The conventional wisdom about the homeschooling community is that it’s all crazy right‑wing Christian fundamentalists. The truth is that lots of homeschool parents are just like you. They’re smart, curious, concerned about their kids, but also concerned that they don’t want their life to go to hell while they’re focusing on their kids.
Here are five trends among homeschooling parents that tell me I’m in the right place. Read more
A big barrier to homeschooling is that it’s very easy to envision a major downside: no more free babysitting. But it’s harder to imagine the upside. We have more examples in media of gay couples raising kids as a normal setting than we do of homeschoolers raising kids in normal settings. So it’s hard to imagine the upsides, but there are plenty.
Here are eight ways my life got a lot easier when I started homeschooling: Read more
The hardest part of homeschooling for me was at the beginning, when all I could see in front of me were endless days of kids, no breaks because they won’t be at school, and me slowly turning into a crazy person. Read more
In a few cases there are men who stay at home and homeschool while their wives go to work. But this is not the norm for many reasons, like boys play war and girls don’t and women want to be with a guy who earns more than she does. But, also, women who believe that families are better when kids are at home are usually also women who want to be the parent at home. Read more
Once or twice a week I send my editor a tirade about how much I hate Sheryl Sandberg’s idea that I should lean in. I don’t want to lean in and I don’t want to hear her telling me why I made bad decisions and that’s why I’m not running corporate America. I’m not running corporate America because when I was leaning in, I had two full-time nannies for two years and I felt like the shittiest parent in the world. Read more
I love the Onion so much. A recent article headline is Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation, and there’s an accompanying photo of a dad fawning over his Talking Heads album. Read more
The preconceived notions I had about homeschooling parents created one of the biggest barriers to me decided to homeschool. I thought I knew what homeschooling parents were like. And I was certain I was not like them. Read more
I’m just going to be blunt and tell you that I make an amazingly large sum of money for someone who is homeschooling. Last year, my first year of homeschooling, I cleared $150K. Some of you will admire my spunk. Some of you will say what I’m doing doesn’t even count as homeschooling. Read more
Part of what makes public schools widely supported is that everyone buys into the idea that kids need teachers in order to learn.
Yet, if you look closely at the arguments for teachers it becomes clear that kids do not need teachers trained in curriculum-based education. Kids need teachers who can accommodate self-directed learning. And anyway, a 1:30 ratio is fine for a babysitter, but not a teacher. All of which leads me to make a list of reasons why parents don’t need to be teachers to homeschool. Read more
What’s the most common reason parents have for not homeschooling? They need two incomes. But I’m just not willing to believe that money holds back parents from homeschooling. Here’s why: Anyone has enough money to homeschool because there’s an intrinsic low-cost-of-living that works with homeschooling.