Ep. 64 – School Isn’t For Everyone with Heidi Steel on Neuro-Affirming Homeschooling and Unschooling

What brought you to home learning?

Did you chose homeschooling because you wanted more freedom and flexibility for your family? Were you already questioning the way school approaches children and learning?

Are you are here because something isn’t working?

Perhaps your child is refusing school, struggling with anxiety or burnout, coming home with behavioral reports, barely making it through the day, or not attending school at all. You may be wondering whether homeschooling or unschooling could help, while also wondering what that would actually look like.

There isn’t a single, uniform reason families leave school, and there isn’t one path forward.

In this episode, I’m talking with Heidi Steel, author of School Isn’t for Everyone (And What You Can Do Instead): A Practical Neuro-Affirming Guide to Unschooling. 

Heidi and I recorded this conversation with the parents in my Day in the Life community after spending the community and I spent nine weeks reading and discussing her book together.

Bookmark this episode, this is one of those conversations you will want to come back to and listen to more than once.

It’s a conversation about unschooling, school refusal, burnout, and trust.

Heidi brings both professional and lived experience to this conversation. She spent more than a decade working as a primary school teacher, taught in more than 25 schools, and has been unschooling her own four children for more than a decade. Her family also includes neurodivergent members, which makes her perspective particularly relevant to the families I work with.

Her book was the book I wish I’d had when I first started homeschooling.

One of the things I appreciate most about Heidi’s work is that she doesn’t present one educational path as the answer for every child. She asks us to question the assumptions we have inherited about children, education, learning, and what a successful childhood is supposed to look like.

That matters so much when you’re parenting a neurodivergent child because so many of the things families are told to worry about can look very different when we step outside the expectations of school.

In our conversation, we talk about:

• What beliefs about children and learning might not exist if school had never been invented
• What “trust the process” can actually mean after school refusal, burnout, anxiety, or school trauma
• How families begin rebuilding trust when a child has had difficult experiences with school
• The grief parents may carry about what their children experienced before they found homeschooling or unschooling
• Why Heidi writes, “You have learned to worry about your child’s reading because of school”
• How reading can develop outside of formal instruction
• Screens and digital play, particularly for children experiencing burnout
• Why relationship is so important when we’re talking about learning, especially for neurodivergent children
• Teenagers, teen development, and the pressures facing unschooling teens in a school-centered world
• What adults need to understand when something isn’t working for a teenager
• The difference between trusting a process and simply waiting for something to change

When school isn’t working

If you’re listening at a point in the year where you have a child attending school, you may be in the middle of a situation you never expected.

• Maybe you’re getting your first behavior report.
• Maybe your child is refusing to get out of the car.
• Maybe attendance has already become a battle.
• Maybe your child is technically attending school but coming home completely depleted.
• Maybe you’ve been trying accommodations, meetings, consequences, rewards, therapy, tutoring, or every other idea someone has suggested, and you’re still wondering what your child needs.

And sometimes, nothing is dramatically wrong. You’re simply beginning to recognize that the way school is organized doesn’t seem to fit your child.

If any of this resonates, I see you. Parents who find 90-Minute School Day have a similar story to tell. All of us would like you to know, you don’t have to know the answer before you start asking questions.

Homeschooling may be the right choice for your family. It may not be. There may be a period of time when you’re figuring that out while your child is still enrolled in school. Your kiddo may homeschool for a while and return to school.

Questions that are worth asking at any point are:

• What is my child communicating?
• What do I notice when I stop measuring them against what school expects?
• What happens when we have more room for relationship, autonomy, capacity, interests, and recovery?
• What might learning look like if we weren’t trying to make it look like school?