SELF-EFFICACY IN UNSCHOOLING MOTHERS: Influencing and Limiting Factors

Record: Kristan Morrison, “’The Courage to Let Them Play’: Factors Influencing and Limiting Feelings of Self-Efficacy in Unschooling Mothers” in Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning 10, no. 19 (2016): 48-81. [Article]

Summary: Morrison is an Associate Professor at Radford University’s College of Education and Human Development. In this article she explores the factors that influence and limit feelings of self-efficacy in unschooling mothers. 

Unschooling mothers break social norms by allowing their children to learn through play and other activities that are generally not viewed as work. In American society, our Puritan roots and Protestant work ethic have caused many people to believe that play is bad and at odds with productivity. However, this dichotomy has lessened over the last century, and people have begun stepping outside of the traditional educational model in order to incorporate free play and choice into the daily routine.

What gives someone the courage to step away from the traditional educational model? That is the central question of this article. After a brief description of homeschooling and unschooling, Morrison discusses her methodology. She learned about the experiences of unschooling mothers through ten 60-90 minute interviews that she conducted, through unschooling blogs and research like Gray and Riley’s study of unschooling mothers, and through attending the Life Rocks! Radical Unschoolers Conference 2013 in North Conway, New Hampshire.

To analyze what she found, Morrison utilizes Bandura’s (1977) Theory on the Sources of Self-Efficacy. Bandura outlines four factors that make people more willing to take on certain tasks, that cause them to anticipate success, and that generally cause them to ultimately experience success:

1. Performance accomplishments. People may anticipate success because they were successful in the past with a similar task. For example, a writer may feel self-efficacy about finishing an article if s/he had finished writing articles in the past.
2. Vicarious experiences. People may anticipate success if they know that others have been successful at the task. For example, someone might have feelings of self-efficacy about a DIY project after watching videos on YouTube of people who had successfully completed the project.
3. Social/verbal persuasion. People are persuaded by their friends and family that they are capable of being successful at something.
4. Emotional arousal. People are more likely to be successful when they are not fearful, anxious, or stressed by doing a task.

Now Morrison uses this framework to explore the emergence of self-efficacy in unschooling mothers:

1. Performance accomplishments. Many mothers had confidence in their ability to unschool because of past experiences. These experiences fell into three categories.
   1. Past educational experiences.
      1. Experience as a student. Some of the mothers were driven to unschool their children because of their own boredom in school.
      2. Experience as a teacher. Previous studies have shown that many homeschooling and unschooling mothers have experience in education. Their understandings of learning, child development, and teaching gave them faith that their children would be successful in unschooling. In some cases, problems that the women experienced during their time teaching such as an impersonal curriculum and standardized testing encouraged them since they knew that their children would avoid these things.
   2. Past success at practicing deviance. Many unschooling mothers also subscribe to other practices that deviate from the mainstream such as homesteading, homebirth, Attachment Parenting, and holistic medicine. The mothers generalized their feelings of success in these practices to unschooling.
   3. Past/early unschooling experiences. The mothers’ perceptions of the early successes of unschooling motivated them to keep going. For example, mothers claimed that family relationships improved and that their children tended to be more tolerant of others, inquisitive, confident, less concerned with what others think about them, sociable, engaging, creative, inventive, well-spoken, active, adventurous, and focused. They also cited academic accomplishments such as how advanced their children seemed to be in comparison to conventionally schooled children.
2. Vicarious experiences. Mothers were also affirmed through the success of others. These experiences can be divided into three categories, which parallel the categories of the performance accomplishments.
   1. Observing others having negative experiences in school. Some mothers remembered the bullying/degrading of children that happened in public schools and desired to avoid this for their children. They had also observed how some children with different learning speeds and styles were often poorly served in conventional schools.
   2. Observing others practicing deviance successfully. The mothers were often influenced by their own mothers who had raised them unconventionally.
   3. Observing others having success with unschooling. Interactions with unschooling families allowed the mothers to observe others’ success with unschooling.
3. Social/verbal persuasion. Mothers were persuaded to unschool by media, conferences, and informal conversations with friends and family.
   1. The media. Mothers said that various forms of media were influential in their decision to unschool like multiple books, authors, magazines, blogs, articles, radio, and TV programs. John Holt and his magazine Growing without Schooling were the primary resources mentioned, but mothers also referenced John Taylor Gatto, Ivan Illich, Alfie Kohn, Dayna Martin, Scott Noelle, Sandra Dodd, Matt Hern, Grace Llewellyn, Sarah McGrath, Peter Gray, Nicole Olson, Joseph Chilton Pearce, and others. These authors frequently use persuasive language that encourages and affirms unschooling mothers.
   2. Conferences. Presenters and fellow attendees at unschooling conferences often encourage unschooling mothers.
   3. Friends and family. Friends, family, and sometimes community members who express faith in one’s capability to unschool can be instrumental in the development of a mother’s self-efficacy.
4. Emotional arousal. For many of the mothers, unschooling resulted in less day-to-day and long-term stress.
   1. Day-to-day. Unschooling alleviated the day-to-day stressors of following a schedule or school calendar, doing homework, and transitioning from school to home.
   2. Long-term. Mothers felt less stressed about their children’s futures because they believed that they were doing what was best for their children.

This framework can also be used to look at the factors that limited the development of their self-efficacy:

1. Performance accomplishments. While previous experiences of failure with the conventional education system usually motivated the mothers in their unschooling, feelings of success caused them to doubt themselves. For example, some mothers looked at the opportunities that were given to them because of their multiple degrees and wondered if they were making the wrong decision. One mother also shared the experience of discovering that her son had an undiagnosed learning disability as a factor that limited the development of her self-efficacy.
2. Vicarious experiences. Comparing their children to non-unschooled children was occasionally a source of anxiety for unschooling mothers. They worried about benchmarks like learning to read.
3. Social/verbal persuasion. Possibly the greatest limiter of confidence and self-efficacy in unschooling mothers was caused by doubts and judgements from others. Interestingly, some of the mothers said that they worried about speaking up in the unschool community because they were worried that people would say that they were not unschooling correctly.
4. Emotional arousal. Unschooling does occasionally cause stress, which leads to higher feelings of self-doubt. The stress may be caused by loneliness, fatigue, frustration at a messy house, or comparing their children to non-unschooling children.

Morrison concludes by admitting that her findings are limited because of the biased nature of her sample. The sources that she selected are likely to include people that already feel successful at unschooling, and thus her results say little about people who have either never unschooled before or tried unschooling but did not keep with it.

Appraisal: A clearer view of the unschooling community continues to emerge with studies like Morrison’s and Gray and Riley’s latest unschooling survey, but the issue remains that every study is highly skewed towards successful unschoolers. Since it must be admitted that unschooling can look like educational neglect when it is at its worst, there is a desperate need for research among families who tried unschooling but stopped so that we can have a better understanding of the types of students that tend to excel or fall behind in an unschooled environment.

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