The podcast I just listened to this morning -- Tests and the Rest -- confirmed this. The Fafsa is changing, some of the rules are changing, overall the form is becoming simpler, but it is launching late. FYI the biggest change I picked up was that the existing FAFSA takes into account if you have other children in college at the same time, and the new one doesn't. 🙁

Messaging you.

Thank you for this -- it is important to hear the cases when things actually do work out as well as the times when they don't. Her father (whom she takes after in personality) has been through many different lengthy periods of stress and difficult hours. The difference is he was doing it in service of his country and had a close knit community with the Marines he served with. She is also more interested in public service, and I worry if she bets everything on Biglaw for the first few years she will really crash and burn. However we will most likely step in to help before it comes to that. We wouldn't be super thrilled but we at least have the ability to help. The next two kids are going to be so much easier to launch, I just feel it!

I appreciate everyone's responses, it really helps us refine our thinking and hopefully my daughter will appreciate even more now how useful the "Hive Mind" is. 🙂

This is for some reason the biggest draw. And I will say that she suffered through UCLA which she said was pressure cooker and sink or swim (or at least she perceived it to be and definitely struggled throughout). But she feels like it was worth it and she would do it all over again. She wants pressure and stress. My other two kids are so much more like me. They want security, closeness, safety nets, and my younger daughter especially wants to just coast. However my oldest takes after her father, and I will say he has worked so hard all his life, and thrived throughout many stressful situations over the years. They both achieve most under pressure.

Her full ride is from the very generous Calvet Waiver that CA gives for dependents of retired military. It's amazing (I guess to make up for the fact our pension is taxed, unlike most other states!!) So there is no GPA requirement.

I will check with her and see if she is willing -- I really appreciate the offer. The deadline is quickly approaching and she is just riding the wave of congratulations coming in from all those around. Rose tinted glasses abound. Tonight my husband and I (by her request) will be sitting down with spreadsheets out to go through the budgeting for both schools, and then he will help her weight all the variables in terms of importance (location, debt, prestige, future career path, etc) and help her really refine her thinking better. We have done this process for all major decisions after our great housing bubble debacle of 2006-2008.

@SeaConquest Thank you so much for sharing your experience. I knew some of it, but not the extent. And the things I intuited (about the generational wealth vs the ppl there on full ride) I just don't have the experience to state, even though it seems obvious those are the only ones able to HAVE the luxury of choice after graduating. I hope you are much happier now in nursing, your journey has been so difficult!

Ikr? This kid (now adult) has always been the most challenging and least likely to listen to us. Always determined to go her own way. My younger dd said to me "I don't know why [older dd] always says not to listen to your advice, mom. When you give me advice, things always work out for me and I end up much happier."

@mlktwins Thank you for this insight. I think when they are young, they don't realize what long hours can actually feel like, day in and day out with no end in sight. My husband was deployed and his hours were often crazy long. His work environment, while dangerous at times, had much more fulfillment and sense of purpose than I would imagine slaving away at corporate law just to pay off debt would have. But we just don't really have much insight as we know so few lawyers well to ask!

So my dd is 23 and will be attending law school in the fall. She does want a little guidance as she has been accepted to two schools, though I am sure she will end up making her own choice. The deadline is rapidly approaching. She has a full ride to UC Irvine, which is very close to home. She just got off the waitlist to Georgetown, which is a T14 but obviously is across the US and she won't get any money. She has ADHD which can be sometimes a lot for her to manage, and she can find herself in tricky situations bc of it. Everything I hear says prestige matters, but my risk averse personality things she would be foolish to give up a full ride. She has always been ambitious, but her thinking is that she will go all in to corporate law to pay off her debts and after that go public service. But her personality is such that if she really hates something, she literally cannot make herself do it. So I could see this turning out really badly. Anyone with btdt law school advice? @Lawyer&Mom @SeaConquest

I have an older dd with ADHD, and anything involving executive functioning is harder. Online school was terrible for her. And when she procrastinates on things because of the EF, then it makes her more anxious, and she goes into a spiral that ends with her sticking her head in the sand and ignoring everything. The things that work best with her is offering help or just being with her in person while she does boring tasks, like filling out forms or doing taxes. If I had told her to "go find scholarships" that would be setting her up for failure. The money dynamic is just plain wrong, and I agree with the suggestion of removing your daughter from the dynamic.

Thanks everyone -- I didn't check back since I thought I would get a notification when someone replied! But I did end up making a couple of modifications -- they have a heating light and I added a floating dock, a filter (though it's not strong enough, it does a little bit of good) and I filled it half full with water instead of the two inches it had. We have already agreed how to explain these purchases (both my older dd and my teen dd love critters and got very excited and wanted to add some modifications for fun) since I don't want to be an obnoxious neighbor. I will also let them know about the food needs and the size increase. I am sure they would love for us to take it (they I guess took it from someone else out of pity?) but I am not interested at all. My dd would love it but she will eventually be going away to college and none of us really wants pets that live this long. Poor thing seems so social, he really needs a friend and a bigger tank! I just don't understand how people get themselves into these situations with these long lived reptiles!

So my neighbor went away and asked us to feed their turtle. They are very good people and I don't know the story but they now have this turtle that they know is is illegal but I suspect they took it in for someone else. It looks like a juvenile. I don't think they know very much about how to take care of it. We don't either, but one look at the set up makes me think they haven't put too much thought into it. There is a lamp but they haven't been using it much. There are some rocks but he is young and has a hard time getting up on them, and from what I read it seems they need a dry rock to bask on. They have just a small thing of pellet food for juvenile turtles and she said just give him 5-6 per day and didn't mention anything other food. We are googling right now and trying to see if there is anything we are missing but if there are any turtle experts out there, can someone let me know if I'm missing something here? This is honestly why I never allowed any caged creatures in my house (for the most part -- we had one hamster and one gerbil long ago). It is so stressful and I feel so guilty looking at critters in cages.

I've listened to all his podcast interviews but haven't read the book yet. I am going to order it now. Research was mentioned upthread -- just guessing here but I think the push has for so long to improve female performance and equity, and the flip in outcomes now has been so swift and sudden we weren't really prepared for it. One of the things Reeves mentioned (at least I think it was him -- it was quite awhile ago!) was that there is no good model/slogan for encouraging young males. We have "Girl Power", "The Future is Female", "Girls Rule", "Girl Boss" etc. But what do boys have? There's toxic masculinity, and then we have the biblical/conservative model of male as provider and head of the household. But what if you are liberal, centrist or atheist? Regarding careers and using math/computer science as an example. For years there has been efforts to close the gap in a lot of the sciences. And I absolutely hope there are no barriers to women anymore in what they choose to pursue. But if computer science is 80 percent dominated by males because most girls just aren't interested, why do we keep on throwing scholarships and program opportunities to encourage girls in some stem programs and bemoaning the fact that the statistics remain skewed? The latest research I had seen was that in the most progressive countries (Denmark for example) where the gender gap was smallest, the employment skewed the heaviest towards traditional gender norms.

A few months ago while trying to help my son come up with ideas about what to do this summer I came across some of these programs that mentor students to do research and then publish a paper. I had always seen those posts on college confidential -- 4.7 gpa, varsity captain this, president that, and published a paper, etc etc. I didn't know how they had done it. And then I saw these programs. One was over 6k to go through the summer research program, and an extra 2k to publish. It just felt so wrong. I really hope colleges are catching on.

awesome! Congrats!!

Every school is different and every student's experience is different, but I will say on paper my kids are both taking a decent amount of AP classes (junior year one has four plus cc linear algebra, and one has 3) and I really haven't seen hours of homework. Now, they do both take study hall, which helps a lot, but over the course of their high school so far the horror stories never really materialized. I have seen periods of heavy homework interspersed with days of no homework. However, I have also seen a lot of high achieving students who spend longer than they need doing homework, who study longer than they need to on tests, or wait until later in the evening to start homework and then complain about having to be up until 2 am doing homework. My kids have decent but not overwhelming EC's, do homework at a reasonable time, and are in bed by 10 pm every night. Now, my son doesn't have to study because it all just seems to come easily to him (even Physics E and M) while my daughter is more selective about what she takes! It was a big adjustment to the hours in class and loss of free time, but they did adjust, and don't regret going. Neither is aiming for Ivies.

Our neighborhood has tennis courts and two have been converted to pickle ball courts. During the pandemic we went as a family off and on to play, and it is so much fun. I enjoy it so much more than tennis. The only problem in our family is that two of us have a similar skill level, one is not super strong, and the last one pretty much mops the court with us, lol. Of course I have been dating/married to him for 31 years so I am used to his ever present athletic abilities, but my kids could get pretty irritated! I think I am inspired to reserve a court again for this weekend!

We have a Venza -- almost got the hybrid RAV 4 and opted for the Venza which is also a hybrid and has similar gas mileage. My area is hilly so it doesn't hit the optimal mpg - it is supposed to be 40 mpg and I get 37.5. A fill up is about 10 or 11 gallons and I get 475 miles out of one tank.

Well, he just applied to the nearby Aops campus to be a math assistant during the summer camps, so fingers crossed that will work out! Covid combined with this kid's personality has made it really slow to convince him to add group activities. The things he did join took a lot of convincing, and often in his mind the opportunity has to be "perfect" before he'll consider it. And perfect doesn't mean most elite or prestigious, it means lined up perfectly with his interests, perfect amount of hours, perfect time of day, etc. So the job I thought he would be perfect to apply to at a kid's coding studio, he refused. Even though the hours were great, it was nearby, and his closest friend works there, he had the impression it had a bad manager and he decided it would be too painful. The four hour a month chess club assistant he didn't like because he felt he wouldn't be good enough at chess. (he has invested time in watching chess videos, reading books about chess, but doesn't spend every day playing so he doesn't think he's good enough). I did convince him with the promise that I would help him quit if it turned out to be a bad fit! He's got a lot going on despite the rigid mindset, so I'm not too worried overall. I just hope he can get into a UC that is nearby and is a major that he is happy about!

I really hope so, since if other opportunities don't pan out, he will be taking the group theory class this summer, and it will be taking a significant amount of time!

it's the age too, probably. Just my two cents, but my twins definitely slumped academically around last middle school, needing more time to veg out and play on MC and talk with friends. Now as juniors they are much more intellectually engaged again with the world. 🙂

I did not read the replies but I will just say that my mom was with me for the first four months, and after that things were still not easy, but survivable. Neck strength on their part was a big help, and by four months one was only waking up once a night and the other twice, and it was more routine. That's not to say I wouldn't have kept help if it was still available, but things started to get more predictable.

Nice!!!