One Free Family - A new take on peaceful parenting

In this episode, James and Taylor return to discuss helping their kids work through their big emotions, and how their mindset and approach has changed over the years.

In this episode James and Taylor talk about how they work to discover the internal rhythms and patterns that influence how individuals in their family are feeling at any given moment, and what they do support each person to understand and align with these rhythms.

Taylor and James are joined by their longtime friend and licensed mental health professional Fiona Griffin to talk about how her profession has informed her approach to parenting.

elping our kids accomplish their goals is fundamental to creating a self-directed learning environment, but it's a more nuanced topic than it first appears. It's all well and good to plan for helping our kids along their learning process, but what about when they hit those inevitable road blocks?

Whether it's minimalism, or healthy eating, or religious views, or just learning the difference between right and wrong, it can be hard to figure out just how far we should go to try and pass along our values to our kids.

James and Taylor zoom in on a single day in their life, taking you through a challenging day in their parenting journey and how that looked for them. They talk about moments they failed to be the parents they wanted to be, times where they were in tense and heated discussions about their parenting, and how days like these can help us keep working on our parenting.

Taylor and James take an episode to answer a few listener questions! How do they approach Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and other cultural myths, and why?

James and Taylor started by doing a mailbag, but ultimately spent the whole episode talking about a timeless parenting question: how do we make time for our relationship with our partner when kids are demanding so much of our attention? They discuss how we need to change our expectations as to what our time together might look like, how we can get in the right mindset for the changing seasons of our lives, and how we can practically and lovingly carve out time to build connection with our partners. Enjoy!

In this episode, James and Taylor talk about their approach to talking about sex with their own kids, and recommend some resources that they have found very helpful in approaching these discussions. 

It's something no parent really anticipates when they start adding more children to their family, but it happens way more frequently than most people like to acknowledge.

In this episode James and Taylor discuss how they approach these different types of "boring" situations with their kids. They talk about how to validate children's feelings of boredom, how to help kids work through their boredom peacefully and productively, and more!

James and Taylor welcome their first guest ever onto One Free Family - their fist son, the 8 year old Ollie! They ask Ollie what it's like to be unschooled, how he learns without formal instruction, what's hard about being self directed all the time, and what we could do better as parents. Ollie then turns the tables and interviews us for a bit! Enjoy!

The idealized family that never disagrees about anything simply doesn't exist. Given that disagreements at home WILL happen, how can we help them to be as productive and healthy as possible? In this episode, Taylor and James share their ideas for how we can have fewer unproductive and recurring disagreements while working through the healthier disagreements more effectively. Disagreements are a great time to help everyone in the family feel seen and heard, and they don't always have to be painful!

Last week James and Taylor took their kids to the sleepaway summer camp they co-founded - Camp Stomping Ground - and now they are back and full of thoughts. They talk about what it's like to be in community with 100+ kids who are all free to do basically whatever they want, what they learned about their own kids, and a lot of the child-development issues that are present themselves when you get so many kids of all different ages together in community.

Over time, we've seen various marginalized groups gain more freedom over time, but one marginalized group that is almost never discussed as marginalized is children. In this episode, James and Taylor share examples of where ageism is directed against children, and how we can try to be less ageist in our own interactions. They also talk about how we can empower our children to be confident and self-reliant even in a world that tells them that they shouldn't be.