I Am Not My Child's Teacher

This is an updated version of the original post, published in March 2011...

My children are four and two years old. By now, they have both learned how to talk, walk, run, jump, climb, make jokes, dance, and do a bunch of other things. But I won't say "I taught them" how to do these things.

Three Steps To Keeping a Clean House

It's hard to keep a clean house when you have young kids.

You want your kids to enjoy living in their own home, but that means messes will be made. You want to spend as much time as you can engaged with your kids and still have some time for your own pursuits, but that leaves little time for cleaning. So how do you do it?


I have solution for parents out there who want to have a guest-ready house at all times, where everything is clean and tidy and perfectly arranged, without losing too much fun time with the little ones...

Three Steps To Keeping a Clean House

Mom To the Rescue!

I forget things all the time. It's rare that I walk out of the house without having to run back in to grab something I forgot. Just a few weeks ago, I walked out without my keys, but I did remember to bring my kids, and to lock the door behind me. I found myself outside in the cold with no keys for the car, and no way to get back into the house.

So what did I do? Since I knew my husband was unreachable, naturally, I called my parents. First I called my Dad, hoping that the extra key for my house was at his house, only three miles away. When he couldn't find it, I called my Mom, who was at work. She had the key!

Unfortunately, Mom said, I could bring it to you, but I'm not going to. You have to learn you can't forget your key. How will you learn if I just bring it to you?

Socialization: My Thoughts

In my last post, I asked some questions about socialization. Here, I share my responses:

How many people do you know who did not attend grade school or high school?

Before I had kids and started thinking about this for my family, I had never met anyone who didn't go to school. There was one person in college who was known as "the homeschooled kid" and all of his weirdness was attributed to that one fact about his past. Now that I am more involved in the homeschooling community (both locally and globally online), I know a lot of people who never went to school. I can say that in my experience, I have found about as much variation in all the usual social characteristics in the unschooled population as in the schooled population.

Are you basing your opinion of unschooled people on a handful of families you have met, or maybe haven't even met but have only heard about? That is like forming an opinion of an entire country or race of people based on the same limited knowledge of them. I was guilty of it too.

Think about the five most antisocial people (by your own definition) you have ever met. Did they go to school?

I'm A Quitter.

Being labeled a quitter is not usually a good thing. Quitting anything apparently means you have a character flaw. It means you give up too easily. It means your parents probably let you quit things when you were a kid. You don't have any sense of commitment. As a parent, you are not supposed to want your child to be a quitter. You can make sure that this will not happen if you don't let your children quit things. Teach them that the commitment is more important than their happiness. Teach them that they might even end up liking something if they stick with it even when they don't want to.

I have known people who played the same sport almost every day for over a decade, from childhood through college, and still struggled with the idea of "quitting" the sport even when it was not bringing her any happiness anymore. So it's not ok to quit something if you have only just started, and then it's also not ok to quit something if you have been at it for a while. When IS it ok to quit something? How long are you supposed to give it before you can appropriately decide you have had enough?