Raising Future Adults

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...

We originally homeschooled through a charter school. They did testing, supplied the books, and had a record-keeping system. The following year, I liberally borrowed from their system when we began homeschooling on our own. I have described this system so many times, that I figured it was time to put it on my website so this is the last time I have to say this! I found a skills check list by grade level for the state we live in. Twice a year, I would read through the skills they were expected to have for that grade level, check off what I knew they had mastered, orally quiz them (if possible -- or observe them for a week or so) on things I wasn't sure about, and then I made a list of goals for the things I knew they had not mastered and were having trouble with. This was the first step in my planning process and the notes I made became the basis for planning the curriculum for the next six months. We homeschool year-round. We did year-round school with the charter school and...

My ex-husband was a bibliophile whose most bitter memory of our marriage was any book I ever made him get rid of. Which I did because he was in the military, so we moved a lot and had weight limits and sometimes had DUPLICATES of books, like the illustrated and unillustrated version. THAT was his zinger during our divorce: He regretted every single book I ever made him get rid of!!!!!! GRRR!!!! He also had extremely serious eyesight problems. Between the two, I picked up seemingly obscure information about physical books that most people seem to have never heard. Prepping A Large Hardback  I've never seen or heard this from anyone else, but he prepped new books for reading to protect the spine. Especially large hardbacks because they are prone to breaking when you hold them open a long time at the same spot. So before anyone was allowed to read a new book in the house, he went through a process of opening the book in several different places and applying enough pressure to break i...