EU394: Weaving Together Neurodivergence and Unschooling with Melissa Crockett-Joyoue

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 pretty extreme. And I spent five weeks in hospital. And it is a key part of our story because it was very traumatic for the children.

So T?mana was there for two of the times, including one which was cardiac arrest. And it meant that he had really severe separation anxiety. And the nature of him anyway, he was very, very attached. But this was really intense. And so I spent five weeks in hospital and had to have open heart surgery. And he kept going to preschool during that time. But it was really difficult for him.

So, it was probably a year later that it was time for him to start school in New Zealand, we start at five. And pretty much everyone just goes at five. You legally don’t have to be there until you’re six. But I knew that he was going to need a long transition into school. I felt that. And the preschool and school were right next door. So, we had this plan in progress. And then COVID happened.

So we locked down at home. And that suited him really well. And also, after I recovered in that period of time, my wife got really sick, but that came after. So, we put him into school. And it went abysmally, basically, from the get go. And after a few months, he started halfway through the year. He started in June. And so the other kids had kind of settled in at the beginning of the year. He only had 10 kids in his class, but it was just too much. And I’m trying to think how I can make this shorter.

So basically, school was really difficult. He, from the very first day, it was screaming violent meltdowns from him. And I couldn’t lift him because of my chest surgery and stuff. And so my mum helped literally drag him into school. And we pushed him in the door. And the teacher closed the door on him. And it was horrific. And I was really fully in PTSD still at that point. So I was having panic attacks and stuff. And so it was, it was intense. It was really hard.

And then they did the classic thing of, you know, 10 minutes later, sending a photo of him playing and being like, he’s fine. But this didn’t stop. And pretty much every day was traumatic for all of us.

And we had meetings with the school and they said that it was because of me. And so we had his grandparents drop him off at school, occasionally my wife if she wasn’t working and so on. And it just didn’t get better. And he would be up trees and my dad, who is a bit rough around the edges. “I’m gonna have to get the chainsaw and cut the tree down.” And it was just really dramatic every morning.

And he went through a small phase of kind of being okay to go. And they were bribing him with Lego he could do in class and stuff. But it just wasn’t supportive of his neurodivergence.

They didn’t understand that. They just blamed it all on his trauma around my heart stuff. And yeah, it just continued to go on.

And everyone was telling us he’ll get used to it. Kids are like this, it’ll be fine. He’s just traumatized, you know, like it’s just that.

And yeah, the plans that they put in place were basically me not being involved. And you know, don’t make it nice for him to be at home, encourage him to be at school, all of those kinds of things. This is with a five-year-old who’s really traumatized.

One of the final days they were restraining him on the ground while I drove off with him, you know, yelling for me. Sorry, I didn’t think I’d get this upset again. I’ve talked about this. It’s all your empathetic faces.

And we had anxiety bands for him that were giving him bilateral stimulation, all this kind of thing. And nothing was helping.

And at that point as well with his learning, I could see some disparities. And I ended up finding out about giftedness and I had him assessed and it turned out he was a highly gifted visual-spatial learner. So then I kind of went down the path of, okay, things will be better if we get them on board with his visual-spatial giftedness.

And we talked about it with him because he knew he was different from the other kids. And so we went in with all these ideas and this 26-page report and the school just wasn’t able to support him in that. And they gave him a teacher’s aid, but it just wasn’t working.

He kept running away from school grounds out onto the main road and stuff. And it was just difficult. And I really wanted to homeschool him. And I knew homeschooling was going to be our future at that point. I’d always kind of seen it because of his food allergies, placements didn’t work out. Then I was like, yeah, I could be a homeschooling mom, but I did really like that local school.

I knew homeschooling was in our picture, but my wife and I thought that I was just having to deal with the trauma that I’d been through. And I was having panic attacks and so on. And we just thought that I didn’t have the mental capacity to homeschool him at that point.

I didn’t know about unschooling. I mean, I’d heard about it. And I thought that was like those really happy, slack parents. I followed one woman on a blog, and she lived in a house bus and the kids were constantly being picked up for not being looked after properly and stuff.

And I was like, yeah, no, that’s wow. And I have nothing against house buses, I think that’s a cool lifestyle. But a particular blog I was reading maybe wasn’t very representative.

So, I thought we were going to have to homeschool him, but I thought that I was going to need to get a whole lot better first. And it just got to the point where he had like four vomiting migraines in two weeks. I thought maybe he had some kind of brain problem going, like some kind of illness or something, some terrible thing.

And it was just stress. And it turned out that he was being really bullied at school. And he was telling us, but we didn’t believe that it was as bad as what he was saying and so on.

And it just came to a crunch when we had a second big COVID lockdown for about, well, it was big for us, it was about four months of complete lockdown. And he absolutely blossomed at home. He completely thrived. He was learning. He was much more interested in learning. He was so much less anxious. And we sat down and had a conversation. At that point, the new protocols had come in that we would have to drop him at the school gate and leave.

Parents just had to drop and go, you weren’t allowed into the school at all. And we just said, that’s not okay. It’s my mental health or his, we decided. And we were like, I can be more robust. I can sacrifice mine for his, we just couldn’t do that to him any longer. And that’s when we decided to homeschool. And I’d been trying to convince my wife for probably six months that we needed to do this.

And we finally had this conversation. I remember I got up off the couch and I walked over to the kitchen bench and I started doing dishes. And then I just had this complete wash over of me, like, how the hell am I going to homeschool him?

Like, oh, I don’t have the capacity and how am I going to teach him maths? You know, and all of those things that just washed over me, just like this whole whoosh. And I went and spoke to her, sent a message to a friend who is an unschooler, who’s a psychologist who lectures at a university. And she unschools her two similarly neurodivergent, at the time we thought, similarly gifted kids. They’re gifted as well. And she said to me, yeah, read this Carol Black essay and you need to unschool.

And so that was it. And I just autistically deep dived into that. And that was it. We were unschoolers from pretty much that day. We didn’t start homeschooling. We just went straight into unschooling.

Wow. Okay. I told you, see me in an hour. Yeah, so it’s a big, big story. But that’s how we got to unschooling.

ANNA: It’s amazing. I think so many parents can identify, just all those feelings and trying to make it work and trying to do what everybody’s saying you need to do. And oh my gosh, it’s just so intense. And then with your health pieces too. So yeah, just feeling all the feels of that experience for sure.

PAM: I was just going to say, so many feels. And I resonated with a few spots that were very similar. Like trying to work with the school, going in with the reports and trying to create this environment in which they’ll thrive and it just not being something that they’re able to do within the constraints that they are living with.

But that moment, I was actually writing about that recently. The moment when you realize all of a sudden, that there really are other options than this, this one thing. You were working so hard with the school and trying to make it at that welcoming and wonderful place. And then the bright side of a lockdown, I guess. But I think it’s kind of the baby steps too.

And I think for me, it was really helpful when we decided to ask the kids if they wanted to stay home, that it wasn’t like, okay, this is our decision that we’re doing forever. We’re going to try it out and see because when you give it that opportunity, oh my gosh. Like your description of how he was shining when he had the opportunity to just be at home and do those things. That is amazing. And that was your insight and moment to be like, okay, I need to make this work somehow.

So it was just fascinating. Thank you for sharing. It’s okay that it was long!

ERIKA: It’s just such a beautiful story. And you can really feel all of the, there’s so many elements to it. And I think for everyone who goes on this journey, there are so many contributing factors. So you’re feeling all the context of what’s going on for you, and then for your partner as well. And then for your child, everyone, all these different people with different needs. And then those relentless outside messages saying, it’s you. Don’t get involved in this, that’s such a pressure on parents.

MELISSA: Yeah, I hear that so much as well, in my community. People that are considering it and they’re like, but everyone says that if I remove my child from the system, where’s all the support going to be? They need an SLT, they need an OT, they need a behavioral person. And it’s like, actually, once you remove them from this environment, so many of those needs drop away.

PAM: Actually that is a wonderful lead into our next question. You mentioned this before the call, but your whole description just brings it to life, how valuable unschooling as a lifestyle can be for neurodivergent kids. So, I was hoping you would dive into that a little bit more.

MELISSA: Okay. Be careful with a little bit more. This is my soapbox.

ANNA: We’re here for it.

MELISSA: Yeah, I’m just so passionate about parents of neurodivergent kids understanding that unschooling is not just a valid, legitimate option, but it may very well be like a life-changing one for their family and for the trajectory of their children’s lives. Because I think that what they are able to gain at home, in a supportive environment, assuming that you can provide them with a supportive environment, is, I can’t put into words, and this is rare for me, how much that can turn around can be. I think about the potential life story of our kids, because my son was at school for one year and there were lockdowns during that time, and there were school holidays, and all of these things, vacations, whatever you guys call it, and he left there, telling us that he was stupid, and that he was worthless.

And he’d got all these messages from there. He hadn’t been told that by anyone, he had internalized all of that stuff. And he had really deeply internalized it. And it’s just because it wasn’t the right environment for him. Even though he had this paperwork telling him he was a gifted learner, he has an extremely asynchronous, really spiky profile.

So, he’s 97th percentile for some things, or 98th, and then 4th percentile for something else. And so all that was amplified at school was those 20 percentiles and the 4 percentiles, and none of the 97th or 98th genius were the things that were focused on. And all we do is celebrate the stuff that they’re good at. Our life’s work is to help them to learn how to regulate and to celebrate all the good things that they bring. And autistic people, which now he’s diagnosed, I’m diagnosed, and our daughter is yet to be diagnosed, have like a really increased risk of very, very poor mental health and a really high suicide rate and so on.

And for me, that is my bottom line is that I want my kids to be mentally well. And if they don’t have mental wellness, to have supports for that, and to be able to learn how to regulate themselves and keep themselves safe. And that is the most essential thing, I think.

And with neurodivergent kids who are in school, even the ones that are doing okay, there’s so much around just the sensory overload and the amount of capacity that they are using in a day just to get to the baseline that other kids start the day at, or spend the day at. The amount of executive function that they, you know, it was said we have no executive function, but actually, we’ve just used it all up, because our brain needs to utilize it just to do all the things that come naturally to other people. So, it’s not that we don’t have any, it’s just that we use it really, really quickly.

And when a person’s central nervous system is in fight or flight all the time, it’s hard for them to thrive in any way, let alone do the bare basics of learning. I think that at school, just simply the sensory overload, even for being in a room of 10 kids. Now I’m not going to put my kid in a room of 10 kids without knowing what we’re going to need to do in advance. We’re going to accommodate in this way. And afterwards, we’re going to have a buffer of one to two days, depending on whether he knew the kids or not, and whether it was extra loud or what they were doing.

I can calculate all of this into my dysregulation maths and be like, okay, this is what we need to place around this so that the rest of our week goes bearably. There’s no control over any of that in school, and just the amount of overstimulation and sensory overload, now that I know that I’m autistic, and I can look at how as an adult I function in certain ways, I can unpick and unpack all of that and just be like, wow, all of these aspects are so, so challenging for our kids. And then they’re there trying to learn? It just seems completely unrealistic, you know. They can’t learn when they’re in complete fight or flight.

I actually had an example with T?mana. They have parent-child interviews, I assume they do that all around the world where you go and you talk about the kids’ learning goals and what they’re doing well at and what they need to work on and so on. And we had one of those when T?mana, it wasn’t long before we finished, and we went in and you’re sitting on the little five-year-old tables with the little seats, and we’re all sitting around with our adult knees up. And there’s the teacher and my wife and I and T?mana, and T?mana was doing well.

But he’s ADHD as well as autistic. And so he was on his knees on the chair, on his elbows, and then his feet, doing all the things that a five-and-a-half-year-old does when they’re sitting in a boring meeting. And I was trying to focus and I was probably trying to people please and over-stressed about trying to convince her that yes, we’re supportive of that, but what about all these other things we want you to be doing? I was trying and feeling like such a pain in the butt parent because I was constantly riding them. And I was starting to get a bit stressed because he just wouldn’t sit still.

And I said, you know, T?mana, we’re just, you know, a few more minutes and then we’ll be ready to go. Like, just try and put your butt on the chair kind of thing. And the teacher looked at him and she said, oh, she said, we never have this. He never does this at school. And my wife and I just looked at each other in disbelief. And we’re like, really? And she’s like, no, no. I mean, you know, sometimes they lie on the floor because they’re allowed to do work lying down and stuff. But he doesn’t do this.

And we left that meeting and for all of the things that got said and discussed and stuff, the thing that my wife and I were just absolutely flabbergasted by was he doesn’t do that at school. Like, I don’t think that kid’s ever sat on a chair unless it’s like an ice cream or something in front of him. He didn’t eat ice cream for sensory issues until he was like six anyway. But, you know, unless it was something that he was hyper focused on.

And we just went, how can he have any creative flow if he is controlling his body so tightly in order to do what he thinks he needs to be doing? How can he excel? And we went, how can he do the bare minimum when you’re putting that much bodily muscle, let alone thought, et cetera, into controlling your whole self? We were just like, there’s just no way.

And that really stuck with me. So, I think that neurodivergent kids who are at home can have environments where they can learn. And that’s probably the key thing. You know, they can regulate. They can learn. They can socialize in ways that suit them. And they can just, they can just blossom because it can be so individualized. Yeah.

ANNA: It’s so interesting. That chair piece really sticks with me, too, because look at how hard he was trying to fit into that environment. And they’re saying he’s not doing this. He’s not doing that. All they’re seeing are the deficits and trying to fix these deficits, but missing the fact that, my gosh, he’s trying with everything that he has, you know, to fit into this environment he’s been put in. And I think all that’s missed. I think that is very, very powerful. =

MELISSA: And there was another day as well where he was more unmasked, shall we say, where we’d had to go to the city for a medical appointment for me, like a checkup, and the teachers didn’t know. And they rang us, the principal rang us and said that he had a substitute teacher, so that was yet another change in his routine. And he was on the table doing a strip show and had got down to his underwear.

And the principal was like, they were used to him running away, but she’s like, I’ve never seen him like this. And we were like, he’s probably quite dysregulated because, well, we didn’t even use the word dysregulated, but we said he’s probably really worried or anxious because we’re doing this. But yeah, these are the things that he was trying to keep down, and that day he couldn’t.

ERIKA: Yeah. My family is neurodivergent as well. And when I think back on just how overstimulating the school environment was for me as a child. The memories that I have of being a young child in school are all the people. I remember what they were all doing, and I was worried because if you do too much, you get in trouble.

There’s so much coming at you being in this room full of children all doing different things. And so to expect someone who’s paying attention to it at all to be able to then somehow tune in to what they’re supposed to be listening to and supposed to be doing. And then if you don’t do that, then you’re getting in trouble. It’s such an intense environment.

And I don’t think that a lot of adults recognize that or remember how it was. But when my son was very young, I was trying to picture him in that type of environment and how aware he was of what all the children were doing. And I was like, it’s just going to be too much for him.

MELISSA: Yeah, yeah. I remember when T?mana was at preschool and then one day he was inside and he was building with blocks. And his teacher said to me, oh, we were having a conversation, like an adult conversation, nothing bad, but they were talking about different countries they’d visited or something.

And they were sitting adjacent to him. But it was a day where there were other multiple children moving and talking and playing and stuff. And she said he was just sitting there doing his blocks and maybe with another kid as well. His cousin was there or something. And then he just started feeding into our conversation. And he’d fully been following it and he knew a whole lot of facts about one of the countries or something.

And she was just like, oh, kids aren’t normally that tuned into an adult conversation. We couldn’t talk about and we can’t talk about anything in our house. And we couldn’t from the time he was a baby, because he would come in and he just knew. He just was super hyper vigilant and aware and all of those things.

The other thing I think that makes it really hard for lots of our neurodivergent kids is T?mana does his learning by asking a lot of questions and info dumping. Those are his communication styles. And there’s no capacity for a teacher to deal with that.

I said to him the other day, he was asking about being at school and whether he might try to go back at some point. And I was like, yeah, one thing I noticed though about you, T?mana, is you like to ask a lot of questions. Do you know that when you’re in school, if there’s like maybe 15, 20, 25 kids in a class, what happens if every kid wants to ask one question at the start of a session? And he’s like, well, that wouldn’t work. And I was like, so how many questions do you reckon you’d get to ask a day? And he’s like, oh, never mind. Our kids learn in different ways and it just doesn’t work at school.

PAM: I do remember a very similar story. I was told by the teacher or the principal. Anyway, I guess my eldest was in class and the principal had come by to look in and could see that he was fiddling with stuff in his desk and playing, et cetera, et cetera.

So the principal called him out and started quizzing him and how he was supposed to be paying attention. And he answered every question about what the teacher was talking about. And yeah, it was probably the principal who told me this story because I talked to the principal a lot.

And he was just flabbergasted that he could know and understand what was going on all around him, even though he looked like he was doing something completely different. So yeah, the environment is just not a place where they can shine. And the other piece that bubbled up while you were talking, Melissa, is so often I think we can worry or wonder, could we even bring our child home to homeschool, unschool, et cetera? The child that we see in that environment and the challenges they’re having, oh, if they come home, I’m just going to have to deal with all those challenges. But no, it is such a different environment.

MELISSA: Yeah, I see that again and again.

PAM: Yeah, completely different child, right?

MELISSA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, we still get meltdowns and we still get dysregulation and stuff. But I think the thing as well that we’ve been talking about in the group a lot lately is there’s this spaciousness. There’s this time. And I did a member feature with one of our people yesterday, and she’s only been unschooling since the Unschooling Summit. So she did that and then she started unschooling.

And she was just talking about how, in her family in particular, so her kids are six and two, and just how long everything’s taking to come to reading or come to dressing themselves or what the different things are. And I said, I think that is the thing with our neurodivergent kids is that everything does can take longer.

I spend a lot of time in my family with my wife saying, it’s okay, it’s just not yet. We can have that experience with our kids later. It’s not the time yet that it would actually be beneficial for them or that they would enjoy it or that it would go the way you think it might or you wish it would.

And we do need to face that with some of our neurodivergent kids that, for some of them, they are disabled in some ways and that things are going to take longer for them to get to certain ways of doing things or being able to regulate themselves or helping you within that space and that time. And we can just kind of lean into the season being longer and that they may not sleep any better than they did when they were babies until they’re 10 and that we have this kind of spaciousness that we can give them time.

We talked the other day, I think maybe it was with one of the Sunday Sessions, I’m not sure, or a Zoom I did recently. We talked about surrender and that surrendering is just such an important part of being a parent and particularly with some of this process. Yeah, that all of those kinds of aspects are really important because things might take longer and we don’t need to rush things.

And I think it was something that I think it was a quote I wrote down from you, Pam, once you guys were doing a talk and you were saying that unschooling learning is internalized and not memorized or something along those lines. And it’s like, yeah, we don’t want our kids to learn stuff by rote because they have to, whether it’s about the need to wash themselves or mathematics or whatever it is. We need them to come to that slowly in this expanding and contraction of their capacity and of their growth and a thing so that it’s really rooted in all aspects of themselves and their learning about themselves and so on. And we have the time for that. It can be hard as parents.

ANNA: We also have neurodiversity here as well. And I think what time allowed what was to see the gifts. I think when you’re in that tightened timeline thinking we have to hit this milestone, we have to do this thing. There’s just only the deficit focus. That’s why it happens that way at school.

But I think unschooling really gives us that chance to see all the gifts. And so those timelines really have no value or meaning, because it’s just we get there when we get there. But oh, my gosh, there’s so much beauty along the way that it doesn’t feel like we’re missing anything. So I really love that.

I’m going to change gears just a tiny bit for this next question, kind of bringing it back to us as parents. I recently had a little aha moment myself about capacity and understanding if I’m operating within my capacity, I’m able to hold things more lightly, and I’m able to be present and not have not take things so personally, not kind of crash and burn when things go awry.

And I mean, it seems really obvious when I say it out loud. But there was just an aha moment for me, because I think I do push beyond my capacity a lot. And I’m like, oh, okay, I need to be aware of this because it’s impacting the way I’m showing up and the way that I want to show up.

And so I know that you talk a lot about the importance of building capacity for ourselves. And so, I would just love to hear more about your experience with that, ideas you have around that, and just what your journey has been around that piece.

MELISSA: Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think especially for me, because it came into it in quite a deficit place, I didn’t have a lot of personal capacity. And now I know that as well as being a kind of PTSD, I was probably in autistic burnout from, I mean, my goodness, just being in a heart ward five weeks is kind of rather stimulating, because people are dying around you and you’re having CPR and stuff. So, I came into this whole season, pretty depleted.

And I really needed to be the one that was building my own capacity. And also, once we were about three or four months in, and things were starting to go quite fine and quite lovely. And we’d kind of done nothing schooling wise.

And then we started to try and do some arts and crafts with our daughter. And so that our son was starting to sniff around that and we were starting to just kind of gently ease into doing things and doing a few more trips out and so on as his capacity grew. And then my wife had a massive medical situation as well, and had to have massive surgery and nearly died as well.

So massive PTSD for the kids, bringing all that up again, and for me, and it was really rough. And so, capacity in our family has been super, super limited. And my wife now lives with an ongoing medical condition. I have to have a lot of capacity. And now I’m also running a business. And so, I’m trying to unschool and I do most of the outings for our family and try to run Weave and the Summit as well.

So, there’s a lot to be said for the pressures that are around you and kind of rising to the occasion, but that can only go on for so long. And so for me, what I did was I tried lots of different modalities to support myself and things like EMDR. And I think that dealing with your past trauma and your past history and so on is a really important thing to do. So I did a whole lot of work for me on this more recent trauma with EMDR and EFT tapping and different things to help my nervous system. And we see a chiropractor and so on. And all of those things are to support our central nervous system. But then I started doing breath work.

And for me, as an autistic ADHD person, meditation was very difficult for me to grasp. But breath work, which really, and it’s not like the Wim Hof style, it’s a polyvagal central nervous system relaxing breath work and it really is just breathing and you might hold like a yoga pose of some kind. But yeah, that has been very, very supportive for me in terms of my capacity. And so, I do lots of online programs where I’m doing breath work with other mostly mums. And that I’ve found has been extremely helpful for my capacity.

And then when I started doing Weave, which is the community that I have, I noticed that so many of us were coming in crisis and that we were discovering that we had neurodivergent kids. Most of us didn’t know that we had neurodivergent kids until they burnt out in school. So the kids were in school refusal. They were coming home because there was no other option. And we were then realizing that we needed to unschool, not just homeschool. And unschooling, you guys all know this, but I think it’s a lot harder than homeschooling. There’s no curriculum.

You can’t just lock them in a curriculum and be like, do that, tick the boxes, red pen out. I don’t know if people use red pens, but you know. And that’s your schoolwork done for the day.

Unschooling is very, very intensive on parents because we actually all really want it to work. And we have all of this weight on ourselves to begin with, especially of like, we are holding this and we are taking this new path and it is on us. And lots of the people that I know don’t have fully supportive, committed partners to the process.

It’s like, okay, if that’s what you want to do, you’re responsible for the reading and the carrying out and the kind of reporting back to me if it’s working or soothing the other partner’s fears.

And you’re going to be holding a whole lot. Often the families that I work with, just like us, are arriving into unschooling in a state of crisis. We’re not starting out in a nice, we’ve made a philosophical decision to unschool and we’ve known that since our children were small and we kind of ease our way into it. We just drop in, trial by fire. It’s all happening at once. And you’ve also got kids that are burnt out and in school refusal and you are at the scraping the barrel levels of your own capacity.

And you’ve got a kid at home who is there 24 hours a day. Lots of our kids don’t sleep. We really, really need to build our capacity. It’s just essential. And also a lot of us are starting to realize in the process of having our kids diagnosed that we are neurodivergent too. And I think if we don’t build our capacity as neurodivergent parents of neurodivergent kids, if that’s your picture, then it’s going to be very difficult. It’s going to be very, very difficult to survive, let alone thrive, you know?

And so I think that we need to get to a point where we can survive and then we need to be working towards thriving. And what I’ve done is I’ve tried out lots of different modalities because everything’s going to be different for what works for different people and what works for different seasons.

And I think for those of us that are unschooling, you have to have things that you can do in these little pockets of time that you have. And you need to find ways to kind of fill your bucket or your whatever you want to call it, your basket, in these tiny moments. And so for me, it’s things like purposely going and finding glimmers and noticing the moment that I take a sip of hot tea because it might be the only one that’s hot. We kind of talk about having a hot cup of tea is like, ahh! but the reality is maybe only you get the first few sips. Make sure you enjoy them, notice it, feel into that. Bank all of these small moments, so that when you do need to dig deep, because there will be multiple times probably through every day where you need to be holding something external from yourself, that you have some capacity.

So, we use havening. I have a havening practitioner that comes into Weave and we do this, we do, that sounds really silly, we do this. Havening is like a whole movement that’s kind of continuing on from EFT, and it’s very good at bringing the nervous system back into alignment. And as an autistic ADHD person, havening practices are very accessible.

Finding a moment to breathe is often very, very inaccessible. So I find that things for me that are very physical, like feeling my toes as opposed to trying to do something like a 10 minute meditation. If my son is trying to get on the roof and I’m the person responsible for him not getting on the roof during a meltdown, I can do some havening or feel my toes. And I don’t have the time for anything else.

So I think that really focusing on spending some time every day, doing one minute of havening to get that muscle memory in your body so that when you need it, you can grab it. And I find that the more that I put in these small practices, these small accessible practices, the more that I am able to have the capacity to feel like there is a well of all that I’m connected to and the earth and all, everything that I’m trying to hold, because otherwise I’m constantly in my head or beyond it. And I don’t feel in my body a lot. So I have to be very determined that I need to have these practices in my life because it’s very easy to let them go.

And ADHD, I love something and then I forget about it. I need to kind of keep coming back to things.

ERIKA: That’s very relatable. I love the idea of practicing them over and over so that they almost come as second nature when you’re in the more difficult moments.

Yeah. I really love that.

MELISSA: It’s like anchoring.

ERIKA: And I was just thinking in some moments when we’re at low capacity, I’ve noticed a pattern of like, we tend to want to add even more things or notice even more things that are missing.

And so, for me, that’s one of the things I noticed. When I’m having a hard time things in my mind get worse and more intense rather than me trying to drop things. And so, I think that the physical practices would help a lot with just kind of coming back to center, but then also just remembering to let things go that I don’t need to deal with in this moment. Because there’s always plenty to deal with in that present moment.

MELISSA: Yeah. And I think for me and for lots of people, the overwhelm cripples you. And this is a small thing I can do to start to move.

PAM: That was one of the big things that bubbled up for me too, how valuable it can be to make it almost second nature by practicing, giving ourselves a space in those less overwhelming moments so that we have it in our back pocket. Because it’s so easy to freeze and just forget all the tools that we have when we are in a challenging moment, so keeping them top of mind rather than saying, oh things are going well, I don’t need these tools right now. Then we don’t have access to them when we need them.

MELISSA: Yeah, yeah, we do havening once a month and during that time of practice it’s, oh I come out of there feeling like light as a feather. But what I was finding was that when I was feeling my dysregulation rising in a moment with my child when I needed to stay calm because their dysregulation was rising or going off, I wouldn’t remember to do it. And so yeah, so we did a thing in the group where we did one minute of havening every morning for 14 days and we all knew we could access one minute and now it’s second nature. So yeah, anchoring in and finding things that are accessible that actually work for us and for other people it might be like a different move or it might be tapping or something, but yeah, finding some, just some little thing that works for you. And for some people it is breathing and things, but for me it’s not always the easiest thing. It feels very forced to control my breath.

ERIKA: Right, yeah, I love that people are different so you have to find what works for you. So I just wanted to see if you wanted to share anything additional. Your group sounds amazing, Weave ND, and just your experience of creating that group and weaving unschooling together with running your businesses.

MELISSA: Yeah, yeah. Weave came about, when we were in that very stuck season when my wife Doria was very unwell as well and we were unschooling and I jumped into a really fantastic online community for unschoolers and we had these Zooms and they were fantastic, but what I was finding was that it made me feel a little more isolated some of them, because if we were talking about socializing of our kids or events or things, the advice that everyone else was sharing on the experiences was so different from ours because my son was not able to engage in those things. And so I ended up asking if I could run a Zoom for neurodivergent parents just to connect and talk within this other group.

And we had wonderful conversations and we started doing that monthly and for about two hours we’d have these meandering conversations that people could come in and get warmed up and then spill and not record it and so on. And then that group decided that they weren’t going to run as a community anymore and went off and did different things. And so I decided and they encouraged me to take it into Facebook and so I did that and then I ran that for two years from the time that I was doing it within the group to deciding that I needed to have employment and my wife couldn’t work.

And so the group, I was saying I was either going to have to close it down or start charging and so we moved into a paid membership community. And yeah, it’s fantastic and it’s a way that I can be at home with my kids and I run it mostly from home. I’m in a hired motel today for the internet.

I use the local motel to have fast speed internet because I’ve ended up doing things like the unschooling summit and I needed to be able to interview people and stuff that the internet wasn’t going to lag and the children weren’t going to come in with chickens and interrupt if I was interviewing some famous person like Pam Laricchia or whoever it was.

But yeah, it’s been an amazing journey and with that journey I worked out that instead of just coming together and talking about our woes, which was a lot of what we were doing but that was becoming quite heavy, was that the key thing that I needed to focus on was this capacity building, because it was the piece that we were all really struggling with and I think also the kind of compassion part. A lot of us are not very good at being compassionate to ourselves in a very difficult circumstance that we’re living in at points of our journey. It can be really difficult and very isolated and so finding ways for us to like connect and be compassionate and then kind of build this capacity was so important.

And so, part of that was that I spoke to Esther Jones about coming in and doing a mindfulness session for us and that just blossomed into a really amazing relationship which has been really cool and we decided to start working together more last September and then one of us just in one of the first emails we had backwards and forwards because she’d been in my community and been doing like you know mindfulness and so on but one of us said and I can’t remember which one of us it was, was like maybe we should do a summit. That would be cool.

And so I was really passionate about more people hearing about unschooling with the neurodivergent flavor and she’s of course, an amazing unschooling person, figure and so we thought we might do like a one or two day summit and maybe invite sort of five or six speakers, weren’t sure, eight maybe and maybe a thousand people might come if we were lucky and we kind of both went nuts, hard out.

She’s in the UK, I’m in New Zealand so one of us would be waking up full of enthusiasm and vim and vigor and the other person would be suggestible and tired and would agree to anything and so it just was this magic equation of alchemy of,I’ve had this idea overnight and I think we should this and the other one would be like okay look if you’re going to take care of that part it sounds fine with me go for it, invite them or do this or whatever.

So I think it honestly was the fact that one of us would be fresh fueled up and one of us would be working on fumes and so we just kind of kept going but yeah it ended up amazing and it was such a joy for us to work together and to create the Summit. So that’s been pretty special and it has had a really strong neurodivergent flavor. It’s been really supportive for our ND families because so many of them are unschooling but yeah really, really broad, interesting thing to work on. So, that’s been pretty special.

ANNA: And so it will be happening again in the coming year? What are the plans?

MELISSA: Yeah, we’re working on it now so we’re doing early morning or late night Zooms again. It’ll be happening in the last weeks of March. I can’t think of a date right now so yeah of next year, same thing three days all for free online and lots of amazing speakers. I’m sure you guys will get invited to be on panels and speak and so on so yeah we’ve got some different ideas this year, ways of doing things.

So, yeah, we’re really keen to have like the diversity of unschoolers reflected which was one of our key things last year and I really loved that people were brave enough to say yes to these two people that well they certainly didn’t know me, they do now but yeah, it’s been pretty amazing and really lovely for my community as well because I’ve had some wonderful people come in and speak within the community now that I know more people and I don’t need to be so shy to ask people to come in and talk and so on.

PAM: I really enjoy participating in it as well but also your piece of finding stuff that you can do for the most part within your home life. You can do it from home mostly, you can like and the people like in your community, they understand obviously the circumstances of your family life as well, so you can have chickens come in and kids.

MELISSA: Yeah, exactly and like yeah, I think that is something I did want to talk about, it’s encouraging people to be entrepreneurial. I think unschoolers often are very entrepreneurial, it’s a very common kind of thing and partly it’s probably out of desperation because we need to make money and get creative about how we’re going to do it. But there is that real spark of not needing to live by the rules and not needing to do things the same way and not wanting to work for a boss and so on. And I do most of my stuff from the kitchen bench or a chair in my bedroom and the kids come in and out and I do have a caravan in the garden but it’s not any less kid infested.

So, I come here to do the recordings because of the internet quality but you can do these things from the kitchen bench with your kid across from you and needing to get up and make snacks and it all just happens and when you find the thing that you’re passionate about, just like our kids, you can just focus on that and they can see.

My son is so invested, drives him nuts, he doesn’t want me on the laptop and he gets very dysregulated part of the time as well but he’s so proud. And anywhere we go out, he’s like, oh yeah, my mama has an online business and she does this summit and she does that and so he tells everyone, oh we’re unschoolers and my mum is an advocate.

And our kids seeing us do something and seeing us mess it up or fail or have a bad day or send the wrong email or whatever. It’s all such vital learning and that was something I think I got from your podcast as well, Pam, I binged yours, and Esther’s, Stark Raving Dad, I was in that really stuck season where my wife was very unwell and my child was in crisis and was having constant meltdowns and stuff because of like the PTSD and we were getting the autism diagnosis and stuff, I just went, I need to work on me. I need to feel like I’m not stuck so I’m just going to educate myself in every way, shape and form about unschooling and then about neurodivergence and the crossover.

And hearing all of your different interviews with different people and all of the different ways that unschooling has gone but part of it for me because I’ve been an entrepreneur in the past was you talking about, you know, you get to actually indulge in your interests as an unschooler because you kind of have to because you need to model that for your kids and you need to not go crazy and I heard stories over and over of people saying, I just do my thing and my kids are around. And that was really motivational for me. It was like, yeah, I could just do my thing and the kids could be around.

It’s hard, and I’m often working till 11 or later at night. With the Summit, we’re up till 1 many, many times and you just fit it in around and you’re really tired and you have bloodshot eyes and you have bags under your eyes but it is possible. I hear other people say, oh no, you need to dedicate at least one day out a week where you go and you do this and whatever and it’s like sometimes it’s just not the reality and if you’re going to wait for that, you’ll never start these things. You’ve just got to dive in, just like we tell our kids, I suppose, if we sit around waiting until everything’s perfect, we’re never gonna get anywhere.

ANNA: That conventional wisdom, right? If you’re going to do a business, you do x, y, z, do the checkbox, but really there are so many ways. And if we can make it fit for our life, that keeps our enthusiasm going, that makes it work for our families and we’re much more likely to then be successful at it. So, yeah, I think that’s always a great reminder.

MELISSA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s definitely a juggling act and I have to be careful not to burn out because of my autistic hyperfocus but, I love that.

PAM: Yeah.I think that piece that you mentioned is just beautiful. Because then you’re thinking about being an entrepreneur and you go and you start looking and you want to learn and it is so much about, do x, y, z, and make sure you tell everybody that when your door is closed, you don’t interrupt me. All these “tips” for working from home, etc.

But what we learn through unschooling, is that we can question conventions, right? So, we can do things differently and not just for the sake of it, but because it works better. It actually works better for us. It keeps our relationships. It keeps our connections.

Yes, we’re up and down and doing this thing and that thing. And maybe it feels like juggling a few things. But you know what? Even the challenge of juggling a few things, in my experience, for my brain, just works better than trying to spend all my energy to get those two hours alone to focus. Even now, when my kids are adults, it’s just how my brain works. And valuing that over trying to make myself conform.

And then your children seeing you do it, even my adult children seeing me play around and doing this thing and trying this thing, etc. It’s just our lives all weaving together, which just feels so much better than trying to put boundaries and separations between it all.

MELISSA: And my kid’s really invested. He comes in and he checks my phone, because when payments come through, it’s updated to my bank on my app. And so he’s like, monitoring there. And he’s like, now I’ve heard this thing on a podcast, where there’s this thing that you can get, this piece of tech. He comes in and he tries to advise and he’s really invested.

And I love that. He’s thinking about it. He’s won a Lego competition recently, because Lego is his special interest. And he’s phenomenal at it. And it was with a real estate agent. So, now he’s engaged his own real estate agent. And so, he keeps telling people, do you know many 10-year-olds with a real estate agent? He hasn’t earned a dime yet, but he’s like, when I make my millions on these particular business plans, because he’s going to be an entrepreneur, then he’s going to have her looking for a piece of land in advance. And it’s just, I don’t know, I love that he has really big dreams. And because he can see me starting something from scratch and growing a thing, he’s learning all of that stuff. And he’s really invested.

And my daughter as well, but she’s more independent whereas he’s more up in my business. She’s out in the garden and doing her own thing. Yeah.

ERIKA: So I just love all the space. Everyone can be doing the things that work so well for them. And we’re all figuring it out. I feel like that’s something so valuable about the unschooling journey is just like, we are all getting to figure out what works well for us and getting to follow our interests. And it’s just a lot of fun.

So, this has been so much fun, Melissa, thank you so much for joining us. We hope that you all enjoyed our conversation and maybe had an aha moment or picked up some ideas to consider on your own unschooling journey. And if you enjoy these kinds of conversations, I think you would love the Living Joyfully Network.

It’s an amazing group of people having thoughtful conversations about all the things we encounter in our unschooling lives. And you can also check out our new substack at whenschoolisn’tworking.substack.com. And the Network is at livingjoyfullyshop.com on the community tab at the top of the page. So thank you so much for listening. And we will see you next time.

PAM: Thanks so much, Melissa! We’ll have all your links there in the show notes as well. Bye!