Many years ago, my husband John asked me to consider homeschooling our children. I immediately responded, "Are you nuts?" John pointed out that I was judging something I knew little about, and he asked me to research homeschooling, so I could make an informed decision. I reluctantly ...

There are very few absolutes in this life. What kind of school our children attend is not one of them.

Home schools, private schools of kinds, public schools, each in their different ways are places where good parents hope for a good education, knowing that at the end of the ...

Christian school was never in the plan or the budget for my kids. I liked their school just fine and we were set on them finishing out their schooling at our local public school.

Until one day when my sweet son, then at the beginning of his seventh grade year, asked me if he ...

When I was 6 and my dad had been hired by the U.S. government to work as an economist, one of the first things he and my mom did after we moved was to call the few fellow Korean immigrants they knew in the D.C. area.

"Where are the good schools?" they interrogated. When they ...

After nine years in a private Christian grammar school our son stepped into his freshman year at the local public high school with 600 people he didn't know.  Almost every student in his graduating class of 80 went on to attend the private Christian high school.  He didn't want ...

Ms. Baker passed me the bag with the wet shirt at school pick-up. My shirt-sucking 6-year-old ran to me with a big smile and latched onto my leg. Since my husband lost his job last summer, our house had become all hills and valleys—mostly valleys. It was starting to show in ...

I have a new article for Christianity Today's magazine that is now available online: The New School Choice Agenda. In it, I write about a group of friends who moved into a low-income neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia who have decided to send their children to the local public ...

Those of you who read this blog regularly know that the demands of family life are a constant source of tension in our household (see Friday's post for but the most recent example), which often doesn't look as cheery as this photo might suggest. You also know that I want to ...

My friend Ellen Painter Dollar invited me to join her in her "Best Thing" Blog Hop, in which she features fellow bloggers who have posted the "best thing" they've ever written. I'm not sure this is actually the best post I've ever written. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's not. ...

Perhaps it is fitting that today was a day with William screaming in the night, with two overtired parents responding with anger, with a morning filled with tears and yelling.

Perhaps it is fitting that after I had locked him in his room for an escalated time-out, as I closed ...

Beautiful post by Mama Monk about the perpetual trials of being a parent of small children. She writes,

I'm a stressed mom. I'm stressed too often. I worry that August's most prominent memory of his childhood will be my contorted anxiety face leaning over his carseat, snapping ...

I tend to balk at generalized statements about kids and adults with Down syndrome. There's a part of me that resists on theoretical grounds–I don't want to stereotype or treat people with Trisomy 21 as if they are in a separate category of human being. But there is also a part ...

I had a wonderful time in North Carolina last week, and I hope I'll take the time to write a series of posts based on the questions and conversations I had with people from the Duke Center for Reconciliation, Reality Ministries, the Trinity School, and at the Church of the Apostles. ...

Peter can always tell when I'm excited about something because I try, unsuccessfully, to hide my smile. Perhaps I'm afraid my excitement will come off as self-important or maybe I'm afraid he won't think it matters much. It happened again yesterday. I told him about another ...

Fellow Redbud writer Kelli Trujillo interviewed me for her blog this week, and in one question she asked:

When you first stepped into the journey of having a newborn daughter with Down Syndrome, you write about how you were faced with the reality that your daughter may not ever ...