Raising Future Adults

When my oldest son was little, anytime we bought a new videogame he couldn't pull himself away from it to do other things and it caused problems. Rather than punish him for it, I ultimately established a policy of only buying new videogames on a Friday so he had all weekend to play before he needed to try to focus on schoolwork again. That successfully solved that problem. It would only be when he was much older that he would be able to articulate that he needed a big block of time with a new game to meet his intellectual needs and be able to wrap his brain around it in a way that worked for him. When he was sixteen, he and his brother sold one of their videogame systems and all the games that went with it and got like $200 in store credit and a bunch of new games for other systems. For the first time in his life, he had enough new games at one time to really feed his intellectual needs. Over the next few weeks, his frantic, addict-like behavior was replaced with a zen-like cal...

Growing up, I was the child that seemed to most make my mother crazy. Once in a while, she would roll her eyes at me and say "God is going to get you. He's going to give you a child just like you." After I became a parent, she once said something like "It's not hard to predict that. That's how genes work." My oldest son got affectionately called Grandma's Curse when he was little. He was like me cubed and vastly more crazy-making than I had ever been but I adored him. When the future ex and I were eighteen, we would go swimming together sometimes. There was a pool in his backyard and his mom would tell his sisters to leave us be and we had the pool to ourselves. His hair was longer than mine, about shoulder length. After swimming, he would towel dry his hair and for a few brief moments he had a blond afro before going in to the house to shower, comb it down and try to control it like he normally did. Other than me and maybe his immediate famil...

I ended up homeschooling my kids. They just didn't really fit in the public school system that well. We were a military family living on an isolated military base in the middle of nowhere and the schools sucked. Some folks reacted to that by taking their kids to private schools in town roughly an hour away but for us homeschooling was the solution that made sense. I enrolled in some email lists to get support for homeschooling my sons. I did look around and there just wasn't some kind of in person group available that met my needs and I didn't see it making sense to try to start one, though I also actually did look into doing that. Homeschooling had kind of a bad reputation at the time as the sort of thing done by religious weirdos in a cult-like atmosphere who didn't want society having any influence over their children. I tend to forget that homeschooling had such a bad reputation because I was on lists for gifted homeschoolers and it was about academic rigor for k...

When he was about nine or ten years old, I dreamed that my oldest son had a Pink Panther themed bathroom. When I woke up, I briefly wondered if it meant he was gay but then decided that it didn't mean that. I concluded that it meant he wasn't "normal" but I didn't feel he was gay. It would be many more years before he would tell me he had concluded he was asexual. He once told me that if he came out as gay, he knew I would only be mad if I had not realized it myself beforehand. I pride myself on being socially insightful, so I would be aggravated with myself for not seeing it myself without being told but I wouldn't actually care if he was gay. He did wonder for a time if he was gay because girls do nothing for him but he eventually realized boys do nothing for him either. He's just not really interested in sex. In 2015, I sent him the following two links that showed up on Metafilter, where I was an active participant at the time: MeFi Projects: Tal...