A lot of people who hire me for career coaching finally tell me that what they really want is a way to make a life that will let them homeschool their kids. When they have kids. Here's what I tell them:

1. Find a husband who makes enough money for you to stay home.
Look, if you don't have kids yet, you should know that in most cases, one parent will homeschool the kids and one parent will work. It would be really nice if both parents could work part-time from home and both parents could homeschool, but this is extremely difficult to set up and it's high risk because no one is concentrating on their career enough to keep it stable.

So since you already know how you want your life to work, don't be shy about making sure you marry a breadwinner. If you know you want to homeschool your kids, then other options, like marrying a starving artist, are not open to you.

2. Make sure your spouse is on board.
Check out the photo up top. It's another by James Maher. At first I didn't like that the photos he took for this blog would be just me and the kids. But then I realized that it makes sense, and here's why: I have yet to see a homeschooling operation that is lead by the dad. I see a lot of dads participating, but the moms are running the show. This is no surprise to me because I've already been in the special needs world, where it's largely the same situation. There are dads who do a lot, but one person needs to run the show and it's always the mom.

So the people planning to homeschool are most likely the moms, but having a spouse that is on board is essential, because the spouse will get as much grief about taking the kids out of traditional school as the mom. The spouse needs to be ready to stand up to the doubters and not get crushed—especially in front of the kids.

3. Live in a mediocre school district.
You will have to confront so many naysayers no matter where you live. But in a town where the parents pay top-dollar for their homes to get access to the schools, homeschooling is suddenly an affront to the financial decisions and housing decisions of the neighbors. In a top-tier school district, homeschooling is heresy.

You will have a lot less friction if you move to a not-as-great school district. And, on top of that, you will get more house for your money, which will come in handy during long days at home with the kids.

4. Practice staying home with kids.
The first time I stayed home with my kids, starting when my oldest was born until my youngest was two, I really hated it. I had no sense of who I was or what I was doing. I thought I was missing out on the good stuff in my work life because I was home with kids instead of running a cool business.

So I launched a startup. And did that for a few years. And then I tried staying home again. The second time I was better at it. I knew what  to expect and I also knew myself better.

No one ever told me that I would need to practice being at home with my kids. People told me that it was natural—either you like it or you don't. But I don't believe that. Being home with kids might take getting used to. So leave yourself time to do that before the pressures of homeschooling emerge.

5. Find likeminded friends.
The earlier you can hook up with other families planning to homeschool the better adjusted you'll feel. When I had a baby, I felt like I needed friends with a baby. And then I had a kid with special needs and I felt lonely until I found a group of moms who understood how totally different parenting is when you have a kid with special needs.

Now that I'm homeschooling I have that same feeling. I really need a community of people around me who are homeschooling. This blog has been that for me, and I feel lucky to have it. Make sure you feel part of a homeschooling community from the start: this support system has made all the difference to me.

We were in New York a few months ago, and of course we played with every animal we saw because my kids are, at this point, probably more farm than city.  And of course we had the violin and the cello because we travel with them everywhere because we practice every day, no matter what.

And I had this idea that I wanted photos of the kids, but I didn't want normal, boring portraits. A while back I found the photographer, James Maher, and I was blown away by his street photography. And then I saw he sells his most popular prints to guardians of visual taste, like Tiffany. So I became obsessed with him, and then I cut a deal with him to hang out with us in New York City and take photographs for a day.

It's amazing to see your life through someone else's eyes, but that's what I got with James. And one thing I realized was that we spend a lot of time practicing.

I would have to say that James got the most shots of two things: the kids practicing and the kids fighting. Which is probably an accurate representation of their lives.

And you know how you can tell you're working with a great photographer? He takes a kid who is being an insanely picky eater and makes it look like art.

So in New York, my son decided to give quitting violin another whirl.

It was practice time and he said he wasn't practicing.

I said he was.

He said, "I'm quitting."

So my son practices every day. I have never met a family who did not have arguments between the mom and the kid while the kid was young and learning an instrument. So a lot of the Suzuki Method is the mom learning how to fight about practicing without making the kid hate music.

My son has been playing since he was three years old. The test to know if a kid is ready to learn to play a violin is if the kid can stand in one place and sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

The the kid spends a year learning how to play the song. I'm not kidding. A string instrument is incredibly difficult. Just learning how to hold the bow takes a three-year-old a few months.

My son is nine. So we've had six years of fights. And now I'm writing this blog every day, where I tell everyone how great it is that we unschool and kids can teach themselves and kids know what they're passionate about. It's hard to align the Suzuki Method with unschooling. I'll admit that.

I told him I'm considering it and he should give me time to think.

This is exciting to him because I have told him for as long as he can remember that he can quit when he's in high school, and he only recently realized that he's not going to go to high school so there is no quitting opportunity on the distant horizon.

He said he's quitting now.

I said he's practicing now.

He said he'd only practice if I pay him.

I ignored that.

We were staying with my friend Lisa, at her apartment. She said to him, "You should go play in Central Park. Open up your case. See if people put money in."

My son got excited.

She said she read in the New York Times that the amount of money you get depends a lot on how good your sign is.

He said, "I'll write: Violinist. Please pay me."

Lisa said, "No. That's not going to work. It needs to be clever. Like you're asking them to pay you but with something clever."

We all thought for a minute and Lisa said, "How about I told my mom I'm quitting violin and she said people would like hearing me play. If you like hearing me play, put money in my case."

My son said. "No. I don't want that. I don't want to tell people I'm quitting. I worked too hard at violin to quit. Let's just ask them for money."

I wanted to jump for joy and kiss my son and kiss Lisa and kiss the world that my son does not really want to quit. But I played it cool. I said, "Okay."

I am receiving lots of emails about summer vacation and homeschooling. For example, the New Yorker cartoon (above) reflects how far behind school is in terms of teaching communication.

But the emails that are really nagging at me right now are the people telling me that I should write about how kids who go to school are homeschooled in the summer.

I think this is complete BS, and it stems from parents who know they should be homeschooling because it's consistent with their values but for some reason (probably money and/or addiction to state-funded babysitting) they do not homeschool.

So look, homeschooling is about trusting a kid's curiosity. So if you send the kid to school all winter and then to camp all summer, your kid is surrounded by structure and adult control over how the kid spends their time.

All kids are gifted. There is a great conversation about this topic in the comments section of my last post. I truly believe this. There are 16 Myers Briggs personality types. Each person has a personality type that makes the person exceptional in one area. Every person is capable of making a significant contribution to society in one area just from his or her personality type.

Unfortunately, school and camp only rewards a narrow type of person—the rule followers. The people who think in very black and white terms (like, is this the right way to do it?). If you put a large group of kids together who are controlled by a single adult, then kids cannot figure out for themselves what they should be doing.

This is why the parent-child ratio is ideal. The parent doesn't need to teach. The parent needs to make sure the kid eats and sleeps and doesn't get lice. It's easy to do that with just a few kids. And the kids can figure out where their passions lie.

If you cannot do this during the winter then surely you cannot do this during the summer. And if you can do this during the summer, and it's working, then why on earth would you put your kid back in school?

So don't tell me you do school in the winter and homeschool in the summer.

It's my weekly post about why kids shouldn't go to college.

To be clear, I write these posts to convince myself that my kids should not go to college. I remember, about ten years ago, when I wrote that entrepreurship is a safety net. I felt like I was writing the post to justify the fact that I really wanted a cushy corporate job, but I woudn't get to see my kids if I had that job, so I had to make my own job. The blog post was convincing myself that I was doing the right thing.

I was doing the right thing of course. But it's hard to see in the moment when it feels so unstable and out in left field.

And that's how I feel now. I'm certain that college is useless, but I cling to the idea that even though I have decided my kids are skipping school, I have this nagging feeling that somehow my kids will have an easier life it they do go to college. All I want, really, is for my kids to have an easier life. It's so hard to do laundry and bathe and eat food before it goes bad. Life is hard. Getting out of bed each day is hard. I want to do something that makes things easier for my kids.

But really, college is not one of those things.

Here are the big arguments for not going to college that I have found in the last week or so:

1. Even if you still think college is a good idea, you probably can't afford it.
Paul Frankenberg, author of Burn Your Resume, points out that college tuition has increased 600% since the 1980s, student loan debt is passing one trillion dollars, half of all recent college graduates are jobless or underemployed, and 85% of the 1.8 million new grads are moving back home with their parents. Mark Cuban, one of my favorite pundits, argues that college tuition today is incredibly similar to the housing bubble: Unlimited lending from the government pushes prices up to nonsensical heights where you could never justify the cost.

2. Colleges are lashing out like terrified beasts defending vulnerable territory.
Schools have started refusing to give transcripts to kids who are not caught up on loan payments. This practice is particularly suspect because the students don't owe the money to the schools. The debt is to the government. But in any case, the net effect is that the student has no proof of academic qualifications if the student is late on loan payments, which seems like extremely harsh punishment, and also, a punnishment that damns that student to low paying jobs.

If colleges would just take responsiblity for placing kids in jobs then they wouldn't have to be so crazy about enforcing loan payments. If kids had money to pay loans they'd pay the loans.

3. The culture of college is making kids nuts.
When I was in Las Vegas with my son, he was watching TV, which is a treat, because we don't have a TV on the farm. In the hotel room the TV is huge and bright with surround sound. My son says, "We need to set up a Gerber college savings fund."

"What? Did you hear that on TV?"

"Yeah."

"I am not saving for your college. You'll get a scholarship. Do you know what that is?"

"A boat?"

"No. It's a big discount on college so we don't really have to pay anything."

"Why do we get that?"

"Well. Because you're Latino. And you live in the middle of nowhere on a farm. And colleges like that stuff. And you are  a very good cellist."

I say this stuff and I hate myself for thinking this way. But I know that we are going to have to play the Latino farm kid card to get the kids into school. And I can't believe we are worrying about paying for school right now. It's messed up. I don't want this to be the future of my kids' learning.

He says, "What if I don't keep playing the cello?"

I say, "That will be fine. You should do what you want." And then I think, "But I know you won't quit and every day I think about taking out insurance on your fingers."

As he arranges the tickets he won to exchange for prizes, he says, "You can have these. Maybe you can exchange them for tokens for college."

The debate over the value of college is heating up. The value of degrees from non-top-tier colleges is negligible.  The future job market does not require a four-year college degree. And now Time magazine is advocating vocational school for most kids.

I have thought for a while that homeschool should be like vocational school. For example, when my son goes to horseback riding lessons, he doesn't just ride. He learns to do the work of the people who run the horse barn. Sometimes I worry that my mind has been clouded from fifteen years of giving career advice and now I'm too vocationally focused. But now I'm thinking that vocational school is the education that kids need to be successful adults. Here are three reasons why:

1. Kids learn liberal arts topics better in the context of a vocation.
The best part from that article in Time magazine about vocational school is that among high school kids taking standardized tests in math, the vocational school kids scored higher. In vocational school you don't have math class but rather you learn math in the context of a vocation. The kids scored higher because they were more engaged in what they were learning.

This makes sense to me because I was in special ed math in high school, but as an founder of three startups I have been able to learn all the math I needed for running business models and making financial projections. In fact, I have come to love using Excel in my personal life because it was so useful to me in my work life.

2. Financially stable kids learn better than kids stressed about finances.
The idea that a starving artist can make art is pretty much false. Because the starving artist makes art about their crazy life as a starving artist. Think Basquiat, painting about squalor and drugs, or Raymond Carver writing over and over again about a man who has no money.

The point here is that it's difficult to concentrate on anything besides money when you don't have enough money for the basics. Kids understand that they will end up taking out loans for college tuition and then they'll enter a workforce and earn a salary that doesn't cover their loan payments. Kids start thinking about this conundrum in high school. They hear their parents worry about college tuition and they hear their friends talking about the loans.

Conversely, if parents could help kids develop a vocational school plan early on, then kids would know they are able to enter the workforce without going to an expensive, liberal arts college. If kids understand early on that they are developing skills to get themselves through the financial transition to adulthood then the kids will have more confidence learning and growing during those teen years leading up to the transition.

But the only way to give kids confidence that they can work and earn money is to show them things they can do. Different jobs. The more jobs a kid tries out before they need to earn money the more likely they will know how to earn money when they need money.

3. Kids learn better with real-world feedback.
Most people do a better job with their work if someone is directly benefitting from the work. For example, if you do a word problem about how many milligrams a polio shot should be you care a lot less than if you a going to actually give the polio shot to the kid sitting in front of you.

Stanford conducted a study about how this idea applies to writing: Students did much better writing when they were writing for the Internet, where there's a large audience, than when they were writing for one, single classroom teacher. Kids do their best work when they feel they are part of the world and they have context for what they are doing.

We also know this is true from workplace studies: If you tell someone how the work they are doing fits into the company's big-piture plans, then the employee will do better work. Context matters, and when kids learn specialized subjects in the context of "you need this for the test" or "you need this to get into college," the kids will not do their best work.

4. Vocational school is more intuitive than curriculum.
Parents spend so much time on the useless topic of which workbooks to use. The reason the discussion is so time consuming is because no workbook is appropriate—they are all bad so the parent always feels like they are missing something. What they are missing, of course, is context. Science 2.0 reports that students do not learn well outside of the context of doing. And research from the University of Kansas shows that in a curriculum of telling instead of doing, kids retain very little of the information they were told.

If you teach a kid by doing, the kid will learn fast and the lessons will feel right because they are the steps the kid needs to take to get where she is going. Ask the kids what they want to do, or leave them alone until they figure out what they want to do and the kid will find their vocation.

Learning by doing is a vocational education, and kids would do it intuitively if we didn't redirect them to useless, unengaged learning.

I'm looking for some way to decide if I should make my son go into Madison tomorrow for gymnastics. And swimming. He loves both of them, but he hates to leave the house.

I can understand: I hate to leave the house, too.  I think most people who have Asperger's hate to leave their house. Well, we hate to do anything because decisions about transitions are so hard. So right now, I am engrossed in writing and my son is engrossed in his Bionicles and we're really happy. Mostly because we know no one will bother us. We can do this all day, until dinner.

But I think I need to teach him to do transitions. I think I need to show him that if he does stuff outside the house he'll like it.

The thing is that I know this and honestly, if I didn't have kids and I didn't need to earn money, I'd never leave the farm.

And it's appealing to me when commenters like Monique say that doing nothing is important in homeschooling. I want to do nothing. I can't quite do it. I fantasize about it. But I get scared that my son doesn't have occupational therapy or physical therapy—both of which he was getting in school. I think maybe I can make up for it in Madison.

My husband thinks this is crazy and the kids get plenty of that stuff when the goats watch them climb trees in the forest.

My husband never leaves the farm. Well, he does, when I guilt him into it. But he hates leaving.

And Madison, home to gymnastics and swimming, is three-hour round-trip. That's a lot.

Here's the list of things I'm trying to teach:

Self-discipline

Body awareness

Making transitions

Keeping commitments

Honoring one's own needs

It's too much. I'm driving myself crazy.

But kids who make their beds each day are happier people. This is because people with self-discipline are happier, and making one's bed is an act of self-discipline. I can't decide: Is going to Madison on a day we are scheduled to go an act of self-discipline? I think it is. So I guess we are going.

But I wonder, can we leave our beds unmade that day?

Watch this video on YouTube.

I just listened to a speech by Astra Taylor, who was homeschooled as a child. It's significant that we are finally hearing from kids who were homeschooled about what it was like. I like that Taylor is honest enough to admit that each of the kids in her family asked to go to school for a year or two in order to see what they were missing.  I like that she sees this as a part of homeschooling—the idea that curiosity is most important, even when it is school that kids are curious about.

The biggest thing I took away from her speech is that school undermines the natural preparedness each kid has for the workforce, so by the end of eighteen years of schooling, a kid's natural, salable talents are demolished. Here are three points she makes:

Schools crush divergent thinking.
This is different than creativity. Divergent thinking is seeing lots of possible solutions for a problem. It's the kind of problem solving that companies pay a lot of money for so they can be sure they've explored enough options to choose the best option. But school discourages divergent thinking because it's so difficult to test. And even if you can test it, it's very time consuming to grade. (This is especially important when schools are trying to figure out how to decrease the cost of grading tests.)

Socialization.
I write this word mostly as a joke. Because we know that it's meaningless and only enters the conversation when someone wants to know why you aren't sending your kid to school to be psychologically crushed by the least common denominator.

The real test for whether you get along with others is if you can work well with others. And Taylor points out that school doesn't encourage you to work well with others. It only encourages kids to follow a proscribed set of rules to keep kids in line so teachers can cope with being outnumbered and provide test scores to prove teacher effectiveness.

My favorite example is copying: Copying outside school is called collaboration. Copying inside school is called cheating.

The real point here, though, is that school is about ranking, and so you are always competing with the people next to you. At work, though, the competition is to keep your learning curve high. If your learning curve is high it doesn't matter what everyone else is doing. Which makes learning outside of school much more collaborative and social than learning inside of school.

Schools teach you to be bored.
Being bored at school is accepted. Our culture makes joke after joke about how boring school is. However we do not accept that work is boring. When we are bored at work we feel crushed and hopeless and like a failure. When I do career coaching, the number-one problem I see is that people are bored in their work and don't know how to solve the problem.

But how can we expect adults to solve their boredom problem when they were taught as kids to accept boredom? Taylor says that her homeschooling mom used to tell her kids, "When you are bored you are boring." And I've got news for you: This is true for adults, too. If you're bored at work it's because you are boring yourself. You haven't learned enough about yourself to know where you fit. You don't know enough about yourself to know what would be fulfilling. You are not doing things that interest you outside of work and you want work to pick up all the slack.

None of those options are open to a homeschooler because homeschoolers spend all day figuring out what it interesting to them.

I have received about ten emails from people who are outraged that the Obama administration is proposing that kids be banned from doing farm work.

People who grew up on farms are posting comments all over the Internet about their farm nostalgia. And I get it. I understand that kids run wild on a farm in a way that city kids could never dream of. But the flip side to that is that kids die too often on farms. From machinery.

A nine-year-old boy in my town just got crushed under an ATV that he was driving himself. And, three days later, a neighbor asked if his four-year-old could drive his ATV on our land so he could go faster.

"The four-year-old???"

"Yeah. He has great body control."

Seriously. This is the mentality we're dealing with in rural America where kids are doing farm chores.

Kids are exposed to machinery on farms in the ways that kids were exposed to machinery in factories during the Industrial Revolution.

So I think the Obama administration is on the right track. Unlike 30 years ago, today's farms are industrial.  Our farm included: that picture up top is my husband. You can't make enough money milking cows or planting corn without using huge machinery. Most people don't traverse their land on horse because there's too much land and horses aren't fast enough. Which means families are riding on ATVs and jeeps – both of which kids are driving way before they have a license. Kids are planting and harvesting. Kids are milking. Kids are going into industrial chicken coops.

None of these jobs is the stuff of a Norman Rockwell painting. This is the farm industry, and Lewis Hine showed us, 100 years ago, that it's no place for kids.

Our national denial about how disgusting our food supply is is the same denial we use to say that kids should be able to do chores the same way they did when family farms were really family farms.

But the Obama administration could go further. We still treat kids like they are in factories when they are in school: They are managed by bells like they punch a clock, they specialize in narrow, unrelated subjects like assembly line workers, and they are educated in batches like a manufacturing plant.

If treating kids like industrial age workers on a farm is no good, then it's no good for schools, either.

You'd think I'd be writing a post about how to work full-time while you homeschool. I might write that post one day. But here's fair warning: it'll look like this picture. My son is trying to tell me about the Bionicle he built. I am telling him I need to write. He is telling me I always say that.

I ignore him and then he takes my phone and starts taking photos of his Bionicle and then he takes a movie of his Bionicle. He narrates the landscape of the feet, torso and body and then he says to the camera, "Don't look at the stuff in the background. That's my mom working. She is pissing me off."

He loves to use the word pissed. He's pissed all the time. He understands that it is not a nice word, but also not a swear word, so it falls into a lexicological problem area. He is so jubilant about the debate about whether we can use the word pissed and in what context that I have just given up.

So the post about working from home while you homeschool would be a mom who is pissed that she's not working and a six-year-old that's pissed that she is working.

Instead, I'm going to suggest that you don't need to work from home. You need much less money than you think. For one thing, people are homeschooling on just about nothing. But even if you don't want to homeschool on an extremely low income, you still don't need a ton of money. The number most psychologists and economists toss around today is $75K. Wherever you live (yes, NYC and San Francisco too) you need $75K to raise a family (one kid or four kids – the number is the same). Beyond that, the increase in happiness you get from spending time with family is much bigger than the increase in happiness you'd get from earning more money. So if you're honest with yourself,  $75K is enough for you to homeschool.

This makes sense because the median income for stay-at-home moms is $65K. This means that most people reading this post have a partner who can earn enough to have the other parent stay at home.

I used to feel sheepish about writing statistics like this, because I have made six figures every year for the last ten years. I'm not really sure how I did it. I mean, my income is sporadic and unpredictable and often times life-threatening. Or at least it feels that way. But somehow, I always make a lot of money in the end.

Then I saw my tax return for this year and I realized that most years, my taxable income is around $50K. The rest is running through my business—it's a messy tax return when you mix your personal and business money, believe me.

But now that I realize that my taxable income is so low, I feel fine telling you that you don't need a lot of money to homeschool. You mainly need a lot of confidence so you can lower your expectations about your standard of living. But most homeschoolers already have that. Homeschooling defies so many expectations that a low cost of living is just one more item on the list.

It's not that top universities are telling people directly to homeschool their kids. Instead, top schools are using a selection process that gives homeschooled kids a huge advantage. Here's why:

1. Good grades are a commodity, so they don't help in the admissions process. 
Girls are doing so much better than boys in both standard high school courses and in standardized tests that their good grades and good scores don't get girls into good colleges. It's not enough anymore. White girls especially need a hook.

A hook is, ironically, something you are passionate about and engaged in that is outside of school. Top schools like Harvard and Stanford have always required a hook. Because when you're in a room full of smart people, smart suddenly doesn't matter—interesting is what matters.

So Harvard, for example, makes a pile of all the applicants who have the grades and the scores to get into Harvard, and then they look for what they need: A violinist, a middle-hitter, a coxswain. Then they look for what else might be interesting. A ballerina, a professional actor, a published author, and so on.

It used to be you needed a hook only for the very top two or three schools. But now white girls need a hook for all the top schools.

2. Your kid will be evaluated on the stuff that is NOT school. 
What this means is that top colleges are devaluing standardized tests. They don't care if you learn the national curriculum. They don't care if you can get an high score on the SAT. These achievements are commodified in the way that learning has been commodified. What really counts now is showing passion, drive, and accomplishment outside of standardized learning.

But now things start to make sense.

In general, a college degree is simply a ticket to play. It doesn't matter what school you went to, unless you go to a very top school, say, top ten. In that case, the vetting process is so tough that it's a huge endorsement to you to have the school on your resume, and there is a great network of students that will help you go through all stages of your career.

It's no coincidence that the only undergraduate degrees that really give you an edge are from the schools that require achievements that school does not provide. You get that special hook outside of school. Not in it.

3. Going to school undermines endeavors that really impress admissions officers.
In fact, most of the hooks that get kids into top schoosl are driven by creativity. For example, Conrad Tao got into Columbia without any AP classes or SAT tutors. He just had his piano and a GED. But the blog Marginal Revolution has a great summary of how teachers in school suppress creativity because teachers don't like creative kids.

So the only colleges that are really worth a student's time and money are colleges that don't value time spent in school. This is one of the biggest endorsements of homechooling that I have found