Avant Parenting Archives
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Avant! Welcome to my parenting blog archives
As you can see by the dates below, this blog is no longer being updated. However, there’s lots of good stuff here, much of it as true now as when it was written. Please feel free to browse, or follow these links: One last piece of parenting advice: Enjoy today even if it’s a rough…
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Calm in the face of chaos, otherwise known as modern parenting
I just got back from a refreshing and fun homeschooling conference. Homeschooling conferences are their own sort of thing: part conference, part costume party, part mass therapy session. This one was no exception. During the Q&A part of a talk I gave, one of the moms in the audience told me something like “I feel…
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The Value of Competition
Our kids are just as smart as we are….if not smarter. They know when people are putting them on, so if we continue the charade that kids’ achievements are all the same, we’re not doing them any favors. Yes, it’s great to celebrate all children’s abilities, but avoiding competition puts our children into a manufactured…
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Goal-setting full circle
Writing this book on goal-setting is sending me full circle back to what I think is most important about goal-setting: being self-reflective, focusing our attention on what matters, and realizing that “success” is all about feeling like we’ve done our best, and not at all about being declared “successful” by someone else.
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From the HEM archives: The Feminist Homeschooler
I was sad to see that after the demise of the long-running Home Education Magazine, the publisher chose to take down the entire site, and with it the archive of years of articles that they published. I wrote for HEM for only the last two years, but I loved being able to contribute to an important voice in…
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Favorite picture books
In our house, picture books have a very long life. My thirteen-year-old refuses to get rid of her favorites, still! Here are a few of the most memorable, with some memories to go along with them. Goodnight, Gorilla We’re a family of words, so what’s this book of very few words doing on our list?…