Raising Future Adults

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...

This is the official video for the song  All my friends are heathens  by Twenty One Pilots. My oldest son who is frequently assumed to be ASD by people who have barely met him had that song on repeat in the background on his computer at one time. Not that video because it's got people in it and tells a story and that's not his thing. He found some video with repeating patterns or something he liked. This is the refrain: All my friends are heathens, take it slow Wait for them to ask you who you know Please don't make any sudden moves You don't know the half of the abuse If you have an ASD person in your life, odds are high they are visually impaired . This is documented that they tend to have poor central vision and better peripheral vision. Visually impaired people don't deal well with sudden movement near them. They tend to be jumpy in reaction to that. ALL people with handicaps require  extra time or other accommodation to learn new things. If it's an obviousl...

In my youth, I had a spider phobia. As a teen, I watched some cheesy B grade movie with obviously plastic spiders on strings being used as giant spiders and was creeped out by it. When my kids were relatively young, I had to woman up and protect them from Wolf spiders in Kansas and Sun spiders and tarantulas in Southern California. That helped. It's a therapeutic technique called flooding. Enough exposure without getting hurt ramps your phobia down. But the cure for my phobia was homeschooling my kids and thereby learning more science than college ever taught me. They loved dinosaurs and we bought Jurassic Park and prescreened it and helped them watch it comfortably at shockingly young ages because that's what they WANTED. We watched ALL the prehistoric anything that ever aired. Any sciency anything about life a zillion years ago and we watched it. Ditto snakes, spiders, and on and on while my five year old held my hand and reassured me I would be okay. So starting well before ...