Age
A problogger post made me realize something. I have subconsciously refrained from saying my age on my blogs because of the age discrimination I have experienced on forums. When I say I’m 25 on homeschooling or parenting forums, I am jumped on with replies like “your children must be really young then, too young for school, so you’re not a REAL homeschooler,” “No wonder you can work from home; your kids must still be young enough to nap!” etc. Any tips I give are not considered credible because I am young and “must not have much experience.” When I then say the ages of my kids – 9, 4, 3, and 6 months (by the way I started school at 3 and believe my kids should as well) – I get a whole other form of assumptions and discrimination. “You were a teen parent?!” (I wasn’t.) “Well I’m certainly not going to listen to you then!”
I have been working online in various forms since I was 15. I also got my first offline job at 15. I finished highschool at 16, and at 18 (using my own money) began to move around the US. I’ve lived and worked in San Francisco, Phoenix, Chicago, and many places in between. I’ve driven boats and piloted planes. So although I am only 25, I have 10 years of real world experience that many people who are much older don’t have.
A blogger’s age shouldn’t matter, but it certainly does, because of the assumptions that go along with age. Young people are inexperienced and therefore stupid. Old people are out of the loop. Etc. A smart reader, homeschooler, or work-at-homer should put aside these assumptions and judge all bloggers only by what they blog, not by their age.
