One aspect of the debate that has gotten particularly heated regards “bike camp.” I learned from a viral essay in the Wall Street Journal (in which I’m quoted) that you can send your kids to camp to learn how to ride a bike. I read with interest ’s essay that described these camps. I saw that objects, and that has found them very effective.

I don’t have any particular opinions on bike camp. I’ve never met — to my knowledge — a kid who learned to bike at a specialized camp. I searched in our area for such camps and the closest one I found was forty minutes away in Hartford for special needs children. There was also one a bit farther away at a ski resort to learn how to mountain bike. Maybe it’s a regional thing?

I don’t have any moral objections to bike camp: there’s all kinds of summer camps, in which kids can learn about many sorts of fun stuff: chess, swimming, woodworking, boating, etc. Bike camp doesn’t seem meaningfully different to me than those other kinds of camps, and I’m all for kids having fun and educational summer experiences.

What I do want to make a pitch for in this essay is the joy and meaning of teaching stuff to your own kids. Obviously, my husband and I fall into an extreme end on this category, having chosen to in-source the majority of our children’s education. We homeschool our older two kids (ages 11 & 9), and our third kid (age 3.5) will start a homeschool preschool program with us this fall. The baby is still toddling around, wreaking havoc and being cute.

But even before we started homeschooling, we still taught our kids a lot of stuff, even when we were both working full-time jobs and our kids were in daycare/regular school. These included how to read and how to ride a bike. We also read aloud hundreds of books to them, and taught them a bunch of math (the math was solely my husband).

Now that we are homeschooling, we still teach them stuff that is just for personal interest or because we want to. For example, my husband is considering using a new logic textbook in future classes, so he’s trying it out on our 11-year old this summer … with appropriate modifications. Our oldest son and I also just put in a vegetable and herb garden for fun, and I’m enjoying teaching him some gardening basics.

Obviously, it would be much easier for us to outsource most of this and send the kids to school. We would be a lot richer if I had stayed in corporate law. What made us decide to forego buckets of money so we could teach the kids at home?1

1. The Joy and Meaning of Teaching Your Own Kids Stuff

In my own case, one of the joys of my childhood was learning lots of stuff from family members. I wasn’t homeschooled — I went to our local public school K-12 — but many of my happiest memories in childhood came from learning stuff from our large, extended family. My great-aunt Judith taught me how to knit. She was an immensely talented knitter, and would produce hand-knit gifts for every member of our enormous family every Christmas. It was not unusual, for example, for her to pull out a giant basket of beautiful hand knit socks or warm hats that she’d spent the preceding year making. She also taught me to sew a very comprehensive doll wardrobe.

My Uncle Mark, a biologist, taught me how to observe and draw flowers in the Florida scrub, where he and his family lived. My Mom and her uncle (who makes penny whistles) taught me to play Irish music. My Aunt, an immensely talented home cook, taught me and my brother the basics of cooking. In particular, my brother, who is an amazing cook, learned a lot while literally standing at her elbow when he was a kid.

Starting when I was in high school, my Dad would edit almost all of my essays; correcting all my grammar/punctuation mistakes and suggesting improvements in his semi-illegible scrawl. (He’s since died, and I was brought to tears a little while ago when I unexpectedly came across his handwriting.) When I was older, my Dad also taught me to brew beer and wrote me and my brother an entire cookbook to use when we went to college.

Anyway, what I’m trying to convey by this long list is that my family has always taken a lot of joy in producing lots of stuff at home … music, cooking, beer, books … and also placed importance on transmitting those skills to the next generation.

Put another way, the primary reason to teach your own kids (in my opinion) is that it is very fun and meaningful. I still like to knit, and I was told this story from another knitter that I think is a great analogy to what I’m trying to convey here:

Random person: What are you making?

Knitter: Socks.

Person: You know you can just buy those at Walmart, right?

In our American culture, which places a lot of emphasis on consumption — not production — it may indeed be mysterious why anyone would try to produce anything at home. But it shouldn’t be.

A thought experiment: what would life be like if we had super advanced AI and robotics that basically eliminated the need for us to do anything? Maybe we’d all be living on an amazing cruise ship like in Wall-E (in my opinion, one of the greatest children’s movies of all time). But in my hypothetical, we have great GLP-1s, and also have figured how to keep our bodies in shape without having to exercise, so we are very healthy as well. Does this sound utopian or nightmarish to you? To me: this sounds like the 9th circle of hell.

Many of the most enjoyable parts of my life have come from doing stuff. To be clear, I also love watching T.V. shows and movies, along with sitting in the easy chair at night reading a book. But I love cooking, gardening, knitting, making homemade applesauce … and teaching stuff to my kids. I get huge amounts of joy and meaning from it.

It’s also an awesome source of connection with my kids. Think about the bonds you might have formed from playing on a competitive sports team … or in my case, doing years of ballet lessons with the same girls under the short-tempered criticism of a chain-smoking Russian ballet teacher. These are usually very strong connections, that were formed because you did hard stuff together.

Our ubiquitous Advertising Regime, which has has infiltrated basically every part of daily life, is going to heavily suggest to you that the best family bonds are formed by consuming things, like going on a 7-day Disney Cruise or buying your small daughter a Deluxe Barbie Dream House. And these can be fun and wonderful things! But I want to make a pitch for the family bonds formed by producing things together: including: gardens, math equations, coherent paragraphs, and a basic knowledge of Latin.

2. How to Teach Your Kids Stuff

If you are teaching your kids for fun and meaning, here are a bunch of tips for how to make it going well. Actually homeschooling, as in handling the vast majority of a child’s education at home, is a whole different ball game — my friends , , and I write about it at Bad Moms Homeschool. Here, I’m just talking about what I think of as “rec homeschooling” or “after school homeschooling”: you want to teach your kids some stuff, but aren’t quite sure how to do it.

The first, and biggest tip I have: don’t make the main goal of teaching your kids stuff to make them academically advanced. I read with interest and some concern ’s very well-done essay series on “How to Teach your Two Year Old to Read.” My concern was not because I thought it was an incorrect synopsis of how to teach a very young child to read! If you’re going to try it, it was wise advice. My main concern was that I thought a number of high-achieving parents would probably read it and draw the wrong lesson from it; namely that the reason to teach your kids stuff is to have them acquire academic skills very early, and it’s desirable to work with your little kid on advanced skills.

For the right kid, this will go swimmingly. My husband taught our oldest son to read at home at age 4, mainly by buying a copy of “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons” and going through the lesson plans pretty much exactly as written. It went great and that son became an early reader. Surely we had cracked the code on creating early readers, right?

Then came our second son to humble us. When he turned four, my husband got the “Teach Your Child to Read Book” off the shelf and … my second son hated it. The lessons went terribly, and finally we had to give up. We sent him to kindergarten, where he didn’t learn to read either. In first grade, we brought him home to homeschool, and I finally successfully taught him how to read using a set of Superman Phonics readers, and it — at long last — clicked.

I’m working on pre-literacy skills with my third child and it’s going very, very slowly. She’s 3.5, and will happily identify letters of interest to her, including the first letter of her name, the first letter of other family members’ names, and so forth. She is totally unable/uninterested in memorizing letters if you try to present them in alphabetical order or any other kind of sequential order (this is, as I’ve now learned, not unusual). So instead I am keying letter learning to stuff she is interested in, like learning to spell her name. She also has an early interest in writing letters … which she loves, and both of my sons hated. By the way, although she’s not great at letters, she’s got a superb innate sense of mathematics (in my opinion, anyway), and has been encouraged in this by my husband.

Do your best to start small. I would not have the first thing you teach your kid be a complex activity, like advanced math, early reading, or logic. Instead, I’d have the initial lessons be easy and light, like learning to bake elaborate cookies together, or learning a bunch of new card games. This is especially true if you’re trying to teach an older child something and haven’t done much of it before, or haven’t done it in years.

People think of being a good teacher as an innate characteristic, like having blue eyes or curly hair. One thing I hear from other parents a lot is: I don’t know how you homeschool, because I just don’t have the patience to teach my kids. I can assure you, I am not an innately very patient person! Instead, little-by-little, step-by-step, I figured out the right approach to help my kids learn.

One thing that really helped me is understanding that learning is a spectrum, not a binary. Take potty training, for example. There are plenty of books/Internet influencers who will tell you that you can potty train your child in three days. Were I Queen of the World, I would burn all those books, and ban all those influencers from public media. I don’t doubt that method works for some subset of people, but I think the idea that potty training is like a switch you flip — on/off — is a very stupid one.

I’m in the midst of potty training my third child right now, and it’s a very complex process. There’s a lot of different skills and issues involved. Can the child take off their own pants? Do they need help getting on the toilet (with a special seat) or should you use a child’s potty chair? Can the child initiate and tell you he/she needs to go potty, or are you, the parent, taking them on a schedule? It’s not unusual for a child to get #1 pretty quickly, but take a lot longer (like, sometimes years longer) to go #2 on the potty.

Sometimes it helps in potty training to have the positive peer pressure of daycare/preschool to solidify these skills … or sometimes that results in a child who basically will hold it all day (or, more commonly, hold #2 all day), and only eliminate when at home. In other words, sometimes rather than preschool successfully teaching them to go potty, it’s instead taught them how to not go in a diaper.2

In teaching anything complex to a child, try to understand the many different aspects of what you’re teaching, and work hard to break it down into manageable pieces. I’ve met several first-time parents very frustrated by potty training who are relieved/horrified when I tell them it can be a many month long process to get from (a) that first successful use of the potty to (b) a child who can independently and reliably tell you they need to use the potty without you prompting or nagging them. Not always; sometimes a kid just gets it.3 But very often, this is the case, and you’re not doing anything wrong if so.

Modify things for your own family, and make clear to your kids that you aren’t perfect either. One of the glorious things about teaching stuff to your own kids is you often learn about the interesting and unexpected ways in which you and your child are alike.4 I read with great appreciation ’s post Chip off the Old Block on quirky similarities between himself and his children, down to a deep childhood interest shared by himself and his little son in trains, even though “surely there can’t be a gene for train obsession.”

To give one small example in our own family life: my kids do their independent reading for homeschool on a theme each year. My second son did “Adventure Stories” as his theme for third grade, and read Hatchet, an abridged Treasure Island, etc. My oldest son chose “Science Fiction” as his theme this past academic year, and I assigned him (among other stuff), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I knew that his sense of humor is pretty similar to my own at his age, and thought there was a very good chance he’d really like the book. I was right — he loved it. I was first introduced to Douglass Adams many years ago at CTY, a sort of geek camp for tweens and teens, and I guessed that he'd like the sorts of books CTY’ers were obsessed with back then. Based on this hunch, I introduced him to There Might be Giants; also a huge hit.

If I can make one single pitch on how to teach your kids at home, I’d say you should read aloud to your kids, including your older children.5 Reading aloud does so many incredible things for kids; vocabulary and language acquisition, exposing them to literature they might not pick up themselves, and creating lots of awesome family memories. It doesn’t all have to be great literature. My husband read aloud to my sons all of the Ranger’s Apprentice novels, which are not high-brow books. He even practiced with the aid of YouTube how to do special accents (you don’t have to do that!) But he’s also read them The Hobbit, all of the Lord of the Rings books, and so forth. I’m in the middle of reading aloud Malcom Guite’s new ballad, Galahad and the Grail. (My kids don’t totally love this one, but we’re pushing through anyway).

When you are teaching, it’s not only fine - it’s actually great - if you don’t know all that much about the subject yourself and are learning along with them. Institutional schools, unfortunately, often don’t do a great job instilling intellectual curiosity and a life-long love of learning in kids. It’s not that they don’t try (or at the very least give lip service) to loving learning. It’s also not that there aren’t exceptions, or exceptional teachers.

However, the emphasis in schools on grades and standardized testing often means that learning as an instrumental activity (i.e. to get a good grade) frequently crowds out learning as an intrinsically enjoyable activity (i.e. something you might want to pursue your entire adult life). From my own family, I picked up the lesson that learning life long is tremendously enjoyable — there were some half hearted attempts to teach this in school, but I internalized that lesson at home. My Dad and my paternal grandmother (who lived with us when I was young) were both voracious readers. My Mom has long picked up new languages and skills (like Irish dancing) with great gusto.

Contrast the students that go to Harvard and then use Chat GPT or other sorts of A.I. to write all their essays and do their math problem sets. I can understand the motivation for why students do that kind of thing (to get better grades and therefore maybe one day a better job). Still, they’re missing out on the joys of having access to incredible teachers, a fabulous university library, and the time and space to think seriously about scholarly issues .. indeed, a freedom to think deeply that probably will not come again during their working adult life.6

I don’t control whether my kids will go to an Ivy League school one day, or what they would do there if they did. However, I don’t want the “have AI do everything” version of higher education for them, and one of the best ways I can think to prevent it is to learn stuff with them at home that I don’t already know. This helps teach them: (a) it’s fine to struggle with hard academic topics and (b) it’s really enjoyable to learn new things. We’re learning Latin together right now, based on my rusty memory of two years of middle school Latin and a decent knowledge of French. I’m making mistakes right along with them, but we are definitely advancing, and it’s a very enjoyable process … even if not the same experience as if they were learning Latin from someone with a PhD in Classics. The point here is not to make them Latin scholars (neither of them seem to have any interest). The point is to teach them about taking on a challenging topic with gusto and grit.

3. The Last Part

I’ll close with a couple of disclaimers.

• If you really don’t want to teach your kids anything, that’s fine with me! I’m not here to judge you. Outsource away.

• I’m not saying everyone should homeschool. As with every other human activity, there’s lots of nuance on this issue. Do whatever is best for your family. We’ve also outsourced various stuff regarding education, including flute lessons, baseball (team sports can’t be insourced!), Brazilian Jujitsu classes, religious education, and more.

• If you’re really busy … well, I can’t judge. Maybe you are genuinely too busy to teach your kids stuff, I don’t know. I’d just encourage you that any one of the activities I’ve discussed doesn’t take much time. Indeed, it probably shouldn’t take much time. Reading aloud to your older kids can be done in 20 minutes before bed. Teaching your kids some Latin is probably going to be much more fun if you stick to a consistent 20 minutes a few days a week rather than two hour lessons on Saturdays. Ditto teaching your little kid the alphabet.

• If the relationship between you and your child doesn’t presently seem conducive to learning stuff together … or if past attempts have gone badly … maybe it would help to relax about the whole process. Definitely do not learn something like pre-algebra; fruit pie-making or origami Minecraft characters are going to be a much better choice. Make sure every lesson is accompanied by excellent snacks or video game reward time (or both). I’m currently finishing up our homeschool history curriculum7 this summer with my older kids because we didn’t get it done during the school year. I’ve incentivized that with 30 minutes of video game time after each lesson is completed. As a result, I’m being nagged incessantly to do history (including on weekends) because we also fortuitously bought them their favorite video game ever (Hollow Knight) earlier this summer. Be smart and strategic.

In short: if you want to teach your kids some stuff, you probably can. Possibly it will end up being some of the most meaningful and fun memories you have of your kid’s childhood. I encourage you to consider it.

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