ILX Parenting 6: "Put Some Goddamn Pants On Before You Go Outside!" is a thing I say now

if indeed we get the "sleep 18 hours and can't get out of bed" variety of the sickness

yep I was just wondering what to do in that situation and the answer is still 'I have no idea'

My 2yo keeps lying down near the stairs and calling me saying 'fall down, big bump'

frogbs otm

If it were just me in an apartment full of books and bourbon and guitars, I would prolly be like "yeah, I've had an okay run."

But with a partner and with tiny people depending on me/us? That is a different calculus.

Even just one parent going into a fevered isolated stupor for a month would NOT be workable, as the other person would have to become simultaneously the main breadwinner AND main caregiver.

Not possible for me to accomplish on my best day. My wife is great but also... no. Could not work.

hi people guardians,

just dropping in to say: I'M STILL NOT HAVING A BABY!!

but for those that do, you might find this interesting or useful:

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/fangraphs-prep-build-your-own-team-hall-of-fame/

Build Your Own Team Hall of Fame
Overview: A two-week unit centered around the Hall of Fame.

You’ve just been appointed the director of your favorite team’s Hall of Fame. Your first task is to evaluate a single player for possible election to the Hall. Then, you’ll build a new set of criteria for election and determine which players are eligible.

Learning Objectives:

Identify a main thesis or point
Form arguments to support the thesis or main point
Research facts and data to support arguments
Construct a compelling persuasive essay with proper structure
Review criteria for evaluation and suggest changes or improvements to your team’s Hall of Fame
Explain the reasoning behind making those changes or improvements
Evaluate a dataset using a set of criteria to identify data points that fit
Project potential fits based on historical data

just thought it was a cool idea that sneaks in some legit educational value, and although it says Grades 9-10, i think i would have loved this the most when i was in 6th grade.

i'm a big fan of emily oster's expecting better. turns out she has a mailing list that has, for the past couple of months, been pretty detailed explainers on what data we have/how to make decisions about parenting These Days.

https://emilyoster.substack.com/ (click “let me read it first” to see the archive)

some good ones

https://emilyoster.substack.com/p/pregnancy-covid-19-updates
https://emilyoster.substack.com/p/can-kids-transmit-the-virus
https://emilyoster.substack.com/p/grandparents-and-day-care

we're having to decide whether to send my kid back to school for the final 6 weeks if they reopen as the govt is hoping. initially I was like "No way" but I'll admit I'm tempted now. they will be in a group of max 15 kids with various steps taken to keep everything clean.

we live in a fairly rural region with only 350 ppl in hospital for COVID in the whole of the region (population approx 5.6m).

We’re in the same boat Kinder, except we’re in a city and are almost certainly carrying antibodies now (see Rona thread) so the risk of our child passing it on or catching it from others isn’t so much of an issue for us. Our priority is his mental health as a six-year-old only child. At the moment he sees nobody his own age and has an impatient home tutor. Pods of 15 at school, with the entire afternoon spent outside seems infinitely preferable given our set of circumstances. Thank goodness we got into the school with masses of outdoor space - quite the rarity in London.

There seems to be a lot of concern with kids getting Kawasaki disease post-COVID but not sure if that's just internet scaremongering or has basis in fact. (There are some news articles about it but nothing to imply it's widespread)

it is very low risk but it does appear to be real. it’s not Kawasaki but it is like it.

madchen, how are you guys all feeling physically now? hope you're through the worst. I'm sure school will be a welcome return to a bit of normality and sounds like you're well set.

My kids are older (youngest is 13) but we won't be sending them back before September at the earliest. But we have no pressure to do so: both my wife & I have been working from home since the start & for me at least that'll continue for a long time it seems.

There seems to be a lot of concern with kids getting Kawasaki disease post-COVID but not sure if that's just internet scaremongering or has basis in fact. (There are some news articles about it but nothing to imply it's widespread)

― groovypanda, Friday, May 22, 2020 5:24 AM (thirteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's pretty frightening, but it appears to affect about 1 in a 1000 children who get covid.

a teacher suggested we get our kids some noise cancelling headphones to use for school meetings - has anyone gotten anything like this and can recommend something?

I got my kids the Taotronics ones. I think they’re like $70. They seem to work well.

$50 now on amzn

mordy how come?

Noisy house hard to focus sometimes

Our school system, in trying to cope with Covid-19, sent out a message in the beginning of May stating

The final second-semester grade for students in high school level courses can be no lower than the grade earned in the third marking period...

My teenager has had a really rough time keeping his grades up in high school, but in third marking period, he turned his shit around and even managed to get on the honor roll. So in light of the announcement by the school system, he decided to bunk most of his online classes and just smoke pot and hang out with his friends. After all, he was going to get good final grades, so why do the work?

for his own good?

our schools just aren't doing final grades this last term.

Yes, I definitely had to explain that doing the work was integral to his education and the continued development of his brain, as well as respecting his teachers who are still there grading his work. He got really pissed off at me for that.

this was a huge battle here with the 9-year-old. we got a progress report a few weeks ago showing that they were at risk of failing most classes for the last quarter because they weren't turning in homework or classwork. the policy here is that if you get a grade better than your last report card, you get a grade, but if you do the same or worse, you just get a pass. but you can still fail if you don't do enough work. so then we had a ton of stress pushing them to make up a ton of work over a couple of weeks, where my wife and i basically had to sit with them for hours at a time to help them (ie prod them into giving decent answers) and make sure stuff got turned in.
it was really frustrating bc they have almost straight a's for the first three quarters of the year, so the problem obviously isn't intelligence or ability, it's expecting fourth graders to suddenly know how to manage an email inbox and virtual classroom and self-motivate and avoid distractions with no training or information. i guess my wife and i should've been monitoring more from the beginning but all the assignment info is behind the kid's google classroom login that we don't have, plus we're both working full-time and also trying to parent another kid.
anyways we got their grades up to A and B levels but it really sucked and was very stressful

My 9-year-old is doing pretty well, thank god. She gets down to work every day. There were a few problem days where I've gone into her room to check on her and she was just sitting there moping because "I don't know what to write." So I had to reiterate the fact that I would help guide her through her assignments and if I couldn't, then her teacher was available . If there's one thing I'd like to hammer into my kids it's "ask for help". The younger one is often too timid to speak up and the older one just thinks its the assignment's fault for being so useless.

My kids' school was already not very challenging. The distance-learning version of their school was hella basic. I think SFUSD did the same thing where you couldn't get any worse grades than what you had when they started distance-learning. Schools out at this point, and now we are trying to find stuff for them to do all summer.

ours was already complaining about school before quarantine, and it's just really hard to get them to focus on schoolwork when they could be talking to their friends online or playing on the ipad instead. we had set dedicated "academic times" during the weekdays and checked in with them about what they were working on but not actually looking at their work or making sure stuff was getting turned in. which was a mistake.

My (12yo) daughter had good grades going into the last quarter. As and Bs.

Yes, she could have brought some of them up, but... why? Like, none of us could think of a reason. Pretty much every school-age kid in the world has an asterisk placed against this year anyway. And given the inequality concerns (kids without access to tech and internet access, kids in less stable homes, kids with less privilege and less fortunate parents, etc.), we didn't press.

Keeping the connections open, fostering mental health, practicing self-care, doing creative stuff,, maintaining friendships, and the pressing need to focus on social justice instead? Those are all way more important than a bunch of bullshit busywork math worksheets anyway.

Frankly, smoking pot and hanging out with friends is exactly what I would be doing if I were a teenager right now, so I am not really in a position to judge her.

The younger one did take advantage of the fact that she knew I was locked up in a Zoom meeting all afternoon yesterday so that she could spend a couple hours watching Minecraft/Sims/etc Youtubers instead of going back to her school work after lunch. But mostly she's been honest.

The task of parenting full-time, working full-time, running a household, while ALSO being the principal (and the only teacher) of a home school was impossible on its face.

It was and is impossible, and we knew that going in. (For the nerds: Kobayashi Maru.) So everything you are doing, or not doing, is right.

My younger (9yo) child is intellectually disabled. Normally he is in full-time special education. He needs to be walked through each assignment in real time.

Ordinarily he has a 1:1 aide; now it's just us. So we treat school as low-pressure best effort. If he uses scissors correctly once a week we are ecstatic. If he dresses himself 2 out of 7 days we throw a party. This is our life now.

part of the stress was i was mostly focused on getting the kid's grades up to passing level, but my wife was trying to get them to finish every single assignment and get straight a's. we ended up splitting the difference.

Yeah, we're lucky that my wife is an elementary school librarian, so she can ride herd on the boys while I work in the litterbox room.

'Home-schooling' my difficult Y9 boy is so fucking hard. He's so detached and apathetic, and so combative and confrontational with any sort of outside input, that every school-related interaction tends to go only one way. I deal with kids like that in class all the time, but it's contained, I can cajole and have a few sticks to beat them with. Home here, I don't have any of that - beyond 'fine, don't have your X-Box' but that's so old and I feel like a prick doing it over and over again. Plus, he's 14 and I was a useless oaf at 14, so am continually letting myself off, by proxy.

My 11yr old daughter is a breeze in comparison: conscientious to the point of madness.

I'm a teacher and my missus is a nurse. I'm currently teaching pretty much full-time (remotely). Short version: fuck this.

ime y9 boys are the worst, no offence

Our 5 year old is lashing out like crazy. Screaming in our faces when she doesn't get what she wants, saying what she wants over and over and over again. We're starting her in tele-play therapy and we're taking parenting classes online to figure out how to deal with it. We've handled it as well as we could until yesterday when even their mom snapped. It is extremely hard to be measured and cool when someone is angrily screeching as loud as they can a foot from your face. I have taken to wearing earplugs. Yesterday I took video of her meltdown and showed it to her after she cooled down. She hid from herself.

Our ten year old doesn't get enough attention because the younger one needs so much. We've been cooped up together since schools shut down and it feels like our brains are melting. My parents live out in the country and aren't taking the virus very seriously so we've been avoiding them but yesterday was enough. They're going to my parents for a week tomorrow because we can. not. take. it. any. more.

I feel like a big part of it is that the 5 year old hasn't been around other kids in months and she's burnt out on other people being bigger than her, telling her what to do. We wrestled with what to do in July when we have to go back to work. The kids REALLY need to be around other kids but cases in Houston are going up. So we're hiring a nanny. It's starting to feel like child abuse to keep them away from other kids. Knowing that all of this is going to drag on longer because Greg Abbott has no commitment to the public health is beyond frustrating. If schools don't open up in August as planned I don't know what the fuck we're going to do.

I love my kids so much but when my mom takes them away tomorrow I will be overwhelmed with relief.

My 5-year-old is the easier one, but he's a social person and two months away from his peers hasn't been great for him either. We actually sent him back to school this week, and while I generally think of him as the better behaved kid, the house feels a lot calmer and easier to deal with without him here, and he's loving being at school too. I mean, I also hope he doesn't bring back the coronavirus.

she's burnt out on other people being bigger than her, telling her what to do.

I very much agree about them needing peer time. The main problem with my boy is that he doesn't want face-to-face peer time. He suffers from (as yet undiagnosed) anxiety, which is currently manifesting as extreme OCD and germophobia, so is extremely reluctant to leave the house. He's had counselling in the past but covid has sent his OCD stratospheric so christ knows what we'll do to help him readjust. His current routine is to battle with us for a few hours about homework and then play his Xbox with his mates. If I close my eyes and put my fingers in my ears I occasionally convince myself he'll be OK.

And aye, kinder, objectively Y9 boys *are* the worst.

We took a calculated risk in allowing our son to go to his regular babysitter two days a week. We agonized a lot about it but it has been a lifesaver, allowing us to get some work done and just frickin get a break from his demands.

He's always better behaved for other people than for us. There's a joke about how dogs have owners; cats have staff. It does seem like to my son, a babysitter is an authority figure. Mama and Dada are staff.

(mis-post deleted)

chinaski, sorry that was meant to imply that they get better when they're no longer yr9 boys!

That's what I took it to mean, kinder - here's hoping! I see (well, saw) upwards of 80 Y9s every week and have a range of archetypes. My boy seems to be a new archetype; may indeed be a new species, as yet undiscovered by science.

I'm suspicious of the way educationalists use neuroscience in a hand-wavy way, but I'd love to get a look inside an adolescent's brain, just to see what the actual fuck is going on. I bet it's like the Somme in there.

We have let our teen go out to see his friends since the beginning of this. He has one group that he was hanging out with, and they spent a couple months building bike jumps in one guy's backyard. It was not ideal, but I've known from having to ground him a few times recently that keeping him in the house really effects his mental health. And I know from arguments in years previous about wearing bike helmets and wearing shorts in 30 degree weather that he's way too stubborn for me when rationality doesn't prevail.

We've kept the daughter with us and tried to give her as much space as she needs. She has used this space to obsessively watch video game youtubers. We'll take her out on walks to her favorite places around the neighborhood and stuff. Last week she got to see two of her friends and it was a great little test run. One family only let us hang for a brief 15-minute outdoor visit. The other one we spent an hour or two at one of our local beaches.

There's an Australian play called "year 9 are animals" which we studied when I was in high school :) Its true!

I'm so happy. We bought my teenager a drumset last night. Used, off of one of his friend's parents. Some cheap no-name brand that doesn't even exist anymore, as far as I can tell. But he's in there practicing and trying to figure things out now. I had really been worried about how he's been spending his free time, because other than building bmx jumps in the woods, his hobbies have sort of consisted of smoking pot, CS:GO, watching Netflix, and being at anyone else's house other than ours. He played violin for a couple years in elementary school and I showed him how to play Smoke on the Water or something once on guitar, but that didn't really stick. I love the sound of kids making music.

That is awesome!
My 5-year-old has been having piano lessons with my mom (a piano teacher) a couple of days a week for the past few months and he’s reading music now! So he’s officially learned to read music before he’s learned to read words ha! I’m fine with that.

I think my kid took the piss out of me for the first time today. She’s ten months. She snatched the book I normally read to her out of my hands, opened it out, and started “reading” to me in a mock-pompous voice.

get used to it!

...boomer

My 11yr old (going on 25yr old) tagged me in her Instagram story today as the 'most boring person in her life'.

I mean, she's probably right but OUCH.

hahaha lmao