PAM: Welcome! I’m Pam Laricchia from livingjoyfully.ca and today I’m here with Robyn Robertson. Hi Robyn!
ROBYN: Hi Pam, how are you doing?
PAM: I’m doing great, thank you! As a little bit of an introduction, Robyn is an unschooling mom of two fun-loving kids and she’s also the host of the podcast, Honey, I’m Homeschooling the Kids.” I love that title!
I’m really excited to dive into her journey and to get us started, Robyn …
Can you share with us a bit about you and your family?
ROBYN: Like you said, we are a family of four: my husband and I and our two kids. Our oldest Ronan is twelve. Our daughter is nine and her name is Dora. We currently live in Northern Alberta, Canada and we live on a farm—very different from our previous years but we really, really love it. And we unschool. We live our life here, a very quiet life here.
PAM: Northern Alberta! Have you got snow yet?
ROBYN: Actually, today. The snow has been falling this morning. It stopped now but we do have snow on the ground. As we speak.
PAM: Now, you alluded to this…
When your kids were younger you and your husband had decided to embrace travel. I was wondering if you could tell us how that came about and talk about that experience?
ROBYN: It’s funny because it’s one of those things where I tell about it and I can make it as short as possible, but it’s really a journey that probably started a very, very, very, very long time ago—even before we had kids.
If I backup a couple of years, we were living in Edmonton at the time and my kids were probably five, school-starting age. We were doing the regular grind, how you get into that grinding groove where you work and you’re busy with work. My husband had a business. He was in real estate. He started writing on the side, which was the catalyst for a lot of things. He had been pursuing his love and dream of being a writer so he had started that on the side.
I was working for a private school that my kids also attended. I love my job. We love the school. We had a great school experience. We were very lucky that the school was a project-based learning school, child-centered, very small, warm, family environment kind of feel. My kids loved going there and I loved working there, but I was busy. My background was in business and I was doing PR and marketing and admissions for them in a few roles. We had that going. My kids attended school full-time. That particular school started at age three so junior kindergarten and the kids went for two years. Junior kindergarten was full-time so they had the same school hours as the junior high kids.
So, I was working, they were going to school full-time, my daughter started going, my son went there from age three until halfway through grade one and we were busy. Plus extracurricular activities—they were active. By the time do your work day, you come home, go to sports and whatever else they were doing, you make dinner, you go to bed, you get up in the morning. Then the weekends were the same: you get up for soccer early morning and by Sunday I’m just like, “I just want to lay on the couch!” Get groceries and our weekend is kind of done! So I was just kind of going on like that.
We got to a point where my husband and I decided that we needed to—and we wanted to—reevaluate our family values and beliefs and if we were still meeting and living by what we had originally wanted to do when we started a family. It was pretty apparent that we weren’t. It was important to us that we reconnect and that we start reflecting and living by those values and beliefs again. And a big thing was connection. Building our relationship, starting with our marriage relationship. I think with the busyness and the grind you become complacent, or you become detached in some ways. We knew we needed to reconnect and of course through our reconnection we needed to reconnect with our kids and we wanted to build our relationship as a family.
So when we had relooked at these priorities one of the things that we started doing was remembering our dreams that we had when we first started a family. And one of them was travel. My husband and I had traveled a lot by ourselves and together as a couple before we were married. The majority of the years before we had kids we were traveling for many, many, many years. Either living abroad or backpacking, traveling on different trips and things like that. As a child I had traveled a lot. My dad is from Jamaica and my mom is from Canada and my dad worked in the hotel business for a long time so for his work we traveled quite extensively. I always felt it was a big gift that my parents had given me, the chance to live in other places and be in someone else’s shoes and experience that and see how the rest of the world lives, how it’s so similar to myself or how it’s different. When I think of one of my big educational experiences it was travel for sure. My husband and I had said we had wanted to travel, to offer that to our kids as well. So we decided to put that back on our plate, let’s work towards that. That’s when we really decided that we wanted to embrace traveling again.
PAM: So how did that work out?
ROBYN: It worked out really well. I want to say that people will say, “Oh my God, you have so much money that you can just spend on this and go travelling and move and stuff,” but it’s not that. One of the things was how are we going to afford it? We had bought a house. We were traveling when our son was born. So my son was actually born overseas in Korea. We were living in Asia at the time. We actually lived in Korea until he was about two and then we moved back to Canada when he was turning two. We had still been in our travel journey when we had started a family but we very quickly got back into “regular life” in Edmonton when we were back in Canada.
What was the question I was answering? Haha!
PAM: What was the first place you went to and how did you transition?
ROBYN: It was one of those things where we had set a goal to reach and save for it and we realized we were never going to make that goal. Our kids will be retired and seniors and it’s just not going to happen anytime soon. So we thought we would take the plunge, we’ll try it. We would rent our house and simplify. We both had a vehicle so we sold one of our vehicles and put things in storage.
Then I took a leave of absence from work. We’ll just take a couple of months and try it, go to Jamaica because my dad’s from Jamaica, we have family there. My dad was living there. We can stay there with family and it’ll be easier this way. It’s an ease into it and we can say at least we tried it—if it doesn’t work then at least we tried. At least we’ll be happy with that. So I took a leave of absence from work for a few months. My husband had enough clients for writing so he was able to step into writing full-time and we decided to go to Jamaica. So that was our first place we went and we loved it! We spent six months in Jamaica before we went to Asia.
PAM: Wow, that’s very cool. I love the idea of all the little steps. It doesn’t have to be some big gargantuan throwing everything away. You set yourselves up wonderfully so that you found a way to try it affordably. You went to where there was already family, you were renting out your house, you were storing stuff, he had the writing which is awesome for him to be able to work remotely. It’s just all those little bits that you get a chance to try it out and see. That’s awesome!
ROBYN: I think that’s the biggest thing, some of us just have to try and if it doesn’t work that’s totally okay but see what works and fits.
PAM: Yeah, there’s nothing wrong. If it doesn’t work out you’ve learned more and back you go, you’ve got that experience and now everybody knows more about themselves because now you know why that didn’t work, right?
ROBYN: That’s it. Completely. It’s so much about the process and experience.
My understanding is that you guys began homeschooling while traveling because, of course, it made sense. I was wondering how you eventually discovered unschooling and what your family’s move to unschooling looked like?
ROBYN: We started homeschooling because we thought we wanted to spend more time together as a family and that was a big factor. We had looked into schools in Jamaica, but we found homeschooling would be the best fit for us and it would also allow us to be flexible if we wanted to travel to the other side of the island to see family, then we could do that. That’s when we started homeschooling.
I had worked in education for quite a while by then so, for me, homeschooling was about replicating school. So when we got to Jamaica and we are homeschooling we got up in the morning, did school until lunch time, and I had it structured. My son’s teacher had given me books that he could finish out the year and we followed that. We had math and I had a timer. So math was at a certain time and when the timer would go off then we would switch to writing and we’re going to switch to this. We were all very much in the school mindset so it was very easy and we still had fun. We did it on the deck in the sunshine or we did it upstairs in the spare room where we had created our own little school room and space and decorated it how we wanted to so they were enjoying it. In the afternoon we spent every afternoon at the beach and it was just play and joy. It was beautiful and it was really nice. Sometimes we had a lot of people that came to visit us and we would travel so it flowed really well.
I think our unschooling process was more gradual. There wasn’t a time where I said, “Okay, now we’re going to unschool from now on.” It was more that we fell into it at the time. I think I remember reading an article about it and I connected with it. I thought, ‘Well, that’s kind of what we do.’ I didn’t term it unschooling at the time and really what happened was we became more relaxed about what we did.
It’s those things that you see, right? They were still enjoying it and having fun from their lessons, but it was those things like, there was a guy in my dad’s neighborhood, this Rastafarian guy, who was squatting in a house in the neighborhood. But he had this herd of goats that would roam around and they would sometimes get into our yard and we’d have to chase them away. He would come and try and grab them and it was those conversations with him as he was getting the goats and those cute little kid goats. Or just being on the beach and meeting new friends or new people. There were regular people that we got to see and visit with. Visiting Auntie Bunny, who we call family because they are like family, she was older, and she would love to have the kids over. Those connections and the travels around that were what they really held onto. It wasn’t the formal lessons, it was those life experiences that I saw them really growing and it was enriching.
Then we got to Korea because we moved to Seoul after that. I think part of it was such a culture shock in some ways for them. We had lived there before. My son had been there before, he was fairly young when we left but it was just so different from Jamaica. Like if you wanted to take to two opposite cultures, that would probably be it! So we went from the tropics and a yard with lots of space and the beach to hard core city Seoul, Korea. To an apartment where we had neighbors underneath who were not kid-friendly so any noise or anything like that they would complain. We had a few neighbors but it just happened to be them. The other neighbors were fine. Things like it’s busy, it’s noisy, and it was very different and I think we needed to take some time to readjust to that and slow down on things and not really have strict lessons per se.
So it was over time that we slowed down and we slowed down more and more until it was nothing formal I guess you could say. Nothing that resembled strict school structure anymore like I had been putting on them in the beginning and I think that’s how we grew into unschooling.
PAM: That’s so interesting!
When we were talking before, one of your big goals was to reconnect as a family and that sounds like through reconnecting with them and actually spending time with them during the day instead of them being in classes you got to see them engaging with the world and learning. It’s so fascinating to see doing the lessons in the morning because that’s what they knew too, you guys were reasonably comfortable with that. But then having the afternoons and the times that you took off to be engaging with the world then you can see them learning and growing so much through all those other experiences like you said, just slowly the more formal stuff just dropped out because your time with them you could see them in action. Ddoes that make sense?
ROBYN: Yep, that’s it exactly. That’s totally it.
And I think another thing is—I know we can talk about this more later how it reflects each family as well—but, I think when you have a formal curriculum or lesson or however you want to define it or something resembles a traditional structure of school in the way of timed lessons and timed evaluations, what happens is, the one person who’s the ‘knowledge keeper,’ the gatekeeper, is kind of like, “Well, now I’m going to share this with you. It’s within this time, within this lesson.”
What happens a lot in traveling is you become so in the moment. Your senses are so stimulated, your sight, everything is new. You’re so there. With homeschooling/unschooling, the parent is the student. It’s no longer you are the top-down teacher. You’re learning those life lessons right along with them and there’s stuff that you don’t know. Maybe they know before you do! There’s so many things to learn that you are the student—you’re just as much in that with them. You’re not the only one, you’re not the gatekeeper of knowledge.
PAM: That’s a great way to put it because we come to see that there’s so much for us to learn, too. That’s one of the shifts, because conventionally, growing up, the adults know everything, and we can’t wait to be an adult where we’re going to be the one who knows and tells other people what to do etc. But that shift to realizing how big the world is, and it’s okay to not know things, and it’s okay to keep learning—that such a fun discovery along the way, isn’t it?
ROBYN: Yes it is and it’s humbling at times; quite humbling. When you step into it thinking that you should be the one knowing everything—no I just have so much to learn continuously everyday, every year! That’s right I don’t know everything at all! I’d have it all figured out if I did!
PAM: I love that! It’s so true, so, so true!
Before the call we were emailing, and you described unschooling as being more about the flow of your family and I really love that. I talk about flow quite a bit. I wanted to dive into that idea with you. I love hearing how people see it. I wanted to start with the challenge of defining unschooling. I’m sure people have heard me say it lots of times that unschooling looks different for different families. On one hand that’s totally great because now we’re open up, we’re not trying to follow some set of rules and it doesn’t have to look like it looks in somebody else’s family. But on the other hand that really doesn’t help a lot if your newer to the idea of unschooling and you’re just trying to figure out what it is and what does it look like, ‘Tell me, tell me!’ So I was curious what that part of the journey looked for you.
How did you get comfortable with the idea that it was going to be different for your family and how did you discover that?
ROBYN: I think it’s still continuous.
I think a big part is getting to know your kids, giving them the time to get to know themselves, getting to know yourself, as well as myself as parent. When you do that, you see what works and what doesn’t work. When you try things and if it works you can continue and if it doesn’t you can put it away and try something different—and I see that especially with my kids. As all kids are, their personalities are very different.
When you’re first starting out I think you think that things should be a certain way, if you follow a certain pattern or certain ideas then you’ll get the specific end result and it doesn’t happen because we’re all so different and our situations are different, even our environment creates two very different meanings for us where we happen to be at the time. So it was really trying to get comfortable with the flow, especially getting comfortable with myself and my ideas of what I thought things should be and why they should be a certain way and seeing that it doesn’t always have to be one way.
My daughter, for example, she likes things structured. That’s just her. Her room, she usually keeps it clean and organized the way she wants it to be organized. She has two calendars in her room. One is a regular calendar where she puts dates on there. She has sticky notes in her room that she puts on her mirror, some set things that she does like gymnastics, she sings (she has a voice lesson), and she coaches gymnastics now so her time schedules she puts on there herself to be reminded of. That’s what she likes, that’s her.
I think I had a workbook left over for my son—my son’s the opposite, I can talk about him after. I bought this workbook in Korea at this book store. It was a critical thinking/ problem solving workbook that I bought for my son and he had never really taken an interest in it but I kept it and my daughter had taken it out one day and she loved it. She was all over it. I tried to look for more for her, the kind where they give you a problem like, “There are Joey, Katie, Sam”, six kids that live in a neighborhood and they give certain descriptions but then you have to figure out which house they live in by their descriptions and they leave stuff out, those kinds of things. It was a lot of those that she loved to do and so she was doing stuff like that.
Then she wanted me to get her another workbook, which I did, which was more like reading and writing and math and stuff like that. At first I was like, “Oh this isn’t unschooling. This is really school-y”. She would finish it. She would sometimes want me to sit with her and do it and that was great. We would sit together or sometimes she would take it and just work on it in her room or whenever she wanted to and she would want me to get her another one. For a while I kind of avoided actually getting her stuff like that because I thought maybe this isn’t okay in the unschooling world. This isn’t really following how unschooling should be because it’s so traditional.
Then I started to question, ‘Is this me putting it on her? Is this an expectation that maybe she’s just happy to engage in because she thinks I’ll be happy with it?’ So, I wanted to step back on that and see if that was really the case as well because a big thing for my husband and I is that our kids are self-directed learning, that they are responsible for their learning, their personal motivations, that they are able to learn on their own, that they don’t need us to govern them in their learning. Then I realized that no, this is just something she really wants to do. She just enjoys it. It’s not like she has to do it all the time where I say you have to do it this time. When she has the time, she’ll do it. That was something that was different.
Come to think of it (she’s done her other ones) I have to get her something new. But when she finishes them she’s like, ‘I’m done’. She puts it away and she never opens it again. She’ll do all the pages and she’ll do it here and there. She won’t go from start to finish so, do the back page or a middle. She’s like whatever catches her interest and then it’s over. And she’s happy if I throw it away kind of thing but then she’ll want to try something new. Just kind of like those lessons #one—what’s my expectation, what’s not, what’s something that they want to do.
Again, I guess, in some ways it’s my expectations again. I thought I had this expectation of unschooling that had to be a certain way when it didn’t. It really is what works for our kids and our family. My son is very active. He likes to move and roll around, he loves to read, loves outdoors, loves fishing, wildlife and hunting with the new and best canada goose call. He’ll be out building a lean-to cutting branches down, carving them up and building a little tent. He’s just a different style of learner. All of that’s totally okay. We try and support what they want to do.
PAM: I really love that Robyn, and I love your observation that it’s really all about the expectations, bringing all the stuff up. I love that you questioned yourself, “Is her interest a reaction to maybe an expectation that she’s feeling from me?”
ROBYN: It happens, totally.
PAM: It could be the same with your son. If your expectation of unschooling was that it looked like the stuff that he was choosing to do, if he felt that he would feel like he would need to keep choosing that. So, it goes both ways. It’s all about figuring out how our expectations are getting in the way of maybe our relationships or the way we’re seeing things. Really, just digging in and getting to know who we are. The expectations of who we think we should be, us and our children as adults, and our children and really discovering who we are instead and how we like to relate to each other instead and that’s where you start to see the flow, isn’t it?
ROBYN: It is, it is.
And you know, it’s not something that either started and ended, it’s something that’s continuous, especially as they grow and reach different ages. My son is twelve and my daughter is nine now, so their interests change and what they encounter is different, so new expectations are coming up for me. I won’t even say new—OLD beliefs are resurfacing as their ages change. I find it’s constant.
That’s one of the things I thought, “Okay, we’re six years in, I have it all figured out! Our flow will be amazing every single day, perfect!” and all this sort of stuff. No, now it’s a whole new stage. And especially as we change, too. I’m getting involved in different things and that brings a different mix into it and it’s like, “Okay, what’s still working, what’s not working, what do we need to adjust?” so it’s an ongoing process.
PAM: Absolutely! It’s life and we’re always growing and changing. That’s always the way—you think you finally got it figured out and then somebody grows, darn it! Haha! My interest changes, their interest changes, there’s always some little something that comes up. That’s another big one. As your oldest starts hitting different ages and different milestones, like you said, that’s when old expectations resurface. We haven’t really had to think about them up to this point because we didn’t have a 16-year-old, or an 18-year-old, or whatever. And once they start getting closer to these ages we have more stuff that comes up for us to work through. You dig into unschooling and you learn about it but, like you said, you’re always learning. There’s always something.
ROBYN: It’s an ongoing journey.
PAM: I was just looking at the next question and how nicely that leads into that!
That’s something I find so fascinating, how the flow of our days changes over time. So, even if it’s not these big things that come popping up for us that we’re forced to process through, like we were saying, even different activities, different interests, waxing/ waning. Just life in general. Things are always coming up. When I was writing this question I was researching river flows because I remember being fascinated a few years ago with the life of a river and how young rivers are straight and as they age they start to meander because the slope is worn and it’s not as steep and things get in the way. There was such a great metaphor for life too, I thought.
I wanted to bring that up and see if that was your experience, if you had any stories to share around that?
ROBYN: I actually think that’s a perfect metaphor because, interestingly enough, I had a conversation with my mother-in-law the other morning and she said to me—because I have a few creative projects on the go and I’ve been doing some public board work in the community and things like that too, so I’m working part time from home. But, also, sometimes I have to go out for meetings and stuff. It started last year. So, last year was quite a transition year for us and I was quite busy. She said, “This year doesn’t seem as busy for you. You don’t seem as busy as you were. Has your work slowed down? What’s going on?”
I realized it was an interesting question to make and then I realized what happened was, after the year was done last year, as a family, we really decided that for this coming year what we wanted to do was slow down. We wanted to spend more time at home. My kids are very busy because they do a lot of sports, a lot of activities in the community. We live out of town, about 25 minutes out of the closest town. They had sports six days a week last year, you have travel for competition and tournaments, stuff like that. It was a lot. Then on top of my work that I was doing, we all just decided we needed to slow down and this was the year to step back.
My work is still the same but because we were conscious of what our family needed we decided to just organize things differently. Make sure we had set days where we don’t go anywhere, where there are home days. Things were dropped from our schedule, to slow down, have a bit of a slow down time.
I thought about the rivers because sometimes rivers are rushing. There’s extra rain, especially in Canada here with the snow melt. You have big snow winters then those rivers that sometimes seemed almost dry and low the year before all of a sudden raging and going quickly, and taking things with them, running high. In some ways I kind of felt like that was our last year.
And now we tried to bring a bit of a dry season. Our river is slowing down and it’s not taking as many things with it! That’s our flow starting this year, being better organized and keeping that in mind and conscious of what we want to do. Therefore, we’ve scheduled things differently and it seems like our mindset, our shift is there as well. We want to have room for conversation, which I think is a big part of our learning experience is our conversation with each other and as a family with the kids. It’s a huge part of the enrichment of their learning and our learning. When we’re busy and we’re not home, we’re not together, those conversations can’t happen. It was important for us to reevaluate. It was one of our priorities to get back to that.
That’s how our river is flowing now and we’re really happy with it. It’s very different from the way it was flowing last year and that’s totally okay because it also created new things for us. It created new grooves when the water was rushing. It took some things away that we didn’t need anymore. Sometimes those pebbles and trees get uprooted that didn’t really need to be there and now it’s kind of a fresh slope. It leaves room for other things.
PAM: Yeah, it makes a new turn because stuff gets deposited.
ROBYN: Yeah, that’s exactly it.
PAM: I love that! I’m sure everybody was happy with the stuff that they were doing last year but then you guys noticed and you took stock, you had conversations about it. That’s another really big thing with the processing, just through being around each other and having time for those conversations. That was something that surprised me as the kids got a bit older was how much kind of down time or open time or unscheduled time that they wanted because you can’t say, “Okay, now it’s conversation time. Everybody sit down!” Haha!
ROBYN: And its ten o’clock! “Here’s your chair, there’s my chair!”
PAM: The conversations are amazing when you both end up in the kitchen making a cup of tea or a sandwich or something and things come up, kind of giving them just the space to blossom a little bit. Conversations find themselves.
ROBYN: Or even watching a movie. We actually had no power yesterday because it was a scheduled power outage. Living in the country that happens. My kids pulled out a DVD and I had to run into town and came back and they were watching “The Incredibles” on DVD. I didn’t know we still had it on DVD. There was still some battery in the computer so they were snuggled on the couch, under blankets watching that and I joined them. We had the DVDs still from “Planet Earth” so we pulled those out and watched that. All new conversations started because we watched “deserts” and they were talking about Mongolia and how hard it is to film the camels there. That leads to whole other conversations that lasted well into the evening. That’s what you said, allowing that space, right?
PAM: This is so interesting—watching a movie like “The Incredibles” or the documentaries but watching them a few years later when we’re all different people, we make different connections with them each time. It’s always interesting conversation, isn’t it?
ROBYN: Yes it is and it’s funny that you say that, too, because that was one of the conversations, “How old was this actually?” The realization that this isn’t as current as we thought it was. “So, is it still like that right now?” Yeah, interesting. They saw it from a different set of eyes.
PAM: Yeah, that’s such a great point.
I’m curious what your favorite thing about the flow of your unschooling days is right now?
ROBYN: I don’t know. I think I have a different favorite thing depending on the day.
Before we had snow it was nice fall weather, it was going outside with the leaves turning, just walking around outside in the yard with all the animals, snuggling with the cats and stuff like that. Now that it’s getting cooler its hunkering down and being inside. The kids are cooking and baking more. I find we’re inside more, enjoying their treats. The kids made dinner last night, which was pretty nice, just being the helper to them. Things like that. Doing things together.
It’s also giving room for them, because it’s a bit slower, to spend more time with friends. That’s what my daughter and I were talking about before I came on. She’s going to her friend’s next weekend for a sleepover. Being able to connect with some friends. We were a little bit busy last year that doing things like that has been great, reconnecting with other relationships outside the family has been really good. It’s been really important.
PAM: That’s awesome it’s fun to see…I guess “flow” is a good word, how our connections can flow as well. Not just our days but our connections with other people, with our interests, and with the seasons things can flow that way too.
As I mentioned before, you host the podcast, Honey, I’m Homeschooling the Kids. I would love to hear the story behind that project! How did that come about?
ROBYN: Well that project was a couple of years in the making.
It first started when we were homeschooling. We were living in Jamaica, it’s a place that we were. You know how you have questions that come up, right? Things happen in your life and it’s like, “Does this happen for everybody? Should I be thinking this? Why am I thinking this? I would like some ideas on different things.” It was hard for me to find community to connect with and to get answers or to talk things through. We were talking about tech earlier that it moves so quickly, but only six years ago—there’s been a lot of changes in six years. Seems like when I first started there weren’t as many blogs on home education and unschooling, or podcasts and books like there are now. I was searching and having a hard time finding things. I thought, ‘What are some ways I can better connect with a community?’
When we moved to Korea we were very fortunate because we ended up making some great friends with some other homeschooling families. There were a few of us that were extremely close and our kids were friends we did a lot of things together. Having that community from not having any community in Jamaica—homeschooling community—made a big difference. Each of us would comment, we were all in the right place at the right time. We still have some strong relationships even though many of us have moved to other countries. Then coming to Canada I live in the north. For anyone that’s familiar with Canada most of the population lives within two hours of the US border.
PAM: I do! Haha.
ROBYN: Pam knows, she understands! Once you get farther north up to certain point, it becomes quite sparsely populated. I’m from Edmonton, which is our closest major center. I’m a six-hour drive by car. There’s a strong community here. There are many families that are home educating here but we’re just not all close together, we’re quite spread out.
So, it was one of those things where I love listening to podcasts. I would say to my husband, “Oh, I wish there were more podcasts for homeschooling. I’m searching, and I want more.”
And his reaction is, “Well why don’t you start one? I think you should start one.”
I was like, “I’d never be able to do that.” Those doubts you have in the beginning.
I first started connecting with a friend who lives in Florida and we did some researching and planned to start one together and then things happened. I set that intention a long time ago and the seed was growing and growing and built. So a year ago I fully launched it.
It’s to help others, but really it was to help myself to connect more with community. I love, love, love hearing about other’s journeys and experiences. That’s one of the reasons why I love traveling because it’s different perspectives, different ways people live and their ideas and how it can be so different from mine yet so similar in so many ways. I just love that and I wanted more of that.
That’s how, Honey, I’m Homeschooling the Kids got started. And it’s still going and it’s a lot of fun!
PAM: I totally connect with you. I just love talking to other people and hearing their stories, hearing how they came to it, hearing how they see it through their lens. It’s fascinating stuff. And foundationally, like you said, there are so many connections and similarities within the foundation, within being human. Yet every call, every person’s experience is different. Like we were saying unschooling looks different for everyone. Everyone of us is a unique person a unique collection of experiences and strengths and weaknesses and personality and everything and how we are in the world is different and it’s so fascinating, isn’t it?
ROBYN: It is, it is so very fascinating.
It’s wonderful because now there’s so much more offered and available, which I think is fantastic and I hope it continues to grow. But it is really cool hearing from people in Sri Lanka or Malaysia or some of my old friends that are in Korea or the United States, talking to others and England. ‘It’s really different for you guys, this is fascinating.’
At the same time there’s this common thread that we’re all human beings, we all have our fears and desires, our want of connection, and our certain beliefs that carry throughout that we want for our families or for our kids. It is really, really fascinating. I love it.
I think that’s what is so beautiful about life. It’s always that learning experience. I look at it as I’m a student and I tell my kids that, too. Everything I do, I’m the student as well. Even with the podcast, learning about the technical aspect of it but again connecting with other people and their stories. I’m the student. I learn something new from every single person I talk to. Always. There’s always something new that I learn and take away.
PAM: Exactly! I love that. There’s always some new connection, some new way of looking at something, a new piece falls into place every single time because it’s just so fun to chat about, isn’t it?
ROBYN: It completely is.
PAM: I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me, Robyn. It was really fun and I appreciate it, thank you!
ROBYN: You’re always awesome, Pam. Thank you. I love chatting with you.
PAM: I know, it’s so fun! Thank you!
Before we go, where’s the best place for people to connect with you online and find your podcast?
ROBYN: iTunes is always the best way: Honey, I’m Homeschooling the Kids. You can connect with me there if you want to listen to the podcast. I’m on Google Play and Stitcher.
I have the website as well, imhomeschooling.com.
You can find my email on there which is Robyn at imhomeschooling dot com.
You can also follow me on Instagram, honeyI’mhomeschoolingthekids or if you want to follow our personal unschooling journey, I really document a lot of that on Instagram and my personal page is called unschoolingrobyn. You can follow me on Instagram there.
We have a Facebook page for Honey I’m Homeschooling the Kids, and I have my personal Facebook page, but really Instagram is probably the best way or the website if you want to email me or connect with me you can definitely do so there.
PAM: That is awesome, and I will have links to all that stuff in the show notes for people.
Thanks so much Robyn, have a great day!
ROBYN: Thanks. You, too. We’ll talk soon.