Last year in early September as the New England air cooled and yellow leaves started fluttering down, I felt deeply sad. My PDA son had burnt out ten months before, and we had suddenly pulled him from the diverse and well-meaning public school where he had a coveted spot in an inclusion pre-K. Instead of collecting cute second hand uniforms & putting name labels in a brand new pair of velcro shoes, I was home with a kiddo who still couldn’t leave the house let alone go to school, and hadn’t worn clothes for several months, let alone shoes. Instead of watching him run around a playground with other adorable little kiddos, I was watching hour after hour of Minecraft YouTube videos with him.
I felt sad for my son last September.
I felt deep grief and guilt for how panicked he had been for so long before we understood about PDA and implemented accommodations. I felt sad that the special interest he had carried for a year in school had precipitously dropped off, and that in addition to panic attacks he had zero interest in the peers who had once animated his days. I felt sad for his neurodivergent-affirming teacher, who had burnt out midyear and left abruptly just as my child was burning out himself.
And I felt deep grief and loss for myself.
I was one of the rare PDA Autistics who had always loved school. From 1st grade through college and 6 years of rabbinical school, schools had been my special interest - a safe place where I found belonging, identity, learning, mastery, and delight. I had loved being part of my son’s public school community. I signed up to be the parent liaison with his teacher. I made friends with other parents. I knew all the names of the kids in his class, and the sensory needs of several of them. I got my rabbi educator hat on and did a whole lesson on Hannukah, reading a story, singing with guitar, and giving our dreidles and chocolate coins to kids who had barely heard the word Jewish before. My son’s school had been a mini special interest for me.
But school had failed catastrophically to meet my son’s need for safety as a PDAer, and last September we were six months into burnout recovery.
Six months is the minimum amount of time the unschooling community recommends to “de-school.” That is, for a child to just rest & recover from the trauma of being in an environment daily that wasn’t working for them.
This September is a totally different story.
My 6.5yo PPDAer has been out of school now for 18 months. He is thriving in radically child-led learning at home, known as “unschooling.”
Here are 7 glimpses of what unschooling looks like for us.
As you read this list, be gentle with yourself if your kiddo is still in deep burnout. My kiddo has a lot going for him. He's an only child (great for many PDAers), Prozac helps him a lot, and we did not ever experience a breach of trust in our relationship the way many parents & PDA kids do. He is also not at all peer-driven, meaning he is happiest at home with adults or teens to play with, but doesn't miss the social aspect of school at all.
I also want you to know also that my almost 7-year old cannot write at all, and spends the vast majority of his time at home on screens. Yet he is thriving.
(1) A Glimpse into Screens
My son is a digital learner, and he learns skills and massive amounts of content through gaming and YouTube. He has mostly moved on from Minecraft & now focuses on two special interests: Outer space, and the video game Portal 2. YouTube and gaming give him ways to learn autonomously, following the natural flow of his attention, going deep into subjects and tasks that interest him. Both YouTube and gaming have increased his executive functioning, self confidence, patience, sense of belonging, and positive identity. We have no stigma or shame around either in our home, & we empower him with information & guidance (not rules) about keeping himself safe online, which he takes seriously at age 6.5. (Check out my blog post on screentime for more).
(2) A Glimpse Into Academics
Using YouTube as a digital village of teachers, my 6.5yo son taught himself to read above grade level by watching subtitles (this was a total surprise to me!). These days he learns about science, astrophysics, astronomy, & engineering, to name a few subjects. Note that completing assignments or producing work is not what we do - rather we enjoy the learning together. A few of his current favorite channels include Veritasium, Astrum, Kurzgesagt, Mark Rober, Be Amazed, and Nile Red.
He also watches silly Minecrafters, cracking up & jumping on his trampoline, or resting. He learns math through conversations about it with me & my husband, & by applying math to real world problems. He has an intuitive understanding of fractions, percents, & exponents, even though he is still learning basic arithmetic. It’s wild to see how organically math learning is happening for him. Not all PDAers are able to do this kind of “academic” learning & that’s fine. Nervous system health has to come first.
(3) A Glimpse into Wonder
One of the things I love best about unschooling is that I get to experience my kiddo’s wonder at the world in real time, on a daily basis. “MAMA!” he’ll pause a video and run to me. His face is bright, shining. “Did you KNOW Voyager 1 and 2 might be around even after the Earth is taken over by the sun?” When we go on walks, which he is occasionally able to do now, he coos at trees, birds, insects. I’ve modeled asking both spiritual & scientific questions about nature since he was tiny, & he asks them now himself. “Do you think these flowers are sad because the tree is blocking the sun?” “I am going to get honey to feed this honeybee, because she looks tired of pollinating.” “Oh! Let’s pick this yellow leaf up & look at it under the microscope when we get home.” His natural stream of wonder & curiosity is flowing again after all that panic and stress healed.
(4) A Glimpse into Outings
My son didn’t leave the house for most of a year. There were five months where he didn’t even get to one of our porches. Now, screens & inside are still his recharge & safe place, but he has the energy to go on adventures and/or see people. It’s unpredictable and irregular when, but it happens. Since recovery, we have explored the Arboretum, the Museum of Science, the Aquarium. We’ve seen mummies at the Museum of Fine Arts after reading about them at bedtime. We’ve gone to Home Depot together to get equipment to fix our toilet. He’s come with me to the doctor’s & watched me fill out medical forms. We’ve gone grocery shopping, & he’s helped at check out. We’ve climbed hills, practiced traffic safety (he’s more cautious of cars than necessary), gone out to ice cream & come home to try and make our own. His learning is driven by both real needs & curiosity.
(5) A Glimpse into Self Awareness
One beautiful aspect of unschooling is that my kiddo gets to spend days with a PDA Autistic adult (me) and we get to talk together about being PDA Autistic. Our family uses a lot of Autistic language in everyday conversation, which normalizes & celebrates Autistic & PDA culture. We talk about infodumping, good “sensory feelings,” stimming, our ability to “monotrope” (deeply focus) and how that is a gift and can be hard, too. We process threat responses after the fact (“That seemed so hard when Papa wasn’t home and you wanted to play with him. I could see that fight response in your body. I wonder how it felt to you.”) He has awareness of his threat response, which he calls “my PDA part.” I know these conversations are not possible for many families if the child’s safe circle doesn’t yet include a PDA identity. But when they are possible they can be very powerful.
(6) A Glimpse into Helping
Unschooling means my child is learning in context. Instead of having a “kid life” in school & activities & another at home, he is integrated into the world of house-holding, such as it is. As a kiddo in the proverbial Village learns how to be a human by watching what the grown ups do, my kiddo learns how to work and care for a household by being there while I’m working & caring for ours. Instead of any pressure to do regular chores, which would trigger his PDA threat, I invite him to help with real tasks that I know interest him. And I let him help even if it makes the task less efficient for me. He gives me feedback on PowerPoint presentations. We brainstorm ideas for the app I’m creating. He helps touch up the paint on the walls, fix the toilet, tighten bolts of our butcher block, vacuum hard to reach places, put new plants in the garden, bake, & groom our dog. These build his sense of confidence & teach him real applicable skills. It‘s all just invited, never cajoled. There are weeks when he can access a lot of this kind of activity, and weeks where he can access none of it. That's ok. It's part of the expansion and contraction cycle that seems natural to him.
(7) A Glimpse into Finances
Sometimes, a PDA child’s sanity and even longterm survival are at risk by keeping them in school. In these cases, even with financial difficulty, parents may make the decision to pull a child from school in the same way you would keep a child home if they had a serious illness & needed full time medical care - even if it meant going into debt. In my family’s case, we had the financial privilege for me to drop out of the workforce during my child’s burnout & my own, & we were able to stay in our home. But we were also clear that we would have moved or gone into debt if necessary, because he literally could not physically attend school, plus we could see the devastating effects of school on his mental health. Now that he is unschooled, I am able to work the equivalent of full time for myself from home during creative hours. I can do this because my child is so happy and stable now.
The PDA Safe Circle™ is my strengths-based approach to thriving
for PDAers of all ages.
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