Seemesew - just want to tell you how much I feel for you. In the last few years, I felt the same as you - it wasn't homeschooling itself, it was everything around homeschooling that dragged me down. No real advice for you, since I wasn't able to find a way to continue homeschooling with the way that life turned out. Just know that I hope you can find ways to protect and heal your heart. Please keep us all updated. I will definitely be praying for you.

Oh, Mercy - your beautiful, sweet daughter. I think that everything you told her was spot on. Just let her know that she is loved for her good qualities, and that she should protect her heart for the true friends that will come her way. And I hope they will soon. 🙂

Funny you should bring this up. Tomorrow morning both of my kids will be in public school. I'm now out of a job. The first thing that I will be doing is reading Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living. Whatever my remaining years are like, I want to live them fully. I want my "living" to be real life, making a "life-ing", not just earning money. What I'd really like to do is find some way to be a scholar/teacher.

@kfeusse, let me just add another voice saying that if you are skilled in organizing, that's a wonderful gift! Please don't downplay it. Maybe it feels like your gift of organizing is not going out into the world right now to bless others, but keep your ears and eyes open - you never know what might show up. One other suggestion: What if you picked a hobby or skill that you know that you don't do well and work on that just as a challenge? I'm just about to do that myself. I have always been really bad at drawing, but I'm buying a "teach yourself to draw" book just to see if I can improve. Who knows? Best wishes to you, kfeusse! Please let us know what you find out about yourself! Wintermom, this is genius. What a great way to bond with adult kids! I'm going to try to find a way to incorporate this idea with my own kids. (By the way, I love the pictures you posted! Your yard is beautiful! You should feel great about your work!)

Friends, you are all wonderful. Your responses have given me many good things to think about. For those of you who are wondering if daughter may be on the spectrum, too - yes, we've wondered the same thing. She has wondered the same thing herself. She does compensate really well in her behavior, so she's been able to go under everybody's radar for a long time. Maybe when we're not in survival mode we can have her evaluated, but right now we're just trying to get through the days. Thank you for your observations - they confirm what's been tickling the back of our minds. Special thanks to all of you, most particularly @freesia, for advocating for my good girl when my judgement was a little clouded because of being overwhelmed. She really is a good kid, a great kid, and I love her like crazy, but sometimes I'm too tired to show it! I'm going to try to look out for ways to make her feel special. (What she really wants is a trip to Europe - but that's not something I can just make happen quickly!) And more special thanks to @HomeAgain for the recommendation of videos on internet safety. I watched some of them last night, and they were very hard to watch, but so important. I've made a decision that no matter what, watching those videos is going to be a condition of the kids receiving any internet-enabled advice that we pay for. I'm overwhelmed with the advice and insights you all gave me. Thank you!!!

Teachermom, you understand so well! The bolded part is what we're trying to figure out.

Thank you so much for understanding, Katy! We are also a family of three first-borns and only one second born. I've tried to be aware of this his whole life. It's got to be hard on him. 😞

I will definitely look into the course. Thank you! I love the idea of the smartphones being used for safety, as well. We're just very, very slow adopters of new technology. 😉 And my husband works on supercomputers! It's not that "tech" scares us, it's just we like the peace and quiet of not being leashed to electronics.

This is a great point! SKL, You are absolutely right. Thank you for understanding!

No worries! I didn't take it that way. It's just hard to know where to give in and where not to.

You understand, Freesia! We've been trying, and we know she's in a hard situation. We're also trying to get family counseling (we're on several waiting lists right now). We keep telling our kids that they have equal access to our love, our resources, and our energy, but they have different ages, different needs, and different situations. Balancing all of this is hard!

Yep - we've said something similar, but it's not making a difference... Thank you - I'm glad for when the moms have my back!

Well, no, but I do want her to know that we hear her feelings. It's a delicate balance.

Oh wow - I'd never heard of an internet safety course! That sounds like a great idea! Do you have one to recommend? I'm not sure that my husband will ever get a smartphone for us parents. But he has a very good reason - he is not allowed to have one at work (security reasons), so he doesn't want to pay for something that's unavailable to him for most of the day. We may have to move in that direction, though, for the reasons you stated. I'll show him your post and see what he says. Maybe it will work!

Thank you, HomeAgain! I need to use these words with her. I've tried to talk to her about how the screaming demonstrates a lack of maturity, but I think the basis is more 14-year-old's hormones. Hard enough in everything! Freesia, this is a great idea I didn't even know about. We'll look into it! (We really don't have any internet devices at all besides our main computer - it's all unknown territory to me.) Thank you for much for understanding! Yes, there is some of this as well, because son has angry-type-ASD, and daughter thinks that we give in to him "all the time" to keep him from having a tantrum. Managing his emotions is always walking a tight rope - but that's another thread! You are absolutely right, Marbel, but her screaming is really hard on me. Just wondering if anyone has a magical solution that will satisfy her and us at the same time.

This was a recommendation from another boardie a few years ago: Telling Tales in Latin My kids really enjoyed it as a fun review. If your son is only six, unless he is particularly driven, any of the heavier grammar-based Latin may be a little much (as many others have said above). But this little storybook might keep his interest alive for a year or so until his English grammar catches up. (You will need to download the errata sheet, but once you take about ten minutes or so to mark up all the changes, you'll be good to go.) Let's see, Roman Roads Media also has a Latin Readers series called Picta Dicta that might serve the same purpose (though I've never used any of them): https://romanroadspress.com/latin/ (They're a little pricy, but they always have some sales that you can watch for.)

Oh, friends. I’ve had nagging and screaming about this for many months now. Two years ago, daughter was 12 and son was 10. Both were being homeschooled. We were in the pandemic. Both were young. There was no reason to get either kid a smartphone (husband and I don’t even have a smartphone), despite older daughter really wanting one. Now, daughter is 14, son is 12. Both kids are going to public school this fall. Both kids are out and about in town more. “Everyone” has a smartphone at public school, and neither wants to be the “only” kid without one. Son wants to fly drones, and apparently the good ones require a smartphone for control. We’re okay with getting the kids their own phones with appropriate parental controls. But daughter is furious that we’re even considering giving her younger brother a smartphone at an age when she didn’t have one. The screaming, oh, the screaming at the unfairness of it all. So, one compromise that we’ve come up with is that they both get smartphones with appropriate parental controls, but older daughter gets hers two weeks before younger son gets his, as a symbolic recognition that she is older (this was actually her suggestion, though she doesn't really like it), and that she gets more privileges on her phone than she has on his. Any suggestions how to be fair to older kid without penalizing younger kid simply for being in a different place in life? (Warm thoughts and prayers would be appreciated - the screaming is hard on me, and no amount of calm-mom deëscalation techniques can seem to touch her sense of injustice.)

Just need to add another voice saying that she's beautiful! @Kela, thank you for taking such good care of this little kitty who needed you so much.

I know this thread went to sleep a few days ago, but someone needs to say this: @Corraleno, your son is way cool. 🙂 Tuvan??? Wow!

This is a really important point. All of us doing home education have to make decisions somewhere about what to include and not include. All we can do is watch our kids the best we can.

Hi BandH. That's the thing - Thoreau really had been reading classics in Eastern literature (as much as he could in those pre-Internet days). The point of his essay "Reading" (and I hope that everyone here will read it!) was that he was arguing that deep thought and study were possible to those who made the effort, and complaining about those who weren't self-educating past childhood. He was actually very much for expanding our knowledge past Western assumptions. Hope that helps. The quote was never meant to be negative to this conversation.

Well, of course not all. But what amazes me about Thoreau is that his Harvard classical education was a door to non-Western classics. Emerson had quite the collection of far eastern and south Asian writings, and Thoreau read them from Emerson's library. Walden and some of Thoreau's other writings are sprinkled with Eastern quotations all over. They may have been 18th or 19th c. translations, but still, he was very widely read (world-wide) for the time. The quote was not meant to be controversial, only inspiring.

Reading friends, I finally finished Tom Jones (1749) by Henry Fielding, just short of 900 pages! You can'r read this book assuming that it is a novel written according to 21st century taste and styles, or you'll never get through it. But it was a really fun visit to the 18th c. I'm continually amazed to read old literature and find out that, at heart, the human spirit is just the same.

Oh wow, I wish I'd had a chance to learn Latin during my school years, instead of only learning a little with my kids a step ahead as their homeschool teacher! Consider this: "It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?... We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old." - Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "Reading" Granted, the study of Latin and old classics is probably more pleasant for weirdos like me who read Walden for pleasure. 😉 But OP, I wonder (respectfully - please don't read any sarcasm into this, because it's not meant) - It seems that we would never ask someone, "Do you regret studying the quadratic equation, just because you've never needed to describe the arc of a parabola in daily adult life?" Wide exposure to all the arts and sciences is very good, because we see all the possibilities of the world and the human spirit, wherever our "career" takes us. The kid who will thrive at Latin will make it known quickly, but other kids may at least need a chance to explore it. @kirstenhill, I'm going to check out the podcast that you mentioned. It looks fascinating! Thank you! @elegantlion, what an inspiring story you have! I want to be you now... 🙂

@lauraw4321, do you have property large enough for a "She Shed" type thing? You know, your own detached "room". Even if you went all-out with climate control, electricity, and plumbing, if would still be much less expensive than divorce. Or, you could just go simply Walden-style, with a simple detached room that would be your own space. @Mrs Tiggywinkle Again, didn't your husband build you your own detached library or something like that? (I often joke that I'm going to get a She Shed with a retinal scan for the lock to keep everyone else out.) Take care, Laura. This is hard stuff.