エピソード

  • EU414: When Unschooling Kids Choose School

    EU414: When Unschooling Kids Choose School
    2026/07/30
    We invited a panel of three unschooling parents to join us to talk about what happens when unschooling kids choose school. Ari, Terri, and Kinsey are all members of the Living Joyfully Network and they all have children who have chosen to try school. They shared about what led to the decision, how the expectations of school affected them and their families, what they and their kids learned from their experiences, and how their foundation of unschooling helped them along the way. It was really interesting to hear about their unique paths and we hope you find our conversation helpful on your unschooling journey! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT ERIKA: Hello, everyone. I’m Erika Ellis from Living Joyfully, and I’m joined by my co-hosts, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia, as well as our special guests today, Ari, Terri, and Kinsey. Hi, everyone. So, I am really excited for this conversation. We invited Ari, Terri, and Kinsey, who are all Living Joyfully Network members, to join us today to talk about what happens when unschooling kids choose to go to school. There are lots of reasons why kids might be interested in trying school. And if they do, it can be a different experience than we might expect, because they’re making that choice themselves. But since people are different, and so are schools, we’ve seen a really wide range of experiences. And so thank you all for joining us to share a bit about your family’s experience. To get us started, can you briefly introduce yourself and share just a bit about your family? And maybe we could start with Ari. ARI: Sure. Hi, I’m Ari. I have three daughters. They are 10, 5, and 7. And we live in Portland, Oregon. We’ve been unschooling for about four years now. And this past year, my 10-year-old decided to go to school. She attended our local public school for fourth grade. ERIKA: Okay. And Terri? TERRI: We live in Swan River, Manitoba, quite a small town. There are four of us, me and my husband, and our two kids, a boy and a girl, Felix and Stella. And Stella decided to go into school this last year, into grade four as well. We live out in the country. It’s nice and quiet out here. And we have various interests that we have going on. ERIKA: Thank you. And Kinsey? KINSEY: Awesome. Hey, yes, I’m Kinsey. I live in Lubbock, Texas. And I have two children, Riley, who’s 15, and Emmy, who’s 12. Emmy chose to try school in 2024, and was there for a little while. So yeah, we had some experience there at our local public school. PAM: Nice. That’s very awesome. Okay, so now let’s get into a little bit more of the details. We’re very excited to hear everyone’s stories. We would love to know how did your child’s choice to go to school come about? And then how did it play out for your family? Certainly like at the beginning, as you guys were adjusting and getting this kind of settled. And would you like to start, Terri? TERRI: Sure, sure. I’m guessing like maybe two years ago, it was coming up to when we could have enrolled her for grade three. And Stella had started asking about school, saying she really wanted to go. And we were, I guess at that point, we homeschooled from when she was young, from the very beginning, and then slowly relaxed into unschooling. So we’d maybe be unschooling for about a year at that point. It felt like we had made this choice to not do school, me and my husband anyway, to not do school. So, it was very tough to wrap our heads around, could she go to school? My husband was very against it. He doesn’t mind me saying he’s like, I said no, he said outright no to her. Outright no to me. He said, we’ve chosen this lifestyle. And this just goes against everything we believe in about the school system. And so that was fair. That was his perspective. And I had that thought as well. But I was kind of keeping it to myself, because I could also see with my child that she’s very, when she knows something or wants something, she knows it through and through, no one will shake her, right? And she’s very strong that way. And I could see that if we held with that no, and held with what we believed was right over what she wanted, that it would be really, really bad for our ...
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    1 時間 5 分
  • EU413: A Field Guide: Shifting from Control to Connection

    EU413: A Field Guide: Shifting from Control to Connection
    2026/07/16
    We’re back with the third episode in our series on the podcast in which we’re working our way through Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. Today, we’re continuing our exploration of the deschooling phase of the journey with stage seven: Shifting From Control to Connection. Last time, we questioned our beliefs about learning and now, we’re questioning our beliefs about parenting. We talked about how parenting doesn’t have to be adults vs children, that children are capable of making their own choices, that equal doesn’t mean fair, how quitting is not a failure, and how strong relationships are the key. We also remembered to allow ourselves the time and space to grow and change. Exploring these parenting mindset shifts was so much fun! We hope you find this episode helpful! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE Learn more about Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT PAM: Hello everyone, I’m Pam Laricchia from Living Joyfully and I’m joined today by my co-hosts Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. Hello to you both. And we are back with another episode in our “A Field Guide” series. We are working our way through my book, “The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide”, which is framed around the hero’s journey and is a weave of myths, contemporary stories, and tales from my own journey. And we are deep in the de-schooling phase of our journey right now. In the last episode of the series, which was episode 408, we dug into some of the popular conventional paradigms about learning and found new truths buried in there. And as we continue our journey on the road of trials, in this stage, which is stage seven, we are exploring some unconventional truths about parenting. If you’re newer to unschooling and this is your first time exploring these truths, you’re likely dancing with these ideas more intellectually to just understand what they mean, what are we talking about, and maybe some of the further reaching implications that come along with it. And if you’ve been unschooling for a while and feel like you already intellectually embraced these ideas and have been bringing them into your family’s lives, now’s the time to peel back some more layers to build more connections and contacts around them. Strengthening your web of understanding with your own experiences, building your wisdom around this. And this is where you move towards, what feels to me anyway, believing these truths in your bones, you own them. These are your truths. So, the first truth that we’re going to explore is that parenting is not adults versus children. And right off with that phrase, there are so many aspects to that one truth. Does the conventional approach of pitting adults against children really make sense for us? What assumptions are we making if we believe that to be true? Does it mesh with our experiences with our own children and with the families that we see around us? The presumption of parental power over children is definitely widespread in our culture. We are meant to assume good parenting means power struggles will happen, a battle of wills over whatever the issue at hand happens to be. Yet many of us see right in front of us that it’s a draining and stressful way to live. And that so many adults who grew up in that environment continue to have strained relationships with their parents. That’s always been a curious one for me. So what if, let’s play with what if we choose to drop the assumption that the one right way to successfully parent is to exert power over your child to ensure that they do the right thing at the right moment? It can be challenging when we have little idea of what else to do. Because shifting away from power and control doesn’t mean doing nothing. So to that end, I personally found it really helpful on my journey to focus on connecting with my child rather than directing them. That’s what I could do instead. That helped me shift my energy in the moment to be open to seeing more of what was actually happening rather than that tunnel vision that comes with trying to control something to go one particular way and my way. And to instead get curious about how they were seeing the moment too, recognizing ...
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    52 分
  • EU412: Foundations: Recognizing Our Biases

    EU412: Foundations: Recognizing Our Biases
    2026/07/02
    For this week’s episode, we’re sharing the next Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Pam and Anna, Recognizing Our Biases. Let’s talk about cognitive biases. Commitment bias, confirmation bias, and negativity bias are common thinking patterns that can lead to errors in judgment as well as conflict in our relationships. Anna and Pam dive into how they show up in our everyday lives and how becoming aware of our brain’s tendencies can allow us to be more open and curious and to find more joy and connection in our relationships. We hope today’s episode sparks some fun insights for you! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE QUESTIONS Examine your thoughts around quitting, sunk costs, and commitments. Are those thoughts serving you? Do you and your partner see them in the same way? Describe a time when confirmation bias stopped you from seeing someone else’s point of view. Do the Joy Writing exercise for your partner or another loved one. Reflect on how it felt and how it changes your energy when you read it. TRANSCRIPT ANNA: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. We’re happy you’re here exploring relationships with us, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world. If you’re new to the podcast, we encourage you to go back and listen to the earlier episodes. We started with some foundational relationship ideas and really have enjoyed how they’re kind of playing off each other and building on one another. And if you’ve already been enjoying the podcast, we’d love it if you could leave a rating and review. That definitely helps new people find us. In today’s episode, we’re gonna talk about a few common cognitive biases that trip us up as we navigate our relationships. Cognitive biases are basically mental shortcuts that our brains will take as they try to quickly process the vast amounts of information in our very complex world. So, let’s start with commitment bias and the sunk cost fallacy. The sunk cost fallacy is associated with the commitment bias, where we continue to support our past decisions despite new evidence suggesting that it isn’t really the best course of action. We fail to take into account that whatever time, effort, or money that we’ve already expended will not be recovered. And this could be something as simple as finishing a meal or a movie one of you isn’t enjoying, because you’ve already paid for it, or something bigger, like finishing a college program even though, at this point, you’re pretty sure you don’t want to work in that field at all, but you stay because you’ve committed to it. This can cause friction in our relationships when we have different ideas about money, commitment, and what those things mean. Very often, the idea to stick it out at all costs was pretty much ingrained in us as children. Somehow we’re a failure if we quit or we would be wasting the money, so we have to stick with it to make these expenditures worthwhile. It’s really worth examining those beliefs if you see them coming into play in your relationships. Understanding sunk costs helps us see that the money is spent, period. The choice then becomes whether I want to take what I’ve learned about myself and move on to something else I can enjoy or stay with something that I don’t. Take the money out of the equation because it’s already gone, but what can I get out of that situation? What I get out of is up to me. Just learning that we don’t like something has value. Letting go of judging ourselves or our partners as failing when we decide to quit something goes a long way to learning more about each other. And providing unconditional support as we figure out what we want to do with our time. The conversation is so much more valuable when we’re looking at the nuances of the situation. And this also comes into play big time with children, doesn’t it? PAM: Oh, it definitely does. We think we’re teaching our children something positive by insisting they stick it out and follow through on their commitments when we sign them up for a rec class or they join a team. But the message they’re often absorbing is, don’t try new things unless you’re really sure...
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    19 分
  • EU410: On the Journey with Ari Lambie

    EU410: On the Journey with Ari Lambie
    2026/06/04
    We’re back with another On the Journey episode! We had a fascinating conversation with Living Joyfully Network member Ari Lambie. Ari is a mom of three young children and she spoke with us about her journey. We talked about the philosophy of learning, the fallibilism of humans, creativity, children’s social development as well as their capability, and a lot more. It was a really rich conversation and we hope you find it helpful! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT ANNA: Hello everyone, I’m Anna Brown with Living Joyfully, and today I’m joined by my co-host Erika Ellis and Pam Larcchia, as well as our special guest today, Ari Lambie. Hello to you all. Before we get started, I just want to mention the Living Joyfully Network. It’s a lovely place where you can find support at any stage of your journey, and I feel so lucky to get to hang out with so many amazing people from all over the world. If you’d like to join us, we’ll put the link in show notes, and you can also go to our website livingjoyfully.ca, and there’s a link right on the home page. I am so excited that Ari is here with us today. She is one of those amazing members of the Network I was just mentioning, and it’s been so fun getting to know her and her family. She loves to dive into all the nuances, and that is my favorite, so I’m very excited. Ari, just to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about you and your family and what everyone’s interested in right now? ARI: Sure. Well, thanks so much for having me. I’m really grateful to be here. I am Ari, and I’m part of a family of five. We live in Portland, Oregon. My husband, Joaquin, is a critical care doctor, so he spends a lot of time taking care of people and solving challenging problems, but he’s also really fun. He brings a lot of light energy to the house. He likes to cook, which I love. I mean, I don’t love cooking, so I love that he cooks. He also likes to garden and play sports and come up with challenging ideas and concepts that are away from the norm, which is our favorite thing to talk about. We’ve been together for 20 years, and we just love talking about the ideas he comes up with, which makes me think hard and come back with either a new way of thinking or challenging him with a new idea. So, that’s what we spend a lot of time doing when we have time to ourselves. My nine-year-old daughter likes to come in on those conversations sometimes. She really likes figuring out the world, talking about it. She likes to read. One of her interests is unusual animals, particularly marine animals. She’s taught me a ton about all these animals I’ve never heard of. She also likes to bake and do some crafty things. She likes to watch Minecraft videos and hang with friends. She spends a lot of time with her friends. My seven-year-old is just this fantastic person of expression. She loves to draw. She loves to listen to music. She’s teaching herself how to play some music. She loves stories and is really good at telling stories. And she expresses herself with her body, too. She’s really athletic, and she gives the biggest, best hugs that you’ll ever feel. My five-year-old, she’s really into pretend play. We play a lot of games together. She loves to be a pet in a pet store, and I come and have to buy her because she’s the most special pet in the store. Or we’ll play that we’re both shape-shifting dragons, and we have to defend against the other dragons. So that’s kind of her jam. She also likes to cook, and she’s really into numbers right now. She’s always figuring out how they go together, how they count up. So that’s been fun to play with her, too. We all like to move. We’re all pretty physical. One of our favorite games is tag. When we go to the park, we will almost inevitably end up playing some form of freeze tag. We’ve invented lots of different games of freeze tag. Me, I like to move outdoors. Hiking is probably one of my favorite hobbies right now. I also like to journal, and craft, and do art here and there. I spend most of my time hanging out with my kids and figuring out life. I’m loving it. It’s so nice. PAM: It’s so great to hear about everybody. I feel ...
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    50 分
  • EU411: On the Journey with Sam

    EU411: On the Journey with Sam
    2026/06/18
    We’re back with another On the Journey episode! Pam, Anna, and Erika had a powerful conversation with Living Joyfully Network member and unschooling dad Sam. Sam shared deeply about his journey with his daughter through autistic burnout. We talked about Sam’s experiences in both PDA and unschooling parent communities, the depth of the inner work that this journey involves, and some of the major paradigm shifts that Sam has made along the way. It was a really meaningful conversation and we hope it resonates with you! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT ANNA: Hello, everyone. I’m Anna Brown from Living Joyfully and today I’m joined by my co-hosts Erika Ellis and Pam Laricchia, as well as our special guest today, Sam. Hello to you all. I really appreciate Sam joining us today. He’s a member of the Living Joyfully Network and it’s been really nice getting to know his story and watch how things have unfolded. He brings that thoughtful, intentional energy that I love about the Network. That energy helps fuel my own personal growth and create a beautiful, supportive environment where we can dig deeper and question the prevailing narratives. So, Sam, to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about you and your family and what everybody’s interested in right now? SAM: Sure, yeah. Well, I live in Minneapolis with my wife Kate and my daughter. I recently retired from work early. I did the early retirement thing. I had been working part time for the year previous to that. And so, I guess I can start a little bit with what my daughter’s into. I mentioned to her that this was going to be one of the questions and she said interior design and interior decorating and games. And then I would add a few things to that, too. Right now, she’s super into making slime, large amounts of slime in many different permutations. There’s lots of experimentation happening with different ingredients and add-ins and colors and that kind of thing. So, that’s kind of fun and messy. She has a wide doll collection and she’s been really into making her own rooms. She calls them mini rooms and they’re essentially like dollhouse rooms, like a kitchen or a bedroom. She makes one room at a time and adds them on to each other and buys these little, tiny little Mini Brand versions of real life products that she stocks in the doll refrigerator really intricately. And I guess that ties into her interior design interest, as well. She’s super creative. She really likes to do drawing. She makes videos and she actually, I’m kind of amazed at some of the videos that she makes because she’s, I don’t even think I said she’s nine. And so she uses her iPad to make videos and she has her own YouTube channel. She has two YouTube channels, which are not updated too frequently. It’s something she’ll get really into and then completely abandon and then six months later be really into it again. And so, that’s fun. And then she likes building forts. She likes playing with our dog Lucy, and various other things. And she watches videos. She loves YouTube and learning. She’s really into watching videos about Minecraft and Toca Boca World, which is the other game that she’s really into at the moment. She watches videos about all kinds of things like science and history. It’s interesting. She’ll frequently tell me very random facts that she’s learned by watching videos and I, being skeptical, when I look at the videos she’s watching then I’ll Google it and be like is that really true? And it’s interesting because it almost always is accurate and so that’s been an interesting learning for me because I’m the kind of somebody who’s avoided YouTube and never wanted to have anything to do with it for many years. And now I watch quite a bit of it just to keep up with what she’s doing. So that’s kind of fun. And my wife Kate, she works in public policy. She’s an environmental climate scientist, and she works on making and contributing to the creation of policy to help us in the state of Minnesota adapt to climate change. And she is super engaged and super smart. And she also likes to compete in triathlons a couple of times a year. She and I are very ...
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    59 分
  • EU409: Foundations: Baby Steps

    EU409: Foundations: Baby Steps
    2026/05/21
    For this week’s episode, we’re sharing the next Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Pam and Anna, Baby Steps. So often, when we’re faced with a challenge or making a choice, we don’t need to have the full picture or the final answer in order to move forward. By taking a baby step in the direction that makes sense to us or to our loved ones, we can learn more about the situation and see how it feels. One baby step can lead naturally to the next. As we keep communicating and checking in, we can find a path forward that works for everyone. We hope today’s episode sparks some fun insights for you! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE QUESTIONS Does it feel like many of the day to day choices you’re making are urgent? Are they really? If you haven’t listened to episode 8 yet about Anna’s mantra, “there’s plenty of time,” I highly recommend it. Thinking back, can you remember a time when you felt pressured (often by ourselves!) to make a decision quickly yet the better choice wasn’t immediately clear? Can you think of a series of baby steps that might have helped? Feel free to get creative! Is there a choice or a goal you’re considering right now that feels big? You don’t need to know exactly how you’d get there, but can you see a baby step in that direction? Can you do that and see what happens? Are you more of a leap-first person or a firm-footing person? What about your partner? Your children? How can understanding that help you communicate with them about future decisions? TRANSCRIPT PAM: Hello and welcome to the Living Joyfully Podcast. We are happy you’re here exploring relationships with us, who we are in them, out of them, and what that means for how we move through the world. If you’re new to the podcast, we encourage you to go back and listen to the earlier episodes. We started with some foundational relationship ideas in these first dozen episodes and have really enjoyed how they are building on one another. And if you’ve already been enjoying the podcast, please share it with the people in your life that you think would benefit from contemplating these ideas. It’s super easy to share. Just send them to pod.link/livingjoyfully. From there, they can pick their favorite podcast player and it will take them right to the show in that app. Thanks so much for helping us spread the word. And so, this week, we are going to talk about the idea of baby steps. When we’re trying to make a choice, so often, we don’t need to make the big, ultimate decision right now. This builds on the idea that there’s plenty of time, which we talked about a few weeks ago. These are the threads that are moving through them all. So, maybe we’re not yet sure whether we want to pursue the end goal that we’re considering. When we find ourselves here, what’s often missing is more information or experience. So, taking the next baby step in that direction can give us more information to help us make that bigger picture decision. Sometimes we need to take quite a few baby steps before we get a keen sense of what we ultimately want to do. Or, maybe our partner or child wants to do something that stretches our comfort zone. Chances are, we don’t need to make a yes/no choice immediately. Staying open and curious, which we talked about last week, can help us take the next baby step in that direction and just learn more about what it entails and how it feels. It can also give us a better understanding of why they’re wanting to go in that direction and some experience that can help us better explain our perspective. We’re learning more about them and we’re learning more about ourselves. That deeper level of self-awareness and having a better grasp of the language around their goal, now we can have more meaningful and connected conversations with them. There’s just so much we can learn when we try just that next baby step, isn’t there? ANNA: Oh my gosh, yes. And it really is the natural extension of last week’s discussion on being open and curious. When our partner or child brings us something they want to do, sometimes if we don’t see the whole path clearly, we’ll just shut it down. At the first thought of resistance, we’re...
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    18 分
  • EU408: A Field Guide: Challenging Our Beliefs About Learning

    EU408: A Field Guide: Challenging Our Beliefs About Learning
    2026/05/07
    We’re back with the second episode in our new series on the podcast, in which we’re working our way through Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. Today, we’re beginning our exploration of the deschooling phase of the journey with stage six: Challenging Our Beliefs About Learning. Deschooling has several aspects, and this is one of the big ones. We may carry many beliefs about the way that school is connected to learning and the way we expect children to learn. In order to challenge those beliefs, we dug into five truths about learning: teaching is not a prerequisite for learning, curriculum is unnecessary for learning, children are always learning, learning is fun, and learning is not hard. Once we start to question our existing beliefs, many of these new truths come to the surface. And they really build on each other until we’re living in a whole new paradigm! We loved diving into learning and we hope you find this episode helpful! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE Pam’s Substack article, “But if they don’t go to school, how will they learn?” Learn more about Pam’s book, The Unschooling Journey: A Field Guide. We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT PAM: Hello everyone, I am Pam Larrichia from Living Joyfully and today I’m joined by my co-hosts Anna Brown and Erika Ellis. ANNA AND ERIKA: Hello! PAM: So we are back with another episode in our Field Guide series. We’re working our way through my book, The Unschooling Journey, A Field Guide, which is framed around the hero’s journey and it’s a weaving together of myths, contemporary stories, and just tales from my own journey. In our first episode, if you haven’t listened to that yet, you can go back, we dove into the first phase of the unschooling journey, which was Choosing Unschooling, in which we answered the call to unschooling. We found our guides, which in a fun twist are so often our children. We navigated past various threshold guardians as we crossed the threshold from the ordinary world into the world of unschooling and moved through our time in the belly of the whale where we came to embrace the curiosity of a beginner’s mind. Now we are firmly in the deschooling phase of our journey, which encompasses seven stages and really does represent the bulk of our transformational work. Joseph Campbell calls this next stage the Road of Trials, which through the lens of unschooling, I have broken into two stages because I experienced them as quite distinct from each other. The first focuses on challenging our existing beliefs about learning and then the second one on those related to parenting. In this episode, we’re going to talk about five truths about learning. And if you’re new to unschooling and this is your first time exploring these truths, you’re likely to be dancing with these ideas more intellectually to just understand what they mean and some of their further reaching implications because it’s just mind-blowing enough to hear these the first time and go what, that doesn’t match with what I’ve known so far. Anyway, if you’ve been unschooling for a while and feel like you already intellectually embraced these ideas, now’s the time to peel back some more layers to build more connections and context around them. You’ll be strengthening your web of understanding with your own experiences, because you’ve been doing this for a while, so building your wisdom. And you are moving towards really believing and feeling these truths in your own bones, owning them for yourself. All right, after all that preamble, the first truth we are going to explore is that teaching is not a prerequisite for learning. And right off, oh my gosh, there are just so many aspects to this one truth, isn’t there? ANNA: It’s true. And I think it’s so interesting, because all of us can think of so many things we’ve learned without being specifically taught in that one way. And, oh my goodness, just look at babies learning to walk and talk without expert classroom instruction. And yet somehow schools have really sold us on this concept that to learn you need to be instructed by someone. And not only that, but learning happens while sitting at a desk. And let’s throw in some power dynamic, loss ...
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  • EU407: On the Journey with Lucia Silva

    EU407: On the Journey with Lucia Silva
    2026/04/23
    We’re back with another On the Journey episode! We had a rich conversation with Living Joyfully Network member Lucia Silva. Lucia was previously on the podcast in episode 251, Unschooling as a Lifestyle. She is an unschooling mom of two and she came back to share some updates about her unschooling journey. We talked about trusting our children’s learning journeys, Lucia’s inner growth and mindset shifts, as well as her experience in the Living Joyfully Network and how the community has supported her over the years. It was a really beautiful discussion and we hope you find it helpful! Watch the video of our conversation on YouTube. THINGS WE MENTION IN THIS EPISODE EU251: Unschooling as a Lifestyle with Lucia Silva We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family. We offer a free month trial so you can see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. Sign up to our mailing list on Substack to receive our email newsletters as well as new articles about learning, parenting, and so much more! Check out our website, livingjoyfully.ca for more information about exploring unschooling and navigating relationships. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT ERIKA: Hello, everyone. I’m Erika Ellis from Living Joyfully, and I’m joined by my co-hosts, Anna Brown and Pam Laricchia, as well as our guest today, Lucia Silva. Hello to you all! PAM, ANNA, AND LUCIA: Hello! ERIKA: Before we begin our conversation with Lucia, 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 such great discussions about so many topics. Our community has such a wide variety of experiences, and everyone’s really interested in learning and growing and being intentional with their families. It’s really unlike any other online community I’ve found. Being part of the Network offers powerful support, especially during those moments when fears pop up or if you’re new to unschooling and just need a place where people understand what you’re going through. If you’d like to learn more about the Network and check it out for yourself, you can visit livingjoyfully.ca and click on Network at the top of the page. And we’ll also leave a link for that in the show notes. We would love to meet you. So I’m very excited that we get to talk to Lucia today. I met Lucia on the Living Joyfully Network and have just loved getting to know her over the years. And she was also on the podcast back in episode 251 and shared her journey to unschooling in that episode. I encourage everyone to check that out as well. And we’re excited to dive in for an update five and a half years later, which is wild. So Lucia, we would love to hear what everyone is interested in right now. LUCIA: Five and a half years later sounds like, in the scope of kid time, it’s so long. It’s so long. And then thinking, how long have you been unschooling? Five and a half years still seems really new. So, it’s interesting to think about those elastic times. And it was fun to see how some things are just so similar. I’m sure you guys see that with your kids. But, wow, I can connect where they’re into the exact same thing. So there’s four of us. It’s me and my husband, Micah, and my two kids. They’re older now. To respect their privacy, I’m not going to be using their names. And I’ll just refer to them with neutral pronouns. They said I could talk about them in general. My oldest child is still really into ballet. And that’s their primary passion. And that has remained strong, grown, changed a little bit. It’s not what they want to do professionally, but it is just a primary part of their lives. They’re also still really into reading and drawing and making. They have a great friend group. And they do lots of fun stuff. I just dropped them off at the botanical gardens to hang out with friends this morning. And let’s see, there was one other thing I wanted to mention. I lost my train of thought. My younger child, back when I originally did the podcast, they were really into building and constructing items out of stuff. And I had not really forgotten, even though we still have a lot of that preserved in the garage. But they’re really into building tabletop games, mostly card games. They’re constantly inventing new games. We’ve brought a lot of them to the table, done a lot of design. We’ve taken them to little fairs and sold lots of them. And we have game tournaments. They’re kind of based around the Wings of Fire lore, because that’s what their friends were into when they started it. It’s turned into this thing where they have this whole group of friends that are ...
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    1 時間 3 分