[Music] Welcome to the Loved Called Gifted podcast. This is your place to come for musings about spirituality, identity and purpose. I'm your host, Catherine Cowell.

C: So for this episode, I'm really delighted to be joined by Heidi Steele of Live Play Learn. Do you want to introduce yourself, Heidi?

H: Hi there. Yeah, my name is Heidi Steele. I am a lot of things, but for the context of this, I am an unschooling parent, which we're going to talk a little bit more about in a minute. And I have four children who are currently aged 17, 16, 13 and 10. And I live at home with them and my husband and I run a support group for unschooling parents at LivePlayLearn.org.

C: Fantastic. So let's start at the beginning then. What is unschooling for people who haven't heard of it?

H: Yeah. I mean, it's not something that you can describe in one podcast episode, but at the very, very foundation of it all, it's an educational philosophy. So it focuses on how we as humans learn.

And families who are home educating their children - one of the ways you can do that is unschooling. And it relies heavily on the idea that children or humans are born with a natural ability to learn and parents provide the environment in which that can happen for their own individual children, because everybody is different and everybody kind of responds differently to different things and needs different things in place. And unschooling allows you to do that, to provide something that's individualized for your children within the context of your family. And so they can learn and be kind of happy and engaged in lots of things that we maybe don't always see from children who are in the education system. Which is a very sad reality.

For context, I'm a qualified teacher and I taught in the education system in primary schools, particularly early years for 14 years before my own children became compulsory school age. And it highly influenced my decision to not send them to school.

C: Yeah. So that's really interesting. So what was it about your experience as a teacher that influenced you to not want to send your kids to school?

H: I think it's quite hard to pin it down to just one thing. But like I said, I was early years trained. So lots of the academic study that I did to teach three, four, five and six year olds, was based around child development, how children play, and how they learn through their play and the experiences they gain through their play, information on the neuroscience and how that works and how our brain develops and all these things are really good for us with this physical activity that children do.
But increasingly within schools, maybe school dependent, but the overall feeling was that children shouldn't be playing and children should be sitting down and learning.
And I thought, I don't want this for my own children. They haven't been to nursery and so they have spent four years playing, being together, going to groups, climbing trees, rolling around in grass, and just being children.

And my eldest in particular was very emotionally attached to me. And I did think the idea that him being away from me for six hours a day might be difficult for him. I didn't have any concerns about him academically as such. And my second child, I absolutely knew he would enter school and he would be labelled a naughty child within the first day, maybe, or the week.
And I didn't want that to be his experience. I thought that's, and that wasn't how I saw him. And I didn't want that to be how he saw himself.
And so a combination of those things really contributed to initially saying, "it's not right, right now". And now they're, as I said, my eldest is now 17 and he's never been to school.

C: So what was it that had drawn you to teaching in the first place?

H: I was thinking about this today, actually, in the context of how young we asked children to kind of make a choice about their future, like what do you want to do and what do you want to be? And for me, I did some work experience at the primary school that I had attended as a child. And there were two members of staff there who said to me, "You'd be really good at this." And I did really enjoy it. And I had always liked hanging out with the younger children and playing and painting or playdoh or whatever it is they were doing. I was quite drawn to carrying the baby on my hip, or playing skipping or whatever.
And I thought, "Okay, I'll do that. I'll do that." And it just so happened that I found it really fascinating. I found all that stuff that I was just telling you about, how children learn and child development. And I found that endlessly fascinating. And that was 20 lots of years ago. And that's the thing that I still find fascinating, which is why I do what I do.
I now talk about how children learn naturally. And I provide that information and support for other parents who are looking to do something a bit different and haven't heard those things or had experiences of those things before. So I share my life experience and my lived experience and I share the knowledge that I have with them.

C: Yeah. So it really sounds like part of what happened is that you, in your teacher training, you would talk all of this stuff that you were really fascinated by. And then you get a job as a teacher and you find yourself in an environment where you can't actually be and be with the children in the way that all of your knowledge is told you will work best for them.

H: Yeah. Those placements were few and far between. There's a real disconnect between what most teachers know, like I said from their training, about how children learn and what's expected within the school environment in terms of the curriculum content and also how to manage that when you have 30 children with you as well. Kind of the practical application of that is a massive, massive disconnect. I first started teaching well over 20 years ago, but a real growing, growing lack of people and lack of people who now really understand those things because of how dramatically and drastically things have changed in the education system.

Because children aren't allowed to play, then people don't have the experience of how that then works, how children learn, how children develop, how they grow naturally. We now think we have to intervene and overly intervene so that we can make sure they know how to do what I said. A growing number of people don't have that experience.
It's kind of self-perpetuating.

C: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So you escaped from the education system.

H: I like that. Yes, I did.

C: So what was that like once you've made the decision? Was that fairly easy? Have there been challenges as an unschooling family?

H: Yeah. It's an interesting journey because I thought it'd be really easy. I thought, "I know what I'm doing." Theoretically, I knew what I was doing. I had a lot of experience working in placements where children played, and I was fairly confident about all of those things. Then the challenges started coming.

One of the challenges, as I mentioned, my second son, he wasn't very compliant. I mean, that's sort of an understatement, if I'm honest. Exactly.

But also, I had intentionally decided that we weren't going to use punishment and rewards in our family, and that the children were going to be supported in the choices that they made around what they wanted to do, the things they wanted to explore. That actually became quite challenging because my children weren't conditioned to, "I'm going to put 'behave' in quotation marks." They weren't conditioned to behave. They questioned everything.
If I asked them to do something, they weren't immediately compliant. They'd be like, "Why?" "Well I want to do it later." Or "Well, I'm never doing that." So that was something that I had to work through myself. How was this going to work? Where is the line between them needing to listen and maybe follow an instruction, maybe for their safety, that sort of thing?
How do we work these things out? That was quite a challenge for me personally.

I had other challenges in the same way that we didn't use a curriculum, and we didn't introduce kind of workbooks, anything basically that looked like school. We didn't have a timetable. We had plans every week. Some people think when I say I don't have a timetable that they just weren't micro-managed. But we did have plans in the diary of things we were going to do and places we were going to go and people we were going to see.
But one of the challenges was that my children didn't learn to read at the age of five.

And as someone who has - I've taunted it up - I've taught over a thousand children to read. That was then quite difficult for me to see that play out and to hold on to the idea that when they're ready and they're able and they have an interest in it and a need, that will come together and it will happen. And it did, but I found that quite tricky within myself to resist the urge to actively teach them. And I say resist the urge, I mean I tried several times because I thought, "Oh, I'm going to have to do something. I've got to do something." And like I said, my children went, "I'm not interested in that. What are you doing?" And they didn't maybe articulate it in that way, but they might have just said no or kind of topped it off and done something else and be like, "Well, no. That's not happening." They made themselves known even though they didn't say it with words. Do it that way.

C: So taking a step back, what were the values and the principles that were guiding you at that point when you made the decision that you were not going to parent with rewards and consequences?

H: So initially there was a lot there about valuing them as individuals and really trusting in the idea that they would when they wanted to and when they needed to and developmentally able to come to those things in their own time. At the time, I didn't understand, I didn't use this phrase, but this is the phrase I use now, but to radically accept who they are as individuals and to be their partner in terms of relationship. Me and my husband wanted to be people that our children could see as their partner, people that were going to support them, people who were on their side. Yeah, that radical acceptance, that partnership with our children.
Rather than what I saw as the power dynamic of us having power over them and using that power for what parents think are right for their children, but actually we wanted to have our children actively involved in those decisions and listen to them and respect their voice. That's quite a lot to start with, isn't it?

C: Was that because that's something that you had seen modelled or were you moving away from something that you didn't like? Because it's very counter-cultural, isn't it?

H: It's very counter-cultural. I would say after many years of reflection, I can see how I was actively moving away from something that I had experienced and I didn't want to repeat for my own children.
At the time, I would have said I watched something on the TV and thought, "Hmm, that looks interesting." So it started for us really when they were babies with baby-wearing, co-sleeping. I became a stay-at-home mum. I did go back to work part-time two days a week, but my mum came and looked after the children, so we didn't outsource that to childcare. So there was this meeting of an educational idea that matched our parenting approach as well. All these threads came together and we ended up here and schooling.

C: Yes. And then from what you're saying, in that journey, there was obviously those internal cultural norms that we carry that gave you moments of eek. I guess this could have worked. Should I teach them to learn?

H: I think we've managed to push all of those ideas to their very limit. Or maybe not to their very limit, but further than I anticipated they would go. So I started breastfeeding with my eldest. I tandem fed. I never would have imagined that I was... I mean, I didn't even know about tandem feeding when I made the decision to breastfeed.

C: So what is tandem feeding?

H: So my boys are 20 months apart, so I was breastfeeding both of them. I was going to say at the same time, I never literally did it at the same time. There are people that can and do, but I was breastfeeding a 20 month old and a newborn. Yes, I did that. And we ended up with my youngest.
I don't even know if there's a name for it. Long-term breastfeeding. She stopped breastfeeding when she was seven. And that's what I mean. I'm going to say we've really took these ideas on board and probably when we did so, I didn't see how far we were going to take those ideas.

It didn't cross my mind when we started co-sleeping with my eldest when he was born. And then his brother came in to co-sleep and they eventually moved out and then his sisters came in. And we still now share a room with my younger two and they are now 10. And my 13 year old still pops in most nights at some point and calls in for a cuddle. So I never anticipated we'd still be co-sleeping with children 17 years after I initially started.
It's a long time.

C: It is quite a long time.
But it's really interesting because there's a lot of hugely good attachment stuff in there, isn't there? You know, that your children have had that responsive attachment focused relationship focused parenting all the way through.


H:Yeah.
And so my 17 year old now will say, and he used to say a lot when he was kind of six or seven and then it went quiet for a bit, but now he will still say the best thing about home education is that he got to spend so much time with his family.
And that's kind of worth gold to me because it speaks of that attachment that you're talking about and that kind of connection that we have as a family still being really valuable.

C: Yeah.

H: Which it is even at 17 as it is at five, as hopefully it will still be in 10 years time.

C: Yeah. One of the things that it strikes me as you're talking as a parent, you gave up the idea of control fairly early and quite a lot of parenting is based around trying to maintain the level of control. Looking back now, sort of 17 years later, is there anything about that that you kind of think, oh, maybe we should have been a bit more in charge?

H: No, absolutely not. In fact now, so I've also got three teenagers in the house, 13, 16 and 17. Now as teenagers, they actively ask my opinion on things. I have heard rumors that that's not normal.
That doesn't mean that they always take my advice. It doesn't mean they always do the thing that I would recommend. It doesn't mean that they don't get things monumentously wrong. But my opinion is part of their consideration. And when they do get things wrong, which I'm going to also mention, we all get things wrong as human beings, not just teenagers. I know they have a higher chance of it because their neurology is such that risk taking is a thing in their teenage years. But when they do get things wrong, they don't run away in eyes from me and my husband. Like we are their first port of call to say, I need help. This has happened. And coming back to that relationship thing that speaks of all the doubts that we maybe had when they were younger. Like it was crazy.

Four children under the age of eight was a little bit chaotic. And we were not the Von Trapp family. They didn't skip along in a line. So there were moments where I thought, oh, maybe this would just be easier if they did.

But actually now, I think we're seeing some really positive impact, really focusing on relationship first, relationship first, relationship first.

C: Yes, yeah, yeah. Very courageous. And I'm imagining that there may well have been times where you really felt that needing to stick with it and keep your nerve.

H: Yeah, certainly when I was out in public, and maybe my child wasn't so happy, expressing their unhappiness. You know, sometimes the way that all children do, meltdowns in the supermarket and all that stuff, not unfamiliar stories, but certainly felt, as I think a lot of parents do actually, very under the microscope and that happens. And my or mine and my husband's direct response not being to kind of yell at our children or, I don't know, withdraw their treat, which I recognise now that might have been my own perception of what others were thinking. You don't know what others are thinking, do you? You know, like when I'm in the supermarket now and I see a child having a bit of a cry, I think of that poor parent, they're probably, they're thinking, everyone's judging me and this is really awful. And actually, I think most of us are probably standing there going, we've been there, you know, we know where you're at. So yes, there were those sort of moments, moments maybe with family and friends who didn't really understand what we were doing or why. Even other families in the home education community, because like I said, you know, you can choose how you do it.

So other families being a little bit curious about what's going on over there with that family, because mine are all on track, sat down, doing the thing. What are your children doing? Because my children are watching your children and wondering why they can't do that. Could you not get your children to sit down, please? "No", that can happen.

So yeah, like kind of lots of little scenarios here and there that you realize that this isn't standard, varying degrees as people from being interested to really disapproving of what's going on.

C: How have you managed to kind of hold yourself and hold to your principles in those moments of disapproval? Because internally it can be really tough.

H: It is really tough internally. It's really tough.
I would say it would depend, and this is something I learned to do. This is something I very consciously learned to do and something I learned from the wider home education community. These are messages we kind of give to each other every day or when people ask, but very much dependent on who it is that is questioning you. And you know, there's a difference between family members who are actively involved in your life and how you respond to them and have conversations with them to the person behind you in the queue in the supermarket.
It's a very different way of managing those and being actually able to say, okay, actually, do you know what? It doesn't matter what you think because you're a stranger in the street to, okay, I value your opinion, but at the same time, this is my family and my decision.
And people who are genuinely interested, I'll have lots of chats with them and that's okay. And sometimes family that's ongoing over years and years and years, just kind of being able to compartmentalise that and say, actually, it doesn't matter what you think. Thank you for your interest.
And of course you don't actually have to engage in conversations with everybody who asks, you know, which again, I think is something that we as humans do. Somebody asks the question, I need to talk to this person. I need to tell them all about this wonderful thing that is unschoolling, but you already know that they're not thinking that. They're already thinking, this is horrible, this is an academic crisis. Your child is going to fail in life. They bring that void to it. No amount of you being glowing is actually going to help. So yeah, being able to turn the conversation around, ask them something about themselves. People like to talk about themselves, move the conversation on.
But for myself, recognising how hard some of those conversations can be, either sharing with the community. So, you know, we've got friends and other unschooling families around us, both locally and nationally. So being able to share that experience with them and get support from them, or even just giving yourself time to process that in a way that suits you. Lie down in a dark room or go have a bath or take a walk and just allow yourself to acknowledge that that was a difficult conversation or a difficult encounter and process that.

C: Yeah. How has it changed you this journey?

H: That is a massive question, isn't it? I couldn't foresee how this would change me as a person.

I don't even think I can put that into, I mean, that's a book. That's like my memoir or something. How has this changed me as a person? I think I have become more compassionate with myself. I think I've become more gracious towards myself. Maybe also compassionate and gracious towards other people as well, actually. I think I have a greater understanding of who I am, of valuing myself, of healing. There's been a lot of healing and that has been part of the effect that unschooling has had on me personally.

C: Yeah, you used the words radical acceptance, so radical acceptance for something that you were wanting to offer to your children. And I suppose what I was wondering is that's something which we don't generally offer one another, not really. I'm imagining that as you offer that radical acceptance to your children, you learn to give it back to yourself.

H: Yeah, so there's this idea that I call unschooling ourselves, which is we learn about unschooling, we learn about how children learn and who children are and how to value them and nurture them for the wonderful human beings that they are. And then as we do that more and more, what tends to happen is this disconnect between, "Oh, hang on a minute. If I'm allowing my child and providing space for my child to explore this hobby, what about that hobby that I had that I really liked?" And then you kind of go, "Well, maybe I'll make myself a little space for that. Or maybe I'll just buy a book." And you start to apply those principles of unschooling to yourself. And then like you say, it extends beyond the practicalities, beyond, "I want to do a hobby I'm interested in," or "I want to spend my weekend doing things I actually enjoy instead of things that everybody thinks I should be enjoying." And then questioning. I've actually known some parents to entirely change their careers off the back of unschooling, but then it becomes these other things, this magical acceptance.

Or if we apply this idea that my child is doing the best they can, okay, they're not being naughty, they're not being deliberately disruptive, they're actually doing the best they can. Well, maybe when I have deep feelings about things, I don't necessarily need to feel ashamed about those. Maybe I need to accept I'm doing the best I can. And maybe there's other things going on. We might say things about our children, like their behaviors actually trying to tell us something. It's telling us that they're distressed. It's telling us that they don't like the temperature or the sound or the activity or maybe even the people we're with. They're trying to tell us something. Well, maybe my emotions and my big feelings are trying to tell me something.

So we kind of call that unschooling ourselves, applying those unschooling principles and ideas to ourselves as adults. And that is where that has this impact of changing us and seeing ourselves through a slightly different lens than maybe we have been brought up with, maybe in our families, maybe through our childhood, maybe culturally.

C: Yeah.

H: Yeah. And that whole process has definitely changed who I am and how I care for myself and the things that I now know about myself.

C: Heidi, it sounds beautiful.

H: It is beautiful. It's also, like I said, really challenging and I don't want to put people off because that's a lot, isn't it? Hello, welcome to Unschooling. Your life is about to change massively.

You know, that is a reflection on the last 17 years and those changes have happened. Some of them have been really steep learning curves and happened really quickly. And others have just been the process of one step at a time. A little bit like I said, when we made the decision, we're going to home educate our children. This is what we're going to do. This is the decision we're making for now, when my child is four years old.
And then we kept doing what was working. One thing at a time. And here we are all these years later with this beautiful life experience and happy, thriving young people.

C: Yeah.

H: One step at a time. Yeah.

C: Well, I'm guessing you would have given up and sent them all back to school if this hadn't worked because I mean, you wouldn't keep kind of slogging away.
I know that amongst your children you do have some additional needs.

H: I do.

C: Yes. Did you know that when you started this?

H: No. No. We were reflecting on this, me and my husband, the other day and saying, wow, could you imagine if, and then, you know, we'd name one of our children, went to school, what do we think that would look like? And in every case we determined that we would probably would have ended up home educating anyway. Because I don't think any of them would have fit the educational system. And it would have been very similar to a lot of the stories I hear about children who tried school or didn't know about home education and went to school. And then particularly those with special needs finding their way to home educating and many of them finding their way to unschooling because like I said, it has this beautiful capacity to really respond to your individual child.
So a lot of families have got children with special needs find their way to unschooling. I absolutely cannot see how any of my children would have fit into that model and into that, into that place.

So yes, we do have a very heavy mix of mostly like neurological diagnosis, neurodivergent diagnosis, quite mixed between all of them. And then some kind of comorbid things that go along side those as well. And some physical and medical conditions thrown into the pot.

So yeah, so actually just on that front, we have quite a lot going on. Sometimes I wonder how we would fit school in, what was kind of managing some of the day to day requirements of meeting those, you know, kind of medical needs and the appointments and all that sort of stuff that comes with it as well.
We do manage to do quite a fair bit and fit in a lot of rest and recovery because some of my children need a lot of processing time. Some of them physically are unable to, or they're physically able to do things for like an hour or two, but then that has an impact where they need to rest for extended periods of time. So yeah, so like I said, unschooling allows for them to do that actually to say, I can't power through for six hours, I can do an hour and then I need to take an extended break and then I'll come back to it in my own time.
Makes sense and it suits us.
But no, I didn't have any idea when we made the decision. Although like I said, my second child was never compliant, so I kind of, I should have, I should have had an idea, but I didn't recognise it at the time.

C: Yes, I think neurodiversity sometimes comes with a level of not compliance, which can be a bit breathtaking.

H: Yeah, certainly probably the thing that when I say, you know, we've taken these ideas and gone, oh yes, I'd love my children to learn through play, for example. And then we've taken that idea and then, you know, my children with their needs have kind of run even further with that idea than I ever thought possible.

C: Yeah. Yeah. So tell me about Live Play Men.

H: It started, now here's the thing, and here's the really lovely thing. It started because I spoke to a friend and we were having a chat and somehow I managed to verbalise in that conversation that I wanted to write a book and she was brilliant. And we talked about lots of things, pie in the sky stuff, right down to like the nitty gritty of how maybe this was going to happen. And one of the things that came out of it was she said, well, if you're going to write a book, maybe you should be in the habit of writing regularly. And I'd always written for myself, like journals and bits and bobs here and there, but never publicly. But I set up my Facebook page, Live Play Learn. That was the first thing I did so that I had somewhere to write and share words about unschooling. And that is how that was born.
That was at the beginning of 2020. If people want to find me there, they can.

I have a website, liveplaylearn.org. And so I started writing a lot about unschooling and sharing that. And it's grown from there. I now have a membership, the Unschooling Village Hub, which supports the families who are unschooling and provides information.
We have like social groups. I do some active coaching there with the members. And that's a beautiful growing space. And hopefully at some point in the next 12 months, maybe, I will actually have a published book, which is why this is a beautiful story. It hasn't taken me five years to write a book. It has just been one of those beautiful things that's just unfolded when the time was right. And that's actively in the process of being compiled as we speak and will be published within the next year.
And I also post my own podcast, which is actually called Unschooling Conversations, where I speak to other lovely families and advocates for unschooling about all different aspects from how the children socialise and what does it look like when our children play beyond the age of five, because that's something we're not familiar with. And I've had some beautiful guests on there. The lovely Naomi Fisher has come on a couple of times to talk about the effects of nurturing an environment on our children and other people, such as Peter Gray, who wrote a book called Free to Learn, which is based on anthropological approaches to parenting and teaching and learning.
So yeah, it's been a heady ride, lots of things going on and evolving from its starting point. And now speak at conferences as well throughout the year and get invited to beautiful podcasts such as your own.

C: Yes, yes, it's been a really good conversation. So your podcast is Unschooling Conversations.

H: Yes. That's right.

C: So people look up Unschooling Conversations, they will be able to find you.

H: Yep.

C: And then your website is liveplaylearn.org.

H: And if you go there, I have loads of free resources from like right at the beginnings, like you've never unschooled, you've never even heard of it, like what is this? This sounds fascinating. I'd like to know a little bit more right from that up to if you're an active unschooler, and it's something you've been doing for a while, but you want to maybe reach out and have more community or you want to have some deeper conversations about some of the unschooling things that are happening in your home. I have resources on the website liveplaylearn.org.

C: Brilliant. That sounds really, really good. I'm wondering if there's anything else, Heidi, that you feel it's important to say or that you kind of have hanging around in your mind to talk about.

H: I would say that schooling is a really beautiful thing. And being able to be with my children, and we're particularly fortunate we have a widespread community of friends, it has been and is a pleasure for me to be with my children and spend this time together. And even after 17 years, it still doesn't feel like enough. Like I still want to be with my children more.

And I would say to anyone that was maybe thinking of doing it that the best way to do it is to actually do it.

Like I said, when you asked the question in the beginning, what is unschooling, you can sit and listen to all the podcasts and read the books, which I absolutely encourage you to do. But actually, until you start doing it and see it working, there will always be like a niggle about it when you actually start putting these principles into place and maybe start making decisions that are based on these ideas. And then you see how wonderful it is. That's the thing that kind of propels you on to keep making changes slowly, to keep moving forward.

And to remember, like you said, if it's not working out, and it turns out that it's not for you and your family, like you can always change your mind. It's not a yeah, you know, and that's the same with anything. Try it, you can always change your mind. Do something else instead, tweak it, go in a different direction.

C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, I mean, we've had a completely different sort of educational journey. But I think there have been points along the way where it's felt like there's been this huge pressure to make the right choice. And what I've discovered is that quite often what we thought was the right choice didn't work, we had to kind of revisit.
And hindsight, I would say exactly that you don't necessarily know.
But you're not making a decision forever.

H: Yeah.

C: We can always try something else.

H: Especially when it involves my children were so afraid wrong.

C: Yeah.

H: I'm gonna put that in quotation marks as well. "Wrong".
What better way for our children to kind of almost learn as well? Well, if it doesn't work, you change it.
If you kind of think, "Oh, this is me, I'll do that" And then you figure out actually, this isn't for me

C: Yeah

H: do something different.

C: Yeah,

H: that's ok.

C: That's wonderful.
Thank you so much for your time this evening. It's been really good to talk to you, Heidi.

H: It's been a pleasure.

C: So Unschooling Conversations podcast, which includes the marvellous Naomi Fisher, and I know she's very marvellous. We had her on this podcast.

H: Yes. It's kind of what I thought people might recognise her name. And I've had the pleasure of knowing Naomi for a really long time. So yeah, yes.

C: Yes. And she suggested we should chat, which was, which has been really brilliant.

Live Play Learn dot org is your kind of hub of all kinds of cool community stuff and information about schooling. And we will look out for your book, Heidi.

H: I'd love to let you know when it's finally published. Brilliant. It's been a pleasure.

C: And thank you for coming on.

[Music]