Teresa Hess is an unschooling mom with three kids and the family—Teresa, her husband, and the kids—live in a cool co-housing community on an island in Washington state. Teresa and I had a wonderful conversation about their unschooling lives, diving into the shift to peaceful parenting, the ever-deepening spiral of mothering and self-awareness, the concept of “joy,” and lots more!
Questions for Teresa
Can you share with us a bit about you and your family?
What did your family’s move to unschooling look like?
A couple months ago you posted a wonderful manifesto on your blog, explaining that you are a radical unschooling family and listing some of things you believe that led you to that choice. I urge everyone to go read it! In it, you also talk about how you came to this way of parenting, and I think that’s a big shift for many people as they come to unschooling. Can you
share what that process looked like for you?
You have a beautiful blog post titled, ‘The Storm and the Ocean Mother,’ and I want to share this quote from the end of the post: “This is how I learn to be more fully myself: by mothering my children. And this is how I learn to mother my children: by being more fully myself.” I love how clearly you described that ever-spiraling cycle and it’s been my experience
as well. Can you share your thoughts about that?
You also wrote recently about learning to follow our intuitive sense of our own Joy. That’s something else that we learn in ever-deepening cycles, isn’t it? It sounds pretty simple, “follow the joy,” yet I named my website Living Joyfully more than a decade ago and I’m still discovering the depths of that phrase. Can you share some tips for people who’d like to explore the concept of joy and how it weaves so elegantly into our unschooling lives?
What’s your favourite thing about your unschooling days right now?
Things mentioned in the episode
You can find Teresa’s blog at sparkleandzest.com
And here are the blog posts mentioned, Manifesto, The Storm and the Ocean Mother, and Joy Stepping Stones
You can also find Teresa on Facebook and Instagram
Episode transcript
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