Unschooling Neurodivergent Kids: Trusting curiosity over curriculum with Melissa Crockett-Joyoue

Laetitia: Welcome to The Neurodivergent Pulse, where we explore the often misunderstood world of neurodivergence with experts, parents, teachers and therapists. Grounded in lived experience, each bite-sized episode gives you something practical to try. I am your host, Laetitia Andrac, AI expert, neurodivergent mum and founder of Understanding Zoe. This podcast is recorded on Dharawal country. I acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded. It always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

Laetitia: Hello Melissa, thank you so much for coming on The Neurodivergent Pulse podcast.

Melissa: Ja, lovely to be here. Thank you.

Laetitia: Thank you for joining us from beautiful, um, Iote, should I do that? It's such a beautiful place. I actually went and visited it but I can't pronounce it properly. So now I have this kind of compassion for people who can say my name properly, because pronunciation can be tricky sometimes. So, Melissa, your journey to unschooling started with your son, and I would love for you to take us back to that moment where you realised that there was another way to support our neurodivergent kiddos.

Melissa: Yeah, sure. So, as I said before the interview, succinct is not really my style, so I'm going to do my very best. So, I'm Autistic ADHD, which I only found out once we started unschooling our children. Both my children are Autistic ADHD as well.

Melissa: The journey to schooling, so kind of very briefly, I was very invested in my child's school. We moved to a small rural country area, and so I spent three years on the board of trustees, turning it in my mind into an even better school for my future children to go to. That was before I even got pregnant. Was very invested. My son was always a little quirky and different and seemed really bright, but he also had really severe food allergies, and so he didn't do the kind of usual daycare or all of those sorts of things. When he was going to go to school, we knew that he would need a gentle transition in, but his time of starting school was end of June 2020. And so we had just come out of a lockdown, and he hadn't got to have the gentle transition in that we had hoped for.

Melissa: 18 months prior to him starting school, at age five, I had had three hormonal breastfeeding related heart attacks that were near fatal, and I had cardiac arrest, and I had to have emergency open heart surgery. And so we had a lot of trauma at that time in our family. Tomana is our boy, and he was basically a school refuser from day one. Now, we put it down to his trauma and his severe separation anxiety from me, not knowing at the time that he was ADHD. And you know, he does definitely have a trauma picture as well, but he refused school from the first day. We did three short visits with me in attendance, and then it was straight into, you know, dropping him at the school door. I couldn't carry him, or I think I could drive at that point, but my, yeah, I could drive, but my mum came with me to help support, because he was pretty nervous about it, and I couldn't lift him and things because of my chest. So she had to basically lift him and carry him, and we pushed him in the door kicking and screaming, and we closed the door, and I cried, and we stood outside. And it was really hard, and it didn't really get a lot better. Any days where I was in the school, because I was the fundraiser and communications person for the school, were fine. But yeah, we just really quickly noticed that it was, I mean it was obvious. It wasn't something we could just notice, we were living it.

Melissa: The school basically put it down to my trauma picture. They tried to get me to get my wife, or my parents, to drop him off. I wasn't allowed to drop him off, etc. And it was just extremely difficult. And so that went on for a whole year that we kept encouraging him to go to school. We figured we probably would have to homeschool at some point. And we noticed that he had some challenges with learning, and so we ended up getting him, might sound weird, but a giftedness assessment, because I had looked up giftedness and gone an autistic way down that rabbit hole and thought maybe this is why he's so adept at some things and not at others. So we went in with our 26 page assessment and recommendations, and the school, were a small country school and just weren't able to support him in his learning in that way, as at that point a visual spatial gifted learner.

Melissa: Things got worse and worse for him mental health wise. He was having constant stomach aches. He was getting vomiting migraines a few times a week and so on. And we thought we would need to homeschool him, but we didn't think that my mental health, because I had severe PTSD and probably autistic burnout, but didn't know, was really extreme. And so we put it off and put it off, thinking that things would get better. And the school just kept saying, you know, it was us and we needed to do this and that, and that's a really mild way of putting a very long kind of process.

Melissa: And then when the COVID lockdowns really happened in New Zealand, we did school at home, and we realised that was much better suited for him, and his anxiety was much reduced because he was much more regulated. And the COVID lockdowns, for our family, were maybe, for many neurodivergent families were quite lovely, because we were all together as a nuclear family, and my family live on the same property as well. So it was ideal for him.

Melissa: And when we knew that we were going to have to drop him at the school gate, when we were really having to scaffold him into class each day, we just knew that wasn't an option. And we basically decided that I was an adult, I could fix my mental health later. He was a child, and it wasn't worth, yeah, the way that he was going, with very low self esteem and really high anxiety. So that's how we ended up, we ended up homeschooling. My wife said, "Yes, okay, we can homeschool." And I freaked out. How am I going to do that for this kid? And then I spoke to a friend who was a lecturing psychologist, and she unschooled, and she gave me some research and some essays, and I pretty much immediately decided that was what we needed to do. So, yeah.

Melissa: I told you I couldn't be very short.

Laetitia: I love it. I love the vulnerability and the genuine experience that you shared with us. So, thank you so much for doing this, Melissa. We had moments in our journey of school camp, and going down the path of homeschooling, and then going back into finding an appropriate school, and then thinking again about it. I think it's this kind of back and forth that we go on and on in our journey, which is how I discovered your work, which we're going to talk about in a minute.

Laetitia: But before we do that, I just want to make sure, for anyone who's listening to this podcast and they may not be familiar with the word unschooling, what does that actually look like? What does it mean? Because yes, as you said, we all have our own journey coming to terms with those alternative ways that are not the way that we've been potentially raised, or the way we've heard society telling us this is what you should do, and you have some obligation in some countries to send your kids to school and so on. So can you share a bit more with us about unschooling, and what does that look like?

Melissa: Yeah, sure. So in many countries around the world, I can't really say most, but in my work with the summit, you know, there are countries from all around the world who are unschooling. Unschooling is just a very broad umbrella term for what some people call life learning, self directed education, child led learning, etc. So it's anything where the curriculum, and you don't actually have a curriculum, is where the children's learning is directed by the children and supported by the parents. So our job is to basically observe their learning, and to resource them and support them, and create opportunities and experiences and so on, where they can follow their passions and interests and have a broad range of learning wrapped up in that.

Melissa: And that's why it's so fantastic for neurodivergent kids, because they can follow their hyperfocus, and out of that they will go on their own trajectory that will generally include all different kinds of learning. You do something in the kitchen, and it will encompass language, maths, potentially different cultures. You might get into social issues and studies, depending on where your food ingredients are and what's going on politically in that country. You might have different languages included, physics, etc. If you were in a classroom, you'd be needing to pull those out into different subjects, but when you were just learning and living, it's all interwoven.

Melissa: So for us, my children's special interests, I guess, are pretty wide ranging, but also go through phases of extreme hyperfocus. My son is extremely interested, has been since he was two, LEGO is a special interest, and as a gifted visual spatial learner that's huge for him. So there's a phenomenal amount of mathematics, geography, well there's a bit of geography if you're looking up, he has an Instagram, so where are all the different people that write to him are from. He does Zooms with adults in other countries, learning about, you know, what they're doing, and doing classes with them etc, or just being mentored. Yeah, if you look up each individual topic there'll be a whole different range of things.

Melissa: My daughter's really interested in propagating plants, growing, environmental sustainability, kaitiakitanga, or looking after them, cultural perspectives of plant medicines, and her grandmother's really interested in that as well. She's very interested in animals, and also very morbidly interested in surgery and hospitals and things like that. So probably related to my journey, and yeah, so kind of vets, anything like that.

Melissa: So, it's really living life alongside your family, experiencing the real world, as opposed to school, which needs to be packaged into little snippets of experiences and subjects. And then as a parent, it's quite intensive. When I heard of unschooling, I thought that it was kind of, you know, random hippie parents just not really doing much. But as I've seen, the unschooling world is very, very intense personal work for the parents, on observing, and a lot of work on your own self and your thoughts about how things should be and how children should be, etc. There's a lot of breaking down of those stereotypes, and examining our own perceptions and preconceptions about those sorts of things.

Melissa: Yeah, it was a term coined in the 1970s, I think, by a man named John Holt. And so that's where the kind of modern unschooling movement comes out of. But there's also unschooling schools. We've interviewed someone for our summit who is the grandson of a man who set up a self directed education school 100 years ago, celebrating 100 years this year, in England, called Summerhill. So yeah, it's not a new thing exactly, but it's definitely growing a lot.

Melissa: Yeah, I think it's not new indeed, because yeah, I've heard some people going, like, growing up unschooled. And so I think it's not a new thing. It's more and more, as parents, potentially we are wanting to go on our own journey of healing as well, and we don't want our kiddos to potentially feel the trauma that school may have created in some of us. I'm talking also about myself, like I don't want her to go to school and have this tummy ache, or feeling nauseous, or headache, you know, all of those kinds of things.

Melissa: And also, just one thing to add as well, is that lots of us, like, I don't feel traumatised by school. I had a very good school experience. I went to a small country bicultural school, did really well at school, was a gifted kid. However, I am, just particularly because of my autistic side that we didn't know about either, and ADHD, I suppose I'm just an absolute people pleaser. I look externally all the time for motivation, and reward, or, you know, there's, I don't have that strong sense that my children are growing, of themselves and what they want and what they're good at. So yeah, I was, like, wanted to just do the best in the test and be a really good girl and so on. And a lot of us are having to break that down now, particularly as we find out that we're Autistic ADHD, and that a lot of those things were a safety mechanism for us. So yeah, that's another part of school appears to be really good. Sometimes there are these kind of subtle undertones that are happening. Yeah, with my family, we will see. Hopefully they won't have that to unwrap later. Yeah.

Laetitia: Yes. Yes. And I guess for me, it was, I was this kind of turbulent child who, because I'm gifted as well, was the best in class but never in the classroom, because I was, lots of the time, thrown outside because I was annoying everyone, having the answer and sitting at the back and doing silly stuff. So yeah, I didn't really enjoy school until it became really, really hard, and I really enjoyed it when I was, like, from 18 to 24, that's when I loved school, because I could focus on the topics that I was passionate about, and it was hard. So I really enjoyed it, but from early childhood till 18 I was really bored, and I was this kind of rebellious child. And so yeah, it was not, it was not very good, but you get all of those labels as well, that you give yourself or that you're given, around your, you know, precociousness, or difficult, or laziness, or procrastination. All those things, I think they just, it compounds upon those labels that we give ourselves as neurodivergent people.

Laetitia: Which is where, you know, unschooling can be something that some parents contemplate, and I'm one of those. But I guess one of the biggest fears, and maybe there are other fears that you can share with us, is for the child to feel left behind, and not being ready then to move into the next phase of life. So how can we, how can we overcome those fears? Did you have them? Have you heard about other fears, and how can we help anyone listening to this who is interested in exploring deeper, and, unschooling, the different steps that they can take in their exploration, what's pushing them in any direction really, kind of educating them for them to maybe decide? But with knowledge, you know, how very often we make decisions, as you said, based on things that we think, biases, unconscious framework and trauma that we have, whereas I think knowledge helps us with regaining this power.

Melissa: Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the ways that we can do it is that, because we are now, there are definitely at least second generation unschoolers, we can look to the stories of the growing unschoolers, and the parents that did that. So we have, like, at our summit we've got a panel called Looking Back, we did it last year as the last panel. So we have a round table of five speakers, or seasoned parents. Everyone that speaks at the summit has lived experience, either as an unschooler or they have unschooled their children. So those stories are very good examples for us. Obviously we're looking at, is it qualitative, you know, data, rather than quantitative, but it's really interesting to see the wide range of careers. And yeah, not everyone's going to want to go into a university career, because they may actually have realised that that's not necessarily the be all and end all. That said, others have.

Melissa: I've had someone in Weave who, she has younger children, but her elder child is somewhere between 18 and 20, and just decided that they wanted to go to a university in Melbourne and study some kind of science, and she didn't think her child had done any science at all, and they put together a portfolio and did an interview and got straight in. So you hear that a lot. Stark Raving Dad, who's a New Zealand unschooler, just did a post I was reading today about his children, who are now 19 and 16, talking about their trajectory, and so one of them has just been accepted into a university level course as well, exactly what he wanted, based on his portfolio and an entrance exam.

Melissa: So there's many, many alternative ways to get into universities, even really significant ones, in the US etc, where people that we have spoken to, their children go on to have, you know, the same kinds of careers that they would have had if they were at school. Esther, who I do the summit with, her second son, who is 17 I think, he's just been accepted into his choice of maybe three different universities in England. Again, completely unschooled his entire life. Put together a portfolio. Actually, no, he went to, both her older sons went to college for the last year or two to get their, I'm trying to, I'm hearing so many different terms at the moment with all my interviews. To get there, is it GCSEs in the UK? So yeah, lots of unschooled kids might choose to strategically take classes, and what you find is that they can cram into perhaps six months to a year's worth of learning if they're passionate about a subject, and if it's, obviously they're probably going to be good at it if they're wanting to do that as a career, they can cram that learning into a short period of time in order to enter a high school equivalent, or to just get qualifications, to take whatever exams they need to, etc, to get the qualifications.

Melissa: So unschoolers are quite happy for their kids to go to school and get qualifications in those particular things if they want. They don't necessarily need 13 years of learning to be at a stage to be able to sit those exams. When they have the right motivation, which is internal motivation, especially I think our Autistic ADHD kids can do whatever they want, and the PDA is absolutely, if they set their mind to a particular thing, they can go and achieve it. So yeah, I think listening to stories from others, and investigating what are the alternative pathways. If, as a parent, you're feeling a need for reassurance, and you're like, I think my kid's going to be really amazing at this thing, what could their trajectory be? You can probably do some research without talking to your kid about that as well, and putting expectations on, etc, especially if they're PDA, because you know they're probably going to otherwise just turn their back on that idea completely. But yeah, often it's the parent that can do the research and the work and set their mind at rest.

Laetitia: Yes. And I love what you said, and I'll definitely join this part of the webinar and listen to it, because I think it's very powerful to indeed have lived experience and stories, and also knowing of all of those pathways, which we may not know, again, with the neuronormative approach. This is how you go to university, this is how you build your career, when actually there's so many paths that can drive you there. And with my own daughter being AuDHD as well, and PDA, and gifted, when she really can't go to school and we keep her at home and we really understand and give her that space for regulation, you know, maybe it's a few days a week, maybe it's a few weeks in a month, maybe it's on and off, it really depends, but she has a homework that she would take a day to do at school in, you know, 30 minutes, an hour. She's like, "I've done my day work. What do I do now?" And then we define together a research or a topic. She's really into mythology. So, okay, what type of myth do you want to explore today? And then she's going and exploring myth and we go to the library and so on. So, I know it is possible.

Laetitia: Yeah, this kind of, yeah, limitation on my own capacity. I think the main thing is, how do you build capacity as a parent, and maybe there is something in the summit about this. I think the thing that holds me back the most, and maybe holds back many parents listening to this, is, how will I have capacity to hold space for her and her learning and her journey, whilst doing the things that I love to do too? Because I'm, here, PDA, and I love to do my things, my technical thing, my building an app, my special interest thing. How do you make space and capacity for both?

Melissa: I think the interview I did today was with a couple of women from an organisation called Radical Learning, and they both have neurodivergent children as well. And one of the words that came up was surrender. And I think that is a very common and important one. We are going through different seasons. We know, with our neurodivergent kids, that nothing stays the same forever, apart from the few things that do stay the same forever, you know, pretty much, things do change and there are going to be hard seasons. A lot of neurodivergent parents that come to unschooling are there because they have children in school refusal, or children in autistic crisis and burnout, and so there really is no other option for them at that point in time anyway.

Melissa: I've lost my train of thought momentarily. I think that our own capacity, it's super challenging. It's really hard work to unschool your kids. This is not an easy option at all. And you know, there is the reality in that, and like I say, in Weave, we are all in there supporting each other. And what has come out of me having this group for three years or so now, is that the most important thing that we needed to do was work on our own nervous system regulation.

Melissa: Because as I did an interview with Em Hammond the other day, from Neuroworld, and she has that beautiful model, you might have seen it, that's like an image of building blocks, and all of these lower building blocks around their identity and their mental health basically are absolutely key for a child to be regulated enough to be able to learn. So that's the key thing, I think, that we have when we have our children at home, is that they are able to regulate. And the other key part of it, I think, is that particularly if they have sensory challenges, is that a home environment is able to be customised, to some extent, depending on other siblings, to the sensory kind of needs, to help them with their nervous system capacity.

Melissa: But if a parent is dysregulated as well, and we are the one that needs to be co-regulating our kids, then that's going to be difficult for them to achieve. So, it comes down to the age old thing of, no one is coming to rescue our children, and we're going to have to do it. And then, no one is coming to rescue us, and we're going to have to do the work on ourselves. And that is a powerful thing, and a terrifying thing. And so in my group, what we just work on a lot is, many of us don't realise that we're neurodivergent when we come into this situation. This is the crisis that gets us looking, and this is when we get our children diagnosed. So if we've had kids that have managed to, particularly our ADHD ones, who've managed it, pass through and just appeared to be challenging, we get their diagnosis, we start to look at our own diagnosis, and I think starting to realise our own sensory triggers, starting to realise accommodations that we need to make for ourselves and our children, is a big part of it.

Melissa: Because a lot of us think, I don't have the capacity for this, and it's actually because we don't know how to regulate ourselves or accommodate ourselves. And so there is the space and the time that you can and need to take to learn those things. And constantly trying to work on being able to move from dysregulated to regulated is a big part of the work. And we know that we're not going to remain regulated, we're not aiming for total central nervous system regulation all the time, but it's, how can we, what things are going to work for us, what tools can we find that will help us to regulate? That's a big part of unschooling for neurodivergent parents, I think, is identifying our own sensory accommodations and ways that we need, what will fill our cup, and what are the parameters that we're working with if we have a neurodivergent child who's in burnout and won't leave the house and needs us in the room to co-regulate, what can we do to look after ourselves at that time, because there will be seasons where that is the reality.

Melissa: One good thing about unschooling is, I mean, I'm running two businesses whilst unschooling two children with an unwell wife. It is difficult, you know, and my child had many tears this morning, because I had a 6.30am meeting, and then I had a 9am interview, and then I was going to spend the day at the local motel where I do my recordings. And that was very, very challenging for him, because he said he needed a home day and he needed to be there to regulate him. But yet, when you're unschooling, part of them is them seeing what you need to do. And whether that's regulating, whether that's doing the online shopping, whether that is running a business and running an international summit and being up at crazy hours, or tapping away on your laptop when it may be inconvenient to them, that's all part of their life learning and their understanding of what makes a family and what makes real life happen. And so that's all kind of pretty invaluable stuff. You don't necessarily have any space, but at the same time you can do your interest, because it's very good role modelling for them, unless they're having a time when they don't want you doing your interest, and then that needs to go on hold. And that's, I think, the nature of having a PDA kid, or a neurodivergent kid with really high needs anyway.

Melissa: Does that answer it? I don't know. It's hard. It's really hard. It's really hard, and it's really amazing for our kids. And for me, my children's mental health is absolutely paramount. My child has had very dark periods, and, as an under 8 year old, I don't want that to be part of his future. So for me, I will do what I can to shore up his mental health and his ability to regulate and so on. So that's, I kind of work from there, and everything else falls out from that.

Laetitia: Yeah, I love it. Thank you so much, Melissa. There were so many nuggets of gold in that answer, you know, for anyone listening to this, in terms of what's working and what we need to consider when we jump on board. So I know you have your international unschooling summit coming up. I'm definitely going to join that, and it gives this interest rabbit hole that...

Melissa: Yeah, and a big neurodivergent focus in that. I mean, honestly, so many unschoolers are neurodivergent in some way, shape or form, and their families. Our speakers last year, every round table, so we have, like, recorded interviews with very well known people like Kristy Forbes, and Amanda Deman, and Em Hammond, Naomi Fisher, all of these big names who have all unschooled their children or are unschooling them. And then we have round tables as well, and those are the live sessions, and honestly, I ran all the live sessions last year, I coordinated them, and every single panel, out of five parents, had at least three to four who had neurodivergent children. And in the Facebook group, just everyone had PDAers or neurodivergent kids. It's a huge movement within the neurodivergent parenting community internationally. Yeah, yeah.

Laetitia: Yes. Yes. And this is where you want to, this is where personally I want to learn, before we hit the burnout, and it happened, for a few moments, last year. So I want to be prepared in case I have the bravery of jumping into that.

Melissa: You have to be brave. And also, you know, if you wait until they are in burnout and in school refusal, you're going to be working with a kid that is damaged and has school trauma, that means it's going to be a much longer trajectory before you start to be able to actually really get into the learning. My whole thing at the moment is, like, instead of, why not try school first and see if that works for you, why not try home education first? Because if it doesn't work, and you can't deal with it as a parent, and you can't cope, they're not going to be any further behind than any of the children in their classes. You know, I'm like, but if you try school first, you're going to have a child that has a lot of work to get, mentally, wise for some children, back to a baseline. So yeah, I'm, that's, I'm kind of, that's one of my things, is like, why not try it the other way around?

Laetitia: Why not? I know. I know that. So for anyone who's listening to this, and they're curious, as much as I am, developing this interest for me, since the past two years that I've really been digging into the space of, can unschooling and homeschooling and all of that, how can they connect with your work, and we'll put the link, of course, to join the unschooling summit happening very soon?

Melissa: Sure. Yeah. So I have two things. There's the Weave ND membership, which is an international online community supporting the families of neurodivergent unschoolers, and pretty much all of us are neurodivergent ourselves, or working it out. So that's a Mighty Networks community, and I will just put it, I'll get you to put it in the show notes rather than even reading it out, because I can never remember the address exactly. And then the unschooling summit, which is what Esther Jones, she has an amazing podcast called The Unschool Space, and pretty much all of her interviewees over the last 100 episodes have been neurodivergent families who are unschooling across the world. And she unschooled her PDA as well, and still unschools her younger two. That is www.theunschoolingsummit.org, and it's live and it's free to come. So yeah.

Laetitia: Thank you. We'll put all...

Melissa: Yeah. 23rd March for New Zealand and Australia. We start on a Friday night for us and go through till the Monday, and everything is free to watch for 48 hours, because we're aware of time zones and we're aware of neurodivergent parents not having the time to listen to a whole thing live. So yeah, it's all recorded as well and available for replay for free.

Laetitia: Thank you. Thank you, Melissa, for joining us today, for the amazing work you do, for the summit you're putting together from the 20th to the 23rd. And if anyone is catching this podcast afterwards, we'll put a link as well for you to be able to watch the replay of the summit. Thank you.

Melissa: Lovely. Thank you so much, Laetitia. Appreciate it.

Laetitia: That's a wrap for The Neurodivergent Pulse. If this helped, follow the show and leave us a quick review on your favourite platform. You can even share this episode with someone who needs it. You can learn more about our platform at understanding.com.