Raising Future Adults

Little Twelve Toes   is a Schoolhouse Rock video . It   doesn't just cover multiplying by twelve, it covers some very basic concepts connecting the fact that we have ten fingers and ten toes  to the fact that earthbound humans use a base ten number system. And it very quickly introduces what a base twelve number system would look like without getting bogged down or watering it down.  It makes it clear that in a base twelve number system, one followed by zero is annotation for the number twelve, not the number ten. Binary is a base two number system. One followed by zero is annotation for the number two . Binary is an extremely important mathematical concept to be familiar with in the computer age because all computer systems are based on binary. That's what's under the hood and behind everything else computers do. We use binary for computers because computers use electricity and there's an on state and an off state. So your on state equals the number one...

Harley Quinn began because some actress wanted a guest spot on Batman: The Animated Series . The actress in question actually is blond and her name is  Arleen Frances Sorkin . There wasn't originally a backstory for the character. They tacked on a made up backstory and clearly named her after the actress in question:   Harley Quinn (Dr. Harleen Frances Quinzel) Although later explanations for the character assume she's the victim of the Joker, the original portrayal by the actress who asked  to get a cameo appearance on the show  in no way behaves like she is his victim and unable to leave the relationship. The Joker  constantly rolls his eyes behind her back like he is some kind of beleaguered boyfriend putting up with her and not really wanting to say anything to her about his complaints. He has no affectionate nicknames for her, but she calls him Puddin. She orders his men around as if she is his equal  partner in life and in business, not his abuse...

When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs with the same neighbors for years and years in some of the houses, Halloween was basically a block party where you got to dress up and little kids got to stay up until midnight and older kids got to stay out later. And then the world changed, and that mostly doesn't exist anymore and didn't for my kids either. We did the mall trick or treat thing once. I hated it. I tried hard to find a kid-appropriate Halloween party on the 31st of October and a lot of years we went to a Halloween party instead of trick or treating. Halloween candy goes on sale the day after Halloween, so my kids got to pick out whatever candy they wanted the next day and I paid half price instead of buying a bunch of candy for strangers and then throwing out half the weird stuff my kids collected. My kids were thrilled to go along with that. They had gone trick or treating a few times and it was usually not a great experience. So costume party plus pick your own cand...

I never felt close to my dad. I spent my childhood feeling like he loved my sister, not me.  I've revised my opinion since his death. Nonetheless, my sister got a real career and I ended up a homemaker for a lot of years. Women with similar interests to their father and TALENT for it sometimes take over the family business or go into a similar job. Women who are close to their father are more likely to have a serious career. The quote above is from a blog where I talk about the challenges women face in terms of trying to establish a career. It focuses a lot on two things: 1. The blind spots women have because we are generally raised to be wives and moms. 2. The social issues we face because we talk to men in business like FWENDS and they respond to that by expecting a date and then we feel like MEN are all horrible sexist pigs and don't wonder what we might be doing wrong. If you are a dad and you have a daughter and want her to have hope of career success and not be limited t...

The title is something someone on a parenting list said. I didn't come up with it though she and I had substantially similar attitudes about that aspect of parenting. When my oldest child was probably still an infant (under a year old), I heard something on the radio indicating that about 80 percent of what most kids hear is no or some variation on it. So "Stop that." or "Quit it." or similar. I decided right then and there that at least half of what my children heard would be what they could do instead of what they couldn't do. And I credit that decision with me getting told by people for years on two continents that I had remarkably well-behaved children. In one furniture store I frequented, my small son would go sit and play with the display puzzle while I looked around -- because my children were actively taught from infancy how to stave off boredom without getting in trouble. I taught them how to stay quietly occupied in boring situations when adults ne...

For the record, I don't really believe in Oppositional Defiant Disorder. I think we over medicalize a lot of stuff. I'm just trying to say I knew telling my kids no resulted in "I immediately must try that." and I'm trying to communicate something in shorthand form. That's the Footnote on a piece here called Decision Making Practice . Coincidentally, I recently tweaked a few minor things on a piece called Adolescence  because I linked to it from elsewhere because it talks about hormonal stuff having social and emotional fallout and some of the drama of adolescence being "a stage" because of that. I had completely forgotten how much that piece goes on about "and when your CHILD mentally develops adult executive function and analytical skills, all those lies that you told can come back to bite you." One of my children has an over development sense of FAIRNESS and justice, BY GOD!!! He seems to have gotten those genes from my mother.  In oth...

Foreword   If you are not already familiar with my opinion that IQ tests HAVE ISSUES, please read previous posts on this site before reading this.  TLDR: My French is not good enough to research this, but long before we had Wikipedia spoon-feeding us predigested answers of what we should believe, I learned that the origin story behind IQ tests is that a Frenchman named Alfred Binet was asked to create a school readiness test in an era where: 1. Not everyone had a birth certificate, so you couldn't use age or birthdate as a proxy for school readiness. 2. There were substantial performance differences between city kids and country kids because the city kids had a lot more exposure to things like lining up.  So they supposedly  wanted a means to figure out who to admit to kindergarten without it being chaos. And fast forward to some later date and people decided this was a measure of INTELLIGENCE. It's NOT. That is absolutely NOT what that test was supposed to do accord...