we’re doing something every week

get them to join us.

Join kid. What does kid like to do? Can you go along to it?

Kid is clearly not part of “we”. Kid needs to be part of “we”. Otherwise, for all the lip service you are doing about how you are reaching out, you’ve othered kid.

I said “I’m on my way”, arrived my teen got in the car said “hey” I responded ‘whats up’ and we drove home in silence. No “thanks for picking me up” nothing at all. And when my partner said “you know you could thank your dad for picking you up” my teen responded “I did”. They did not.

The response is, “I hear you telling me that you did. I believe you. Your brain is telling you that you did. My brain is telling me that you didn’t. So, help me out here, and do it again so that I can shut my brain up?”

Because you do believe them, right? Otherwise you are insisting they lie to your face. “Hey, I know you aren’t thankful whatsoever but I’m going to need you to say the exact opposite to me, k. Give me a full 180 degree lie from your actual feelings on the matter. I’m not interested in you, just in rituals.”

Also, it is super great that your kid is rude to you. I know it doesn’t seem that way, but it means that despite all the rest of your dysfunctions, kiddo feels secure in your unending support. We fawn where we think we stand to be abandoned. Kiddo isn’t fawning. Kiddo knows they won’t be abandoned. That’s a great seed from which a beautiful relationship can grow once some brambles are trimmed back. (Note, this rude-is-good is only for child-to-parent. No other relationship can this rule be applied to.)

and only take their meds when they “remember”.

Those quotes better be because you are direct quoting them and not because you are trying to induce doubt. It is very well known that people with ADHD have trouble remembering (notice, no quotes here) to take their medication. ADHD is an executive function disorder; meaning they have executive dysfunction. Memory is an executive function. What safety net does the family have for the child’s memory failing them? What are your guardrails?

Have you actually planned, strategized, restructured around the needs of one of the inhabitants in your home?

You know the old adage, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”? Looks like no matter how many times your child has their typical struggles, as their outsourced executive function coach and substitute executive function, you haven’t done your part. It’s not shame on your child anymore ;)

I’ll give you a gimme and if it helps, then you can follow up by engaging the services of an ADHD coach – For those who forget to take their medication, put the medication AND WATER next to the bed. Set two alarms. The first one they wake up and take their meds without having to move anything more than their arm. Then they can go back to sleep. The second alarm, a half hour later (because most ADHD meds reach efficacy a half hour after consumption), is their real get up for the day alarm. They should be able to get up more easily due to the efficacy of the medication. It will take 102 practice days, so for 102 days, you need to get up with the first alarm and supervise that the medication has been taken. After that, the routine will be well worn in so that it can be relied on.

Or, if that’s too much effort on your part – Talk to their psychiatrist about moving them to a non-stimulant. Nonstimulants build up in the system and can tolerate several skipped days while still offering benefits. Stimulants cannot seeing as how they lose efficacy within 24 hours.

My teen has always been troubled. They have always been highly sensitive.

Okay, I am REALLY not seeing all this education about ADHD you claim you have.

Of [curse redacted] course they have always been troubled and “highly sensitive” (aka ADHD). It is a LIFELONG CONDITION. In order to be life long it has to be there from their first breath to their dying day. In fact, as a diagnostic criteria for this label it has to be life long, not caused by some later-occurring trauma.

You act as if this is an excuse. No, dude, you are just telling us that your child has ADHD over and over and over and over and over again in ways that I can tell that YOU don’t know you are. This is like ADHD 101. Where the [curse redacted] did you get your education? Almost watching two whole YouTube videos done by clickbait artists bullshirting? (this last bit meant to provide levity; I heard the whole “you didn’t research, you almost watched two whole YouTube videos” somewhere and thought it was funny) I suspect that you have sought information, but that you’ve been ill served by resources you took to be credible that were instead abelist bias-pushing. If Dr. Gabor Mate was at all in your research folder, then just know you’ve absolutely found your way to the wrong information. You are looking for Dr. Ned Hallowell and Dr. Russell Barkley.

You are and continue to be completely unskilled in parenting ADHD. Please own this. Once you do, then you will be open to positive changes. Else, you’ll lose your child. Parenting a child of a neurotype you do not possess is all in the logic brain and cannot come from the intuition brain.

Edited because I read other comments of yours – You seem to have had incredibly poor luck in the ways you reached out for help. Not all therapists, in fact I’d be wiling to say it is a minority of therapists and they are specialists, are able to assist a neurodivergent household. Neurotypical therapy DOES NOT WORK for a neurodivergent home; in fact it harms more than it helps. Your local CHADD or ADDA chapter will be able to point you to therapeutic professionals with neurodivergent qualifications who can provide actionable guidance to make things better. This level of therapeutic professional you need is a very niche specialist who only deals in neurodivergence. So one of the hallmarks of someone who isn’t able to help is someone whose PsychologyToday profile offers therapy for more than just neurodivergent families/households/individuals.

it’s been 13 years lying, deceitful and sneaky behavior, provable fabrication of events, and denials of truths

Okay, but that’s just typical child-with-ADHD. Show me a child with ADHD and I’ll show you a liar who fabricates events and denies truths.

Would you like to know why? Read on!

Because the child with ADHD has been held to standards that are absolutely completely out of whack with who they are biologically (yes ADHD is a biology condition which is why medication is effective). But being children, they aren’t able to articulate. So they lie because it ‘makes the problem go away’. What problem?

The parent asking them if they’ve done their homework. They say yes instead of – No, I haven’t done my homework yet because despite wanting to, I cannot get my body to cooperate with my desires. I absolutely intend to have it done by the time it is due, I’m a good child who enjoys homework and wants to meet those expectations. I’ll do it as soon as my body starts following my brain’s directions and sits down/picks up a pencil. If I tell you I haven’t done it yet, you’ll ask me, “Why?” and I just cannot explain to you because though TheInfamousJ is able to type all this out, that’s because she’s 22 years my senior so has learned a lot of metacognition I don’t have seeing as how my brain isn’t even finished developing yet. I don’t have the words. So yes, Dad [or whatever parent you are], I’ve done my homework because by tomorrow afternoon this statement will be true anyway and it saves me from having to deal with your ish about me, my brain, and how completely unacceptable it and I am to you. … except that time where my body starts following my brain’s directions? It never came before the homework was due. I need help. But you are punishing me rather than assisting me.

and so it goes

My thoughts are that puberty is a hard time. And a sleepy time. And a time that basically the brain is taken over by a chemical soup not far divorced from pregnancy-brain or postpartum-brain. If pubescent children were on the whole tidy, there wouldn’t be tropes about horrifically tossed teenager rooms, so not cleaning up after themselves seems developmentally apt.

If the child doesn’t meet your standards for cohabiting or vacationing, don’t take them. Your own child can relate to their friend in a different scenario.

Sleeping in a closet isn’t typical behavior, no, but it is also harmless. Perhaps the closet was a dark or quiet space which they needed in order to sleep and while they, too, think closet sleeping is weird, the alternative was no sleep at all because too bright or loud. It is tempting to fill in an unknown with a narrative, but your narrative is no more valid than my counterproposed narrative in this paragraph.

I wouldn’t tell her parent anything unless asked directly. I wouldn’t assume that the parent lacks the ability to see the same things you’ve seen as I doubt the behavior you saw is any different except in the better direction than how she behaves at home.

The only thing I can offer you is that motivation isn’t the currency of the ADHD brain. Importance isn’t the currency of the ADHD brain. The only currency of the ADHD brain is INTEREST. As in, “Oh, this is interesting to me.”

It sounds as if school isn’t capturing their interests. Can changes be made so that school is interesting? Harder classes? Different electives? Anything?

And trust me, you don’t want unmanaged ADHD behind the wheel of a car. There’s a reason we of the ADHD brain have a shorter life expectancy on average, and that’s because the deaths that bring down the average are almost all vehicularly related. I’d back off that expectation until the ADHD is under control.

Is there a psychiatrist in play? Medication ought to be lowering the activation energy/removing or easing the barrier-to-action between your child and the things they are interested in and actually want to do, and it sounds as if that isn’t happening.

As a parent with ADHD and a parenting coach with lots of experience parenting ADHD children (though none my bio kids; my own bio kid is too young for their ADHD to be any of the known struggles) – You have to back down, not ride harder. Sure, one of the ways to overcome the barrier-to-action is unholy terror which puts in place fight-or-flight and can get one over the barrier BUT existing in that state endlessly is super duper bad and leads to serious hard burnout and trauma from constantly being The Problem. I know that riding them has been effective thus far, but under the hood, the way it has been effective has done long term harms. As a family, you all need to learn new management and coping skills. You need to stop overfunctioning. Family therapy (which is different in nature than couples therapy or individual therapy) is the direction to go here. ADHD isn’t a person’s problem, it’s a family problem. Especially when it involves a child who need parents to teach and guide them in to how to exist as prosocially as possible with the brain they never asked for but nonetheless were given. You aren’t teaching them how to exist with their brain, you are teaching them how to exist with your brain; they don’t have your brain. ADHD isn’t a malfunctioning neurotypical brain any more than neurotypicality is a malfunctioning ADHD brain. Both are okay and both are different. Think horses and zebras - both okay, both different, both rideable, both with manes and tails, both with hooves, both about the same size, but a zebra is not a malfunctioning horse nor a horse a malfunctioning zebra. A horse cannot teach the zebra how to horse, it would be bad for the zebra.

My own Mother called my ADHD Father some names (deadbeat is the one you chose to call) and when I realized I related to my Father due to same neurotype, I realized two things: (a) my mother would call me a deadbeat too simply because she doesn’t know how to coexist with a neurodivergent person and so her response is disgust and shaming and (b) living in the house with her was going to be supremely traumatic to me because she’s going to take out her discomfort and ignorance on me in the worst ways. I got out of the house. Your child has not.

Might I suggest that your education come from ADDitude Magazine’s webinar series? It is free as a podcast. And I would like to extend an invitation to you to join the How to ADHD Discord as there is a whole parenting section for advice on parenting ADHD children as well as another section called “Hearts asking Brains”. You, not having ADHD, would be a heart. And the adult ADHD brains can offer insights you might not otherwise have been exposed to.

If you feel comfortable with a book in English, check out the book “Why Will No One Play With Me”. It sounds as if there may be some neurodivergence going on and from only what you have mentioned here, this limited information fits almost exactly the pattern for ADHD. But there’s obviously more information you aren’t disclosing.

ADHD is highly heritable which makes sense that like parent like child.

Child psychiatrist is who you take her to for a diagnosis. Once you know where to look for strategies, which is what that diagnosis tells you, then you can start supporting her in all the best ways she’d benefit from.

Thanks for being a concerned parent.

Having to do the work to learn healthy techniques to healthily regulate one’s own emotions so that one can coregulate small humans who are just learning how to do the alive thing and then actually putting into place what one has learned is a challenge vs not doing any of this? You don’t say. /s

These preliminary findings, which will be submitted soon for publication, should be interpreted with caution since the diversity of our sample was limited.

The authors polled 100ish parents across the country; just 100ish parents. Are any of you all family studies scholars? Is this really something which would be published with this kind of study design simply due to the inclusion of the “should be interpreted with caution” caveat? Like, in a reputable peer-reviewed journal, published? My background has me completely flabbergasted that something of this nature would come to be and I need reassurance that it is okay in its field.

a 36-year-old mother of two children under 5 reflected that she often feels like she “has nothing to give” and gets “easily overstimulated and overwhelmed all day every day.” She ended her reflections with the simple confession: “I often feel out of control.”

Oh lovely woman, you’ve skipped a few grades in Gentle Parenting. The first steps are to learn effective and healthy techniques to regulate one’s own emotions. You, my darling lovely woman with two under five, have not. You are burned out, overstimulated, and overwhelmed because you haven’t. One cannot pour from an empty teacup and no teacher was ever deemed effective who taught from the textbook without having a deep understanding of the material.

I fear that situations like the above will lead to mass impressions on the youth that respectful, emotionally intelligent parenting is useless simply because children are not unaware of burned out, tapped out, stressed out, touched out, and overstimulated parents. They are more attuned than we know.

It took me twenty years, a lot of therapy, several post graduate degrees, and twenty one children raised from bottles to backpacks as the AIC (adult in charge) during weekday daytime hours as a nanny to dial in my ability to healthily regulate my own emotions and sensory needs without disadvantaging any children who came into my area of effect. Save the Duggars, I don’t think any actual parents (note, gentle reader, I am also an actual parent of a darling son) will have the opportunity to go through 20+ children as part of their learning curve. I think that Gentle Parenting is a fabulous and delightful ideal to aim for, but perhaps more realistic is Good Enough Parenting where you sometimes let them be angry without having to tell them that they are angry (footnote), while you go sip your tea in another room while it is still hot.

(footnote) Telling someone the name of their emotion in the moment without, you know, helping them with what to do with it, is unhelpful but it makes for great Instagram reels. Imagine yourself, very, very, very, very thirsty and unable to get a drink. Along comes someone who can provide you with a drink. Instead, they turn to you and say, “You are thirsty.” And then they sit with you in your thirst. Rather than, you know, getting you a drink or anything. You’d gain a vocabulary word, but no skills. Same here with naming emotions. Magda Gerber was on the right track but she didn’t get to the station, if you follow my analogy. And “Good Inside” can be summarized on a fortune cookie as: “They aren’t giving you a hard time, they are having a hard time. Your experience is accidental.” This, too, isn’t the station.

I’m reading this from my laptop in my bed with my baby tucked up in his bassinet within arm’s reach (which, amusingly enough, is the product name of the bassinet as well). My goal is to co-sleep in the roomsharing sense for the first year since I am breastfeeding.

Have I fallen asleep with him in the same bed as me? Absolutely. Did it the first night after he was born, in the hospital, even. I was in labor for over 24 hours and was knackered. The nurse came in and gently took him from me and put him back in the plastic box by my side. Hospital was big on “rooming in”.

So, because I knew I absolutely could involuntarily head off to slumberland while breastfeeding, I took care to set my bed to be as safe as possible should this occur. It’s like wearing a seatbelt in a car – no plans for an accident, but just in case.

And let me tell you, my mental health is great! I know enough about me to know that my mental health would be far worse if I had to trudge down the hall in order to breastfeed at night or chastised myself for sharing a bed at such times as my body desperately needed sleep so took it. And with me sane in the membrane, I’m the kind of parent kiddo deserves in terms of personal quality. He doesn’t deserve me loopy from sleep deprivation; so I’m not, mostly.

I’m a nanny. I provide childcare in the child’s home. I’m hired by the parents. And those essential oil, antivax, homeschooling parents? They PROUDLY tell the world that they bedshare. In fact, during interviews they quiz me to find it out if I’ll cuddle their child for the child’s naps because that’s the only way kid knows how to sleep.

I’m pretty sure the ones who lie to their pediatricians are those who are much more mainstream, based on how many times I’ve gone searching for a child’s sleep sack only to find it in the parent bed, the parent bed unmade, and a clear impression of a sleeping child still in the pillowtop. But they won’t even admit it to me, who doesn’t care and just wants to know where the sleep sack is.

When did this become a contentious topic.

When people decided to make the perfect the enemy of the good. I don’t know what concise term it is that is happening here, but it is the same as Time Out. So before Time Out was a thing, parents would assault their children simply because they, the parents, felt upset or frustrated with their children existing as new people who were still learning. In order to keep children from being hit so hard they’d welt or bruise, the public health authorities convinced parents that Time Out was by far more effective – go sit in a corner by yourself! The only thing it was more effective at was getting that child out of the walloping range of an emotional parent; the goal. But if the public health authorities told those parents that, they’d keep hitting their kids. Time Out is not actually an effective teaching tool and for parents who aren’t inclined to beat children, it’s actually a poor choice to make vs taking the teachable moment to teach. So it isn’t really A Good Thing as it has been branded. But if it saves even one child from harm, let’s spread the good word.

Same with this one. Some children were overlaid by inebriated parents. Saying that children in the bed is A Bad Thing will save the lives of children whose parents are prone to inebriation and would otherwise have bedshared with them. And since it saves even one child from harm, we spread the good word. However, much like the parent who isn’t going to beat their child above, there is also the parent who avoids intoxicants.

Yet people like hard and fast rules and like sanctimony. So they’ll stan No Kids in the Bed under all circumstances without noting the nuance.

Personally, we follow the Safe Sleep 7, though baby spends more sleeping hours in his own bassinet than in our bed. Yet sometimes, only proximity to parents will do at night and so we make it as safe as possible so we can all get some much needed sleep.

Weird how they lump cosleeping as both the same surface and same room. Very different situation for the safety of the child, especially when they are under 2.

They do that because in both cases, the child can hear the breathing of the parents so is unlikely to succumb to the part of SIDS where they stop randomly breathing during the night (happens to all children as brains learn to brain) without restarting (this part doesn’t happen to all children). Apparently hearing breathing is good for reminding a new brain to do the breathing thing.

That said, bedsharing and roomsharing have been studied separately under their own titles.

Dinner means night. Surely the child won’t be awake for 6 hours. You will likely do toddler dinner then bed time routine and then they will be asleep. Ask to go over a day early to shadow the bedtime routine.

A lot of people like the Fair Play deck of playing cards.

My answer is that there are work hours and there are parenting hours. When the full-time worker is at work, so is the at-home-maid-of-all-work (stay at home). BUT, and here’s the key, when the full-time worker comes home, the at-home-maid-of-all-work is off duty as well. Which means that weekend cleaning chores are shared, childcare is shared (it’s called parenting), loading the dishwasher is shared. Just because there’s a stay-at-home spouse, it doesn’t mean the full-time worker is exempt from household duties.

Since there are children in the picture, the main duties of the at home spouse are the safe care for the children and the age appropriate education and stimulation of the children. Perhaps children’s laundry. If you are lucky, household laundry. And maybe supervising contractors and vendors coming to service the home. But that is the entire job description of the at home spouse. Nanny (what I’ve just described) is a FULL TIME PAID JOB. Expecting an at home spouse to be able to do more than a full time job in the hours of a full time job is tempting, but unreasonable.

Does this make sense?

(For reference: I’m a nanny by profession so I am in a house all day with children and can give reasonable guidance as to what one individual can accomplish with children underfoot. By simply duplicating the nanny role, the at home spouse is saving the family five to six figures in outlay were they to hire me, instead. That’s enough. And ought be equivalent to the earnings of the full-time worker.)

I did notice that when signing up for an account, I got stuck in the wheel of death. Photos @ https://we.tl/t-ltrqpoTrpI

I could only access settings, no other options.

I avoid confusing phrases once I’ve learned that the phrases confuse the children. So for this child, I would have “put” and I would have “trash”. And as I pointed to something or handed them something I would either say “put” or “trash”. Clearly, the word “away” is presenting a challenge to them that is making this more difficult than it needs to be at this time in their life. Later on we can work on multi word phrases, maybe closer to 1 1/2 or two. Right now, one word.

I like to play a game I call toddler fetch. You throw a ball, and then they go fetch it and bring it back to you, and then you throw it again. You can use a soft inside ball to do that.

Another game I like to play involves them running back and forth across your field of vision, and you have a ball, and your goal is to hit them as they run back-and-forth. This is usually a soft ball, and an indoor activity, and you need to be intentionally bad at hitting them because the whole point is to get them to run back-and-forth and get tired. I play this particular game while sitting down, when I’m tired myself.

As a non-verbal crawler, they can still do a version of toddler fetch which is more like crawler fetch. Since they are crawling they will have to dribble - think soccer - the ball back to you instead of simply bringing it as would happen in toddler fetch. While you can explain the rules, it does help to just simply get excited when they bring the ball back and they figure that out really fast.

Slice the homework into small chunks and allow her to alternate: bit of homework - play for a short period of time (15 mins? 5 mins?) - bit of homework - play for a short period of time

It seems like this proposal will make the completion of homework take more time than sitting down and doing it one go, but if you add in the procrastination and struggle of sitting down and doing it in one go, this is actually shorter in time frame.

I work as a nanny and am forever being asked by parents to recommend a baby logging app they can use with the other caregivers for their children. Data security has always been paramount so my previous top choice didn’t offer sync or sharing in order to keep the data safe.

The biggest feature is that it’s entirely end to end encrypted

I think your app has now become my new top recommendation because this is the one thing I’ve been waiting for in other baby logging apps! Thank you for the work you’ve done!

My chid is too young to have a phone but I’m a career nanny with experience. You’ve tried the rudeness angle and it isn’t sticking, so let me ask some questions:

1. Do you put a Call to Action in your texts? Something like, “Reply with a 👍 to let me know you received this.”? She’s still a child so as adults we do still have to do some of the executive load lifting.

2. When you ask her what the barrier is to her replies, what does she report? Is she falling prey to the, “I’ll do it in a minute,” thing which never happens because you never do it in a minute? If so, can you mentor her through realizing that such an inclination is a lie and what to do instead?

Some of this yes. Some of this no.

Every arm and leg wiggle, every eye blink, every coo and fart and startle.

This is the no. First of all, at this phase the child is a synesthete. The arm and leg wiggles are not communication but stimulus response. Espying the color red may be why the leg wiggled. While delightful to a parent, don’t make more of it than it is.

Also, they cannot coo at this stage. You may have confused the social smiling/cooing phase for what the OP is commenting on. The OP is referring to far earlier in development.

The startles are reflexive. The Morrow reflex. It is also not communication. It is just an instinct hardwired in to a primate brain to prevent newborn death by putting the primate newborn in a position to grab on to an adult’s body fur and thus prevent falling to their death.

I find this phase personally delightful because you get to see the human BIOS on which their person operating system is shortly to be installed, but it is absolutely okay for people not to, just like some computer enthusiasts love a BIOS and others don’t. So long as one isn’t neglectful, it is okay to not be enthralled.

She is amazing and I love her so much, but she’s boring! … How do you feel?

You aren’t wrong. And so many people will come for you with pitchforks and torches for having said so. But you aren’t wrong. Before ~ 6 weeks when they get social smiling, they really are potatoes that you care for. They have lots of amazing development going on inside, but on the outside you water, fertilize, give sunlight, and weed your potato and your potato … sits there.

I actually call this The Grub Phase because they remind me of grubs: eating, eliminating waste, growing, leaking fluids in weird ways (not that this stops, mind you, a common statement exiting my lips at the toddler stage is, “Why are you sticky?”), and wriggling/writhing but mostly not going anywhere.

What’s your favorite stage of child development?

I love the lying phase which occurs between 5 and 7 on average. It is also the boundary testing phase. I love seeing what children think might be possible. They sometimes have the freedom of unconstrained creativity to come up with some solutions that are possible and while inelegant are a fresh new approach to problems. Of course, the payment for all of this delight is dealing with all of their sassy pushback on everything and sometimes undetectable lies due to their plausability, but it is worth it IMHO.

The parent outsourced their thought processing to the groupthink of a Facebook mom-group and never gave it a second thought.

In my due date/birth/parenting group* , the common response to anyone mentioning that their child is plagued by gas, writhing discomfort credited to gas or constipation, or constipation, is one of two things – chiropractor or probiotics. Mind you, my child isn’t even as old as an infant, they are new born new born new born. Kids at that age just have digestive issues because it is the only body system that hasn’t been used in utero so it has to work the kinks out land-side. But given that the comments are overwhelmingly in favor of these two absolutely awful choices** because we who follow science-based parenting have fled the group to save our brain beans by not spending every hour of every day countering the essential oil mommies, I can see where a truly bewildered new parent who doesn’t know how to vet credibility might conclude that a seemingly unanimous response means it is the right thing to do.

Now, I still am struggling with how, if you’ve had a child and have a pediatrician, you might not know how to vet credibility. Seems obvious to me that the one who went to med school is credible. But the world has all kinds.

So yes, I do suspect that your reasoning is the answer.

*I don’t know what to call it. It started out as a due date bump-buddies group when I first learned I was pregnant and has evolved now that the children are born.

**For the lurking parents or parents-to-be who are skeptical about the claim I casually tossed out: Chiropractic at best does nothing but is a parental placebo and at worst can permanently injure the child. Nothing but milk or formula is supposed to be given to a child before 4 months of age lest there be risks of life threatening infection as seen in the parent article.

good bot

A lot of parenting advice comes from “I tried X thing at the same time that the behavior happened to change” and a lot of the time what the parent was doing when the change happened was a coincidence (see B.F. Skinner’s superstitious pigeons).

THIS. If nothing else, THIS. So THIS.

“the phase where they’re basically a potato”

I’m laughing because I call this “the grub phase” because grubs eat, poop, sleep, and generally wiggle a bit. Glad to see I’m not the only one who has a pithy nickname for this phase.

Sounds about newborn. :D

I’m not a fan of any age or stage under age 1 when they start getting toddling and verbal. I’m not someone who is gaga for babies.

If I may offer any advice it is this – take pictures and video of the really dull, repetitive moments. Some day, you might think back and wish to engage in nostalgia. Or you might not. Or they might have kids of their own and ask you about the dull, repetitive moments and you’ll want some reference material. Or they might not. But digital video is basically free so it is better to have and not need then need and not have. And besides, playing documentary videographer adds some interest to the dull, repetitive moments.

Ask your children. Ask them what they think about handling birthday parties, playdates, etc. Your children share your values and so will have a more clear idea about how to navigate their friendships. In this, you’ll be polishing their rough plan, but they are the best ones to come up with a rough plan.

Thanks for letting me know. I’m obviously a novice in this area.

Me too! The internet is amazing!

PM me and let’s exchange some details.

PM sent. :)

Sadly, no one has. Apparently the venn diagram of those who know how to 3D model and those who like this bento box have no overlap.

Where I live they also don’t encourage loose garbage or even garbage in loosely tied or untied bags. The reason here is that uncontained garbage subjected to a brisk wind, which we have plenty of, becomes litter. And no one wants to award themselves a ZeroWaste badge when they are directly contributing to landscape litter.

I work in the childcare sector and the only reason I can afford to have a child of my own (which I do) is because I have the fringe benefit of being able to bring my child to work with me for free. I know some places allow a parent to bring their child for a discount which still might make having a child unreachable given the wages we earn in the childcare sector; but my child’s tuition is completely waived.

This creates a perverse incentive in that some of my colleagues who work for other employers drop out of the workforce and accept government assistance for the duration of the time their children are in need of daily care. Once the children age in to a pre-K or HeadStart program or age into regular elementary school, they rejoin the workforce. But for those first 3, 4, or 5 years, they are on welfare because they simply cannot afford childcare.

Also, thank you for the Gift Link. Much appreciated so that I could read the article.

The cost of providing child care is getting far too expensive for working parents, while wages of the actual child care workers are insufficient to actually keep people in that career.

From what I - a childcare worker - have been able to figure out over the past decade when I’ve made note of this becoming a trend, this is called a “market failure”. And also it is known to the US Government but they don’t feel the need to do anything about it such as nationalize the childcare sector like they did to the previous child-related market failure: elementary education.

I’m J. I’ve been with my partner for four years and we have a 5 week old son.

In my professional life I have worked for over a decade as a professional nanny - master’s degree, it’s not babysitting, yes like what the UK royal family has. Though I’ve only been a legitimate parent for a few weeks, I’ve seen that it isn’t very different from nannying in the mechanical aspects (changing a diaper is changing a diaper) only in the self-regulation/emotional/energy OF MYSELF aspects (with nannying, I could clock out and sleep), so I hope that some of my professional expertise can translate here.