success : Helen Lee: Author, Speaker, Missional Mom

An Unexpected Choice: Why We Traded the Public Schools for Homeschooling

Saturday, August 11, 2012

(This article originally appeared on Christianity Today‘s This is Our City website.) 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 ran out of people to call, they called their friends’ friends and asked the same question. It took no time to build a list of acceptable school districts, a list that concurrently created the boundaries for where we would consider living. If a city was not on that list, it did not matter how affordable…

Monday, March 21, 2011

I spent the weekend in (rainy) Northern California, invited to speak by the Institute for the Study of Asian American Christianity (ISAAC) on the topic “Beyond Tiger Parenting: How Missional Moms and Dads Create Truly ‘Successful’ Families.” The raindrops did not deter people from attending, thankfully, so we had a wonderful time of thinking together through the challenges of parenting in today’s culture. We especially took time to examine the success narrative that so many of us adopt without even realizing it–that the only right way to raise kids is to get a great job and live in a safe neighborhood with top-notch schools, then encourage your kids to be involved in every activity under the sun so they can get into a great college…