OP, you very regularly, over the course of many many years, come to this forum for help figuring things out - and often they're very googleable things, like how to keep an exercise plan or manage stress or pick up a hobby or fight depression. Then you generally throw up your hands in despair and say nevermind, none of this advice will work, I'll just keep doing what I've been doing and hope something changes anyway. People ask other people for help all the time, and/or decide something isn't worth the effort, and/or tinker with it alone until they get somewhere.

A child is only in the car seat stage if you own a car. Lots of people in big cities with babies and toddlers don't have cars.

So I have a kind of weird perspective on this: I'm not religious, and I never have been, and I never will be. But my kids sometimes go to church or youth group with friends, and that's fine with me. If they start going pretty regularly to one particular church, I like to check out the website to see, to be completely frank, how socially and religiously conservative the church is. I find this ridiculously difficult to parse, because I don't know the in-group terminology that signals such things. I really wish churches, along with their statement of beliefs about the inerrant word of God and baptism and Jesus being a man and God simultaneously, or whatever, would also say things like: We ordain/don't ordain women. We welcome/discourage lgb folks. We teach kids explicitly about/don't mention hell. Etc. It's really frustrating. I don't need every church to be explicit about every social issue, but I'd like a general signal, kwim?

I would feel sad too. I remember that feeling with an ongoing serious health scare. I'm so sorry this is happening for you, and that you're not well yet. I am wishing for your ease of well-being from over here in the US.

But it does require a very big thing, which is deciding societally whether sex is a mutable characteristic, and whether sex or gender is protected in various contexts. It only sounds simple, unfortunately. Currently, until we sort out sex vs gender, it is not simple.

The thing I really don't understand is single stall restrooms labeled men's or women's. I use the men's single stall if the women's is in use; there aren't any men in there! It's empty! Why in the world is a single stall with a locking door restricted to half the population?

That makes sense. I don't necessarily see how this is likely to impact their health. It sounds like it just looks bad to you (and probably to most people!), but greasy cabinets or crusty baseboards are not dangerous or unsanitary, and if they're content with it, what is the actual problem?

I can't quite get a specific idea of what you mean about the state of her house cleaning. Is it really just that the fronts of the cabinets are dingy and there are cobwebs and dust in places no one touches often, blinds aren't clean, and baseboards are dirty and grimy? None of this seems like a health issue, but it's possible I've misunderstood it.

It came up because I'd mentioned to them that I do sometimes have trouble feeling confident in relaying my parenting methods to the school (the school has in the past called to note some misbehavior in the kids, and asked what I do to address this at home). The truth is that I often take a riled-up kid with me to sit quietly in a different area of the house for a while, to calm down while out of the presence of other kids they have been conflicting with and then to talk about what happened, etc. The school has seemed unimpressed by this, so I was telling the person in question that I sometimes slant it more toward a time-out sort of punishment when I explain it to the school - which it's not, actually, but whatever. So that's why they suggested I say this other thing to the school, I guess - they don't have kids or interact with k-12 schools, so maybe they really thought this was a vaguely reasonable thing to say, I'm not sure. But it turns out that they weren't proposing it seriously at all, although it seemed real enough that I came here to ask and did a fair amount of research before coming here. Baffling.

So I emailed the person to ask for clarification, and specifically to ask if it had been said facetiously, as a sort of dry humor - that is to say, made up - since I couldn't find any reference for it and you guys also thought it was weird. The person does have a dry sense of humor, but there was so much detail and defense of it (complete with a real-sounding term!) that I really thought they had meant it. Neither of us laughed when we were discussing it, kwim? They said that there will be nothing on the internet about it, and it wasn't intended seriously at all; that they could have just said to tell the school something the school would accept. I think now I'm more confused than before, but at least it wasn't meant seriously? Anyway, thanks for all of your perspectives, and for making me feel less crazy. I'll delete in a few hours. What a weird interaction.

I also would have understood it as a "this thing might help a child self-regulate, so encourage the child to try it" and wouldn't have been weirded out by that at all. It was proposed as a non-violent aversive technique, akin to blowing in a cat's face when it's doing something objectionable (which, like, I also would never do, but mostly I just try to avoid cats, so idk).

They're neither a teacher nor parent; they don't have any regular interactions with kids - so I wasn't worried for my kids, or anything, but I rely on them professionally in non-parenting things, so whether they're either lying to me or completely out to lunch is important to me.

They're definitely out of touch with local social norms; we're very suburban Midwest here.

It was explicitly proposed not as a thing you encourage the child to do for self-regulation, but as a non-violent (which I guess was meant as "not intended to cause pain") aversive to modify behavior. It seemed both impractical (how do you force an upset child's head down without potentially causing pain, or even injury?) and demeaning - but then I thought, this person has access to recent developments in the field, probably, so maybe it's a real thing and I'm just overreacting. I don't think I'm overreacting; I think it's weird, and I appreciate that the combined hundreds of years of parenting experience here (and some professional experience, even) also says: weird, and not good.

Yeah that was my feeling about it. Thanks for your thoughts, I was really thrown by it.

I'm just trying to check my perspective; I read this as pretty weird, and I can't find any reference point for it pretty much anywhere on the internet or in any academic literature, but it's possible I'm really out of the loop. Important notes: this idea is not mine, I'd never in a million years do it or anything like it, and the person who suggested it to me isn't involved with my kids (or to my knowledge, any kids) in any way. The suggestion was to use (or to tell people that I had used, as some sort of protective cover to make it seem like I'm a good disciplinarian according to the school system) the following method, which they called behavioral head-down: when the child has misbehaved, press gently on the back of their head so that their head falls between their knees, and maintain that position for 5-10 seconds. It's nonviolent, I get that, but it feels demeaning and unnecessary to me - but mostly, it just seems weird. Does it seem weird to you? Have you heard of anything like this in any parenting or maybe behavioral modification forums or anything? Please don't quote, I'll probably delete.

Yeah the NIMBYism here is impressive.

If you really can't resist coming here, and you know that on the whole it causes you harm, you need either therapy or a better system of blocking sites in the internet. If you're interested in clean water charities, you might look up Effective Altruism - it's a system of deciding where to focus your charitable giving by evaluating which charities are most efficient (that is, making the most difference for the amount of money you donate). Clean water charities are one of the ones they have good data on, I think. It's pretty eye-opening to see how many more lives you can save or improve by spending your charity money with organizations that are more effective.

It's frustrating but it's absolutely not the fault of the customer service agent. They're evaluated based on whether they day the things they've been assigned to say. Of course they're not actually sorry for the inconvenience - they didn't cause it! They're being paid $2/hr or something to deal with annoyed people all day, none of those problems they caused. But they do have to say it, or lose their job.

Here, $7k take-home a month is only not paycheck to paycheck if you don't have significant debt or ongoing regular medical costs like therapy or a chronic health issue and don't have to pay for daycare. We're pretty medium COL. Rent on a 2-bed apartment is $1500. Daycare for one kid, also $1500/month. This leaves $4k - say $500 for utilities (including internet and phone), $300 for a car payment, $200 for gas/car insurance - now you have $3k. 1k of that is food ais d household expenses, $500 is health insurance (of the cheap insurance variety, high deductible), and say another $200/month for healthcare. Now you have $1300. $1300 a month is a decent margin, unless you have debt, or ongoing medical expenses, or more than one kid in daycare, etc. just one extra kid in daycare or after school care and the $1300 is completely gone; $400 in monthly therapy costs or $500 in debt payments (say student loans) and suddenly everything is quite tight - you haven't been contributing to savings and one bad car repair or other minor disaster and you're in trouble.

Bolding mine Medical professionals are absolutely more expert in the diseases or other medical conditions they treat than most of the people who have said disease. If I have chest pain and a numb right arm tomorrow, or develop lupus, or schizophrenia, a doctor in the relevant specialty is more likely to help me by far than just my thinking about it myself, or even researching myself.

Does reporting them to the government not result in state intervention?

Is this the daughter from earlier this year, with the husband who got addicted to pain meds, had a psychosis in the hospital, and tried to kill her and the kids by bashing in the front window of her car with a baseball bat while she was in it? If so, even though she's rejected you for now, I'd be extra careful to keep any connection you can, because she's been through an insane and frightening time and may not really know how to process it. If it's a different kid, disregard.

If she's an ND, she's not a doctor. You should be seen by a doctor.

I also read it as female, but that's probably because I'm female and any time I read a book in first person where it's not immediately obvious, I assume the narrator is female like me. I feel reeaaaaal iffy about this too. I really think they will need to make him as gender-ambiguous as possible or it can never work. I'd have preferred a masc woman, tbh.