Doctor’s office BS

 

Confession: I hate taking the kids to the doctor’s office. Probably, at some point when I was a brand new mom, I was great at going to the doctor’s office. But I soon realized that unless the kid is dying, the doctor will send you home with nothing but a piece of paper that explains why antibiotics are not effective against viruses. Or colic. Or whatever.

So I wait until I think there is something really serious. And then I try to send the nanny. I hate the waiting room, I hate the paperwork, and I hate having to keep the kids from touching the really sick kids. Read more

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Why I homeschool

I started writing this blog to figure out if I should homeschool or not. It took me only about a month of blogging to realize that there is overwhelming agreement in the education reform movement that a customized education is best for kids. The issue with homeschooling is not whether it’s best for kids. The issue is whether or not parents can handle doing it.

I homeschool because it seemed to me that it was like breastfeeding: Of course it’s the best thing to do for the kids, it’s just difficult. So I told myself that even though I had no idea what I was doing, it’s clear to me that even starting with no idea what I’m doing is better than putting the kids in school. Read more

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I love TV for kids

My kids do almost all their TV watching on our computer, in the car, or in a hotel room TV when we travel. Which means that I hear everything they watch, and I have to say I love the shows they choose. My six-year-old’s favorite shows are iCarly and Jessie. He watches each episode ten times, which means I hear each episode ten times.

And you know what? I rarely get sick of the episodes. I’m fascinated by how much he learns about how the world works from these shows. Read more

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Reminder to myself: Homework is useless

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During my last business trip I bought my son a phone. I try to say yes to what they want to buy. I try to trust that they’ll use it for something interesting. Sometimes it ends up being a waste of money, but usually not.

So the big surprise about the phone is not that he used it for pictures—I think Generation Z just assumes that every gadget they have takes photos. The surprise to me was that he started texting the photos to people.

And then he responded to the responses, and soon he was spending fifteen minutes a day figuring out how to spell. Read more

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Profile of the average homeschool parent

For the most part, my kids and I go through our days without seeing any homeschoolers. We wake up early, do chores and breakfast, and then the morning unfolds slowly, with video games and music practice, and me worrying about my work that I am going to try to do while I have the kids all day long. Then we do one or two activities, like horseback riding.

I imagined that we would be part of a community of homeschoolers, but the only community I have found, to be honest, is online, on this blog and other homeschooling blogs I read, like Lisa Nielsen’s and Peter Gray’s.

Read more

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How to adjust to anything

One of the topics I write about most frequently on my other blog is happiness. I am sort an encyclopedia of the research people have done in the past twenty years about what makes us happy.

The most surprising thing is that happiness has to do with outlook. If you are positive and you feel that you are in control of whether or not you get what you want, then you are happier. But you can’t really change your outlook.  We are born with a happiness setpoint, which Sonja Lyubomirsky explains in her book The How of Happiness. We can control for 30% of our happiness setpoint. (Which seems, unfortunately, similar to the situation with our weight.) Read more

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What it’s like to have no limits on video games

Child playing video games on train

Here’s the update on my grand video game experiment: Unlimited video games has been great. If there is nothing my kids are supposed to be doing—feeding goats, practicing violin, taking a skateboard lesson—then they can play video games. I have not put limits on how much they play or what they play. I have even been very liberal about making purchases that they kids needed to play what they want. Here are some examples of what happened: Read more

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The hardest part of homeschooling is the beginning

The first few months of homeschooling were terrifying to me. I have a very social son who had no one to play with.  And I had no idea how to fix that. You guys gave me tons of suggestions. And everything you told me turned out to be true. But the best advice I got was that it’ll happen in time. He’ll make friends, just give him time.

I did not believe it. I’m not a wait-and-see kind of person. But so much of homeschooling is wait-and-see. So much is being patient while the kid learns at his own speed. So much is waiting to see what the kids want to learn. I’m a planner. I’m about hard-driving, achievement-oriented blue-ribbon lifestyles. I work very hard to not force this onto my kids. (Even though I hope hope hope that one of them chooses this for himself.) Read more

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Spying on schools

My son had a friend sleep over the other night. He would be in first-grade, like my six-year-old, who, really, I should have held back a year because all the rich little boys in New York City are being held back a year, and I want my son to be able to compete with them. But water under the bridge, right? Because we are not doing school. And I can just send him to college a year later or something.

So anyway, this boy would be in first-grade, same as my son, and I confess that I grilled the kid about what is going on in school.  I wanted to know what math he was learning. Is he typing? Does he read books with no pictures? Is there fun gym equipment? I start prying: Read more

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The educational kitchen

My other blog gets so much traffic that I receive 5-10 emails every single day offering to write a guest post for my blog. The pitches are so terrible that I usually delete them without reading them.

This homeschooling blog, on the other hand, is so new to me, that the offers to write guest posts still intrigue me. I usually learn something from considering the proposed post.

Take this pitch, for example: Read more

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