As a career coach I’m constantly stunned by how unprepared kids are for the workforce. Teachers and parents spend tons of time telling kids to get good grades and get into a good school, but no one mentions that good grades actually have little correlation to workplace success. 

I have let my kids run wild all over our farm, doing whatever they want, even in the almost-dark of early autumn evenings. We have a lot of land. They have a lot of choices.

Donalyn Miller is a reading expert who also writes a blog. I took a look at her site today and the first post I read was about how the reading curriculum does not encourage reading. You already know the arguments, but one interesting one Miller added is that she read three picture books with her granddaughter but […]

I have been reading tributes to Joan Rivers for the last three days. Some, like this sign my friend saw in London, are very funny. Nearly all of the tributes acknowledge how Joan Rivers was groundbreaking in comedy.

I want to tell my friends who send their kids to school to STOP STOP STOP this is crazy. Ours will be the last generation of educated parents to send their kids to public school. How will you explain to your kids that you didn’t see that school is a waste of time? Will you say […]

If you have a decent sized blog you get tons of pitches from public relations people. And somewhere in the PR rule book it says that you do better with pitches that are tied to current events. And as we all know, thanks to the industrial revolution, fall is no longer a time for harvest: […]

We have about 4000 books in our house. This is because I threw out so many over the years. At one point I was moving from Chicago to LA to Boston to LA and on and on with nothing but 80 boxes of books.

As a society we believe that kids should save some things for later in life. The easiest example of this is sex. We don’t think it benefits kids to do it early. Even though for centuries older people have forced kids to have sex with impunity, we do not accept that in our society. It’s statutory rape […]

Here’s an email I received this week: I’ve been really insecure lately about college for my oldest, but then every time I research Gen Z these kids are hacking their education and are basically gonna leapfrog over Gen Y… I don’t know how to prepare my kids for that.  Maybe I should just leave them […]

When my kids want to know something, they search for it on YouTube. It would kill me to watch a video to find out where Tajikistan is. But the kids go to YouTube for everything.

© 2023 Penelope Trunk