Last year my son Eric encouraged me to do a blog. It was nice to have your progeny think well enough about me to think that you have something to say to others. He told me how to get a URL (web address) and gave me space on his company’s web server. He showed me how to pick a free blog template (from the WordPress.com offerings) and deploy it on my blog. I ran into a few initial obstacles which he helped me resolve.

I decided to focus my blog on parenting since my Partner Sally and I adopted a rather unique approach to this role relative to most of the other parents we know. After much thought I decided to call it “Lefty Parent” because of the double entendre of being raised and living in a politically left environment, but also being left-handed and thinking outside the box of a right-handed world (even the left-leaning side of it that nurtured me).

Particularly on the subject of education, most of the other otherwise politically progressive parents I know are pretty conventional in their thinking, and in my opinion, don’t apply their progressive, civil rights oriented principles to dealing with youth, including their own kids.

My own click came raising my own kids and recalling my own youth and how my parents raised me with great love which included giving me as much agency as I was able to take.

to see the need for an individual youth and their family to have the liberty to chart their own educational course has led me to a more libertarian position on many things, thought not absolute right of property. According to Wikipedia I think I am becoming a “left libertarian”. Is there some sort of pill or salve I can cure that with?…*g*

I realize more and more I really had a unique and positive childhood, the kind all the child development thinkers and youth liberation types talk about. Now I turn around and after resisting at first finally raised my kids way outside the box, including being okay with neither of them graduating from or even going to high school, let alone college. They are now 19 and 23 and have been basically charting their own courses for the last five years to learn whatever they want however they can figure out to do so. It makes most of the other parents we know very nervous to even fathom what we did with (to) our kids.