I don't think Christians are abusive. I do think that conservative Christians expect more in the way of compliance and obedience than Average Pacific Northwest Person. Not necessarily right or wrong, just an observation. I time-out like crazy between two and four, and then right before turning five my children seem to discover the key to being a reasonable human being. I hope they don't lose it again as preteens.

You can get them used from abebooks.com http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=12292912176&searchurl=bsi%3D120%26amp%3Bkn%3DSkulduggery%2BPleasant

Far fewer than 1% of people have serious reactions to vaccines which is why it's likely that the average person doesn't know anyone who has had a vaccine reaction. Some people do know someone, since obviously such people exist. When I'm deciding what to do, the relative risk matters. There is a risk that my children could be permanently damaged by a vaccine. There is a much larger risk that the child could be permanently damaged by a preventable childhood illness. And I don't feel comfortable piggy-backing on the ever-weakening herd immunity. In fact, let me be stronger on that: I believe that it is immoral to piggy-back on herd immunity.

The safest time to immunise your children is on the CDC schedule. The next safest time to immunise your children is now, unless they are pregnant or immuno-comrpomised. You should get them immunised for everything they qualify for, including Gardasil. Very few things you do in life are as safe as obtaining vaccinations. The danger of not doing it is the disease. There is such a thing as a serious vaccine reaction. It is much, much rarer than the disease. You probably don't know anyone who has had such a reaction. I don't know anyone who has had such a reaction. There is no serious reason not to vaccinate.

I have four closely-spaced kids, and I tease that they like to BYOP -- Bring Your Own Playgroup. They play with each other. I never play board games. Play board games with each other. So the answer is, "I deal with having more children by being a worse mother than you are" ;) But I have been nursing for nearly eight years without a break of a single day. And I don't like teaching phonics, and I've only done it twice. I hate listening to beginning readers. And the entire stage of life between 2-4 can bite me. Not cute like a baby, and not a reasonable human being, either. I don't know why G-d decreed that children should walk and talk before they have sense.

If you can get to a pediatric psychiatrist, that would definitely be the way to go. It might be helpful to think of a particular medication if and when it is suggested, rather than medication in general. That way you'll have a much clearer picture of the potential side effects and long term ramifications. Some psych meds are relatively safe, and some do have serious side effects and are more suited for rather desperate situations. But "meds" in general is scarier than "this med, for this period of time." I second the wariness of the supplements/PANDAS/red dye route. I know people feel that these approaches have helped them. Supplements are much less regulated than medications, and you are trading a known side effect for a host of unknown ones. In addition, many of these alternative therapies are very time-consuming and difficult to implement and you already sound at the end of your rope. Can she sleep on a mat next to your bed? would that help at all?

Well it depends. If you're an extremely conservative Christian, the type of person fine with the book Before You Meet Prince Charming, who thinks purity balls and the surrounding culture are something you might participate in, you'll be fine. If you're not this person, I don't think you're their demographic.

My 7 yo is already aware of the Holocaust, but it's part of the cultural context in which she lives (lots of survivors, related to Holocaust refugees, Jewish). I think my 5 yo is too. I wouldn't give her Diary of Anne Frank, but the actual text would not be beyond her reading level. And she didn't learn her alphabet until kindergarten.

You can rub it out with a little oil. It will take a long, long time.

Larry Sanger is all over that comment thread. IIRC he had an unusually precocious child, and he's one of those people who generalises from his kid to everyone. I'm interested that he brings up a seven-year-old reading Treasure Island and Diary of Anne Frank as one of the benefits of early learning, because that's not really that exceptional. The gap between his child and average was much larger when the child was four than it is now.

No, you missed my point entirely. I believe that untested supplements do something. I believe that no one knows what they do, because they haven't been studied in large numbers. And so I don't take them. In addition, I know that supplement makers are close-to unregulated, and so I don't know what I'm getting in that bottle. I also don't take off-label medication. I might if I were in a desperate situation, because then the risk might be worth it. I believe that many popular "natural" treatments are both mostly harmless and utterly useless, but of course none of us would use those ones because we practice evidence-based decision making.

First you address obvious vocabulary. Then you have him read it. Pause and recap frequently for longer passages. Correct and re-read particularly difficult segments.

I would not use these. ACE is sketchy _now_, but was super eccentric back in the days of VHS.

McGuffeys were intended to be read aloud. They have elocution lessons at the beginning of some of them. He should read them aloud to you for about twenty minutes at a stretch. Go slowly and address unfamiliar vocabulary. You might want to start with three.

Core Knowledge is really designed for public schools. Kids in very enriched environments usually already cover CK. Hirsch's point was that we owe it to kids who aren't from an enriched environment to make sure that they are exposed to a common body of knowledge. It can be easy to forget that there are kids who have never heard fairy tales and who don't get dragged off to see mummies at museums. The ideal was to have a network of schools that covered similar topics at similar times, because kids (disproportionately poor) can be put at a huge disadvantage and get a shoddy, patchwork education as a result of multiple moves in elementary school. It was a reaction against a trend to make everything skills-based and reflective of a child's life at home.

I don't take supplements unless they're recommended to me for some reason (like folic acid or iron), so this is unlikely to come up. This might be similar though. I used to take a medicine that was thought fairly safe during pregnancy. It turns out that large scale studies suggest that it isn't safe. I had four pregnancies, no issues. If I were going by "how this works for me," I'd keep taking it. But of course I stopped the medication. I tend to go more by research than how I personally feel. Alternative remedies that have stayed alternative are of two types: the ones we haven't studied, and the ones that we know don't work. I'd avoid the first because I'm risk-adverse. I'd avoid the second because, really, life is busy and expensive enough.

There's a difference between using something off-label and using something we've studied and know to be useless -- like homeopathy or mega-doses of vitamin c. Most common supplements were studied and found to be useless. The ones that have use, like folic acid, are recommended conventionally.

The gap is actually widening. I have some common core math materials (Horizons) and to accord with the BC curriculum I'd have to use them 18 months late. Personally I don't think it's wildly efficient to force more and more learning into the k-2 time. American students seem to start strong in international tests and fall off over time. I have some 1967 Lippencott readers. They handle phonics in first, starting from zero. That's different from an accelerated child. I don't know why people are resistant to recognizing that just because a bright child can do it doesn't make it generally appropriate for children of a given age.

Double post

Do you really, truly believe that your daughter's asthma was cured by water?

My kids are pretty low-key and quiet. They're a lot more likely to be the children getting screamed at, not the child who has to be restrained because he's screaming and violent. 1:1 aides is not going to do it if a kid is really determined out of control, especially if the aide isn't supposed to restrain the pupil. And I don't think that home schooling or distance learning is necessarily a solution here. Parents with kids that troubled may really, really need the relief of having somewhere safe to send their kid during the day. Sometimes really high needs kids need a team.

I know bunches of Miriams. It gets shrunk to Miri a lot though. I like Margaret better than Margo.

Private schools may do what they do, but the BC Curriculum -- which nearly all BC schools follow, because their funding is tied to it -- is really light on the writing and grammar compared to what is going on here. They're required to know their alphabetic sounds and about 100 words to fluency by the end of first. Here is the standards on conventions in writing, for the end of first: "use some features and conventions of language to express meaning in their writing and representing, including – complete simple sentences – “s†to form plural of familiar words – capital letters at the beginning of people’s names and of sentences, and capitalize the pronoun “I†– a period to mark the end of a sentence" The suggested evaluations include such suggestions as "use uppercase and lowercase letters with some consistency."

We're having this in a Classical Conversations thread right now. Pudewa gives me a really strong "no" feeling, and the company he keeps reinforces that for me. I doubt I'll ever take it further than that. I do think that these programs that are high investment (CC, IEW) tend to elicit stronger defences than low investment programs. Pretty much everyone has tried 100EZ Lessons at some point. About half of the people who try it, despise it. No one seems to take that particularly personally.

My daughter could not read that series without becoming deeply upset. I would not encourage her to think about how it might feel if mummy and daddy divorced and were bitter towards each other. Cripes. And they're reading the entire series? What is the redeeming literary value of these books? There are so many perfectly lovely children's books for a good reader her age. The Moffats. Half Magic. The Saturdays. The Penderwicks. Your daughter sounds normal. Your daughter's teacher sounds really controlling. I agree with Ellie. Also, my 7 yo, good reader is reading through this list. It's really great. http://www.brearley.org/data/files/gallery/FamilyHomepageForms/Chapter_Books_List_2013.pdf