The Happy Homeschool

The Happy Homeschool starts from a claim Laura Blodgett states plainly: character and habits are foundational to anything else a parent teaches, and more important besides. Much of the show follows from that. She holds that parents must keep primary authority over their children until those children are grown, and she asks a lot of the parents holding it. In 'Winnowing Your Children's Friendships', she borrows the old word for separating wheat from chaff and turns it into a checklist. How does a friend talk about other people during a conflict? Can they forgive without being a doormat? Are they humble, respectful and trustworthy, or given to gossip, grudges and manipulation? She acknowledges that choices like these can make other people uncomfortable, and she tells parents not to let that dissuade them. The parenting episodes are frank about a parent's own failings. Selfishness, she argues, is the biggest barrier to good parenting, and it usually arrives repackaged as something wise, noble or practical. That episode belongs to a sequence she calls 52 Weeks to a Better Relationship with Your Child. In 'The Falsely Patient Parent', she finds the phrase 'helicopter parenting' faintly absurd, since it pictures supervision as a destructive whirl of blades, and she defends watchful oversight as proper authority. Her examples rarely come from a textbook. They include the horse she has kept for about eight years and the lesson of a manure pile with no method for handling it. There is also a litter-mate puppy staying for the week, a daughter's adult-league soccer game and a small swimming pool whose pH has to be measured and corrected. That pool anchors 'Making Math Matter', which argues that school subjects overlap in real life and that math turns up in money, cooking, bridge building, clothing manufacture and farming. In her view, classroom education drifts away from real application. She is just as willing to challenge ideas people have tied to their sense of self. 'The Deceptive Allure of Learning Styles' begins with a story from her psychiatric rotation in nursing school at UCLA. It then leans on a book called The Cult of Personality Testing to compare personality tests to astrology and to explain the Barnum effect. Christian faith frames the most personal episode, 'Confessions of the Color Pink: The Birth of the Transgender Ideology in the 1960's'. There she recalls adults' remarks about her figure, her own sense of lacking femininity, and a conviction that it was unwise to disagree with the God who made her. The episode ends on helping children be humbly content in who God created them to be. Episodes close with a pointer to her Dangerously Helpful Homeschool Dispatch and a nudge to go and have fun building a homeschool. For a first listen, 'Making Math Matter' shows the practical side, and the friendships episode shows the character-first thinking at full strength.