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Homeschooling or Unschooling Your PDA Child
By Marni Kammersell
Many of us in the GHF community are parents of beautifully quirky, neurodivergent kids who—shall we say—have a strong connection with their “no.”
Can we just celebrate that? Self-advocacy is an important and often difficult skill to learn. Even when it’s inconvenient, it’s such a beautiful thing to meet young people who know themselves well enough to advocate for what is right or wrong for them in the moment.
But that kind of self-awareness in a young person—especially when paired with still developing maturity—doesn’t align well with a one-size-fits-all system like most conventional schools. Which is how so many of us end up homeschooling or unschooling!
While some homeschoolers recreate a schoolish structure at home, others are drawn to a more learner-centered model that aims to foster the child’s intrinsic interests.
This kind of education relies heavily on trust and connection, and underlying those two goalposts is an entire philosophy.
Unschooling is not the absence of schooling. It’s a different kind of education with different goals. When we choose self-directed education, we let go of concerns about the specific knowledge that young people learn on a daily basis—ideas like “all kids should learn multiplication in third grade.” We also don’t ask kids to prove what they know. There are no adult-driven worksheets, curriculum, tests, or agenda.
As unschooling parents or facilitators, we walk alongside young people and help them explore their interests. The skills and knowledge we foster through unschooling include:
- Helping children know themselves deeply
- Listening to their bodies with time to eat, drink, sleep, and use the bathroom
- Learning how to learn
- Figuring out what they like, and don’t like
- Exploring autonomy and consent
Learning how to learn is an especially important part of self-directed education. It may not be immediately intuitive to us, living in a culture that focuses on children learning certain things at certain times, but it makes sense when we think about ourselves as adult learners.
When an adult wants to learn a new skill like knitting or changing a tire, we might sign up for a class—but for most tasks we’re more likely to turn to a video, a book, or a friend. Unschooling works the same way. Young people learn through exploring their interests, and in doing so they develop skills they will apply to other things in the future (yes, including formal classes, if and when they want them!).
Two important theories that I’d like to share with you that help us think about why self-directed education works well for many gifted and otherwise neurodivergent learners are monotropism and self-determination theory.
Monotropism is a theory of Autistic attention style developed by Autistic researchers Dinah Murray and Wenn Lawson in the 1990s. It holds that Autistic folks generally have a narrower focus, which is great for deep dives but makes transitions (like six class periods a day) difficult. That intense attention can also carry a learner into flow, which is a mental state that supports improved emotional regulation, productivity, and life satisfaction. Going deep on one’s interests can benefit anyone, but it’s especially key for Autistic and PDA kids, and unschooling allows for this in a way no other educational philosophy does.
Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is another model I return to again and again. Developed by Deci and Ryan in 1985, SDT holds that human motivation and well-being are shaped by three basic human needs: competence, relatedness, and autonomy. Competence is the ability to find and engage with “just right” challenges that help someone feel capable and self-efficacious. Relatedness is feeling connected, understood, and a sense of belonging with others. Autonomy is having meaningful choice and agency over one’s life. It’s certainly possible to achieve all three in a school setting, but only when attending is chosen by the young person in the first place (remember that big autonomy piece?!). Many neurodivergent kids, and especially PDA kids, have to be able to say “no” before they can say “yes.”
And they will say “no” a lot.
Listening to and honoring those “no”s can be inconvenient and even scary. Will they ever eat a vegetable? Leave the house? Put on pants?! Read a book? Do anything other than read a book? Have an interest beyond Minecraft?
Other unschooling parents can share with us that yes, they stopped forcing, and eventually their children decided to do all of these things and more. Or sometimes they didn’t, and they found ways for that to be okay too.
My doctoral research explored the paths of young adult PDAers who unschooled during their teen years, as well as the approaches and supports provided by their home educating parents. Unschooling through high school isn't for everyone, but for those who've done it, some clear patterns emerged in what helped them thrive.
The themes of Self-Determination Theory ran through their stories. These young people needed autonomy to thrive, and unschooling allowed them to feel secure in making their own choices. This opened up new capacity and willingness to take risks, knowing that they could always change their minds, and could always go back to that well-established “no.” They built strong personal connections (relatedness) both online and in person, often with people of all different ages rather than narrowly focusing on their same-age peers. And their competence bloomed in unique spaces as well, such as running online Discord servers, starting an equine-assisted personal development business, becoming a Lineman electrician, and yes, going to college.
If you’re in the thick of it right now, wondering whether trust and connection are enough, I hope these brief stories offer a bit of reassurance. It doesn’t look the same for every kid, or happen on any set timeline. But the “no” that we honor today may be exactly what sets our young people up to find the “yes” they can choose wholeheartedly in the future.
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