I don't think it's necessarily about betrayal of trust. That depends on the family dynamic and the child's personality. But, yeah, it's about stealing, not sharing. If the parent said, "Can I have one of your Halloween candies?" and the child responded by hitting the wall and calling the parent a name, THAT would indeed indicate a sharing problem. Getting angry when somebody steals your stuff does not indicate a sharing problem.

I think that looks pretty darn good for a 10yo, especially given the topic and complexity of the assignment. And, for those who think they are "hopelessly behind" because their kids couldn't do this: I'm a writing instructor, and I think this is an entirely inappropriate assignment for a child that age. I'd expect an upperclass high school student to be ready to handle it, not an upper-elementary kid. I never received an assignment anything like this when I was 10, and I refuse to believe that a hundred years ago, kids were asked to write essays like this at 10. It's a developmentally-inappropriate assignment, and if your kid would balk at being asked to write it, that's because they're normal 10yos. I have college students who would have trouble with this. That's a problem. By the time a student hits college, this is the kind of assignment they should be able to handle with ease. But at 10? No way.

Depending on the child's personality and the parent/child relationship, I think it could either be really mean or just really funny. I asked DS what he'd do if I told him I ate all of his candy, and he said he wouldn't believe me. And, that's probably true. He knows that I wouldn't do something like that but that I probably would joke about it. ;) If a family is more joke-y/prank-y, and the kids have the kind of personalities where they are okay with that, I don't think it's a big deal, at all. Healthy families can operate in many different ways, and I think that being kind of prank-y can be one of them. But, I also don't think the kids who got really angry were reacting in a disturbed way. The Halloween candy was theirs. Somebody taking your stuff without permission is mean and wrong. And, little kids don't have the ability to control their reactions the way that adults do. I'm not sure how we'd expect a child to respond to an adult saying they ate all of their Halloween candy, if they really believed them. "Oh, no problem"? Kids are simply not developmentally capable, much of the time, of controlling their emotions, and they also often lack appropriate ways to express those emotions they can't control. If somebody did play this joke on their child, and their child called them a name, I think it would be horrible to really take that kids' candy away. Use it as an opportunity to talk to them about appropriate ways to express their anger, but punishing them for responding badly to a joke that, if they really believe it, is mean seems extra mean.

:iagree: :001_smile:

She sounds like a great kid. I don't know exactly what your daughter is doing. As hard as it is, and as difficult as it might be for you given your beliefs (and I think it's hard for any parent no matter what they believe), I'd make unprotected sex another non-negotiable. I don't know to what extent her "fun" with boys has gone, but, especially since she seems willing to talk to you about it, I'd use that "in" to make sure she knew that, regardless of what her beliefs or your beliefs are, she needs to be careful. :grouphug: Sounds to me like you are doing a great job and you have a great kid. I have a feeling it's all going to work out in the end. I think that most of us probably worried our parents a bit when we were 17.

If you do Santa, does Santa bring all the presents? Just one? Some by not all?

This past Easter, DS asked me to tell him the "really real truth" about the Easter Bunny. So, right there, I knew he knew something was up, otherwise he wouldn't have asked for the "really real truth." ;) I asked him what he thought, he said he didn't think the Easter Bunny was real, I said he was right. But then he couldn't figure out how the candy was getting in his basket, and was genuinely surprised to find out it was me and DH. :lol: So once he knew that, he figured out all the rest, including Santa. He wasn't upset with us or disappointed. He was actually super sweet about it and told us how nice it was for us to get him all those presents. He's very excited about getting to be one of Santa's helpers for his little brother and sister this year. ;) I guess I think that you can kind of feel it out. DS asked me once before when he was about 5, if Santa was real, and I kind of hedged and starting babbling about the nature of reality and the value of myth, and finally asked him what he thought, and he said "Santa IS real." Okay, then. I figured he wanted to believe in Santa, so I wasn't going to interfere with that. But this Easter he clearly wanted to really know, and at that point I wouldn't have felt right not telling him.

Yes. Yes to pretty much all of those. ;) Writing is learned in steps. I think the issue might be that, in the late elementary and middle school years, students don't have the vocabulary to use particularly vivid nouns and verbs much of the time. So, adding adjectives and adverbs helps them to think more specifically about what they want to say, and then as they develop a more extensive vocabulary, they can replace those adjective-noun and adverb-verb pairs with vivid, specific nouns and verbs. I remember being told, in middle school, to never use a noun without having an adjective in front of it. As far as advice-for-all-writers-at-all-times goes, that's terrible! But, as far as advice for middle-school writers goes, it probably wasn't all that bad. Now, I do think it's helpful if teachers are a little more upfront about their objectives, so that the students know this is a pedagogical tool and not a rule-for-all-time. Saying something like "In this class, I always want you to use adjectives with nouns and adverbs with verbs, in order to practice using more specific, vivid language" is probably far more useful than saying "Never use a noun without an adjective before it" and will lead to less confusion. My ninth grade English teacher would not let us start sentences with "the." She phrased it as a hard-and-fast rule--"Thou shalt not ever begin a sentence with 'the,'" basically. While I quibble with that, it wasn't a bad pedagogical policy, because it did teach me to vary my sentence structure more than just being told "You should vary your sentence structure" would have. It was a useful pedagogical tool, even though it is impractical and not very useful as a rule for writing. Five paragraph essays are horrible. They are bland and formulaic, and most college writing instructors I know shudder when they receive them. However, they are also really pedagogically useful. Mastering the five-paragraph essay teaches students to craft a specific thesis, organize the body of an essay, back up their arguments with evidence, and write a conclusion rather than just having the paper drift until it just stops. Many of my remedial writing students have never learned how to write a five-paragraph essay, so I teach them. I let them know that this is NOT the kind of writing they should be doing for their other college classes, but that it is a format that develops skills that they will need to use in those classes. And that is all a long, rambling way of saying that, yes, there are lots of writing techniques that are very useful pedagogical even though they don't result in what we'd consider beautiful or particularly skilled writing. However, I do not consider using synonyms for "said" to be among those. ;) Well, at times they can be, but when we're talking about a verb used as a tag before or after quotation marks, "said" is just fine and there's really no reason to have students embellish it.

Do we? I don't know. I get the message that parents should make sure they know where their kids are at all times, and at all times their kids must be under the watchful eye of an adult. Kids should be let go to go to school, earlier and earlier and for longer and longer, but they shouldn't be let go in ways that would allow them to grow in independence. That said, I know that part of why I homeschool my DS is because I like him home with me. He's still little. I like our family being together. I like him spending most of the day with his parents. Is that selfish? I don't know. I do think that if it is selfish, it's natural and not necessarily a bad thing, because I don't think I'm doing him any harm.

Thank you so much for sharing this.

I think a lot of it is just local culture. I never had or gone to family-and-friends parties growing up. There'd be a kids-only party--the adults would just drop the kids off--and then you might have a party with family and friends of the family another time. Here, nearly everybody has just one party, with friends and family, so the whole family is included in invitation. So, that's the kind of parties we started having. We have one birthday party for the kids, and invite everybody--my friends and their kids, the kids' friends and their parents, neighbors, any family that's in town--and feed everybody. When I'm invited to a party here, unless otherwise specified, that's what I expect. But, I wouldn't necessarily assume the local culture would be the same if we moved.

A few people have said this. Honestly, I find this kind of odd. I don't know if people take "expect" to mean different things, but if I stay at a birthday party, I do expect to get fed. I don't demand it. I don't think I'm somehow entitled to it. But, I do expect it because that's just been what's always happened. Around here, the birthday parties I attend are nearly all family-and-friend events, and invitations are for the entire family. If the party is during a meal time, there's food. I would think it was strange if the adults at a party weren't offered food. Now, I've never been to a "party place" party, so I have no idea what the custom there is. But given that this woman apparently didn't demand food, ask to be fed, or complain about not having been fed--but simply expressed what sounds like surprise that she'd have to feed herself--I really don't think she was being presumptuous or entitled. She may just have been used to birthday parties where adults stayed and everybody got fed.

It would probably depend. If the kids were young, I'd probably stay, and I probably would expect for there to be food for parents. But, I wouldn't say anything if there wasn't food for the adults, and I'd be fine with buying my own. I'd just be a little surprised. If the kids were older and it seemed like a drop-off thing, then, no, I wouldn't expect food for any adults who chose to stay.

Why? OWS in Detroit has been small, but entirely peaceful. The same is true in most other cities. The protest organizers are committed to non-violent protest. They can't control the actions of everybody involved and they aren't closed protests (i.e., anybody can join, so you may get people who aren't committed to non-violence joining in), but as far as I can tell, the organizers have done an admirable job of both promoting non-violence and maintaining a non-violent atmosphere. Given how many people are involved, and the length of time they've been protesting, and the level of police action that has been taken against the protesters, I think it's pretty remarkable.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the standard is one word. I've read a couple of more academic-type books on homeschooling, and both used "homeschool" and "homeschooling." As long as you use whatever term you use consistently, you should be fine.

The school lunch thing may be cultural. My family wasn't conscientious about no-meat Fridays outside of Lent, but we did always have pizza night on Friday. A lot of people in our very-Catholic town did. I assume it was a holdover from when all Fridays were meatless. I never associated it with penance. I much preferred pizza night over another night of baked chicken. ;)

I kind of think the internet has been a bad thing for Catholics. Suddenly everybody and their brother is an expert on Canon Law. It seems to me that the traditional way to handle this kind of question ("Should I fast on Fridays?") would be to meet with one's priest and discuss these concerns. It would not be to Google it. I don't know, I just find it somewhat ironic that people who seem most invested in traditionalism within Catholicism often seem the quickest to dissuade people from listening to their priests/bishops and instead to rely on the internet. I think having a discussion with one's priest about this issue would be the best way to decide on what would be an appropriate penance for Fridays.

My DH plays. I used to have my own account, because he thought we'd have fun playing together, but I didn't play enough to justify keeping it up. However, once he gets that Panda expansion pack, I think I might create a panda character on his account. :)

Yay! Best wishes for a quick, easy labor!

I've had my white gold ring for 11 years, since we got married, and have had no problems with tarnishing. I love it. I never wear yellow gold, so something silver-toned was a must.

What evidence do you have of that? You mention that, when you were a teen, you snuck out and scared your parents nearly to death. My sister did that once, too: she and her friends caught a train to NYC and went to a rave. My parents were also furious with her when they found out. She got a very long, disappointed lecture, and was grounded for a month. She is a responsible, caring, decent person as an adult. She didn't need a beating to get her in line. I think I'm a responsible, caring, decent adult, as well. I was sometimes mouthy and rebellious as a teen; I think most teens are. I never got beaten. I was never even grounded. I simply matured out of most of it, and my parents guided me there with patience and the occasional lecture.

I just wanted to add, I think this is a danger of asking kids what they want as a present. They're going to have certain expectations, and that will possibly lead to (understandable) disappointment. There are certainly more and less appropriate ways to express that disappointment, and kids will learn that, but I wouldn't fault the child for feeling disappointed. We'll either not ask at all and just tell DS he's getting a surprise, or we allow him to pick out exactly what he wants. Usually we do a combination of both, and he'll get a present that he picked out, and then a few things smaller that DH and I chose.

This. As the adult in the situation, the parent has a responsibility to respond with restraint and maturity. You might feel like wringing a child's neck or slapping them in the face, but those are not the actions of mature, responsible adults. That's just stooping to the child's level.

If I liked it, yes. Probably. Our kids are all named after their great-grandparents. So, we didn't take current popularity into consideration, we just used the names (none are all that popular, though). If we were picking a name that didn't have any family significance, we might take popularity into consideration to some degree, but it wouldn't be a deal-breaker. I really like the name Emily. I'd use it regardless of popularity. (If we ever have another girl, I'd like to name her Charlotte or Eleanor, even though both of those are kind of trendy right now, at least among people I know.)

Yup. I know overindulged kids who are amazingly thankful and gracious. I know kids with very little who show no gratitude when given something. And vice versa.