Raising Future Adults

Remember that the goal of my writing on this site is helping people with difficult kids raise future adults. In other words, the plan is to empower children with personal challenges to grow up to be functional members of society who are willing and able to take responsibility for their lives no matter their personal shortcomings. This is not a piece intended to make excuses for adults who didn't have the kind of information I am trying to make available nor to merely excuse bad behavior on the part of a child. I am trying to give parents tools for effective mitigation. As a small child, he was a lying little brat who thought he was being clever to just say whatever BS popped into his head. I began checking his story and he came to live in fear of The Momminator or Darth Mom checking his story because I would go ASK other people questions. I broke him of lying and he began proactively making sure his friends told me stuff ahead of time so he didn't need his story checked. That...

Small children sometimes blow a gasket and have a tantrum. I never allowed that to become a situation where they got the idea you could use a tantrum to manipulate mom into giving you your way. I also didn't punish them. One son has flat feet and he used to have a meltdown periodically when we were out and about and I would sit down next to him and wait and occasionally ask if he was done yet. I eventually realized he fell apart due to foot pain and began arranging to have a stroller or cart or some means to not put him in that position. One of my sons needed more sleep than average and trended towards ONLY sleeping well in his bed. While moving or traveling, he sometimes got overly tired and had a meltdown and I would send him to bed to get the rest he clearly needed. One son once was literally hopping mad and apparently literally burst a blood vessel. His fit ended completely and suddenly when he began gushing blood from his nose. Years later, he told me that it served as a kind ...

I was a full-time homemaker and homeschooling mom, so I cooked a lot and nutrition and health was a big part of raising my kids. I was trying to make sure they had a sound mind in a sound body and everything I understand about life says that's an important part of what parents do. But people have often reacted really negatively and really strongly to me talking about nutrition and health, as if that's somehow not the responsibility of the parents and amounts to me trying to "practice medicine without a license." Even if your kid is on prescription medication under the care of a physician, there are pieces of the puzzle you can and should handle yourself without calling the doctor every five minutes for permission to feed your kid. Staying Legal should help you figure out where to draw that line. I have two blogs that are health focused: Atypical Cystic Fibrosis  Formulary of Life   I recommend reading both in their entirety while you start a health journal recording...

There's no single test for ADHD and they have to go through a process of elimination and rule out other things first that may be causing the issues. ADHD was at one time a diagnosis given to a small number of children and now it gets described as being at epidemic levels. My oldest son was assessed for ADHD when he was five and attending an unusually good public school in a small city with a big university where there was enormous competition for teaching positions by qualified people. They concluded he had some kind of attention span issue, but it wasn't ADHD because he weirdly paid more attention to longer, more complex sentences and they had no idea what that meant. Years later while involved with the gifted community online, I dubbed that Bored Gifted Kid Syndrome. Prior to that, at one school his frustrated teacher said we should "Put him on Ritalin." to control his behavioral issues and made no mention of assessment for ADHD and didn't bother to ask if he ha...

I coined the expression Bored Gifted Kid Syndrome while participating on Tagmax and I have a post with that title that doesn't really talk about that. So let's give it another try. When my oldest was probably twelve and I realized his real problem was Bored Gifted Kid Syndrome and that was a very large part of why he made me crazy, I began engaging him in ridiculous arguments with circular logic and over the course of eighteen months this stopped a lot of his worst habits. Like his dad, he just argued with me all the time and made me nuts. I don't remember what I turned that into but I had something I would say to him where arguing with me proved me right about my statement and ceasing was the only way to actually win the argument and prove me wrong. And he's genuinely socially challenged, so the first time I did that, we argued about it for something like ninety minutes and years later he told me it took him about forty-five minutes to get it and then he kept it going...

Here is a short clip of Trevor Noah talking about promising his mom he would be rich so he can buy "two" (things from the menu I guess) and buy desert. He basically says they were poor and did takeout about once a month and trying to pick the one thing he wanted off the menu was such a big decision and very stressful, so he decided he would get rich enough to buy whatever food he wanted. He doesn't say how old he was when this conversation occurred. I'm inferring he was fairly young, like four years old. That's not really poverty . That's probably developmental and has nothing to do with budget. He kind of retconned that after he grew up. When my oldest was two years old and I was pregnant with his brother, we were living in Germany and the American military grocery store was kind of kitty-corner across the street and I was in a third floor walk up. I think the grocery store was open six days a week and I typically went grocery shopping every single day it wa...

I read an article about a woman Supreme Court Justice, probably Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and it briefly mentioned that her children kept a journal documenting anytime "Mommy Laughed" because she didn't laugh much. She was a very serious person and didn't do a lot of laughing. That resonated with me.  My older sister who was a serious person with a serious career and not exactly your giggly party girl, once told me one of her friends asked her if marrying young and having children young made me so serious and sis replied "No, she was always that way." My kids think I'm fun. I had to stop reading bedtime stories to them because they would get so excited, they were jumping on the bed and all revved up instead of nodding off to sleep. But even my kids agreed I didn't laugh much. My oldest son eventually told me that at an extremely young age, probably prior to his second birthday, he decided he wasn't a freeloader and he needed to earn his keep. He decid...