on the weekend. So that that's a good example of seeing an adult who's following his own hobbies and passions. And so, in a way, he's not doing it to make money, but when he sells a typewriter, that supports him buying another typewriter. So it supports his hobby, his collection. And by driving around and seeing more of the state, he's able to scout out where there's a cool bed and breakfast or some hot springs or something that they might want to go and visit. And I think that if unschoolers can see what their kids are doing as something like that, if if something that they do to support their child's interest is to take them to a conference or to another town where there's more of whatever that is that they're interested in. If the kid's interested in rock collecting, find some rock hound club where they're where the old guys who know a lot about geology who maybe used to be professionals in some field, now they're retired, and they just on the weekends go out in the hills and look for rocks, they would be glad to tell somebody else about it. So there are things like that the parents can facilitate that the kids might not have known about. So there's an exposure situation where if you know that there's something that they won't discover on their own or can't get to on their own, you could be the driver or you could find them some resources, books, storage places for the rocks that they have, help them know how to use resources online to identify minerals. If the parents can be the facilitators to support that interest, and then let it go when it's gone and see what the kid comes to next, if anything, if anything that needs that sort of support and networking. I've seen parents take their well, uh one mom only had one daughter, and she would take her daughter to Barbie conventions. The daughter really liked dress-up dolls, not necessarily Barbies, but fashion dolls of one sort or another, and was really interested in how the dolls were made. How do they, you know, build the faces and stuff and how do they reproduce them? She was interested in that sort of technological aspect of it and the costumes. And the mom just went with it and said, Okay, let's get you some more dolls. Let's find sites online where they talk about these dolls. And there are sites, some of that's on my on my site on my website because the mom had documented so much of what they had done, but there are sites that show you how to put hair on dolls, like to restore dolls, how to paint their faces if the makeup's weren't off or whatever, what to use to do that on plastic so that you're just not making a mess, and how to plug the into those little holes on fashion dolls' heads, how to what to buy to put new hair on them and how to fasten it in. And I had no idea. But this kid knew it all when she was 12. She knew where to look for some and where to buy the hair, and that's a deep dive into an interest. And the mom was totally patient and helpful about it. And I've seen My Little Pony Interest. There's a page on my site, there's a scientist named Christina uh Alvarez, maybe Alvarado, and she got interested in math and science because of My Little Ponies, which doesn't seem obvious, but she would braid the tails and see the combinatorics of the patterns of the tail braiding and the mane braiding. And I read that and I sort of vaguely understood it and brought that to my site. And Holly came home, and Holly had a lot of My Little Ponies, and she knew how to braid. And so I was reading that part to her, and she said, Oh, yeah, mom, look. And she pulled something that she had already braided, and she starts telling me, here's a seven-strand, here's a nine-strand. And so I illustrated that article with some of Holly's ponies. But it's it's interesting to look back. You can always see the trail looking backwards, but you can't see the end point looking forward. And that's another important thing about hobbies is if you look back on a person's life, you'll see where some of that came from. Where some of the interests in maps or writing or publishing or typewriters might have started. But you can't look at what they're doing when they're 12 and go, oh, I know where this goes. You don't know, they don't know, nobody knows. There's some job that's not invented, like being uh the manager of a team of game masters for World of Warcraft. Who would have known?

Cecilie Conrad: 01:28:10
I think a good takeaway from this really is the broad array of different interests children could have that are all of equal wet value. So that's one thing. And it's a good de-schooling trip to take with yourself to pause it when we assign different value to different things. So are they into the Monster Truck videos on the iPad? Maybe sit down, maybe sit down with a knitting like I'm doing right now or whatever, and watch some Monster Truck videos and and consider that as important as if they were studying French, which is easy to be proud of. So so all hobbies are born equal is one way of talking about this. I think it's important. And what was the other thing? The other thing was spending time with our children. You say that very often, Sandra. You know, your job is to be there, go spend some time with your child. And and I hear this story about the dress up dolls. I think it's amazing. But that is basically a mother taking interest in a child's interest and just walking with the child. Sit down, do the Legos, uh, learn the magic tricks, be interested, spend time.

Sandra Dodd: 01:29:34
Monster truck rallies lead to other things too. I I live where they have monster truck rallies, and they have sometimes they have those in a place in Albuquerque called Tingley Coliseum, which is kind of a rodeo place. And sometimes they used to, there are ice rinks now, but they used to do like ice capades, big ice shows there. So it's a big, it has bleachers all the way around, you know, seating. And that floor, I don't know how they do it, but they can do things like deep dirt, mud for rodeo or monster truck, and they can put ice. I've been to concerts there. I saw Crosby's Tills and Ash there twice. They have when the rodeo comes for State Fair, they have Western music, cowboy music, you know, country and western concerts in that building on the same day they have a rodeo. Somebody knows how to manage that. There are some people who I don't know what they have, I don't know how they put an ice floor in there. You know, that's not the same day as the rodeo, but they must bulldoze all of that poo and car oil or whatever it has been, and get that building ready for something altogether different. It's like magic. So that's another thing that people could learn, and that could be a job that they're not going to teach in school. There are just so many things. If you look at the world a different way, don't slice it with what grade, what grade, what university, what degree, but look at all the things, all what needs to be known and done for the world to function and to advance and to roll into new things that nobody expected. That's another way to look at the world.

Sue Elvis: 01:31:10
I think that it's important to be prepared to share or even just listen to our kids when they have the want to talk about their interests. It's uh a wonderful opportunity to connect with our kids. I was just recently I've been exploring AI-generated podcasts, my big thing at the minute, and making little videos. And then thinking, how could I use this? But that's not the goal. The goal is not, well, how I I've got this, I want to use it here. I just want to experiment to see how it works, and then maybe there will be a way of using it. But my husband has been coming home in the evening and he's been saying, What have you, you know, what have you been doing today? And I tell him, and he says, Can I see? And then he sits down and I show him and he says, Wow, that's really good. I really love that. I like how you've done this and that, and I didn't realize this was possible. And because he's showing interest, I feel really good. You know, it makes it feel uh, I don't know, I just feel that he's willing to listen to me and give me some feedback, and it increases my enjoyment because I'm sharing it with him. But I remember lots of times as my kids were growing up when I would maybe do a workout with my daughter Sophie, who was very much into exercise, or talking to her about diet and nutrition and food because that's what she was interested in, or I never sang with my daughter Imogene because I don't believe I can sing, but I sat down and I went to concerts with her and I went to her performances and I asked her questions. But every time my kids were always grateful for my interest that I would take that time to take an interest in the things that were interesting them. And I think our interests are always a part of who we are. We learn more about ourselves as we're exploring things, and I think we get to know our kids better by taking that time to share their interests. We understand what makes them tick, why they're feeling joyful about this particular thing, just that bubbling over with excitement, two people enjoying the same thing, even though it's not particularly my thing, it becomes my thing for a little while, and it just gives so much joy to the person who the interest does belong to. So sometimes my parent parents will say to me, Oh, but my I'm not interested in the same things my kids are interested in. I just don't like video games, or I just don't like this. And I think there's great benefits from at least listening and to finding out a little bit more about it, just being prepared to share it. Maybe we won't want to do it, but just to share it sometimes. Have you found that Cecilia? Sorry. I just noticed Cecilia was nodding there, and I wondered if she had a story about that as well.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:34:23
No, I just totally agree. It's unschooling is about spending time and and sharing life and being interested and being so the method, if you will, is is uh trusting the process. Uh, Sandra just said, you can engineer it backwards once you see where it ends, but you can't predict it from where you are. But you can trust that there is a way, or there's several ways, but they'll choose one and they'll find something they're passionate about, and they will start working with that and at some point make some money. That whole end goal thing, it will happen. We don't have to force it or foresee it or support it in any specific way. The support is giving the space and the trust and putting in the time and being interested, supportive of who they are, and supportive of having a good life growing up in unconditional love. We did an entire podcast on that one as well. So, so the the hobbies, focuses, obsessions, interests. I think we need to pursue our own to be who we are, and we need to join our children in theirs. And and there might be some where you just I cannot be interested in all of the things they're all interested in, not to the extent they are, but I can be interested in their interests, and I can join them for a while with the things they do, and I can put in the effort. I've noticed, and my husband's been pointing at it very clearly, that for a while it's just been easier for me to jump in and do things with my teenage daughter than with my sons, because the things that she likes to do happen a lot of them to be the same I like to do. So it's very easy. And I have to put in more effort to do things with my boys. Uh, my oldest, the things I do with him, the things we do together demand a lot of mind work, it's a lot of studying, it's a lot of brain work, and that's not so easy. It is the same interest, but it's just harder to study hard physics and and read complicated things. And you know, it's just whatever. I don't have to name them all and what it is with it. But it's it's my job as an unschooling mom is to make sure that I have some interests that I can share with my children and I I can join them in their things. So while they are children, being less focused on where this leads to, where it takes us, and more focused on just being there in the moment and working with with our fears so that we arrive at a point where we maybe trust the process, trust that this is the right thing to do. And yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 01:37:17
You have both made such beautiful summaries, and it seems like we're winding down, and I'm gonna wind it back up because when Cecilia asked, Do you want to talk about different cultures and countries? I said, No, because I don't want it. We could do that for a long time. But if people want to unschool, if they're in Germany, too bad, you can't gotta move. There are some places where it's easy and some places where it's difficult, and people, I can't guarantee it's not like I'm selling a vacuum cleaner and guarantee to change the cord to their own electrical outlets or anything like that. If you can, do you know, do as much as you can if you can, and you know, but learning works the same way regardless of laws or language or the cost of university. Learning still works by having an idea, learning a little bit of something, and going, oh, that's like this. That's not like this, that's different. All that comparison and contrast of little ideas spark up that web of connections. But there's a problem in English and probably all Germanic languages, that we don't have two different verbs, like a romance languages. Sometimes I know Spanish does have a word for a thing that you really are all the time and a thing that you are in this second. But in English, if you say, I'm sleepy, I'm hungry, it's the same verb as I am a nun, I am a teacher. I uh so I went to a workshop when I was 25. At that time, I had had this same hobby. I was a school kid, it's not not got to do with training or anything, but aside from school and all of that, I really liked folk songs, ballads, old songs, the older the better. And I learned a guitar so I could sing them, and I knew lots of them, long songs. I went to a workshop, I also played recorder, and not played recorder, farting around like a kid, but serious, playing teleman sonata stuff, you know. So pretty serious. And I went to a workshop that lasted a week that was up in the mountains in Taos, and so we're ever I was camping in a camper, some people were staying in a hotel every day from morning till dinner. We did these serious Renaissance music things, and so I went to a workshop that was French chanson. I could read French to pronounce it, and I could read music. So I thought, okay, easy. This is two part harmony things to read off music in French. I can do it. So I'm singing, I'm competent, I can sight read. I think this is going to be a cinch. Teacher stops, says, stop, stop, stop. She points at me. This is out of about eight or ten people. You sound like a folk singer. And I said, I am a folk singer. Okay, but I knew what she meant. Don't do that kind, don't do that style, do this style. It's not operatic, but it's more formal. So okay. I did. So she but I, you know, for me to say I am a folk singer, that was true. This is my first touch of French chanson performance. I'd heard some, but I didn't ever do it in front of a teacher who was going to tell me wrong, wrong, wrong. So the fact was I was a folk singer. She spotted it, or at least insulted it vaguely. And um so that there's an identity like that does affect how other people see you and what you know and what your abilities are, what you've practiced. So that was a good example of am I or am I not a singer? Yeah. Am I, am I, or not a folk singer? Okay. Can I tone that down and do something different? And I think through people's lives, they will be a thing. And then they're a former that thing. Kirby's a former game master. He's a former Pizza Hut employer, or it wasn't Pizza Hut, it was a place called Dion's, a former Dion's employee. And that's okay. So if your husband is a former sales manager and now he's a he'll someday he'll be a former teacher, that's also a thing to be. It's a place to park your thoughts and identity. You know, when I was a kid, I did a lot of Lego. That might be said by someone who does not own any Lego at that moment, who is in that Lego free house. But he can still say, I loved Lego when I was a kid and I had a lot of it. So I think as people move through their lives, that collection of what they've been and who they've what they've done and how they've done it is kind of the story of their life.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:41:39
And also the story of who they are. That's what I think you do become, you do pick up all the skills, and it becomes part of who you are.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:41:51
I don't think it's that bad to say I'm a doctor or I'm a blogger or I'm a musician. It's how we use the language. Uh, you can say I have a job as a musician, I have a job as a, or this is what I do for a living. That's another way to phrase it. But to say I am a doctor doesn't necessarily mean that you are nothing beyond that, and that you have no other interests, or there are no other elements of your personality, or that you didn't work in a pizza shop when you were 17, then you were a pizza salesperson. And well, I don't know. I think we just don't have to over-identify with these things, uh, not restrict ourselves to be one thing.

Sandra Dodd: 01:42:38
And I also want No one ever said no one ever said to me, You're not a folk singer, because no one's paying you to be a folk singer. And so there's that too. Do need do people need to be to have that as a as a career or as a paying job to say that they are? I I know a lot about World War II, can be said by people who are not professors of history.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:42:59
Can you remind me how you round it well took it back up a notch?

Sandra Dodd: 01:43:05
What oh that that I didn't make a sweet, I didn't make a sweet summary like you guys did. I went trying to wait.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:43:12
I'm not trying to make a sweet summary, but I am looking at the time thinking we did talk about stopping after two hours today, and we're we're getting close. So that's why I'm trying to think back, you know, to the original passions and and focus and interests, and how did we talk about the thing? And the fun thing is, like on a meta level, we talked a lot about career paths and education, higher education, university, all these things that are exactly what unschoolers are looking at when they build Lego or start doing magic tricks. And we're trying to say, don't look for it when they're small, just let them be small, just let them play with their Lego, just let them do their magic tricks, just let them do whatever, and let them let go of it as well when they don't want to do it anymore. And yet, here we are talking about careers, jobs, educations.

Sandra Dodd: 01:44:12
It's like a typical day. When people are new to unschooling, they have those worries, and so it's worth addressing the worries. Yes. But also to remind them that as they de school, they won't think about it as much. When those when those thoughts are not your first five or ten thoughts every morning, then you're doing better as to unschooling.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:44:29
I like that. And I like that. I was thinking about the it's it called an idiom you use in English. I really like we cross that bridge when we get to it. Yes, we have that. That's kind of the thing, you know, when you have a five-year-old or even a 10-year-old, you don't have to worry about how they are going to make money or how they are going to parent their children. You know, it's it's at a uh now they're 10. So let's work with that. There are different jobs growth things happening when you're 10. You don't have to, so we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. And I have two children who are one has crossed it and is supporting her own life, and another one is starting to contemplate, hmm, you know, maybe I I want to do these things now. So we're getting at the bridge, then we start crossing it. I think all unschooling also is about, hey, child let childhood be childhood. We're not at the point of supporting our own lives. And and I am actually, I don't know, I am I think that it's a false idea that what they do until they are 15 years old is going to what they do academically is going to affect big scale what they will be able to do when they are, let's say, 25. Yeah. All these things we say, you need to do this math book. You're nine years old, you have to sit and do this boring stuff that you don't want to do, because otherwise you'll have a bad life.

Sandra Dodd: 01:46:08
That idea is false. All the time was I that I was in school, they used to say, Your permanent record will follow you for the rest of your life. Okay, yeah, whatever. And then I was out of school for four years, went back to the same school district in the same building where I had gone from first grade, second grade to ninth grade, and said, I want to see my permanent record now that I'm an employee, right? I want to see my permanent record. And they went, it would be in storage. It didn't even follow me for four years after, darn it. I wanted to see what they wrote about my not even when you wanted it to. I know. Because I knew that there were photos, all my little I still had the photos, but you know, I just wanted to see what they said behind my back, but no, no, you wasn't really available. Yeah. So that's certainly not for unschoolers. No. So I think still, as I think the summary to all of the podcasts we've had is make your days happy and peaceful and look at the relationship between you and your kids, and everything else will fall into place.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:47:07
And trust the process. At the other end, there's a lot of good stuff happening at the other end.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:47:13
Should we end it here? Now we've all done a beautiful sum up. And we've talked for two hours, so maybe that's all good and fine. Thank you. Thank you for today.

Sue Elvis: 01:47:26
I enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:47:29
It was fun.

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