The Radiant Mission
The Radiant Mission
107. Unschooling Insights w/Leah McDermott (Part 2)
Ready to rethink education and unlock your child's full potential? Join us on the Radiant Mission Podcast as we sit down with Leah McDermott for an inspiring discussion on unschooling and child-led learning. Leah reimagines the concept of curriculum by focusing on teaching children how to learn, rather than what to learn. Explore the flexibility of unschooling and discover how structured resources can be used effectively. Leah shares her journey in crafting a child-led curriculum that prioritizes real-life skills and developmental stages over standardized testing.
We dive deep into the holistic approach to childhood development, emphasizing the importance of nurturing physical, emotional, and social growth during adolescence. Leah and I discuss how unschooling can bridge the gap between traditional schooling and a more personalized learning experience. By building strong connections with our children, we can understand their interests and challenges, ensuring their learning journey extends beyond mere academic achievements to encompass life experiences and personal growth.
Leah also shares invaluable insights into fostering emotional connections and creating a supportive family environment. We tackle the societal challenges of transitioning from traditional schooling to unschooling, such as finding balance in daily life and learning to be together as a family. Discover the joy of witnessing your children's growth and curiosity while prioritizing emotional well-being and open communication. This episode is packed with practical advice and heartfelt stories that will inspire you to create a nurturing and engaging environment for your children.
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Hello and welcome to the Radiant Mission Podcast. My name is Rebecca Twomey and we are on a mission to encourage and inspire you as you're navigating through this life and with your relationship with Christ through this life and with your relationship with Christ. Last week, we had an amazing conversation with Leah McDermott about unschooling, and today we are here to hear the rest of her interview and her story. So let's jump right in Now. Talk to us a little bit about what does quote curriculum look like. You know, what does doing? Learning how to do math or learning how to you know write I almost said novels, write papers, essays, you know how does that play into unschooling?
Leah McDermott:I do want to touch real quick, though, one thing you said that I think is really important for parents, cause I think this will make a big difference with like that mindset and de-schooling. You mentioned that you now run a podcast and what you would choose to do in your free time was basically pretend you had a radio show. And if you take a look at most entrepreneurs, the work that they are doing didn't come from anything they learned they were good at in school. They do the work that they chose to do for fun, for fun in their free time, and that is how you discover who you are, when no one is forcing you, when there's no pressure. And with that, unschooling and this kind of segues into what curriculum looks like as an unschooler because that's a big myth too is that curricular? You know you can't be an unschooler and use a curriculum which is not true at all.
Leah McDermott:The goal of unschooling is to teach your kids how to learn, not tell them what to learn. That's like the big like mission, because if you know how to learn, you can figure out anything anytime. If you know how to ask a question, if you know how to ask for help, if you know how to word your searches right. The entire world's information is in this rectangle now, so I don't need a person lecturing me to teach me something. I can find it out myself because I have those tools. And so my job now as a parent is to teach my kid those schools, those tools teach them media literacy, how to know if something is true, how to fact check. But that's the goal. And so how does curriculum play into that? Look, I authored a curriculum, I sell a curriculum, and that is because a lot of parents aren't ready to jump straight from public school to unschooling. There's so much work mentally that needs to be done before being there. So you know, if you're listening to this podcast episode, you're like that sounds really great, but I literally don't even know how to be with my kids during the day, and that's a big one. We don't know how to be together anymore. As soon as a baby's born, we separate them Like that's. That's also for a reason. The society that we're in to separate and simply choosing homeschool over public school for so many people is just relearning how to be a family again, how to be together all day, every day. I just ran a poll recently in my community about what's your greatest fear of unschooling, and I thought so much of it would be like I don't know how to teach them. A huge chunk of it was how will I ever have alone time, how will I be with my kids all day, like that part of human nature, like we don't, as a society, know how to do that anymore. And so for people who are still working out so much of that, a little bit of structure can be really really helpful as a bridge between here and there.
Leah McDermott:It doesn't have to be black and white and so you know, the curriculum that I wrote, for example, is extreme. There are no textbooks, there are no workbooks, there are no tests. It's completely child led. So it's starts with the development of the child instead of the standardized test lists, right? So we don't say you need to know fractions and decimals and percentages at this age. So that's where we're starting. Instead, we say, okay, you are eight years old and so you are really starting to figure out, like, how other people communicate, and you're starting to feel feelings and you're having hormone surges, you know, like prepubescent hormone surges. So you're feeling all of these emotions in ways you've never felt them before. Let's start with that and then we can build off of that with we can talk about math in real context.
Leah McDermott:Where do you use math in your real life? I use it when I'm cooking, when I'm shopping, when I'm calculating how long it's going to take me to travel somewhere, when I'm buying gas and I'm going to invite my kids into that so that they can see those skills in real life. So, you know, curriculum can mean all kinds of things. It's not just a boxed set. It can be, you know, bits and pieces. It can be real life things, online classes. There's no, you know, curriculum doesn't have to look like one big thing you purchase and it comes in a box. It's life. Life is a curriculum really.
Rebecca Twomey:Absolutely, absolutely. I mean even making lunch right, it's something kids don't do at school, no-transcript. And those are life skills that a child could learn early. I mean my two-year-old mops the floor because I got him a child side mop, because he's interested in that, he loves to mimic and he loves to copy everything I'm doing. So he has his little pretend vacuum and his little tiny mop. That actually does work and you know they're learning skills without it being a chore, necessarily, right, like you have to do this. They're copying what I'm doing and I think that that's something that's cool. When kids are home they have the opportunity to do that.
Leah McDermott:Definitely, and they can learn those self-resiliency and independence skills in a safe environment and not you know. The funniest thing with college is we expect you know a month before they're still having to ask to go to the bathroom, and then we expect them to like pay their bills and do their laundry two months later when they're in college.
Leah McDermott:Like we're not adequately preparing people to go be adults. You know, and for me, the biggest thing was letting my kids trust themselves and, like you know, you mentioned earlier sleeping until they're not tired anymore anymore. Like we don't have those rigid things in my home where they're forced to go to bed. You go to bed when you're tired and just respect that other people might be sleeping and they naturally fall into a good rhythm. And you know, my teenager is at that stage where he's hungry all the time and thank God I taught him to make his own food so that I don't have to be awake at midnight helping him make snacks. He can go do it by himself. He can fry himself some eggs and make a sandwich or use the air fryer, you know.
Leah McDermott:So I think it's just. It's just a different mind. It's breaking free of that school mindset, right. Like what is what does life look like without school? If that wasn't there, what would you do? What would you focus on? How would you help them become adults? And that that's what it is right, and those are great starting questions.
Rebecca Twomey:Yeah, absolutely, and thinking about our children as human beings, as individual people. I always admired this about my mom that she said you know, when one of my brothers, when he was going through puberty, she said, I noticed that he needed extra sleep and so he just, you know, slept till 10, whatever it was.
Rebecca Twomey:And I think that that's just whatever it was, and I think that that's just. You don't hear moms talking about that, Right? What a crazy thing. And it's like our society in some ways recognizes it because, if you think about it, middle school does start later than elementary school. It's like they know.
Leah McDermott:Well, that depends on where you live. In a sense, true, true. Still, where I live, high schoolers are there at 730 in the morning, and that's true. Yeah, we were not through puberty by then, so definitely not. It's funny. My, I was going somewhere early in the morning with my 10 year old, like a week ago, and it when, when we were driving through town, was when all the kids were walking to school the high schoolers and he was like mom, it looks like the walking dead. They all just look like zombies, like he felt. So he's super empathetic and he like I feel so bad for them. Like no, you can tell, not a single one of these kids out here wants to be here. And I was like and imagine now that, like they're supposed to go learn something when they're all exhausted, they probably haven't eaten anything that wasn't filled with sugar, if at all they're just trudging to like oh, it was. It was really depressing but for him to see that and make that connection like they just look like zombies mom.
Rebecca Twomey:Well, you just triggered something in my mind about. So when I went to grad school, I was an English major and so I taught writing, or I was a you know TA or whatever it's called teaching assistant for two years and I taught 1101, 1102. And this is kind of an extension of high school, right? Because kids are going from being in high school under this rigid thing, you know this rigid system, to coming into college, and now, for the first time, they're getting to make decisions for themselves. And it was interesting to see how the truth came out. Right, they didn't care when they were in high school, but they were forced to go every day. Now they're in college and they think they have a choice because they're in college, right.
Rebecca Twomey:And so there was always those kids who would try to push that attendance thing, Like I'm just not going to go, I'm not going to go, I'm going to go. Anything else is more important to me than this. And that's what's interesting when to me, when students are forced to learn like they didn't want to be there, they wanted to be somewhere else, they didn't want to be taking that class, and the truth is they didn't want to do it when they were in high school either. So they just now finally have the autonomy to say well, I'm just not going to go and unfortunately, because it's the college system, you're just going to fail. So I mean, that's the other part of this. But I'd love to kind of go back to kind of this philosophy We've been talking a lot about this already, but this philosophy behind natural learning and supporting children's natural curiosity and growth, you know, what else do you feel is important for parents to know about this?
Leah McDermott:topic. I think the most important thing is to remember that academics is like the littlest piece of who your child is, and that that, I think, can help you really make keener observations, not just about, like how the world is working, but about your child specifically, because, you know, no other time in our lives is our body changing so much Like. So I mentioned a couple of times my son's a teenager and most of his friends are older than him, so they're all like 14, 15, 16. And I won't see them for a couple of weeks and then they'll come over to the house and they're like six inches taller than the last time I saw them, right, and all I can think is like how much their bodies must hurt. You know, like if my body was stretching and growing, you know, six inches in six months I would not want to do anything but sleep and like sit in a hot bathtub.
Leah McDermott:And yet we have so much pressure and expectations on children when so much is changing in their bodies and so like just that's when we talk about natural learning, it's not just the learning part to pay attention to, because, again, all of those academic skills they're like. I know this is a podcast, you can't see my fingers but like put them as close together as you can imagine them right, like tiny, tiny, tiny, because there's physical changes that are happening. There's so much emotional change that is happening. One day this person's your best friend, friend, and then they're your worst enemy. Like navigating the feelings of that is so challenging. And when we have again so many pressures and expectations, those things that are so big become so. They feel trivial to the child but they're not at all so. They feel trivial to the child but they're not at all.
Leah McDermott:And just just social growth. Like pay attention to who your child is, without the academic pressures, because you'll really be able to see so much. And the most important piece of all of this is connection. You have to find that connection with your child because that's when they will show you these things, the things that they're interested in, the things that they care about, the things that are hard. Right now we just that's. That's.
Leah McDermott:The most important thing is recognizing that growth and development does not just look like learning something new every day, because, well, you are learning something new every day, but it might just not be an academic skill, right, it might be how to navigate a hard conversation. It might be standing up to a bully. It might be trying something new, trying again for the 10th time to get something right. There's a lot of ways as humans that we grow and develop and change, not just in childhood, but forever. And if we only boil it down to those standardized checklists, we miss 99% of who the human is underneath. So that's really what natural learning is is paying attention to the whole person.
Rebecca Twomey:Absolutely, and you had mentioned earlier about how you feel like even today, you're learning something new every day, right? Yeah, it's. You know. The science on this is what, around age 27, 25 to 27, they say that the brain finishes developing, something like that.
Rebecca Twomey:Yeah, I personally feel like that is true, in the sense that it wasn't until my late 20s and 30s that I feel like my brain unlocked, like something opened inside of my brain, and I was suddenly able to see things, certain things, for what they are, or comprehend things in a new way or learn in a new way. And it's helped me to have a lot of empathy towards children, and especially during things like education and learning and all of that. How could we expect a child whose brain hasn't finished developing to understand concepts that I didn't understand until I was in my 30s, you know? I'll give a small example that doesn't have to do with unschooling or homeschooling, but fertility and our cycles and how all of that stuff works. I did not understand that when I was a teenager. It took me until I was about 32 years old before I truly understood how my body as a female even works.
Leah McDermott:And I will tell you I do so. I home birthed my children and I have done some work as a doula. Most women go through having babies and still don't know that that's not even like, that's not even just teenager to womanhood. There are women every day having babies and still don't understand everything that's happening, absolutely.
Rebecca Twomey:And that's just such an awakening for me personally to say I don't want my daughters to have to go through this experience of not truly understanding. Now, maybe there is a piece in their development where they're not going to be able to see things the same way, Because if you're a kid, you're not going to know all of the ins and outs of things, depending on what age. You are right, but I could still teach my daughters about their bodies and how it works and how the cycle works and you know all of the different phases of our cycle. That's not something that there is such a huge focus on in school, when that is one of the most important things and facets about our whole entire lives, Right?
Leah McDermott:Yeah, we're teaching calculus, but not about how our bodies work.
Leah McDermott:Yeah, and're teaching calculus, but not how our bodies work, yeah, and as I'm, I only have boys, but that was never something we hid from. That Like they're going to have partners one day that go through all of that. That will matter to them too. They were there when I had home births, you know. Like they were part of that. It wasn't this. Yeah, that's a big thing. It's just like this shame around so many things about who we are as people are ignoring really important things.
Leah McDermott:And as a homeschooler, unschooler, you have the opportunity. This is really where you get to say what's important, what, what, what matters in this life, those kinds of things. How your body works matters, and you know, even I learned a lot of those things when I had my children and about fertility, but even you know I so last was the last year, I guess I had um, a hysterectomy, and I was having like issues. You know which is which led to the hysterectomy, but I didn't even realize like how much was going on with my body until after that procedure and had to deal with like how many months and years did I live with like pain and discomfort and hormonal, Because I didn't know. Like we don't talk about these kinds of things and I never made. Nobody ever made time to have those discussions with me to talk about those kinds of things. But we don't. We don't prioritize that kind of stuff, and that you know. Now having that experience will be a priority for me to teach my children and those around me.
Rebecca Twomey:So yeah, and even from you know you mentioned you have boys, even from from. It doesn't matter which gender, all children go through puberty. All children go through those hormonal changes and I feel that if we had more conversations around that and normalizing let's use that word that your body is changing and that's okay, and you're going to feel a little crazy sometimes, but that's normal.
Rebecca Twomey:Because I remember going through that as a teenager and feeling like I was crazy, like something was wrong with me. But nothing was wrong with me. My body was just going through its natural changes. Now, maybe for some people there is a sign that maybe they have type one diabetes and don't know it, but because they don't know their body. You know what I mean. So not every situation is the same, but I think that when we just Not every situation is the same, but I think that when we just brush it all into the rug and then kids become teenagers and, you know, feel this depression, we don't sit and talk to them about why they might feel that way.
Leah McDermott:Yeah, that's a side of things that is important the emotional growth that we go through, you know, and what an expectation we have of children to just be happy all the time, that they should just be happy. And you know we have this thing in our home where we'll just everyone, someone it's okay to point that out Like I think you're having a bad day today. My kids will say it to me yeah, you're right, sometimes I have bad days. That's going to happen. We're humans. We're people in this crazy world. We're going to have bad days.
Leah McDermott:But that doesn't mean that we have to fight or that I don't love you.
Leah McDermott:Like I get to have bad days and you also get to have bad days where you know we'll just leave you alone and if we're not caught up in that system that doesn't stop churning where, well, too bad, you're having a bad day, you have to go to school or too bad, you have to go to work, you know, if you that's the system also right, like it's this culture of doesn't matter productivity over everything.
Leah McDermott:And when you can step away from that, you can tune into those things, like your emotions and your physical feelings, and just having an off day is is a normal thing and it's okay. And how can we help people having those off days instead of judging them or pressuring them to move forward? Anyway, like it's very, it's very freeing the more you step out of that world and then just embrace it Right and like every it's. It's like I say, um, homeschooling might be you opening one door and then all of a sudden you see like all of the other ways in which the world is like kind of crazy around you and you start to just open your eyes to so many other things like kind of crazy around you.
Rebecca Twomey:You start to just open your eyes to so many other things, absolutely yeah. I remember when I first got my cycle. It was very heavy and like hard for me to adjust to, but thank God I was homeschooled because I could stay in bed and I could, you know, do whatever I needed to do. I couldn't imagine having to get up and go to school and feel that way and go through those feelings in a formal under the fluorescence get this done, you know, type of way. So I want to kind of ask you a little bit about, you know, parents that are unsure about where to start and what to do. What are some of the first steps that they can begin to start unschooling or practicing natural learning at home? And maybe this is someone who's already homeschooling. That might be one example. Or maybe this is someone whose kids are going to formal school right now and they want to make the switch.
Leah McDermott:Yeah. So I mean, those are going to be a little bit different. Unless so, if you're homes, well, maybe not. If you you are. If your child is in any kind of rigid system, that can be public school, that can be home. If you look at your dining room table and it's covered with textbooks right now and that doesn't feel good to you, that's okay, right, but there's going to be that period where you need to de-school with the kids. They need to heal from that experience and recognize that there's no timeline for that.
Leah McDermott:And this is one of the big myths I've seen out there with de-schooling is that there's someone somewhere at some time put a like a formula to it saying, like, for every year they were in school, you need a month of de-schooling, and it's just very like disingenuous timeline of like, okay, you're done, now we have to go back to normal, and that's not the goal. The goal is not to reject it for a little while, to heal from it, just to go back to the normalcy of learning. Looking a certain way, the goal of this is to find a new normal way. The goal of this is to find a new normal, and so really, it is just this daily work of undoing what you formerly believed and letting your children rediscover who they are Now. If you have little kids and they've never had to be in that system, then nothing has to change and that's the best part of it. Just keep living again. Ask yourself every day, every time you have that fear, if school didn't exist, what would we do? And then you do those things and you just live with them and that's the hardest but yet easiest thing to do.
Leah McDermott:But if you are in that journey where you're kind of unlearning with your children, connection again is going to be the most important thing having conversations with your kids, helping them rediscover what it's like. Because you know, imagine being a child who, until you were 10, 12 years old, every day your alarm went off, you did the same rigid thing and then all of a sudden you don't have to do that anymore. A big part of them is going to feel like at any moment you're going to change your mind and rip that off from under them. And so there's like and that's what educational trauma is and that's like a whole other podcast episode we can talk about. But like feeling safe in that is a big thing, like the security of that feeling Okay, like, is she going to change her mind? There's no way mom's not going to make me do the textbooks anymore, right, like there's no way she's not going to make me go back to school.
Leah McDermott:That is something that needs to heal and that can take a while and they have to kind of. First, the first layer of healing is like trusting that this is real, that this is okay, that this is normal now, and then the layer of rediscovering whoa, my time is my own. What do I do now? Like, I get to just do art. Do I like art? Am I good at art? I get to play video games. I get to go outside.
Leah McDermott:Like having to rediscover. That's a whole new layer, right, because for however long they were in that system, even if it was at home, that was conditioning still, and so they get to, kind of they have to relearn what that's like even just being able to sleep until they're not tired, eat when they're hungry, go to the bathroom when they need to. All of that takes new layers of rediscovering. So the most important thing is just be okay with living together, existing together, seeing the learning in the everyday things and just doing that healing work, because you know with.
Leah McDermott:So, for example, with Bridge Academy, when I run, I have consult calls with parents who will ask me exactly that, okay, we're going to pull them out of public school. We're committed to this. What do I do now? And I tell them. You know what, if the only thing you do for the whole next school year is just heal, that matters. That is the most important thing that you can do, because they won't have to do that when they're 20, when they're 40, they'll get to do that now, and then they have that time to rediscover themselves, and it is never wasted time. So, whatever amount of time it takes for them or for you to work through that processing, that is the most important thing.
Rebecca Twomey:Absolutely, and it sounds like for the parents it's also learning to enjoy your children. Maybe, again, maybe you know, maybe you haven't been, and so maybe it's learning to enjoy being with them or seeing those curiosity sparks and things come up. I know that my little guy, who's two and a half, he's starting to talk more and say things, and my husband went out of town for work and we were going to bed and we called him before bed and my husband said hi, benny, how are you? And he said good, and it was the first time he ever did that, it was the first time he ever responded to that question how are you?
Rebecca Twomey:And I just remember in that moment going that's so sweet, like that's the first time, and I think it's just, you know, relishing in those moments of excitement for them when they're learning something new and that they're really, you know, just showing who they are as little people. I think we can lose our own excitement for that sometimes because we're so used to just being in the hustle and bustle of life, and that's something that's so cool about unschooling and natural learning is this idea that we get to be excited for our kids and about our kids and the things that they're doing and learning. You know, we all know our kids love to show off and hey, watch me look what I can do, being happy for them in those moments.
Leah McDermott:And the older they get. You know, speaking from as a mom of teens and I'm also the neighborhood mom so there's so many, you know much older kids that are hanging out at our house all the time just because there's a reason, right, it feels safe here. We love everything. We don't only ask you about school, like this is a fun place to be. They all flock to our house, to our house just being able to like connect with them when they're teens too, because you built those relationships so strongly when they were little.
Leah McDermott:It matters so much what they're willing to share with you. You know, it's not just for my children being that way, but the privilege that I feel of knowing that other kids come to say things to us and open up to you know, to me, because they don't feel that connection at home is really, you know, quite a privilege. So connection really, really really matters. And the more you can do that when they're little, the more time you can spend with them, the easier that is when they're older. And then how much easier it is for them as teens to know they have that safety net of somebody that's listening to them, that cares about them, that understands who they are. It continues to matter, so it's it's really important to build that connection.
Rebecca Twomey:That's a really great point. I might you know, my sister is my co-host on this podcast. She's usually on these episodes, but she's working on moving again for the 500th time, so, and we did an intro episode for this series, and one of the things that we mentioned was about how, the more time we spend with our kids, the more opportunity we have to build that connection, because a lot of times, if you think about it, we send kids away for six, eight hours a day. We're gone. Maybe they go to somewhere after school too, so we're only really with them for an hour, the most stressful time, edge and tired, and all of that. There's no opportunity to build that connection. And so when something bad happens to a child, or something that potentially even dangerous, who do they tell? Are they going to tell this parent that is their authoritative figure that they've only been with for 45 minutes every night, or are they going to talk to someone else?
Leah McDermott:Yes, and I will tell you. They will talk to somebody else and I have had numerous children say to me if I, if something bad happens or I get in trouble, can I call you instead of my parent? They have said that to me because they know the difference in what will happen, the difference in how I will react versus now. You know, of course we have to have conversations about I'm not your parent, you know. But to know, to know there's that. I think it's really important for parents to hear that because they will find a safe place and if it isn't with you, it is going to be with someone else, and you don't always know that you can trust that other person. So it's they.
Leah McDermott:They will find somebody and it might even be a peer that can't be trusted, or you know they will find somebody that they can trust and it might not be you, so do the work to make it huge.
Rebecca Twomey:Yeah, that's going to be my next question for you, cause a lot of times parents don't find out these things until their kids are grown. Yes, that certain things happen to them, right, because they didn't feel comfortable talking to mom and dad when they were kids. So can you share a little bit about how to foster that type of relationship where your kids do open up to you and they do want to share everything with you, that they talk to you? How do you foster that? How do you create that?
Leah McDermott:I mean, obviously, the more time you spend together is going to help that right. The more time you spend with someone, the more you're going to be able to connect with them. But I think a lot of it is modeling. So I share my husband and I share openly about our feelings with each other. We have discussions openly with our children. We apologize when we've been too harsh or when we've been in a bad mood. It's a lot of it is just emotional security, right, being able to have conversations and model those conversations that are hard, talk about hard things, but also remembering to listen without judgment. Accept that your children are people. They're going to make mistakes and when you make them feel bad about those mistakes, they internalize that and then they won't want to share with you the next time.
Leah McDermott:You know being careful with how often you say no, what you set boundaries for. You know, in our home, for example, boundaries hard boundaries are things around safety. You still don't have to like them, but you know we have boundaries around curfew, right, because that's a hard boundary in our home, because at certain times of the night it's not safe for you to not be home anymore. There's a safety concern. Or, you know, wearing a helmet, that's a safety concern. Whatever Wearing a seatbelt, you got to wear a seatbelt.
Leah McDermott:We have safety concerns, our hard boundaries and everything else we talk about. We negotiate and we do that together and it's never because I said so, it's because this is you know, I still get to make the decisions at the end, but we're going to talk about them and treating your child as a full human and that their emotions matter. That's how you build connection and it doesn't mean that everything's always fantastic. We certainly have moments in our home that are frustrating and we argue, but we have a mutual respect and I build routines in with my children where they know that there's those points during the day where they can always connect with me and we don't have to talk, but maybe we just high five or I peek in or I. You know there's. There's little things built through the routines during the day that allow us to have those connection points. But it's really, it's more than anything, modeling that emotional security and being able to have hard conversations.
Rebecca Twomey:Allowing kids to have their own feelings and talk to them about it, versus shutting them down, right, or saying you know, stop acting like that, Stop doing that. I'll give you a small example from last night. Okay, so we were at Dollywood, which is a theme park, and it was closing. My husband really wanted a milkshake. He was the one who wanted it. So he goes to this ice cream place like this is the end, right, and me and all the kids were doing something else, and he didn't hear my daughter that she had asked for actual ice cream. So he got milkshakes for everyone, right. And so when we come out from where we are, he has milkshakes and she gets upset, she starts crying and said I really wanted ice cream and I thought I told you I wanted ice cream or something like that.
Rebecca Twomey:And he could have reacted in a million ways. Right, and I think that a way that a lot of parents would react to that situation is well, just be grateful, you got anything right. But my husband got down on his knees so he could be eye to eye and he said I am so sorry, I didn't hear you when you said you wanted ice cream. I know you. It sounds like that's what you really wanted. I'm really sorry that I didn't. I wasn't able to get that for you and you know she was still upset and she was able to go through her feelings and I later talked to her about grace and forgiveness and she said I don't think I could do that, mommy, I'm not ready yet.
Rebecca Twomey:I'm not ready yet, but you know it was a. We were able to have this conversation about how sometimes people make mistakes, or sometimes people don't hear, don't listen, and it opened up a larger conversation instead of it being about let me try to control her emotion right now and not allow her to cry in emotion right now, and not allow her to cry in this public place and not allow her to have feelings. She's allowed to have her feelings and I think that that's something that for me personally, I know I want to allow her to have so that she can be her own person right.
Rebecca Twomey:Like I don't want her to just be this robot, like, oh, I can't cry about this because I got something you know. Anyway, just a small little thing.
Leah McDermott:But that continues to matter. And recently my oldest was having an issue with one of his friends and he came and talked to me about it and I gave him some advice and later, when that friend found out that he had talked to me, he made fun of him. He's like, oh, you're such a little baby, you still tell your mom your problems. And my son again. So he was like, yes, I have a relationship with my mom, that's a good thing. And he was able to see the benefits of that. And we talked later and he was like I don't think my friend has that with his mom and I think it was jealousy, Like he was able to say.
Leah McDermott:I think it actually made him sad that he couldn't go to his mom and had to had to deal with those feelings as a child by himself, Absolutely Sad and alone, that feels. And for him to recognize that difference was a really powerful moment. I think sad and scary, but a powerful moment. For him to recognize that difference was a really powerful moment. I think sad and scary, but a powerful moment for him to see, whoa, that's not normal, that I have that connection with my parents.
Rebecca Twomey:So that's great, that he was able to see that and that he was able to not care what the friend thought. Right, Because so many kids just want to people please their peers and like, oh yeah, talk down about my mom Definitely, peers and like, oh yeah, talk down about my mom Definitely.
Leah McDermott:And I and you know, I think for me as somebody that has noticed or you know I noticed all of those things about my kids, cause I don't just focus on academics that was the biggest moment of growth for my son in the last year, that he didn't care what his peers were saying, that he made you know that, seeing that emotional development, that made me more happy than any test score he could have brought home, because what an amazing growth as a human.
Leah McDermott:How many adults still care so? So much what other people think. But for him, you know, for him to to recognize what it was at its core, to have the emotional intelligence to wait. Oh okay, that's a you problem, not a me problem. You know that was. That was huge for me.
Rebecca Twomey:That's amazing. Wow. What a great milestone too. You know, I think our society is so afraid of not being liked or, you know, not being likable or getting deleted on social media because you post something that you really feel or that you really think and oh, people are gonna not like me for this. I mean, that's the world in which we live in, and it's a sad place that we can't be ourselves and think for ourselves because we're worried about what other people think. Now I wanna give you opportunity to share a little bit more about you have amazing resources and community support through your Natural natural learner and through Bridge Academy, so share a little bit more about that and what you're doing there and what the tools that you can provide to families, because I'm sure people are going to have lots of questions about how they can find you, what they can learn, how they can get involved. Share a little bit more with us.
Leah McDermott:Totally so. The easiest place to find me is on Instagram. That's where I spend most of my time. I think that's where we connected.
Leah McDermott:Yeah, I love your Instagram, it's easiest for me, so that's at your natural learner. So that's the easiest place to find me and anything I do is going to be there. Anyway, I've always got new ideas, but so through natural learner. Your natural learner is where my curriculum is for K through eighth grade and then, um, just lots of workshops and things that I'm running all of the time, so all kinds of cool stuff over there. Again, you can see it all through Instagram. And then bridge Academy is again the um private school for homeschoolers and unschoolers that we founded. Um, again, I post about that on my Instagram too, so you can find that there. But the site for that is bridgeacademyus. But that incorporates, or when you enroll in Bridge Academy, you actually get all of the your Natural Learner curriculum anyway to use as a resource. You get all of the support as either a private schooler or homeschooler community other resources, so pretty great place to be. Yeah, that's awesome.
Rebecca Twomey:And Bridge Academy, as you mentioned earlier, allows you to actually un-enroll unschool but enroll in a community where you don't have to necessarily except you mentioned two states you don't have to Very few. Yeah, go through all the hoops and bells and whistles that you may have to go through when it comes to testing and all that type of stuff.
Leah McDermott:Yeah, exactly so it's. It's basically a private school is how we're registered in almost every state. So we have like check-in forms they call them the learning logs. So you and, or the kids together, you hop into that once a month or so. You share what you've been doing together. If that looks like curriculum, that's really cool, Awesome, Share that with us. If that looks like your world, schooling and traveling and that's how you learn cool, share that. You share all the things you're working on and we take all of that information and turn that into official academic credit so that your children still get transcripts just as if they were in a private school, so that they can become, you know, they can go to college with those transcripts, transfer back to a school if they want to. It's all. It turns real life learning into real academic credit, basically. So pretty cool.
Rebecca Twomey:Amazing. I love that. So definitely visit bridgeacademyus for more information on that. Shosa mentioned the website yournaturallearnercom and of course you have to go follow her Instagram, instagramcom. Forward. Slash your natural learner. I love all your posts and I think Instagram knows it because lately I've been logging in it's like first I'm like yes, yes, yes, yes yes, of course, the more I'm engaging with it, that's going to give it to me, so I love it.
Rebecca Twomey:But I love everything that you're sharing. It just resonates so much with my own journey with my kids right now and where we're headed. So, yeah, I appreciate you. Is there anything else that you wanted to share with the audience today?
Leah McDermott:I don't think so. I mean, I'll maybe end with how I end most interviews. So if you listen to me anywhere else, I'm sorry for repeating it, but the anytime that fear is popping up. So wherever you are on your journey, I promise you there's going to be a moment of like oh, am I doing all of this so wrong? Something is going to happen that make you feel that way. So when you feel that fear, I want you to notice that it's coming. Don't react to it, and I want you to give yourself 24 hours and for 24 hours, just turn it all off and spend that 24 hours observing your child with zero expectations, because I promise you, in those 24 hours, they're going to show you something new, something unique, something amazing, something small. That will help you see, everything's okay, they are growing, they are developing. That fear is yours, it isn't theirs, and it helps you to make more informed choices than just reacting to that fear if you did in the beginning.
Rebecca Twomey:Amazing. That's fantastic advice. And it's great advice for more than just this too. Totally A lot of things in life. We have fear around it, right? I mean, we're talking about birth before earlier.
Rebecca Twomey:Yeah, it's not a big area, but definitely in the area of this. That's awesome. Thank you so much for being here and for sharing all this fantastic information. Of course, thanks for having me again, of course, and thank you for tuning in and being on this journey with us. If you would like to follow along outside the podcast, be sure to join the mission on Instagram, facebook and this will also be on YouTube at the Radiant Mission. And today we're going to close with Proverbs 1, verse 5, let the wise listen and add to their learning and let the discerning get guidance. We're wishing you a radiant week and we'll see you next time. Bye, everyone.
