Avant Parenting Archives
-
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As you can see by the dates below, this blog is no longer being updated.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…
-
Talk to your kids
When my children were small, we were fortunate that our lives intersected briefly with a wonderful woman who was temporarily working as a babysitter. She was a refugee and had gone from being a respected professional in her native tongue to a naive beginner in America. As such, she had the unusual experience of being…
-
A question of scale
This year my son and I decided to use a new and unusual history curriculum in our homeschool. The Big History Project is an attempt to reshape history to be meaningful to kids in the age of information. Rather than focusing just on the wars and conquests of the past, this curriculum attempts to help…
-
From homeschool to school
A friend told me the other night that she was eagerly awaiting my next installment of our ongoing school saga. After homeschooling kindergarten through fifth grade, my daughter decided to try out public school this year. Probably the most surprising news for most people is that there is so little news. Because it was her…
-
Women helping women
The other day I wrote about how I’m a bit of a skeptic about the exploding field of alternative health. It is so hard to separate the noise of the snake oil salesmen from the soft-spoken voices of reason. But here’s another example of how advances in modern healthcare don’t always happen in the laboratory.…
-
A behavioral diet toolkit
I am not what I would describe as a great enthusiast for the alternative health craze. I remember reading when I was a child about the “snake oil salesmen” who precipitated this country’s need for a Food and Drug Administration. Although I’d love to believe that all of our modern snake oil salesmen are well-intentioned,…