Hey IndieHackers 👋
My name is Gary and I'm taking some time out this year to look at ways to help us homeschooling parents enable our children for the Future of Work. 🚀
I started a side-project with a temp name "IndieSchoolers"
However the name has grown on me and the community has fallen in love with it too. I even bought the domain - https://indieschoolers.com/
It's so relevant for parents wanting to school in their own Independent way
This obviously has no correlation with IndieHackers, however I would definitely want to get feedback and post a very transparent "Building in Public” journey through the IndieHackers community.
Should I:
I appreciate any thoughts or feedback
Hah, well if you don't want it, I'll buy it off you.
But seriously, happy to chat or bounce ideas. I've been unschooling my kids for 8 years or so.
Also, a lot people use the name indie in relation to other things. Indie artists, indie music, etc.
This sounds awesome! I just listened to Leo [zen habits] on the Tim Ferriss podcast recently and his thoughts around unschooling really deeply resonated. We have a toddler home & our second is on its way; we knew from years that we don't want to send them to school, but we were only aware of homeschooling. Unschooling is fascinating. Would you have any ressource / book / website you'd recommend that helped you at the very beginning? or on the contrary, you just trusted yourself [and your kids] and adapt on the way?
Ah, I should listen to that episode.
It can be hard to write about how to do unschooling because there is no one way to do it, and that's the whole point. It's all about stepping away from the system and figuring things out as a family and for each child.
It's also easy to say 'just trust your kids'. That is what we believe we do, but it's so hard to do in practice. Society and culture place so many expected norms, things we are taught to believe are good and needed, but actually many are not.
A perfect example is trusting and letting kids learn to read at their own pace. My two older kids learned at school (we took them out of school aged 8ish), so I didn't have to teach them. My current 9 year old has never been to school. I did my best to trust the learning process of encouraging reading, but not forcing it. At almost 9 he showed no interest, but could read with reluctance. TBH, I was getting nervous about the whole thing, I kept telling myself to trust the whole process, but in the back of my mind I was freaking out about me damaging him. Luckily, come lockdown March 2020 he decided to start reading. Spends hours in his room every day doing it. And has read at least 50 proper size books since, including the Harry Potter series, twice.
So yeah, having trust and trusting the process is hard.
The classic concern people have, which is always the first thing people ask, is 'but how do you socialize your kids'. People can't seem to view good socialization skills without school. It's crazy once you know how damaging school can be.
This website is quite good - https://livingjoyfully.ca/
And many people refer to unschooling as self directed learning too - https://www.self-directed.org/
This is really helpful Rosie, I will def check these out.
I agree that trusting your kids is the hard part, especially when they are trying to justify playing FortNite all day, because they think they will make a career out of it. However I think this leads into a whole other topic :)
Thanks again for all the support, we are ±50 sign-ups away from reaching the my personal target of 100 🤞🏽
I've come to the conclusion that trusting your kids doesn't mean letting them do what they like, it's more of a constant life negotiation.
At the end of the day, as parents we are responsible and need to make decisions.
Thanks a ton for that feedback. That helps tremendously 🙏✌️
Yeah I never really understood the 'socialialization' part myself since as far as I remember, I made most of my friends outside of schools + I always found there are plenty of moments & spaces in life to socialise.
Thanks for the positive feedback Rosie!
I really appreciate it.🙏🏽
Would be great to setup a discussion.
Lets set something up, I'm [email protected]
I think this is such a cool idea. My wife and I are still new to parenting with an 11 month old at home. This is definitely a resource I would use and love to be a part of.
I really like the idea of providing space and resources for parents who are trying to go the "indie" route. It's definitely an underserved population.
I like the name, just signed up.
I dig it!
I think it's perfect.
I just signed up for your mailing list.
I love the name! I'd keep it. I don't think it would be confused in any way with indie hackers.
@rosiesherry might help
Thanks to everyone for your support 🙏🏽
Even @csallen reached out to me to say it's cool
Now the real fun begins. 🚀
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.