Yet again a post in this series is purely about pointing you to someone else’s cool post. Glennon Doyle Melton writes at Momastery about the difference between feeling like saying ‘no’ to someone or something and finding the words to actually say it. Even harder for teenagers, in endless intense situations with friendship capital at stake […]
This is an all-in-one post for Week 2 of our Lent with Kids plan. To fill in some background, start here. You can also see the series index here. Week 1 of Lent is almost done, and Sunday is a-comin’! I’m experimenting this week with just one post with everything we need for the week. Let me […]
[Trigger warning: if you have experienced sexual assault, please just be aware that rape and rape culture are discussed in this post. Many of the links similarly lead to pages that need a trigger warning.] Sad, sickened, shocked, triggered, appalled, horrified, not-actually-that-surprised. Most New Zealanders could tick most of those boxes this week as our […]
SBJ is sick at the moment with a cough and fevers, poor boy. He’s all croaky and sounds like a little duck, which is SUPERcute (though I am of course very sorry for him, too). The poor wee mouse is uncharacteristically miserable, so we are watching a lot of YouTube, and therefore needing to expand […]
If you had a six-year-old child, and institutional schooling had never existed, how would you go about preparing them for adult life? In the next few posts on unschooling, I want to tease out a few different issues and discuss them separately. Today it’s the different social experiences schooled and unschooled (or homeschooled) kids have. […]
Is it fair to say we all want our kids to have better, healthier, happier feelings about their bodies than we have about ours? How can we avoid passing on our own insecurities? Alex linked recently to this bawl-inducing letter Kasey Edwards writes to her mother in ‘Passing on Body Hatred,’ excerpted from […]
‘All I ever needed to know I learned in the mental hospital,’ says Glennon Doyle Melton, from the Momastery blog, in her recent TEDx Talk. It’s sort of Glennon 101, an introduction to the big themes of her mission to live in the open, be a shameless truth-teller, and help everyone else to feel ok […]
It is a legal right in New Zealand for all children to have free education that meets their needs. This includes the right to ‘special education’ for people under 21 years old who need extra support, or something different from the usual classroom teaching. The vision statement of the Ministry of Education, in relation to […]
It’s the first day of school for lots of people in the Southern Hemisphere this week, if they haven’t already headed back. I am among the hundreds of thousands of people who read and were moved by Glennon Doyle Melton’s yearly talk to her son about what’s important at school: Chase – When I was […]
In A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor gives the news each week from the township of Lake Wobegon, where ‘all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.’ It’s not just Lake Wobegon. Some friends of ours observed the amusing number of parents around them who considered […]