"A great question: What do you do when there's something that needs to get taught/learned that they're resistant to?

My current answer: I can't think of anything the must be learned that a child won't eventually see as worthwhile and pick up. Our assumption is that they have to figure it all out while they're in our care. They don't.

All the time we see adults starting over. They pick up and quit their jobs, go back to school to study in a completely different field. We change. We evolve as human beings. We mature. And we do this fastest when someone else isn't hovering over us saying, "You will do this. You will go here. You will spend years learning that." Figuring things out takes time. We have to give them time.

What we're really on the hook for, as parents, is giving our children the opportunity to see different interesting things that might strike their imaginations. We're on the hook for giving them space in which to consider who they are and what matters to them as individuals. We're on the hook for treating them like real and actual human beings with preferences, ideas, dreams, and desires and we're on the hook for respecting these things.

We're on the hook for not treating them like product. Our children aren't products we're making for consumption. They're people. We're not molding them or training them or shaping them. We're helping them as they mold themselves, train themselves, and shape themselves. When we see them molding something we are pretty sure they will dislike, we are on the hook for giving them useful information and suggesting they reconsider. But that's about as much as we can do.

We must listen ever so much more than we speak. And we must model the choices we would have them make. Don't want your child on Minecraft all day? Get off Facebook. Don't want your child to sit on the couch all day? Get out of your easy chair. Want a curious, interested learner? Show them how. Want them to keep learning? Show them how. Want them to exercise and eat well? Guess what you have to do? If you aren't doing it, they will not do it. But I digress.

We refuse to make assumptions for our children. Many people want to assume that their children will go to college and get white collar jobs and live in houses with two garages. That's a whole of assumptions you're making for your child. Stop that. These are individuals you're raising. They need to have their own ideas about how their lives will go. Maybe they will want to go to college, but that needs to be their decision. And hopefully they won't make that decision because it's what they see everyone else doing. Homeschooling for us isn't just a faster, more efficient way of getting where everyone else is going. We're not interested in getting where everyone else is going. We're interested in helping our children find out who they are, what matters to them, what interests them, and helping them launch into that. Whatever or wherever it may be.

And, yes. That could include calculus."