Get your kids to be their best selves

My husband is experimenting with letting pigs be free range. It’s a difficult experiment because he doesn’t have a lot of other farms as a model. Most farmers think the pigs need to be confined so they are manageable to the farmer. There are so many pigs and only one farmer, so most of farming […]

Unlimited video games in the news

When I started homeschooling, I used workbooks. I got my kids through a whole grade level in about two months. But I found myself forcing my kids to learn stuff they were not interested in learning. The constant arguing killed me, and the lack of excitement over learning seemed like the opposite of what we […]

3 Reasons to homeschool your gay child

It’s a big day in the history of gay rights. The majority of the US population believes that gay people should be allowed to get married, which matters because married people get financial benefits and protections that unmarried people do not have. The majority of people in the US think it is illegal discrimination to […]

What we did when our son was failing school

This is a guest post from Anna Keller. She just took her son out of school.  We’ve just pulled our son out of a private, academically rigorous preparatory school. He’ll finish 8th grade in a minimally supervised online program and spend most of his day in a baseball training program for high school-aged athletes.

4 Ways to avoid parent burnout

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.

Abstract art for your exceptional child

Something that really makes me sick about homeschoolers is that they think their kids are exceptional. I mean, of course your kids are exceptional to you. It’s why you love them so much. But they are not exceptional to us. So all kids are exceptional which makes none, really exceptional.

What makes a dad a homeschooling dad?

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 […]

Being consistent should not be a homeschool goal

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 […]

How personality type affects homeschooling

Each of us brings our own personality to homeschooling, whether we like it or not. There are sixteen personality types, and each one brings special strengths and weaknesses to the table when homeschooling kids.

National nut jobs: homeschoolers put 6 kids in college before age 12

The Today Show just featured homeschool parents who put six kids in college before the age of twelve. These parents are a terrible representatives of the homeschool movement. They are just as bad as the parents who homeschool so they can intellectually isolate their kids from views that differ from their own. 

© 2023 Penelope Trunk