Raising Future Adults

When my oldest son was four, we visited my mother. We stayed about six weeks and he turned five while we were there. He had an undiagnosed medical condition, so he was a skinny little kid. Actually, both my sons were skinny when they were little but my younger son has a different build and people didn't hassle him about it.  My younger son later put on weight, but I once saw an old photo of him and was shocked at how prominent his collar bone was at a young age because no one ever hassled him about being a bag of bones. He had a bigger bone structure and wild curly hair making his head look huge and people missed the fact that he was actually quite skinny. He's extremely introverted and didn't tell me at the time that he was intentionally gaining weight. Years later, he mentioned it was intentional. He said he was tired of being cold all the time and at age nine or whatever decided to just eat extra until he stopped feeling cold all the time, so he's been on the chubby ...

My ex husband was career military. When our oldest was in second grade, "dad" got orders to move elsewhere late in the school year. My oldest had substantial social challenges to begin with and I didn't like the idea of him being the new kid in school for just a few weeks at the end of the school year. So I went to the school and asked them what was the earliest date he could be considered "graduated" from second grade and then talked to the husband and he took a few days of military leave to delay our departure. This allowed my child to "graduate" about a month early and skip the trauma of being the new kid in school so late in the school year. So given my views of development, I looked at my oldest child and went "He NEEDS a sibling. Full stop. He will never be functional if he grows up as an only child, and never mind that I live in terror of ending up a poverty-stricken, divorced single mom and another child is another mouth to feed." My...

I'm still trying to sort out HOW to tell stories about talking to my difficult children about the fact that when you turn eighteen, you become a legal adult and on that day the rules officially fundamentally change in many important ways. But if you have difficult children, regardless of HOW I talked to MY kids about such things, the important piece is that I did, in fact, tell my children that the rules are different for children and as long as they didn't do anything extremely serious, like kill someone or burn a building down, I was their mother and I had parental rights that gave me latitude for how to deal with them. I made it clear that if they did something extremely serious, law enforcement would get involved and then Mom no longer had final say. But as long as that didn't happen, Mom's decision generally trumped that of their teachers and other adults who maybe thought they were weird and difficult. One son informed me after he became an adult that he conscious...

Why do I have to learn math? That's a teacher who loves math wanting help explaining to kids who ask why they need to learn math. I have ZERO advice for them. Technically, no one has to learn math. We can just let society devolve into a worse trash heap than the cesspit we currently have if no one wants to learn math. My understanding is the first math book involved NO numbers at all. It's a geometry book and has drawings of geometric figures and rules about relationships between angles. I'm guessing the kids most likely to ask this question of school teachers are kids who had elementary school teachers who not only couldn't teach it but were actively math phobic. I argued this once on Hacker News and some people backed me up: Women who go to college and have trouble with the math portion of something they want to pursue get told "Oh, it's not a big deal. Just go into early childhood education." Men don't get told that. Men who want to teach elementar...

A search for do serial killers start with animals gets this: Yes Yes, many serial killers often start with animal cruelty. Research indicates that serial killers frequently torture or kill small animals from an early age, which can be a precursor to later violent behavior towards humans. Notable serial killers, such as Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, have recounted animal torture as their first acts of violence. However, it's important to note that not every serial killer begins with animals, and not every animal abuser becomes a serial killer. This suggests a complex relationship between animal cruelty and future violent behavior.  If you merely search for serial killers and animal cruelty,  one of the hits is  The MacDonald Triad . Arson and persistent bed wetting past age five are the other two parts of the triad. My kids were extremely difficult but neither was ever cruel to animals and I inadvertently cured them of any interest in arson by enthusiastically sharing my m...

ASD child says he can't remember anything I teach There's information elsewhere on this site about supplements I used to help my oldest. Autistic kids may have metal poisoning or other health issues. My oldest has a serious medical condition and getting him generally healthier and better fed helped his academic performance enormously.  I mostly OBSERVED my kids to see what they could do. They didn't want to be quizzed. I mostly didn't test them. They hated having to prove they knew it and my oldest has a scathing phrase about public school: "guess the teacher's password." In other words, public school isn't designed to educate children. Children survive it by memorizing what the teacher wants to hear and their competency be damned. It's not relevant to getting passing grades. And he had trouble guessing the teacher's password because he's not neurotypical and struggled to figure out what the heck they wanted him to say. When talking about...

Anthropology has the terms high-context and low-context cultures . You may be more familiar with the terms Ask culture versus Guess culture. These days, you can search for the terms "ask culture and guess culture." My understanding is this originated with a reply on Metafilter to a question on AskMe. Low-context culture would be Ask culture. High-context culture would be Guess culture. It's not really that you are expected to guess the meaning. It's really that they expect you to already know a lot and be able to infer conclusions that aren't explicitly stated. My father and ex husband were both career military. This tends to be Ask culture where you explicitly state things. Like New York, the American military is more multicultural than most American towns and that contributes to an expectation of stating things very explicitly to avoid misunderstandings. But there are also lives on the line, so the military has a lot of protocols surrounding making sure you clea...