Ep 267: It Ain't About Just Doing School Tings at Home!

Moving away from school-centric culture and the performances we got going on is a very real thing that one listener voiced and we're sharing it here in this episode.
We're diving deep into this topic, addressing the importance of honoring our children's confident autonomy and moving away from the ingrained schoolishness we perform at home. We're exploring this through one listener's transformative story, lessons from my personal parenting journey, and the integrated perspectives that Savorism has allowed.

Embrace this journey with us as we navigate the shift from school at home to more liberated and nurturing approaches. We recap Season 4 and 5 in this episode and highlight the overarching themes. This episode is a fusion of personal narratives, listener insights, and practical pieces of advice tailored for anyone managing the beautiful task of raising free people.

Let's rethink education, nurture relationships, and foster liberation, while savoring the spaciousness it allows.

Some links:
Our family of podcasts all in one place: RFPN
Pleasure Series: Ep 112, 113, 114, 115, 116
Racial Equity in SDE: Ep 125
Chevanni Davids: Ep 146
Black, Queer Feminism: Ep 109

Chapters

• 0:00 Listener feedback: Moving Away From School-centric Culture
• 9:36 Blackness, Savorism and the beauty of slowww
• 11:54 Season 4 & 5 recap
• 22:02 Notice, witness, look forward to...
• 30:12 Offering and Affirmations
• 33:06 Shifting Perspectives on School at home
• 43:53 Close out

Transcript

Dope Listener: 0:00

And this idea of allowing them to be free makes me kind of feel free. My son is like I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow. I don't want to go to school for the rest of the day. I want to hang out with you, I want to play my video game, I want to go have lunch with you.

FOFC Podcast: 0:16

You heard a snippet of what I'm about to play here, which is a message from a listener who was really just sharing with me what she was going through as she first started listening to this podcast recently, and I think it is just so honest and I could relate to so much of it. When I think about my daughters when they were younger they're now 19 and 17. And then I also in service of this episode where we'll be talking about moving away from school culture instead of just doing school at home I feel like her message here is relevant. It's relevant for beginners and it's also relevant here because we're really just going to be talking about the very same type of thing that she's saying, which is basically like, oh shit.

FOFC Podcast: 1:09

When I back up a little bit from the performance of being this type of parent and making sure my child is this type of student, I'm realizing that it's actually more in flow and more in alignment with the type of relationship I want to have with my child, when I do honor their request to stay home from school, not just because they're sick, and that it invites me to honor my own body's needs and requests to chill out or to do less Right, like these sorts of things are what we're talking about, because the unquestioned dedication to school culture can be disrupted, and when it is, we really get to move into right, healthy, evolutionary relationship across generations. So shout out to this listener. We won't say her name, but her energy is all up in this episode, as is yours, as you listen, all right.

Dope Listener: 2:10

Akilah, I wish I was listening to your podcast when my baby was in my womb. I wish I listened to your podcast like before the pandemic. Oh my gosh. I'm just sitting here really because I'm like I was just so hard on my babies at the time. I had a first grader and a fifth grader and the girl was in fifth grade and I'm just like, oh my goodness, the creativity that could have came out of that time. But I was just so focused on allowing them to do that busy paper work crap that they sent home with the kids for the pandemic. And mad at my first grader, who has ADHD, who decided to just listen to the teacher while his iPad was up and the teacher only could see the ceiling fan. Oh my goodness, if I knew what I knew now, I would have been like let him see the damn fan. Hello, girl. But that's okay.

Dope Listener: 3:24

My kids are still in public school and my journey hasn't revealed to me exactly what I need to do with that. My little one he wants to stay in school. He's so motivated Like mom I need to figure this out Like I really want to stay. I just got one more year here and I'm done and I'm like I've been taking away his little power for such a long time and thinking that I know what is best for them. And I see my mother efforts were good and my intentions were good. But what it does to the kids when you constantly making decisions for them instead of being a navigator and guide, or in their life? Because one thing I realize is just kind of like it's futile for me to try to control my kids because the body will fight up against it. And you know, I didn't grow up with my biological mother. So I am just raising my kids from an empty space and I'm trying to fill my space and give it to them. And it's so many mistakes. But even though, akilah, that I went through all of that, I feel like myself still came forward that even though I'm mother without a map, that map is still being created each and every day. And my mother mistakes did not define who I would be as a mother and my kids, they're going to come forth who they are. It's going to show whether I suppress it or not. So why not help me that guiding light for them, no matter where they decide to school at? And this idea of allowing them to be free makes me kind of feel free.

Dope Listener: 5:12

My son is like I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow. I don't want to go to school for the rest of the day. I want to hang out with you. I want to play my video game, I want to go have lunch with you and you know before I would have been freaking out like you need to be in school, you're going to miss the content and all that. I'm just like, okay, let's do this. What you want to eat for lunch, come on While you watch playing your video game, I'm going to take me a nap and I'm a lock my hair and I'm a binge watch a television show.

Dope Listener: 5:41

Why are you doing your thing? I just I'm not gonna sit and ruminate on the past, but I could tell you oh, my goodness, I just I just wish I knew about this content, but my heart wasn't ready for the journey, obviously, and it just came right after the right time. So I always say that my, my daughter, made me a mother and she makes me want to take better care of myself, and my son is helping me uproot every lap I believed about myself and parenting.

FOFC Podcast: 6:21

You can't keep using tools of oppression and expect to raise free people. This episode, episode two, six, seven you will be rocking with a sister while we go through recaps of seasons four and five Because, as you may know, this is the final season of Fair of the free child podcast. The elder is being laid to rest and I really feel like it's important to pay some attention, some naming, some honoring of what has happened since July of 2016 through August, ish, september issue will see of 2023, as we do this eulogizing of this experience called Fair of the free child, and Also make sure you know what else we doing, what we rocking with, what we're expanding, what we are letting die and everything in between. So this episode, we will focus in on seasons four and five. I will say some names, I will tell you about some of the themes, I might nudge you towards some particular episodes, and then I'm gonna move into, as promised, the details of this particular path from home schooling, as in just doing what they do at school, just doing it at home, to more confident autonomy Practices, right moving away from school centric culture. I'm gonna talk about that this episode. I will also drop in a few affirmations in between, because they Showed up as I was working with this episode. One of them is one that I've been using for years and it showed up here as I've been working with this episode. And then a few others just came more recently, specifically around this episode, some really grateful for the Spaciousness that this season is offering and thankful to be co-producing it with Nas, formerly known as Fatima, my sister in, who is really with the details of this, with me this season and reminding me that, as we are learning how to savor this era of our lives as women, mamas, unschoolers, de-schoolers, in this stage of our journey in our 40s, we are learning how to trust this slower pace, how to really honor the savoring and not like worry about it or, um, say that we want it but then still push to do a lot of things. And you know, I'm in that space sometimes and it's really beautiful to be able to do this with Nas, because then she steps in and is like Yo, you know, drop into the, the spaciousness, and it's just like thank you for the reminder, oh, my god. So I'm grateful to be able to drop these affirmations in here, as they had the space they needed to come through One core theme that runs through all episodes of this Is the exploration of unschooling and its relevance to black people, and seasons four and five, of course, stayed in alignment with that and it's so beautiful to me always in so many ways, the way that I can see how the health of blackness, as I understand it, is really just such an opening and point of connection to so many different aspects of people and culture and community and relationship and including beyond humans, like with animals and spiritually and all of these things.

FOFC Podcast: 10:21

So much of that for me is connected to my exploration and acceptance and expansiveness around my blackness, and so I am very much one of those people of the mindset that the better off black folks are in our capacity to be free and safe and happy and thriving, the more beneficial it is for everything and everyone else. I truly have that experience over and over, and so, as I was Time traveling through seasons four and five so that I can bring this to you here, I really can appreciate, continue to appreciate, the overlapping and intersecting themes that Were really the thread there for me was blackness and people's exploration of that. It's like this whole thing about raising free people, mindful people, is is also about in many ways challenging societal norms and systems, and one of the huge, evident characteristics of of these societal norms and systems is anti-blackness. So I really value that this podcast was able to make offerings into that particular well of truth and reality. So season four continued that exploration and zoned in a little bit on personal leadership and self-expression, while also addressing things like mindfulness, liberation, of course, and education, all through the lens of self-directedness or self-directed education.

FOFC Podcast: 12:14

One of the highlights for me of season four was the pleasure series. That was episodes one twelve through one sixteen, in case you want to move right into those after this. So those were just like very specific exploration around Our relationship to pleasure. You know, when we see our children, for example, for those of us who are parents, when we see our children being happy doing a thing, there are a lot of filters For that happiness to come through before they land Wherever they land. For us and by that I mean Some of us that we talked about it in the series some parents have had the experience of resenting we're not knowing how to accept a child being Joyous, like just being in a state of pleasure doing something that they, the adult, didn't think was Like productive or useful Right. Gaming is a big example of that, and it's not to Invalidate the diversity of any of these things that we talk about, including pleasure. Something that someone finds pleasurable may not be healthy or safe Right, like all these elements of pleasure were explored here, and so we had Theamonye, my good sister, hold us sacred retreats, and Marley I owe the movement. Thea joined us. We also were joined by being a joy whose liberation work lives in dance and movement, and I go over to that particular well over and over at different times in my life. I'd like gravitate to be able to move certain things through my body, through dance. I love her work. Also, other good sis Ivy Felicia, the body relationship coach, founder of fat woman of color, which is a community care space around fat liberation and fat acceptance. Ivy kicked it with us Episode 125. I really enjoyed that experience.

FOFC Podcast: 14:15

We covered the topic of racial equity in self-directed education by highlighting some conversations that happened at the liberation and education summit in Clarkston that was hosted by Hartwood agile learning center. Talked about the importance of creating inclusive spaces and dismantling systemic barriers, even in a space that can sometimes assume that those things are not happening at a certain level. So really talking about what, what that meant, the realities for the need for racial equity. Season four also covered de-schooling, relationships, reparenting I was just having that conversation with another unschooling mom this morning the reparenting of ourselves and also older versions of our children. Hello, oh, my God, if we were doing another season, we would have to talk about that, like what it means to be such a different parent when your kid is 20, than you were when they were five or 10, and revisiting that space right, like, yeah, also, regenerative practices we talked about that In season four.

FOFC Podcast: 15:29

I remember episode 146, we featured Shavani. Beyond David's the homie. We met Shavani, sebastian, his brother Lolo oh my gosh Anna Meshela. We met in South Africa years ago and our family's connection remains intact despite the distance and it's such a blessing. Shavani is part of a small team that manages Reimagine Learning Center, a space that centers unschooling, community and restorative practices, and that conversation was amazing and you just need to know what Shavani is up to in the world. If you're listening to this podcast, you definitely need to know about Shavani's work, so be sure to check out the link. The show notes page will have the link to where you can follow Shavani's work and you can find the show notes page usually wherever you listen into the podcast homie.

FOFC Podcast: 16:23

What else did I wanna share with you? Oh, episode 150, dr Yolande Tomlinson. We had a beautiful conversation about black queer feminism and the black queer feminist approach to self-directed education. Shout out to Yolande. In our season four finale we joined the planted up podcast host, val, who's also my mom. Such a good time exploring the connection between plant care and self-care. We talked about how, at different times in our lives, we discovered the power of cultivating relationships with nature as a means of nourishing ourselves, because we are also nature. Right, that's something that I really need to constantly come back to. I am nature. I'm not trying to be with another thing. I'm trying to be more of myself in certain ways, which includes the transformative selves, all these other natural things that I can do and I'm equipped to go through. So it's so good to be able to talk with mom out loud about how that's showing up in our lives. That was episode 180.

FOFC Podcast: 17:32

And we kept the theme of these short run podcast series like planted up podcast, mom's podcast. We did that all the way through. So in season five you also heard from Asia Marie of she Said we Shed podcast. Asia, I am forever grateful for your willingness to talk about black mama trauma and really push back against these monolithic ideas about what black family structures and black mamas look like, so that we don't get to grieve our shit because people telling us what we can and cannot talk about out loud. And I think Asia's work is like such a testament to the power and connection and healing work that can happen when you are insistent on telling aspects of your truth.

FOFC Podcast: 18:22

And then we introduced the poor podcast which was Leslie W Bray beautiful opportunity to really move into what you are pouring into, what's being poured into you, and it's a beautiful acronym, just like check that out. In season five we also kicked it with Lou Hollis of Grief, growth and Goals podcast. Love what Lou is doing now running this agile learning space with these opportunities for entrepreneurship and moving through the business that Lou knows like the back of her hand in terms of her talent, management skills and marrying all of those things with her commitment to self-directed education as a mother, as a member of community, just so proud of and excited for what Lou is continuing to do. And you can hear the details of that story through Grief, growth and Goals podcast, which is still fully accessible, and check out the details of that. In season five, we also introduced how she got free podcast with my good sis, katrina Monique. We never ended up publishing full episodes of that podcast, even though many were recorded, and we trust that the data the deep, sweet, truthful data that we collected during that time is meant to serve a thing, even if it was not this version that we had envisioned of that podcast. So I'm grateful for the time and space and we remain in touch in harmony. You know, doing what we do.

FOFC Podcast: 19:56

We did that towards the end of season five, continuing these short run podcast series, but the earlier part of season five, which all went down in 2020, the year that COVID rolled up on us like break yourself fool. We really just continued the conversations around the themes of personal leadership, spirituality and self-expression and the intersection of those with parenting, with education, of course, and with decolonization. Yeah, so that's what we were feeling into and talking about together in seasons four and five, and I really felt like those conversations gave us like the type of insights into mindfulness, stretched over into parenting practices, including the re-parenting of our own selves, like whether we have children or not also navigating societal expectations period and cultivating liberation within family dynamics? That's one of the main themes that stuck out in seasons four and five, this notion of liberation, work, living within family dynamics and again, not only family dynamics, with you as a listener being the adult, but also you as an adult being a part of a family, whether it's your relationship with your elders or with your siblings or with your body. It's all about relationship with your body, that's mixed into all of it, but really intentionally with your body. So, cultivating liberation within family dynamics, within community dynamics a lot of that came up and really, really encourage you to get back into that particular time portal for 2020 and 2019, for seasons four and five.

FOFC Podcast: 21:49

["the World's Best? So this focal point is about what you might notice, what you might witness, what you might look forward to or look out for as you intentionally shift the way that you are in relationship with young people, your children, somebody else's children entrusted to you, your inner child. How you might move away from just doing school at home or having a very schoolish approach to your thinking and your ways to shift from that over into something more liberation-centric, something that's more in honor of and in trust of lifelong learning, not cramming specific bits of information and then regurgitating it in the form of a test or telling yourself the same stories over and over again from things that happened to you in childhood and living into the consequences of that today without stopping to question whether you still wanna be aligned with who you became as a result of that thing that happened to you when you were a child. So when I talk about the inner child work, that's the kind of focal point that I'm leaning into here the things that shaped who we are today, those things that happened in childhood and the ways that we stand on those grounds and look around from that particular perspective. What is it that you're noticing as you're doing more of this type of work? Listening to more things like this, being in more conversations, groups, gatherings, readings that are more about how you wanna feel, what type of communities you wanna contribute to, what ways of thinking and moving and living and buying all of that, buying into what are the ones that you're moving away from? And for some of us, that is very much connected to our work with our children, our commitment to raising them with a particular level of confident autonomy and having them be, as my friend Zakiya says free people and aware people, not just free to do whatever, cause whatever. But when we talk about raising free people, we're talking about having a certain freedom of mind, a certain liberation-centric way of being in the world, a type of normalized sense of what community care means. Because this way of raising free people means that we are free to come back to some of the ways that colonization and capitalism, patriarchy, some of these things that have moved us out of what was actually normal for us and we've moved into these newer, inhumane things like school and even the ways that we think about money and relationship.

FOFC Podcast: 25:23

Through schooling we are taught to be in relationship with people for what they could do for us. Leverage and what we could do for them is in service of what we want from them. You know, leverage connections to climb the ladder, to shine brighter, to stand out more Literally. In school the point is stand out, stand apart. That's the language that's used. And while competition can be healthy and consensual and like really aware of what's going on, this isn't about don't ever do this, always do that. It's about the lean, it's about the way that we are oriented towards a lack of mindfulness around things like competition to the point that it costs us our skills around things like rest, because if you're in competition mode at all times in some element of your life, you not prioritize in rest, and we are understanding from people like Trisha Hersey and Octavia Rahim and others who are doing the work around building our rest skills. We're learning about the costs of that.

FOFC Podcast: 26:38

When you are school centric, you're not in healthy relationship with things like rest. You are not in healthy relationship with things that don't give you this definitive binary yes or no result. You try, we try, when we are school centric, basically to force our thoughts about people and situations into this space of the defined. Oh, I understand what is happening, this is what's happening. This is a way that I could probably resolve it. You know which constantly looking for categories and confines. Right, we're looking for them all the time, and so where they do not exist, when somebody don't make sense to us something they said, something, they did, something a child is showing us or telling us then if we don't see those confines or parameters or those specific yes, this is this and this is what I do then we put them there, place them there, and those things, of course, help to erode relationship, healthy relationship, building skills across and among generations.

FOFC Podcast: 27:51

So when I say, and when you hear folks say schoolishness, what I invite you to think about is where am I looking for this definitive response that makes sense to me, that I would say, yes, thumbs up, I understand and I like it. Where is it that I am forcing that energy as opposed to paying attention to how I actually feel about it, what I tend to do when I don't like the way I feel about something or I don't understand something and how that is affecting how I feel every day and how I want to feel every day this gap between what, at this stage in your life, a healthy, aligned, evolving beautifully relationship with yourself and a person, each person, a child and adult, whoever your job, your career, what your relationship with these important things in your life look like You're paying attention to, whether what you're doing each day is aligned with that or not. That's why, for me, the reclamation of prayers has been such an important part of my ongoing de-schooling. Since we started doing this with Marley and Sage, me and Kurt started doing this with our daughters in 2012.

FOFC Podcast: 29:10

I have written and talked publicly about my migration away from Christianity over into really seeking and then witnessing my own relationship with God, with self, with universe. One of the things that I didn't know how to do was to pray, because I was no longer praying to Jesus. That's what I was taught, but that wasn't what was real or true for me. So then it's like, okay, well then I guess I don't pray. But then I learned over time to have a different type of relationship with prayers and I want to offer you this, and then we can move back into what we might notice, what we might witness, what we might look out for or look forward to as we move away from school at home, into something else. It's okay to pray. It's okay to determine what prayer means for you at any particular time in your life. Let us pray and don't just pray fast every time.

FOFC Podcast: 30:29

Sometimes, savor your prayers, take it slow, write it with your hand if you can, record it with your voice, if you can and want to Really de-school your perception of prayers. When I did that, and as I continue to do that, I recognize that my prayers are really the same as my affirmations. I treat my affirmations like prayers outward, like vibration to God, to universe, to a particular person. At times I treat them like prayers inward, so that I can remember to invite accountability in and notice things and witness things. I treat affirmations like prayers down deep too, like to be rooted in the truth of what happens when the prayer comes true. I treat my affirmations like prayers outward, inward and down deep. Let us pray Prayer one. My daily choices are offerings meant to fortify these prayers. What I do and choose determines the paths I can see and sense. My guidance includes so much more than my conscious mind when I make choices that align with my prayers. And if we want to drop a little mad question asking in there, I might ask you are your choices aligned with your prayers? Are you doing the things that feel aligned with these prayers you pray in Prayer 2.

FOFC Podcast: 32:33

Affirmation 2. My prayers need no pretense, and so my very real feelings are present and valid. My prayers do not center my fears or obstacles, because my fears are fragments, often on loan. My prayers affirm. My prayers ground me in my wholeness, and so, as you are maybe slowly backing away from a defined curriculum at home, maybe as you are allowing yourself to not stay up to date on all the things around, what children need to be learning. Maybe as you give yourself even more grace about not teaching a child in your life all the things that you think they need to be learning and should be learning under your watch, if you just slowly give yourself the space to not react to that feeling with information, by giving them information.

FOFC Podcast: 33:44

That is the starting point that I recommend. It's the one that I also understand, because no one when we first started I can't imagine that anyone would have been able to impress upon me in a way that I believed that we should just not give our daughters any type of work to do. I remember and I wrote this in Raising Free People, the book how much Chris and I were like shit, are we doing them a disservice? Are we about to make them be less smart? Because now we're pulling them from the place where they got all the information and it's like those sort of things are what held us kind of captive to doing school at home. And so the less you answer those feelings with action, the more space you get in between the version of yourself that thinks those sort of thoughts and the version of yourself that understands something different and is willing to learn and support what natural lifelong learning looks like those two just need distance from each other those two aspects of yourself. So each time you choose not to react to that feeling, that need each day.

FOFC Podcast: 35:02

As I mentioned in a previous episode, when the girls would not complete an assignment, we went from enforcer to maybe more gentle enforcer to investigator. Investigator was also a type of enforcer, because we investigated to try to fix it. I wonder why she didn't complete the assignment. What could we do to get her to? Maybe we need to be more flexible with timing. Maybe we need to introduce a more diverse array of topics. We went from that sort of thing to why is it that we're making her do this thing? I wonder why she's pushing back against it. Since she does trust that we're not giving her busy work.

FOFC Podcast: 35:47

Okay, I wonder, if she didn't do it, could she maybe learn something else? Or is it important that she learn this particular thing? If it is, does she need to learn it now? Am I thinking? Does it make me just feel like I'm doing my job? What is this for? What is this about? Who is this for Right?

FOFC Podcast: 36:08

I have a question that I posed a couple episodes back that got so much traction on Instagram in particular Tons of comments, many people saved it, got a lot of DMs about it. The questions I asked are who is in my head when I try to make my child do something? Who is this particular performance for? That is the type of reasoning that came up for Chris and for me after spending some time with our daughters, but also surrendering at first out of frustration, and then learning to trust their resistance. That's really what I'm offering as my insight here that the resistance that you might meet from a child to doing school at home is your roadmap. Pay attention to your response to it, play with honoring it and not honoring it, and see what you are learning and unlearning.

FOFC Podcast: 37:09

Also, every child is not going to be resistant. For some of us and that happens from where children and some of us are adults and are still this way we're not going to resist. That's not the way we do the thing. We're going to follow it because it feels safe to follow what we're used to. If you are in the position of wanting to switch from just doing school at home to something more spacious, but you feel like the child you have or the child you're around needs the structure, likes it, thrives in it, then that's okay.

FOFC Podcast: 37:43

Unschooling is not about not doing schoolwork. Some children enjoy it. Some people enjoy it. At all stages in their lives, whether they're children or adults, they get something from it. So if it is the case that this young person is not resisting it, roll with it. Pay attention to the types of things that they want to dive into. Introduce other things that they might also add to their structure. Give them practice with what happens when a structure needs to change, like if they wake up and they like to do their homeschooling work from this time to this time. Ask them about going to the park or wherever at a different time of day and see how they respond. For some people, young people included, it'll be like oh great, no problem, I'll just do this stuff later. For another one, it might be like no, I like to do it at this time, and you could intuitively feel into whether you want to offer that as a type of life education of okay, so what happens when shit changes and you don't get to do exactly what you want to do? Life is going to give that to them anyway, but so I'm just talking about the shift from homeschooling to something else.

FOFC Podcast: 38:58

If you're in this earlier stage of it you might need to say you might not yet be in a place to acknowledge or trust into that. You don't have to simulate certain life experiences. You can trust each person's life experience, including the child in your life, that you do not have to be the giver of all the experiences. They will get those in different places. You not even will always know about it, but you can always talk about these things. But if you're not yet there and you want to, like we did in the first couple of years, feel like we want to impart certain things, then you can do little things like shifting the schedule, asking about shifting the schedule, helping them to navigate the emotions of okay, but I like things just so Right. So you get to basically play with the real personalities and needs and tendencies of the people in front of you, the children in front of you, you, the person in front of you, the person you are trying to be, the ways about yourself that have developed as a result of things that happened to you that you didn't approach, you didn't appreciate, didn't love, didn't ask for, didn't consent to this. This is again why, for me, the word savoring and this process of invoking this saver complex feels like such an important part of my journey right now, including my journey as an unschooler, a more embodied version of what happened in 2012. Is that this process of savoring is about?

FOFC Podcast: 40:36

As I've said here before, three parts. It's first acknowledging harm, and that harm can be, oh, what I'm doing now with my child. They did not consent to, they're pushing back in ways that I want to pay a little bit more attention to, or this structure doesn't feel good for me. I don't want to be doing this type of force work with them for these hours a day. I don't, I don't want this, but it just feels like what I should be doing. Whatever the harm is.

FOFC Podcast: 41:06

That first part of this saver complex is to acknowledge that. What does harm mean to me right now? Little H harm, big H, whatever it is, to name it. So to acknowledge harm, and then the second part is to detangle a little bit from it, to start to de-school, where you can. If it's a little H harm thing and you might say oh, whatever that thing is for you, you might say to detangle from it might mean am I willing to sit in the discomfort when I choose A instead of B? I'm going to pick a day this week that I'm just going to really allow myself for two hours to sit in discomfort around this particular thing. I'm going to ask them to make a choice about a thing that I would much rather choose, but I'm going to ask them and sit with the discomfort. If that's your thing, if control is your thing, then sitting with the discomfort of giving away that control, which is what it feels like before you realize we don't actually have it. These are some of the ways that we can start to detangle from harm. So that's what I mean by the second step of detangling.

FOFC Podcast: 42:15

Sometimes I'll say, instead of detangling, de-schooling, which can really be a similar thing, because you're really just detangling from what you've been told, what you've been taught, what you haven't questioned. And then the next one, after you have acknowledged harm and you've detangled from it, is to open yourself to connections. And that's either going to be having the space on the other side of the detangling to notice connections that were already there you just didn't notice them, or to make connections, like to really sit with that spaciousness, with that slowed pace, to notice something, to witness something, enough to establish a connection. It wasn't one that you made before, it wasn't one that was sitting there. You had the space and the time to notice and really implement that point of connection. Let me know how that lands.

FOFC Podcast: 43:21

I was pushing back against my own schoolishness, the idea that I really wish I could give you like five specific things, and whenever I can I do. And then there are other times, like this, where it's like I really can just offer you a reasoning and you pull from it what threads align with where you are, where you're trying to go. Yeah, so this episode 267 has show notes wherever you're listening to this podcast. And so we've gone over the beginner stage and we've gone over this from homeschooling to lifelong learning, and we're going to continue that path next week as we do a little bit more recapping of Fair of the Free Child podcast, past seasons. And then we're going to move into the for me, not them path, the one that has nothing to do with children and yet still everything to do with raising free people. As always, thank you for listening and chat to you next week. Peace Audio by raising free people network.