Living Joyfully

Helping parents cultivate a thriving unschooling lifestyle in their family.

  • Start Here
  • Deschooling
  • Unschooling
  • Parenting
  • About
  • Contact
  • Podcast
    • Q&A Episodes
    • Ten Questions Episodes
    • Interviews I’ve done …
    • TUC Talks
  • Books
    • Book Clubs
  • Network
  • Summit
  • Questions?
  • Articles
    • Spanish Translations
  • Blog
You are here: Home / Parenting / EU011: Unschooling a Child With a Chronic Illness with Brie Jontry

EU011: Unschooling a Child With a Chronic Illness with Brie Jontry

March 17, 2016 By Pam Laricchia 6 Comments

EU011Brie Jontry is an unschooling mom I’ve connected with a few times over the years because we share the experience of having a child who is living with a chronic illness. At first glance, it might seem like you’d need to drop some unschooling principles when your child’s health is in question, so I was excited to speak with Brie about her experience.

Quote of the Week

“Unfortunately most people are convinced that when control fails, it’s because they didn’t control enough.” ~ Joyce Fetteroll

Questions for Brie

1. Can you share with us a bit about your background and your family?

2. When did Noor develop type 1 diabetes and what did the diagnosis look like?

3. What were some of the advantages of Noor not being in school during this time?

4. One of things that stood out for me was that because we hadn’t been controlling Michael’s eating habits, he was already comfortable listening to his body’s cues, which had some great advantages now that he had to manually manage his insulin levels. Was your experience similar?

5. Once we got a handle on the day-to-day management and it became more routine, I found it really important to shift our focus away from the illness and back onto all of Michael. Did you find yourself making that shift?

6. When we look at how children learn through unschooling, we see that the most effective learning happens when they have choices and control over their actions. That can seem scary when the consequences could be drastic and immediate, but even with health issues I’ve found life and learning flows so much better when I don’t take on the role of gatekeeper or director. Have you found that as well?

7. With unschooling, we talk a lot about building a trusting relationship with our children, free of judgement and shame. Have you still found that to be a valuable foundation for your days when there’s a chronic illness in the mix?

8. Let’s talk about the teen years for a moment. As kids get older, they naturally spend more time away from their parents. If diabetes management has been closely controlled by the parents, which is often the conventional parenting approach, this time out from under their gaze can seem like freedom from all of that. In that situation, I think teens often make choices in reaction to that parental control, rather than in their own best interest. What has your experience been?

9. Also, as they get older and their life expands, new fears crops up, don’t they? Like their first overnights away from home, then their first extended trips, and Michael will be driving on his own in the next couple of months. How do you move through those moments?

Links to more info

Pam’s article: In Control: Helping a child self-manage a chronic disease (published in Natural Life Magazine, Mar/Apr 2010 issue)

Transcript

Read the transcript

Filed Under: Parenting, Unschooling Tagged With: life, relationships, teens

Comments

  1. Fern says

    March 30, 2016 at 12:09 pm

    Pam, my hero, I almost cried just reading the title of the podcast. My son is 3 yrs. + 11 months. He has multiple, severe, contact food allergies. I don’t feel any school would be safe for him. Exploring unschooling has helped me concentrate on the “why to” homeschool instead of the “why not to” school. This conversation is so helpful to our whole situation. Coincidentally, I’m also a single mom and my mother died 2 years ago. It’s so comforting to listen to women with so much in common.

    Reply
  2. Fern says

    March 30, 2016 at 1:55 pm

    🙂 always have my BIG purse with the epi injectors and cleaning wipes. The longest I’ve ever left anyone else in charge of him was to test drive a van around the block. (And I don’t “need a break.” Thanks for the e-mail about that blog post, Pam.) I’ve found some webinars on kids with food allergies. They have been very helpful on topics like anxiety over the condition, dealing with eating out, family gatherings, birthday parties, etc., BUT they always talk about school safety/dangers/alienation and, maybe I missed it, but I’ve never heard any mention there of homeschooling, much less unschooling. It’s almost like the mainstream in that community would see homeschooling as chickening out of sending a food allergic kid to school. Your conversation was so great! Thanks again Pam and Brie!

    Reply
    • Pam Laricchia says

      March 30, 2016 at 2:20 pm

      Thank you, Fern! I’m so glad you connected with the conversation! Yes, Brie and I both found the mainstream community around our children’s health challenges to be, well, challenging. LOL!

      I love your point about how some seeing homeschooling as “chickening out.” But once you’re away from school for a while you realize that we don’t need to frame our choice in the context of school at all. It’s not a reaction to school, it’s a completely valid choice all on its own! That’s so freeing. 🙂

      Reply
      • Fern says

        March 31, 2016 at 7:52 am

        Very nice!

        Reply
  3. Calla says

    August 5, 2019 at 3:00 pm

    I know this is an older episode, but I was wondering if you had links or information regarding the studies mentioned about children from either very hands off families or from a very controlling family environment struggling the most and having worse outcomes? I will Google search myself, but I thought maybe you knew about these studies and could show me in the right direction? Thank you.

    Reply
    • Pam Laricchia says

      October 3, 2021 at 8:39 am

      I’m sorry I missed this comment before, Calla! Brie shared this info with me:

      “I think I was talking about Diana Baumrind, a developmental psychologist writing/researching in the 70s who found there were three primary parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. Later, others broke “permissive” down into two more categories: indulgent and neglectful/uninvolved.

      On the surface, I think a lot of people mistake unschooling for permissive parenting but the unschoolers I know who’ve raised the most thoughtful, confident, self-secure, ethical kids were more in the authoritative camp. Authoritative parents are the most responsive to their children’s unique needs at different developmental stages. But, they also clearly communicate expectations.

      These two links look like good summaries of Baumrind’s model and related studies:

      http://parentingscience.com/authoritative-parenting-style/

      https://www.thekindofparentyouare.com/articles/parenting-styles-part-i-the-baumrind-model

      The other researchers who added neglectful parenting to the model are Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin.”

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The Living Joyfully Network community

The Living Joyfully Network

The Living Joyfully Network is an online community for parents worldwide to explore unschooling with other like-minded parents who are also choosing to embrace lifelong learning and develop strong and connected relationships with their children. We invite you to join our candid and wide-ranging conversations about living and learning through the lens of unschooling!

Learn more about the Network here!

free intro to unschooling ebook

Click the book cover to get the book from your favourite online retailer, or click the link below to join my mailing list and download the book directly!

What is Unschooling? A book about living and learning without school.

Exploring Unschooling Podcast

click to listen to the archive of all Exploring Unschooling podcast episodes

Choosing to live and learn without school isn’t as intimidating as you might imagine!

The podcast archive is now home to more than 300 episodes, filled with unschooling goodness.

support the podcast on Patreon

Have you read my books?

Free-to-Learn-Cover Free-to-Live-Cover Life-Through-the-Lens-of-Unschooling-Cover Living-Joyfully-with-Unschooling-Box-Set-Cover The Unschooling Journey Libre d'Apprendre cover Libre para Aprender cover Szabadon Tanulni cover

Journey with us to a new way of seeing your child

icon-logo

Join Anne Ohman, Anna Brown, and I in our online Summit where we share the experiences, insights, and tools that we found most helpful on our unschooling journeys. We will walk with you from where you are now, to where you want to be.

Looking for something?

I've been exploring unschooling for many years now and there's a lot of content here! I've been working to tag things to help you more easily find information about the questions you're curious about right now. I'll continue to work on this.

Click a topic to explore:

college

dads

deschooling

food

grown unschoolers

learning

life

math

reading

relationships

relatives

technology

teens

work

Welcome to Living Joyfully

Pam ... an online resource for parents who are curious about unschooling. If you're passionate about exploring the world with your children, this site is for you. I'm Pam Laricchia, the author and owner of this site. Thanks for inviting me along on your unschooling journey!

The Living Joyfully Network

The Living Joyfully Network is an online community for parents worldwide to explore unschooling with other like-minded parents who are also choosing to embrace lifelong learning and develop strong and connected relationships with their children.

Learn more and join us here!

SEARCH LIVING JOYFULLY

Living Joyfully participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and the iTunes Affiliate Program. This allows me to earn a small commission, at no cost to you. I appreciate your support!

Read my Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy.

Copyright © 2023 · Living Joyfully Enterprises

By using this website, you agree to the use of cookies. I use cookies to provide you with a great experience and to help my website run effectively. OK READ MORE
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT