That's how I use it, too. DS can get screen time back at 3:30, but his main consequence for misbehavior during the school day is getting that time pushed back.

This. He's got his own brand of fundamentalism. And, he seems to think he represent atheism, when the kind of strict scientific materialism he espouses is not something all or even most atheists hold to. The funny thing is, just like I'm pretty loathe much of the time to identify as a Christian because of all of the awful Christians out there who seem to think they can represent the whole religion, my husband is very hesitant to identify as an atheist because he doesn't want to be associated with the kind of strict materialism and intolerance of religious believers that Dawkins and his ilk represent. He'll say he's an agnostic or an atheist-leaning-agnostic.

It really depends. Honestly, at this point I'm not all that strict about it at all. Screens are off between 8:30 and 3:30. And, DS has to start reading at 8 p.m. to get calmed down for bed. Beyond that, he's pretty much free to watch/play when he wants. But, we have one computer and one TV, so he has to share, and he obviously can't be on during dinner. So it probably comes out to 2 hours or so a day of TV and video games, maybe 3 if we watch something together at night.

If it were my DD, I'd sit her down, maybe gather some of her friends and my friends, and have a good, old fashioned, feminist consciousness raising session, and talk about all of the things that are being brought up here about societal expectations. Does she have close relationships with older girls/women outside of the family? That might be another good thing for her. I know that having some older cousins, some teenage girls who were neighbors, and some younger (younger than my other aunts) aunts was a really important thing for me around that age.

Unless I'm either teaching somebody (my kids or one of my students) or somebody has asked me to read over and correct a manuscript, I do not correct people's grammar, ever.

I meant heard it growing up. I should have been clearer. I don't doubt he hears a lot of that now, but that wasn't his childhood experience, most likely. He didn't, for example, grow up in a really controlling, manipulative church or have a family that put a lot of pressure on him to conform, belief-wise. I'm, in general, a bit put off by anybody, Christian or atheist or whatever, who believes that their own worldview is synonymous with reality. So I think Dawkins actually offends me more as a postmodernist than he offends me as a Christian. There seems to be so little room for accepting that maybe the world is different or more complex than he thinks in his way of thinking. I know a lot of agnostics and atheists, but none take the absolutist scientific materialist view that he does, and I think it's a shame that he seems to want to make that viewpoint synonymous with atheism.

I try to remember this. But, while I think it explains why so many people like Dawkins' style so much, for me it doesn't explain Dawkins. He wasn't raised a fundamentalist. He wasn't even raised in a country where conservative Christianity has the kind of significant presence it has in the United States. I doubt Dawkins heard much of what you are talking about. (I grew up in the northeast, and I never heard that kind of thing. But, I was in my 20s before I knew anybody thought the earth was 6000 years old. The moderate Catholics and mainline Protestants who made up most of the people I grew up around didn't go in for that sort of thing, and wouldn't have taken any issue with somebody being an atheist or agnostic.) So I really think his hatred of religion stems more from a kind of bourgy disapproval--you really can't see Dawkins being, as Terry Eagleton pointed out, the world's biggest fan of postmodernism, Dadaism, radical feminism, anarchist socialism, or deconstruction, either--than from an understandable response to painful, negative personal experiences with Christianity.

:iagree: I would also recommend No God But God by Reza Aslan.

I think I'm somewhat spiritual, and I don't have any idea, either. I wouldn't be sure if it was a new way of asking if I was "saved," if it was more of a "What's God doing in your life right now?" kind of question, if it was asking me about spiritual disciplines, or what. And, regardless of which of those it was, I don't think I'd be comfortable answering unless it was somebody I knew very, very well.

Intimidating and threatening other people is not okay. A parent encouraging a teen to intimidate and threaten another teen is really, really not okay.

My DD is 18mo, and it's pretty hit-or-miss here how thing go doing school time. Yesterday was awesome. She either played with toys or sat at the table with us and colored. Today was terrible. I ended up putting her in her crib with a bottle and some books for about half an hour, because I just wanted to finish up.

There's a couple of pretty good evolution books for kids out there. We have Our Family Tree and Mammals Who Morph. Both describe evolution in a way that would be perfectly compatible with either an atheistic or theistic worldview.

I didn't have a choice about going to college, but it sort of like how I had no choice about finishing high school or putting on clothes in the morning. It wasn't so much that my parents forced me to do it, just that it was so expected that I never seriously considered doing anything else. For our kids, college will be a choice. I assume they'll probably choose it--DH has a doctorate, I have a master's and teach at a university, so they're going to be around academic types a lot (although that could very reasonably turn them off of higher ed!) and my DS at least is very academically-inclined--but it won't be something we push on them.

I do sometimes feel like my degree is worthless, but, quite honestly, I don't think it was a waste of time or money. I have a B.A. in English and women's studies and an M.A. in English. My post-secondary education comes in very handy for homeschooling, helped me to develop useful writing skills, and allows me to make a decent amount of money for the number of hours I work (i.e., I don't make very much, but I work even less). I think it's very easy to blame the difficulty many young people have finding jobs on them. If they'd only picked a better major, if they'd only worked harder, if they'd only done an internship, etc. But, the fact is that right now the job market sucks. It is probably the worst time for young people to be looking for jobs than we've seen in a few generations. And, there's no magic bullet to save young people from that. I keep seeing business degrees mentioned, but I've known people with business degrees who ended up returning to school to become teachers because they couldn't find a job in business. Like I said, right now everybody wants their kid to go into engineering because it seems like a sure thing for making good money, but where I live there's already a good number of unemployed engineers and I'm sure we'll see a more widespread glut soon. My husband and I both studied the things we loved. (DH studied psychology and film.) And, while we haven't had the easiest time of it financially--I don't know anybody in their early 30s who has!--we've been able to find work, we've been able to support ourselves and our kids, and we love what we do. I don't think our lives would be better if we'd majored in something practical that we didn't actually enjoy and were now working jobs that we didn't particularly like so that we could make more money. My sister and her husband make about twice what we do but they do not like their jobs, and I wouldn't trade places with them at all. I do think that college is, right now, a racket. I think employers are getting away with making a college degree a prerequisite for nearly every job, most of which could be performed just fine by people without degrees, and that's not okay. And I think many people would probably be happier if there were more opportunities for people who don't go to college. But, I can't say I agree that there's no value in a liberal arts degree. At the very least, somebody is going to have to teach the liberal arts courses that all of the engineering and nursing and business majors are taking.

I was never very good at geometry (although, for whatever reason, I was good at trigonometry). So, I have a feeling that I'll be working hard when we get there, if I'm the math teacher.

This is what makes me nervous, though; sometimes what looks like a good investment is a bad one. A decade ago going into teaching seemed like a sure thing, now my friends with teaching degrees are getting laid off. A few years ago becoming an SLP seemed like a brilliant career choice, now we're just not seeing the jobs that were promised in that field. I wouldn't be surprised if, a decade from now, if not sooner, the market is glutted with engineers, because today that seems to be the "sure thing" job.

I didn't get how much college cost, either. My parents never told me. They paid for all of my undergrad degree. And, I did really well and finished in four years with a double major. I can certainly understand having your kids pay their own way if you can't reasonably afford to put them though school; it's very unlikely we'll be able to put our three through school unless we get a big employee discount. But, I wouldn't make my kids pay just to prove a point, because quite honestly I think it would backfire. I find, as a college instructor, that after a certain point, the more hours my students work, the poorer their academic performance and the more shortcuts they want to take. FWIW, I did a quick search to see what research was out there, and it's been found, variously, that working less than 15 hours per week positively impacts academic performance while working more than that impedes performance, or that time spent working has no impact on academic performance. Nothing indicate that students who work more than 15 hours perform better academically. Also, every survey/study agrees that the number of college students who worked (and the number of hours they worked) grew dramatically from the early 1980s to the late 1990s. It's been about stable since then. But there are certainly many more students working while in college than was the case in the past.

I tend to think that 5 years for an undergrad degree is fine. I don't really see the problem. I finished my degree in 4 and had credits to spare, but I took summer courses, I wasn't working so I was able to take 15-18 credits each term, and I never switched majors. I don't know, taking an extra year just doesn't seem unreasonable to me, especially given how many students transfer at some point, how many are working 20+ hours per week, and how difficult it can be, at many schools, to get into the classes you need. I have a friend who took 6 years to finish her degree. She started out majoring in hotel and restaurant management and went to a school that had that program. She decided after a year that she really didn't want to do that. She stayed at that school for another year, and then, when she transferred, almost nothing went with her. I think they took 6 credits total from her two years of school when she transferred.

As my son gets older, and is friends with older kids, our biggest concern is his coming across an older kids who has an illegally-obtained gun (or has a gun that legally belongs to somebody else in their family/home). Illegal guns are a huge problem here (well, in many places, I think). It's not all that unusual for 14 or 15 year old kids to be carrying. I'm not one for major amounts of sheltering, but we're extremely careful to not let DS be in situations where he might be around kids that age without responsible adult supervision for that reason. We're also careful about him going to a home where there's an older sibling or cousin unless we know them and know that, at the very least, if they did have a weapon, they'd be sensible enough to keep it away from kids.

A friend of mine had good luck teaching two of her kids to ride by taking the pedals off and having the kids use the bike as a scooter until they found their balance. Once they did, she had the pedals put back on, and her kids start riding right away.

Honestly, I probably wouldn't. I'd assume that any family honest enough to admit they had a gun would probably be responsible enough to keep it locked up away from the kids.

Honestly, it doesn't seem that unusual to me, given that they had a sub. I've worked as a substitute teacher in elementary schools, and that doesn't seem atypical for that age group in that situation. I wouldn't expect kids who to go church to behave differently than other kids, so I wouldn't be at all surprised by it. I'd try a week when the usual teacher was there before coming to any conclusions.

Yup.

Yes. We live in a city with a very high crime rate (we were never particularly pro- or anti-gun--it just wasn't on our radar because we're not from gun-owning families so it just wasn't anything we ever thought much about--but DH became really anti-gun after being robbed at gunpoint a few years ago), and we expect that some of the homes our son visits will have firearms in them. At this point, our son knows that, if he sees anything that looks like it even could be a real gun, he is not to go anywhere near it, and he is supposed to let an adult in the house know that it's out. If a friend asks to show him a gun, he should say no and tell an adult. That's one of those situations where tattling is okay.

This. I love audiobooks. I like to read, too, but I also really enjoy listening to audiobooks. I put them on while I'm knitting or cleaning the house or going for a walk, and I find that doing something with my body actually helps me to pay more attention to the book than if I'm just sitting there trying to listen.