School separates exercise into something different from our main job. When we started homeschooling, one of the biggest shifts I had to make in my own thinking is that exercise is not school. I had to teach myself, every time my kids were playing, that learning is not divided between academics and gym, learning is both parts. Read more
It’s scary to think that if you don’t send your kids to a classroom, there won’t be thirty other kids telling your kid all about what’s available in the world. It’s scary to think it’s your responsibility now. But the truth is, it’s not that big of a responsibility. Read more
The New York Times reports today India is finally coming down on coal mine companies that employ kids. The description of the lives of the kids is harrowing, but nothing I haven’t read before from people like Lewis Hine or Jacob Riis, who wrote about the same child labor problems in the United States in the early 1900s. Read more
The impact of being part of a family that lives in a fish bowl is that I am a lot more conscious of when I’m lying. To other people, to myself, to anyone, really, because the more you lie the more you have to compensate for the lie. (I know you know that, but you probably don’t risk the wrath of popular sentiment like a blogger does.) So I end up thinking all the time about if I’m being honest with myself. Read more
Every parent will be more successful if they understand their chid’s Myers Briggs score. It’s unbelievable to me that this information is not more widely distributed to parents because it’s so incredibly helpful in terms of becoming a good guide for your child.
Quora is a fascinating site because good questions are so hard to ask, and Quora is an aggregator of good questions.
In the past I have loved questions like, What does it feel like to have a trophy wife?. Recently, Victoria Kirk sent me the link to the question: What’s the single most unfair advantage? Read more
If you give a parent the choice between having eight hours a day of freedom from their kids, or spending eight hours a day forcing their kids to learn to read and do math at home, no parent will chose the latter. It doesn’t matter that homeschooling isn’t really like that. Non-homeschoolers think it is. So the key is to reframe the choice. Read more
So much of parenting advice is what you should be doing. But the hardest advice to take is what you shouldn’t be doing. Because it is actually more difficult to just sit on your hands and wait than to insert yourself where you think you can make a difference. Here are three areas where inserting yourself will just waste time and cause trouble: Read more
Families that are cohesive and intradependent generate high academic achievers. Families that are child-focused create high academic achievers.
Families that are broken, non-child focused, and full of conflict generate creative thinkers. Read more
My mom and dad were pretty terrible parents. My brothers and I each went through our own hell, and everyone in the family has been in therapy—together and separately—to deal with the result of their parenting.