A friend asked re: Attachment Parenting International’s Eight  Principles of Parenting, “I wonder what this would look like for teen years? I'm curious about the equivalent [8] principles and what they might look like? Any thoughts are appreciated.”
The API’s Eight Principles in full are here: http://www.attachmentparenting.org/principles/principles.php
In brief:

1. Prepare for pregnancy,  birth and parenting
2. Feed with love and respect
3. Respond with sensitivity
4. Use nurturing touch
5. Ensure safe sleep, physically and emotionally
6. Provide consistent and loving care
7. Practice positive discipline
8. Strive for balance in your personal and family life

So how would these apply to parents of teens? Pretty much the same with a couple of tweaks.

1. Prepare
Read books. Talk to parents who have children you like and relationships you wish for with your kids. Consult with a therapist; clear out your own baggage and run situations past a neutral third party.

2. Feed with respect and love
Hopefully, you’ve been doing this all along. Incorporate more education. Explain why what they eat is important. Educate your kids how processed food is engineered to appeal to our natural desire for fat, sugar and salt. Follow their eating rhythms. Model good food behavior yourself (have an issue there? Back to the books or therapist or self-help group for you!)

3. Respond with sensitivity.
Teens can be confused and confusing. Their behavior can cause us and them embarrassment. Perhaps they were going for glamorous, not strip club, but they are still working out the fine points.  Ask questions and don’t feel like you need to know everything. Be OK with being the structure they need to push away from.  Remember their brains are reorganizing (yes, go research that) and their bodies are morphing. They don’t know who they are any more than we do. That Martian who replaced your kid is just as startling to them. Love the beautiful being in the midst of the chaos even if you aren’t sure what’s going on in there.

4. Use nurturing touch
We don’t touch our teens enough. Our kids need to know that they can get nurturing touch (a basic need of the human body) without being in a sexual situation. One great side effect of binge watching together was the “puppy pile” on the couch; it was fine to get some mom or dad snuggle time while we wasted a snowy afternoon in front of the TV. Keep kissing your kids good night and hugging them, even if it becomes a joke.

5. Ensure safe sleep, physically and emotionally
Teen sleep patterns can be different from the rest of the family. This has a physiological basis and is one of the main objections I have to high school. Teens naturally stay up late and sleep in. Trying to wrangle their bodies into a more societally acceptable rhythm is costly to their health. There are ways to make sure your kids are in the house and unable to be on their devices after a certain time (when mom and dad need to be sleeping so they can function). Use your parental controls on those devices and let your kids read all night, write all night or craft all night, but not text and watch porn all night. Then let them sleep in.

6. Provide consistent and loving care
This is what you have always strived to do. If you’re having troubles with that, get thee to therapy.

7. Practice positive discipline
Talk it out. State what is objectionable. Ask why it happened. How can the wrong-doer make amends? How do we move forward? Wonderful learning happens when mistakes are made.

8. Strive for balance in your personal and professional life
As that old chestnut goes: children learn what they live. As parents, we need to earn the respect and admiration of our children; after the age of nine or ten they start catching on if we’re being hypocrites. Are you the kind of person you want your child to be? Again, it’s all about you, the parent. Are you taking good care of yourself? Are your needs getting met? Are you aware of places in your life where you need some help? Are your behaviors and values in line with what you are asking of your teens’ behaviors? Are you walking your talk? Are you treating your children with the same respect you ask from them?

These principles apply to teens as well as babies. We must assume that our child is asking for something important in every behavior they exhibit. If there is something amiss then we need to look to our supports for help. And, in their twenties we get to learn how to be parents to grown adults. Very exciting stuff ahead!

I want to talk about listening. Of course, it’s hard to listen while you talk, but I am writing so I don’t have to listen to anyone except the clamoring voices in my head that want to talk about listening.

I have so much to say about listening. About how I learned to listen.  About how important it is to be a listener. About my struggle to learn how to listen fully and then allow myself to respond instead of just plotting my clever response while the person continues to talk (and I am no longer listening). About how grateful I am that I learned to listen to my children. About how sad I am that I wasn’t always good at it, that I missed some things that I wish I had heard more fully when I was too busy, tired and/or overwhelmed.

First, my babies taught me to listen. Then I learned some practical skills in Reflective or Active Listening as a childbirth educator and La Leche League Leader. Then I took a course in Re-evaluation Counseling and that taught me the value of ONLY listening. Then I started my training as a craniosacral therapist, which requires profound listening.

Truly listening means that I trust that the person I am listening to has something valuable for me to comprehend or notice. Sometimes I lose track of that, but when I do manage to listen intently, I am rewarded with a tremendous sense of peace. Even if the situation is asking me to notice something disturbing, by listening I can stay in a place of accepting the realty at hand instead of hoping for a different version. Listening doesn’t support magical thinking; it supports radical acceptance.

Listening requires that I put my responses aside. If my monkey mind starts bouncing around, I ask it to still so we can be in reception mode. Action will come, but after we listen.

So how does this apply to children and clients and clients who are children? Children train me to listen because they have excellent fraud detectors. They know when I am not attending to them. They will not make excuses for my lack of listening. If I have promised to listen and I wander off, they will either call me on it and give me another chance, or they won’t trust me anymore.

When I am truly listening I am not assigning a value to what I am hearing. I am just listening. For example, do you know someone like this? They go to a movie (or they watched a television show or they came up with a solution to a problem) and they really loved it, so they need to tell someone all about it. And, since you are their special someone, you get to listen to their download of the whole blow-by-blow experience. I call those people talkers. I am married to a talker and we spawned another talker. Some people might call them verbal processors. I don’t know if that fits, because they usually aren’t looking for any input or any kind of a solution, they are looking to share with me this wonderful experience that they had.

I need to remember that these “unimportant” things are very important. When I listen to the downloads I am affirming my caring. When a client goes on about “unimportant” things they might be testing me. “Is she really going to listen to me, no matter what I tell her?” When I demonstrate that I am listening to all of it, then a quiet significant something might come. A quiet significant something that needs complete safety to emerge. We may just sit with that quiet something or maybe something else will happen, but we will both be different because we were both there when that quiet significance emerged.

When I am listening deeply I don’t need to pounce on that significant something. I don’t need to label it, change it, fix it, even if it scares me. I just need to love it, to love the person sharing it.

I wish I had more of this understanding with my kids. Often, with the significant somethings I wanted to spring into action and make the world safe and happy again for my daughters. But that action just communicates that I don’t trust that they will find answers of their own (with our help, if they ask for it, and the help of others in their lives) or that I fear the world is such a dangerous place that it is impossible to find a good solution for them.  And this is true for therapists, too: I need to believe that my clients’ inner wisdom knows what is best for them.  Instead of solving the problem, can I just witness their situation and their own insight? When the client senses that I can be a witness to their natural goodness and resources then they can also access those strengths and put their strengths to work on the problems.

It's not about my ability to say something insightful and "helpful", it's about my ability to listen and then respond from my heart.

As people relating with other people, especially as parents or heath care providers, we can nourish one another by facilitating joy.

Joy is food for our self-healing abilities; it is the fuel for our learning abilities. Joy is what gives us resilience. If we lose track of the joy in our lives, then it becomes harder to heal from everyday living. We need joy to recover from traumatic events. Recent research by the HeartMath Institute has shown that while meditating can help us feel more calm and safe, feelings of joy and delight are what make it possible to heal and renew.

One of the most important conversations I have with my clients is about resources. I use the word resources to refer to the people, places and things that nourish or foster joy. I ask them “Where do you find joy in your day?” Some people can access joy easily. They know where their joy is and can access it well. Others sit quietly and slowly realize that it has been a while since they have felt joy. Maybe it has been so long they aren’t sure where to find it. In the movie “City Slickers” Billy Crystal’s wife tells him to “Go find your smile” when he appears to have lost track of his joy. Other people respond too quickly: they assume their joy is in the same places they have always been, or maybe where they think they should be, but is that really where they find joy today?

My resources can be my husband (sometimes), my kids (sometimes), my dog (almost always), my cats (almost always), and quilting (usually). But small animals, babies, beautiful sunsets, and watching bugs pollinate my garden always bring me joy and delight. These are my personal sources of the joy found in delight.

We also need social resources. The feeling of being in a supportive community, part of a clan, or a contributing member of a team can provide a profound sense of the joy felt in satisfaction. We can play as we dance, sing, cook and eat together.

Health care providers become a social resource for the client. As I begin a treatment, my hope is that my caring demeanor and loving hands allow the client to feel safe, creating the opportunity for their body to settle deeply long enough to allow them to access their joy.

I use the example of a bucket when I talk about replenishing our body’s resources. We all have a bucket that represents our capacity for handling the difficulties/stresses/traumas that come our way. Some people have small buckets and some people have large buckets and most of us are somewhere in between.

Costly feelings, such as anger, disdain and sadness, deplete the resources in our bucket, they activate our sense of “not safe” and cause our body to fight, flee or freeze.  They are not “bad” feelings. Indeed, they are necessary for our full participation in life, but they do cost us resources to experience them.

Neutral feelings don’t change the resources in our bucket. We feel safe in the moment, calm, peaceful and meditative. While I would hypothesize that, if we experience neutral feelings as a discipline over time (like a meditation practice) then that discipline can make our bucket slightly larger and sturdier, according to HeartMath neutral feelings don’t replenish our resources. They also don’t use them up. We could say that neutral feelings prepare the way for joy.

Replenishing feelings like joy, delight, happiness and gratitude refill the bucket. They allow our autonomic nervous system to reset to levels that allow healing and repair activities to function efficiently.

When we are looking at another person, it is important to see them as a whole. If all we notice are the parts that aren’t working well, then we are missing the vast majority of the person: the parts that work perfectly 24/7 like a well-tuned machine. Holding this wellness in our awareness, while noticing the parts that might need some assistance, is a way of acknowledging the person’s resources. Instead of asking “How can I fix you?” We might ask, “How can I be present with you in your experience in a way that allows your healthy parts to give resources to the parts that are feeling overwhelmed?” This does not mean that we only allow “good” feelings, it means we are there to be a resource for the person as they process the difficult feelings. They can feel the joy of being cared for as they also feel sadness or grief or disappointment.

Maintaining a broad perspective allows us to see more than a small piece of the person. When we allow ourselves to see the whole person (not just the part with a complaint or a part we find lacking) we gain access to resources that are nurturing to the whole person. When we see the whole person we tap into compassion and the joy of connection, allowing us both to deepen into greater well-being, refilling the bucket.

Given our child's present ages/needs/desires, how can we facilitate their growth? We are on a train that is constantly moving. As soon as I figured out how to take care of my newborn, she became a creeping infant, then a crawler, then a toddler, then a preschooler, then that blessed age between 6 and 11 where they can take of themselves physically, but oh no! she has problems with reading (or math or social skills or a physical problem or needs extra attention because of a family situation), then we tear headlong into puberty, the declarations of independence, first jobs, driving, college apps or exploration travel and then, maybe, helping her set up her own independent life. It never stops.

So we must be attentive and flexible. We must honor our own needs as well as meet our children where they are. We must be open and honest about who we are and how we can be of help to our kids. We must be willing to share our children with our close community and the community at large. I am so grateful that my girls have many extra parents that they call when they need help.

When kids need more structure, you can try adding one small thing. Try thinking about it as rhythm instead of scheduling. How do you want to live? What is important to you? How are you allowing kindness into your family life? Is your life an act of kindness to yourself? What is preventing you and your family from living the way you want to?

One of the traps I noticed myself falling into was comparison. I would lose track of my one family. I would see all of these amazing families with amazing kids and amazing resources and feel badly that we weren’t doing all of those amazing things and being those amazing people. As a family unit we were pretty darned amazing, but if I compared us with the sum total of all the other families, then I was holding us to a ridiculous, unattainable, exhausting-just-to-think-about-it standard.

When I was hurriedly running around trying to be like other people I was prone to crankiness and a general sense of failure and running behind. When I thought in terms of purpose, love and kindness I felt satisfied. This is a personal practice that requires clarity and discipline. How can we expect our kids to embody clarity for themselves if we don’t have it to model for them?

We continue to grow together. My community continues to be my inspiration for being the best person I can be. I worried that once Maggie and Elsa lived elsewhere I wouldn’t have that drive to keep learning how to be my best self, but I discovered that my love for my friends drives me just fine. My constant question continues to be “Given our present ages/needs/desires, how can we facilitate each other’s growth?”

When you see a picture of a pride of lions lolling about on the savannah, do you think, “Wow, such lazy creatures!” Of course not. Lions are smart. They save their effort for when they really need it.

As parents we are all asking, given our child's present ages/needs/desires, how can we facilitate their growth? When my daughters were very very small, a friend of mine chastised me for not signing Maggie up for preschool. She scolded, “You are not doing your job. How will she learn how to stand in a line and sit in a circle?” I was amazed by her questions. Really? I had to pay a lot of money (that we didn’t have) and deal with carting them about and taking part in activities, just so they could learn these basic things? My kids were already involved in two unstructured playgroups that were teaching them everything they needed to know at 2 and 4.  Just like the lions, our cubs practice in their play the same skills the adults use to survive.

Because our family sees the choices we’ve made as living choices, not schooling choices, we still ask the question, but the answers have changed drastically over the past few years. After being completely independent for a couple of years, Maggie decided to go to grad school, so we supported that goal by allowing her to live with us and being generally supportive as she completed her goal. Now that she is finished and employed, we helped her move out and now we encourage her to come home to visit and do laundry. Elsa lives in Columbus, so our ways of being supportive to her look very different.

How does this relate to being lazy? I don’t believe in creating more work for myself or anyone else. Life continues to present me with difficulties I choose to endure cheerfully because I really have no choice.  I have plenty of hard work to do in addition to all of the parts of my life that full of ease. And, for me, all of my parenting choices were about finding a way to meet our goals with ease and without unnecessary effort. Breastfeeding, family bed, child-led weaning, finding families to walk with on our journey, consulting families with older kids when I felt stymied; these are all ways that I found more ease-full than more conventional choices.

We live in a world that values striving, hard work, sacrifice, suffering and deprivation. If you’re not sweating with exertion then you’re not “fulfilling your potential.” In this world it is a chore to do everything and people will exhort you with their struggles, victories and busy-ness as badges of honor. One of my brothers-in-law said that his son needed to learn early that life was hard, that’s why he and his wife put their son in a rigorous kindergarten.

It is hard enough to be a parent without inflicting more difficulty on ourselves and our children. Believe me, life will throw back-breaking challenges at you regardless of what choices you make. Illness, a child’s learning differences, job problems, housing struggles, etc. will give you and your family plenty of opportunity to practice discipline and fortitude. Hard times also help us learn about community, strength and gratitude. We don’t have to avoid difficulty, just not feel obliged to undergo additional hardship because that’s what other people are doing. Education should be every child’s birthright, but it doesn’t need to be toilsome. As a parent, I found the school lifestyle arduous (we tried it for short periods when the girls were curious). When people exclaim, “How did you do it? That sounds like so much work!” I reply, “Having them in school was much harder! How did you manage?”

Almost all homeschooling parents went to school. We need to allow ourselves to be deschooled. That feeling that this can’t possibly be enough stems from the indoctrination we all continue to receive that traditional schooling must be a good and necessary thing or we wouldn’t spend so much time and money on it. I think my kids would have some interesting things to say about their own perceptions of “having got away with something” because they didn’t invest as many years in schooling as their peers did, but they would need to speak for themselves.

So how is my lion pride? In our family I can report that none of us are perfect, but we seem to be functional (for the moment). We all require help from others at times. We all appear to be mature adults capable of holding down a job, finding friends and community, and keeping reasonably healthy habits. We all have the ability to run fast after a wildebeest if we see one that we need. And when we’re not running, we know how to rest and play. Sounds like success to me.

Originally written for the Lilac Children's Garden Newletter, 1999

"Doing work that has to be done over and over again helps us to recognize the natural cycles of growth and decay, of birth and death, and thus become aware of the dynamic order of the universe"

-Fritjof Capra


What a favor we do for our children when we show them the joy of everyday tasks. Young children love to mimic us in our daily routines. Sharing the rewards of our daily work now will help them enjoy their maintenance duties when they get older. It may also teach them that the goal is not to be finished, but rather to determine the right balance of work, play, and rest. About six years ago I realized that even if I could afford a cleaning person, they would not organize my things, do the laundry or do the grocery shopping. I was amazed to discover that even if we were “rich” I probably wouldn’t want someone else doing those things. (Ahh, but a great vegetarian world cuisine low-fat chef, that would be wonderful!) I got the unfortunate impression as I grew up that household tasks were chores. Somehow I picked up that housework and other daily maintenance were not a “real” activities.

There was no joy or sense of accomplishment in housework. It was drudgery I had to get done so I could do something I enjoyed. I have carried that sense of housework as drudgery into my life and it has been regrettable. As soon as I started living on my own I realized that I was solely responsible for the maintenance of my surroundings. And I resented that once a task was finished, such as dusting, it would simply have to be done again. I was never DONE! As the years have progressed I have learned that I (as an adult) am also responsible for maintaining my health, my family’s health, friendships, relationships with family members, my car, etc.

In short, “Life is Maintenance”.

So, if life is maintenance and I’ve been taught that maintenance is just the stuff you have to do before you get to the real living, how much real living can I get to in a day, especially as a mommy? This negative view of the mundane has given me a lot of stress. I have been tempted to “enrich” my life and look outside of myself for the good stuff. The fact is that the good stuff, the real stuff, is in my sink. It is in the laundry pile. It is in my refrigerator and on my kitchen floor. It is in cutting my kids fingernails, shopping for their clothes and shoes, and arranging for their many classes and social visits. It can also be in classes or at my computer, but it is most real here in the dust bunnies under my bed.

Just as there is a heady excitement to infatuation, new people and career opportunities, the true sustained contentment in life comes from the everyday. It has been an ongoing challenge to give my children a sense of joy in maintenance, and I feel tremendously inept. I don’t believe in pretending with them about my feelings (I’m too transparent), so I’ve had to address my dread head on. But I have been buoyed by the belief that this is important to their well-being as adults: To see the rewards of a clean kitchen, stacks of neatly folded laundry, a shoveled driveway. And, thus, to learn that the kitchen gets dirtied, the laundry gets worn, more snow falls on the driveway. These repetitive tasks do teach us the “natural cycles of growth and decay”. We work a while, we play a while, we rest a while. Each activity is worthy, joyful and necessary to our well-being.

Written in 2007

I want to address the child who is avoidant. Elsa has assiduously avoided math. We have had many many moments of the two of us battling over this. I gave up, we hired tutors, worked with friends. Nothing has taken. But Elsa knows she must do some official math so she can get to where she wants to go in life. Next year she'll be addressing that at MCC. One could accuse her of being delayed, or us of being negligent, but I truly believe that Elsa's ability to
grasp spatial concepts is fine, she just doesn't compute well. She'll find a way to deal with this. (She seems to be doing fine with the cash register at Cold Stone Creamery.)

But Elsa's situation is different from a child who has "issues". I have seen children reluctant to take on writing because they weren't  comfortable with producing a a "less than perfect" product. This has more to do with personality than ability. Again, using Elsa as an example, despite the ridicule she has received for her abysmal (but vastly improved) spelling and grammar she has posted stories for family and friends, because she cannot stop herself from expressing
her ideas. She is compelled to write, so she doesn't care about the errors. (Sometimes they make the story more interesting!) Elsa is not shy about putting her ideas out in the world. A child who expresses that they find writing difficult or impossible may be struggling with the exposure of putting a part of themselves on paper. I know of one
child who wouldn't show her writing to friends or family, but had a large online community that she wrote very prolifically for. She needed the anonymity to feel safe expressing herself. Not because her family was unreceptive, but because of her own stuff (which she appears to have outgrown).

What I used to tell my kids when I "compelled" them to do things was "Please do this so I can feel comfortable with what we're doing about your education. This is because I need it, regardless of whether you feel the need to do it." This worked because I kept those items to a very small number and because my girls are generally pretty compliant,
even if they grumble the entire time they are complying. I do have to add that whenever I took on the demeanor of "we're having a wonderful learning moment!" my daughters ran away. They really did not like the idea of doing "fun learning activities". They really have enjoyed the times when I shared things that genuinely interested me, or that I
thought might genuinely interest them.

Written around 2006

I spend a lot of time with children who seem exceptional - how could it be that most of the children I know are "exceptional"? (It's like being in Lake Wobegon!)

So I've decided that most of these children are fortunate enough to be members of exceptional families. Their parents are at least one of the following: very well educated, very thoughtful, financially secure, very available for both quantity and quality time. Praising my girls for what appears to me to be their extraordinary gifts feels silly when they're surrounded by children with extraordinary gifts. And when my kids go out into the world they're going to be in settings where they will encounter other children who come from such blessed backgrounds. What gives them the chutzpah they'll need to feel they can hold their own out in the world? I don't think that believing you are a "good" or "worthy" person is enough. Every child needs to grow up knowing that they can meet a difficult task, struggle with frustration and hard work (emotional, physical or intellectual), and then be rewarded with the satisfaction of making it through to the end of the process with or without success. Sometimes failure is a worthy accomplishment. If they can learn that, then they will not fear encountering something they cannot do.

I think that is one of my most important roles for Maggie and Elsa is to be their cheerleader. As a cheerleader it doesn't make a lot of sense to tell the team that they are strong or that they can throw the ball better than anyone else. Cheerleaders tell the team to keep going, to keep pushing, to keep their eyes on the prize.

This week I had the privilege of talking with a wise mom whose two sons are now grown. The boys were not "easy" and all three of them made mistakes, but she talked about how she was careful to help her sons find their own goals and support them in working hard toward those goals. The rewards came not from her (the parent), but from making progress, reassessing, and continuing to work as the goals and paths changed. These men are so lucky to have such a cheerleader in their court!

Written around 2006

New homeschoolers read a lot of books touting a certain kind of homeschooler: the child with a passion for music, rockets, lambs, computer games, etc. We're often told to wait and watch for our child to find their "thing" and then the high school years and college unfold easily. I've seen a lot of homeschoolers fall naturally into that pattern and it is wonderful to see them blossom in that way.

But not all people fit that pattern. Some kids reach a certain age and they realize that high school is perfect for them. Supporting our child's choices can be very challenging when they've chosen school. (And you thought you'd be challenged by hang gliding or scuba camp!)

So I guess I'd like to say that we need to know that our children won't all find a "thing" (although some of them will). They won't all be the perfect SAT taker, the musical prodigy, or the nationally ranked gymnast (although some of them will). Or, maybe their thing will be something of dubious impressiveness: a makeup artist, a soap opera writer, a mechanic. Are you prepared to honor your child's dream to become a cosmetologist? Or a juggler? Most of them will be ordinary people doing ordinary things. We're here to be sure they're doing whatever they do with joy in their hearts, without the burden of other's expectations, with a sureness of their own selves. For years that looked like playing dress-up at our house. Now it looks like two days of MCC, a part-time job, trips to the thrift store, karaoke, skiing, and making SNL spoofs called Wednesday Night Dead; all with a group of friends we've known for many years who push us to become better people, not better resumes. I know my girls will be works of progress when they are my age. They don't have to have all of the answers by 18, 25 or 45. I have great faith that they have the self-esteem and confidence to know where they want to be today and how to plan for a meaningful future as they figure out what that looks like. They are so far ahead of where I was at their age because they have some idea of who they are, not who everyone wants them to be.

As for high school: Maggie tried it for eight weeks and came home disgusted and ready for MCC. Other kids try it and love it. I found it a very valuable experience for both of my kids to explore this alien world and choose for themselves the place where they felt they functioned best.

Originally written in 2006

I would like parents to think about what it means to you to send your child to a selective college and what that means to your child (yes, even those of you with little ones; we all dream about the future). I would also like to suggest that attitudes about "appropriate" college choices are bound in family and peer culture. Bucking that culture requires a lot of work from infancy on and the college application process is a little late to try and go against the tide. Is an ivy-league destination your goal for your child? How will you feel if they either don't want that or can't achieve it? How will you handle your child's disappointment if they don't get into the school of their dreams? It wasn't long ago that homeschoolers miraculously got scholarships to elite schools because they brought "diversity" to the student body, but those days are over. Elite schools want our kids, but only after we've proven that they fit the school's mold. In an age that values standardization our square pegs must be shoved into round holes.

Perhaps if your child's peer group and/or family culture points to disappointment with anything less than a selective school, then testing and preparation appropriate to that track from an early age is called for. At my house we don't have that worry: Maggie and Elsa come from a long line of state unversity alumni who have done quite well without ivy league pedigrees, we didn't start homeschooling with an ivy league dream, and their peers haven't been ivy-bound (although a handful have gone to ivy league schools). I'm hoping that we can find the schools that will want them so that the girls are being pursued instead of being the pursuer. I'm looking forward to interviews because the openness and excitement for opportunity that comes from our kids isn't communicated in paperwork. Everyone is amazed at the level of conversation my kids engage in, but they don't have anything resembling a transcript. It would be fraud for me to try and pigeon hole what we've been doing into arbitrary classes and grades. Their MCC work will have to demonstrate their performance potential. If this means that the pool of colleges that are interested is limited, Kurt and I are OK with that. It has been worth the trade for our family, and ultimately I think my kids will agree.

Although some kids may be great test takers, I feel that in the current environment SATs and SAT IIs require lots of preparation. Maggie is taking the SAT because prior homeschoolers have found that it is required at schools she may apply to, and a lot of scholarship aid is tied to the SAT. So we are paying a tutor to help level the playing field for her. (I didn't know there were strategies for the SAT. I took two practice tests and showed up on the test day with a hangover. This was back when our farmtown teachers told us the tests were designed so that studying wouldn't give you an advantage!) I will strongly discourage Maggie from taking SAT IIs, especially if they are only required of homeschoolers.

Every college has its list of homeschooler horror stories. There is some prejudice out there that our kids are over-protected, hyper-achieving, socially delayed ultra nerds with overprotective, hovercraft, meddling, pathologically-attached moms. Let's keep those diplomat hats on and give them a different picture. Unschooling means that college choices are just one part of a long life of learning, don't let the anyone (including US News & World Report) tell you otherwise. It would be a shame to let those relatives win in the end after all those years of standing tough ("Yes, I'm certain she will use the potty/ wean/ read/ do some algebra someday.") Where our kids go to college is not our final grade as parents. Our relationship with our kids, their ability to realistically determine and satisfy their own needs, and our ability to grow beyond being homeschooling parents is my measure of success.