Raising Future Adults

Caroline?   is an obscure made-for-TV movie with a one-paragraph plot summary on Wikipedia that completely leaves out anything substantive. Wikipedia says "Caroline" shows up just before a large inheritance is due, but my memory of the movie is that the concern of the person claiming to be Caroline isn't money. It's the fate of two minor children in a wealthy, dysfunctional family. The majority of the movie focuses on the drama involved in inserting herself in their lives successfully, gaining their trust and establishing the ability to meaningfully help them. They are probably Winston and Heidi in the list of characters on Wikipedia. Heidi is presumed to be retarded. She's actually hard of hearing and being treated like a baby doll and dressed up in cutesy clothes like she's still four years old and she absolutely hates it. The fake Caroline initially thinks she can help Winston and then Heidi but ultimately concludes she needs to help Heidi and that will fre...

Video (not quite 10 minutes):  What face blindness is actually like . He uses garlic cloves instead of stones, but it's a similar analogy to a piece I linked to previously when I wrote about face blindness  before . My ex-husband really liked movies and TV shows, so a big part of our relationship was watching movies and TV shows together. And over time it became apparent we had very different strengths and weaknesses for recognizing the same actors in different roles. The wife of Peter Falk played in some of the episodes of Columbo. After learning that, we would try to identify her. She didn't play a recurring character. She always played someone different and they tried to cover up the fact that the same actress was used repeatedly, so they tried to dress her very different. I was better at identifying her than he was because this was typically about changes in hairstyle and clothes and makeup. If you recognize faces, that's a huge advantage. But Christopher Lloyd, who pla...

There's a certain amount of natural variation in personality traits. There's probably not a single person alive who doesn't have a few "difficult" personality traits. I don't believe in nature OR nurture. I believe in nature AND nurture. I believe that a great deal of social stuff is learned or learnable. Spiders get just BORN with behaviors hardwired into them. People, not so much. I have difficult children. One lacks a conscience, an innate sense that "It's WRONG to hurt other people." He's head injured from an incident involving an irresponsible nurse when he was four months old. Maybe he was born with a conscience and lost it due to head injury. Or maybe he never had it. I raised him to understand WHY he needs to behave ANYWAY. Traits like that can be useful in times of war or in certain professions or whatever. He's not bothered by things that can be unpleasant but simply need to be done the way some people are.  I taught my kids thi...

Venus Flytrap, character on WKRP in Cincinnati (show from my childhood when I owned a pet dinosaur and rotary phone,) explains the atom: Shorter version   Longer version   A few short clips I tripped across recently (most of which you shouldn't try at home): Calcium   Liquid oxygen Bromine   White phosphorus   My oldest slurped up science like crazy and I was constantly on the lookout for what I called "science snacks" because I couldn't keep him in science. We bought The Cartoon Guide to Genetics. I was having fantasies I had like six weeks worth of curriculum. He read it in like two hours and was half finished before we got home from the bookstore. His younger brother took a week or ten days to finish it, making me feel slightly better about paying for it. If you routinely watch cool science , you might get lucky and the insane stalker that the modern Internet is might routinely say "Hey...hey... look!" and deliver nifty keen science tidbits regularly. But...

I watched this clip that says on the cover screenshot "Trauma = Genius!" I previously didn't watch it but looked it up for this post because that blurb stuck with me. I first tried to find a clip from the 1987 version of the movie  Overboard  where Goldie Hawn tells off the teacher. This is the best I can find; Part one and part two . She describes the test as a means to pigeonhole the potential of children and says that cannot actually be done. I agree with that and I've written more than one piece on this site about tests, their uses and limitations and common misperceptions. A really good friend of mine whom I knew through gifted education circles who actually sold educational materials once made a similar remark about genius and trauma seeming to frequently go hand in hand and wondered if there was a cause and effect relationship. I don't believe there is. I do believe that extreme circumstances help people express their strengths and help other people see t...

I have been hesitant to write about this because my seemingly cavalier attitude occurred in a particular context where me failing to be a control freak had no real opportunity to go sideways. This was before the Internet, so I wasn't dealing with YouTube and streaming services and needing to figure out how to gatekeep access to an ocean of who knows what. But my kids had a sheltered existence even in comparison to many American kids because I moved to Germany as a military wife when my oldest was about eight months old, so he had access to exactly one extremely conservative English-language channel run by the military, plus whatever videos I supplied, until we returned to the US when he was not quite four-and-a-half years old. Even after coming back to the US, we still had limited access to the most explicit or liberal stuff because we moved to small town Kansas. I would visit my sister in the big city and she had channels I couldn't get even if the budget allowed and the budge...

My oldest son is very aspie. I had a second child while terrified my marriage was about to end in divorce because I felt my child needed a full blooded sibling to have any hope of being socially functional. I fundamentally don't agree with a lot of the nonsense we hear about how children today are being born with Autism Spectrum Disorder or Attention Deficit Disorder.  Spiders  are born with certain social behaviors hard wired in. Humans  get raised for eighteen years and much of their social stuff is learned behavior. When I was growing up, I was one of three kids. My mom was one of twelve kids. My dad was one of five. I had an aunt, uncle and four cousins down the street and a next door neighbor with eight kids. We have a lot fewer children per household on average today and that means a lot fewer siblings, cousins and neighbor kids. And then we jump to the brilliant conclusion that kids today are simply born  with serious social deficits that we imagine didn't exi...