Category: Parenting

  • Reading list for your gifted young reader

    There is a lot of understanding these days about finding appropriate books for emerging readers. An entire new genre has even sprung up for struggling older readers who want something more mature than Amelia Bedelia. But there’s a problem on the other side of the spectrum for kids who read early. It’s not uncommon for…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…