Hi Hugh...thanks for that detailed to my off the cuff response. I guess I was thinking that unschooling more meant letting your kids run amok without a sense of accountability. Doesn't seem like the case in your instance!

I do wonder about harder skills ad Kevin mentions...I doubt many kids will take it upon themselves to fully learn something like calculus or chemistry.

Maybe it doesn't make you a bad parent, but it probably makes you a bit worse of a worker--if you have to constantly shift gears and deal with the kids, I doubt you can be as productive.

I'm not sure that I like this unschooling thing that's been popping up on the blog today...sounds like a cool life though.

Maybe unschooling doesn't make people unintellectual per se, but it seems to me there is a baseline of knowledge you won't get if you don't get some sort of structured formal education. I don't think its possible for a child to self teach themselves this breadth of material, and without a curriculum to follow most parents won't have the knowledge to do so either.

Yea, this is left wing liberalism gone too far...we'll just get a new generation of even lazier more self entitled kids than the current crop of younger parents are themselves. At least this idea is nutty enough that it won't go anywhere. I feel bad for Phil Biegler's kids though.

haha..so true. and then we get those failed attempts to make them safe in big cities like SF and NY http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/nyregion/11toil...

Hey..someone using replies properly. Well done!

When I was 12 my mom wanted to remodel one of the bathrooms. She called around and got a few quotes from local contractors, but when my dad saw the estimates, he insisted that it was highway robbery. He, of course, could do it himself for a fraction of the price –just give him a few weekends.

He started the project with enthusiasm, but he almost immediately bought an old Alfa Romeo to rebuild, and his attention quickly shifted. I’m now in my mid-twenties, and my parents were divorced a few years ago. Just recently – more than a decade later – she hired a contractor and the bathroom finally got done.

I doubt the bathroom debacle directly caused my parents to divorce, but in hindsight the best decision would have been to hire a pro from day one, spend the extra money and put the bathroom to rest. The people who are slinging mud on LifeLock won’t acknowledge the fact that they too will probably never get the bathroom done, and they also seem to completely discount the value of peace of mind. Ten bucks a month isn’t a bad price to pay.

I do have a question for you as a VC –what did you think when you initially heard the LifeLock pitch? What did they emphasize? I’ve been pursuing a business that essentially sells peace of mind relating to emergency preparedness and family connectivity, but I’m often met with skepticism. We did win the first round of Google’s Android Challenge though!