A lot of people who hire me for career coaching finally tell me that what they really want is a way to make a life that will let them homeschool their kids. When they have kids. Here's what I tell them: 1. Find a husband who makes enough money for you to stay home. Look,…

You'd think I'd be writing a post about how to work full-time while you homeschool. I might write that post one day. But here's fair warning: it'll look like this picture. My son is trying to tell me about the Bionicle he built. I am telling him I need to write. He is telling me…

  Confession: I hate taking the kids to the doctor's office. Probably, at some point when I was a brand new mom, I was great at going to the doctor's office. But I soon realized that unless the kid is dying, the doctor will send you home with nothing but a piece of paper that…

My other blog gets so much traffic that I receive 5-10 emails every single day offering to write a guest post for my blog. The pitches are so terrible that I usually delete them without reading them. This homeschooling blog, on the other hand, is so new to me, that the offers to write guest posts…

I used to have a column on Yahoo Finance. I would write the basic advice that I wrote on my career blog, stuff like Job hopping is good There are no bad bosses Don't be the hardest worker These are not controversial topics for my career blog. It has an audience of very smart, very…

I'm pretty sure that the most insecure parents are the people who hate their parents. Actually, I don't hate my parents. I mean, they have apologized for everything I could ever want them to apologize for. It's just that they ruined my childhood by being children themselves, during my childhood. So I have no gratitude…

Much of the disappointment in adult life comes from not understanding the inherent limitations of our Myers Briggs score. An ENFJ woman will never be okay with her work/life balance. And ISFJ man needs to marry a breadwinner. These are not things our parents warn us about.  So by the time adult life comes, 98%…

Mothers who homeschool (let's be honest, it's almost always the moms) spend a lot more time with their kids than mothers who send their kids to school. I am trying to figure out if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Certainly it could go both ways. (And certainly there are exceptions—like the…

I remember where I was when I first heard Mick Jagger singing about  mother's little helper. I was in college. I had grown up with a mom who worked ten-hour days as a COBOL programmer and then even longer days in management. I felt sorry for the moms in the 60s who couldn't go to…

We are at an indoor-playground type place, and it's all boys, from about five to ten years old The place is sort of out of the way. The moms talk about how they had to drive twenty or thirty mintues to get here. They ask me how long my drive was. I say, "Two hours."…

I hid in the bathroom of a coffee shop today and cried. I am so bored. Please do not tell me to learn side-by-side with my kids. I do not want to learn what they want to learn. What about my own self-directed learning? Even the people who are the biggest die-hard fans of self-directed…

I have started dressing up. I wear make-up every day, I curl my hair sometimes after a bath. I make sure my jeans are clean and I stopped wearing the baggy ones. I dragged my son to a store with fun jewelry. And, I think, also, that I might buy $400 boots at Nordstrom. I…

Confession: I am supposedly unschooling, but I sneak math workbooks. Not because I think the kids are craving them. I do it because my six-year-old is doing fourth grade math and if I give him workbooks for a few months, he'll get to fifth grade. It blows me away. He's impressive. I like telling people. I…

Last week I posted about what a day in my life is like. It's crazy. It's not like any day anyone would want to have, if they had a choice. And I'm working on changing it. For example I took a trip to LA with the kids, so I could get some time to think….

I'm pretty sure the reason more people don't homeschool is because it's so, so hard. And my situation is no exception. I am the primary breadwinner, we live 90 minutes from a city, and I am much better suited for the relatively predictable world of  business than taking care of children. I started this blog…

This is a guest post from Kate Fridkis, whose family did homeschooling when she was growing up. She blogs about body image at Eat the Damn Cake and she blogs about homeschooling at Skipping School. The photo is Kate as a girl. Adults are afraid that kids will fail at life if they don't learn all of the basics….

Recently CNN announced that the cost of raising kids has increased 40% in the last ten years. But if you look closely, the increase is largely because the cost of child care has gone up. This week's Economist shows that on average, childcare is consuming 68% of the second parent's income. As a kid who…

I promised myself that I would stop going to the Lego store as a form of entertainment. There is no difference between using video games to take care of the kids and shopping to take care of the kids, except that while both are evil, video games don't cost money every time we turn to…