The conventional wisdom about the homeschooling community is that it's all crazy right‑wing Christian fundamentalists. The truth is that lots of homeschool parents are just like you.  They're smart, curious, concerned about their kids, but also concerned that they don't want their life to go to hell while they're focusing on their kids. Here are five…

A big barrier to homeschooling is that it's very easy to envision a major downside: no more free babysitting. But it's harder to imagine the upside. We have more examples in media of gay couples raising kids as a normal setting than we do of homeschoolers raising kids in normal settings. So it's hard to imagine…

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.

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…

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…

I love the Onion so much. A recent article headline is Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation, and there's an accompanying photo of a dad fawning over his Talking Heads album. 

The preconceived notions I had about homeschooling parents created one of the biggest barriers to me decided to homeschool. I thought I knew what homeschooling parents were like. And I was certain I was not like them.

I'm just going to be blunt and tell you that I make an amazingly large sum of money for someone who is homeschooling. Last year, my first year of homeschooling, I cleared $150K. Some of you will admire my spunk. Some of you will say what I'm doing doesn't even count as homeschooling.

Part of what makes public schools widely supported is that everyone buys into the idea that kids need teachers in order to learn. Yet, if you look closely at the arguments for teachers it becomes clear that kids do not need teachers trained in curriculum-based education. Kids need teachers who can accommodate self-directed learning. And…

What's the most common reason parents have for not homeschooling? They need two incomes. But I'm just not willing to believe that money holds back parents from homeschooling. Here's why: Anyone has enough money to homeschool because there's an intrinsic low-cost-of-living that works with homeschooling.

There are stories of what kids did in order to achieve incredibly unlikely goals. Taylor Swift had her whole family relocate to Nashville. Gymnast Gabby Douglas left her Virginia family to go live with her Iowa coach. The pianist Conrad Tao's family moved from southern Illinois to northern Illinois for a piano teacher and then…

My older son loves going to Cave of the Mounds. Maybe you would like it, too. It's one of the largest caves in the United States, and geologists love it because it has one of the most diverse groupings of stone in the world. Or something like that. I don't really know. I hate going…

I am great at work. I was born to dream up big ideas and then sell them. I love a meeting—as long as I'm talking the whole time. So, actually, I love a lecture. But the only time it's socially acceptable to lecture is in the context of work. So I really love work.

When I was growing up, my brother and I suffered from lots of different forms of abuse, but probably the biggest one was neglect. When I was in second grade and he was in kindergarten, we started waking ourselves up to go to school and we put ourselves to bed at night. There were days…

This is me, holding my niece, Eva. This is the first time since I had my own babies that holding a baby did not trigger my feelings of despair. When I had babies I had no support system. My mom has borderline personality disorder, my dad has Aspergers, and my in-laws have (admittedly undiagnosed, but…

This is a picture of me and the boys at the music workshop we went to in Boston. You will notice that there are no instruments, and no teachers. This is because after two hours we left the camp and just did a trip to Boston. In the past, this would have been a hard…

I'm traveling with my son, which means I'm reading USA Today, which is distributed liberally throughout hotels in the US. I usually love USA Today. It's like eye candy with all the photos and it's nice that I get the same paper no matter what city we're visiting. My favorite spot in the paper is…

This is a picture of the very famous Joshua Bell. Here's a story he tells: His mom dropped him off every week at some university where he was supposed to practice violin. But the room he was supposed to practice in was right by the video game room, and he found himself going there a…

I think by now that you know I think you should homeschool your kids. And I think you should not use curriculum. And I don't care that I am the stereotype of the recent convert who is an intolerable zealot. Because you know what? I think it's okay to judge people. I don't think everyone…

I am trying to be more conscious of what is different about my life because I homeschool and what would I be dealing with anyway even if I didn’t homeschool. For example, last week I was at cello camp with my son, and I noticed that the place was split between stay-at-home moms (lots of…