The following is excerpted with permission from Better Than School, Nancy Wallace's wonderful account of her family's early years of homeschooling. I highly recommend reading the entire book!

[W]e have to find ways to raise our children to be our friends, so they can help to fill the void as early as possible. Bob and I have done this in many ways, although at first we weren't clever enough to realize what we were doing. We thought we were being selfish when we insisted on reading aloud to Vita and Ishmael only books that we enjoyed, and when we took them along to the movies we wanted to see but seldom if ever took them to children's movies. Of course we were being selfish, in a way; but on the other hand, we gradually gained two extra people that we could discuss books and movies with, and the kids, of course, enjoyed being treated like equals--or at least not like "babies." When Ishmael, at age eighteen months, drove us crazy by tearing apart our two-room cabin in Vermont during a severe winter, Bob began taking him to work occasionally just to protect the house; and we began making a point of including him in as many of our adult activities as possible, hoping to distract him from his overeager curiosity by letting him help with tasks like cooking, cleaning, and carpentry work. Better to let him measure the flour and break the eggs, no matter how many shells went in, than to let him take the phone apart or break all our chess pieces, we reasoned. It was only later that we realized that by including him, and in time Vita, in our own work and interests, they not only learned to be helpful around the house but they became our closest friends. Home-schooling, for us, has only strengthened this relationship as we share more and more of our favorite books, ideas, music, and other activities with each other.