A Brave Writer's Life in Brief

Raising children puts us face-to-face with our memories of what we did or didn’t get as children, ourselves. Parenting your children is a chance to re-parent yourself, too.

Give yourself the same…

• kindness
• patience
• support
• enthusiasm
• and faith

…that you offer your children.

If You Need Help

One of the goals of Brave Writer (and our membership community, Brave Learner Home) is to help you heal your own uncomfortable relationship with your education. If you were the kind of person who struggled with grades or boredom at school or have memories of homeschool that were not positive, our work is dedicated to helping you reimagine your role in learning with your kids.

Also, my book, Help! My Kid Hates Writing, is my manifesto. Bad writing instruction causes lingering damage—yet everywhere I turn, the same tired, harmful practices are being adopted by many parents and teachers. There’s an entire chapter in my book called “Healing the Damaged Writer in You.” It will help.

My other books support the atmosphere and power of learning and critical thinking. I promise you. Your homeschool will feel completely different when you stop thinking in terms of schedule planning and curriculum and instead focus on the deeper experience of learning.

Are you sick of trying to do a better job of homeschooling? Good!

That means you are closer to trusting yourself instead of comparing yourself to everyone else.

The biggest missing ingredient in today’s homeschools is confidence. Confidence comes from risk—try something! Put joy or curiosity at the center. If you don’t see those happening, pivot! You deserve to have a good life! That matters the most—way more than “hitting a bunch of standards.”

Experience Ahead of Image

Evaluate your homeschool by how it feels, rather than how it looks. Put your energy into creating an experience rather than an image. Every day we are shown pictures of smiling children, learning effortlessly in clean, trauma-free homes. Yet homeschooling thrives in lived-in homes, with caring adults who are growing and adapting.

You’re doing better than you realize every time you put experience ahead of image.

Need more support?

If that sounds impossible, read my book The Brave Learner. I spell it out for you. It provides handholds to make life a learning adventure rather than a carefully curated “school at home” that looks beautiful but feels rigid.

Every so often, we’ll give you a peek into Brave Learner Home, our supportive online community. Today’s post features an encouraging message by Dawn Smith (President of Brave Writer) that she recently shared.

There’s a word I used to catch myself mindlessly saying, and I hear it everywhere. Someone asks how life is going, and out comes: “Busy.” It just slips right out. But when my kids were still quite young, I started using a different word, and it changed something for me.

Busy or FULL?

There’s something about the idea of fullness that shifted my perspective.

• A full day of exploring nature with my kids.
• A full pantry and a table filled with good food.
• A house full of experiments, innovation, and learning.

It’s the same mound of laundry growing with each muddy nature walk, the same need to feed endlessly hungry mouths, and the same pile of cardboard, tape, and markers scattered all over the floor, but full days feel like something to cherish, rather than something to endure.

As you lean into this season, I encourage you to look for the fullness in your days. When you reflect on your homeschool year this way, even assessment shifts. Instead of something to get through, it becomes a reflection on everything that filled your days. It’s a chance to see what your family actually did, what your kids learned, and what surprised you.

That’s not a daunting task to endure. That’s a gift to cherish.