Annie Friday (she/her) is the current editor of Tipping Points Magazine, as well as an SDE parent and facilitator, Flying Squad Instigator, ASDE organizer, host of the Out of Line podcast, and architect of conscious caregiving.

January 6th, 2026

I think most of us can agree that 2025 felt like one heck of a year. A doozie. A whopper. A mess. Or as my friends in Costa Rica have said, un despiche total.

It was a year full of fear and unknown futures for many of us engaged in the practice of Self-Directed Education (SDE) as many families come to SDE due to circumstances that have already left them feeling excluded from the conventional systems in place to support families.

For my family, we had a year full of change and upheaval. Some of it we chose, but much of it was thrust upon us. On top of a major move and a job change, my 10-year-old was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that none of us had seen coming. Our lives changed drastically in the course of just a few days at the children’s hospital. We came home with new, and mostly uncomfortable, routines, medicines, expectations, and limits. In those late winter days, I could not have been more grateful for the space that Self-Directed Education brought to our lives.

I found myself in all kinds of new online spaces and forums for families with the same medical diagnosis. I read horror stories about the back-to-school transitions for these families. Every time I read one, my thoughts immediately went to how lucky I was to skip that piece of an already crummy situation. Schoolwork, attendance, missed assignments, and arbitrary timelines felt even more inconsequential after such a life-changing moment. I felt lucky to let my kid get to know this new version of life without the added pressures of spelling bees or math tests. I felt lucky to be able to find opportunities to rest during the day after having been up many sleepless nights. I felt lucky that my kids already had a set of supportive, non-parent adults in their lives who trusted them and already saw my young people as capable and worthy humans. I felt lucky that our relationship with these other adults was rooted deeply in trust in ways that meant the care of my kids came before any arduous paperwork or liability concerns. I know to many of us unschoolers, that sounds like such a basic core tenet, but being thrown back into online community spaces of mostly conventionally-schooled families left me remembering how rare this actually is.

It was in the calamity of the past year, the chaos of my personal life, as well as the chaos of the world, that I truly connected my personal deschooling work to my ability to show up in the world as a more capable and healed version of myself.

In a world that wants us to move faster, be more productive, know more, achieve more, do more, be more... I felt such a huge relief in moving slower, being far less productive than probably ever before in my life, and yet still feeling as though I’m enough just as I am.

I have many SDE folks to thank for my ability to feel like I am enough. I have felt reinforced throughout the year by the wisdom of Akilah Richards who taught me how to actively grieve more than the grief that comes with human death, but also the everyday complex grief that we encounter living in this human experience. I have been stabilized by monthly meetings with my unschooling and parenting coach, Iris Chen who reminds me regularly of the nuances of our individual relational experiences within our parenting and unschooling. I have been re-affirmed by the unschooling research and personal experiences shared by Dr. Gina Riley that have allowed me to rest in my role as parent during the times that our family doesn’t show any marked “academic” progress. I have felt fortified by the words of Bria Bloom through her newsletters and podcasts, that unschooling rooted in our collective human needs is far more than just an alternative option for education. I have found daily text support in a group of unschooling parents and advocates who I have come to rely on through our common connection of supporting Flying Squad programs around the country.

In addition to those more personal and intimate connections, I turned to another essential pillar of support for my unschooling life so far – the Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE). I recently celebrated a year of volunteering with ASDE. I came on just as a wonderful team of mostly volunteers was wrapping up their work on the ASDE Compendium, which is a tool designed to advance the deschooling process for anyone practicing or considering SDE.

The ASDE Compendium launched just after my 10-year-old received his diagnosis. As an ASDE volunteer, I had agreed to help support the first Compendium cohort. I had wanted to enroll in the ASDE Compendium cohort because other life changes had required new levels of digging into past held beliefs conditioned in me mostly through my many years of school – as student, parent, and educator. I didn’t expect my deschooling to be taken to such new depths. I moved through the collective cohort experience of the ASDE Compendium, and it highlighted how varied and personal SDE work is to each individual engaged with it. I felt simultaneously embraced and challenged by the others in my cohort. I got to share what my life has looked like since finding the practice of SDE, as well as being introduced to others’ ways of living out SDE. I think it is this quality of not trying to define SDE that makes the ASDE Compendium so unique.

The ASDE Compendium is thick and rich with personal experiences that don’t fit neatly into chapters or categories – just like the lived experiences of most of the unschoolers I know. The team did an incredible job getting the work of over 60 contributors into four sections rounded out with definitions, reflection questions, deschooling moments, a resource section, contact information, and more. This is a living tool because SDE is a living practice. The ASDE team will surely find additional themes within SDE that haven’t yet been covered; we will continue to discover new ways of undoing the conventional conditioning of life before SDE. This conditioning prioritizes product over process, instead of living for the wholeness of the collective web of humanity. It upholds the imbalances of power and resources in our world. The conditioning serves a few, while breaking away from it serves the collective.

I know that not every unschooling family takes a collective liberation approach, but I know the people of ASDE do. It shows up in their values, actions, and offerings. ASDE is an organization that I have turned to again and again through the years in order to find connection, strength in numbers, affirmation in research, and a sense of commonality of experience. It felt important to give back where I could – as I had the capacity to – because I know more and more families are feeling this sense of system failure. I know more and more are turning to SDE in order to prioritize family needs like emotional wellness over academic achievement.

So while many of us have spent significant portions of this past year feeling scared, worried, and angry that our children might be even more at risk in today’s world, many of us also spent time in deep connection with our community to assuage these fears. We have been finding our strength in each other – even those we have never met who are on the other side of the world, yet share some aspect of this collective experience. We are leaning harder into the detangling and the healing that deschooling work brings. Thankfully, in the face of the many removals of support and attacks on human rights, there somehow seems to be a collective voice growing ever louder and stronger for youth rights.

Consider this my corny love letter to ASDE and the Compendium assembled by the ASDE team. I believe that I am a more whole person with confidence in my young people, trust in collective humanity, and a softer heart because of ASDE, as well as people like you who are here reading this, engaged in the practice, and still trying to make the world a better place for ourselves and future generations.

P.S. I am a facilitator for the upcoming 2026 Compendium Cohort that kicks off in January 2026 and I would love for you to join me there!

Annie Friday (she/her) is the current editor of Tipping Points Magazine, as well as an SDE parent and facilitator, Flying Squad Instigator, ASDE organizer, host of the Out of Line podcast, and architect of conscious caregiving.