S3E2: Unschooling - Coping with the Unexpected | with Sandra Dodd, Cecilie Conrad and Sue Elvis

AUTOGENERATED TRANSCRIPT

S3E2 | Ladies Fixing the World

Cecilie Conrad: 00:00
Welcome to the Ladies Podcast, episode two of season three. I am here with Sandra Dodds Wilvis, as I have been for a while, and I enjoy very much welcome both of you. We're going to talk about coping with the unexpected as unschoolers. The frame is unschooling, and we're talking about how do we cope with things that you don't plan for, things that happen. Because we live this unschooled life inside, or while we live a real life where things happen. So that has been part of all of our journeys, and it will be for everyone who venture on and unschooling their kids that you you know you can think so much and you can plan so much and you can read the books and listen to the podcasts, but then things happen, and the unexpected can become a quite big part of the show. So we thought we'd do an episode about that. And as always, Sandra Dodd is ready with a story. And we hope I don't know, but she's ready to open.

Sandra Dodd: 01:06
I I have an old story from the 1980s. When I'd had my first baby, I went to a group called La Lechileague that was here that was moms helping moms. And it was about breastfeeding, which had gone out of style in the United States for a long time. And I wanted to learn that. So I was there, and one of the first benefits that they discussed was seemed very foreign to me at the time. So I think that made it more memorable. They said, so say you're out in a boat. I live in New Mexico. I'm 800 miles from the ocean and either or the Gulf of Mexico, 800. So I'm not out in a boat. But let's say that I was. And then they said, So the engine dies and you can't really get back to shore. This scenario just doesn't fit any of the water in New Mexico. I just I loved it, you know. So I'm just sitting there thinking, what boat? What water? And she said, but if you're dependent on formula, how are you going to feed your baby? But if you're nursing your baby, then you don't have any problem. Everybody else might get hungry, but your baby won't. And I thought, oh, that's sweet. That's a good idea. So that was, it was being prepared for the unexpected and having an advantage from decisions that you had already made. So then when I got involved with unschooling, which was partly because of that, because of being involved in a group that talked about, well, what's natural? What do babies already know how to do? Things like that. You know, that led pretty easily to unschooling. Some other things did too. But when I got to unschooling, I thought, okay, what are the what are the things that we could benefit from like that? Like in what sort of emergency situation is this a benefit? And what comes to mind right away is schedules. If you don't have to be somewhere at a certain time, then if the dog pukes or the car didn't start or something like that, it's not as big an emergency as it might be if kids needed to be at a certain place at a certain time with their lunch, with the right uniform. What all of those things that school requires. So that was an easy one to see. And years passed, and I came across lots of stories and had some of my own emergencies. But the big one was in 2020, when all over the world people were saying, we have to stay home. Everybody stay home. We don't know what's going on, but stay home, keep your kids home. And so many families just flipped out and said, How are we going to do that? We can't do that. How will we get along? And and what will we do? I don't know how I don't know how to be with my kids at home all day. And all of the unschoolers were kind of, you know, smiling and relaxed because they did know how. It wasn't as fun after a few months. We couldn't go to museums and run around town, but still the initial stance and relaxation that the unschoolers had was quite a luxury. We didn't know how long it was going to last, but we'd already been doing it, most of us, for years. And so they said, um, stay home, keep your family together, stay with your kids all day. We're like, okay.

Cecilie Conrad: 03:58
Yeah, I remember that. That it wasn't that big of a deal relative to how our everyday life was organized. It was a big deal, though. To me, it was a really big deal.

Sandra Dodd: 04:13
Not that we didn't have to have an entire COVID conversation, but but we didn't have what other people had on top of it, which was figuring out how to communicate with our kids, figuring out how to feed them lunch. No, we didn't have that. Also, a lot of the unschooling kids had friends online that they could still hang out with from World of Warcraft or whatever games they were involved in. And they weren't as isolated from their friends as if their friends were all at school. And the parents weren't as flipped out about kids being on the computer as parents of school kids might have been, because their schedule had already been set. How many hours this, how many hours that, when you have to go to bed because you have to get up. So for them, it was a huge disruption.

Cecilie Conrad: 04:55
I think you talked about something different than what I thought you would talk about. And it's not that it's not relevant because it is. It's just when is unschooling an advantage to the situation when something unexpected happens? And this is a very clear and very good example. We were very much in a better position, all of us who already lived at home and did our own thing. Is it very often an advantage to have lived this kind of life when something unexpected happens in our context?

Sandra Dodd: 05:32
Well, another example I've seen several times is a grandparent gets sick, needs needs care from one of the unschooling parents, one of their kids. So sometimes the parents have said, this will mess up our homeschooling. I'm saying, why? They'll learn all these things that are going on. They'll learn about the problems or you know, elder care, whatever the legalities or finances are in your area. What does it take? And you're not disrupting their school schedule. If you go stay at the other house, if the kids go with you and help or stay home, there's a lot of flexibility there, and there's a lot for them to learn. So even if it's even if it's very acute, you know, almost full-time care, and the kids are disrupted for months, it doesn't seem to be a big problem. There, you can see the advantages in what the kids are learning. And they're not having to go to school and wonder what's going on at home and worry because they're right there in real time seeing it happen. I think that's an advantage.

Cecilie Conrad: 06:30
I think so too. And I think maybe it's one of the things we really need to learn on the journey of unschooling to sometimes, even for longer stretches of time, to even let go of the idea of what the kids are learning. To it's not always the center stage, the home education, in at least in our unschooling life. And I'm not saying I don't care about my kids' quote unquote education. It's more like I trust what's going on. I learned over the years that the setting of unschooling, the way I can trust what they are doing to be the best education they can have. And I can trust that whatever life brings will eventually put us at a point where we grow in some one way or the other. And that as an unschooler, I don't plan for it. I don't have to plan for it, I don't want to plan for it, I don't think it's the right thing to plan for it. So if I or we have to cope with something really rough that happens to our family, then we cope with that. And the learning journey. I mean, I'm not even thinking about it. If it's a kind of crisis situation, something happens and we're all disturbed and emotional and confused and maybe busy because we have to solve a big problem and we're running around, or mentally at least, and we might be so overwhelmed by what's going on that we're not focusing clearly on our kids, not primarily. I still, if I step back for a little while and think about the situation, trust that in the whole of it, their tri childhood is set up in a way where it can't go wrong. Whatever happens, we grow from it. Whatever happens, there will be times later on where there is more peace, and we get to evaluate and we get to to figure out what we learned from this specific situation and how that set us up to be ready for life in a better way onwards. So you're right, Sandra, that if we have to cope with disease and the loss, maybe, or potential loss of family members, and we have to practically be the ones to bring the water and change the sheets and spend a lot of time doing that. There will be learning that can afterwards be defined. And you said so we learned this about finances and that about diseases and this about language and whatever it was. In the situation, that's probably not what you're thinking about. You're thinking about your sick mom or whoever you're looking after. And what would be really nice was to not worry about your children's education on top of that. And maybe if we are in schoolers, we are in a better place to not worry so much about it for the time when our focus is somewhere else. Does that make sense?

Sue Elvis: 09:56
Yeah. Yeah, well, we we've learned that our lives are still, I guess, in some ways, even richer when you have unexpected circumstances come along and our children are learning things that they wouldn't learn without those unexpected happenings. And some of them are very difficult to endure. You might not ask for them. But looking back, you always think that was such a rich time. We have learned so much about being a family, about all kinds of things. But we know from experience that is going to happen if something else unexpected comes along because we've experienced it. But I find that a lot of other people worry, even about things like having a new baby in the family, the life is turned upside down for a while. How will we cope with our children's education on top of looking after a baby or a sick person? And we just sort of go with the flow and recognize that learning happens in all situations. And as you said, Cecilia, we don't really have to think about it. But there are other people out that do worry about that. And sometimes I sort of sit down with people virtually because I don't know anyone face to face, and make some suggestions about the sort of things that their children are learning to maybe make them more aware of things that we don't even think about because we just know. But yeah, just sort of tuning their eyes into all the learning that's going on, especially I think if they're home homeschool registration, if they're having to fulfill requirements and how are we going to do this now that we can't concentrate uh solely on our kids. So I think that we are very fortunate that we recognize. Well, I don't have any smaller children anymore, but we had so many circumstances that just came along and that were very difficult to endure, but we recognized as maybe not what things we wanted, but they were certainly rich in learning. Yeah. We wouldn't ask for them, but they came anyway. And yeah, they just in the way, just go with the flow and not worry. Well, we didn't worry, but just recognize that whoa, life is full of learning. That was a bird that just flew into my window. Wow. Sorry.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:50
Wow. Is it okay, the bird?

Sue Elvis: 12:52
Well, it flew away. Last time when I was sitting up for one of these, the bird flew into the window and dropped. But this one is gone. Okay. We get a lot of wild birds where we live. We live on the bush.

Sandra Dodd: 13:06
Sometimes the smallest unexpected problems might be like the toilet doesn't flush or the shower is running over, or you know, we can't clean the dishes for some reason or another. That's sort of the house isn't working. But without the without the emergency schedule of all the kids have to be at school at eight, it's not a big deal. Much less a big deal. And uh they might learn how to fix the toilet. You know, there are lots of things are available if you look at it from a learning perspective. They can learn other ways to wash the dishes, or if you know if a washing machine's not working, what can you wash by hand? Jeans are hard, but underwear is easy. You know, older people know a lot of things that younger people have never seen done before. And it's uh it's a chance to live like the pioneers for a little bit if you have to. Electricity's out. Maybe you have candles or emergency light sticks that you shake, you know, those kind of chemical lights sticks that they use on boats and stuff. See, I know something about boats. The worst stories I saw involved death of a child. And even there, the parents because the parents were really already involved in unschooling and had other unschooling children, and one family there was only one other child. But one was a seven-year-old boy who had gone skating with another family, and the parent the families were friends, and the parents never like blamed the other family or anything. They were just glad he was having fun. He fell through the ice and drowned. And people were right there, they did the best they could. He was seven, and the other was a nine-year-old girl who died of leukemia. She was diagnosed and did not live long after that. It was a big surprise. They didn't know there was anything wrong with her. And the effect of both of those was that other families, because it was in the days when there were a lot of people in this discussions constantly by email, and so other families got to see how the parents dealt with that. The kids didn't have to go to school and either have the kids asking a bunch of rude, nosy questions about it, or the teacher saying, Okay, stop crying, do your work, sit still. The kids were able to be with the parents or just sleep or watch cartoons and be distracted. And those both moms in the both those families use that as a way to remind other parents to be sweet with their kids, not to put things off, to do fun things that the kids want to do. And it was sweet of them to take their grief and turn it into something positive and a tool, sort of, that other families could use. And a lot of people had known those kids. And so it wasn't isolating, it was in a way community building. And I only know those two stories. I know of some other stories of older kids who were grown or almost grown and had problems of one sort or another. But it's more unexpected with a young child. I think the older you get, the closer you are to could be now. I know because I'm really old. I am so old, you guys. So I'm getting tired. I almost fell this morning. And when I went to the hospital the other day, he said, Have you fallen lately? And I said, No, but I've stumbled a couple of times. I've I said, What if what happens if you say yes? Because they always ask me now that I go to the doctor. And they said, Well, we would put a wristband on you and offer you a wheelchair. And I said, No free tea and cookies. And they said, No, it's okay. No, I didn't fall.

Sue Elvis: 16:36
So Cassandra, that sounds like that sounds like a one of a typical example of uh a situation you you just wouldn't want. You couldn't imagine it, but it happens. But the sort of things that you get, you learn from it about death and love and what's really most important in life, compassion and as you said about the the real that bond between parents and children. There's nothing more important than our children, and go hug your children, and uh we always we could put other things ahead of our children, but when you've experienced something like that, the whole world changes, your view changes completely. And I always remember we had a baby who died, and I wouldn't put it, I'm not saying that that's on a level where the seven-year-old, we only had him a very short time. But what we I would, when I look back at it, and it was such intense grief for the whole family. And we were paralyzed for ages as far as normal life went on. We couldn't live normal life. Uh I used to go to the shops because I had to, and I would look around and think, how can anybody be walking along, listening to music, having trivial conversations when I'm hurting so much? All the ordinary things of life seem so unimportant. But when I look back at that time, what I remember most is learning about love, about how we all pulled together and how we would have gone through that all over again for that particular child, to have that particular child. And it really gave power to our unschooling view, that other things like getting your reading done or having some math records to show somebody, all these were so unimportant that if all our kids really need is to be loved unconditionally and everything else will fall into place. But yeah, that was an unexpected happening. We never expected that to happen to us. But yeah, it sort of contributed to the way the thoughts that um the way we wanted to live our lives. And I know that's true, Cecilia, for you, because you have told us your story of cancer and how that really formed the basis of your life with your family. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. So would you like to retell some of that story in the context of unschooling in unexpected circumstances?

Cecilie Conrad: 19:33
Well, the honest truth is that our cancer story and some of the ribs of it all comes before we chose to unschool. So we were not unschoolers when I had cancer, and I was thinking when you talked about the loss of your son, how death played a really big part of our choice. I mean, it is very good at waking you up to understand what's truly important. Death is. And I had a lot of it close to my life when I had cancer. I had a very low survival chance. People around me died. You get to know people very well very fast at the hospital when you have the same disease, and everybody is uh, you know, standing there at the edge of the cliff looking down, knowing that you might be the next one who has to jump. It just sparks friendship, intimacy. So they were close friends that died around me when I was sick, and I survived. Obviously, we didn't know that at the time that I survived. Surviving is something I mean it didn't kill me until proven otherwise. That's how it works. It's not a cancer, the one I had that goes away. It's the kind of thing that at some point you can't measure it any longer, and statistically it's probably gone. I never got uh all clear because that's just not how it works. And the final choice to homeschool in our story. I've told it before, I can tell it again. We were working on it. Storm had said that he didn't want to go to school. My husband wanted him to at least try it out, see what it was. And I was doing the taking him to school three times a week situation. So my his veto was he has to try it out. Mine was I'm not leaving him there until he says it's okay, I can go home. So basically, I never left the school. After a few weeks of trying to get him started with school, getting him integrated there, and you know, making him not making him, but offering him this context of schooling where he could see if he could adapt and maybe have some fun. The teachers told me, sat me down and and said, This is never going to work. Yeah, your attachment with your son's attachment to you is too strong, all that bullshit. There's no such thing as too much attachment to your primary caregiver. It doesn't exist. But school teachers sometimes think so. But anyway, they said to me that maybe my husband should come in the morning because that might be easier to penetrate that relation and might be easier for Storm to let go if it was the dad. And I actually felt it's not me who want him in school. So they might be right. And maybe yes, but taking him there would show, make it clear for Jesper how this context wasn't right for Storm. This sounds like I had an agenda of not integrating Storm in the school. I actually liked the school for a school, and I actually did try wholeheartedly to see if it could work. So, anyways, but I the teachers wanted Jesper to come. Uh, this is after three weeks of coming three times a week, something like that. And we went home, it was a Thursday, our three days was Tuesday through Thursday. So we had the four days break at that point. Saturday morning, the phone rings, and another one of my friends had just died of leukemia, uh, which is the disease I had. Surprisingly, she had had the transplant and she had survived the hundred days, and you know, we thought it was good. But then something happened. So, this one I didn't go to all the funerals, that's not how close we were, but well, obviously, also I was sick when lots of people died when I was sick. But at this point, I was through my treatment and we'd had fjords, so this is like a year later. But with this one, I wanted to go to the funeral because I was quite close with this lady. And on the Monday, we went to the funeral, and it's just such a confronting thing for us, really knowing. I mean, you all always know when you're at a funeral, you know, someday it's gonna be your turn. But this was just there was a lot of survivor's guilt. Let me just put it that way. It was someone else's children letting go of their mom. It was someone else's husband who had to say goodbye, and there I was surviving, um, and that was quite confronting for all of us, especially for Jesper and I, the adults. So driving home, he had had a wake-up call inside of his mind, and it's a little bit like how do we care about the math book, or how do what the question of what really matters. And it's just sad that for many of us, it's these almost catastrophes that or actual catastrophes that put us at a point where we stop and think about what really matters, because we should all do that all the time. What really matters is where we should put our attention. And so that day it's a Jesper, he realized, you know, why are we why are we trying to push our kid to do something he clearly doesn't want to do? And and he he's very clear, he's very wise. My husband, and on that day he he already said the things that we still say, you know, unschooling, home education is about focusing on what's truly important in life. And actually, all the academics take census that takes second place, it's not census stage. Um what we want our kids to learn. We're not worried about world history, math, languages, uh, whatever, grammar, all these things. Those things are the easy ones to learn. Those things are the ones that everyone can learn, those things are the things you can learn later on in life. Whereas knowing that you're loved, being truly adaptable, learning to navigate emotional stuff, learning to reflect on what happens in life, learning to navigate social life, learning to carry your own personality, your passions, and your I don't want to say flaws. We all have things we're less good at. Navigating that, figuring out how to engage with life. That's where our children really need our help or need a context that gives space for learning these things. And that's where our focus is, that's what's truly important. That you feel good and you know how to feel good, and you are good, and you know what that means. So he said all these things in the car on the way back that this is what we're supposed to focus on, this is our job as parents, and if we push them away by putting them in in the hands of someone else to focus on whether or not they can multiply seven by 54, we're deflating, we're like we're we're just aiming in a completely wrong direction. And yeah, so that's our wake-up call story. But that's before we realized that we wanted to unschool. That came later.

Sandra Dodd: 28:01
But that means that Jesper didn't r actually have to go to the school.

Cecilie Conrad: 28:05
Yes, he never went.

Sandra Dodd: 28:06
He did he did go how many times? Zero. Oh, so he got out of it.

Cecilie Conrad: 28:13
He decided on the Monday that Storm that we should home educate and uh never went on the Tuesday. We called them on the Tuesday and called the whole project off. Yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 28:22
Yeah. So you said that it that there's no such thing as too tight a bond as being too close. From an unschooler's point of view, that's very true. From a psychologist's point of view, that's probably very true. But from the point of view of school, if the assumption is school is necessary, school is important, we need to do what we need to do to make school work well, then of course there's too much of a bond. They need to break that bond so that the child is satisfied to be away from the parent for six hours or eight hours or however long it's gonna be. So yeah, it's sometimes every sometimes a statement or a situation is like, it depends. If you say, is there, is there, is it possible to have too strong a bond? It depends. What's your goal? But I think a lot of a lot of the advantages are have to do with mental health in any of these stories, the big ones or the small ones. When your son broke his arm recently, it was probably a relief for him not to have any places he had to be. He could just be with you. He could just be on his own schedule and and get sympathy and not be expected to dress a certain way, be at a certain place, act a certain way, write with his other hand. Was it his offhand or his or his main hand? It was his offhand.

Cecilie Conrad: 29:45
Yeah.

Sandra Dodd: 29:46
But yeah, still.

Cecilie Conrad: 29:47
Yeah, you say that it's funny because actually it wasn't a relief for him because there was nothing to be relieved from. You know?

Sandra Dodd: 29:56
Well, yeah, that's true. So he didn't know that it would have been a lot of basis for comparison.

Cecilie Conrad: 30:00
Yeah, but he doesn't well, of course, but that's a very theoretical thing for him. He's never been to school, so for him it's just it is what it is.

Sandra Dodd: 30:08
So we see the mental health advantage and the the healing advantage because he didn't have stress on top of a broken arm. Well, I mean the regular stress that comes with a broken arm and the frustration and all of that, but he didn't have the other layers that we know potentially he might have had. Another big stressor in the world is moving for lots of reasons. Even even if everything's ideal and everybody wants to move, it's still stressful. To pack your things up and go to another place. My son's family just slightly moved, they're not unschoolers, but it's it's between school sessions. So school was school hasn't been a factor much yet. And new beds, new everything. They don't know where anything is. You know, when they get to the new place, they can't go to the bathroom in the dark. Everything's so different so suddenly. And they they're far, far away. They're in Alaska. And so they don't get to see their other grandmother that they saw quite a bit. They don't get to see the friends that they had grown up with. They've already made a couple of friends, but still it's it there's no taking that kind of stress away. It's stressful for the adults too. And that can't be helped. That's a stress there always. But without the addition of school schedules and requirements and expenses, the parents know that there's some relief. That there's some some ease and comfort of the children being able to just be with the parents in a calmer, more direct way. If they're sad or scared or disoriented. They're still with their family, same family they had at the other house.

Sue Elvis: 31:41
I was thinking about the fact is that not everybody loses a child, not everybody uh has to deal with cancer, and but everybody has to deal with the unexpected because that's just the way life is. That whether it's as Sandra was saying earlier, the power goes out or the car doesn't start or whatever, life is something we can't always control. And that in trying to control it, we end up battling and stressed out in exactly the same way as if we try to control our children. And having that attitude of life to go with the flow of it, of course, making plans and doing things we want to do, but to deal with those unexpected things without letting them crush us or throw us too far off track, depending on the size of them. We like I said, we were paralyzed for a while after our baby died. But I think that unschooling just is a reflection of the way life is. That it's not that we unschool to because it's the best way of coping with life and unexpected things. It's just as if if it's a choice, it's just a natural thing, how to respond to a life that isn't under our control, but which lots of people are trying to control. Uh and we all end up a lot happier if we accept what life sends us and learn from it, instead of trying to battle to make life look exactly how we want it to look and to learn the things from it that we think are important. And of course, there are times when we can make decisions and choices and direct our own circumstances and learning, but there are so many times when we can't and to accept that and just go with it.

Sandra Dodd: 33:55
One thing that might help with that in a way is that parents get used to seeing that children don't all learn to read at the same time, or they're not all as eager to go out every day. Some some do, some want to stay home. And so seeing those differences in kids and accepting that can help with something you something we don't even know. There will be something come up in the next couple of months that none of us have thought about now, probably that on some unschooling and family ends up dealing with. But if the parents have already begun to accept that people have their own ways of being and learning and dealing with things, that'll probably help them when something unexpected comes up and not all the children respond in the same way. And it and they'll have some, they'll have had some practice at surfing the waves of life, of staying upright, even though they really thought this kid would be reading by nine. I really thought that that he would have passed that math test so he could get into community college or whatever little things like that. The parents are still jittery about. If they get calm and can accept those kinds of educational things, learning things, learning realities. I think that helps in other areas of life. It's starting to see what's what is natural in a human life, in the range of our family's lives, and in particular members of the family. Because they'll all if a pet dies, the children won't all respond the same way. If a pet's sick, probably one child will be more aware of whether it's eaten and how it's doing and what it needs, and it's nice for them to be able to stay there if they have a sick puppy to stay there and take care of it and not have to go to school. The parents will know that. I guess the kids won't.

Cecilie Conrad: 35:49
Yeah, that's the thing. But isn't to to me it's quite clear that it's how we cope with things and how we make choices and how we feel and how we cope with it if we don't feel good in life. If something feels off. How we choose, did I already say that I might be slightly tired? How we choose how we make choices as to how do I spend my time, what am I doing first, all these things that have to be done in a different way in an unschooled life. These are the things that are really important. That these are the learning lessons, the things that I find to be maybe the focus of our unschooling. If I was to say, so what are what is this all about? What what are we learning? It's these skills more than I said it before, more than the academics. So unexpected things basically happen all the time. Sometimes they're devastating, sometimes they're just something that happened. It's very hard to plan out life because we just had a conversation yesterday, my husband and I, quite frustrated one, you might even call it an argument. And inside of that, he said something like, Why don't we get some structure? And I almost laughed because we've been married for more than 20 years, and we've been it we don't do structure. We can talk about structure, but we don't do structure, and there's no reason to do structure because every time we do structure, then life happens and other things are more important. We think we're going to sit down between this time and that time every day to get this thing done. And the reason we don't is because something is more important. Something comes up that is more important, and we know how to make that choice to navigate. And it can be frustrating to not be able to see a spreadsheet, and we can see if we just keep going like this, there will be progression and we'll finish, we'll fill out the workbook kind of situation that we learned in school. This is how you work in life. Our children who are unschooled, they know how to, they don't know workbooks, they don't know school years, they don't know exam at the end of term, and you know, now you're done with this because you followed the structure. They know how to follow their passion, they know how to do the thing that makes the most sense to do, they know how to work with the project that's full of energy and light for them, and they are so amazing in how many things they get done. And you could say one of them is getting done. Uh, there's less respect about things that they do inside, for example, video games, and it's way more easy to see a new crochet backpack to be an accomplishment. But actually, they're accomplishing a lot of things, all three of them by choice. But the choice of which project to work on is always contextualized, it's always based on an actual context of the actual options right now, right here, and of where what to where have to what point have I arrived right now? What will fill my cup? What will make me happy? What makes sense? What needs to be done? They're very good at doing right now. We community live with a lot of not a well, with four or five families living together. So you need to do the kitchen first. You might want to go dancing with the other teenagers and laugh and play music. Fine. But as we are 20 people living together, you can't leave the kitchen table chaotic because someone else might, and they know that. So they do these things because they know how to make choices and they know how to adapt to an actual situation. Whereas these planned out lives with curriculum and school and all these things, you try to push life to be something that it is not, and maybe that's where all of the frustration comes from. Because then when the unexpected, is it it's not even unexpected that unexpected happens. Unexpected happens all the time. How are we why? How do we think we can control life? Obviously we can.

Sandra Dodd: 40:19
No, but I think all the practice with the with the expected days, with the routine days and normal days, makes it easier when when things don't go exactly right. And practice practicing on little things helps when it's something bigger. And we talked or in another one of the podcasts about how communication is where a lot of the learning comes from. And I think that's really true. And all of these things that we're talking about today involve communication. You know, where am I supposed to, where am I supposed to go to the bathroom? The boys can go pee on the trees. You know, we'll figure out this. Here's what we how about camping toilet? How about we act like we're camping? We'll figure something out like that. And uh maybe some of the kids could go to relatives' houses for a day or two until the plumber comes. You know, they're just all kinds of problem-solving activities that the parents can model for the kids, that the kids can be involved in so that when they're grown and they have kids and something's not working, they'll already have seen how a family working together figures out a situation. Unlike I know that I know our own kids don't see the comparison because they haven't been in school, but if we're looking from above at a level of what's the advantage of unschooling over a family all involved in school, the kids who are in school don't see how plumbers get called or how long you have to wait, or you have to pay extra for them to come right away, or what what all factors are there? And the ones at home might not either, they might be doing something else. But there's a potential for that, for a share for them being around when problems are solved. You had a story, Sue, about some sort of local fire or something. How what how did that affect you guys?

Sue Elvis: 42:10
Well, we live in a high bushfire danger area. We're surrounded by bush. And in a drought season, we've had we've been lived through a few bushfires caused by the drought. And it's for people who live in town, I don't think they really understand what we're going through in our village with with the danger. Life does go on to a certain extent, but life goes on with your eyes on your computer screen to look look at the fire updates, or you're outside talking to the firefighters, or you're looking at the sky with the smoke coming closer and closer. And those times that we've lived through bushfires, we had the last one was 2019, 2020, the summer of those years, when our house was, we had the bushfire on the other side of the garden fence. And the bushfire went on for weeks. It got so big, different bushfires around the state, they all joined together to form one huge fire that nobody could put out. And it did affect our lives significantly. Thinking about things like will, if we go to town, will we be able to get back to our village? Will our house burn down? Uh, how how are we going to look after the pets if we have to evacuate? Uh and a lot of what you were saying, Sandra, is how are we going to problem solve this situation? What will we take if uh we have to evacuate, which we did? How are we going to divide up who's going to take what car? How are we going to take the pets? How are we going to prepare our houses if we have to stay and fight the bushfire? Uh, it was a huge learning time. And not just from that, it was talking with the people like the firefighters on the street, learning how how bushfires begin, how about how they're actually beneficial to some plants, the native plants they need a bushfire to go through uh to actually germinate the seeds. Things like that. It was such a rich, well, we've done we've been through a few bushfires, such a rich experience. But I think what we've learned most about is about being part of a community of people who care about each other and who help each other. You get to know your neighbours when you're all out on the street watching a fo a fire coming up the gully. You watch out for each other, again about learning what's important in life. Your house isn't important. It's getting everybody out that that's important. Uh the amount of um positive things that I've heard that have come out of situations like this, people's houses burn down and people grieve, and then afterwards they say, Well, we wouldn't have learnt this if we hadn't gone through that experience. And I guess as um younger unschoolers, not the last one because all my kids were grown up or almost grown up, but certainly the one before that. I had to keep taking notes for the homeschool registration, and it was amazing. I'd sit down and think, well, we didn't um read any books uh this week because I just didn't have the concentration. I was too busy outside watching for bushfires, or well, we didn't do all these normal activities, but we learned about how bushfires affect the bush, we learnt from the firefighters, we learned about all those things that are important, and I just wrote down so many notes about the things that we learned about while we went through those weeks where life wasn't normal. We just couldn't live a normal life. Yeah, as it looking back, I think I'm glad that we have had those experiences because they've made us strong, they've made us uh resourceful, they have drawn us closer together as a family and as a community. And we've had lots of neighbors who've lived around us who've lived through one bushfire, and as soon as the bushfire is over, they've sold the house and they've moved on and they've said, well, we don't want to live in this area. And we always talk about whether we should do that. And we just love where we live. And we always think if the house goes down, we build it again, as long as we all survive. And I think that that strength, that vision, that love of where we live, we wouldn't have that if we weren't brave enough to live where we are. Some people would say we're stupid, but we live in such a beautiful area, so rich. But certainly, as far as unschooling goes, it's that sort of accepting every day as it comes, not worrying about, are we learning? Are my kids learning? Have we done the reading that normally we would do together? Have what notes am I going to make for homeschool record keeping? I just sort of pull it out onto the page. We just accepted everything that came our way every day and lived life. And yeah, was rich. But we wouldn't have we don't ask for it. We don't want a bushfire. And the last few years we that we haven't had a drought. We have had rain, and it's been so totally different. We're learning different things. And I must say, life's a bit more relaxed these days, but our time is almost up. I think they say that it's about six years you get. Once the fire has gone through your bush, you get a uh a respite of about six years, and then the vegetation all is all back, it's rich if you go into drought again and you go through the cycle. So we're expecting next summer maybe to be a hot and dry summer, but that's all right, we'll deal with it. And I think that's the thing that's come out of it. We'll deal with it. We'll be okay. And I think that life can be frightening, whatever circumstances you think that might come along. Your imagination can go wild. This could happen, that could happen. And then you think, I'll be okay. We've survived this, we'll be okay. We got each other, we know what's important, we'll be okay. And I think a lot of that has come from unschooling.

Sandra Dodd: 48:52
Sometimes parents have said, Oh, I was I was so upset about whatever it was that the parents were upset about a move or a death or just some disruption or other. And then they'll say, and so that means that the kids didn't learn anything for four months. And I'm like, I'll bet they did. I bet they did. And also when parents are starting to count days again, it's like, what if your kid somehow didn't learn anything for two months? Somehow, magically, learn nothing day is coming up in about a month. So that's that's an annual uh reminder that it's not gonna happen that they don't learn. But the if the parents are concerned that no learning was happening, I always say, Well, how many days are required in your in your jurisdiction for school? And where I live, it's 180 days. 180 days, that's less than half of the days of the year. So I said, Well, you know, that's fine. You have that many days to to not learn anything because kids aren't in school every day. Oh, yeah. And then they start realizing, like you're like you're saying, they talked to all these people, they saw how their parents dealt with stress, they saw how people, how long it might take to get over grieving, how long, blah, blah, blah. You know, how stages of recovery from unexpected um happenings.

Sue Elvis: 50:12
Or just reminds me of like when our son died for 11 weeks. I know I know to know this, 11 weeks. I didn't show any interest whatsoever in taking my kids to the library, reading to them, doing anything like that. For 11 weeks, all they did was sit at one computer, because that's all we had, and played this one computer game, I think, or two, because that's all we had. And they went off other times because they had to take turns, so they'd disappear to go read books or go out in the garden and play. But this the thing I remember is this computer game and the music to it, oh, over and over and over and over again. And I if I hear that in music now, I I'm transported back. But I think that 11 weeks, I mean, that wasn't all the grieving, that was just coming up for air. And I think it's it was insignificant as a time frame for you think, well, I can't let my some people say, well, we can't go down to the beach today with you because my kids have got to get their work done. I can't miss one day. And you think, we've I didn't even think about homeschooling and record keeping or anything else, at least for 11 weeks. And that was only a short fraction. I just remember sort of surfacing briefly at 11 weeks and starting to think, well, you know, what are my kids doing? And it was just like a blink of an eye looking back. And the thing was, it wasn't as you said, Sandra, they weren't doing nothing. They were filling their time pretty well. And all I remember, of course, is that computer game, but they weren't, they were doing other things. And I think they weren't doing nothing. They were really resourceful, they were going out there, filling their time in, grieving at the same time and learning those lessons. But how many times are we afraid? Well, when people say, I'll unsch I'll try unschooling, I'll give it a few weeks, or we'll unschool at the after lunch every day, or we'll unschool over the school holidays. And you put a time limit on it, thinking, well, that's the only amount of time that I'm willing to let go and see if it works. And I think that time, I didn't even think of anything, but it was rich. I didn't know where I'm going with this, but how we maybe how we worry or how some people worry about time that a few weeks sounds like a long time in the in a child's life, and it's nothing. And she says, Sandra, about how many hours do we do are we legally required to home educate our children or send them to school. There's a lot of other hours in the week, isn't there? Maybe have them all together while you're dealing with a crisis. But it doesn't hurt children at all to have all that doing nothing time. And sometimes we need it, parents as well as children.

Cecilie Conrad: 53:30
I think it hurts a lot to be stressed out. And it hurts a lot to do things that don't make sense. And I think in the context of something painful and existential and overwhelming, it makes even less sense to fill out a workbook that you don't want to fill out. But e equally so, in the context of a beautiful summer day with ripe strawberries in the garden and spurge on the sky, and friends you could dance with or play with, or and maybe a new passion of drawing cats or trying to do a backwards flick flack or a novel that you're really absorbed in. Both extremes. And then someone shows up with this worksheet that you have to fill out for no reason that makes any sense for the child. Either way, being pushed to do something that doesn't make sense. We talk a lot in our family about, you know, what's the meta learning from that? What do you well? You might learn whatever 10 new words in French, which is fine, but you're also learning to obey, you're also learning to ignore the strawberries and the summer and the friends, or to ignore your grief. Um to make a choice that makes no sense because someone's pushing you to make that choice. Is that something we want our kids to learn? I'm not I'm sure I don't want that. I want them to say no to me as well, if I come up with a bad idea. And I like that they give me that feedback, and I can learn. I just had a few situations, this reason this yesterday with one of my kids, and one of them went really well, and one of them went really bad. One of them I suggested why don't you stop what you're doing to do something else right now? Because I think that's that's a better choice for you. And he was like, What? And I was insisting once, yeah, I think I think you should stop what you're doing now because the thing you're doing right now you could do anytime, but the other thing is a moment right now that you could participate in with the other people around you, and you know, this will pass. And he said, Well, he just I don't have to go into the specifics of the situation, but his feedback was really good. And I love having children who can give me that feedback. He who said, I don't think I can go into this situation, I don't think it's mine to go into, I don't think it makes any sense to participate in this. I don't want to push it. I see that this has nothing to do with me, and I'm actually enjoying my time with what I'm doing. I'm glad he can see that and he can make these choices. I feel I lost my point. Did I lose my point?

Sandra Dodd: 56:51
Do you well, was the other situation you were gonna tell too?

Cecilie Conrad: 56:55
The other situation. Well, it just didn't go well. Maybe it was too late in the day. I did the same thing. I was like, you know, you're doing this now, but this has that consequence, and I think it's better if you change and you you maybe make a different strategy, and there were some misunderstandings, and I was insisting too hard.

Sandra Dodd: 57:16
That was that was I thought the other story was the one that didn't go well. Sorry.

Cecilie Conrad: 57:21
No, no, I think it goes very well when my children tell me I'm wrong and I can hear it. Um, when my children tell me I'm wrong and I insist too much, or we fall into an argument, or we come out of it frustrated. Now, my point, I the thing I wanted to talk about in the context of unschooling is the stressors. So if you're stressing about a curriculum, or you're stressing, as you said earlier, Sandra, you have to be somewhere at eight o'clock with a nice clean t-shirt and a packed lunch in your backpack, but you just lost a child, or you just got received the news that someone's really sick, or the toilet doesn't flush, or something. Yeah, or you and you're not going to be able to it tomorrow either because nothing's working and you don't even have time to fix it. It's not good for us to be stressed out, it's not good for us to not have bandwidth for these things, and it's not good for us to think that worksheet is more important, is so important that it's worth it to be stressed out.

Sandra Dodd: 58:26
Yeah. I think emergencies, um unexpected life helps kids learn, helps them become, not helps them learn to be, helps them become resilient. They, you know, oh, okay, I'm still on my feet. We're okay. And patient because they know some people are taking it harder than they are. Some people that if if they're not the most wounded and the most affected in that situation, they can back off and play a video game for a while and just be there, but you know, be aware, still paying attention, seeing if anybody needs them, but also not being needy, being loud, being in the middle. And that's those are really good life skills to have, and for them to be resourceful. Uh okay, I can't do the things I wanted to do, what can I do? How can we find something out of this, something to fill the week otherwise without my parents needing to pay so much attention to me for a while. They'll be back. They'll be back, but they're not here right now. And that those are all great mental health tools that you can't we can't set up a situation for them to learn those things. You can't fake it. You can't like let's play like there's a bushfire behind our house. Like, yeah, let's don't. We got other things to do. But yeah.

Cecilie Conrad: 59:44
The funny thing is, but you was saying the last word I put down on my notes because I wanted to talk about exactly that, Sandra. And I I think I talked earlier about attachment and how school teachers sometimes use that term in a wrong way. Like Like technically speaking, it's not wrong in their context. They need the attachment to be weak and to be broken. But well, now I want to talk about resilience. Resilience is a word that comes up a lot around children, childhood, growing up, and school. And it's also a question I, as an unschooler, get a lot. So, how will they become resilient? You know, are you just when they grow up around their parents, will they then become soft and never grow into strong, independent young people? There's no resilience coming from staying home next to your mom. There's a lot of that going on. And I don't like the word resilience, how it's used. Also, sometimes the word robust comes out, and it's as if the mainstream pseudo-psychology, when people talk about why it's a good thing to go to school and why children have to grow up in this way they do in mainstream life, that they will become robust and resilient by being hurt, basically, by being in situations that are very uncomfortable, very feels very unsafe, that are very confronting and um induce even anxiety in some children, but that will make them robust and resilient. And I think it will actually just make them scared and insecure and stressed out, which is not a good thing. Whereas in the unschooled life, as you frame it often, Sandra, the natural, you know. So what's natural? How how do people learn? How does life unfold in a in a less forced context? There's a lot of resilience grows in these children who learn that it's not always about them, that they are part of a real life where sometimes shit hits the fan, but also sometimes we can run out and pick those strawberries Tuesday at 2 p.m. Because we can choose to do it. We can choose to make our own choices, we can choose to make our own mistakes, have conflicts, and resolve them, and we can we can involve our children. They will be involved in bushfires and financial crises and toilets that don't flush and real stuff that we have to cope with. And also they will be involved in people in our surroundings criticizing our lifestyle. They will be at they personally will be asked the question. So can you do? I've even had my kids being quizzed by strangers trying to ask them math questions. They have to fucking sorry cope with that, you know. That's true. Resilience to have made some real choices, to be part of a community, to live in a certain way, and to have to stand up for it, to adapt to whatever happens. And it's not in the math book. So let's say a train goes by this and that speed to this and that speed because that person has to bring apples to a sick grandma. No, we actually have to bring the apples, and there's no train. So what do we do? So yeah, so I think resilience, they become very resilient and very I can't, what's the word? Very good at adapting, very good at adaptable. So the hardest, thank you very much.

Sandra Dodd: 01:03:36
The hardship that unschoolers deal with is school people asking them stupid questions about multiplication, I guess. Or yeah, Holly was in a situation like that once, um, where um somebody was, we were out in a car in Arizona, like in the middle of the mountains, and it was just we're stuck. And so this guy is very mathematical-minded, he's in his 20s, he doesn't have kids, and he's trying to figure out how unschooling works, and he says to Holly, who is very mathematical, she's sitting in the backseat. I think she was probably 10, give or take. And he he was saying, So, Holly, we have like three-quarters of a tank of gas, and it's another 150 miles, blah, blah. He's telling her all these factors, right? And wants her to tell him, you know, how much how much gas is costing or something, right? Who cares? Um, it doesn't matter. And she heard listen to the whole story, listen to the whole question. And when he was through, she said, Do you really need to know? Or are you wondering if I could figure it out? Perfect answer. Because if you'd said I really needed to know, she would have started trying to calculate it, but you know, she's not a she wasn't a pencil and paper math person, but she would have probably figured it out or asked the questions that that would help me and and this guy figure it out. It was pretty funny.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:04:52
We actually tried that once in Mexico. I remember we were driving from some place to some other place through a desert. It was a long drive, and we had gas, and there were two gas stations on the way to where we were supposed to be. And we did the math. So we'll be all right. We can actually get to the end, probably with what we have. Um, so we skipped the first one because it was right after we started, and we were seven people in the car, and you know, it took all day to we just kind of had that momentum. Now we need to go for a while, and we'll just we'll we will what do you call it, fill the tank on the second gas station in the desert so that we can put some hours in before we stop. It's frustrating to stop after 15 minutes when you've been working for many hours to fill the car and get people going, and it's hot. And so we did, and we arrive at the second gas station, and we actually did in the car do the math. Can we make it all the way with what we have? And it was this we probably can, but it would really suck if we can't. So let's fill the tank on the next one. We get to the next one, and this is actual desert. There's nothing between. That's very strange for a European, but there's nothing between. It's just gas station, nothing, and gas. Well, not nothing. It's amazing nature, but no help if you run off gas, and not a lot of cars going. We get to the second gas station, and this is a dealing with the unexpected, because at the second gas station, power is out. They have gas. But they can't pump it. And they're like, they can't do anything about it. They had called for help, someone to come and fix whatever. They didn't even know why they didn't have electricity. It was like this little stopover area. There were two rest not even restaurants, but little places to buy something to eat, and a toilet, and a bit of water, and maybe I don't know, a mechanic, few houses, farmers, and uh this gas station. And it was all out of electricity. And they didn't know why. And it it had been for six hours, and they had called for help, and they were just waiting patiently. And we had to, this was a rented car, and we had to give it back three hours later. We were one and a half hour from our destination, but we did not have gas enough to get there. So that's a new question for you. That's an unexpected situation. We'd done all the nice math, and that was a beautiful you could have put it in the books of how real life gets you to do math with your unschooled children and how they all work together. We had our oldest with us and our son-in-law, and and it was actually quite a lot of fun in the car to be like and talk about how much we would risk it and what would happen if we ran out, all the things, and we all arrived at a shared conclusion. No, we just fill the tank. It's stupid to not do it. Uh, we have to fill it anyway before we deliver the car back. And then you get to the point where you thought you could get gas and you couldn't get gas.

Sandra Dodd: 01:08:19
So, did you siphon it out of one of their cars?

Cecilie Conrad: 01:08:23
First, we waited, and then we went all to the bathroom, washed our hands and faces, scratch our heads a little bit, uh, talk to the people again. What do we do? What do you, you know, do you have any suggestions? What would you do? How can we somehow we just need 10 liters? We just need to get to the next town. And after a while, one of the guys working at the gas station said, let me drive to the farmer right around the corner and ask if he has a tank, like um, what's that called a tank, like um plastic tank, yeah. Uh, maybe maybe we can get you 10 liters, and well, that's the end of the story. Eventually we got 10 liters and filled enough to get to the next town.

Sue Elvis: 01:09:13
But that's the silence.

Sandra Dodd: 01:09:15
Now on your checklist for future trips, it is before everybody gets in the car. Some one person goes and fills the tank up, right? You won't forget that next time. And don't count on this one place because we used to do a lot of camping. That's a great story. Our checklist for camp for camping was the first few things were the things we had forgotten and knew how terrible that would be. Like you're camping where there's a lot of cactus and rocks, don't forget boots. You have to have boots. Um, don't fly swatter. We had had wasps in the tent and didn't have anything to to get them out, you know, to get them with. And so that was fun. Take a broom. It's not things people usually take camping, but if you really needed the thing, you see the value in it, like a full tank of gas.

Sue Elvis: 01:10:00
I was thinking, um, Cecilia, when you mentioned strawberries a couple of times and my mouth started watering, and I was thinking about how it's so very sad that it would be so very sad if we didn't take advantage of all the wonderful things that come our way instead of going and picking strawberries or whatever and s saying, well, we're gonna sit here today and fill in those mouths worksheets instead. And how very sad that is, because those strawberries won't be there for very long. And that's an experience that's come our way. And how can we just push it aside and do something mundane like a mouse worksheet? And I was talking to a friend, oh, this was years ago, and she was telling me how at the end of the week, if all her kids did all their work that she they weren't unschoolers, have the work through all the work that she had set for them, she was going to take them out for lunch as their reward. And I thought, oh, I'm gonna take my gifts out for lunch anyway, and we'll probably go out for lunch a couple more times before Friday. Thought I didn't tell her because I didn't want to sort of upset her or get in her into an argument, but I was wondering whether she would think that we didn't do anything because we were always doing the lovely things, the the things that she would call treats. We were doing those as many times as possible in the week. And because I had this attitude that I wanted to add as much joy to our days as possible. And if that meant buying an ice cream on the way home from shopping and stopping at the lake and taking time to walk around and see the ducks and lick an ice cream, that's what we'd do. And I was always looking for ways to spoil my kids in those ways. I say spoil, quote. Uh, other people might have said I was spoiling them, but I wasn't. And I think that we need those times because unexpectedly, one day life does change. And the joy doesn't go on forever. And I found that those joyful times really set us up for the times when life seemed grey and difficult. And it just gave us the tools, the hope, the love, whatever, that we needed to get through the more difficult days of life. And yeah, it just seems to me very sad to make joyful days as dark, as unexpectedly dark days, the days that we don't have any control over. Why turn all life into that kind? Well, why turn the days of you know every day of our life into a gray day? It just didn't make any sense to you. Why do that? Prepare your kids for the dark days by giving them dark days ahead of time so they'll know what to do. I don't know. But um, if that sort of thing is gonna make you tough, uh, because life is tough. And you think that's not the way, as you were saying earlier, Cecilia, to make to help children become resilient is not to make them tough by taking everything away from them. So they learn, uh they learn life is tough and they better just learn to deal with it because that's the way life is. Yeah, I that just makes me so sad.

Sandra Dodd: 01:13:47
And not everyone survives the resilience practice activities. So, you know, some kids don't don't do well from being bullied at school or being pushed or required or frustrated. My mother-in-law said one time when my boys were three and five or so, she said, You need to frustrate them. She was serious. Like that it was a need I had to artificially frustrate my children. And my thought, which I did not voice, was we bring them to see you. So I didn't argue with her, I didn't defend myself, I just blinked and smiled and didn't frustrate them on purpose. And it's possible that someone could grow up without becoming resilient because everything went well. It's possible that someone just didn't break any bonds, um, didn't ever have, you know, experience any death, didn't ever have a toilet that didn't flush, and falls in love with someone, stays with them, gets married, and stays for 40, 50 years. That has happened. That probably hasn't happened as much as people who have had misfortune and problems, but it has happened. And so what are you gonna say? Oh, you're up, resilient. Somebody should have frustrated you. It just if we if people just live their lives as happily and hopefully as they can, with as good a memories as could have been provided for them, and they have opportunities to see some problem solving, and things don't go terrible for them, great. They lucked out. It just it's like winning the lottery or something, but it but they you know it's still not over till it's over. Something bad could happen. So I don't think it's worth planning on or engineering or inducing. I think letting those things be unexpected is healthier.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:15:37
I can hear our I obviously agree, but I can hear our critics whisper in in the corners things about being lazy and things about being not prepared, and what about this, that, and the other? And don't we need to get ready for whatever could happen in the future? And if you never put in the work, then you will never gain. And and so the kids need to learn to refrain from the ice cream so that and sit down with the math problem so that they can understand what it means to have a working life and all this sacrifice kind of mindset. And from my point of view, the whole working mentality and sacrifice mentality is very unhealthy and it just ruins happy hours. And that doesn't mean we don't work, and I just want to put it in here in the equation of what we're talking about that obviously unschoolers also do things that are not necessarily fun. We clean our bathrooms, we do the dishes, we fold the laundry, we I don't know, keep track of our money, do adulting, boring admin stuff. I just had a conversation in the kitchen yesterday, twice with two different children about don't do things you don't want to do. Just don't. But I'm doing the kitchen, the kitchen needs to be done. Yeah. But if you're really frustrated while doing it, you don't want to do it, then don't do it. And that could sound like we will always just like ice cream and and look at strawberries, but actually, at the end of the day, at some point, you want to re-eat your food from a clean plate more than you do want to wash it. You want to participate in the community, giving your contribution more than you want to read your book. At some point, and so doing these things, now we just talked a lot about staying in the joy, doing things that makes us happy, stopping at the lake, looking at the docks, doing all the nice stuff, and not do the worksheets. Well, the reason we don't do worksheets is because worksheets don't make sense, and in the moment when they do make sense, let's say you arrive at a point in life where you realize, oh, I need to know calculus, let's say, because I want to arrive at whatever they want to do. Then they make sense. Then worksheets make a lot of sense, maybe, if that's your way of learning. And you sit down with a lot of worksheets, and you might even say no when your friends call and ask if you want to go out in the sunshine, play soccer, and eat strawberries, because you have a higher goal or not another goal, a different goal, and then you do these things. So, yeah, I just wanted to put in here that the concept of work and the concept of doing something that is not on the surface necessarily fun to do is also something unschoolers obviously do. Um, it's just done on the basis of making good choices, on the basis of knowing who we are and what we think is important. And sometimes it's more important to go out and eat the strawberries, but sometimes, like a few days ago in this community living we have right now, the kids do a boring cleanup after 20 people sit-down dinner before they go dancing. And on another day, it was the reverse. I told them, no, go play, go dance, but come back and do the dishes before you go to bed because I'm not doing it. And so these choices are made in a real context based on real needs, and some of these needs are just clear for the kids. And some of them sometimes say, I really don't want to do it today. I really don't want to do it today. Can I be excused? And of course. So that's different from growing up with rules and structure and curriculum and planning and the stress that comes from having to stick to that plan. But it's not all strawberries. There are there are dishes to do as well.

Sue Elvis: 01:20:16
There are, and I think that you can add the joy into you don't have to have days where it's just all fun. You can do the chores before you go and do the shopping, and they're all things that maybe we don't want to do, but we all do them to help each other, but it doesn't stop us having an ice cream and stopping at the lake, as well as doing the work of the day, that is not sometimes one or the other, but a mixture, but it's adding more of the joy and the smiles. I think it's uh thinking about it carefully because sometimes we miss opportunities. We're always in such a rush. Got to get home, got to put the groceries away, got to get on to the next thing. But what's wrong with slowing down and enjoying the sunshine and going and picking those strawberries from the strawberry farm on the way home before you get home and have to cook the dinner and do the other things. And I was just thinking about how anybody, we can all add a little bit of joy to our days by slowing down and not worrying about the unimportant things. But at the same time, it doesn't mean that we don't get the work done as well. But not, it's got to be work that means something, doesn't it? You know, you were saying, Cecilia, why do the mass worksheets? They don't make any sense. But it does make sense to clean the kitchen or to work out um how much uh petrol or gas you need in your tank to get you somewhere on a trip that you're enjoying. It's uh a balance between the two. But on an ordinary day, there is things that we have, I say have to do, things that make life run more smoothly. And there are people around us who we want to help. And you're just saying there, Cecilia, about somebody who doesn't want to do the dishes that particular day, they can't do them. But I always found that always when somebody's like that within the family, the other people will make up for it. You go sit down, you don't feel like it today, you're tired, you'll you you really want to go and do whatever it is. But because we're used to living life with each other and we know each other and we give and take, it's you go do that, I'll do your dishes for you. It's and then somebody else would do uh that person who didn't do what the others are doing will do something for somebody else another time. It's that tuning into people. I always remember a time where my daughter had Saturday morning singing lessons, and she got up one morning and she was supposed to clean something or other, and I wasn't very nice. She got up late and she was rushing towards the door, doing, you know, picking a bag up, picking her keys up. And I said, You haven't done what you said you were going to do. You should have got up earlier. And then I stopped and thought about it, and I thought what the real response was would have been the best one, is don't worry about whatever you were doing. I'll do that for you. I'm quite happy to do that. You get on, get going. Because I think it's that trust with our kids. I knew that she wasn't the sort of person who was inconsiderate, who didn't want to help, who was doing it deliberately to be a nuisance to everybody else. And I knew that another day would come when I would be in the same situation and she'll say, Mom, hey, put that aside, I'll do that for you. You go do what you need to do. And that give and take, that knowing each other, that willingness to give when somebody else can't give and not question it, and not have this sort of a tally sheet of this is fair and this is not fair. That's one of the really wonderful things that have come from unschooling, whether it's you you unexpectedly slept late or you unexpectedly got a headache, or you just unexpectedly got this computer game that you really want to play. Uh, that you all adapt your life around it. You can um, yeah, it all fits in without too much rearrangement, it just happens, I think, that we're all in tune with one another because of unschooling. And and there's nothing wrong, as you said, Cecilia, that you don't somebody doesn't do something that maybe other people think that they should do. There are times when times when I don't I get up and I think, I don't want to wash the dishes tonight. My beautiful husband, he just says, Stay there, I'll make you a cup of tea. And I think, oh, how lovely that we live life this way. And he doesn't say, Oh, I was at work all day, come on help me in the kitchen. And I think, isn't that a great gift that we can give somebody we give without expecting anything in return, but it all goes around that we all there are times when we all give to others, and times when we all can't do what other people might expect us to do.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:25:37
I think actually, just uh to be honest, that sometimes we're not in tune in our family, and sometimes we get really annoyed at each other, and sometimes one of us thinks, Oh, I'm doing all the work, and why are you not helping? And all this frustration comes out and is not perfect, like you know, what you just did.

Sue Elvis: 01:25:55
You don't find oh I I'm sort of saying that yeah, making it sound like life is perfect every single day. But there are times when you get overwhelmed, overtired, overstressed about something, and it falls apart. But I'm talking about the basis, the foundation of life.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:26:11
And sometimes I don't say, well, if you don't want to do it, don't do it. Sometimes I'm like, it's your you know, I I'm not perfect, but I think that some of the most important things we've learned about life and each other and how to handle this project of navigating a life and a family. We learn from these glitches, you know. If if we're not perfectly attuned, we realized we're not perfectly attuned, there's something up here, and we need to talk about what's actually going on, and we need to find a way to navigate this because we don't want to have these confrontations, we don't want to have this negative emotion in our family life. We don't want to feel, I don't want to feel overworked or not, I don't know, appreciated for what I do. And and but I also don't want to feel needy for that appreciation. I I want to only do things I want to do. And I if I do them voluntarily, I have no right afterwards to say that I sacrificed my entire life to make this dinner. I if I make the dinner, it must be because I want to make the dinner. If I'd rather write a blog post, I shouldn't be making dinner. I should ask someone else to make the dinner or say today's sandwich or conflicts night. So those lessons that I've learned about being fair in my relationships and also expecting the same kind of openness and clearness and fairness from my husband and children. I've learned from living this unschooled life, unraveling what has to be done. Once you take the school out of the equation, you start questioning everything that you think everyone does, and this is just how it is, because it is not necessarily how it is. We don't necessarily have to fold the laundry or do the dishes. We can actually leave them at the counter and we can have all the laundry in what one big pile on the sofa, and everyone has to dig for their underwear and no one can sit down. And if that's what we want to do, we can do that. And obviously, we don't want to do it because we like sitting in the sofa. So all of these things, all of this unraveling, questioning, does it have to be this way? Does a chore really a chore? Why do we call it a chore? If it's not fun to do it, if we can't put on music and chat and do it with some sort of joy or use it as a mental break or or whatever, why don't we just not do it then and see how that works? Hence the sofa example. And then you realize, oh, that doesn't work. It's not that it's really annoying to have to look for underwear when you're busy. It's better to have them right there in the drawer where you're where you know where they are. So yeah, I just didn't want to paint the picture of being, you know, always leveled and always harm harmonious and always because sometimes things fall out of balance and then we have to think about it. But I think as unschoolers, we think about it in a different way because we are very open to that fact that there could be many ways of coping with small things like laundry and big things like cancer in the family. And the way we cope with these things is based on putting our family first, putting unconditional love first, putting children and a meaningful life first, and then everything else has to fall into place, and everyone also there's this whole You could call it democracy, you could call it equal rights. Everyone's opinions, like my story yesterday, I had an idea about how my son should behave in a specific situation and what would be best. And he had a different opinion, and his opinion was as good as mine. Maybe actually better. It was better. It was also his time we were talking about. But this equality that everyone has the right to have an opinion, everyone has the right to make their own choices, everyone has the right to have different values. That part of the story well, it just becomes this analytical tool, you could even say, when something unexpected happens. Even when something expected happens, we put these things first. So how do we navigate whatever is in a way that makes sense for everyone and and that keeps us in a life that we get to share and where everyone gets to be as happy as as possible and get through whatever it is, not hurt, not stressed, but leveled and and harmoniously in some way. Or we can come out, we can see that on the other side of this there's a good life for us again.

Sue Elvis: 01:31:21
I think that's the Can I just say something about just something really quick about projecting life as perfect? When I said that my daughter rushed out the door and what I said to her wasn't the right thing, and I think that we learn from the things that we say wrong. So things aren't always perfect, but we learn and then we try again the next time better. But also the way we the words we say, the way we react, kids our kids learn from that, and qu so many times I can think of examples where my kids have copied things that I've said or things that I've done. Like I say, you go and rest because you're tired, and then they might come back and say, Mom, you look tired, you go rest. But I think we've talked about it a few times in previous episodes, that we change as people as we're unschooling. And so the mistakes we make, we think that was the wrong thing to say. Next time I should have said this, and this is what I'm going to say. But we change little bit by little bit, and life becomes more in tune. And of course, we there are days when we all just lose it. But also, my kids have all grown up now, and I've only got one left at home. So it's very easy these days to be in tune when your kids come back and you're having dinner on Sunday evening, for example, and you haven't seen each other for all week. And so maybe, yeah, maybe it's easy for me. And it's also easy for me for the fact is that I have such a wonderful husband, you know, he's a great example of how to love and treat other people. And so maybe I'm not perfect, but I've got a good example for him. But I think you're right, Cecilia, that we can give the idea that we're living the perfect unschooling life. And life is a bit more difficult than that.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:33:32
Yeah, but the mindset, mindset is the only word on my list here. I I'm not sure that I've talked about or we talked about. But I just did. I just maybe didn't use the word. The mindset of questioning and the mindset of making the analysis, the mindset of knowing my values, or if I'm not clear on my values, get clear on the values first and then make the choice. That whole mindset, the mindset of having that conversation with everyone in the family, excuse me, disregarding age, that someone who is three years old have a value system and have the right to have a value system and have the right to have a joyous day, that whole mindset has to do with the unschooling choice. It's it's it's the foundation and the result of unschooling. And that mindset puts us in in a different place to solve it when things are not harmonious, when things are not perfect. And I think that is perfect. That is harmonious to have that mindset.

Sue Elvis: 01:34:34
Some of the worst things are. It's my turn to ask I just I just want to I'm talking over everybody here. I'm sorry, but I was noticing, Sandra, that you were busy there writing some notes. And in a previous episode, you said to me, What have you been writing? And now it's my turn to ask you, because you've been scribbling away, and I I've been talking a lot, and I want to hear what you've got to say.

Sandra Dodd: 01:34:56
Well, first I was gonna say you said something about regret, and I some of the worst advice I've ever heard, I heard recently, outside of an unschooling context, but I've had unschoolers come to discussions and say, don't regret anything, don't live with regret. Regret isn't useful. I'm like, what are you talking about? If you don't regret something you did before, why would you make a different, better choice next time? And some people just justify what they do. What I did was good because I'm good because that's how it is. And I don't think that's healthy and it doesn't model well for the kids. And this is not what I wrote down, this is what just came up. Worksheets do make sense if you're a teacher with 25 students. So it's it depends. In an unschooling context, worksheets don't make sense unless the kid just wants to mess with worksheets. And if they're just treated like dot to dot or or crosswords or mazes, and it's just for fun, and the kid can throw it away like you throw away the maze book, that's fine. If it's just treated like a like a game. But what I was writing was a checklist to her picnic on Friday. Keith and I are taking a five and a six-year-old grandkids. Our youngest granddaughter, Tommy, well, the youngest one is in town now. Um, she's second to the youngest overall, wants to go to the mountains. We can see mountains from here. She said, My dad has never taken me to the mountains. So the first time I just drove her up the hill until we come to the forest. Like it it wouldn't look like forest to you guys, probably, but you know, national forest land. And so some of the roads just dead end against a fence. And so I took her up there and I said, look downhill. You can see, you know, the valley and the mountains on the other side. She didn't look, she doesn't want to look that far. And then she said, I see a goat. It was mule deer. There are there are like four or five of them crossing the road behind us. So we turned around and watched these deer, and she was very happy that she'd gone to the mountains. And I'm just thinking, I just drove in the most uphill neighborhood I could find. So Keith took her hiking, and they her second trip to the mountains. Still, Keith didn't go actually on the in the car to the mountains. He just went to that side of town, went to where there's a bike trail and a hiking trail. And this little girl can read. Um her name's Tommy, she reads well, and so she could she said, Why are there no bicycles allowed after this point? Why is this hikers only? Why stay on the trail? So she was learning about cactus and um the grade, you can't ride the bike up where you have to climb rocks. And so that was fun. So one thing I was writing down on my list was bowls or paper plates. And that reminded me that was about when you guys were talking about dishes. One of the coolest conversations that ever happened, conversation in writing, someone came to an unschooling discussion and was super insistent that people have to do the dishes, dishes have to be done. You can't, there's no option. She's just like, this is the hill she's gonna die on. You have to do the dishes. And my big thing is you don't have to do anything, you need to choose to want to. What would make you want to choose to do dishes? But that was, you know, I'm just being like mattery philosophical on the side. Joyce Federal, who's great at analogies, and Deb Lewis, I think, I think it was those two mostly. Sorry, bam, bam, bam. Well, you could use paper plates. Well, that's expensive. Yeah, well, but you could. You could just eat over the sink. You could just eat things that go on paper towels or cardboard or something like that. So they're just like a little sarcastic, but a little like this is true. You don't have to use dishes. What if you didn't? And then um the best suggestion that was in that discussion was you could go to yard sales and thrift stores and just buy dishes and then throw them away at the end. And so what they were telling her is you have choices. Is your choice going to be to wash your dishes? Now you made a choice. You don't have to, but it may be the best of the choices you can come up with. And so and it doesn't have to be the same every day. Some days paper plates, some days it's a paper plate day. So I'm thinking about this. That's what I was writing down for the picnic. Paper plates might blow away. So we need something heavy. So I was thinking maybe I should take like silver and pewter, like the heaviest stuff we have, so we can put stuff down on a picnic table in the mountains and it won't blow away. So that was my checklist while I while you guys are talking about dishes. I'm thinking about that really cool discussion of Joyce and and I think Deb. I'll I'll find that list because I saved that discussion. I don't know where to how to put lists in show notes, but I'll send it to you too anyway for amusement. And we maybe we should put it in the show notes.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:39:29
It's very close to the two-hour mark that we're trying to aim for.

Sandra Dodd: 01:39:33
But I just let me say one more thing about dishes because it might apply to a lot of these other topics, so these emergency things. If I have dishes I don't like, like sometimes I've had one dish that reminds me of something irritating, or I used to have three or four of them, and now I just have one and I'm mad because they got broken. You know, if there's some negativity about a dish, I repurpose it, I give it away, or I put a plant, I put it under a plant. I try to only have dishes I think are worth washing, that I like, that when I'm washing it that dish, I feel good about it. I'm glad that I have it. It's pretty. And that can make a difference too. If people are stuck with dishes they think are stupid and they have to do it, that's not setting a good example for their kids. And if they make the kid wash the dishes that the mom thinks are stupid and she doesn't want to wash them, then it doesn't build a good relationship with the parent or the dishes or life or decision making. So I think all of the sweetest that we can be to our kids is the best way to be, as far as I know. And if you can be sweet on a good day, it helps you be sweet on a rough day. True.

Sue Elvis: 01:40:39
And if you're in a a crisis, a big one, maybe it paper dishes are a good choice because washing dishes doesn't seem very important when there's other big things going on in your life. So maybe that's a good choice, a good time to spend that money on paper things and make the You didn't like the word chores, uh, Cecilia, but some things do feel like chores when you've got other things that you are dealing with, but gets rid of that. That's a good choice. I like that one. I'm gonna think more about those dishes, Sandra. I'm interested in seeing uh that article or that list that you've mentioned.

Sandra Dodd: 01:41:19
I'm sorry that when I was when I was writing notes, it was it says cookies, fruit, sugar snap peas, and uh flags. I bought them some New Mexico flags that I wanted to give them.

Sue Elvis: 01:41:31
I'm a bit envious now. I want to go up the mountains with you.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:41:36
I want to add one more little thing, even though we have the nice come down laughter here, and that is just I'm reminded how when I sometimes have had the, but you have to do the dishes mindset on things, you know, like, but you have to make dinner or you have to whatever. And someone challenges me, very often my husband, you don't have to, it's not necessary, and I feel so self-righteous in how necessary it is and how this has to be done, and therefore I don't have time for the other things, or whatever. When we have these concepts stuck in our mind about how things have to be in a specific way, and someone challenges that, and we're not maybe necessarily ready for it. I said, We a lot, I will own it. If I have that, I get so annoyed. I get so annoyed with people telling me that what I think is really necessary and has to be done, and it's a chore, and someone's gotta do it, and now I've sacrificed myself and done it for all these years, and you better be thankful. You know, it sparks so this, it has to be done, sparks all this negativity. When someone challenges that, I get so annoyed, like really very much. And only after a lot of years, I've learned that feeling, that annoyed feeling, that's the alarm, that's the red one flashing. Beep, beep, beep, you're in the wrong, Cecilia. You need to grow now. This is your moment to learn. This is your moment to stop and question things and find out why do you think this is so important? And you know, just to expand so that I, as an individual, can figure out who I am and what I'm doing, and maybe become a little bit nicer, a little bit smarter, a little bit more leveled, a little bit more resilient, a little bit more harmonious. Whereas 20 years ago, that feeling would have become a big fight between me and my husband, or me being very self-righteous and annoying and and I don't know, telling my like you said with your daughter who left that morning without doing whatever it was she was supposed to do, then it would have been this whole story in my case um of you didn't the the parenting the way I don't want to be a parent. So yeah, I just wanted to put it out there. When you sometimes feel that, and I'm sure there's a lot of listeners who can relate with all of the things we said, except for two or three things, they are like, but that has to be done.

Sue Elvis: 01:44:21
Maybe it doesn't. Can I tell a dishes story? Yes. We never had a dishwasher until we moved into the house that we live in now. Having lots of kids, they just sort of we all sort of got into the kitchen, enjoyed the conversation, just washed and dried the dishes, put them away. We moved into this house and there's a dishwasher. So we thought, oh, we'll use the dishwasher. So we stacked the dishwasher. It didn't take us long to realize that washing dishes in this particular dishwasher not only consumed a lot of water, it consumed a lot of time. The dishwasher went on and on and on and on. And one of my children remarked that, Mom, it's much quicker if we just wash the dishes. So we decided we'd just keep washing the dishes by hand. But then one Easter Sunday came along and somebody in the family, I'm not sure who it was, said, Mom, how about we put all the dishes in the dishwasher today? It doesn't matter if it takes all afternoon to wash them because we haven't we're not in a hurry. The dishes don't have to be washed by a particular time. So we all put the dishes in the dishwasher, we got the cycle going, and then we didn't think anything more of it. Anyway, the months went by and Christmas Day came, and my kids said, Mom, today's a good day to use the dishwasher. So we opened the dishwasher up, and there's all our Easter Sunday dishes inside the dishwasher. We had forgotten to unpack the dishwasher. And the only conclusion I came to was we were, well, we weren't used to unpacking a dishwasher to start with, but we must have hundreds of dishes in the cupboard because we didn't notice that we were missing any. That's fine. Oh, that's a good place. Oh, yeah, sometimes dishwasher, sometimes not. But they're you can always get a good story out of um things that happen. That was an unexpected thing, I think. We never expected to open the dishwasher on Christmas Day and discover our Easter Sunday dishes. Very unexpected. And I think that's the thing about life, isn't it? That it's the unexpected things that teach us a lot, but also many times they give us wonderful stories to share with other people. Some of them are humorous, some of them are sad, but they're all stories of our lives, and they're all valuable in some way. And I just want to thank you, Cecilia, for sharing your cancer story and all the other stories that both of you share with me. Yes, it's good. I think that uh doing what we do, we share a lot of our lives and a lot of our stories with people.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:47:17
And it is story-based to share how this whole unschooling life worked. I also think I want to thank you for sharing our stories today. It's been a it's been a fun and enriching conversation. I think Sandra needs to go to bed, or at least I know it's very late on your side. So I want to. But it's nice to it's nice to be with you both. It's always fun. So thank you for this conversation. And um yeah, we'll get ready for the next one.

Sandra Dodd: 01:47:50
And I hope we're talking about things that most of your listeners will never need to know.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:47:55
Well, I don't know. Maybe talking about I think it's been important to talk about mindset and resilience and choices and happiness, and it came unexpected to me that we talked so much about the unexpected, not the catastrophes. We talked about them as well. I mean, thank I my cancer story is small compared to you soon losing a child. There's nothing that compares to that.

Sue Elvis: 01:48:26
No, I was thinking the other way around. No. I think that it's also maybe not that we shouldn't compare stories because our own stories are personal to us and they all hurt, and that comparing stories isn't really uh, we can't really do that.

Cecilie Conrad: 01:48:44
Well, we say we've learned from a master in our life to say when you compare you die, as in a board game, you know, when you have to go back to start. Comparing is not helpful, anyways. It isn't. We've talked about devastating catastrophe things when they hit. And we've also talked about surprises or unexpected things when they are the good unexpected things. And we've talked about adaptability and resilience and reality, and I think it's been a very good conversation. I'm going to need a little more coffee before I can wrap it up in a beautiful way, so I'm going to wrap it up in a less than perfect way, which is totally how it's supposed to be. So again, thank you for joining me. It's been fun, and I'm very much looking forward to next time. Thank you.

WE HOPE YOU ENJOYED THIS EPISODE