A Potluck Life

Category: family life

  • Putting our trust in kids, and in ourselves

    Being a parent is a tough job. So many decisions to make right from the get go. Where to have the baby. How to have the baby. How to feed the baby. Where to put the baby to sleep. Before you know it, it’s how to toilet train, how to handle screen time, how to…

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  • Don’t try to get your kids to do chores, just let them

    I loved this NPR article on kids lending a helping hand around the house. I also hated it. The title, for example: How to Get Your Kids to Do Chores (Without Resenting It). I understand about click bait, but still, there’s so much implied in that title that I dislike, including trickery and veiled coercion,…

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  • Reading for the joy of it

    I was delighted when I saw a recent New York Times article touting ‘Reading Aloud to Young Children Has Benefits for Behavior and Attention.’  Reading aloud was a huge part of our lives as our kids were growing up, and it still is. My husband and I read to each other every night, and we…

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  • Is socialization overrated?

    Mirror, mirror on the wall, what’s the most common homeschooling criticism of them all? What about socialization? Hands down. I’ve heard it over and over again, I’ve read about it over and over again, I’ve addressed it over and over again, but sometimes I have to wonder: Is socialization overrated? Dictionary.com defines it as “a continuing process…

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  • Homeschooling on a shoestring

    Recently I heard a parent casually remark that in her experience, homeschooling one child costs about eight grand a year. That certainly hasn’t been my experience. During the first ten years of my kids’ lives, the amount we spent was negligible. As teens the kids had interests they wanted to pursue but we still curbed…

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  • Perceived homeschooling pitfalls, and how to avoid them

    I recently read an essay by someone who temporarily homeschooled her kids. It didn’t work for her. While the author and I differ on our experiences with homeschooling, I do relate to her list of things that she wants for her kids. In her mind, homeschooling was an obstacle to those ends. In my experience,…

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  • I homeschooled my kids and recess was our curriculum

    The other day I heard about a bill to mandate recess in my state. The proposed law would require elementary school students to have at least 20 minutes a day of  “supervised, safe and unstructured free-play recess.” 20 minutes? That floored me. Elementary school kids are approximately 6-11 years old. When my kids were that age, their…

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  • What homeschooling gets right about socialization

    As a mom who homeschooled four children to adulthood, I’m accustomed to naysayers who focus on socialization. Sadly, it’s been decades and the ridiculousness just keeps coming. This week in particular, I read more than one article on the subject, so I decided to make a listicle on some of the tools and techniques that…

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  • Put the ‘home’ back in ‘homeschooling’

    Recently I read an advice piece for homeschoolers. Sign your child up to attend a learning center or free school for a few days a week, it said, so as to provide a “home base” for your child’s homeschooling experience. I admit I was taken aback. For me and most of the homeschooling families I…

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  • I couldn’t wait to send my kids to school, but when I did…

    I first heard of homeschooling in a creative writing class.  I was in my twenties and struck up a friendship with the other young mother in the group. When she said she didn’t send her kid to school, my reaction was full of the incredulity I regularly encountered later, once I jumped on the homeschooling…

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