Tonight I am sitting on my couch with my 11 year-old son. We are both blogging on WordPress.

I am fairly confident had I not started this #BLOG365 journey, this moment would have never happened.

Each night my son asks to read my blog posts and each day he sounds more and more like his mother when he talks about education or homework or social studies or museums.

It has become a bit of a nightly tradition, another way for us to connect.

I watch him struggle through many of the same emotions I have while blogging. He gets frustrated with his writing, deletes his posts, questions his decisions, starts over, stops, starts over again. I watch his little fingers pound away at the keys, writing about the causes and ideas that are important to him. I see his words express his concerns and his hopes.

Often he asks, “Mom, what should I blog about?”

I tell him to write about things that are important to him.

Sometimes he says,”tell me what I am supposed to write about.”

In those words I hear the influence of the formulaic writing he has been exposed to in school.

I don’t want to tell him what to write about. I don’t want to give him specific suggestions. His blog is where he has choice. It’s where he writes without a rubric or a prompt. It’s where it doesn’t matter if his sentences are complete or his thesis is clear.

It’s where he writes.

I had a diary as a child, but never a blog, never a real-life audience. My son doesn’t have a ton of people frequenting his blog, but he knows there is a chance others will read his writing and maybe comment.

His writing is different because of that.

My only hope for him is that he will learn from his blogging experience. My hope is that he builds his voice so that when his audience is bigger his words have the impact he seeks.