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…

Here's this week's photo from the GAP. It's not my favorite. This one is. But now that Zehavi has convinced me that we should go to the GAP each week after cello, I decided that I'll document the new outfits. Maybe GAP will sponsor the blog or something. I should email them.

School separates exercise into something different from our main job. When we started homeschooling, one of the biggest shifts I had to make in my own thinking is that exercise is not school. I had to teach myself, every time my kids were playing, that learning is not divided between academics and gym, learning is…

It's scary to think that if you don't send your kids to a classroom, there won't be thirty other kids telling your kid all about what's available in the world. It's scary to think it's your responsibility now. But the truth is, it's not that big of a responsibility.

The New York Times reports today India is finally coming down on coal mine companies that employ kids. The description of the lives of the kids is harrowing, but nothing I haven't read before from people like Lewis Hine or Jacob Riis, who wrote about the same child labor problems in the United States in…

The impact of being part of a family that lives in a fish bowl is that I am a lot more conscious of when I'm lying. To other people, to myself, to anyone, really, because the more you lie the more you have to compensate for the lie. (I know you know that, but you…

Every parent will be more successful if they understand their chid's Myers Briggs score. It's unbelievable to me that this information is not more widely distributed to parents because it's so incredibly helpful in terms of becoming a good guide for your child.

Quora is a fascinating site because good questions are so hard to ask, and Quora is an aggregator of good questions. In the past I have loved questions like, What does it feel like to have a trophy wife?. Recently, Victoria Kirk sent me the link to the question: What's the single most unfair advantage?

If you give a parent the choice between having eight hours a day of freedom from their kids, or spending eight hours a day forcing their kids to learn to read and do math at home, no parent will chose the latter. It doesn't matter that homeschooling isn't really like that. Non-homeschoolers think it is….

So much of parenting advice is what you should be doing. But the hardest advice to take is what you shouldn't be doing. Because it is actually more difficult to just sit on your hands and wait than to insert yourself where you think you can make a difference. Here are three areas where inserting…

Thank you so much for a great year. Before you get to the list of the best posts, I want to say thank you. This photo summarizes homeschooling for me so far: the feeling of being smothered by my kids, and at the same time being surprised by how happy I am with it. The…

Families that are cohesive and intradependent generate high academic achievers. Families that are child-focused create high academic achievers. Families that are broken, non-child focused, and full of conflict generate creative thinkers.

My mom and dad were pretty terrible parents. My brothers and I each went through our own hell, and everyone in the family has been in therapy—together and separately—to deal with the result of their parenting.

We had a funeral for our goat. The goat was our favorite goat. For those of you who don't know, in the goat cheese industry, which is very prominent in our area, the goat farmers kill the baby boy goats when they are born. The US imports goat meat, so there is no market for…

When my kids went to the local school, before I started homeschooling, I made a big deal about Rosh Hashanah. We didn't go to synagogue. Too boring. And also, we live in rural Wisconsin so it's a 90-minute drive to the closest synagogue. Instead, I made a big deal out of Rosh Hashanah by taking…

If you had $10,000,000 would you still homeschool? Someone emailed this question to me. It's an interesting question. Because before I started homeschooling, I would have taken that money and hired a consultant at $10K per kid to get them both into one of those top NYC private schools. Then I would have bought a…

This past week we had a film crew at the house getting footage for a reality TV show about our family. I'm excited. At first I was scared that the TV show would be bad for the kids. And the night before the crew got here, I went food shopping, (because I thought I definitley…

A few weeks ago my son and I took a driving trip to Ohio for a cello institute. I want to tell you to read this post thinking about classical music filling our ears for a week. But I felt like it was a week TV. In the car driving there, in between lessons at…

This is a guest post from Danielle Ali Shah. She is an Australian living in Rawalpindi, Pakistan with her husband, and three children whom she homeschools. You can read her blog here. This post is about Danielle's daughter, Diyana, pictured above. I often think of my kids as pretty non-self motivated learners, since they tend…

My kids do almost all their TV watching on our computer, in the car, or in a hotel room TV when we travel. Which means that I hear everything they watch, and I have to say I love the shows they choose. My six-year-old's favorite shows are iCarly and Jessie. He watches each episode ten…