Lainie Liberti is a best selling author, international speaker, community leader, teen mentor and alternative education advocate. She was one of the first to write about the subject of ‘worldschooling’ on the Internet, when back in 2009 she closed her Los Angeles based business and set out on a backpacking journey across South America with her then 9-yo son, Miro. As they traveled, she shared their adventures on a blog called Raising Miro on the Road of Life.
As they immersed themselves into a life of joyful discovery of the world, both Lainie and Miro quickly fell in love with the freedom to live and learn on their own terms completely, and decided to simply continue traveling! What started out as a one-year adventure turned into a lifestyle that has taken them to almost 50 countries over the past 14 years. Today, Lainie lives in Guanajato, Mexico.
Lainie has founded a worldwide community of traveling families as well as organized and run numerous Teen Retreats and Family Summits over the years. In May 2022, she published the book “Seen, Heard & Understood – Parenting and Partnering With Teens for Greater Mental Health.”
Why is the topic of parenting, especially in the teen years, so important to you?
I was raised in a household, where I was never seen, heard or understood. I was in survival mode a lot. I often felt invisible. This is a big part of the reason why I think it’s so important to establish a connected relationship with your children.
My book is a guide on how to maintain that connection during the teen years, and also how to create it, if it’s not already there. I have raised my own son with unschooling and partnership parenting, and worked with teens this way for more than ten years. When I say ‘greater mental health’ (in the subtitle of the book) I don’t mean just for the teen. It’s very much for the parents too! But it’s not about “fixing” the child, it’s about working with your own belief systems, triggers or anxiety as a parent, recognizing the unhealed needs of your own inner child etc. in order to authentically and genuinely connect with your children.
What exactly is Partnership Parenting?
It’s a parenting approach based on connection and on the belief that children are born as whole people. Not empty vessels to be filled by us.
Parenting is not meant to mold the child into what we want, for the convenience of the parent. Parenting should be about holding space for our children to uncover their own true nature. As the parent, you are the sacred caretaker of a small human being. In this perspective, partnership parenting continues in the line of thinking of the Continuum Concept.
In essence it’s erasing the authoritarian paradigm and stepping into a journey of walking side-by-side with your child.
What is the role of the parent within in the framework of this philosophy?
Parents are facilitators and guardians. We are there to ensure that our children are safe. But to strike the balance of trusting and allowing while also facilitating with safety requires a lot of inner knowledge from the parent. We must trust that our children know who they are, and that they are able to explore their own limitations physically, mentally, spiritually independent of our desires.
How does this tie in with unschooling?
When my son and I set out on our adventure, partnership was the exact word that we used to describe how we would go about it. We would learn and explore together and partner on all of the decisions.
Was there a period of ‘deschooling’ for you?
In a sense yes, but I sort of bypassed it because the first 8 months of our travels were full of wonder and excitement, which gave me the confidence to continue this lifestyle. During this time Miro and I also defined learning over education. We no longer wanted this conceptual thing called ‘an education’ given to us or earned by us through an institution. We just wanted to explore the playground of learning, and so we did that, and it was effortless.
I did sometimes have thoughts pop up in my head, that would be a worry or a doubt of some kind, but it wasn’t that often because I could see in every single moment that he was learning, and we were learning in partnership. The social learning, the immersive learning, the experiential learning…those were all strong and because I was already quite anti-establishment, the need to unhinge from the school paradigm wasn’t a big part of my personal journey.
How did learning unfold in your lives?
I think that for us, the predominant stimulus was the traveling itself. You can’t help but to learn when you travel! There is the immersive nature of travel, but for us the commitment to doing it without a time limit was also important, because it brought freedom to explore in your own pace. Which in turn also created the need for a great deal of inner accountability and responsibility – to take charge of making your own life exciting.
Travel gave us the power to be present in our lives and it gave us an actual, visual experience of how the outer world reflects what’s happening in our own inner world. So an understanding of the fact that we all see and experience things differently. It helped us to recognize how unique we all are, culturally and globally, and to see where the similarities and the differences are. Travel gave us a bigger scope in this way.
It doesn’t sound like you did a lot of very conscious thinking about learning?
No. But we both brought our individual interests into our daily life. For example, I have always been quite an activist and very attached to politics, geopolitics…so as an American traveling to different places, this naturally brought in focus on historical or socio-political topics, like ‘why do people here see this particular issue from this perspective?’ or other questions like that. And so because I had a great interest in these things, I would always talk to Miro about them. Which led to lots of engaging conversations and exploring these things more, through books or podcast or other. Over the years, I have seen Miro’s own interest in these topics really take off. He is extremely knowledgeable about the political history of the countries that we have been to, as a result of this active, immersive experience for both of us.
Why do you think your experience with unschooling has been such a success?
Because we approached it in partnership. I raised my son with a high degree of communication, we talked about everything. There has been times where I tried to be controlling and apply an ‘iron fist’ but it just didn’t work. It wasn’t conducive of a strong, connected relationship. It was doing the opposite.
Is that the ‘goal’ of partnership parenting? A strong connection?
Yes. In traditional parenting the goal is often to raise ‘succesful adults’ and the definition of success is usually based on monetary criteria, on your career or diplomas. But that’s not what partnership parenting is about. The ‘goal’ of partnership parenting is to enable us, as parents, to support the unique journeys of the sovereign human beings that we have birthed, and to help them find their individual paths.
If parents are already in a rut with their teens, what are some ways that they can start bettering the situation?
Read my book, haha. It really is written for parents in the trenches. There are many active tools that you can apply, but what you need to do first and foremost, is look at yourself internally and become aware of how you respond to situations (and why).
Replace coercion with connection, which is what partnership parenting is all about. So, learning to recognize what coercion looks like is a starting point. It can be an expectation, an agenda, a small manipulation, a nudge – and the majority of these things are done because it’s more convenient for the parent. Getting into the habit of pausing, another tool, before you respond allows you to examine these things and apply inner accountability towards yourself. It takes practice. A lot of practice.
Why is it so important for parents to do this inner work?
As parents seeking to raise children who will know themselves, who will be comfortable taking risks and able to deal with the consequences of their choices, we must allow them as children, to practice this in a safe space. If we don’t do this, if we prevent them from making mistakes and discovering their own capabilities, we will be raising a fearful adult. It’s important too, because we don’t want our children’s mistakes to get stored into their belief system as shameful. So working on the above things, like agendas and expectations, is important because these things can kill the ability to live in the moment and to parent in partnership.
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