Unschooling in Babylon

How to Unschool in Babylon

We don't live in a tribal society; we don't live off-grid; we don't have a homestead or commune of 40 like-minded families; and we don't have endless free time. Our life is full of appointments, a mortgage, a kid with ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, and ARFID, and a mom who works night shifts at a hospital. When people ask how we manage unschooling without a farm or a trust fund, I call it "Unschooling in Babylon." You don't have to leave the world to raise a self-directed kid. What matters is having a few working principles and using them consistently in the life you already have.

Here's what that actually looks like.

Start with 1-3 goals, not a curriculum.

The biggest change for me wasn't finding the right books or the right co-op. It was learning to stop thinking in subjects and start thinking in terms of goals. Instead of saying, "we need to do Language Arts today," I ask: what are the one to three things that really matter for Holden right now? This year, it was reading, writing, and math. Nothing more. Everything else supported those goals, or it was free play, and free play counts too.

Focusing on just a few goals does something important: it gives you room to be creative. When you aren't juggling a twelve-subject checklist, you have the mental space to notice your kid's interest in running a lemonade stand and realize that's actually a math lesson in disguise. You can't spot these opportunities if you're buried in curriculum. Unschooling doesn’t mean unparenting, unguiding, unmentoring. How is that done? How do we honor the child and allow them to make as many choices as our family can stand? What does that actually look like? Short answer: different for every child and parent. A parent has to know their own boundaries so they don’t give too much, and have an interest in playing with their children. That's pretty much the bones of it. Well, that and enough privilege to homeschool. I tried homeschooling as a single parent, and it was so hard. Honestly, we couldn’t make it work in practice. So, child-led meant honoring my daughter's wish to go to public school. I couldn't afford the local Waldorf school, which was the closest thing I could find to a child-led private school. This was 18 years ago; I had never heard of unschooling. But I trusted my child and knew the public school system was killing her natural curiosity. If I knew then what I know now, we could have made a success of homeschooling.

Find your child's interests and smuggle the goal inside them.

Once you know your 1-3 goals, the real work is the translation: how do I meet these goals through what my kid already loves?

• Spelling → hangman, out loud spelling games, silly words allowed, no worksheet in sight.

• Math: We use Synthesis and Beast Academy for some structure, but Holden is usually in his sensory swing, and I type the answers. We also only do structured math about 3-10 times a month. And I don't stress at all if structured math gets zero time. Math is a foreign language. I love it, and I want him to love it. I don't want him to be a mathematician.  So we play games; his favorite is when we make our own game board and write our own rules. We rules. We also play shop with real money.  We play real games with special +/-/x/divide dice games, card games, and especially playing shop with real money. Making change is math your body remembers. Nothing teaches place value like a kid realizing he's about to shortchange himself.

• Writing: We skip handwriting drills for a kid whose hands can't keep up with his ideas and instead build his fine motor skills by having him draw characters he loves, using YouTube tutorials. Also, kids are natural oral storytellers.  They can create a rich, detailed story out loud with total ease when they are not stressed about physically writing it. Text-to-speech is a learned skill; I still cannot write a paper this way, and I’m working on a master's degree. Kids today will never have to submit any academic or professional work in handwriting, outside of public elementary school.  So we work with the knowledge of the actual skills he needs for whatever he chooses. That strength: dictation, short-story unit studies he picks himself, and illustrating his own work. The goal is "writing," but the way in is storytelling. Learning how to get what’s in our head onto paper that others can read and understand. To get our point across with clarity and style.

• Reading: We don't use assigned books; instead, we do constant read-alouds and library trips for books filled with pictures that still tell a real story. Harry Potter broke me, y’all; I was an avid reader. I did NOT use audiobooks!! That was my personal boundary; I loved books too much…But, alas, I could not keep up with my son's need to consume Harry Potter for years and years and years, constantly. I also let him re-read Harry Potter for the 100th time instead of pushing for "something new." Repetition is comprehension. A kid who goes back to the same story again and again is learning, not stalling. However, I have my boundary: if you want to listen to an audiobook with me in the room, it has to be something I enjoy too. He gets to pick from my long list of classics, and I will try new things, but if I don't like it, then he has to listen without me. There is way too much great children's literature out there for me to listen to something that bores me or for him to listen to something he doesn't enjoy. The object is to LOVE literature. Real, living literature, not just Dog-Man! My refusal to read graphic novels is what pushed Holden to begin reading on his own at age 7. He started by just looking at the pictures, over and over and over. I got him every book. It wasn't until maybe the 5th- 7th time looking at the pictures that he even began to focus and read the text.

None of this works if you're strict about what the lesson should look like. It only works if you keep the goal flexible enough to let your child's real interests guide the learning.

Quid pro quo for the hard stuff

Not everything can be a game, and that's okay. Some tasks are just hard, and I don't pretend otherwise. What works for us is simple quid pro quo: you do the hard thing, then you get the thing you want. Screen time, for example, is now something Holden manages and negotiates himself, instead of me handing it out…at least ideally…in theory. That change from me managing his screens to him managing his own screen time and the media or education he chooses started about 6 when he needed to engage with time 4 learning, Beast Academy, Reading Eggs, Math Eggs, or Hooked on Phonics-before he got time on his video games. At this time, Minecraft was considered an educational game; a screen time activity. But for his type of neurodivergence, even educational screen time has to have limits, or he gets grumpy, dysregulated, not hungry, not thirsty, and definitely not tired. A small semblance of independence with his screen time to enrichment brain time, and completing his chores was our main goal for 3rd grade. It's been one of our biggest wins this year. He is far from independent, but he doesn't fight the algorithm, and he understands it himself. That's huge for us. My use of Quid pro quo wasn't a bribe because it was consistent and honest, but it was very authoritarian and needed to be adapted as he grew more responsible at 10 than at 5. So the boundary/algorithm/“rules” didn't change; they just got way more consistent and fine-tuned into something I could write and could take charge of.  That's how the real world works too. You do the unpleasant email before you get to the fun project. He should learn that rhythm now, with me as a soft landing, rather than later with a boss who won't be. However, if he doesn't want to eat a cookie, then he doesn't have to eat the vegetable. And he gets to choose what vegetable he wants to eat. This is how I have used as many choices as possible, and if he wants to be independent, industrious, and build something, he can do it all day. Only, for Holden, his only desire is to get attention from me and play video games. As I am typing this at 11 pm, he isn't tired, so he doesn't have to sleep. But no screens for him after 8-9 pm. I will stop working/writing if he wants to read a book I enjoy with me. But I won't stop to play a game; that was earlier. And he struggles; he is constantly trying to pull me away as I type.

Adults have to learn to play — actually play.

This is the part that gets easy for adults to skip once their kids get a little older, but it's what earns your kid's respect more than almost anything else. If you don't know how to play, watch a Bluey episode and copy what they do. I mean that literally. Bluey is basically a masterclass in how an adult can play with a kiddo for 15-20 minutes…not all day. The parents get down on the floor, commit to the game, and let things get a little silly. Kids can tell the difference between an adult who is just pretending to join in and one who is really playing with them, but it doesn't actually matter, as long as you give them as much power as you do in the playverse. Learning to play is kinda hard for me, and my kids learned how to play with me as well, inside my own boundaries. I don't like loud noises; I don't like my face touched, and sometimes they will help me with my chores so I can play faster.

When we play, Holden makes most of the rules, but they have to be logical, at least a bit. That's not just being permissive—it's practice in agency, negotiation, and creativity, all within a safe relationship. But "most of the rules" doesn't mean "all of the rules." I bring my own short list of non-negotiables and say them clearly before we start. If you want me to play with you, here is what I need from you to make it work.

That's not a contradiction of child-led play. It's what makes it sustainable. A kid can create a whole universe of rules within a boundary. But he can't build anything if the adult with him is silently gritting their teeth, just waiting for it to end. Stating your limits calmly, maybe a time limit, before resentment builds is part of teaching him that everyone in a relationship has limits.

What this actually produces

People sometimes think unschooling means a kid who can't focus, can't sit still, or can't get along with others. For us, it's the opposite. Holden's social life was my main goal from ages 5-9, and it's still a high priority. Because Holden is so, so, so social…and I am a bit of an introvert, but I like kids. I like organizing space for kids to be autonomous, so I have created many, many free community classes where the kids get to lead the way. Hiking (no playground equipment, but child-led), Lego/building, art, D&D, science experiments, swimming, and I didn't do it alone. I always found a parent willing to help me. Holden's handwriting looks like a preschooler's, and his spelling is even worse than mine (thanks, Grammarly!). Holden learned to read autonomously “late,” and I am not sure where his math level ranks. But Holden has a full, easygoing social life with real friends, and he played Little League baseball (I am not naturally a Little League mom… but we made it through, and he loved it). He moves easily between younger kids, peers, older kids, and adults.  That's not in spite of the unstructured approach. It's because of it. A kid who is regularly asked what he wants to do, and trusted to help build the answer, usually knows how to be with others. Building community is essential, learning scholarly skills is ideal, but loving the 3 main ways humans learn new information these days is my dream. I want him to love reading, writing, and math. I don't care how advanced he is in any of those subjects; we pluck away at them. And when it stops being fun or is exceptionally torturous, we stop. This is what I try to remember, and what we build at Sonder Life Learners: you don't need a commune or a curriculum company to raise a curious, capable kid. You need a short list of real goals, a willingness to find them in what your kid already loves, the humility to learn to play again, and boundaries clear enough that everyone—including adults—actually wants to stay in the room. The room.

That's unschooling in Babylon: ordinary life, done on with intention.