We are an unschooling support group for parents and caregivers of atypical kids.
Terms, Copyright, Donations, Background
This is a public page with resources. You can join one of our private groups on Substack or Facebook to ask questions, and we have a public page for memes. Our group has been primarily on facebook for 10 years, and we are building this space as an accessible archive of information, as well as our Substack as an alternative for conversation.
We have found that NON-COERCIVE and RELATIONSHIP-BASED approaches work MUCH better for our kids than most mainstream methods of education and therapy.
You may join one of our private groups to learn about unschooling, get support in moving toward unschooling, or share your experience unschooling your atypical** child. We ask everyone participating in these spaces to be curious, aim for unschooling, connection, and anti-ableism, and respect lived experience.
We are a global group willing to go against the status quo. Let’s support each other!
Terms
For more, see our glossary and faq
Unschooling is a TYPE of Homeschooling, but it is VERY different from the “school-at-home” approach most people are familiar with. It requires quite a paradigm shift in the parents’ minds, which is called Deschooling. We offer support to anyone curious about moving towards unschooling, but not support in practicing parent-directed school-at-home or child-led ecclectic homeschooling.
Atypical includes neurodiverse, (autism, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, ADHD, gifted, 2E, highly sensitive, etc.), physical disabilities, genetic differences, sensory differences, Downs syndrome, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, chronic asthma, epilepsy, blind and visually impaired, deaf and hearing impaired, medically complex, chronic illness, chronic pain, mental and behavioral health issues, explosive, avoidant, cancer or other illness, PTSD, and cPTSD, and any other difference that might make mainstream unschooling advice feel inaccessible to your family.
Donations
If you are able, your donation is appreciated! If not, we appreciate your work to be a better parent and community member and your contributions to the group. Donations in any amount make this work more sustainable.
You can donate using the Liberapay yellow button below, the wordpress/stripe form below, “Buy Me a Coffee” with ko-fi, or via paypal. All are collectively managed by our admin team to ensure the group stays informed and accessible. Liberapay and paypal have smaller fees and are preferred.
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Every day dozens of families join our support group feeling lost after their kid has been traumatized by school, struggling with kids in burnout, feeling uncertain, or feeling like it’s impossible to balance everyone’s needs. Our support group is a safety net, catching so many of these families when they don’t know what’s next.
The information here comes from other parents, the website and group come from our admins volunteering behind the scenes.
Donation supports our volunteer admin team’s ongoing work. This includes maintaining websites and groups, private one-on-one support, and organizing information. This also includes consulting on issues that need insight from lived experience or research–from neurodivergent parents, BIPOC, an international perspective, disabled adults, mental health professionals, CPS coaches, etc.
Donations also support paying website fees, accessibility efforts (audio and video) and purchasing outside materials (art, pdfs, etc.) to make the information more accessible, accurate, and helpful.
Copyright
Unschooling Every Family is a compilation of insight and resources gathered from years of support discussions. The original group, “Unschooling Special Needs,” was started by Christina Taber Wester.
Except when a specific author is noted, much of the writing here is anonymously archived by our admin team.
Our admin team as of 2023 is Angela Sulfaro-Menconi, Crystal Byrd Farmer, Delia Tetelman, Ellie Welsh-Ferreyra, Heather Mae, Ingrid Biery, Janet Callahan, Kaitlin Walker, Marni Kammersell, Paula Day, Rayne Depukat, and Supriya Narang.
Unschooling Every Family by Angela Sulfaro-Menconi, Crystal Byrd Farmer, Delia Tetelman, Ellie Welsh-Ferreyra, Ingrid Biery, Janet Callahan, Kaitlin Walker, Marni Kammersell, Paula Day, Rayne Depukat, and Supriya Narang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Background
This group was originally “Unschooling Special Needs,” and formed as a spinoff from unschooling support groups that did not welcome diagnosis or labelling, or see it as relevant to parent support questions. Sometimes these groups either saw kids as not “really” autistic, or as “too” disabled to be able to unschool.
The founding members sought to create a space where parents could get unschooling support informed by knowledge of specific disabilities. The original group was meant to be an explicitly supportive space in contrast to many unschooling spaces where parents were criticized and their language dissected in order to help them deschool through criticizing false beliefs.
By siding heavily with supporting parents, however, “Unschooling Special Needs” offered support and affirmation for ableist and sometimes damaging perspectives on disability and neurodivergence. Actually Autistic group members protested and ended up leaving.
In the past five or so years, the group changed to recognize that neutrality wasn’t enough, that marginalized groups need to be centered, that lived experience is essential to understanding and unschooling a disabled or neurodivergent kid. The document below details more on this change, symbolized by the name change to “Unschooling Every Family.”
This group still prioritizes support, alongside education. We ask group members to respect terminology, listen and learn, and we strive to archive and document resources so that our disabled and neurodivergent members don’t need to repeat information again and again. We recognize and value care work alongside disability justice, and believe both are essential in practicing non-coercive, connected parenting with atypical kids.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D1r61IdfvgXKV5A1ijP-QgoH27KUoYd8Jt9-TU01z5U/edit?usp=sharing
Unschooling Every Family 
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