PAM: Hi everyone, I’m Pam Laricchia from livingjoyfully.ca and today I’m here with Lauren Seaver. Hi, Lauren!
LAUREN: Hi Pam!
PAM: Just to introduce Lauren a bit to everyone, I had the pleasure of meeting her earlier this year at the Childhood Redefined Summit in Canandaigua, New York. Her enthusiasm for life is contagious and I’m so excited to dive into her deschooling experience, so let’s get started!
First can you share a bit with us about you and your family and how you first came across the idea of unschooling?
LAUREN: Yes. So I have one son, River, and he is nine years old and he is amazing and hilarious. He is a showman and he loves to dance and rap and ride bikes and play video games and he loves playing with his friends. We live with my boyfriend Aaron and our hamster Chewy. (Pam and Lauren laugh) Chewy is very important here. He really is.
And River also spends about two days a week at his Dad’s and stepmom’s house, so we are a blended family. His Dad and I separated when River was four but we have a really good relationship and River always had a great relationship with both of us and our partners so we’re just really lucky.
I also run my own business and when I’m working River usually is with my boyfriend Aaron or with his Dad. All of us have alternating schedules so it really makes unschooling doable while you’re working. We just feel really lucky.
We also live very close to my parents and my sister and our family is very supportive of unschooling which is so awesome. So that’s kind of us.
And the story of how we came into unschooling actually starts a long time ago, even before River was born. I was going to school to become a teacher so I was in college and as part of that I got to observe in a lot of different elementary classrooms and through that process I learned that not all teachers loved children and some teachers don’t even like children and it horrified me.
I thought, “oh wow, it’s almost like luck of the draw if you get a teacher that really likes children and loves learning,” and this was shocking to me. It was then while I was in college I thought maybe I should consider homeschooling because I love kids and I love learning. Gosh, wouldn’t it be fun to learn with my own kids! So already before meeting River’s Dad I was thinking homeschooling is where we’re going to go. I hadn’t heard of unschooling yet.
So then when I had River around five or six years later I had a home birth which is kind of alternative and with that home birth community there’s the attachment parenting community and all of that sort of leads into the homeschooling community. So it was almost like I had it all laid out for me. Through this attachment parenting community one of my friends recommended the Consensual Living yahoo group, which was created by Anna Brown from your podcast, and Pat Robinson, who are two amazing unschooling moms. And from there I learned of the Shine with Unschooling yahoo group, and the Always Learning yahoo group, and I was just like, “Oh, this is it! This is what I’ve been looking for!” Because I knew from my own experience as a teacher and as a person that we always, all of us, learn best when we are interested and passionately engaged in what we’re learning about and what we are doing, so it just was a no-brainer. Ok, we have to unschool, this is what we are going to do.
So that was the plan and so River was two at that time and I did a lot of paradigm shifting and we really lived in that manner as much as you can when they are so little. We didn’t limit TV or games or food or anything and that just seemed really normal and natural and it just worked. And you know, meeting River’s needs in creative ways and just living joyfully.
So that was great. And then when River was around four his Dad and I actually separated and then later divorced for all sorts of reasons, so everything kind of changed. I went to work full time out of the home and suddenly homeschooling and unschooling no longer seemed to be feasible. River had gone to this unique preschool that was two days a week in a homeschooling mom’s house and I was allowed sit next to him at the table and hang out and be there as long as he needed me. He really loved it so I was like well this wasn’t so bad maybe we can find a schooly option where he can go while I’m working.
We found a local school that was really alternative and their focus was very much on kids learning about what they were interested in and it almost had a democratic slant to it so I was like, “Alright, this could work.” He tried their summer camp for one day with the teacher that was with the youngest kids and he loved it so I thought, “Alright, let’s try it.” He ended up being in that lady’s classroom for two years and he loved it. He would run in every day. He would wake up and want to go to school and he loved it so much and I was like “Oh God, thank God, this is all working out.” Because all that I cared about was that he loved what he was doing because I knew that he would learn whatever he needed to learn as long as he was loving what he was doing.
And he and I are both pretty outgoing and love to be around people so I think that was part of what made this so fun for him. So the first two years were great and I was like, “Alright, this is great.” But then he began his third year of school and it was with a different teacher and this was second grade. He was seven and then turning eight that year. It was totally different. Everything changed. Even though this lady was really nice and the school still this alternative school, he didn’t love it anymore and half way through the year I was dragging him out of bed to get him to go to school. I felt like I was forcing him to go to school and that was against everything I believed in because I so deeply believe, then and now, that we learn best when we love what we are doing. It was clear that if I have to drag you out of bed you are not loving going here. I really felt like we needed a change. At this point I had quit my full time job and had just started my own business that would end up giving me a lot more flexibility and I brought up the idea of homeschooling to River.
He was like “No, no, I can’t. I want to be with my friends, I want to go to school. I really like it, it’s fine. No.” And so through the rest of the school year I just tried to support him as much as possible and kept bringing up the option of homeschooling. At the end of that year, which was, I think it ended in 2015, the school actually closed due to funding issues, and I said, “Ok, your school is closing, do you want to try homeschooling?” He was like, “Ok, let’s try homeschooling.”
As soon as school ended and we started homeschooling it was like, “Oh my god, this is amazing, this is what we have we been waiting for!” And we never looked back. He loved it and I loved it. So that’s our crazy, windy path to unschooling. I was always into it and wanted to do it and felt like we were supposed to, and then our lives were different and we didn’t see it as a possibility. So now we’ve been doing it for probably a year and three months I believe. Because I really count that, I count May of last year. In my heart, we started earlier. So that’s how we learned about it and now finally chose it.
PAM: That is awesome. I really loved hearing about how your perspective evolved through all that, the way you took those unschooling principles, or at least that perspective on learning and supporting each other, and have woven that into not only, as you said, your blended families and your extended family that is nearby, and right through always looking at River to guide you through those choices, right?
LAUREN: Absolutely. And I’m so grateful for that because that has been the foundation of our parenting and our lifestyle from the beginning. And I love that. It’s so wonderful. In all of my relationships, not just with River, it’s amazing. It’s very far reaching.
PAM: That was a wonderful story!
What was your biggest concern that drove your choice to move to unschooling?
LAUREN: So, like I said, River was not wanting to go to school. It changed from running in, to “I don’t want to get up.” The biggest issue I felt was reading. The school he was going to was really friendly and alternative. They have different, positive names for things, but he was basically in a remedial reading group and even though the teachers are kind and gentle, he still had reading homework and he felt this pressure to learn to read. He felt so much pressure way before he was ready and I knew this. I was like, “Wait, why are you pushing this? He will learn to read when he is ready. We don’t need to do this homework. We don’t need to do any of this stuff. It’s not helpful.”
I’m a passionate book lover and I knew that if he was just left alone to explore words and books and text and whatever, in whatever way it interested him, reading would come naturally whenever he was ready.
And I was really sad thinking that this kid who was so excited and awesome and hilarious and talented and enthusiastic was having a possibility for future love of learning squashed out of him by this experience, this emphasis that school was placing on this skill that he was not ready to learn.
I was heartbroken knowing he was feeling bad about himself, feeling bad about his own abilities around the idea of reading. When he would talk to me about it, the message he was receiving was basically you should be able to read these books right now and you are a failure because you can’t.
When I think back to it, I think, “How did I let him keep going to school?” Because it’s so awful. It was not the school’s intention. They were just trying to help him, but they are a school. They were like, “You need to learn this by this time.” That’s just how they think.
He would even say, “I’m bad at reading. I hate reading.” I was just like, “Oh, this is awful.” So that was my number one reason and then the other real reason was that I felt like I was supposed to be doing this all along and then this moment in our lives opened up where I realized, “Ok, now this is a real feasible time, a real possible time for us to do this, so let’s do it.” So that was a huge motivator.
PAM: Yeah, it was something in the back of your mind always and you were paying attention and you saw when those possibilities started to come together. Yeah, that’s cool. And what’s so interesting too is that whole reading piece. That was very much Lissy’s experience at school too. When she came home it was all, “I hate reading. I don’t want to read. I can’t read.” All those messages. And we just made sure to totally back off and it took about a year for her to move through, move past all those messages that she had gotten. She was in second grade when she left too.
LAUREN: The same as River, yeah. It’s amazing. It’s like if we could just as a culture look at people, just let them be. They’re going to get it, you just got to leave them alone. It adds all this unnecessary baggage. It’s so detrimental.
PAM: Yes, it is. You mentioned that you learned a lot about homeschooling and unschooling when River was young before he was going to school.
When you finally jumped into it—a year and three months ago—did you still have some fears and uncertainties?
LAUREN: Well, at first when we started we were literally returning to this homebirth and attachment parenting community. So the first feeling was, “Oh my god, we are home. This is so awesome.” And all these people are so weird like us, well, not like us but just sharing similar values. And seeing my old friends and his old friends and he was like: “I knew this kid when he was a baby.” It was really great. So I wasn’t even thinking of the fears then.
When I think about it, the first few months I think my biggest concern was that our unschooling life didn’t match the picture of what unschooling looked like in my mind. I had these unschooling fantasies about what my own personal unschooling path would have looked like if I were unschooled as a child.
I’m one of those people who throws themselves into whatever they are learning. When I was a kid I was into pioneer days, the mid-1800s and Westward Extension, and when I was into that, that was my whole life.
I had a pioneer dress with a bonnet I wore and I had the American Girl Doll and I read all the books. And all the books I read were about the Oregon trail and that time period. And I played the Oregon Trail Video Game and made food from that time period, all that. So I am the type who throws myself into stuff and it becomes my entire life. Then River and I started this unschooling path and I was noticing, “Wow, River doesn’t learn exactly how I learn.”
You’d think that wouldn’t be a big deal but, for whatever reason, I had envisioned something like it. When he was really interested in tornados and lightning, he didn’t want to be thrown into a world of weather. And I could get all the books out from the library about weather and he was like, “I’m not looking at those. I don’t care.” It was a really big deal for me to learn, “Oh wait a second, just because this is how I learn it doesn’t mean that’s how he’s going to learn, and just because I thought it was going to look this way doesn’t mean that’s what it’s going to look like.”
So I think just letting go of expectations was so huge for me to be able to really relish what was actually happening in our unschooling lives. So letting go of those shoulds and just being there and actually witnessing what was happening was what helped me to see “Oh my god, he is learning so much and look at the way he does it. It’s so fascinating. And what he is interested in.” So that was big for me.
So I don’t know if it’s as much fear as it is just letting go of baggage. I think that’s kind of a key piece in my unschooling experience and in our unschooling experience. Me letting go of baggage.
PAM: I think that’s such a great point, Lauren. Because when you mentioned the phrase “unschooling fantasies,” as parents we are learning about unschooling and we are excited enough about it to want to try it with our families. We build such a picture in our head of what it’s going to look like and truly it’s not surprising that it’s based in our own experience and how we would like to learn if we had this possibility. That’s such a great point.
Something to really pay attention to, to shift the focus to seeing how they like to live their days and how they like to learn, and supporting them. Of course, we are going to start from our own perspective, but to be open like you said to dropping those expectations and seeing what actually comes out of it, right?
LAUREN: I know for me, the shifting my focus from the imaginary child that I had envisioned before I had River, to being like, “Oh, this amazing, complex person in front of me who is his own person and actually just him and celebrating him,” versus like whatever I had expected, has been probably one of the biggest aspects of parenting that has been a growing process. Wow, they really pop out themselves and you just are there to witness them and support them as much as you can and love them. And grow by being around them.
PAM: It really is, it really is. I love the way you explain that. And that leads very nicely into our next question.
I’m wondering about what your move to unschooling has looked like, whether it has been pretty smooth, you know, you talked a bit about letting go of your expectations. Have you talked to River specifically about unschooling itself, the processes or principles behind it or have you found as you have been talking about the changes being more internal to you, so most of your focus has been on how you are choosing to observe River and how you are changing your responses to him and letting go of the expectations?
LAUREN: Yeah, definitely. I don’t think I talked to River much about it other than to support him and living everyday life and he knows we homeschool. I’m sure I used the word unschooling and said: “This is the kind of homeschooling we are doing.” Because there were points in the beginning when he was like, “Wait, aren’t we supposed to be doing something? Should I do some maths?” And I asked, “Do you want to?” And I might write out some questions for him if he really wanted me to at that time. And then he would say, “Ok, I know how to do this, that’s fine.” I think he had a couple of concerns in the very beginning but now he is just totally into it.
I think our foundation of unschooling friends has been very helpful, has helped us ease into this. He has just been loving life and exploring things of interest to him and it’s just better than I could have thought. It has been pretty seamless and the majority of the changes have totally been internal for me. And they continue to be. River is naturally really awesome at doing the things he loves and having fun which is where all of our learning is.
You don’t have to work on this stuff. Where 99% of the process is me again just letting go of my own baggage and assumptions and things that help me to better connect with him and better celebrate him and our lives. And I really think having a community of other unschooling parents locally as well as online to reach out to and explore my own stuff with has been really helpful.
And, like you said, I went to the Childhood Redefined Unschooling Summit with you and Anne and it really shifted my perspective so dramatically. It just really helped me to see things in such a more positive way and I only realized afterwards it had such an impact on me that I felt changed and I acted in a different manner. It’s hard for me to put into words but I noticed that I have a lot of power in our home. I could change the energy of our home with my own choices and the viewpoint I’m bringing into every interaction. That was amazing to me.
I really noticed if I shifted into a more positive, loving, peaceful place where I’m celebrating what’s happening, and what River’s celebrating, and what Aaron is celebrating—everything changes. It is mind-blowing that I really impact this family so much. We all do, but I have a lot of power inside of myself.
I think that’s my work as an unschooling parent: to do that work within myself that allows me to see and celebrate River for being him and his own unique self, and then to support him in ways that are best for him on whatever path that he chooses, and just our connection.
PAM: That’s lovely. I’m glad you enjoyed it!
LAUREN: I can’t explain it. The whole idea of “Oh, I paradigm-shifted back when he was two,” and I was like, “Oh, wait a second, there was way more to do…” (both laughing)
PAM: That’s awesome!
Can you tell us a bit about how your definition of learning has changed since discovering unschooling?
LAUREN: Well, it’s been an evolving process since I was in that teacher training program back however many years ago. I have to do the math for it’s a long time ago. I had a pretty unschooly definition of learning when River and I started homeschooling but when we started I still was making lists of the subjects to keep track of what we were covering for my own records and peace of mind. So if we played Uno or a game with a map I checked off “math” or “geography” thinking “Ok, we covered that today.” (laughs)
After a couple of months, I just dropped that stuff because when you are doing it you just start to see, “Oh my god, he is learning so much and so much more than I could ever write down.” And what really amazed me was our conversations and the depth with which we would explore questions and topics and just how much we were both learning together. I feel like I see learning in such a limitless manner now and that there are no have tos and no shoulds. It’s just choices and options. And there is no not-learning. You are always learning, it doesn’t matter: if we follow joy and try to live in a manner where we are most content, that’s going to be really fun learning. No matter what you are learning.
Something I love is that it’s so not just about River learning. It’s us learning as a family. River has really been into BMX biking for the past few months and that stemmed in part because my boyfriend Aaron was really into it. He was rekindling this passion from his childhood, which I think has a lot to do with our unschooling and I really think he was excited thinking about stuff and looking into his own passions because of it. And then we have an unschooling family friend. Our whole family were good friends with them, they are wonderful. They are huge into BMX biking too. So these relationships inspired a passion in River for it and now BMX biking is a way that he connects with my boyfriend Aaron and this other unschooling family and we all go to skate parks together and we watch BMX videos on YouTube to learn new tricks and he and I go on lots of bike rides and it leads to all sorts of conversations and all sorts of different things depending where we go. It’s just amazing. Learning just keeps happening based on whatever we like.
Another thing he and I are really into the musical “Hamilton” which we learned all about this summer from some people who loved it. So we bought the CDs and we started listening to it and falling in love with the music. River loves rap and he loves music. That really led him into wanting to explore past wars because there are these battle songs that are really awesome and that led us to go to a civil war re-enactment as a family. We are all learning about these different topics in our own ways and I just love being able to witness how our paths evolve from a single interest or question that one of us is exploring and then how they connect. So that whole limitless nature of learning. It just feels like it’s all about choices and following our joy.
PAM: That’s it. Those are beautiful stories.
LAUREN: I love that. It’s so fun! What I know now is that until we did it, I couldn’t know how beautiful it would be or how full and rich it could be. I just couldn’t know. Especially with a teaching background you might come into something thinking “Ok, we are going to learn this set list of things!” but with unschooling and with this idea of limitless learning, there are no boundaries. There is so much more to learn. I love that.
PAM: I love how each of your answers is leading into the next question! But before we get there, I love your phrase “limitless learning,” because that was the huge piece for me. When we started it was all about the learning. It was, “Ok, if they are not going to school I’m going to replace the learning somehow,” But that first year of just watching them and seeing it in action … I tried to journal, tried to write things down, and I would go for maybe a week and then there was just too much to write. It expanded into life. You just see the learning in every minute. Ok, let me read the next question. So that people know what we are talking about (laughs).
Did you find a difference between understanding the principles of unschooling intellectually and then living them day to day?
LAUREN: When I read this question I was like, “Yes, Yes, Yes …” I wrote “Yes” five times because this was a big surprise to me. I think I said this already but since I learned about it when he was two, I did my paradigm-shifting. I got this. We are just going to become unschoolers; this is awesome.
But then I realized I still have lots to unload through the process of doing it. I think for me, the biggest piece that I didn’t realize would be such a huge piece, even though I read all about it, was trust. And that trust is really essential to unschooling is, in a lot of ways, born out of the act of unschooling.
So kind of like the chicken and the egg: you can’t have the trust until you trust, but you develop the trust through trusting. I just feel like trusting him in his own path; I had to live that, in order to build that. I didn’t do it before we unschooled. The amount of trust that is needed and that comes out of unschooling has just blown me away and how that connects us and how he trusts me to support him in his learning about anything and everything.
If he comes to me with a question, an interest, or something that he just happens to say, he trusts that I’m going to listen and respect him and support him in learning more about it and finding the resources that he needs, and I trust that he will learn everything he needs to learn by following his passions and joy. I didn’t know how deeply we could trust each other and I didn’t know how connected we could become before we were unschooling. I read about it forever. That’s the way I learn. I love reading everything about a topic and then maybe I will act on it or maybe not. This was mind-blowing, the difference between actually living it versus just reading it. It was amazing.
PAM: I found the same thing. I mean the relationships just blew me away. I had no idea about the depths of trust and connection that you could have with another person. I don’t think I had that kind of connection with anyone.
Maybe that’s why when I ask in the Ten Questions episodes, “What is the best thing that you found when looking back on unschooling? What has been the most surprising or your favourite outcome of it?” Relationships has pretty much always been the answer because it’s just something you can’t get, you don’t understand when you get started until you develop it, right?
LAUREN: And I was shocked by that. Because we are so close. I’m closer to him than anyone. I just can’t believe how much closer—worlds closer—that we became through the process of unschooling. You just can’t know until you do it. It’s mind-blowing, really.
PAM: It’s true!
I was wondering if you could talk a bit about what changes you have seen in River since he left school?
LAUREN: Yes. He just loves his life. He loves homeschooling and unschooling and he will say to me regularly, “Mom, I love my life.” I’ve just seen him become happier and more confident and more flexible and more understanding, just a lot of changes. He will proudly tell anyone that he is homeschooled. Recently we went to a party and another kid asked: “So, did you go on any vacations this summer?” And he responded with, “Well, pretty much every day is a vacation for me.” He really feels like, “My life is so fun.”
One of the most interesting shifts that I have seen is that he has grown so much socially since we started homeschooling. I love it, I think that’s funny that so many people question about socialization. He gets along so much better with other kids now, which has not always been the easiest thing for him. I just feel like he has become more empathetic and understanding and I think that has a lot to do with all the unstructured play he gets to have with other homeschooled friends as well as friends in our apartment complex. He has so much time to just be with kids in an unstructured manner where no one is saying: “time to do this,” or “you guys need to interact in this way,” or even just someone micromanaging their conversations. He is playing in these unstructured settings, with me there to support as needed of course, but I’ve seen so much growth in those ways.
Another big thing I wanted to mention was the reading. He started reading half way through the year while simultaneously avoiding all books because of his negative school experience. When we first started unschooling, if we weren’t out connecting with friends and we were home, he mostly spent his time playing video games or watching YouTube. He just loved it. He really started learning how to read by doing stuff online that he really liked. He started reading probably six months into our unschooling journey and he would read signs in a drive-through, or read comments on YouTube, or read directions to a video game. He would type in words if he was looking for information, read the words on a YouTube lyric video song he liked. He really is into music. He would even have me pause it so he could read the whole thing and I remember him reading something with the word “champagne” in it and I was like, “Holy crap, he just read “champagne”.” (laughs)
And I feel like this experience of him reading on his own without any support of me besides, you know, I’m with him and I’m reading things when he asks me to, or typing in something for him on games, but without having someone sitting down with him and teaching him how to do it. I think this was super empowering for him after his school experience. And after that he started to go back to the library with me and he would read books to his friends at the library or at his cousin’s house and it’s just like he reclaimed it for himself and to me that’s so healing and so wonderful because that was my biggest concern that this bad experience would sit with him for life. I feel like that has been a major change over the past year. I don’t care that he can read or not. He is nine and he can take forever, I don’t care. But what I care about is that he owns it. And I really think he knows that: “Wow I did this on my own.” And I love that.
PAM: I think that’s a great point: owning the experience. Giving it back to them, to whatever timetable they end up having. But for it to be back in their court so that they have choices and control over it. That’s awesome!
What has been the hardest part of your unschooling journey so far?
LAUREN: This question I thought was so hard because I feel like we haven’t had a lot of hardships with unschooling. Sometimes life can feel hard, but that’s not because of unschooling. We went from a lifestyle where River was in school for six hours and I was working out of the home for nine hours and then we come back home together at the end of the day and it was like we only had the worst of ourselves to give to each other. We were both grumpy and exhausted.
So going from that to a lifestyle where he is home so much more and I am home so much more and we are together so much more and there is no pressure to do stuff he doesn’t want to do and I’m working at a job that I love and we are both really fulfilled and happy. I feel like it’s only made everything better and easier and more wonderful. I think sometimes parenting can feel really hard, and living as a member of a family can feel hard, but unschooling actually makes all of it easier and better. So I didn’t have a good answer.
PAM: No, that’s a great answer! It’s great to hear your perspective.
LAUREN: It hasn’t been hard. It’s been awesome!
PAM: It’s been awesome! (both laugh)
We might have touched on this, but was has surprised you most about your journey so far?
LAUREN: For me especially, I come from that teaching background, and the biggest surprise for me about unschooling has been that unschooling is not really about learning. It’s not about education, and I mean that in a respectful way. I don’t mean to belittle the learning that River is doing and that I’m doing with our lives—we are learning so much more than I ever imagined we would learn—but it feels totally secondary: like a benefit that occurs along the way. To me unschooling is about living and about joy and about our relationships like you said before and that has been the biggest surprise for me.
When I was coming into it, I thought, “Oh this is how we are going to learn the things he needs to learn, just like he would have at school.” But instead, it’s “No, this is just our life and this is how we enjoy living.”
I was in a Facebook conversation with Anne Ohman and she wrote in a comment: “The Learning is a by-product of the Living.” And I was like “Yes, that’s exactly it!”
Just by living these wonderful, exciting lives—and you know we have our own issues and struggles at times, but living through all of life—we are learning so much. But that’s just a piece of it. It’s so beautiful and it’s so wonderful and it’s so rich and it’s so much about just us celebrating being together and our lives together and what we love. It’s about so much more than learning. That was a surprise to me.
PAM: Yeah, first we think of learning as the lowest common denominator. That’s why we go to school. For the learning, it’s for the learning. Yet once we start living it and seeing it in the wild, maybe you see there is actually more. There are roots to learning. There is a foundation of living and relationships and connecting and trust and everything that lies in the foundation beneath the learning. So instead of focusing on the learning, when we focus on creating that strong foundation, the learning is the by-product that just kind of bubbles up out of it.
LAUREN: It is so beautiful and I would never diminish the importance of that learning but it’s, like you said, the relationships. I’m just in awe of how close we are. It’s something I take for granted now, almost, how close we are. But it’s the by-product of unschooling and living this life. It’s so awesome! It’s so much more awesomer than I thought, and I already thought it would be awesome. (both laugh)
PAM: It’s awesomER!
LAUREN: It’s awesomer than I thought it would be, which is so great!
PAM: Oh, that’s awesome. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me, Lauren. That was so much fun!
LAUREN: I know! Thank you so much, Pam. Like I said I’m a throw-myself-in type of person and unschooling has been one of my big, huge passions, so it’s so fun to talk about it and to think about it and to explore it, because I won’t do that with River because it’s not really his big passion, so it’s so nice to talk to other people who are into it.
PAM: I know, that’s exactly it. You mentioned that earlier too. I didn’t use the word unschooling with my kids for a few years. I think when we went to the first conference it had unschooling in the name. Yeah, we are just not going to school, we are homeschooling, that’s that. They figured it out. They figure out life and living and just pursue it and we are the ones who do all the work, seeing how learning can really happen in everyday living.
Before we go, where is the best place for people to connect with you online?
LAUREN: Probably on Facebook, my name is Lauren Seaver. I love Facebook and I’m always putting fun stuff up there what we are doing.
PAM: Yeah, and they can send you a quick message saying they heard you on the podcast if they’d like to connect, right?
LAUREN: Yeah, absolutely.
PAM: Thank you so much again, and have a great day!
LAUREN: Oh, thank you so much, Pam. You have a wonderful day!