School Survival

by Cassi Clausen My son is now 9 months old. His days consist of waking up, eating, playing, napping, playing more, eating more, bath and bedtime. He’s not being very productive, is he? Well, at least that’s how many would react if he were, say, 9 years old. And, to be honest, I sometimes feel […]

Police have arrested a Georgia woman who they say forced her son to kill his pet hamster with a hammer as punishment for earning a bad grade. Meriwether County sheriff Steve Whitlock told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday night that the 12-year-old boy told his teacher about the killing. The teacher reported it to the Division […]

Delaware’s child welfare law, known as The Delaware Child Care Act, is being used by state officials to unreasonably burden some homeschooling families with government oversight. As amended in 2001, the law defines “child care” to include, in part, any person, association, agency, or organization which (1) has in custody or control one child or […]

New article added to the articles section: Schooling: The hidden agenda. It's a speech Daniel Quinn (author of Ishmael) gave at a home-schooling/unschooling conference. For those of you with short attention spans, here are some snippets I found interesting. I've even bolded some parts so if you have very SEVERE attention span issues, you can […]

Parents struggling to get their kids to revise in the run-up to exams can now keep them at their desk using a ball and chain that only unlocks when they have studied for long enough. Concerned mums and dads set the desired study time on the Study Ball and attach it to their child's ankle. […]

Teenagers with earlier bedtimes are less likely to have depression or think about suicide, a new study reports. This adds to a growing body of research linking a lack of sleep to a higher risk of depression and other health problems in young people. What do we know already? Sleep is vital to our bodies, […]

If you can't convince your parents to let you unschool, or even to homeschool you, finishing high school online might be a decent intermediate option for you. It's more "school-like" than homeschooling and unschooling, so in theory it should be easier to convince them to let you do it. Depending on where in the world […]

A study, which found that young children whose parents spank them perform better at school later on, isn’t winning high marks with child development experts. The research, by Calvin College psychology professor Marjorie Gunnoe, found that kids smacked before age 6 grew up to be more successful, and that there was not enough evidence to […]

Stun gun maker Taser wants to help parents, not with jolts of electricity but with a tool which allows parents to effectively take over a child's mobile phone and manage its use. "Basically we're taking old fashioned parenting and bringing it into the mobile world," Taser chairman and co-founder Tom Smith said at the Consumer […]

Parental controls are in everything - and now in your car By Gary Marshall CES has barely begun and we're depressed already: the good people at Blackline GPS are showing off their Young Drivers Report Card, a GPS-based monitoring system that ensures you'll never have to trust your teenager again. According to the blurb, you […]