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In this episode, we were so grateful to be joined by Melissa Crockett-Joyoue of the Unschooling Summit and Weave ND. Melissa shared her dramatic journey to unschooling, her experience as a neurodivergent parent of neurodivergent kids, and how amazing unschooling has been for all of them. We also talked about increasing our capacity through intentional self care practices and being an entrepreneur while unschooling.

It was a very rich conversation that we hope you enjoy!

QUESTIONS FOR MELISSA

Can you tell us a little bit about you and your family and what everyone’s interested in right now? And then we would also love to hear a bit about your story of coming to unschooling.

Before the call, you mentioned how valuable unschooling as a lifestyle can be for ND kids. How have you seen that in action?

I know you talk about the importance of building capacity for ourselves. Can you share some of your ideas around that?

You’ve mentioned your online community, Weave, and there’s The Unschooling Summit event you co-host with Esther Jones. We’d love to hear more about those and a bit of your experience weaving unschooling together with being an entrepreneur.

THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE

Weave Community: weave-community.mn.co

Weave IG: www.instagram.com/weave_nd

Melissa Unschooling – IG: www.instagram.com/mama.weaves

The Unschooling Summit: www.theunschoolingsummit.org

The Unschooling Summit on IG: www.instagram.com/theunschoolingsummit

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

ERIKA: Hello everyone, I am Erika Ellis from Living Joyfully and I’m joined by my co-hosts, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia, as well as our special guest today, Melissa Crockett-Joyoue. Hello to you all. 

MELISSA: Kia ora.

ERIKA: But before we begin our conversation with Melissa, I wanted to invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, which has really been life changing for me in so many ways. On the Network, we have amazing discussions about so many topics since our community has such a wide variety of experiences. Everyone in the Network is really learning and growing and being intentional with their families.

It’s unlike any other online community I’ve found. Being part of the Network offers powerful support, especially during moments when questions and fears come up, or if you’re new to unschooling and just need a place where people understand the journey. If you’d like to learn more about the Living Joyfully Network and check it out for yourself, you can visit livingjoyfullyshop.com and click on the community tab. We’ll also leave a link in the show notes. We would love to meet you there.

We are so excited to have Melissa joining us today on the podcast. She is the co-founder of the Unschooling Summit, and the founder of WeaveND, an online membership community supporting neurodivergent unschooling families with a focus on building capacity and connection for the parents. She lives in New Zealand and is mama to two unschooling kids. I met Melissa recently when I participated in her Sunday Session with Esther Jones, which is part of the Unschooling Summit. I’m excited to learn more about her in our conversation today.

And so to get us started, Melissa, can you tell us a little bit about you and your family and what everyone’s interested in right now? And we’d also love to hear a bit about your story of coming to unschooling.

MELISSA: Okay. Well, I’ll check back in an hour with you. So, kia ora koutou. So I’m Melissa and you know that we’ve done that part. I live in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I live in a small coastal rural fishing village, which is approximately an hour north of Auckland. I grew up in the very far north.

I’m part M?ori on my mother’s side, and a big mix on my dad’s side, and grew up really intensely connected to that part of me growing up in a small, predominantly M?ori area in the far north. And my wife and I, she is from St Lucia in the Caribbean. And we have two children.

So we have T?mana, who is 10. And we have Hinem?rie and she is seven and a half. Hinem?rie did three part days at preschool with me in attendance and was a big fat no. And that was her journey in mainstream schooling. And T?mana did a year at our really lovely little country school with a role of 60 kids max. It was probably about 55 when he was there, a school that I had been on the board of governance of for three years before I even got pregnant, because we moved to a small town and I wanted to make connections and help out. And I thought, I’m going to make the school really awesome so when my kids get there it will be great. That didn’t turn out quite how I anticipated.

So, that’s where we live. And we live on a big, big property that my parents own. So it’s native forest. They live there as well in a different dwelling within shouting distance. And my uncle lives there as well. And my brother and his wife and two kids live just a five minute drive away.

So, it’s a beautiful intergenerational kind of living with all the ups and downs of that when you are striking out on a different path. My parents are supportive, really supportive of the unschooling stuff, more challenged by understanding the neurodivergent stuff, because they’re neurodivergent too, they don’t know it yet. They’re working it out. So, we have a different parenting style that they are trying to be supportive of. And we’re all kind of learning how that works. 

Our journey to unschooling was a mixture of, longer than I wish it had been in hindsight now, and kind of quite quick to jump straight into unschooling in other ways. So as I said, I was quite invested in the whole local school and so on. I was also doing fundraisers for them. I was working on M?ori strategy with them and so on.

So, when T?mana was smaller, he had really intense food allergies. And so we didn’t do a lot of socializing with him. We lived quite an unschooling kind of lifestyle anyway. He didn’t go to any kind of childcare. He was only ever looked after by my mum occasionally.

It was a very kind of attachment-style parenting. And I ran a M?ori language play group with my sister-in-law. And so he socialized there. But apart from that, play dates were really hard because of his food allergies. And he liked other kids, but there was always something. He really liked adults. For his fourth birthday party, his list was all grown-ups and elderly people he wanted to come to his party. And so it was always a little bit challenging. And he really liked babies. Those were his key interest areas with other kids.

We put him into preschool when he was three and he wouldn’t go inside. And we just thought, oh he’s just such an outdoor boy and he just wanted to move rocks and climb trees and ride bikes. But every time he went inside, he’d get really upset, particularly if it was raining.

Now I’m looking back and seeing all these flags for sensory overload and stuff that we just didn’t know or understand at the time. And we thought that it was his food allergies making him really cautious around other kids. So, he did a little bit of preschool, like two mornings a week. But I had a new baby and I might get him there at 10 and he might have to finish at 12. So he did about two hours twice a week max.

When my daughter was eight months old, I actually had three SCAD heart attacks, Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissections, which were near fatal and