Mother Nature is the biggest misogynist, and I wish we had better solutions. So many women make these choices (I made the SAHM choice and am incredibly luck after 18 years at home to come back to my field and find work).

I don't see this a ton in my area at least -- there is a LOT of STEM focus all around, and most of the AP bubble that my kids are in is pretty balanced male/female. It is very common to at least have finished AP Calc by 11th grade in this particular subset of kids. Many of the girls took through MV Calc and Linear Algebra at the CC. The high school girls through I meet through my kids' EC's are extremely focused and driven and know what they want. And for the most part they want humanities or biology related majors. One went all in Chemistry (and is at MIT now) and we know one who wants to go CS, but MANY of them are drawn to the biological sciences, or bioengineering at most. Right now the girls are doing better in school overall, so it's hard to imagine that it's still gender bias within the k-12 setting. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/boys-left-behind-education-gender-gaps-across-the-us/#:~:text=The education gender gap emerges,about as well in math).

I am only commenting on the people who actually have money, good money, and act like other people spending money "frivolously" on trips or what not as being a waste of money or implying that they would never be able to afford it.

My nephew’s girlfriend’s family invited my nephew on a trip to Ireland - 2 weeks or so. My mom said something along the lines of must be nice to be so rich. My parents have plenty of money to go on a trip like that every year if they wanted, but travel makes them incredibly anxious, so they do very little of it! I am genuinely happy when people are able to enjoy their money and especially like it when they travel, so I can hear all about new places!

I remember one time having had a lot of work done and afterward it rooks days before I could open my jaw fully again. It wasn’t weeks though, it was days. I grind and am prone to tmj regularly.

My son finally perfected the skill of asking questions by giving all the information he knew and all the things he had tried already. Asking for help is definitely is a skill in itself.

Applying it more broadly to more than just sports -- out of myself, my husband, and three kids, three of us are absolute wimps with ANY thing that resembles high emotion, high stress, or conflict. Spirited debate that is too emotional? We often completely shut down. My husband and daughter thrive on it -- their brains click on and they really get into it without feeling it is at all personal.

How old is she? My son was nervous about asking questions for a long time before finally he just did it enough to get over his fear. Then he found that often times it took a LOT to have the question be useful - the answer always started out very cryptic and “leading”, and he had to engage over multiple back and forths before he got any useful help. We did a combination of online classes and just working through the books. Working through the books fostered a deeper knowledge base because there was time to do more problems, but the downside was not having a teacher to ask questions, as I was not able to help. Once the videos dropped off (around Algebra 2 I think?) we were on our own. My son found the Geometry class to be pretty tough, and the Intermediate Algebra was challenging (though not overly so - just enough). Intermediate Number Theory was HARD, so he had a very clear schedule to devote most of his brain power to that. He had no writing curriculum that year - it was mostly math, science and then just reading books.

This. My husband was a Marine for 21 years and has been in plenty of highly charged, in your face arguments with others, people who are his closest friends. Even now in his post retirement job, while it's not as physical, he can still really lose his temper on other people and let fly. He'd always go back later and make sure things were ok, and if he felt he was in the wrong when he cooled down, he would apologize. And he would never treat anyone in his family like that. It is hard for him I'm sure -- I'm very much a wimp when it comes to confrontation, so when we disagree on things he really has to channel his inner Mr. Rogers. But he does it because he's a grown up.

A lot of the parents I talked to just really didn't understand because they weren't in the class room and had nothing to compare it to. They just assumed it was good because that's what they were told. When problems happened or they needed tutors they assumed it was their own kids only, and that real learning was still going on in class.

When my twins were in k-2 before I homeschooled, they had textbooks, but they still weren't great. They were ok, but they jumped all over the place, had poorly written problems, and sometimes even asked questions that presupposed a skill that hadn't been taught yet. They were supposed to guess and check division in second grade, apparently. So frustrating. I homeschooled using Singapore Math because I could tell my non-mathy kid REALLY needed a strong basis in number sense. It was quite shaky. She would have been just passed along getting weaker and weaker as she went. She was already set up to hate math from the beginning, though, when in kindergarten she had to 1. Fill out a number scroll from 1 to 1000 (over time, but she got so behind because her hand strength wasn't great yet, and she was forced to finish before the year ended) and 2. She got behind in in-class math worksheets and was forced to do around 36 math worksheets over the course of two days to catch up. Not that the teacher was ever going to check them anyway. Ugh. ETA: this is in the VERY good school district that everyone wants to be in. I was underwhelmed. Bad math combined with no phonics. What is the use other than babysitting at that point? Kids are either being taught at home, by tutors, in Saturday school, or just fall farther and farther behind.

My husband applied almost on a whim -- another student mentioned applying to USAFA and USNA, and my husband (then boyfriend) was like, hey that sounds good. I'll apply too! Fours years of school and 21 years of the Marine Corps later... Neither one of us had any family in the military. My husband still says the four years he spent there were the hardest thing he's ever done. It is not for the faint of heart! (he was an engineering major with a not great academic background, so he was barely treading water academically on top of all the other requirements there) But he made lifelong friends and had incredible teachers, and it was really the foundation of his adult life.

Congrats! My husband went to USNA and we were (slightly) hoping one of our kids would be interested in a Military Academy, but alas, we had zero takers:)

We have Integrated Math here in CA, but my the textbooks are so bad, so much of it is online, the lower level teachers didn’t teach a lot (especially during Covid) and my daughter struggled greatly. My son skipped it all and had Calc in 9th grade, and his teacher apologized to the class for anyone who had to struggle through Integrated Math. I think it’s a combination of bad materials and unprepared teachers. The jumping around REALLY confused my daughter too - she would learn a concept and practice only 1-2 problems and then it would leave it immediately. I got her through most of AOPS intro to Alg (the first half of the book) before she went to high school. We pared it down and kept Alcumus at easy level, but any high school math that she had already covered with AOPS she breezes through. She said it was so much clearer than what she did at school. The best teachers taught Calc, so when she got to Calc she did better too - though still she got A’s mostly because of extra credit. But she passed the AP exam with a four, so she’s hopefully done with math!

My kid that was diagnosed ASD struggled in ninth grade with English class (at public school, after really streamlining it at home due to anxiety about writing) For him the things that didn't work were any assignments that were creative or personal -- the one that bombed was writing about another student and how one's impression of that person changed over time. He struggled because it was so artificial - he didn't have enough time to get any impressions of the student enough for them to change but he also struggles with writing anything that isn't true. As the writing got more frequent and more clearly defined, he did much better. Practicing on demand writing has made him so much more comfortable with writing in general, and clear guidelines with good feedback. He even finally was able to write a personal narrative when he wrote his college application essays. But it took a lot for him to get comfortable doing it. Because of our dynamic, it was very important that he had someone else assigning the work. School refusal had set in with certain subjects from homeschooling and he had to work through that with other teachers. Gradually the anxiety lessened and he was able to write. That being said, he spends far more time on any English assignment, and finds them much harder because they can still be open ended. For instance, two pages of annotations might take him 45 minutes, because he is trying to get them perfect and (more likely) not get anything wrong. His twin sister breezes through them in about 10 minutes because she is able to put in ONLY the minimal effort required for any assignment:)

I lurk so much more than I post but something about seeing that error screen made me feel a little adrift myself! And this happened right after I had deleted Twitter and Facebook yet again from my phone! Really need to pick those books back up instead...

My older daughter fainted while having her blood drawn and I almost fainted watching her faint. My younger daughter has fainted multiple times, at blood draws and from vaccinations. One time she hadn't eaten much and was stressed about her first AP test coming up, and then was reading a book that was somewhat gory and then fainted. Maybe having something sugary or a protein bar on hand would help?

I don't know how much you've read about it, but one big change is that it's adaptive, so that one's performance on the first half will decide how difficult the second half will be. If a student does really well, the second half might get much harder questions. I think the podcast Tests and the Rest has an episode that talks about the digital SAT.

Just adding that when my now husband and I were young and dating, there were a lot of missteps and breaking up/getting back together. That would have been a LOT harder and more frustrating if moms were involved!

We love the Brookies in the baked goods section. Brownie and cookie bites basically. So yummy. Love the brie with apricot jam and the fig and olive crackers. We buy bags of the powerberries and butterscotch sea salt chocolates and have those for dessert (when we aren't eating brookies) Their prepared soups are very good -- I love the tomato feta soup, and I LOVE the tabouleh.

I've heard it described as the Peter Pan generation. Many more kids who have had a much more sheltered, protected and protracted childhood trying to stave off adulthood. The book Generations by Jean Twenge uses a ton of data to show all the differences between our generations regarding pace of life and milestones as well as mental health issues. **(don't quote) My daughter who wasn't affected by gender issues absolutely wanted to stay a kid and was traumatized by her period, going so far as to go on the birth control pill that has no breaks so as to never get her period. She is a dancer so that definitely complicated things, but I felt like her resiliency to deal with issues like that was much lower than was expected for our generation. It's like, trying to fix the problems we had growing up just moved the bar lower for what new problems emerged.

That's the problem though - depending on your state therapists feel constrained for fear of losing their license to do anything but affirm and not question. And sadly there are a huge number of very bad therapists out there. Some feel out of their depth and so refer straight to a gender clinic. And once you start the process it is very hard to stop it. Some of the detransitioner stores are pretty shocking.

Kid is depressed. Kid researches on internet what is wrong with me. Finds trans. Parents put kid in therapy. Therapists are all gender affirming. Suggest gender clinic and tell parent (and sometimes kid) that their kid is in a marginalized group and has a 41 percent chance of killing themselves. Then starts the medical journey. Meanwhile the comorbidites range from ADHD, Autism, childhood or teen sexual assault, illness or death in the family, or any other major trauma. This is happening 100%. Right now our culture's symptom pool is trans. Before is was eating disorders. Before that, I don't know... female hysteria?

Today my son finished his last college application -- the UCSB College of Creative Studies supplemental due date was the 31st of January, so he's actually a few days early for once:) Now he can finally sit back and relax a bit!

I once brought my college seeking daughter on a California trip (when we lived in VA), starting in Sacramento and driving in a rental down to San Diego and flying out from there. Halfway through the trip I realized I had booked round trip tickets from Sacramento! Yikes. I got everything changed but that was nervewracking! Just recently same daughter had a rental scheduled to drive cross country with friends, leaving Jan 1. We get to the rental place where she attempts to pick up the car, and finds out that they only accept credit card for one way trips (not debit). Well, she had cut up her credit card and sent us the new one, which was fortunately laying around in our house somewhere -- but it was so stressful! She was trying to be good and not use her credit card as she tends to overspend.