I live in PA where we have a lot of Amish. I also used to be an Rn and worked in labor and delivery. We also were required to ask those questions about having running water or a refrigerator, but we nurses were told that it was so that people who didn't have these things could get referred for assistance in getting those things in place. In all of my years I never once had a newborn referred to foster care because of it. To be fair, we really do live in a wonderful area for getting all kinds of assistance and I do know some ladies who did get refrigerators or stoves from local charities after being referred. I never heard that they were told they 'had' to accept those things or lose their babies, however. Oh, just remembered that some people live in cabins that do not have a well. They usually have a cistern to catch rainwater for household use and sometimes they pay a company that comes with a water truck and fills the cistern. The drinking water they buy by the five gallon container in various places. It is not uncommon around here to do that, especially around the State Forests where it is very beautiful but often it isn't possible to put a well. I know we had drinking water delivered by Culligan for a while because the running water we did have from one well tasted nasty. Dh does work in CPS, so I did ask him about this and he said that he does know some cases in which the families had no utilities and CPS was called to investigate. He said that locally if the families had clean homes and clean children and a way to get water CPS would offer referrals to assistance if the family was interested in that but would not get otherwise involved. He said that in the cases that CPS did end up getting involved and especially in the cases in which children would be put in foster care there was a lot more going on than choosing to live with no utilities. As for the Amish ladies, some did give birth in our hospital. We still had to do the form, but we wrote 'Amish' across the top of it. I never heard of any of the Amish people being investigated by CPS for pretty much 'being Amish', and we do have some very strict Amish groups out here who deliberately do not have septic systems and use outhouses still. The running water in a number of cases is a pump attached to a windmill that pumps into a cistern that is gravity fed into the house, while some families have just an outside hand pump, and there is often no water heater in the families that didn't use propane. They heated water for washing on the woodstove. I have never heard of Amish families running into problems with CPS just for living their normal Amish lifestyle. I guess things must be different in different areas. Maybe that is why the Amish settle in our area, because we don't have rules that interfere with the way they choose to live. We have a lot of areas around here that do not have building codes. Maybe in some areas CPS is not tolerant of people who do not choose to live a 'standard american' lifestyle and is more likely to give people like that a hard time even if they do take good care of their children. Seems unfair to me.

:hurray: I can't imagine living in that area without ac, even when NOT pregnant!

Dh (works for CPS) says that no running water alone in our area is not grounds for removal of children. Niether is no septic system (we do have a lot of Amish families and some of those apparently do not have septic systems while others do). Asked about heat: There must be a heat source in the winter, a wood stove is fine.

Holy cow! That is perfect, just the kind of idea I was looking for! THANK YOU!

Okay, so it is a fact that the Hive knows all, so I have an odd question to throw out there. I live in a trailer. I hate my floors, a mix of sheet vinyl and vinyl planks poorly installed by dh, and icky carpet. I'd like to have the same floor through out the whole place and I'd like it to NOT be carpet. Is the part under the floor I have now likely to be something flat like plywood or something? Can I rip out all of the floor covering I have now and get down to a flat surface that is fairly consistent through out? Do I WANT to do that or should I think more about adding yet another layer of something? What is the cheapest stuff I can put on the floor that will wear like iron? Sheet vinyl? I was looking at those epoxy type coatings that you can put on concrete but I'm not sure they would bond with what is probably a wood subfloor. I'm willing to entertain the craziest, though inexpensive, ideas.

My daughter is now an adult and is a sociopath. When she was a teen, my daughter wouldn't learn empathy from community service that involved being around people. She learned to feign empathy and remorse from doing some community service work she found unpleasant, like picking up trash in the sun. It wasn't much of a punishment, since she was also pretty and charming and was able to talk her way out of a lot of it. What worked better was being incaercerated and that has been the best deterrent of all in her case. I'm not talking just about boot camp or a stint in an adolescent residential facility with tv and cupcakes. REAL incarceration messed with her comfort level for months at a time. :D That is the only thing that ever made her think twice about doing something.

I'm in PA, and we get fabric at the thrift shops all the time. It usually isn't anything I'd want to use but it IS there. Sometimes TONS of it.

It isn't the teacher who is influencing those kids, it is the other kids. It is all that 'socialization' that we are so determined that our kids 'should' have, that we think they 'need'. Public and private school parents who take their kids to school in the morning and drop them off, then ferry the kids to afterschool activities, ect and rarely spend even that mythical 'quality time' with their kids are the most gulliable but even homeschoolers fall for the idea that their kids 'need' lots of time around other kids to 'develop properly'. Well, you are wrong. It isn't the teacher, it isn't the parents, it is the other kids who become the strongest and most important influence on kids, on how they think, how they feel, and how they act, how they dress, on what they say or what they listen to. Kids, especially in the teen years. are intensely drawn to 'fit in' with the crowd. Who is the 'crowd'? The crowd is that group of kids.....and they don't look like or act like adults. So, who is making the choices that determine what the 'crowd' will look like or act like? Other kids, that's who. kids who are bright, charming, natural leaders......and some of those bright, charming popular kids are sociopaths. I began to find out what my bright, charming, popular fourteen year old kid was when she tried to smash in another girl's face with a brick to keep that girl from testifying against a local drug dealer in a criminal trial. Did she get kicked out of school? No. Did she go to jail? Not that time. Did she get banned from the bus, the library, or the cafeteria? No. Did the school kick her out of the college prep courses or prevent her from taking AP courses? No. Did all of her friends drop her in horror and refuse to have anything to do with her? No, in fact she became even more popular. Your kid wanted to be like my kid. Your kid wanted to dress like my kid, to hang out with her, to listen to the music she listened to, to spend time with her. THAT is what you should think about........THAT is what you should be concerned about.

Nice idea, but there IS NO other 'care' for some children. Certainly not anything someone could pay for unless one were extremely wealthy. And sociopaths do not always choose to be born into wealthy families. The only thing I could finally think of to do was to quit my job (which supported the family) and chain my dd to my body. Literally. CPS agreed with that, as long as she was chained to me and not to an inanimate object. Even then she escaped. Do you even understand what that is like? How sustainable do you think that was? By then I had four younger children at home also. This illness doesn't present until the teen years remember. There is NO OTHER CARE. In case you are curious, you can't even hire a security guard to sit on your kid because they won't do it. What other care? Teens are as physically large as adults, too. Would you want to chain a hundred and thirty pound violent sociopath to YOUR body? Even when she was placed in residential treatment by the courts for short spurts of time she regularly escaped and mixed with the general population of kids. Eventually I ran out of money and had to work. Did I work while she was supposedly at school or in the evening when my absence would mean literally dozens of other delinquents would invade my home and put my other kids at risk? What would you do? It sound alll nice and proper to say 'the parents should' this or 'the parents should' that, but in reality the parents may well be shell-shocked and horrified themselves and completely overwhelmed. Isn't that what this thread is about? That even good, caring, involved parents can end up completely out of their depth trying to parent a kid with a serious mental illness and not be successful? It would have been very helpful if some of those human services dollars coudl have been allocated for long term residential treatment with close 24 hour supervision, and intensive treatment and monitoring of kids like these, but our society would rather sigh and pretend that all bad kids are the result of lazy parents. And then act horrified when one of those kids surfaces in their own (good) neighborhood. Please remember that your average sociopath presents as pleasant and charming and makes friends easily, they don't run around with a sign on their heads. These kids aren't mentally challenged. they can be very bright and even gifted intellectually, they don't have any trouble with impulse control or with knowing right from wrong, and when you meet them they are very sweet, friendly, and nice, usually very popular with other kids. Leaders, in fact. If any of those kids on that bus is a sociopath you won't be able to tell by looking at him or even listening to him. They are perfectly capable of acting contrite when it is expedient, they are capable of feigning remorse. It is how they act when they think they can get away with it, when they think no one important is watching that makes the difference. And isn't that exactly what happened on that bus? None of those kids ever thought anyone would know what they did or said. If those kids aren't sociopaths they are at the very least 'on the spectrum'.......they had no guilt or remorse UNTIL they got caught. Sounds like a sociopath to me. I agree that some kids just need their parents to step up. But you are living in a fantasy world if you think that is all that needs to happen. There is a substantial percentage of kids out there with this diagnosis influencing the culture and behavior of the rest of these kids. That culture reinforces those antisocial traits and it is a vicious cycle. I've read that the incidence of sociopaths in society is increasing because of certain social and culture attitudes and other factors that reinforce sociopathic tendencies. We should all find that frightening.

I knit, sew, and crochet, but only because I enjoy it and not because I'm saving money. I guess I could do it in a way that would be money-saving, but that would take a lot of the pleasure out of it for me. I just like making pretty things.

I also like the Joy Hakim science series, and I wanted to suggest Horrible Science by the people who do Horrible History. Here is a link to the main website, but you can usually find the books on ebay http://www.horrible-science.co.uk/

We tried several programs, but they moved too quickly and didn't have enough practice and were hard for this non-latin comprehending mom to teach. Then we tried Latin Prep from Galore Park and it has been wonderful.

We have relatives who have disapproved. I just don't discuss it with them. I have enough problems in my life and I don' t need to invite more in. Oddly enough, dh does discuss homeschooling with his parents (who disapprove) and the other night his step-mother told him that while she had no doubt that he and I were educating our children properly even if it was at home, she didn't believe other people should be allowed to do it. :lol:

:lol::lol::lol::lol: "edited by moderator!" :lol::lol::lol:

I haven't read the other replies yet. Yes, we have gone wrong with how we are raising our children. Kids are meant to have a close relationship with one or more caring adults and to model their behavior on those adults. They aren't meant to be 'socialized' in packs of thirty or more kids and to model their behavior on those other kids with very little adult supervision. They aren't meant to have superficial relationships with their parents. Public school is a big part of the problem since it makes it acceptable to throw these kids together in large groups and to let them develop their own maladaptive sub-cultures. Parents do NOT have the most influence in their child's lives anymore for most of these kids. Do the math, how many hours a day for how many years have those kids been thrust into large groups of other kids, starting with daycare at the age of six weeks for a lot of them. Read 'Lord of the Flies'. Read 'Hold on to your kids'.

:grouphug: Wow, I have no idea what you did! I thought I was the only one who could have stuff like that happen to me with yarn! Good luck! I'm sending positive yarn thoughts your way!

The kids were thrilled when the new math manipulatives I ordered came in!

I have one for sale cheap!

Would you want my intellectually gifted, violently inclined budding sociopath on a bus with kids like that? Do you know what a sociopath IS? The kids on this bus are the kind of kids who are most in need of protection from kids like my daughter. It would be especially foolish to deliberately put a calculatedly violent child on a bus with kids like that. My daughter didn't act out because she couldn't control her impulses, she acted out because she enjoyed it. She hurt others because she liked it. She was able to control her behaviors to minimize the risk of being caught. Of all possible responses from the school district, putting a kid like her on a bus like that is one I would have never even imagined in my worst nightmares. The solution is that once kids like mine are identified, they need to be removed from the mainstream and intensively treated for the long term, and there is no provision for that, no place where that is done unless the family is very, very wealthy. I'm not saying that the kids on the bus in the news are all sociopaths, but it seems to me that there is a strong possibility that those kids were strongly influenced by peer who is likely heading in that direction.

We are in Pennsylvania in the Crawford Central School District. You are welcome to contact them, I'll get you the phone number. Children here who are mentally ill with a clearly documented violent history like my daughter (she tried to beat another girl's face in with a brick, in the felony incident, to intimidate her into not testifying in a criminal trial) do not rate any special concern from the school district.....regular classes, no aide, no special bus. Kids like my daughter sit in classes with all the other kids, ride the same bus, everything. I pulled her out to homeschool her on my own initiative (she was violent at home as well) and was criticized by the school district for doing that......they wanted her in class.

You are not well-informed. My daughter, diagnosed with conduct disorder and oppositional defiant disorder, never rode a special bus or had a 1:1 aide. My daughter was charged at the age of fourteen with felony witness intimidation, and later was revealed as the 'muscle' behind a teen heroin ring. She is now an adult and has 'graduated' to the diagnosis of sociopath. Budding teen sociopaths don't rate 1:1 aides and special busses, but you don't want your kids riding with them, believe me.

So true. I have one daughter who has a mental illness and is very manipulative. She was often violent toward others. It seemed that most of the people I had to deal with because of her just assumed that she was the way she was because of me.....I was even lectured in the court room by a judge who told me that I needed to set a better example for her! Um, this girl has nine siblings who have never been in trouble and were perfectly normal......where were they getting their examples from? I can also say that the 'system' such as it is for separating kids like my daughter from influencing and bullying other kids is broken, the threat that kids like her pose to other children is underestimated, and there is very little actual treatment (or consequences) for these kids and almost zero support and education for the parents.

Mine is the name of my two youngest kids, Raine and Fox. You can hear me yell out the front door at dinner time "Raine! Fox!". I wanted to use the name of my first WOW toon to make 85, Aoifebelle, but Aoife is already taken :001_smile:

We stress the 'we are a team' ethic when it comes to work around the house and the yard. Everyone is on the team and the team does the work and gets the rewards (like dinner). We still get grumping and complaining, though. As for the 'what household chore takes two hours' question, I have to add that I wish I had video of some of the lollygagging that goes on around here when it comes to chores. I could post it on You Tube and become famous. The absolute best would have been my now adult son at age seventeen mowing the lawn around our mobile home lot. It took him two days to get it all done, and we live in a trailer park so you can imagine the size of the lot! He would stop every two or three feet, sigh, flex his hands on the mower handle, look skyward, wipe the sweat from his brow, sigh again, look around the yard, re-adjust his baseball cap, sigh, take off the chore gloves he had invested the first two hours into locating, examine his hands for blisters, sigh, ect. It was beyond hilarious. I really regret not filming him. I can't imagine why, if the chore is soooo intolerable, they would want to drag it out for so long.

Good for you!