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Friday, May 23, 2008
Why Homeschooling?
From Pam Dolan of TheDay.com
Why am I planning to homeschool our kids?
This question keeps coming up. It’s a fair question, but I still do not have a fixed and ready answer. You’d think that after all these months of thinking and researching that I would have come up with a workable response, but the question still stops me cold.
It seems like the kind of question I will be much better equipped to answer five or ten years from now. It’s not that I’m waffling on this decision. I am thrilled to pieces by the notion of learning along with the kids for the next several years. It absolutely feels like the right thing to do.
But why? Read more...
Labels: homeschool, parenting, unschool
Friday, April 04, 2008
9-Year-Old Rides the Subway Alone
I can remember being sent on errands by myself when I was 6 years old. I often worry our own kids (and everyone else in their generation) might be a bit too sheltered. This story may help you try a little independence.
I left my 9-year-old at Bloomingdale’s (the original one) a couple weeks ago. Last seen, he was in first floor handbags as I sashayed out the door.
Bye-bye! Have fun!
And he did. He came home on the subway and bus by himself.
Was I worried? Yes, a tinge. But it didn’t strike me as that daring, either. Isn’t New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It’s not like we’re living in downtown Baghdad.
Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. Read more...
Labels: parenting
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Inoculate Children Against Advertising
Get Rich Slowly has a great post about how advertising could influence children more than parents and how to keep them out of that trap.
Shortly after we saw how easily we had been replaced as the value-shapers in our home, we also began to notice just how much allure commercials held for our children. And as soon as we began to hear choruses of, “Can we buy this?” and “We need to have that!” from the lips of our twins, we realized we needed to act. Read more...
