5 steps to prepare for homeschooling your kids

A lot of people who hire me for career coaching finally tell me that what they really want is a way to make a life that will let them homeschool their kids. When they have kids. Here’s what I tell them:

1. Find a husband who makes enough money for you to stay home.
Look, if you don’t have kids yet, you should know that in most cases, one parent will homeschool the kids and one parent will work. It would be really nice if both parents could work part-time from home and both parents could homeschool, but this is extremely difficult to set up and it’s high risk because no one is concentrating on their career enough to keep it stable. Read more

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How much money do you need to homeschool?

You’d think I’d be writing a post about how to work full-time while you homeschool. I might write that post one day. But here’s fair warning: it’ll look like this picture. My son is trying to tell me about the Bionicle he built. I am telling him I need to write. He is telling me I always say that.

I ignore him and then he takes my phone and starts taking photos of his Bionicle and then he takes a movie of his Bionicle. He narrates the landscape of the feet, torso and body and then he says to the camera, “Don’t look at the stuff in the background. That’s my mom working. She is pissing me off.” Read more

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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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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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Teaching self-confidence

I used to have a column on Yahoo Finance. I would write the basic advice that I wrote on my career blog, stuff like

Job hopping is good

There are no bad bosses

Don’t be the hardest worker

These are not controversial topics for my career blog. It has an audience of very smart, very high-performing people are who are managing their careers carefully so that they have interesting work that doesn’t ruin the rest of their life.

On Yahoo Finance, people were not so forward thinking. They would tell me that I’m an idiot. They would tell Yahoo to fire me. Sometimes I would get 1000 comments, and most of them were disparaging. In fact, someone at Yahoo had the daily task of removing the really offensive ones. Read more

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Parenting insecurity

I’m pretty sure that the most insecure parents are the people who hate their parents.

Actually, I don’t hate my parents. I mean, they have apologized for everything I could ever want them to apologize for. It’s just that they ruined my childhood by being children themselves, during my childhood. So I have no gratitude toward them for what they did for me, and it makes it hard for me to understand what makes kids so grateful to their parents.

It seems miraculous that kids love their parents and it seems so hard, in my head, for me to be good enough that my kids will love me when they grow up. I know, this is not rational. I’m just telling you what goes on inside the head of a kid who had totally shitty parenting.

Read more

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Myers Briggs envy

Much of the disappointment in adult life comes from not understanding the inherent limitations of our Myers Briggs score.

An ENFJ woman will never be okay with her work/life balance. And ISFJ man needs to marry a breadwinner. These are not things our parents warn us about.  So by the time adult life comes, 98% of the workforce has to realize that only ENTJs run companies and they’re not an ENTJ.

Read more

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Are you an overbearing parent?

Mothers who homeschool (let’s be honest, it’s almost always the moms) spend a lot more time with their kids than mothers who send their kids to school. I am trying to figure out if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

Certainly it could go both ways. (And certainly there are exceptions—like the mom who homeschools but is outsourcing it all, which I’m pretty sure Ree Drummond is doing, for example.)

I spend a lot of time coaching people in their 20s about their careers. Invariably these people are lost. That’s simply what life is like in one’s 20s.  And invariably parents are expecting more of the kids and the kids feel bad that they can’t live up to their parents’ expectations. I end up telling a lot of people they have to stop looking to their parents for guidance in a workforce that they’ve never had to navigate.  Read more

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Mother’s little helper

I remember where I was when I first heard Mick Jagger singing about  mother’s little helper. I was in college. I had grown up with a mom who worked ten-hour days as a COBOL programmer and then even longer days in management. I felt sorry for the moms in the 60s who couldn’t go to work and had to take Valium to cope with their lives. I was happy I’d never have to live like that.

So it’s hard for me to tell you that I’m taking Zoloft. Here’s how it happened. I couldn’t stop the huge anxiety I had while I was spending days with the kids. My anxiety is generally great for work. I can do way more than a normal person can. I need very little sleep and my mind races with ideas all the time, so as long as I have a bunch of fast-paced projects going on, I have a place for each of the ideas.

Sitting at lunch with the boys, making Arthur pasta pieces talk. That just made me nervous. There was is no structure, there is nowhere to put my racing ideas, and I was anxious all the time. Also, I was yelling. And I really really don’t believe that it’s okay to yell at the kids. I think it’s bullying.

So I started taking Zoloft.

You can tell, on this blog, when I started. I stopped posting every day. Because it takes a crazy, manic energy to be able to maintain my other blog, which supports my family, and then also launch this blog.

I grew up thinking I’d be an exciting, edgy artist like Mick Jagger, and instead I’m becoming one of the moms in a Mick Jagger song.

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The moment when I feel great

We are at an indoor-playground type place, and it’s all boys, from about five to ten years old

The place is sort of out of the way. The moms talk about how they had to drive twenty or thirty mintues to get here. They ask me how long my drive was.

I say, “Two hours.” And I can feel tears coming. Because the driving is too much. I don’t think I can do it. I say, “I know this isn’t working. I’m coming up with a new plan. I have only been homeschooling a few months.”

The moms try to be supportive but I can tell they think I’m out of my mind.

I am scared to respond to emails on my iPhone because the moms are knitting and breastfeeding four-year-olds. It’s not a work-from-the-playground sort of group. And I want to fit in. So I stare into space.

The boys are running and screaming and they don’t slow down for an hour. Then they line up and appear to choose teams and pair off.

Then, on the floor, wrestling. Standing on each other, dragging each other by the feet, rolling around like new puppies in spring grass.

I say to the group of moms, “They could never do this in school.”

And another mom says, “Yeah, it takes all a teacher’s energy just to make sure this doesn’t happen.”

This is the moment, so far, when I have been most certain that my son does not belong in school.

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