APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE

Summary

In this conversation, Adrienne Miller and Iris Chen explore the concept of untigering, a response to the strict and controlling nature of tiger parenting. They discuss the journey from traditional parenting methods to more conscious and respectful approaches, emphasizing the importance of understanding children’s emotional needs and the impact of systemic oppression. The discussion also delves into the idea of decolonization in parenting, the transition to unschooling, and the radical imagination required to envision a life outside conventional systems.

Follow Iris Chen on Instagram here

FREE Unschooling Resources:
👉 Take the FREE Quiz: What’s Your Homeschooling Superpower? https://thesereveries.com/quiz
👉 10 Simple Ways to Connect With Your Child https://thesereveries.com/10-simple-ways-to-connect-with-your-child
👉 Is Unschooling Right For Me? https://thesereveries.com/is-unschooling-right-for-me-guide

Stay Connected With Me at These Reveries:
Instagram | Pinterest | Facebook | Youtube | TikTok

Read the Transcript:

Adrienne Miller
Hi everyone. Welcome back to the show. Today I have Iris Chen on as my guest. She is Untigering on Instagram and this has been a long time coming for me. Last year I started this Instagram account and I kind of toyed with the idea of having a podcast and you were one of my first people on my little like manifest journal about who I was going to have on. So thank you. Thank you so much for being here.

Iris

Thank you so much for having me.

Adrienne

And just let’s start with that. So what is, I had never heard of tiger parenting until I came across your account. So let’s talk about that and what untigering is and kind of what you’re all about. We share the same space with schooling and decolonization. And I’ll tell you one of the biggest reasons why I wanted to have you on, I follow you and admire you so much is that the unschooling space is really filled with white people and that same kind of middle-class suburban straight white community and often heavily Christian, heavily conservative. And so it’s just so nice to have other people in this space that are not of that community. And so I really just wanna give you know, people of color who homeschool a platform and especially unschooling in particular as it, you know, relates so much to just this liberation of all people starting with children at home. So yeah, please go ahead and introduce your space and yourself and how you got into, you know, this untigering page too.

Iris

So for those who are unfamiliar with tiger parenting, It comes from Amy Chua’s book, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. So she wrote this sort of memoir back in 2011, describing her experience being raised by like a Chinese immigrant father, and then her raising her daughters, and how quote unquote Chinese parenting was really about like very high expectations, high control, high demand, not a lot of emotional warmth. And so she was comparing that with, again, quote unquote, Western parenting, which she viewed as very permissive and lax and letting kids get away with everything. And I think, you know, for those of us who come from maybe immigrant, you know, whose parents were immigrants, who maybe come from Asian cultures, like this type of parenting was very familiar to us. We didn’t necessarily have a term for it. But I grew up in a family where my parents were very, very strict, had high expectations and all of that. So I think a lot of us resonated with that story, not in terms of like agreeing with those philosophies, but yeah, like it reflected our experience of what the type of parenting that we grew up with.

And so for me as a second generation immigrant, recognizing that there were parts of the ways I was raised that I didn’t want to continue. I wanted to break the cycles. But there was a lot of it that went unquestioned as well, where I was like, well, I still expect my children to obey me. I still expect my children to like excel and do well in school and all of that.

So, and then I had children. that sort of like blew everything up in terms of, I thought that I could follow certain scripts. I felt like I could follow certain strategies to get my children to behave. And they were not falling in line.

which surprised me because I was a child who did fall in line. I was the type of child who did what was expected of me, who obeyed, got the good grades, all of that. And when my children were pushing back, it was like, where is this coming from? You know, and so I thought that I just needed stricter rules, harsher punishments, I doubled down. And it just got to this point where

It was like so much chaos and frustration and heartache in my family where I was just trying to control more in order to, yeah, make their behavior change.

Adrienne:

And for reference, what age were your kids at at this time where you kind of had this realization?

Iris:

Yeah, they were like, maybe seven or eight.

Adrienne

okay. So not young toddlers. yeah. Okay. Okay.

Iris

It was like, I was like, pushing through and like really committed to authoritarian parenting for many, many years. And yeah, it just came to a head. I went to a parenting conference, a parenting workshop. And, and this was the first time that anybody had talked to me about like brain science. Like all the books that I had read before were all about behavior management and control and all of that. I also grew up in a you know, fundamentalist Christian environment. And so a lot of it was about behavior control. And so I thought that that’s what it meant to be a good parent is to use my authority, my God given authority to get my children to behave in the ways that I wanted them to.

And at this parenting workshop, the speaker was just sharing about like what’s happening in our little kids’ brains. And like the chaos that is going on in their fight, flight, systems in their brains when we are yelling at them, when we are punishing them, when we are isolating them or just creating more fear and threat in their lives that they are going to react in these ways and their ability to regulate, to think clearly, to make good decisions, that’s all going to be really like they’re not able to access that because they are just trying to protect themselves. And that was like a really big aha moment for me where I recognize that my children were not intentionally acting up. They weren’t intentionally melting down and fighting back that they experienced this threat and were trying to protect themselves. And they needed my help and not my anger, not punishment, all of that. And so I had been using a lot of very abusive, controlling parenting strategies up until that point. And that really flipped the switch for me where I went home that day and I decided like, I have to stop doing these things. I have to stop using violence and threats and fear. And so that, yeah, like just sent me on a trajectory of figuring out now what? Now that I don’t have these quote unquote tools, what do I do?

And so that, yeah, took me on a journey of what I called untigering, which is really healing, detoxing from that type of really controlling power over authoritarian type of parenting and really pursuing a more peaceful, respectful, conscious way of parenting. And along that journey, discovering

Unschooling felt that it was so aligned with conscious parenting in terms of like understanding your child, respecting your child, honoring their autonomy and not using control and power over to get my child to submit to my own agendas and all of that. And so untigering was all wrapped up in that because tiger parenting specifically is also very focused on academic achievement.

doing well in school, getting a good job, like going to good colleges and all of that. so, yeah, choosing to unschool was very countercultural for me in that way, especially in the Asian American community. And so I began blogging about it in 2017 and yeah, now I’m here.

Adrienne:

I love that Iris, and I really love your transparency too, because it is really hard to say, you know, to thousands of people. Yeah, I used to do this. I used to have all these abusive practices in my home and be really open about that because it’s such a vulnerable, know, shameful, embarrassing, guilty, like all of this. You already are struggling with parenting. We all are. And then to have these extra layers, especially with our background too. I grew up Mormon. I’m not anymore, but same thing that like very fundamentalist strict Christian upbringing.

And it’s a lot, it’s a lot to leave that, that culture to go against what your parents are doing, to go ahead and try and parent without any model really, at least for me, of how to parent then properly and everything you’re reading is just books or snippets on Instagram and you didn’t have that foundation growing up, right? And so for me, I tie very much my self-worth to my obedience as I’m sure you did. And it’s hard to parent while unpacking all of that and processing all of that trauma and dealing with the current, I don’t know what your relationship is like now, but my relationship with my parents is very strained just from all of that happening. You leave the community, the church community that I’d known my whole life. Then you pull your kids out of school and you leave that mainstream. So it’s a lot. It’s very layered with all these things going on on top of the every day of laundry and managing emotions and all of that. It’s my gosh, like you and I just feel like it’s just so nice to have other people in the same community and with the same mindset. And as you were talking, I definitely thought, you know, once you pull away from that type of parenting, I find that it really infuses that mindset into everything. And so that is really when I started being like, well, church is really doing the same thing. And in a lot of ways, government is doing the same thing. And then school is doing the same thing over here. And it’s really hard to not connect all of those pieces because all of those systems use the same methods. And we see this honestly in Palestine and Sudan and everything going on in the world. It’s all connected to that power to controlling people to not allowing everyone to have the same rights and freedoms. You know, we see it with transphobia, like every single ism out there with ableism and racism, all of it. It’s all connected to these systems of oppression that use power to control behavior and disallowing, discouraging people, advocating for themselves, people’s individual autonomy and the right to self-determination and all of that. It all comes down to that same power, that same oppression, and it starts at home. So I love that the work that you do about starting at home because it’s it’s so the perfect place to start and the hardest place to start in our generation who is now parenting completely differently than how we were parented. But that’s where we have the most power and the most influences at home, right? For good or bad. so let’s talk about that a little bit. So what is decolonization? What does that look like in parenting?

Iris:

Yeah, and I feel like decolonization can mean a lot of different things to me, beyond the, know, land back and the real practical ways that we can decolonize. I think of colonization as coming into a space and imposing your own will and values on others and expecting them to conform. And within parenting, that’s what we think good parenting means oftentimes is actually colonizing our child where we’re indoctrinating them with our values and controlling their behavior making them do the things that we think are valuable, all of that. so I think, yeah, really bringing that into that decolonization into all our relationships. And I feel like the parent-child relationship is one where that is totally normalized, where it’s expected that that’s what parents do.

Adrienne

We own them and it’s our choice and it’s our values in our home and our schedule. Yeah, that’s right.

Iris

Yeah. And they don’t have hardly any say and they’re seen as not having the capacity to make their own decisions about things or to have an opinion, to be able to self-determine.

And so I think, again, this power over structure, which is at the heart of colonization is I have power and I’m going to come and exploit or use and enforce and impose. And so as we approach parenting with that type of lens, really questioning

the use of our power because as adults, do have power. We do have systemic power and we are developed in ways that our children are not yet. And yet how do we use our power? Is it used to serve and protect and empower and honor? Or again, are we using it to enforce our own agendas onto our children?

And I think once we begin to unpack that and unravel that, we see all these different systems like school that reinforce those power dynamics. And if we want to begin to dismantle that, we have to really question what we normalize, what we subject our children to, and

I must admit like for me, unschooling was not originally that. It wasn’t a practice of decolonization. It was very much like, I have no other options right now and I’m just gonna try this thing. And so there’s a lot of entry points into, you know, unschooling or conscious parenting or all of that. And there’s no one right way. But the more I have dived into it,

learning especially from Akilah S. Richards and her work and just seeing, yeah, like how all these things are connected. And once you pull on that thread, like other things start unraveling and you begin just to see the world in a different perspective.

Adrienne

yeah, like you were saying, it really travels into everything. I think homeschooling tends to be, you know, this like,

pedagogy and this educational philosophy, and then it kind of ends there. But with unschooling, it really goes into every other aspect of what you’re doing because you start to unpack everything about why are we doing this? And you start to look at things, even things that you think are unrelated, like take capitalism, for example, and you’re like, well, school capitalism, like separate, but then you look at it and they’re like so intricately linked and you look at like,

Well, tying my kids’ self-worth to their productivity, we learn that in school, absolutely, which is a fundamental principle of capitalism, right? And that these Western ideals and even consumerism and this idea of over-buying, exploiting, keeping up.

with the Joneses, all of that, which again, we learn in school with that heavy competition or this heavy comparison that happens. So then you start to look at all these things that are affecting your daily life that you probably didn’t think about very deeply before, right? Like we’re all just born. We have our childhood. We go to school. We do our homework. We get a job without the deeper thinking of what.

are we doing? Why am I doing this? Why am I shopping here? And then you start to really become more conscious. You called it cautious parenting, but we can throw in conscious, we can throw in mindful parenting, all of these things that just bring that awareness to what we’re doing. And then bring that much, that greater intention. Why am I disciplining my child this way? Why am I putting them in timeout? And just to

come back full circle to what you said at the beginning with even just that brain science, because we’re not taught that in school. We probably weren’t taught that growing up. We probably didn’t learn that in college. And then there’s no requirement to have kids. We all just can have kids whenever we want to and bring kids into this world, well-intentioned or not, well-prepared or not. But just starting with that.

those truths of what’s going on in our kids’ brains and what is happening in their bodies. So I want to bring this into schooling a little bit. I saw this post the other day, and I think this is really common around this time, it’s September, right? So we have all these anxious posts coming up from, I don’t want to drop my kids off at school and I, you know, does it get any easier? And my heart is breaking and you know, these real genuine pleas from anxious parents.

and anxious children. And then you get parenting accounts or family therapy accounts who then say, okay, well, we have people in these scenarios. How can I help people in these scenarios? So then the content is here’s how to help your child feel less anxious at school. And one of the ones I saw the other day was they’re going into school in a state of fight or flight. It doesn’t feel safe.

Here’s how we get them to not be in that state at school. And we kind of look at these band-aid solutions instead of, well, why don’t we dig deeper into the system? What if school isn’t actually a safe place? And same within the home, because maybe that the parenting advice will be, OK, how do we get our kids to regulate?

How do we look at their behavior and fix their behavior instead of what am I doing in my home that’s making my child feel unsafe? What am I doing that is putting them in that state of fight or flight and making me the threat and the environment, which you kind of alluded to at the beginning. And so, and I always give this disclaimer, there are people.

for whom school is a necessity. And you and I both don’t stand on this platform of everyone can unschool and it’s just a choice and we all have the same access and you should feel bad about putting your kids in school. It’s not that, but I like to unpack because if we normalize kids, if we normalize September, we normalize school, we normalize that anxiety, we normalize the very serious red flags going on in that system, then

No one takes the time to think otherwise, right? And so yes, you and I advocate for this other way divesting from this system. But yeah, just so that we’re clear, you and I do not perpetuate this idea that it is shameful to put your kids in school and how dare you. And we all have the same access. It’s just a matter of you’re just being selfish or whatever it is.

However, I know you and I also like to dig deep into, but let’s look at the system as a whole, right? And it’s really the same idea that I see a lot of people who are outspoken around the election saying, you know, like, yes, voting, but let’s also look at the system as a whole, this entire colonial system, this entire system of imperialism, instead of trying to always navigate within it.

and being heavily controlled within it. And how do we manage that? Same with capitalism, right? Instead of trying to manage within it, let’s divest, let’s look at alternatives to imperialism, let’s look at alternatives to capitalism and consumerism instead of trying to navigate those systems. I’m kind of like ADHD-ing here and I’m trying to remember where I started. But looking at those alternatives, yes, sorry, unpacking the system in general. So whether it’s school or whether it’s home and those relationships, instead turning to our kids and going, you’re having what is actually a normal developmentally appropriate response to being yelled at, to a new environment, to an environment where you have very little choice in whether or not you can leave, when you can eat, when you can go to the bathroom, who you can talk to. Like it is a highly dysregulating environment. And you’re having this normal human response for your age. There are not very many adults who would put up very well with being in that school environment either. So I find it cruelly ironic that we expect our little ones to be operating so well.

you know, masking, you see all those posts like, kids are having meltdowns after school. And that means you’re a safe place and whatever. But that also means they’ve been masking for six hours that day from Monday to Friday, from September to June, from K to 12. And no one should be expected to do that. That is humanly unsustainable. So I just, I like raising that awareness to, well, can we look at the system as a whole? Can we look at our family environment, our home environment, and the school environment or sports or church, whatever it is. I know I always sound very anti-school, but really it is any oppressive system that I happily hold to these high standards since they’re dealing with young children in their formative developmental years, they absolutely should be held to a place of being criticized and held to standards, high standards. And so I think that really helps to reframe how we look at our kids, right? And looking at the environment instead of their behavior, because in all actuality, not only are they much

they’re in stages of that development that our 40 year old brains are not. And to note, most adults I know are not emotionally mature or developed either. So we can just throw that in there that you don’t have all these adults running around with perfectly regulated nervous systems and a perfect system of being able to handle their triggers and who have all healed from their traumas. Like most likely that is the exact opposite of what’s happening. But yet we look at our kids and we look at their behavior and we go, well, you’re triggering me. That’s the problem. You’re making me feel uncomfortable. That’s the problem. Your difficult, uncomfortable emotions.

are difficult for me and I want to silence them and I want to oppress them. And I don’t think we are in this state of consciously thinking that way, but that’s what’s going on. Especially if we’re parenting from a mode of survival, which I think a lot of us are, particularly those of us who’ve come from trauma backgrounds and abusive household holds and toxic family dynamics, we probably entered parenting very much in survival mode, not just from raising these kids and getting no sleep and not knowing how to do things, but having not unpacked and processed all of our own trauma. And so we look at this situation where we are triggered and we look at the source of that, we go, well, you’re causing my trigger. So that’s what needs to change instead of what you and I, I think, really try and push, which is we need to heal our own traumas. We need to shift that focus away from our kids and start meeting our own needs, start doing that deeper inner healing work, start to unravel all of our trauma because we all have it. I think people look at trauma with this capital T as being this one event of going to war or maybe a sexual assault case, but it’s we all have the trauma with a little t and that complex trauma of we all know what it’s like to have our consent not be honored as children. Everyone has that experience. We all know what it’s like to have our voice not matter, especially if we grew up in school or in church or in these oppressive systems where we heavily experience not having that autonomy over our own bodies. And that does something to a person, right? For year after year after year in childhood. I don’t care if you think you’re fine. Once you start unpacking, you will see and you will notice those times where that trauma has now shown up in your relationships and shown up in your body. There’s a book, a really hard book called The Body Keeps the Score, but it reads very textbook, so I find it very difficult. But the whole point is that it is embedded in our DNA and in our cells and our body remembers whether our conscious brain even remembers, whether we acknowledge or not, it is there. Our body knows what’s happening. It knows what happened and how it’s affecting us. And it’s gonna come out more likely in maybe health symptoms. That’s very common. Chronic pain or illness or just random symptoms. And it’ll show up in our relationships with spouses, with partners, with friends, with bosses, and then especially with our kids, because I find that they’re the ones who tend to unveil most of that for us, right? And mirror all of that back to us, because every time we have a child who is disobedient or who triggers certain things in us, we then go right back to that inner child of, I don’t like this because I wasn’t allowed to yell as a kid. I wasn’t allowed to talk back. I wasn’t allowed to advocate for myself. I did not feel empowered and that is triggering to us. so, just shifting that from our heavy hyper focus on how our kids are behaving and what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and discomfort of allowing them to essentially create this chaotic environment because kids are messy. They are loud. They are dysregulated. They are all over the place. They have big emotions. They are not burdened by everything that we grew up with, which was you need to be silent. You need to be well behaved. You need to be quiet. You need to be calm at all times. You need to be always regulated. That is not only unhuman for all ages, it is unhuman for children, especially. so yeah, I just want to ask you a little bit about that transition. I guess your kids, said they were around seven or eight. So were they in school already? Had they been put in school?

Iris

Yeah, they had been in sort of like a, we were living in China at that time. So they were living, they were going to sort of like a private bilingual school. And part-time homeschooling.

Adrienne

So talk to me a little bit about that transition and what that looked like. I know I just rambled on for a really long time, but that transition into, a lot of the parents in my audience are not necessarily

the age of four and five starting unschooling, a lot of them are coming from that public school space or coming from a highly religious space. And they’re transitioning into unschooling, which can be quite jarring because we have that traditional homeschool model of, you don’t need to put your kids in school, but you can replicate school at home. And that’ll feel comfortable to you because you’ll have this plan and you’ll have this perfect curriculum and you’ll have this book and it’s going to tell you exactly what to do and it’s going to tell you what to teach your kids. And that makes all these parents who grew up with the same rigid schedules from school feel a lot more comfortable because there aren’t going to be surprises or unknowns. And this is how I’m going to do things, which we so like crave and grasp onto when we’re feeling something new and something scary and something unknown. We want that familiarity. And so we’re going to replicate the system.

So what did that transition look like for you and what worked, what didn’t work? What would you advise in all of your experience and wisdom to the new people listening?

Iris:

Yeah, I think maybe because, you know, sometimes we talk about unschooling as like natural learning and it should feel very natural. But when we’ve been conditioned into systems of control and rigidity. It doesn’t feel natural. It feels very scary and triggering. And so I think like the work of unschooling and de-schooling, especially when you’re making the transition, I feel is mostly for the parent. It’s mostly for us to like feel the triggers, recognize them, to be conscious of them and to ask ourselves, why am I feeling this way? What is this pointing to? So it’s not necessarily like, it’s making me very uncomfortable that my child is spending all this time doing X, Z. And so I need to create more structure for them. Fix that problem, yeah. Instead of thinking that, it’s just like, why am I so uncomfortable with this is like really, there’s so much self-reflection and yeah, inner work that we as a parent have to do when our children are just humaning and are not comfortable with them humaning. We want it to look a certain way. We want learning to look a certain way that is very capitalistic, that is very controlled and like all of that. So yeah, I think for me, because I was blogging through that time as well. So really using that as an outlet for me to process what was going on within me instead of like feeling those feelings and then projecting them onto my children and feeling like I have to control my children now. Yes. was like, okay, just slowing down, taking a breath and examining my own discomfort with what I was noticing. And then also like…

Adrienne

Well, before you move on, I just want to touch on that point because I think that really speaks to how disconnected we are from listening to our own bodies. So we grew up in, and I think a lot of us grew up in these systems where it was not taught to us to trust our own instincts. It was not taught to us to be in our bodies, to sit with our feelings, to see our emotions as messages being communicated to us. So even that step, we’re having to learn that as 30, 40 year old adults while also trying to parent. But because we’re so disconnected, which again, is such a colonial capitalist idea to disconnect people from themselves, from their own voice, from their intuition, from their bodies. Because as long as we keep that disconnect from ourselves and then also from each other in our communities, people are so much easier to control. If we’re keeping people in a state of not self-reflecting, not being introspective, not you brought up rest and slowing down. If people don’t have the time to slow down because we are consumed with the next holiday and the next decorations that we need to put up and all the things we need to buy and then over consuming. then our lifestyle goes up, which means our finances need to go up, which means we need to work more and then just builds on itself that consumerist Western idea.

It disconnects us from having that time, having that emotional capacity to look inward. We feel uncomfortable looking at our own emotions. We feel uncomfortable sitting in our bodies because we binge Netflix and we overbuy and we pack our schedules full of things because we have all these…

We have this whole world of classes and our kids need to do this and they need to perform here and they need these tutors here and they need to, you know, we just, all overdo everything so that then there’s no room for that. So that then we parent and behave in a reactionary state instead of a calm, conscious, mindful parenting state. So I love that you bring that up as the first point to really let your kids be, let them play and just sit back and start doing that journaling and that introspection and that questioning of why is this bothering me? What is showing up for me in my body when this is happening? And why is that showing up? Why do I feel so angry about this or why do I feel the need to control? sorry, moving on, I really wanted to just stop for a moment and acknowledge that as being such a valuable piece because I think what so often happens with homeschoolers is they take their kids out of school, sure, and then, my God, it’s September, I need to start doing all the things and you have all that anxiety buildup of, okay, but I’m supposed to be doing something. There’s this emergency and I’m acting in a state of fight or flight myself because school’s not doing it, which before I could send my kid to school and then be like, okay, that was my job. I’m gonna clean or work or whatever. But school’s taking care of that. And now I have placed that burden on myself and now it’s all my job and things need to be happening. It is already September, whatever, and my kids are gonna fall behind and you don’t take a moment and you don’t take a look at yourself and what’s going on for you.

Thank you so much for bringing that up as the first step.

Iris

Yeah. And I think like…

I guess my next point is just that it doesn’t have to be perfect. Like sometimes when we think of unschooling, we were like maybe purists about it, know, like, unschooling has to look a certain way. It has to mean there’s like absolutely no schedule or no curriculum or no, I don’t know. And you know, like I was coming from hardcore tiger parenting. So it wouldn’t like, it’s a process, you know, so I really allowed myself to have a process. I didn’t feel like I needed to do it perfectly. So in the beginning, we like, I was still doing math, like sitting with my kids every day doing math workbooks. And we were still doing piano lessons and having a Chinese tutor with So I think it was like maybe three things that I wasn’t going to let go of. And then I think just as we went along feeling

stronger in my convictions of why I was doing this and feeling a lack of resonance with how I was practicing it. And so slowly like letting go is like, okay, I’m really uncomfortable letting go of doing absolutely no math, but it didn’t make sense anymore to me to continue to try to enforce it. And so I feel like we need to just give ourselves a lot of grace and compassion as we make the transition. It doesn’t have to be like jumping into the deep end. It could be like wading in where you might start off with a little structure, relaxed homeschooling or whatever. And then you realize like, you know, can let go of and slowly let going of more, because I feel like sometimes if we are not grounded enough in our beliefs or in our inner work, then we’re just gonna be flailing and we’re so overwhelmed with like our own triggers that we’re gonna sort of like default back into more control. If that makes sense. Or we’re gonna just like throw the whole, our hands up and say like, this isn’t working. This isn’t working for me. Or for my family. So I think like just, it’s okay to ease into it. Like some families just go all in and some you need to ease in. And I think again, this like,

letting go of perfectionism, letting go of needing to do it like everybody’s telling you to do, know, how it should be done. Again, I think unschooling gives us the freedom to really tune into ourselves and our families and our needs. And so if you need to take it slow, take it slow. You need to hold onto a few things at first. Just continue to be self-reflective about that. And be honest about your process and continue to like get support. But yeah, there’s no one way to do.

Adrienne

Which I think is just the beauty of unschooling is that it looks for some people it’s living in a yurt in New Zealand and for some people it’s living on a sailboat and for some people it’s homesteading. Like that’s what’s so great about it. And I think that the homeschooling community tends to show this idea of people wearing linen and canning their preserves and that this is what homeschooling is, right? And we’re all gardening and we’re all, I don’t know, knitting. Like just there’s an idea of what homeschooling is, right? And it really, really doesn’t have to be. And I think that’s what’s so special about unschooling is it’s really removed itself from this system of what the expectations are and what the standards are and what what it looks like. It looks absolutely different for everyone. And yeah, I think being in tune with, you know yourself best, you know your kids best, you know your family best, Instagram does not and Pinterest does not. So really just lean into that. And I always try and start with, what do you like doing with your kids? Just start there. So try and not place this burden on yourself as having to be, know, college professor, knower of all. And it’s my job to fill these empty buckets because they’re not, are living organic creatures who have already, let’s remember they’ve already been learning from the day they were born. They’ve been experimenting. They’ve been, hey, if I cry, this happens. Hey, if I fall, this is what happens. Like they’ve been experimenting with the scientific method for years born curious, they’re born natural learners. And so it’s okay to just sit with them and enjoy life with them, which again, I think this is such a radical anti-colonial idea that we would live enjoying ourselves, that we would live authentically without concern or maybe not concern, but without that full burden of having to do these certain things in a certain timeline, having to perform in certain ways and prove certain things and show the world that I’m good because I am doing this in my home school or I’m meeting these standards and expectations that people have for me instead of this unfortunately very radical idea that we can just live as a family and yes, pay our bills in the ways that we need to, but that we can live intentionally and we can live outside of this conveyor belt factory system of what kids are supposed to do. it even delves really strongly into even the gender binary. So even that idea that is so heavily infused as kids that boys look like this and do these things and buy these things and same with girls, start, once you start to just see kids as kids and you start to let everyone just be weird and authentic and quirky and whatever they are, you start to pick away at pull this thread and it starts to unravel as you said earlier with all these systems of why do we buy these things for boys and these things for girls. Why do we have these ideas? And you realize that, all of these things have been imposed on us from these very colonial imperialist forces that have been working for decades at this system of forcing people to look at the world a certain way. And it’s really, you unplugging from this matrix idea and just being like, this is, we don’t need to operate in this world.

Iris:

something you said just sparked the idea is like really just being with your family and seeing what feels good for your family. So even for unschoolers, know like for those who are just starting off, it’s so easy to like want to read all the books or like follow all these Instagram accounts or whatever. And I find that sometimes that can be very discouraging. So people should see how they feel about it. But sometimes like seeing what everybody else is doing is stressful because then you feel, we’re used to these systems where we’re told what the standards are, we’re told what the rubric is. And so it’s like, that’s what an unschooling family is supposed to look like. Now I need to start doing all these things or not doing all this, whatever. And so I sort of encourage people like instead of, you know, trying to tap into what all these other families are doing. And if it makes you feel good and gives you good ideas, then go for it. But sometimes like it’s the whole comparison thing. It’s a whole standardization thing again.

And so how to really learn how to tune into ourselves as a family, tune into yourself. Again, we’re not used to that. We’re not given many opportunities to really be embodied, to be attuned to ourselves. We’re like watching what everybody else is doing and like trying to make everybody else happy and meet everybody else’s expectations. And so like, I really encouraged people who are making this transition to like, okay, quiet all those voices. really, yeah, like tune into yourself, tune into what your kids are doing and just finding a rhythm, finding just a way of life that works for you.

Adrienne

Yeah, yeah that’s such a good point. start there. If you’ve grown up where

your calendar is so full, your kids have been away at school and they’re in a million sports and you’re at work and no one knows how to be present. Just start there. Start getting to know each other. Do they want to go to the beach? Do they want to go to the park? Do they want to play a board game? It doesn’t have to look like a lesson you can actually just like bake together and go for walks together. yeah, just echoing what you said about tuning in and learning that skill, because it’ll probably feel new.

right, for people who it’ll probably feel uncomfortable. They probably haven’t done it for a long time. And maybe we’ve been doing it when our kids were young and babies, but then maybe we shifted away from that as soon as we got into the morning rush of school and the nine to three and the September to June. But coming out of that really just, it’s not an emergency. Leah from your natural learner always says like in 24 hours,

Nothing’s going to happen. Your kid’s not going to fall behind in 24 hours. So if you’re ever feeling that activated nervous system, take 24 hours. Just spend the day with them. You don’t need to decide on a curriculum now. You don’t need to sign up for classes right this second. You don’t need to have your year planned out in the next 24 hours. Just take that moment. Anyway, is there anything else you want to share? I just wanted to wrap up, but I love this conversation so much I could talk to you forever.

Iris

Yeah, no, it’s been a great conversation. I feel like, for me, and it sounds like similarly for you, that conscious parenting and unschooling was really a gateway for me to begin to because I think school in general is sort of a given of an inevitability of what

childhood looks like in the societies that we are a part of. And I think once you realize that all the fear mongering around it or all like this, it has to look this way. And once you realize it doesn’t, and that life without it is wonderful. I think it causes you to question. It opens your eyes to say like, okay, what else have I been told?

I need that things have to be this way. And yeah, and then you’re like, you’re just always curious and wondering and reflective about whether or not these systems really serve us. yeah, I like to talk about like having radical imagination outside of the systems.

Adrienne

Yeah.

Iris

I’m grateful for how unschooling has done that for me. Yeah.

Adrienne

I love that Iris, thank you. I will put your Instagram and links to follow you in my show notes for everyone listening. Iris is such a gem. We’re so, so lucky to have you in this space. So thank you for talking to me today.

Iris

Yeah. Thank you, Adrienne.