Our May Review

We're retiring the Childhood Redefined Unschooling Summit online course on June 1.

Hi! It’s Pam here to share a recap of May, 2026.

Spring came late this year and this morning I took some time to wander and marvel at the lilacs starting to open, the flowers soon to burst on the trees, the tiny wild strawberry flowers blanketing our “lawn.” It’s beautiful!

We have finally passed the last frost date and I’ll be diving into some gardening over the next couple of weeks.

Immersing myself in this season of new growth reminds me again of the cyclical nature of things, which in turn feels so grounding.

Speaking of …

Quick reminder: the Childhood Redefined Unschooling Summit online course is closing

Ten years ago, Anna, Anne Ohman, and I released the Childhood Redefined Unschooling Summit into the world. After two amazing in-person events, we quickly realized we wanted to offer these ideas more widely, which led us to build an online course version.

Over the years, we have received such beautiful feedback from participants. And while we celebrate its ten years in the world, we have also made the decision to retire the Summit on June 1.

With that in mind, we want to give everyone this last opportunity to pick it up before we close the doors. We are offering it for only $50, hoping to make it available to anyone who in interested. It was such a meaningful project for us.

Click here to learn more about the Summit.

Note that the Summit course is hosted inside the Living Joyfully Network. Once you join, we’ll send you the link to purchase the Summit.

Join the Living Joyfully Network here.

Remember, the first month in the Network is free! And if you choose not to stay, that free month is plenty of time for you to download all the Summit course content. As we mentioned, it’s yours to keep.

Not that we want to encourage you to leave the Network. 😉 We think it’s an amazingly supportive community! But we do want anyone who’s interested in experiencing the Summit to be able to get it before it goes away.

The Living Joyfully Network

For our May theme in the Living Joyfully Network, we continued with the next stage of the journey in my book, Accepting the Value of All Experiences.

Joseph Campbell calls this stage, “The Meeting with the Goddess.” In myths and stories, the hero must be spiritually prepared to meet this revered goddess, the Universal Mother, who represents the whole cycle of life. To meet her in her true form is to rise to her challenge and be able to contemplate the entire birth-death cycle she represents with equanimity–with calmness and composure. The ups and downs. The good and the bad. Cosmic creation and destruction. To be able to hold both these seemingly opposing ideas in your mind with comparable appreciation.

In the book, I share that Kali, from Hindu mythology is a great example of the kind of goddess you might meet in this stage. As the goddess of time, creation, and destruction, she represents both the benevolence of a caring, comforting mother and the fury of an aggressive, punishing one, as well as the expanse of time that contains them both. When we look at Kali’s right side we see good; the left, we see bad. And when we are ready to grasp the truth that lies at the heart of this stage, we see her full nature: both.

And we’ve been preparing to meet our version of Kali with all that we’ve learned so far on our unschooling journey.

We’ve started to see the connections play out between our new perspectives on things like why quitting things isn’t “bad,” why saying yes more isn’t “bad,” why our kids seemingly doing nothing is not “bad.” We’ve noticed times when we didn’t stop our child from making a choice we feared might go “badly” and they went on to happily engage in the activity.

By giving our days the time to unfold more naturally, we’ve seen new and interesting things take root in the wake of destruction and upset many times. From a fallen block tower springs a taller and sturdier one. From highly anticipated plans falling through emerges a spontaneous trip to the park, or a cuddly movie day, which turns out to be just what was needed.

Without knowing it, we have been thoroughly preparing ourselves for this meeting.

The conversations in the Network this month around this theme have been so insightful! I so appreciate how thoughtful and reflective the community is.

We invite you to join us in the Living Joyfully Network, a warm and welcoming online community of like-hearted parents. It’s a non-judgmental space where you can steep in these unconventional ideas around parenting, relationships, and learning, and explore what they might look like day-to-day in your uniquely wonderful family.

We offer a free month trial so you can meet us there and see if it’s a good fit for you. Click here to join us. We look forward to welcoming you! 💖

The Network has had an enormous impact on me and my family! Conversations in the Network have been the catalyst for a number of realizations about my identity and other members of my family. It has helped me grow in patience, compassion, and confidence. I have been able to relax a lot of expectations of others that were unhelpful to all of us, and understand what I can control (myself) and what I can’t (eeeeverything else!). The knowledge that others are on this same path has been priceless to me in just not feeling so alone. I feel like it has literally rewired the way I think!” ~ Becky Mofya

The Exploring Unschooling Podcast

In this episode, we began our exploration of the deschooling phase of the journey with stage six: Challenging Our Beliefs About Learning. Deschooling has several aspects, and this is one of the big ones. We may carry many beliefs about the way that school is connected to learning and the way we expect children to learn.

In order to challenge those beliefs, we dug into five truths about learning: teaching is not a prerequisite for learning, curriculum is unnecessary for learning, children are always learning, learning is fun, and learning is not hard. Once we start to question our existing beliefs, many of these new truths come to the surface. And they really build on each other until we’re living in a whole new paradigm!

Listen to the episode in your preferred podcast player or listen/read the transcript on our website here. Or watch on YouTube.

This month, we shared the next Foundations episode of the Living Joyfully Podcast with Anna and me, Baby Steps.

So often, when we’re faced with a challenge or making a choice, we don’t need to have the full picture or the final answer in order to move forward. By taking a baby step in the direction that makes sense to us or to our loved ones, we can learn more about the situation and see how it feels. One baby step can lead naturally to the next. As we keep communicating and checking in, we can find a path forward that works for everyone.

Listen to the episode in your preferred podcast player or listen/read the transcript on our website here. Or watch on YouTube.

We hope you enjoyed our episodes this month!

Have a question for us?

We know that the Exploring Unschooling Q&A episodes are some of the most fun and most listened-to episodes and so, we would love to create more. To that end, we invite you to share your questions with parenting, unschooling, or relationships? Feel stuck somewhere and you’re unsure how to move forward? We would love to hear from you!

If you are interested in submitting a question, click here and complete the submission form.

Whether this is your first encounter with these ideas, or you’re circling back and peeling back another layer of understanding, I’m so glad you’re here!

You inspire me to continue to learn, reflect, and grow.

Wishing you a wonderful June! 💖

1:1 Business Mentoring with Pam: I help entrepreneurs cut through the noise, untangle messy systems, and get back to doing the work they love. Get support here.

1:1 Coaching with Anna: I specialize in helping you awaken your strongest sense of self-discovery, understanding yourself and the inherent differences in all of us. Learn more here.

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