Extraordinary Parenting: the essential guide to parenting and educating at home

It’s not just children who benefit from more predictability and stability in their lives. As parents, living in a more rhythmic way can help us to simplify our lives and focus on what matters most.

With younger children especially, leaving an invitation to play for them to find in the morning can be a great way to buy you time to have a quiet coffee first thing.

The breathing-out phase refers to a period of time when your child relates mainly to the world around them (independent free play, running around the park, writing a letter to a friend).

school is the biggest source of stress for young people.

Just keep encouraging that “why”.’

As Natalie Wexler asks in her book The Knowledge Gap, ‘What if it turns out that the best way to boost reading comprehension is not to focus on comprehension skills at all but to teach kids, as early as possible, the history and science we’ve been putting off until it’s too late?’

Homeschooling — however long you do it for — provides a unique opportunity to build up your child’s knowledge of the world, knowledge which will give them the context for all future learning.

Activities repeated throughout the seasons, year after year, slowly become woven into the fabric of family life.

When you start to view challenging behaviour not as naughtiness which needs training, punishing, or discipline, but as a problem to solve together, the dynamic of your parenting shifts

can help to remember that you’re on the same team as your child; that they don’t want to create more work or stress for you, and that you want to parent as well as you