I keep thinking it’s like trying to fit a size 12 foot in a size 9 shoe. Despite all the purging we did over the last two moves, we have to get rid of more stuff in order to fit four people and their stuff in this house.

I decided not to let anything in the house that isn’t going to stay here. So you can imagine what the garage looks like.

Someone suggested that had I spent more time over the last 30 years getting rid of stuff instead of keeping it, I would be better off.

I thought about that for a while. At first, it sounded right. But then I realized that while I did go through things at times, I was never forced to do a major purge because we lived in a big house that allowed me to store things instead of getting rid of them. Also (and most importantly), I was so busy raising and homeschooling four kids that I never had time to do a major purge.

And that’s ok, because I spent the time I could have spent going through stuff doing more important things, like explaining algebra, playing games, and reading to my kids. Now that they’re grown, I have more time to go through everything. So while going through all this stuff now isn’t a lot of fun, I’m glad I had the time with my kids when they were home.

So if you have lots of kids and lots of clutter, take heart. Someday you can take care of the clutter. But the time to take care of the kids is now.

Even an hour spent on the Internet makes it clear that experts are everywhere: some are experts by virtue of their life experiences or training (I value the first more than the second; how about you?) and others are self-proclaimed experts. After all, it seems like nearly everyone has a blog these days where they share their “expert” advice.

Then there are the women’s magazines, which proliferate around checkout counters across the land, with blaring headlines declaring “Your Body: Advice from the Experts!”, “How the iPad Can Release the Genius Inside Your Child” and “50 Ways to Please Your Man!”

Everywhere we go, it seems we’re surrounded by experts. Their proclamations can make us feel unprepared and diminish our confidence, particularly when it comes to parenting our children.

Our childhood school experience also contributes to this feeling. We grew up with the common wisdom that we should learn to read in kindergarten or first grade, achieve perfect penmanship in third grade and master algebra in eighth grade. The expected age for attaining these milestones was established by (you guessed it) so-called educational experts. To make matters worse, children who don’t conform to those ages are labeled: if they read before kindergarten, they’re “gifted,” and if they haven’t picked up algebra by 9^th grade, they’re “delayed.”

It’s very hard to break free of reliance on experts when you’ve grown up hearing so much from and about them. We don’t realize how we’ve been trained to rely on others instead of ourselves. But once we become parents, we have an ideal opportunity to become experts instead of relying on them, because we know more about our children than anyone else does, and that knowledge grows daily.

Ultimately, this becomes an issue of trust: are we going to trust some “expert” or our own instincts, experience and common sense?

Trusting yourself as a parent isn’t always easy, but that trust can be developed early on. In fact, every time you bump up against someone who tells you you’re parenting the wrong way, you have an opportunity to develop trust in your own judgment.

For example, when our first child was a few months old, we left her with a well-meaning relative for a few hours while we went out. The next day, I learned that this relative had given our baby a cookie. Yes, it was a soft cookie, but our child had not yet begun eating solid foods (at that age, her sole nourishment came from breast milk). So I asked the relative not to give the baby anything to eat except the bottled breast milk I provided when she babysat our daughter.

This didn’t go over well. The relative, though childless, was a nurse, and believed that based on her experience and training, she knew best what our child should eat. But it was our job as the baby’s parents to make such decisions. I felt strongly that she wasn’t old enough to eat solid foods (and once she was, we weren’t going to start with cookies). Being faced with opposition only made me stronger, and helped me learn to trust my instincts with my child.

Still, trusting my parenting instincts did take time. Some time later, even though my eldest had learned to read with minimal help from me at age four due to her own desire, the common educational wisdom that children should be reading by a certain age intimidated me enough that I tried teaching my middle children to read once they turned five . But I soon gave that up because of their resistance. Giving up was an indication that my parenting instinct muscle was becoming stronger. What I finally learned is that when each child was ready to read, I wouldn’t have to do much more than answer questions and provide reading materials. It turned out that the “experts” were wrong: the child is not supposed to learn to read at age five or six. The child is supposed to learn to read when he or she is ready to do so.

As we discover from experience that our children learn without our coercion, we develop trust in their instincts as well as our own. Instead of forcing them to take piano lessons or join the soccer team, we encourage them to make their own choices. If those choices turn out to be the wrong choices, we don’t criticize them, but instead help them see that failure at something is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, they learn that failure brings them one step closer to success by showing them what doesn’t work.

Sometimes our now-strengthened trust in our parenting instincts collides with the trust we’re trying to develop in our children’s instincts. One parent, frustrated with his ten-year-old’s reluctance to master physical skills such as riding a bicycle and turning a cartwheel, decided that she was never going to learn the physical activities commonly learned in childhood without being pushed, literally. So in frustration he threw her off a pier, thinking that she would learn to swim out of necessity, as some animals do. However, she didn’t come to the surface and had to be pulled from the lake, sputtering and choking. She knew she wasn’t ready to swim, but his reluctance to trust her on that almost resulted in a tragedy.

The stakes don’t loom nearly as large when it comes to homeschooling, but it’s still very important that we learn to trust ourselves and our children instead of the experts. It alarms me when I see articles about how to homeschool our children written by “educational experts” who have never taught their own children. I’ve even been to workshops at homeschool conventions presented by childless people. Some of the homeschool curriculum programs and online schools now advertised widely are run by people with no parenting experience, much less homeschooling experience. These “experts” will not only make you feel inadequate if you let them, but they’ll charge you plenty of money to lead you in the wrong direction.

But if you trust yourself and your child, you can be discerning about such resources and advice. You can assess them to see if they’ll work for your children and for you. And if you find them wanting, you can stop using them without a moment’s concern. Given the enormous and ever-growing homeschool products market, having confidence in your instincts and your children’s ability to learn will save you a lot of money and time.

Ultimately, learning to trust ourselves and our children will make teaching them more efficient, and enjoyable for us and them. It will also help us develop good lifelong relationships with them. And while I’m not denigrating the experience-based advice being shared by true experts, I think being able to ignore the self-proclaimed experts whose advice comes from solely from their training (at best) is a big plus all by itself.

How do you feel about letting your children watch television?

I have to admit, my feelings have changed over the years. When I was a young parent, I only let my kids watch “Sesame Street” and “Mr. Rogers.” The rest of the time they played: in their rooms, in the living room, in the yard and at the park. VCRs were still new and expensive; we rented one once in a while so that we could watch a movie, and we often rented an old Disney movie for the kids.  But that was the limit of our children’s television viewing. We didn’t even buy a color television until 1989; even then we bought a tiny one, hoping its size would keep the kids from becoming addicted.

Then we had more kids. I found that homeschooling the older kids was a lot easier if the little ones had a video to watch. Yes, it was on the tiny television, but it kept them glued in one spot for a while so that I didn’t have to worry too much about someone climbing up the kitchen blinds while we worked on long division in the living room. The rest of the time, however, I limited how much television the kids could watch.

By the time we got a bigger television, the kids had become used to entertaining themselves most of the time. Sure, they had a couple of favorite cartoons that they enjoyed (I think the theme song to “Pinky and the Brain” is still lodged inside my brain!), but if the weather was nice, they always preferred playing outside.

I do have some fond memories of my children watching television. I clearly recall my eldest daughter at age eight or nine yelling “Stop!” when, while channel-surfing, we flew past a play being shown on PBS. We went back to it and she became completely absorbed in a performance of “Into the Woods.” It was the start of a love of live performances that continues on; today she enjoys working behind the scenes of plays in the city where she lives.

And how could I forget my young son and my husband gluing themselves to the television for Chicago Bulls games during those glory years of the early 1990s? How they loved watching that team together.

Over the years, even after we bought a VCR, we found that limiting but not eliminating television worked for our family. It probably helped that we never had cable television, so our family was limited to a handful of local channels. Today I’m not aware of my adult kids being channel-surfers, although they do like watching movies and television series on DVD.

However, I must confess that our youngest is television-addicted. Josh is typical of many people with developmental disabilities in that he loves certain movies. He will not only watch his favorite Disney movies over and over, but he’ll also sing along, belting out the lyrics by memory. Since he has speech delays, it’s good for him to sing, and to reenact his favorite scenes. It also gives him great joy.

So, I don’t think the television is a bad thing, if you control its use. Unlike this mom, I don’t believe your child will become a genius if you withhold television viewing from her. But I do think unregulated amounts of it will make dummies out of children. I think we see the proof of that decades-long trend all around us these days, don’t you?

Amy Chua thinks you can and you must, and her methods are drawing a lot of attention. An excerpt from her new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, recently appeared in the online version of the Wall Street Journal. It’s been the site’s #1 most visited page for weeks, and already has over 7,500 comments (most articles there get a few hundred comments at most). It’s also sparked debate among parents all over the country. (Note: Ms. Chua has accused the Wall Street Journal of taking the most shocking parts of her book out of context, but read on and see what you think.)

Ms. Chua’s daughters are high achievers; one even played piano at Carnegie Hall. Ms. Chua credits their achievements in part to not letting them go on sleepovers, be in school plays, have play dates, watch television or use computers. She required that both girls learn to play the piano and violin (no other instruments allowed). Here’s her description of one daughter’s attempts to learn to play piano with both hands:

Lulu couldn’t do it. We worked on it nonstop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over. But whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart. Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off.

Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu’s dollhouse to the car and told her I’d donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn’t have “The Little White Donkey” perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, “I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?” I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn’t do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.

“Get back to the piano now,” I ordered.

“You can’t make me.”

“Oh yes, I can.”

The girl did end up mastering the technique, and according to her mother, was thrilled about it. But was it her achievement, or her mother’s?

I found this statement by Ms. Chua particularly disturbing:

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences.

Nothing is fun until you’re good at it? I remember the crooked little quilts my girls made when they were young. They loved making them, and I didn’t force them to do so. Now they can crank out lovely quilts much faster than I can. But the point is, they had fun making crooked quilts and now they have fun making straight ones, and it was their idea to make quilts in the first place. I merely taught them the basics and helped them when they asked for it.

Recently I read The Element: How Finding your Passion Changes Everything, by Sir Ken Robinson. This noted creativity expert studies very successful creative people. In his book, he cites the experiences of many creative types who didn’t know what they were good at until they heard or saw something that struck a chord within them.

For instance, Robinson interviewed drummer Mick Fleetwood of the band Fleetwood Mac, who, as a young boy, struggled in school but loved to tap on things. What Fleetwood called “this tapping business” really came to life when he went to a live musical performance for the first time and realized that he wanted to be in that kind of environment:

“One day, I walked out of school and I sat under a large tree in the grounds. I’m not religious, but with tears pouring down my face, I prayed to God that I wouldn’t be in this place anymore. I wanted to be in London and play in a jazz club. It was totally naïve and ridiculous, but I made a firm commitment to myself that I was going to be a drummer.”

What came next was a series of “breaks” that might never have occurred if Mick had stayed in school.

Mick’s parents understood that school was not a place for someone with Mick’s kind of intelligence. At sixteen, he approached them about leaving school, and rather than insisting that he press on until graduation, they put him on a train to London with a drum kit and allowed him to pursue his inspiration.

Note that Fleetwood’s parents didn’t force him to play the drums, nor did they dissuade him from following his dream in order to follow one of theirs. Robinson’s book is full of stories of people who successfully followed their own interests, or passions as Robinson calls them. Not one of them achieved greatness by following their parents’ passions. In fact, in most cases the parents, if mentioned at all, either encouraged their children to find their own passions, or at the very least did not get in their way.

So who do you think is on the right track, Chua or Robinson? I’m with Robinson. I’ve watched my own kids pursue and master subjects that I had nothing to do with, or that I’m weak in. I think we help our kids achieve greatness by removing obstacles and giving help when asked.  I don’t believe in forcing kids to study specific instruments, or threatening to take away their belongings if they don’t practice.

I love watching my children enjoy becoming good at something they love. Why turn it into something negative?

When I was a teen, I learned to compose my work on the typewriter at a journalism camp, and I found it to be much more efficient. So having kids in the computer age, it seemed like a no-brainer to teach them to type so they could type their essays on the computer. Besides, writing things out in cursive seemed so time-consuming and old-school.

Now I’m rethinking my stance. A recent scientific study showed that kids learned more by reading and writing by hand than by reading and then composing on a keyboard. Apparently the extra time it takes to write something by hand instead of typing it gives the brain a chance to absorb everything better. This makes sense to me.

I”m curious: what do you think?

Does this photo from a Christmas ad bug you the way it bugs me? I just hate that our society promotes being a rock star to little children.

I mean, think about what we’re saying to our little people when we push this stuff on them:

It’s important to be the center of attention.

It’s important to be cool.

It’s important to gain the adulation of others.

(And we wonder why kids are so spoiled and demanding these days.)

As if that wasn’t bad enough, don’t parents care that they’re encouraging their children to emulate people who dress like bums and hookers, smoke pot (and worse) until their brain cells are fried, and pickle their livers because they’re drunk so much of the time?

Seriously, do these parents look at their little darlings and think, “Maybe she’ll be the next Lady Gaga!”?

So few people seem to care about developing good character in their children anymore. It’s all about fame and fortune and having a good time. How sad.

(Rant over.)

“…they had to have been married for more than 25 years and have had three or more children, as well as a brilliant career.”

She turned her findings into a book, The Compleat Woman: Marriage, Motherhood, Career – Can She Have It All? Her conclusion was that it was very rare for a woman to be able to successfully juggle a husband, children and successful career.

Now, a British newspaper has marked the twentieth anniversary of the book’s publication by going back and interviewing some of the women whose lives were chronicled in it to see if they think it’s gotten any easier to “have it all.” The very interesting (and lengthy) article is worth reading, but if you’re pressed for time, I’d like to share a couple of key points these women now make, as they look back on their lives from the vantage point of old age.

1) Women try too hard to give their children the perfect childhood.

Author Faye Weldon, 77 and the mother of four sons, says:

“Today, we try to fight that destiny and give our children the perfect childhood in the hopes that it will make them perfect. I think children are the better for a little healthy neglect. Mine certainly were.”

I don’t think she means neglect in a bad way. What she’s saying is that if we give our kids more autonomy and stop trying to micromanage their activities, they’ll do just fine and we’ll be less exhausted. This is a point we homeschooling moms, who are already involved personally in our children’s daily education, need to take to heart.

2) Women should realize they can have a career while raising children, but it won’t be easy, and the children must come first.

Shirley Hughes, 80, the mother of three children and a well-known children’s author, recalls writing at home with children underfoot:

“…despite publishing more than 50 books, Hughes managed without a nanny.

“I would have been too jealous of her relationship with my children,” she explains.

“We did have au pairs to help out domestically, but I would never have left them in sole charge of the children all day…..But fractured concentration due to interruptions from children is the bane of a working mother’s life, especially if you work from home as I did.

“But it was the right thing for me. I was able to be there for my children, and so glad I was self-employed and did not have to disappear off for long days away from the home.”

3) Women expect to have too many material things that don’t matter in the long run.

Sheila Kitzinger, 80, a mother of five grown daughters and honored by the British government for her years of work for the National Childbirth Trust, says:

“Women now think they need so much more. Everyone must have a second car in the family.”

She also seconds Ms. Weldon’s concern about providing a wealth of perfect educational experiences:

“But also, we feel the need to do so much more with our children. There are constant educational trips – must see the Tutankhamun exhibition, must see the Chinese warriors at the British Museum.

“It’s relentless, exhausting and very expensive.”

Ms. Hughes agrees:

“Perhaps women think today they need to have too much. We all say we work because we need the money, but are there sacrifices to be made.

“Perhaps not having a second car; maybe moving to live somewhere cheaper.

“It’s very sad when people think they cannot afford to have more children. What do you regret at the end of your life? Is it the expensive stuff, or not having a child?”

According to the article, these women with such successful careers look back over their lives and see where their time was best invested: in their husbands and children. As Ms. Hughes put it:

“My only regrets are that I got too bogged down with getting the shopping and household chores. I should have let it all go to pot a lot more than I did.

“What I wish I’d done more of is sitting and talking to my children round the kitchen table.

“And conversations with my husband, too, now that I’m widowed. Once your husband dies, that is what you long for above all.

“But when you’re young and busy with work and family, you are always rushing on to the next thing. That’s life.”

We can all learn from those who have come before us. And with that, I’d better go make dinner and spend some time enjoying it with my family

A looser schedule lets moms spend more one-on-one time with each child. Having four children, I found that I often looked at them as a group; the laid-back feeling of summer seemed to give me permission to take time alone with each of them, and we sure enjoyed that.

How to spend that time? That was never a problem with the girls. My eldest loved to go shopping with me, while my younger daughter preferred time spent doing something together, like baking or sewing.

As for the boys, my older son wasn’t as interested in spending time alone with good old Mom as he was having her take him somewhere he wanted to go or to get something he wanted without the whole gang trooping along. And that was fine; I learned that even time spent sitting in traffic and talking uninterrupted was good for both of us.

My younger son was used to having alone time with me every week because I drove him to a speech therapist an hour away. We’d sing in the car and stop for McDonald’s somewhere en route, and that was enough for him. However, he was also very happy to have my full attention on those rare occasions when my husband took the older three to an amusement park for the day, or the movies for an afternoon.

Spending time alone with your children, one on one, helps your relationship with each of them grow in a different way than when the whole group is together. Summertime is the perfect time to start a routine of occasional one-on one-time. Why not give it a try?