The person might have been lost and they were texting the person whose house they were looking for.

Addicts come from all socioeconomic groups. You can't assume that because it wasn't an old beater. With that said, it sounds like they could have just been trying to find a house. We have to do something similar every year for Girl Scouts because they seem to keep the cookies at a different house so often. I even joked to our troop leader about how people probably think we're looking for drugs when really we're just trying to pick up our order of Thin Mints. 😂

I think it's completely right and appropriate and in no way even a tiny bit wrong to hate someone who has abused you. I think where it becomes harmful is if instead of acknowledging the feeling and working toward letting it go, you hold onto it. The latter isn't wrong, either. I've held onto negative emotions for a long time, and I don't think I was in any way morally wrong for doing so. But, at the same time, it also wasn't good for me and my mental health. ETA: Also, letting the feeling go doesn't mean you don't think the abuser did anything wrong, or that you forgive them. It only means a person has decided to try not to feel it anymore.

I try not to hate, but I'm not very good at it. I think the Buddhist quote about anger, how it's like holding onto hot coals and expecting the other person to get burned, applies to hate, as well. But like I said, I'm not very good at it and the list of people I hate is probably very long. Hate is kind of ambiguous, too. What I think of as "hate" might be another person's "intense dislike."

I'm glad to hear you guys are working with a great mental health facility. Like someone else mentioned, don't be afraid of getting a second opinion if you still aren't finding answers. I don't have a rebellious teen, but I was one to some extent, though my dad's mental health issues made mine look like nothing. For me, it was extreme anxiety that went undiagnosed. When you are constantly in fight-or-flight mode, a lot of the time you end up choosing to fight because you reach a point where you can no longer function around other people. I barely slept because of the anxiety as well, which only added to my issues. And even though I was seeing a therapist weekly to help me deal with my dad being whatever the heck he was, no one ever figured out I had obsessive-compulsive disorder. So even professionals can miss stuff.

If sin and pot turned teenagers into violent sociopaths, we never would have survived the nineties. Tough love is going to do exactly jack shit if this boy has a mental illness or personality disorder. In all probability he needs inpatient treatment, meds, and specialized therapy.

Thirty teenage boys? I'm gonna go with all of them. You will need all the buns. 😂

Please, please do not encourage him to try to enlist. Basic training is psychologically difficult for a stable person, never mind someone with the symptoms your DS is exhibiting. The military can teach a lazy person how to have more self-discipline, but it CANNOT cure or treat mental illness. I don't know why so many people think it can do that. When I was in basic training, one of the guys I was training with snapped and attacked a drill sergeant. Thank god it happened in the first phase and not when we were doing rifle training. During AIT they had a special mattress near the main stairwell where they could keep an eye on the soldiers who were suicidal. There was at least one every day. Your son needs to work with mental health professionals. Drill sergeants are not mental health professionals. ETA: I should clarify that I'm bringing up the mattress thing not to tell you that they have a lot of experience dealing with mental illness, but to say LOOK HOW WELL THEY DON'T HANDLE IT. Suicidal? Spend the night on the special suicide mattress where a couple of exhausted teenagers on fire watch can make sure you don't kill yourself when they aren't mopping. It's horrifying.

If that's all you'll be using it for, you aren't going to need much beyond the most basic laptop. A Chromebook would be fine if you don't need to store a large amount of content on the actual machine, but I agree that you should go with at least a 15" screen so the online classes are easy to see. I definitely wouldn't buy anything with less than 12gb RAM, but 16gb would be better because you don't want it to become obsolete too soon. If you're hauling it around a lot in a backpack or whatever a SSD might be a good investment because they're more reliable and don't have all the moving parts of a HDD, but they're also quite a bit more expensive.

So he spent a year in bed after getting expelled from school, and multiple therapists told you he isn't depressed because he has high self-esteem??? You need to get new therapists, ASAP. A person's level of self-esteem has nothing to do with being depressed. I don't mean this in a snarky way, but were these religious counselors who have only had training through a religious program? If so you need to find an actual psychiatrist. And in the meantime, I'd try to get him admitted to an in-patient treatment program if at all humanly possible.

There's a freaking galaxy of difference between teaching your own preschoolers at home and teaching an actual preschool class in a school. I homeschool my kids, no problem. I couldn't even begin to teach my toddler's ECFE class because holy migraine, Batman. You honestly think it's no big deal for qualified preschool teachers with degrees to make minimum wage???

Actually, people disagreed because someone commented that housekeepers are uneducated and as such don't deserve to be paid a living wage. People were disagreeing with the idea that you don't have to pay a housekeeper much, not that housekeepers don't have an A.S. in cleaning or whatever.

I only have a second so I don't have time at the moment to read them myself, but did the meta-analyses you linked all exclude any studies that didn't control for socioeconomic factors? Because in everything I've read, that seems to be the deciding factor in all the supposed overwhelming benefits of breastmilk. Whenever you control for income and education, the benefits either mostly or completely disappear. Except asthma. That seems to be the one thing bfing does actually help prevent, from what I've read. So if I had a family history of asthma, that would definitely make me want to try hard to breastfeed. And we were discussing the *possible* toxicity of breastmilk. Which is certainly a possibility in some situations, and something I would take into account if I was thinking about breastfeeding but I had spent the last few years renovating a historic house or something along those lines that would have caused a high amount of lead exposure. Just like you wouldn't buy formula that tests high for arsenic or mercury, you also wouldn't want to breastfeed if you do lead remediation for a living, or if you eat three cans of tuna fish a day. Breastmilk isn't always the best option no matter the circumstances.

I don't know about mercury, but you can get a lead test at the doctor's office. Also, if your kids had any lead exposure through breastmilk you would probably know because they routinely test for lead around a year old. I'm sure most women don't have high enough levels of heavy metals to cause symptoms in a baby via breastmilk. My point was just that nothing is 100% free from potential risk.

I would love to read the full paper for this if anyone has access: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953614000549

Their position is that breastfeeding is better. NOT that formula is harmful to babies. Kale is better from a nutritional perspective than strawberries. That doesn't mean feeding my children strawberries is harming them.

Whose norm? Evolutionary norms? Biological norms? Because as far as deciding what's healthiest for our bodies, we still can't agree. Cultural norms? Obviously problematic when discussing what mothers "should" do irt breastfeeding. Breastfeeding certainly comes with "increased risks," as well. Anemia isn't at all uncommon among exclusively breastfed babies because breastmilk doesn't have as much iron as formula. Since you like anecdotes so much, my older dd was formula fed, and her iron levels were amazing. My younger dd (twenty months old and still breastfeeding) had a fairly severe case of anemia that required aggressive iron supplementation, which ended up permanently staining her baby teeth. If a mother has significant levels of lead and mercury in her body, that gets passed on to the baby via breastmilk. Boobs do not magically filter out heavy metals. However, formula is FDA regulated. I can go online and read test results for heavy metals in baby formula, then choose the brand that tested the best. I can get organic formula if I want it. Good luck doing that with breastmilk. Everything has some "possibility of harm." Even breastfeeding. Parents need to make the best choice they can based on their current situation, and everyone's situation is different.

Citing sources when asked is silly? If you're going to make an outlandish argument like "Formula feeding causes harm to babies," you'd better have some sources to back it up if you expect anyone to take you seriously. Because I've never seen a single health organization say that formula is hurting babies in the developed world. Science isn't decided on the gut feelings of homeschooling moms.

That's complete and total bullshit. Please cite your sources showing that feeding infants formula can cause "short and long term harm." Because every study I've seen says exactly the opposite- that there is no significant difference between kids who were ff vs. bf. Also, please cite your sources showing that ff kids are having negative outcomes from synthetic DHA.

It's so ridiculous that the first linked study didn't try to control for any other factors at all. Which is the problem with so many of the studies that announced bfing will make your child a wealthy genius. Pretty sure the home environment and family income might have played a role there, too.

SBSK is seriously the purest, kindest thing on the internet. I can't even count the number of times his videos have left me in tears- both happy tears and sad tears. If you only follow one youtube channel, it should be that one.

From the studies and information I've read, if you're comparing modern formula prepared with clean, lead-free water to breastmilk, I don't think there's any significant difference. And I say this as someone who is still breastfeeding a twenty-month-old, so I'm not bitter or jealous or whatever breastfeeding proponents like to claim. I agree with the video that it's all the other factors that make a difference, not the breastmilk itself. And the argument that, "My breastmilk changes colors so it must be better!" is the silliest thing I've ever heard. It changes color depending on diet, just like how raw cow's milk or chicken eggs look or taste different depending on the animal's diet. That doesn't make it superior to modern formula. I mean, my pee turns pink if I eat beets but I'm not going to squirt it in my kid's ear if she gets an ear infection. 🤣

I live in a rural area, and Walmart starts at $15/hour here. No one around here actually pays minimum wage because it's insanely low. You also have to keep in mind that a housekeeper isn't getting a steady eight hours a day. It's sporadic and includes a lot of travel back and forth, which means they need to get paid more per hour to compensate for that if they're going to be able to pay their bills. Comparing them to someone with a steady, full-time job with benefits is apples to oranges. I also take issue with the idea that it's not "an educated position." It may not require a college degree, but an experienced, reliable housekeeper who knows how to clean anything without damaging it and in a reasonable amount of time is worth his/her weight in gold.

I'm sure it varies by area. $15 an hour for a housekeeper would be downright insulting around here. Especially for a good one.

That seems reasonable to me. I would probably write up a brief summary, then run it through Google translate in Lithuanian and give her the translated copy just to make sure she's on board.