Oh. I just saw this after I posted. I'm sorry. There are kinks in every mother-child relationship. Some have big affects, some have none, and environment and the kid's personality have as much to do with whether those kinks matter as the mom has anything to do with it. If you weren't a good mom, you'd be denying it, not even posting here. You'd be huffy and uncaring and you wouldn't be looking so hard at how to help your child. You wouldn't be willing to change whatever it takes for your kid to get better. Because you are a warm, attentive, caring mom, who puts her child's need before her own pride, you are considering all possibilities, including this discomfiting possibility that your style of parenting at meal times is a poor match for one of your children's style of being a kid at meal times. You're a good mom. I've been reading your posts on this forum for years. You're a good mom. Remember that good parents have issues too, because all interpersonal dynamics are enormously ornery Rube Goldberg machines, especially those with preverbal people. If it does turn out to definitely be infantile anorexia, just remember that things go wrong all the time everywhere and it's normal to have to periodically run after a loose bolt and screw it back in tightly. It doesn't mean anything's wrong with you that you didn't arrive at each moment already able to do a perfect job and it indicates something is quite right that you are at this moment able to work on fixing it.

I recommend family therapy because there are parental behavior characteristics intrinsic to the diagnostic criteria, which you can read here. It's a psychiatric condition that grows out of stressors in the child's environment. (I hope I am managing to say this gently. I don't mean to be accusatory. It could totally be a sensory thing. Sounds like your doctor's not a psychiatrist. And even if it isn't physical, please let me be clear that I am NOT trying to say this is about bad parenting. it would be completely normal if raising a kid who didn't grow for three years before you had this one affected your response to younger kid's feeding patterns, for example.) Try reading the book When Your child Won't Eat by Dr Chatoor.

If you go to Audible and search "history," then select the kids section, many interesting-looking options pop up.

Food chaining and desensitization would be a nightmare, the worst thing you could do, for the damaged feeding relationship that is the underlying cause of actual infantile anorexia. Infantile anorexia is psychological and based in a child's attempts to meet their own affection and autonomy needs. I don't mean to hate on food chaining. If a kid has a sensory disorder, food chaining can feel like a miracle cure to a parent. But if a child has infantile anorexia, the degree of argument, negotiation and debate over food chaining will worsen the condition. In infantile anorexia, something more like Dr Chatoor's feeding protocols are what are called for -- kids maintain control of what they eat within certain boundaries, and parents are trained to establish those boundaries without setting off their child's anxieties. That's a gross oversimplification of those protocols but you get the idea. It's basically the exact opposite of what you'd do for a sensory disorder. I know you said, OP, that this is a temporary diagnosis pending further testing. It's a big deal diagnosis -- your whole family should be in therapy if this is what your kid has -- so definitely get that further testing (to a GI, to an allergist, etc.) before you accept this diagnosis. You really need to know if this is physical or if it's infantile anorexia.

My eight-year-old just came out of p.s. after five months trying out the third grade while his father and I were in family court about which of us gets to homeschool him. (I do, huzzah!) Since he'll need to pass a standardized test at the end of the year in order to keep homeschooling, per the new custody order, I need to make sure he's on grade level in all the non-arithmetic topics, like money, time, graphs, geometry, measurement, algebra, etc. I don't know what he currently knows in those areas, since he's been in a Common Core school and Common Core focuses on arithmetic rather than taking the mile-wide approach that's been popular for ages. So does anyone know of a quick test or evaluation I could give him to see where he is in those areas? Or a scope and sequence I could compare him to?

I used just the New England section before Kathy Jo finished the other states and added reading suggestions, so my review may be incomplete. I've also used BF. BF is much much more prescriptive. It tells kids exactly what to feel, believe and think, as well as what pictures to put where, what quotes to copy, etc. 50 States is much more open and leaves room for children (or parents) to choose what to record. BF is explicitly Christian, and very vocally its own little small sect of Christianity, and it uses geography to teach providential Christianity; whereas 50 States, while written by a Christian, is about geography, and uses mapping exercises and good old books (that occasionally describe moments of what Christians could interpret as providence) to teach geography. 50 States is also more comprehensive, whereas BF is a bit spotty. BF focuses on the places the books take you. 50 States starts out with the states and includes books that will take you there.

Hm. I put it all in a grid and it does actually work.

Can you do MFW's light day on Thursday instead of Friday?

Have you seen Overly Honest Methods? "Samples were incubated for 14 hours instead of 12h so we could attend a lunch seminar about the migrational patterns of zebras" and other confessions. Swimmermom wrote: "I suspect that in a formal lab setting it may not be acceptable to run into the house and hold the beaker over the heat vent until the solute dissolves."

This is why I hope my outside-the-box homeschool will end up being like a mosaic. The tiles are the projects. They are largely interest-led, but some mom-initiated real-life stuff, and some just artsy joys: going to City Hall, getting ARCs at publisher expos, building a moving Santa Claus from scratch. The grout will be the systematic overview to be sure all the bases were covered: reading through textbooks, passing tests. The tiles are definitely bigger, but without the grout it wouldn't be a finished job.

It is replacing it. At an orientation I attended for a robotics camp, an admissions counselor from a university with a fabulous nanoscale materials program spoke to the parents. She said that more kids than ever are entering schools as engineer hopefuls, but most of them are dropping out when they realize that engineering does not in the slightest resemble what they had to do to pass their AP physics course. She said there are now actually fewer graduates. Businesses and universities have begun to realize this and react by looking for evidence that teens have done projects, favoring that experience over academic work in the sciences. When admissions officers see that STEM career hopefuls have done hands-on, inquiry-based, practical projects, they know those kids experienced what is tricksy, annoying, nitsy and frustrating about science and still decided they wanted to do it for the rest of their lives, and that kind of dedicated persistence is most valuable. I imply no value judgments. It's possible this is the "new math" of high school science.

Some of my outside-the-box ideas for my kid: English Since he's such a voracious reader (a whole novel in a single day is not unusual for him), but also so laser-focused on one genre (sci-fi), he's often simply out of good materials to read. So I plan to hook him up with advanced review copies and get him blogging reviews. That plus what will surely be an enormous list of books read will hopefully constitute a comprehensive survey of sci-fi. We're reading (and discussing) our way slowly through a small number of great books connected with histories, a la Well-Educated Mind, as a family hobby. Everyone in the house is in the same book -- me, husband, and all the little kids are in an abridged version. We just did Gilgamesh and had fun making fun of him together. History is a means of supporting the literature, of putting it in context, and works really well as that whereas with no reason to dig into it, we might have been bored. (For the record, I don't think the above is enough to prep him to handle a college course, so he will do inside-the-box English stuff too.) Civics Living in downtown Albany, up the block from the capitol building, we have to shove our way through a protest to get to the grocery store at least once a month. There is no way to avoid opining with the office workers and the protesters as we wind our way through the hidden routes of the capitol complex, racing to get on to our destinations before we're trampled by angry people with signage. It is interesting, to say the least. Our bank and our post office and our drugstore are all in there -- we have to go in to get our errands done even when Pete Seeger (who lives nearby and comes over for protests with regularity) is standing on the statues leading hundreds of people in song. And I used to like protests, but now... Just being here has been an education because we have to talk about what is in front of us. We always know when the state of the state is, and what the issues are, because of the screaming. When there is no screaming, or when our windows are closed, we like to play "guess the protest." Did you know most libertarian protesters are middle-aged bald men who wear hats? Other types of protesters don't wear hats. I don't know why, but there it is. These are things you learn when you have to walk across the capitol lawn to leave your neighborhood. Our state requires a credit in "participation in government." I anticipate sitting in on a lot of meetings at the capitol, as well as protests, just because it's a sixty-second walk so we can. City Hall is right here too, busy and open and active, and we've already visited the City Council a few times for issues that matter to us. Our neighborhood association is very active with the local government too and their email list is a good source of information about Ward business. In this context, a book on how government works feels more like a manual. So even though we'll use a text, I consider all this practical out-of-the-box stuff the heart of our civics learning. Science Science is this child's passion. We have a great hackerspace here. My son'll take the training to be a volunteer staffer, meaning he can open the building for groups and function as host. That will put him in the building for tons of random classes. Our First Robotics Competition team is one of the oldest teams and is wonderful, warm, active year-round; the kiddo will keep on spending five hours a week there during off season and twenty hours a week there during build season. We have a personal library of how-to-hack-it books and hundreds of dollars of teeny tiny components, too; the boy always has a project in the works (right now, a one-of-a-kind electronic musical instrument) and will eventually have a portfolio of completed hobby electronics and mechatronics. We travel to RIT's Innovation Festival and the NYC MakerFaire each year for additional inspiration. We subscribe to Science News, MAKE magazine, MIT's Technology Review, Popular Mechanics, etc. He gets project inspiration from Instructables. He'll take biology, physics and chemistry at community college during high school, and he's thinking of aiming to take the Apple Certified Macintosh Technician test, and maybe get a Ruby certification if he can swing it. He makes pocket money repairing iPods now and he'd like to apprentice at a computer shop. He'll probably have on his transcript all-at-home credits in mechatronics, robotics, HTML, problem-solving in engineering, drafting and electronics, and all of that will be self-directed project-based learning, garage style. Math I have had the hardest time putting math in a box. We used LivingMath.net's lesson plans and Life of Fred for years. Resultingly, my boys love to read about math and they simply devour whatever text comes into the house. They don't stop to do the problems, though. So they can talk math with professors (and do -- we have dinner regularly with two math professor friends), and can figure out how to solve basically any problem you throw at them, but they are so so painfully slow -- and creative -- about it. Then when I say, "okay, kids, hit the books now and this time work the problems," they need to start way back at fractions to build fluency, and they are bored and annoyed. My solution is to have them doing all the books at once. Yep, the oldest (8th this year) is doing an algebra text, a geometry text, and an arithmetic text, all at the same time. One page of problems in each book each day. Since he isn't having to learn new concepts, this is working for him. It's definitely weird though. I plan to list his credits by subject, not by year, when I make his high school transcript, to obscure the weirdness.

What is it about this education that fails to prepare kids for 4-year university acceptance? You say they read and research a lot, and it sounds like they must be analysing and discussing their projects with peers and mentors on a daily basis at a fairly high level. So it sounds like they have some intellectual rigor going on. They will be able to say they have done botany with lab at least, if not additional biology and engineering labs from farming and carpentry studies. Will they have no math credits besides algebra and financial math? That can't be -- they need geometry for carpentry. Is it that they have no APs? That no one has taught them to write academically? I ask because I could imagine that if you did add a course on writing academically, and you packaged all this excellent work in a way that made it clear to an admissions officer that it was intellectually rigorous practical work -- researching, analysing, reading, discussing, experimenting -- then you could easily send such a kid off to a four-year school. In our local public high schools, project-based learning is all the rage. Kids are given pretend real-life problems like building a house or managing a garden, split into pretend families (teams) and then asked what they'd do to solve it, using the scientific knowledge they're supposed to be researching up themselves. We have a magnet high school program that's housed in a major STEM university that functions like this as well as a sub-academy in the public high school and a charter school like this. The magnet school focuses on environmental problems, the charter on business tech development, and the public on projects in the trades, but all three are sending kids to universities like Georgia Tech, Harvey Mudd, Rice, Rose Hulman, Olin, etc. So if competitive high schools are trying to be more like real life, why are we calling real lives not good enough for 4-yr college admissions? (I don't mean this rhetorically. I really am curious what you think is lacking.)

It sounds like she believes children should only speak when spoken to, right? Or are your kids starting to talk in the middle of her sentence? If they are, that's interrupting, and I would put a finger up to tell my kid I heard them but they need to wait til my sentence is over for a response. Do you think she'd stop and acknowledge the kids if the kids did something a bit differently? Some folks teach small children to place a hand on the arm of the person who they are trying to have the attention of. If a kiddo walked over and put their hand on Auntie's arm, might that cue her to give them center? You might even say to Auntie that you've been trying to teach the kids to take turns in conversation and you're trying this arm-touching cue.

My doctor-does-nothing rate is about 1 out of 3 visits (weird arm rash, several common colds). I do feel like that's balanced, though, by the amount of well-child visits at which my doctor gets pretty alarmed about something I didn't see at all (spinal malformation, anemia, aphasia).

I am homeschooling mainly because I just want to be free to read, make stuff, explore nature, and play with my kids. I don't homeschool to give my kids an academic advantage. I'm with you on not liking workbooks, seeking to avoid APs, wanting to read poetry and listen to punk rock all day, and gravitating toward the weird classes like underwater basket weaving. But I admit it raises some alarms for me that everything that your child is doing, except one thing, is listed by the publisher as sixth to eighth grade material. Looking solely at your list of core curricula -- WWS 1, GWG 8, TT Alg, HO 2 -- I'd feel like I was lying if I represented that as high school. In the four core subject areas you are using all middle school texts (except TT Alg, which is appropriate for 7th - 9th grades). I know that accredited high schools like Sycamore Tree, Clonlara and (when it was accredited) NARHS would not accept those courses as high school level. I don't know if you have to report to anyone or plan to ever provide a transcript of your child's work. If you don't, maybe it doesn't matter. But if your daughter is academically a year behind across the board, and it sounds like she is, then I would just call this year eighth grade and make sure next year to use materials that publishers state are appropriate for high schoolers. (And I would happily continue NOT making those high school level materials the center of my kid's life. Adolescence is too full of magic to waste it on getting lots of good SAT II scores.)

You know that bit in To Kill a Mockingbird where Atticus is like, "I've never had to punish you before... please don't make me now"? Or possibly I am remembering it incorrectly. But that's how I've used it with stepkids and it's worked. I would sit down, the three of you, and ask him or prompt him to think through the natural consequences of failing this course. And then I'd say something like, "Look, this is awkward, because you're not our own kids, and we've been trying to give you a lot of what you're used to, and we know you're not used to crazy nagging and forcing you to do stuff. But we feel like we'd be failing you if we let you fail this course. So we can't let you fail it. Maybe we're wrong, and there won't be any value to persevering through the last dumb assignments, in the long run. We admit we're kind of afraid of hurting our relationship with you by forcing this. But we also suspect that it really is important to finish it. So we do have to make you.... Only we want to ask you to please not make us make you. We could be hardarses and take the video games out of your hands during the day, but you're almost a grown-up and that feels like a dick move. So could you please, please, just comply with us on this one thing, and not make us have to get confrontational? And if that's too hard, we hope you'll forgive us and be understanding when we have to force you to do it. Please remember we're just trying to do what's best for you." Super open, super honest heart-to-hearts like that have been pretty useful with my stepteens and now with my own 13yo I'm finding they're just as killer. Kids might be grumpy, but when they see you so willing to be honest, wwhen they know that you aren't sure you're right but you are trying to do your best, they interpret it more kindly. The teen who is thinking "they're idiots, but they're trying to do what's good for me in their own idiot way," is a MUCH easier teen to deal with than the one who is thinking, "they're idiots! they just like fighting me!"

Us too. My kids have spent a few months each in two different schools, and each time, we had a flu-like thing (aches and pains, low grade fever, sniffles, post nasal drip, sneezing and coughing) the entire time they were enrolled. Entire. Time. Maybe we're allergic to school. When no kids are in school, I get sick about a once a year, as fall turns to winter. To try to survive, I gave them immune boosting supplements, increased the amount of dark greens and garlic and red pepper in their diets, and was a handwashing maniac. But it made so little difference that I gave up after a couple of months.

Of the seven people in our household, three were born in July and three were born on the 19th of their birth month.

I don't think there is such a thing as oven-safe glaze. It offgases some pretty scary chemicals (arsenic, lead) and you don't want those in the same place you prepare food. I would try to use air-drying clay (such as this) and, once dried, spray on a coat of clear acrylic (like this). I've never tried it before, though, so if you do, be sure to make something to be a test subject before you let your kids get attached to their creations.

WinterPromise's Children Around the World was a fun year for us and fits your description of your kiddo. KathyJo of Barefoot Ragamuffin Curricula has a free, annotated list of books sorted by region. You could combine that with Ellen McHenry's Mapping the World with Art.

Am I the only one who discovered the kid needed more clothing? My youngest boy was in p.s. this fall because I was in court with his dad about custody. When he was homeschooled, it was common for the kiddo to wear the same outfit two days in a row if it stayed clean. After he was in school, his teacher noticed his dad always sent him in the same clothes two days in a row, and she asked me if she could get in touch with the kiddo's law guardian to report this "neglect." I hadn't thought of it as neglect, ever; I only hadn't done it because I was afraid kids would tease him. But I had made sure he had five pairs of pants, so he could wear a different one every day of the week. Previously, when homeschooled, he only had two pairs of clean, nice, casual pants at any given time (plus sloppy pants for art and mud, which can't be worn to school). Also, my homeschooled kids have never (in this cold climate) owned sneakers in the middle of winter. They get warm waterproof boots in late fall and wear those until spring, when I buy them rainboots and sneakers for the warmer season. But the school is so particular about what the kids have on their feet! Kiddo needs sneakers for phys. ed. and is only allowed to wear snowboots on actually snowy days. Plus, I had to go buy three more pairs of long johns. Two pairs per kid has always been my standard - one to wash, one to wear - because my kids would only put them on to go play in the snow after a big storm. While he was schooled, I had to put my son in long johns every single day, because at 6:30am (when he has to walk the .9 of a mile to school) it's freakin' COLD out there no matter what the temp will be later. In previous years, if my kids outgrew their snow pants in February, that was the end of playing in the snow until next winter. This year, though, I'd have to buy the next size up, which was sure only to get a month of use, because if he had to wade through the snow banks to get to school in his regular pants he'd arrived soaked and man those teachers are on that "neglect" thing. To be fair, I imagine not all schools are so uptight about it. Kiddo's school was in a poor neighborhood, but is the district's science magnet school (and the only school in the district that teaches Latin in elementary school), so it had all the local poor kids and all the suburban snots who wanted their kid to get a STEM education. I think that mix created a very trigger-happy environment for all the mandated reporters who work in that building every day. We also have had to decide how to deal with all the optional things-- field trips, fundraisers, instrument lessons, dance lessons, sports clubs, art clubs, parties, even movies (yes, they sent home a flyer saying, 'do you want to spend $5 to have your kid transported to a Pixar movie in the middle of the school day?'). Sure, we could have said no to any of them, but the social consequences for our kid would have been unpleasant in some cases, and, well, we do want our kid to learn an instrument, do art, do sports, etc. Since I have been homeschooling for years, and was homeschooling my older two boys, there would have been no extra cost to include my little guy in the art, sports and instrument work we were doing. I could have used hand-me-down books for the most part. Because of our circumstances, I'm pretty sure the total cost of homeschool supplies for the little guy alone would have come to less than I spent on clothes, shoes, a lunch box (because school provides lunch, but not snack, and kids whose parents don't send one have to sit there doing nothing while the snacked kids eat), and a replacement backpack when his cheap donated one fell apart. So maybe if you've always been a brick-and-mortar schooler, it's even or cheaper to send your kid to brick-and-mortar school. But if you've always been a homeschooler, are stocked up and staying home anyway, heck yeah, school is more expensive. Also, mega mega inconvenient. School is a PITA. I hated getting up at 5:45 every morning. It threw off the whole rest of the day. I hated having to arrange to meet the kid after school at 2:25 every day. Having a mandatory mid-day experience made everything else so difficult to schedule. It bissected my afternoon. When you're used to setting your own schedule, school is a vexation.

Gosh, this thread is so old that I have since moved. No longer in Utica, we now live in Albany County. I'd be up for a gathering of Hudson Valley WTMers. I know of one other mom from the forums who lives here.

How many years did I bemoan the fact that I could not stick to a schedule? I worried, prayed, scolded myself, endlessly read self-help books about self-discipline. From the time I was a homeschooled teen to now - fifteen years - I did eventually figure it out. Now I cherish and crave my days at home doing the schedule. Some things that helped: - making the place where we do school a really, really nice place to be: pretty wall color, cushy seating, inspirational art, the right lighting and room temperature - sitting down and visualizing my whole day, step by step, with the schedule in front of me, so there are no surprises - getting enough sleep the night before, which for me requires not looking at a screen after 8pm - killing my Facebook account (which was distracting in the moment, anxiety-producing on an overall level, and offered me too many events to attend - intentionally place a few "breathers" throughout the day, subjects that feel like a break, like a nature walk or silent sustained reading - having hobbies that I pursue in the same room and at the same time as all the kids' schoolwork (collage, needle felting, knitting, or anything I can do with my hands but relatively brain-free) - having one weekday available for non-school, and ONLY scheduling doctors appointments, errands, etc., for that one day (for me, Wednesdays) - having a tea pot, so I can fill it and bring it to the table instead of having to get up and down for a cup from the kettle all day - teaching only subjects and materials that I love on more than one level, so I know they are very very worthwhile - make up a new schedule every time any one thing changes All of these things together make it possible. When I skip even one - really even ONE - we don't stick to the schedule. It also helps me when I remember that my kids are watching me and judging me and judging their own education. They are becoming teens who worry about how their education stands up against that of their peers. My sister is dating a young woman who was homeschooled. She said that while her mom did mean to teach her, she never consistently enough got around to teaching her, and as a result, she just wasn't educated. She described getting new books in the mail, everyone being excited, doing the new stuff for a few days, and then it just sort of stopping until it was forgotten. This young woman clearly feels inadequate and struggles to find the confidence to pursue her goals. She was aware of how great a dedicated homeschool could be, and aware that she didn't actually grow up in one, and that was horrible for her. I didn't want that to be my kid.

You could buy each kid their own book, stagger lessons, or have one kid read to the other. My two older boys squeeze onto our chair-and-a-half and read from the same text, each silently, asking before turning any pages.