The difference here is that I had little to do with him reading so well. He was never pushed or strapped to a chair. He did much of it on his own. I’m proud of the boy and I hope he keeps up with that kind of self-directed learning.

That contrasts with so many folks who are shuttling their kids from one esoteric learning experience to another so that the kid may be smart, but is a burnout at seven. That kind of pressure that parents feel to have their kids in karate class, Montessori, private Latin lessons, and on and on—that’s the keeping up with the Joneses issue.

There’s nothing wrong with being proud of our kids, but we shouldn’t be trying to turn them into Doogie Howsers just because everyone around us is.

I guess my whole take on all the controversy is that, well, honestly, I don’t pay much attention to it. My family has made and will continue to make choices regarding our kids’ upbringing and education according to what seems best suited to us and our particular circumstances, goals, and values. We “do our thing” and that’s about it :-).

To address something from one of the other posts: I identify myself as a “homeschooling mom of 3″ on my blog because it’s short, to the point, and descriptive of the main thing I am at this point in my life. I didn’t say “married,” because more moms are married than aren’t; I didn’t say “stay-at-home” because that’s probably assumed from the fact that I homeschool; I didn’t say “trumpet-playing” because that sounds kind of dumb and I spend a lot less time playing my trumpet than I do homeschooling. (I list that I’m a musician in my profile.)

I never bring up our homeschooling in social situations unless it comes up. For example, if people ask me what I do, I tell them.

I like the things you’ve said in this post; they pretty much describe what we do. No, I wouldn’t say that our homeschooling life is a breeze, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s a lifestyle and I love it. Will we homeschool all the way through? Dunno. We’ll see what the future holds.

Blessings, Dan; cherish the time spent with your son in living and learning!

P.S. My husband is a public-school teacher and does some of the homeschooling too :-).

Our kids have benefited greatly from having us read to them — both reading aloud to the whole family so they can hear the rhythm and intonation that the writers intended, and reading aloud side-by-side, with my finger underlining each line, so they could see the words as I read them.

We started when they were about 12-18 months with the simplest children’s Bibles and other simple kids’ books. We kept getting more serious Bibles as they got older, reading and talking about Bible stories nearly every night at bedtime and trying to work biblical truth into our daily conversations.

We had a great experience when our oldest kids were young. On a short vacation, we played an audio book in the car of a historical novel aimed at kids — about Paul Revere, written from the horse’s viewpoint! The author knew his history and knew how to bring characters (human and animal) alive. We were all captivated by this story, and when we returned home, the kids wanted more historical fiction. Our library had a lot of quality kids’ novels from the 1940s-70s on early-America topics (a lot of Newbery/Caldecott winners), plus the old Landmark history series, so our kids were soon reading all about US history and eating it up.

A couple of years later, we introduced the Narnia books, both reading aloud and letting them read the books. Then The Hobbit. It just grew from there, till they were reading all kinds of stuff, even the original editions of Robinson Crusoe (where the Bible is quite significant), Pilgrims Progress, and others. My son tore through many G.A. Henty novels, many of which are available in text format online.

Of course, we monitored their selections pretty rigorously for years. We’ve never allowed a Harry Potter book in the house, though, and a number of novels went back to the library when we saw that they were too violent or too secular in their worldviews. My wife and I set the example in our own reading, so there’s no R-rated “forbidden fruit” lying around the house.

I could go on, but you get the drift….