One of the best things you can pass onto your child is confidence. Without real and solid confidence gained in childhood, adult life can turn out to be pretty tricky and filled with lots of disappointment. People, who suffer from low confidence often choose safer, less aspirational career paths, because they don’t believe they can do something out of the ordinary or follow their “unrealistic” dreams until it becomes a reality. Safer career choices often mean working in places that only pay the bills, not in places that could get them excited every morning before leaving for work. Despite their personal ambition and high education, those people often get trapped in jobs that are way below their qualifications and education level. All because lack of confidence won’t allow them to move on. If, from a young age, you are told that certain things in life are impossible to achieve and dreaming more realistically is more practical and safer (as if dreams should be more realistic, practical, or safer), it’s easy to give up on yourself, …

Nearly a year ago Little M. went to a dyslexia assessment centre in London to do the dyslexia test. The results were overwhelmingly negative and a huge blow for him, even though he never said anything about the sadness he felt. The stress of that day left his body and spirit on the train back home when he started crying out of the blue. He was diagnosed with profound dyslexia, and according to the assessor, he should be in a special dyslexia school. Of course, she didn’t put any of that in the official report since the councils in the UK have no money for kids with educational difficulties and schools in the UK minimalize their resources to accommodate our kids. Before homeschooling, the Little M. was in an alternative school that took very little notice of his learning hardships and difficulties even though we flagged that up to his class teacher on several occasions for over a year. In fact, it took the class teacher a year to get SENCO involved in our discussion. …

A lot of the scientists, teachers and influential voices in the education sector tell us that children learn from observing and imitating the grown-ups in their lives. I believe this to be true and have often seen Little M. doing stupid stuff, which his dad or I have done. I know that our family is not an exception for teaching the younger generation the bad and ugly habits, which we, the grown-ups, cherish with such a devotion. Children are smart and very observant, and whatever we do, they will imitate. For instance, if you spend a lot of time on your phone or tablet, your child will want to do that too and if you decide to limit your child’s access to electric devices they will ask tons of questions and will want to know why you can be on your phone all the time and they can’t (by default kids are very much justice and equality driven). If you work all the time and never have any quality time for your children and your …