Jen

Homeschooling involves sacrifice. Even if you’re not sacrificing a paycheck, or a career that you loved (and many of us did both), you’re sacrificing a lot of time and energy that you might have used elsewhere. We were fortunate: my spousal unit’s career is enough to provide for our tiny family and then some (we’ve … Read more

You might find this quite surprising, but I didn’t always think outside the box. In the really-not-so-distant-past, this conversation happened. Scene: I’m on the phone with my homeschooling friend whose children are a few years older than mine. Her middle child, a tightly wound young women, was a highschool sophomore who was attending the local … Read more

“If you’ve ever tried to wrestle a kid into line whose parents have convinced him to believe they’ll love him in spite of anything, you know how impossible it is to make self-confident spirits conform.” ~John Taylor Gatto, “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher” I know you.  Your child is struggling in school.  It’s become a battle.  You’re … Read more

I think schools do a really good job of reinforcing the “right now” fallacy. That is, they operate on the fears of parents that if your X-grader can’t do something “right now” then their “educational foundation” is shaky, and they won’t be able to do X or Y in the future, because they didn’t master … Read more

I use the terms “de-facto homeschooling,” “legal homeschooling” and “independent homeschooling” to distinguish between public programs that are largely administered at home, HBI status, and HBI homeschoolers who don’t participate in public school programs. It seems to me that a lot of this comes down to a “states rights” type issue, which is, in part, … Read more

Farmergirl plays with powertools, runs the saw mill, drive, lights fires in the woodstove, cook son the gas range, runs all over the forest we live in (124 acres surrounded by other large tracts of land), flies transcontinentally, talks to strangers . . . she’s ALWAYS talked to strangers. For that matter, she’s never met … Read more

I certainly think that taking into account the experience of others has its place, but I think you have to temper relying on that. Funny case-in-point.  We were in the grocery store, and my daughter (about 8yo then) asked what the brussel sprouts were, and then what they tasted like.  I said I didn’t know, … Read more

A parent in a forum I’m on asked this: How would one answer this question: How can we expect our kids to make their own decisions when they are not developmentally ready or experienced enough to be aware of the future consequences? K T I would assume that such a person asking this question believes … Read more

As homeschooling is legal across the US, it certainly SHOULD mean that, once you explain that your school aged child who is outside on a “school day” is playing, that the questioner should cease and desist. But the problem with the world is that it’s full of people. Worse, still, it’s full of well-intentioned people … Read more