I never set out to build a method. I just never stopped talking with my kids.
My son is 23. He’s a translator living in Asia. I didn’t raise him on a system. I raised him with conversation. Constant, real, back-and-forth conversation. I didn’t know that was the thing until I started doing it again with his sister twenty years later. What I discovered wasn’t something I planned. It was something I noticed after it had already been working for twenty years.
Cami is almost two and a half. She narrates her world, asks questions that stop me mid-sentence, and remembers things I forgot she ever heard. A school director with degrees in biology, psychology, and neuroscience had worked alongside her for a month and said: your daughter is weird. That became the title of my book.
I grew up figuring everything out myself. I left home at thirteen. I raised my son mostly alone, working whatever hours let me be present when it mattered. I have never had a safety net, and I have never waited for permission to trust my own instincts. That is not confidence… it’s something quieter than that. It’s intuition built from years of having no other option.
When Cami was eleven months old, I left the United States and moved us to Cambodia. I wanted a slower life. One with enough space to actually be present. And in that space, I started noticing what was happening between us when we talked. Not the milestones. The moments just before them.
I documented all of it. That documentation became Your Daughter Is Weird — a book about what happened when I talked to my baby all day, and what everyday conversation actually does for the way children learn language and learn to think.
Homegrown Thinking is where I share what I notice along the way. Not a curriculum. Not a system. Just a mother paying close attention — and writing it down.
— Robyn, mother, teacher, and author of Your Daughter Is Weird
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