Unschoolery

Can You Unschool if Both Parents Work?

By Leo Babauta

Unschooling might be seen as a luxury -- usually at least one parent stays home to homeschool their younguns.

Eva was a teacher when we decided to homeschool our kids, but we made the conscious decision to scale back our lifestyles so that she could quit and focus on homeschooling. It was something we both wanted, and so we figured out a way to do live on one income.

We are lucky, I'll admit. But lots of other families could probably do this if they wanted. Others can't. So in this post, I thought I'd start a discussion of some of the options.

Here are some possibilities (not exhaustive obviously):

  1. Scale back your life and live on one income. This is possible for many people. It means giving up a car, and a bunch of luxuries, and maybe moving to a smaller home, and getting out of debt, and eating out less. But it's totally worth it.
  2. Scale back your life and have both parents be home part-time. It doesn't just have to be one parent who stays home. What if both could work part-time from home, or work less and be home more, and both parents split the homeshcooling duties?
  3. Work from home. This is more and more common, and even if you don't work from home now, you could possibly negotiate for this with your employer. If you work from home, you can unschool -- it just takes some flexibility. More on this below.
  4. Have the kids stay with relatives during work hours. There's no rule that says the kids have to be with parents all day long to unschool. They could be doing their own thing during work hours, at grandma's house, and then do fun things together with parents when the parents come home. This could work for a single parent too.
  5. Split time with a homeschooling relative or friend. If you know someone else who is homeschooling, what if the kids went to their house some days of the week, and their kids came to your house other days? This means you can go to work on the days the kids are at the other house. If you have three homeschooling families sharing time, this would be even more ideal.
  6. Hire a nanny/babysitter. Lots of people do this anyway, but if you had someone to watch the kids while you are at work, you could have them doing unschooling-like things during this time, or just playing, and then do fun things together when you come home.
  7. Let the kids go to school (traditional, or maybe even an alternative school), then unschool after school. There's nothing that says you can't combine regular school with unschooling. I guess this is what most people do anyway. But you could do it more explicitly, exploring unschooling ideas at home and even working with teachers to have them manifest your unschooling philosophy during school hours. This is a good way to transition as well, if you aren't sure about unschooling and want to give it a try.

So yes, you can unschool even if you're not able to stay home with the kids.

It's important to note that unschooling, theoretically, could take less of a parent's time than you might think. Now, this doesn't always work out in practice, but you could do it if you really wanted. Here's why.

Unschooling is about self-sufficiency. At least, that's one of the main things I like about it. It's about the kid taking control of his learning, and deciding what to do and how to do it, and letting the parent be a participant and facilitator when appropriate, but also letting the parent step back and just let the kid do his thing.

So, in practice, that often means the parent has to guide the child a lot at first, but try to let the child do stuff on his own as much as possible. Don't take over, don't direct, but instead prompt with questions, explore things together but encourage the child to lead the exploration. Challenge the child to do things on his own -- can he write a blog post alone (and then you can read and give feedback), can he create his own Youtube channel, can he watch videos to figure out how to do things?

In the beginning, this is a lot of work, encouraging self-sufficiency. But in the end, it saves a ton of time, because the child does things more and more on his own, and the parent can step back and do his own thing too. And more importantly, self-sufficiency is something everyone should learn, and the earlier the better.

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When I became a single mom people told me "you won't be able to continue to homeschool your son, you know" and I said "watch me" because I wasn't going to put him into an unhappy environment just because I needed free childcare. I took stock of my skills and found a creative way to work from home. It wasn't enough at first, so I supplemented my income by doing housekeeping once a week during which my son was with my retired parents who used that time for interesting and educational activities, or a day bonding over puzzles, playing ball, or enjoying a special movie. Now I have enough work that I can just work from home. I work mostly at night after he goes to bed or early in the morning before he wakes, so I still have my days free, but our routine is flexible on both our parts. He amuses himself if I do need a couple of hours to work during the day. The trick for me is to live within a modest income. Cutting back on wants allows me to cut back on how much I have to work. It's a simple formula but it works.

We started homeschooling our 16 year old this year because it became all about the grades and not about the learning, and he was hating school which was not the norm. We have taken a relaxed approach no tests, a few classes in coop, working in the family business, and assignments every week. I like the idea of unschooling; however, our son doesn't have a lot interests at this point other than video games and has trouble occupying his time.

He loves coop where they take four classes once a week and talk about them not a lot homework usually just some reading and homeschooling activities I think he has been more social in one semester than several years combined, and he is happier. We starting to let him choose classes more because we want him to direct what he's learning, but he seems more comfortable in a little more structured environment rather learning just on his own. We enrolled him an Engineering today webinar class and he loves it.

I am still having trouble with the basics - getting him to write, brush up on math skills, do a little of science (from a research based curriculum etc.)

My husband is great with sending educational video mostly very intensive research on a subject where they prove their theory, and my son loves those things. He does seem to interested about practical things - how to run the business, benefits, insurance, etc.

I am having a little trouble deschooling myself and how to present my basics mentioned above in a more fun way. Especially the writing..I have tried different things...write a review of something we've done on vacation and put it on our family web site, write about one the videos you watched this week, etc. No matter what I do he hates it, but I think it's really important that he communicates well which comes by doing it and looking to see how you can make it better. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Wow Kim! Wow.

I have a 15 year old that sounds very similar to your son. He is a sophomore at a traditional school here in SF. However, a shift is needed. I'm researching options now.

I know DECHOOLING will be so necessary, as my son is not self directed if it does not involve sport.

I wish you the best in finding ways to deschool, and discover complements for your families' needs.

Go Unschoolers!

  • I was so excited to see this post. I'd love to hear other family's stories. We started out very traditional, stay at home mom, unschooling the kids and now I work from home, my husband has a small collection of professions and my oldest daughter chose to attend public school this year. My second daughter wants to see what school is like so we are getting ready to start her in a local school that is very welcoming to unschoolers. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to balance everyone's current schooly interests. It's pretty amazing to understand that even though our family circumstances change the underlying philosophy is always the same. Everyone's needs are respected, everyone will learn what the need when they need it and while life learning is a wonderful thing no matter where it's happening.

We are happily un-schooling with our child in school. Thank you for helping me understand what we are doing! The last few years we home-schooled our 3 year old due to a potential move to Asia...when the move did not happen, I just continued to homeschool her. She was to start kinder this year--but when evaluated the teacher said--I can not keep her in the Kinder class she is reading Stuart Little and advanced her to first (I guess I was doing something right) My heart would love to do it again, but I am finishing up my own education in nutrition, and realized my limits...many of our friends un-school, and it is our style of looking at the world. I am grateful for this new site that I can keep connected (and not be judged!) just because we opted for a progressive school alternative which includes somewhere for her to be during "school hours" and then continue our vision after hours! Thank you Leo for always giving such beautiful content.

We successfully set up a business so that we could both be home with our first son from birth onward, originally intending to at least do that for the first 3-5 years of any of our kids lives. We've shifted that over time, selling one business to fund more time at home, starting consulting of the work I used to do before, but from home instead, adding some other sidelines, writing, and now looking at possibilities of short bursts of outside contracts or my wife going back to work at different points in the future.

Combine that with a little bit of conscious scaling back for the short term - but not a lot, and just deliberate choices that my wife and I discuss extensively, and it makes it work.

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Read Next

When Can I Start Unschooling?

By Leo Babauta

I've had a number of parents of young kids (toddlers and preschool-aged) ask what age they should start unschooling -- when is too early? And some parents of older kids (middle school, high school) are also wondering if it's too late to start unschooling.

I'll do my best to answer those two questions in this post.

First -- what age is too early? When can you start, if you have a young child? The simple answer is that you're already doing it. You're unschooling.

Say what? Let me explain: unschooling isn't a specific method of learning. It's basically just living your life, exploring and playing and doing whatever you normally do -- outside of the artificial learning environment we call the classroom. Everyone does it, from adults to toddlers to yes, even kids who go to school. We all unschool.

What is Unschooling?

On Indigo Girls Gone Wild

By Leo Babauta

Unschooling is a version, a subset, of homeschooling -- schooling at home. I also think it's the best version of homeschooling (or learning in general), because it prepares you for life, for being an entrepreneur, for learning anything, for being autonomous.

What makes unschooling different from other homeschooling methods? Often when people homeschool, they just do school at home -- do a curriculum with math, science, reading, history, etc. at home, often with similar teaching methods and books.

But that doesn't take advantage of the freedom of homeschooling! We can do whatever we want, because there are no rules, no one to tell us we're doing it wrong, which means we can get creative as hell.

So unschooling throws all the rules of school out the door:

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