EP44: Spacious Parenting: Trusting Enough to Unschool with Amanda Hodge

Creating Space With Christine Kathryn

In this episode, we continue our series around the theme of Spacious Parenting. For the month of March I’m talking with inspiring Mamas who are creating safe spaces for their kids as they navigate challenges they feel they weren’t prepared for or chart courses they didn’t necessarily expect to take and have since ended up paving the way for others.

Today I welcome back a past guest of mine, Amanda Hodge. Amanda is a wife, mom of three, and spiritual mentor. She shares her journey to and through motherhood and how she has made a radical shift in her parenting style over the past 6 years toward a more spacious approach to include an unschooling lifestyle. She shares how she came about making the shift and the various styles of alternative schooling styles she tried before landing on unschooling. Amanda shares a very simple definition of unschooling that really makes sense to even the most skeptical sorts.

Unschooling has a lot of moving parts and a great deal of variability and looseness associated with it, but at the foundational level, Amanda shares, we must see our kids as arriving whole and complete at birth and that our job as parent is to walk alongside them nurturing their growth.

We delved into various concepts along with specific examples in support of this type of parenting and learning to include the concept of deschooling, the idea and implications of depressurizing, the essentialness of preserving relationship, and the core necessity (and quite possibly the greatest shift for most of us) of trusting ourselves as parent and trusting our child as a person with innate knowledge ready to be discovered. It’s another deeply rich topic and I’m thrilled to share our chat with you. Join us now as we begin to create space...

Important links from the Show:

• Connect with Amanda at her website www.knowingwholeness.com
• Work with Christine one-on-one. Set up a complimentary 20-minute Hello! session with her to see if you are a fit for each other!
• Download this episode’s Guided Meditation