First cohort begins July 6!

Stop worrying so your kids can be their best

Dear Parent,

Are you tired of worrying about your children?

Deschooling Parenthood is the course for worried, exhausted parents.

There is another way

I’ve spent years working with, teaching, and studying children, and supporting their parents as they guide their children to adulthood. In the process, I’ve learned that most of the stories we hear about how to raise children to adults are nonsense.

Does this sound familiar?

  • Worrying constantly that you aren’t doing enough for your children.

  • Worrying that your children won’t get into a good college or find a good job.

  • Worrying that your children will “fall behind” and never catch up.

  • Worrying about your unhappy, anxious children who never seem excited about much.

  • Thinking something is wrong with you because your children aren’t perfect.

  • Fighting constantly with your children.

  • Wanting your children to grow up to make positive contributions to the world, and feeling flummoxed about how to make that happen.

  • Wanting to choose an alternative to traditional school for your children, but worrying they won’t get a good education.

So many of us feel this way, and we try endlessly to fix ourselves and our children. Maybe you’ve tried:

  • Playing “police officer” to your children: nagging, threatening, yelling, arguing, bribing, and punishing

  • Hiring tutors

  • Taking your children to therapy

  • Changing schools

  • Meeting endlessly with teachers, school administrators, or parenting experts who suggest new strategies to “fix” your children

  • Asking for advice on social media

If this is you, chances are you are exhausted. Worrying constantly is unrewarding. Never feeling you are enough is tiring.

But there is a better way!

Here’s what I’ve learned

Children thrive with parents who are calm, non-anxious, gentle guides. Children are smarter and more capable than we give them credit for, and they want their lives to work. Most will work hard to make that happen, when given the chance to shape their own lives.

Rather than trying to mold our children into perfect resumes, or perfect people, we can change our perspective and learn to see our role as creating a healthy, safe, loving space for them to do their own work of growing up. Instead of adopting the set of beliefs sold by traditional school and traditional media, we can choose our own agenda, the agenda of allowing our children to grow. We can learn to see that growing up happens everywhere. We can learn to see the many ways and places learning happens, besides at school. When we begin to trust our children to create the lives that are right for them, we discover that there are many forms of contribution, many definitions of success, and many ways to make meaning.

Instead of molding our children, we can let our children author their own lives!

My Story

I’m Alexa. I’ve been a Montessori guide for over a decade. I  chose Montessori, because I remembered how vibrant and enthusiastic I felt as a Montessori child myself, two decades earlier. The world was a fascinating place! I wanted to help children find the same joy in learning and zest for the world that I’d felt myself.

But when I entered the classroom as a teacher, I discovered a far more anxious world. Parents worried whether their children were learning to read fast enough. Administrators wanted to know whether students had memorized their math facts. Some parents complained that we weren’t offering enough “enrichment” activities. Others wanted a week-by-week listing of the work their children would be doing. There was so little room for joy, excitement, or spontaneous fascination.

Some teachers have an amazing ability to block out those demands and inspire their students anyway. I couldn’t do it. That anxiety leaked through, and I saw it harming my students. The more anxiety the adults around them felt, the less capable, less curious, less independent, and less joyful they became. In fact, the classroom where I had the most ability to protect my students’ freedom was also the one that produced the most enthusiastic learning and the most impressive work. After years of trying to be the interface between adult anxieties and children’s freedom, I burned out. I couldn’t do it anymore.

So I decided to take a different approach. Instead of trying to fix children, I’d try to help adults see that all this worry and pressure is unnecessary, counterproductive, and exhausting for everyone. After more than a decade of informally supporting parents and guides, I’ve decided to make that work available to more people.

Deschooling Parenthood is that offering.

You can read more about my work as a Montessori guide and the growth of my thinking over at The Montessori Cosmos.

Our keys

Trust

Children and adults thrive with autonomy

Nature

Evolution made children to grow up into competent adults.

Joy

We have a right to enjoy the wonderful moments!

Community

You can’t go it alone. Neither can your children

Connection

Connect with your children so they will connect with you

What You’ll Learn 

  • In which we get to know each other and get oriented to the basic ideas we’re going to be exploring.

  • In which we begin to understand the roles school plays in our lives. We’ll see how ubiquitous schoolish ideas are and begin to explore how we’ve absorbed these ideas into our thinking.

  • In which we begin to explore the collateral damage of school on children’s well-being, and begin to recognize and heal from the harms we experienced in school ourselves.

  • In which we begin to view raising children through the lens of ecology, and discover what people need in order to thrive.

  • In which we take a deep dive into the core assumption behind the schoolish model of learning, and then discover the many ways that children truly learn, when given freedom to direct their own activities.

  • In which we begin to let go of what we’ve been taught to worry about and instead focus on the traits, beliefs, and habits we want to model for our children.

  • In which we explore how to offer guidance to our children without taking away their autonomy.

  • In which we explore how to help our children make school work for them, or how to choose an alternative.

  • In which we explore the wider potential of deschooling on our children’s futures, our futures, and society’s future.

Choose your starting point

I’m Not Sure Yet
Let’s talk

Schedule a time to talk with Alexa. We can decide together whether Deschooling Parenthood is the right fit for you.

I’m in!

$799 $189

I can’t wait to join the first cohort of Deschooling Parenthood!

Live sessions on Tuesdays, 4:30PT/7:30ET (US times). Can't make a session? They will be recorded to watch later!