Raising Future Adults

My oldest son has a lot of social challenges. I always thought he was funny and quirky and adorable but most other people found him to be incredibly unapproachable and very Aspie. He once told me that I was the only adult in his life who saw him as having problems rather than as being a problem . Given how others treated him, it's hardly surprising that for most of his childhood he only really lit up around me and maybe his brother and mostly when there was no one else around. When he was sixteen, I began and moderated an email list designed around his needs and interests called Wired for Science . This was not my first experience with moderating but it was likely the first time I founded a list. We would post articles about research into how memory worked or other psycho-neurological stuff and discuss it on list. This was about meeting the social and emotional needs of my quirky kid who was real into science and not into people. It was a discussion list about neurological s...

Just before my oldest turned two years old, I learned I was pregnant and then we got notified maybe a week or two later that we were finally getting into military housing. Moving into quarters was like going from being dirt poor to being middle class overnight. Directly behind our new apartment was a playground. I was pregnant and my two year old had a long history of having trouble sleeping, so I took him to the playground probably every single day. I would do the grocery shopping in the afternoon and then if I needed to stick something in the oven or thaw something or whatever, I would do a thing to get dinner started. Then my two year old and I would go to the playground for an hour. When we got back inside, I would stick him in the bathtub and run back and forth between the kitchen and the bathroom to finish up dinner and keep an eye on my toddler. I would pull him out of the tub and wrap him in a bathsheet and he sometimes fell asleep right after dinner or sometimes before dinn...