This is a guest post from Erin Wetzel. She is a painter and a poet who lives in Tacoma, WA with her husband and daughter. You can connect with her on instagram @ekwetzel. Earlier she wrote Unschooling Starts the Day Your Child is Born.
Tonight, as Phoebe was getting ready for bed, she turned to me and lamented, “I only know how to read one book, Mama. I only know how to read “Maisy Big, Maisy Small.” She looked longingly at her bookshelf. Read more
My son was in a guy’s home recording studio adding a cello track to a rock song. At first the process was fascinating. Then it got very detailed and monotonous for anyone not involved. Which, at that point, was only me. But I was fascinated with the technology. There were recording devices everywhere and somehow each seemed to be related to an iPad. The only laptop in the room was mine. Read more
My younger son wants to go to school. I won’t let him.
It’s clear to me that he has no ability to understand why school is crushingly terrible. I mean, most adults can’t even see it. Read more
Digging up dinosaurs is not my first choice of what to do in my life. What I’d choose would look a lot less picturesque: locked in a room with wine and bagels and my computer churning out blog posts that my editor says are perfect and pure genius. But we’re not doing that. We’re in the badlands. Read more
This is a guest post from Ilana Wiles. Parent’s magazine crowned her the Queen of Instagram. You can follow her @mommyshorts and she blogs at Mommy Shorts.
I started following @2sisters_angie a little over a year ago. Back then she was posting the typical stuff you see from moms on Instagram — pics of her daughter at the park, pics of her daughter eating breakfast and lots of photos of her daughter playing dress-up. Read more
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
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
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
My son wants to be popular and the center of everything and loves a crowd. He went to preschool and kindergarten and his only school memories are of him being the Mr. Popular center-of-everything and he misses that. I remind him that he was three grades ahead of everyone else and the school wouldn’t change his curriculum and he doesn’t care. He says he wants to help the other kids catch up to him. Read more
After decades of research about what makes a person happy, it turns out that self-regulation is at the top. Sonja Lyubomirsky studies every day actions that can increase our happiness and it turns out they all require self-discipline -from giving two random compliments a week to walking with a book on our head for one minute a day. Gretchen Rubin’s bestselling book The Happiness Project is her leveraging self-regulation to test out the theories of positive psychology in every day life (for example, five compliments to her husband for every criticism.) Read more