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This week, we share a conversation that Pam had with Roya Dedeaux in 2021, diving into her book, Connect with Courage. Roya is a grown unschooler, a marriage and family therapist, and an unschooling mom of three, so she has lots of experience to draw from as she considers how children learn and thrive.

In her book, Roya describes the many benefits of supporting our children’s interests and the strong connections between parent and child that those positive interactions cultivate. She also details nineteen different barriers that can arise and walks readers through ways to find solutions. In their conversation, Pam and Roya talked about two of these barriers and how so much of it is our inner, emotional work to do to move past our fears and to a place of connection with our kids.

The conversation was energizing! Connect with Courage contains some powerful, life-changing ideas. We hope you enjoy the conversation!

QUESTIONS FOR ROYA

As a quick refresher, can you share with us a bit about you and your family? What is everybody interested in right now?

I’m thrilled to have recently published your book, Connect with Courage: Practical Ways to Release Fear and Find Joy in the Places Your Children Take You. I really love the book, and I think it may well be life-changing for many parents. Let’s start off with this: why is the connection between parent and child so important?

When it comes to connecting with our kids through supporting their interests and passions, lots of things can get in our way! And that’s where our work as parents comes in, which is why the many exercises you’ve included to walk parents through these challenges are so helpful. In the book you work through nineteen common barriers, and I thought we could touch on a couple of them here. First, let’s dive into “I don’t understand why they enjoy it.” How can a parent work through that challenge?

Another barrier I hear parents complaining about pretty regularly, especially with younger kids, is that the thing their child likes to do is messy. There are a couple of aspects to that, aren’t there?

What do you love most about your unschooling lives right now?

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

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

Roya’s book, Connect with Courage

Roya’s earlier podcast episode, Growing Up Unschooling with Roya Dedeaux

Roya’s website and Instagram

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: Welcome! I’m Pam Laricchia from livingjoyfully.ca and today I’m here with Roya Dedeaux. Hi, Roya!

ROYA: Hello, hello! How are you, Pam? 

PAM: I am very well. Thank you. And, Roya, you were first on the podcast back in 2016, right? We did a Growing Up Unschooling episode, and now I’m very excited to have you back to talk about your new book Connect with Courage. So, to get us started, I thought a refresher would be great.

Can you share with us a little bit about you and your family? And what’s everybody into right now?

ROYA: Yeah, absolutely. The first thing though, I have to say, is thank you for publishing my book! That’s kind of a big deal and I really, really appreciate not only the time that you spent on it and the editing and the publishing, but also the esteemed company I’m in. It’s very exciting to be up on that list. So, thank you, Pam.

PAM: Oh, it was my pleasure. I love this book. I’m so excited to actually talk about it with you!

ROYA: So, we are in an interesting transition phase. I’m just coming back from maternity leave. I have a four-month-old now, so I’ve got a seven-year-old, a four-year-old, and a four-month-old. And we’ve been diving into the world of finding babysitters and getting me back to work.

As part of that maternity leave, we were able to go on a big, grand, 10-national-park RV trip, which was really exciting. We went to Dinosaur National Monument, because my son is super into everything dinosaur, wants to be a paleontologist. We also moved about five months ago and so, now we have a pool and a trampoline and a new neighborhood to explore.

So, it feels like a lot of big muscle movement summer days down here in Southern California, lots of swimming, lots of trampoline, gardening, cooking things and taking them to our neighbors, paying attention to all the birds. We know all the bird drama in the neighborhood. And we downloaded the Audubon app to watch birds. So, some of you listening might be in rural places where this isn’t a shocker, but I’m in Southern California, very close to LA, and so, it’s really fun to have a barn owl swoop down while we’re eating dinner. Lots of that kind of noticing happening.

PAM: Oh, that’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. So, dinosaurs, that’s a big thing. Paleontologist in action right now.

ROYA: Oh yes. And he got to touch actual dinosaur fossils and talk to very knowledgeable rangers and we saw bison and went in a cave and, oh, it was just an amazing, amazing trip.

So, my kids are just living their best little lives. And then, I am up to my eyebrows in getting back into the world of therapy and I also make and sell jewelry and I run online bazaars. So, I’ve been occupied with that in the best way possible. And then, of course, talking about selling the book and making a whole bunch of journals and publishing those on Amazon.

PAM: Yeah. Yeah. We’ll definitely put links to that stuff in the show notes, as well. So, let’s dive into your book. As I said, I am really thrilled to have been able to publish that. It was so much fun working with you on that, back and forth, and back and forth, for what seemed like many months as we both had life things come up. It was awesome. That’s one of the reasons why I do love working with unschooling parents, because we have our priorities and yet when we have the time, we dive in deep. It is a lot of fun.

But anyway, I think your book will definitely be very life-changing for a lot of parents. In fact, you don’t even specifically talk about unschooling in it, but why I was so excited to work with it is because so much of deschooling is our work to do, parents’ work to do, as they’re exploring what unschooling is and how to just cultivate that lifestyle, that learning lifestyle in their family. So, this book just meshes so well with that whole process.

I wanted to start off with a bit about your background and why you wanted to write this book and why connection between the parent and child is so very important.

ROYA: I’m the oldest of three girls. They’re three and then six years younger than me. And so, I finished out fourth grade in traditional public school and then I never went back to fifth grade. My parents decided not to send us back. There were lots of small reasons, but it boils down to they saw that our interest in things and our curiosity was being stamped out, whether by being forced to learn things we didn’t want to learn about, or by honestly other kids making fun of us that we wanted to spend all summer reading and that kind of thing. They just didn’t send us back to sc