Holly Dodd video by Lee Stranahan

Item on the Huffington Post site:

Who Needs School? Interview With A 17 Year Old "UnSchooler" (Video)

"In a society that often considers the act of parents teaching their children at home to be something bizarre, the idea of unschooling is about as radical a parenting strategy as one can imagine. It's homeschooling without the artificial structure of formal education...."

Mothers' talk is key to kids' social skills, study says

CNN article on a British study:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/05/15/mother.children.social.skills/index.html

You can predict even from when the children are 3 or 4 what their social understanding will be like when they're 8 or 9," said Nicola Yuill, lead author and senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Sussex in England.

This effect becomes weaker from ages 10 to 12, perhaps because as children get older, they spend less time at home, and their peers and teachers influence them more, she said.

The 12-year-olds, however, generally did as well as their mothers on social understanding tasks, indicating that children at this age can be as "socially sophisticated" as adults, the authors said.

Oh, Yeah, School. About That…

Oh, Yeah, School. About That…
May 3, 2009 by Mary Jessica Hammes

An article on homeschooling, with statistics, which turns toward unschooling, describes a few families, and has several paragraphs about Ren Allen and her family. Some of what Ren said:

“We started as very eclectic home schoolers and hit lots of bumps along the way, before finally realizing that when we went with the flow everything, well, flowed,” says Allen.... . . . "I don’t believe my husband and I would be as connected to our children’s joy, to their dreams and daily activities the same way if we hadn’t chosen unschooling."

(More by Ren Allen)