<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"></figure>

In this episode, we’re sharing a conversation that Pam had with Lucy AitkenRead in 2017. At the time, Lucy unschools her two children and blogs at Lulastic and the Hippyshake. Pam and Lucy talked about her family’s move to unschooling, the hardest parts of her journey, the most surprising bits, as well her husband’s journey to unschooling.

We hope you enjoy the conversation!

QUESTIONS FOR LUCY

Can you share with us a bit about you and your family?

How did you discover unschooling?

What has your family’s move to unschooling looked like?

Can you share a bit about your husband’s journey? Was unschooling new to him? If so, how did you help him learn more about it?

What’s been the hardest part of your unschooling journey so far?

What has surprised you most about your journey so far?

You recently started a group and website called Parent Allies. I’d love to know the inspiration behind it and a bit about your plans!

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

John Holt’s book, How Children Learn

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s book, Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children

Lucy’s blog, Lulastic and the Hippyshake and her YouTube channel.

The Living Joyfully Shop – books, courses, including Four Pillars of Unschooling and Navigating Conflict, coaching calls, and more!

We invite you to join us in The Living Joyfully Network, a wonderful online community for parents to connect and engage in candid conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling. This month, we’re talking about seasons—in unschooling and in life. Come and be part of the conversation!

Sign up to our mailing list to receive The Living Joyfully Dispatch, our biweekly email newsletter, and get a free copy of Pam’s intro to unschooling ebook, What is Unschooling?

Listen to our conversation on YouTube.

Follow @pamlaricchia on Instagram and Facebook.

Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about navigating relationships and exploring unschooling.

TRANSCRIPT

PAM: Hi everyone, I’m Pam Laricchia from livingjoyfully.ca, and today I’m here with Lucy AitkenRead. Hi Lucy!

LUCY: Hi Pam! How you going?

PAM: I’m going very well. Just to let everyone know, Lucy is an unschooling mom of two kids, and I have been following her adventures online for quite a while now, including her family’s experiences living in a yurt in New Zealand, and now their travels back to the UK. So, I’m really looking forward to diving into her unschooling and deschooling experiences at this point on her journey.

To get us started Lucy, can you share with us a bit about you and your family?

LUCY: Yes, of course. So, I’m Lucy and I’m married to Tim. And he is a Kiwi, but we spent most of our early marriage in London, where I’m from. And that’s where we had both of our daughters: Ramona who is now six, and Juno who is four. We lived really happily, living quite a normal life I suppose, in London, until a couple years ago when we decided to sort of up sticks and move to a forest in New Zealand, where we now live in a yurt.

PAM: That is so awesome Lucy. And I’m sure you’re going to share some amusing stories from that time as we go through this.

Can share with us how you actually discovered unschooling? How’d you come across it?

LUCY: Well yeah, it’s quite interesting for me, because I guess, deep in my heart, I’m a bit of a socialist, and I always really held onto the idea of school as being a really important common good, and that my children would definitely go to school. We would support that school. Because education is something that every child deserves, and people who are able to input into their local schools, it’s a really great thing that we should support. Basically, I had a really strong belief around that.

And then I had my children, and my first child Ramona really took me on a huge learning curve, I guess. She’s a child who is just incredibly spirited, and I believe that her spirited nature caused me to ask a lot of questions about how I wanted to raise my children.

When our second child Juno was born, we sold everything in our London home and we sold our London home, and we packed our bags into a VW camper van and we went traveling around Europe. And someone had given me John Holt’s How Children Learn, you know, which is always a slippery slope when you pick up a John Holt book, I think.

So, I was kind of reading this probably a little skeptically, but also knowing that I was already raising Ramona in quite a radically different way to how I thought I would. I guess my mind was already beginning to open about some of these ideas about raising children respectfully, for sure.

But then we went to a forest kindergarten in the Black Forest, in Germany, as part of our big trip around Europe, which we were doing. We’d set aside six months to do that. And then we got to this forest kindergarten, and I was reading How Children Learn, and I think it just was like a potent combination for my mind.

I was reading John Holt, and seeing all of these children around me, basically just unschooling in the great outdoors. There are teachers there, and they’re well trained teachers, but they see themselves much more as facilitators for a child’s own learning. And yeah, it was just so incredible to see it in real life in action, exactly what John Holt is talking about. I guess that was the moment when I knew that we would be unschoolers, and that all these ideas I held about school weren’t actually necessarily going to be the reality for my family.

And so, then we ended up back in New Zealand with our kids, and even though Ramona was only three at that stage, and Juno was a tiny baby, we rocked up in New Zealand and immediately attended an unschooling camp. And there were 150 people there, and we just kind of arrived and we felt like we’d found our people. This is a community that we wanted to stay within and raise our children within. So, I guess that’s the story.

PAM: How did you hear about the camp? Was it just random?

LUCY: I googled it, yeah. I actually googled “unschooling NZ,” and instead of any websites coming up or any groups or resources, there was just an event detailing where to turn up and how much to pay. And we were like, “Okay, let’s do it.” Google had spoken. (laughter)

PAM: And that is such a nice introduction—actually in person. I know when I first came across unschooling, it was all online. There wasn’t like local gatherings that I knew of. All those connections came so fast and made so much sense, at the point that I was there. But definitely seeing it in action would be a nice introduction, right?

LUCY: Yeah, it was really, really cool. And there were definitely a few moments where we were like, “Oh! That’s interesting!” It wasn’t at all like, “Oh we do everything exactly this way.” It wasn’t at all like that.

But it was the community that really inspired us, I guess. We really just felt at home within the way that adults were interacting with the children, because that was something we really felt certain about at that stage. We really knew that we wanted to be parents that interacted with our children in a really respectful kind of democratic way, I suppose. And that is what we saw there.

And that was probably the magic for us, that made us go, “Ah! Yeah, this is something we’re going to really dive into.” And now we actually go to between four and five unschooling camps a year. They’re a really important part of our family’s unschooling framework, I guess. And all of that. Just a whole massive group of people just being in their element for a few days and every season. We make it happen come hell or high water.

PAM: That’s awesome. And you mentioned there too that already before you even came across John Holt etc., that your parenting was less mainstream, right? So, you were kind of already primed for that. You no