This is a guest post from Anna Keller. She wrote an earlier guest post here when she took her son out of school.
Last spring, my husband and I pulled our eighth-grade son out of a private, academically-focused school that he had attended since pre-K. While it was a major decision, it was also an effortless one. We had reached the end of our rope. Read more
Traditional school focuses on well-roundedness, but a well-rounded kid has no idea what their value is to other people or how to offer it up to a potential employer. It’s late in the game to help your kid to figure out how to be useful when they are 22 – they expect to be more independent from you at that point. Read more
We unschool in our family: video games all day, no math. I didn’t teach my youngest child how to read and write. He learned to read from Pokemon and he learned to write on Minecraft. Read more
Today all parents are faced with the choice of how to regulate screen time for their kids. It’s a decision made more difficult because much advice about video games and parenting comes from people who are too scared to question the status quo or people who are too scared to imagine their kids having a childhood different from their own. Read more
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