Sometimes I visit Science Daily and click around until I find something fun. Recently I found this: Homeschool kids are leaner than kids who go to school. And I thought to myself, of course this is true.
Often my reading about school makes me angry. There’s a big conversation on Mr. Money Mustache about how everyone knows their kids are wilting in school. And yet, they still send their kids to school. It’s amazing to me how much parents understand the detriments of school even as they turn their brains off to follow the status quo. Read more
Homeschooling is a big risk on the part of a parent—it’s going against what society tells us is right to do with our kids – and it can seem even riskier if you think your kid might not be able to go to college. Read more
Let me just say that everything I have memorized I like having in my head. I have some poems in my head. I have totally boring dialogue from my French textbook that I was so scared I’d have to read aloud that I said it out loud 5000 times. I know way too much about Renaissance England. And I know so much about children’s books that my family’s book store did not have to go to a computer—I had it all in my head. Read more
The purpose of school is to get kids out of the house so parents don’t need to take care of them. But we can’t talk about school that way because if we did, any school would be good enough. So if you want to market your school, you have to differentiate it by focusing on superficial stuff. Read more
Humans do an incredible amount of growing outside the womb. Many animals are born able to walk, feed themselves, find a place to sleep. Human babies are helpless.
Which explains why kids have an amazing way of normalizing any situation their parents put them in. This behavior makes sense because kids are dependent on an adult to take care of them, and they want to believe they are being taken care of. The highest risk factor for borderline personality disorder is when a child is not actually being taken care of, because they still make their brain believe that really, they are being taken care of, so they start losing touch with reality. Read more
My younger son potty trained himself at 24 months. He took his diaper off and said he needed underwear. I was like, “No, you need a diaper.” Two days later, his day care was like, “No way.” But he did it. Read more
The most frequent question I get from people is, “How can I work and homeschool at the same time?” For example:
Just recently got turned onto your blog and am seriously considering the homeschool path for my three, yes three children-ages 9 and 6 yr old twins. Neither my husband nor myself want to give up our work–thankfully I work at home as a researcher and writer for a non-profit, he is less flexible. So please direct me on your blog or elsewhere to how, if it is possible, to work and homeschool. Do I have to give up working to manage the day? What resources can I access to start to figure this out?
I should have sent her the picture above of my older son reading while I meet with my banker. But I wrote this answer back: Read more
I live in rural America, so it’s easy for me to find pictures of animals that would appall you. Because you are not used to seeing how people really treat their animals. You’d think people would hide their animals when they treat them poorly, but in fact, people convince themselves that what they are doing is ethically and morally fine. So it’s all out in the open. Read more
It’s very scary to take your kids out of school because if your kid grows up to be a lonely, unhappy adult, everyone will blame homeschooling. So I spend a lot of time worrying that I’m doing the wrong thing. At first I worried the kids wouldn’t be socialized even though I had no idea what the word meant. And I worried the kids wouldn’t be well-rounded, even though I didn’t know what well-rounded meant. Read more