Avant Parenting Archives
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Avant! Welcome to my parenting blog archives
My children are grown, my interests have moved on, so this blog is no longer being updated. However, there’s good stuff here, much of it as true now as when it was written. Please feel free to browse, or click the headline above to access quick links to my favorite topics. One last piece of…
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What can you say?
There are times when you realize that nothing you can say is exactly right. In the last couple of days I’ve read a number of pieces about “how to respond to tragedy,” but I find them all lacking. Really, it seems to me, there is nothing right to say to parents who have lost a…
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Favorite boy, favorite girl
My daughter has started to refer to her brother as “Favorite Boy.” You might think that this is not an epithet, but you would be wrong. She is skilled at turning any fine word into an insult, when her brother is the one she’s referring to. In this particular case, after years of not pulling…
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Attachment and Success
I was reading about attachment research in Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed and remembered a conversation I had not long ago with another adult. I had mentioned something about how so many of my homeschooling friends were attachment parents (read this if you don’t know what that is), and this person responded, “Aren’t their kids…
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Birthing a book
People compare writing a book to having a baby, and in many ways its the same. You pour a huge amount of yourself into a book, whether it’s an autobiography or an academic treatise on a rare insect from Guatemala. But for me, the process of publishing my book, From School to Homeschool, has been…
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News from the convention, Day 3
Following are my notes on the National Association for the Gifted Convention, day 3. Click here to read day 1 and day 2. I can’t believe it! I’m typing this on the airplane home and I may in fact be caught up when we touch down. Now, whether I have time to put any links…