But once they were old enough to pay for and choose their own higher education - 19 or so - they could have chosen an advanced degree (or even another bachelors, I guess, if they were determined) in the humanities, right? I disagree that a university is a place with varied political views. If your choices for university were truly BJU or Liberty University, would you want to pay them to educate your kids? If sending them to these places were basically the only way for them to enter or stay in middle/upper middle class society, maybe you'd send them, but I doubt you'd say to yourself, well, they need to be exposed to varied political views. I guess I see their view of homeschooling as somewhat different from mine - I want to direct (to some degree) my kids' educations in high school, that is why we homeschool. I do believe in the value of a true liberal arts education (in high school). I can't really see turning that over to a community college. But they saw the purpose of high school education as something much different, obviously - they saw it as the first part of a differentiated education in which you were basically career training, not educating the whole child or whatever. There are countries that operate more like this and require a much less broad-based education in high school, and there are certainly groups within society (largely immigrant groups from Asia, ime) who are more likely to see some degrees as much more valuable than others, and encourage their kids to pursue only these disciplines.

This I can agree with - it seems like they found the main purpose of a college education to be getting a job. But I can see where they are coming from. The vast majority (Vaaaaaast majority) of professors, both in private and public universities, lean heavily left in their sociopolitical beliefs. It's not a secret. If your options were to send your kids to receive higher education from people who are 95% conservatives, and many of them very conservative - to the point that most of your college options look like Bob Jones University - you might say to yourself, well, I don't want to send my kids to be indoctrinated at Bob Jones University, but being without a college education in the US puts you at a serious financial disadvantage, so I'll find a way to send them to college for job training in disciplines that are more neutral by design (that is to say, STEM). I don't think many liberals or leftists or whatever (or many people who are fairly centrist, or even moderately conservative) stop to consider what the college landscape looks like to someone who is very conservative (not that I know whether this book's author is or isn't). To us, it looks like it would look like to you if the vast majority of schools were clones of either Liberty, BJU, Hillsdale, or maybe the service academies - and if those were significantly more conservative in actual campus culture than they are now. You would see the value of a college education differently if those were, largely speaking, your only choices.

Jimmy John's delivers sandwiches; I can't see how the profit margin over materials is significantly different for a roast beef sandwich than for a hamburger, and the sandwiches are made and packaged separately. Maybe it has something to do with sogginess during transport - but then, when we ordered burgers in college they were never soggy. I hadn't considered the addiction angle for fast food, that is probably true. You'd definitely want to start something like that in a health-conscious market (or maybe not, maybe you'd want to start it in a highly diabetic market and just push really hard on the health angle). The perish-ability is I think something that can be got around, but maybe not - I don't know the food industry well. Does McDonald's take a loss on their salads? You would have to charge more per meal, but you'd have to charge more anyway probably just to signal quality.

At any rate, if they were doing it for English 101 and 102 at the community college, my understanding is they were using those courses as the first year of high school, when their kids were 14/15. Now, I'm not saying I'd proofread/edit my kids' papers line by line in high school (please lord don't let me be doing that) but there are definitely a fair number of, especially homeschooling, parents who do at that age. If we're talking an actual first college course, that would be maybe different. I would never do either, but I'm not particularly surprised or appalled that parents do and would at those ages and for those classes (essentially junior/sr level HS English)

I have a DD who is highly gifted, self-motivated, has great executive function, and is compliant and willing to "do school." She started being able to do math without my fairly constant participation at around 6th/7th grade. In 3rd, no way.

Wow, I will check that out tonight! I accidentally left my payment info in Amazon overnight once not too long ago (I usually delete the payment method each time I purchase) and woke up to find out that a child had purchased like 30 episodes of Martha Speaks.

Also, as for the bolded, this is not a sentiment unique to adoptive parents. :)

Oh, lots of people do this from different industries. People on Etsy often ask for shop critiques or help with a listing. On occasion I'll give advice. 95% of the time they get super defensive and dismissive, which is fine, but why ask for advice in that case? They rebut line by line why your various suggestions won't work, or whatever. I think it's just very hard to hear criticism of something you are so personally invested in. I know I feel the same way when someone criticizes my shop, or even offers advice for improvement.

Kids do this. It's not like kids are blind; they recognize the physical differences in other people as well as we do, they just haven't been trained not to comment on them yet. DD12 once said, when she was about 4 maybe, upon seeing a rather obese lady at the Hobby Lobby, "Wow, mom, that lady is even fatter than you!" (loudly). I was mortified, but, well, she was right. She just hadn't learned yet that you only say polite things about other people in public, and even then there are things you don't say at all, even if they are complimentary.

I've thought of something like this too, although I didn't think of seniors, which makes a lot of sense. Population of old people is increasing and will continue to do so for at least a decade, and because there are fewer multi-generation homes (at least this is my understanding), there will be more demand both for community and for basic services. Food is one of the few things I'm interested in besides fiber arts - I am what you might call food-motivated. Here are some things I never understood and would maybe consider if I were trying to start a food industry business: 1. Why can't you drive-through something healthy? I don't mean get the salad at McDonald's, or even a sandwich at Subway (which doesn't usually have a drive-thru anyway, right?), but why isn't there a chain where you drive through and pick up an orange already sectioned into slices, a boiled egg, and some sort of vegetable finger food? Or something else, I dunno, whatever. You could cater to gluten-free people, people with allergies, vegans, and low-carbers. Maybe this only seems like a glaring hole to me because I am often out running errands and think, "I'm so hungry, why are my choices french fries or a burrito?" It might be a demographics issue but you'd think with the rise of diabetes and other specialty diets, there would be at least some demand for healthy low-carb options. 2. Why doesn't anyone deliver hamburgers? Pizza delivery is a huge industry, they have sandwich delivery places, Chinese always delivers - but I've lived like one place, a college town, where you could order a hamburger.

Ah, yes! Well, I think part of it is due to the resergence in fiber arts in the last 15 years - more young people picking up sewing, knitting, etc. And what happened (at least this is my theory) is that the people who were already set up to make labels for fiber products were geared toward the previous market - large scale producers and smaller makers whose design inclinations tended toward the 50s-80s aesthetics. So once you had all these new people enter the marketplace, both making things for themselves and making things for others in their own new small businesses, the previous label market wasn't sufficient - they wanted smaller runs, a modern aesthetic, newer fibers (or I guess more traditional fibers, but you know what I mean - naturals, organics, etc.) You can see the same phenomenon with something like Spoonflower. Spoonflower makes, I am fairly certain, an absolute killing. They saw the burgeoning market in small runs of fabric for people who started collecting and obsessing about new, modern, small-scale designers, and realized there was a niche for custom printing. I remember people on Etsy, right around when Spoonflower started or maybe slightly before, did screenprinted runs of 1-2 yards for like a zillion dollars. Really I am pretty sure it was $40 a yard or more. So Spoonflower's founders must have said, hey, we know how to print small runs of eco-friendly fabric (or at least we have an idea of how we might do this), and wouldn't it be cool if you crowd-sourced the designs and/or allowed people to have their own designs printed? And they just went with it and it was great. anyway as you can tell I like fabric :) Yarn and I have more of a love-hate relationship.

Everything is lucrative (at least, I am pretty sure this is the case). I don't really know enough about most other industries to say how I would use a million dollars to make more money in them, though. I could probably figure it out with most craft-related, especially fiber-related, industries, but it would take several years of getting to know the process and the market and etc. For something like say hairdressing, or architecture, I have no idea and I doubt I ever would have any idea. I would say most people on these forums are pretty knowledgeable about homeschooling - more than your average joe, of course, and I'd venture to say more than your average homeschooler. You know the holes in homeschooling, the products or services you need but can't seem to get, or maybe one you know you have (product or service idea/potential) but are not sure if other people need or want. There's opportunity in the homeschooling community for money-making for sure, and especially since A. the government provides a fair amount of the cash in some states (and I would venture to guess that will expand to other states in the next decade or so) and B. homeschooling is in a period of expansion, and a lot of the expansion is by people who seem more interested in outside assistance than previous generations of homeschoolers. ETA; and when you combine that with demand for afterschooling - people seem more interested than ever, to me, in things like tutoring and extracurricular enrichment of an academic nature, and just a way to shore up their kids' educations either from schools that may not be great or for the increase in competitiveness of college admissions and merit aid.

It won't make any of you rich, but it would make me rich :) I'd say that most people who already run a small business could take a million dollars and turn it into 5 million in a few years. My small business is clothing labels. I linked to a woven label machine, a photo of one. You can find youtube videos of them in action. Basically, the way we do labels now is the "I had $100 to start this business" option; a woven machine is the "I have $100k to start this business" option, and with a million I could do woven plus a few other options - twill/cotton tape (which has always been my favorite kind), recycled satin, etc. Basically, if you know a market well - I know labels, but not really anything else - and you are interested in business, you can often see where the holes in the market are, where the opportunities for growth are. In the labels market, and I am totally tell you all a secret here but it won't matter because none of you are obsessed by clothing labels, there is an eco-friendly hole for small runs and modern design. So right now we make organic cotton labels, I have an excellent sense of design, and we do small runs, but we can only do printed labels. They're great, don't get me wrong, but what would be greater would be woven organic cotton labels. Now, you can buy woven polyester labels, and you can buy woven cotton labels, but I am not sure you can even buy woven organic cotton labels. Even to the extent that you can buy woven polyester labels (which are scratchy and plasticky), you generally have to provide the design, or the options are limited and dated, and you have to order a zillion of them at a time, and they're produced in China. (ETA: there are some produced in the US or elsewhere, but mostly you order them from China). For satin labels, there are a few US makers, and the entry point is actually relatively low - $1000 or so. I have thought a lot of times about adding satin labels, but I haven't found a recycled poly satin (because it has to be poly) that would stand up to the cheaper machines. So either I'd have to get someone to custom-produce me some recycled satin ribbon, in which case you're talking $, or I'd have to get a fancier machine, in which case you're also talking $ - and without either case, I don't know that I'd have a product, yet, that would really stand out. Plus, and here's the key, growing a small business from something you, your husband, and maybe another relative can do to something that you'd need 5-10 employees for means a very different level of commitment. At that point you can't just take a vacation on a whim and take the business with you in your trunk; you can't move every year to a new state; you have to file reams of paperwork, etc.

I think it would generally be considered victim-blaming to suggest that girls who have bullying or sexual harassment problems with social media, or whose social media contacts spread vicious rumors about her, primarily have these problems because they've chosen the wrong friends. It might be true - but so is the correlation between getting drunk at parties in college and being sexually harassed or raped. It's still kind of in bad taste to say well, that won't happen to me because my friends and I aren't into that kind of stuff, kwim?

Here's a link to a woven label machine (not necessarily the one I'd buy, though): https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQf67H52jLAOAJWKUpmQnRezUDGUUmy-UXNq0p8gmdLV_DNdXS7

Well, if we're talking about what we'd do with a million dollars, instead of how we'd invest it to make more money, I'd definitely use some of it to buy an off-grid house out in the woods somewhere. But I wouldn't buy real estate as an investment, because I know I could grow this business to about 10x its current size in a couple of years, given the cash (and the willingness to work harder than I do now).

I don't mind getting solicitation emails, for the most part, because I just delete them and that is that. I am fine with kids on my kids' team emailing me or calling me or leaving a flyer on my door or whatever, that is fine. But, and here's the rub, I don't get to decide for other people whether they are willing to have someone they don't know email them (or call them, or come to their house) to ask for money. I can make that decision for my own private information, but not for someone else's information that they gave to me for a purpose other than inviting solicitation. Thinking you can make that decision for other people is inconsiderate; insisting that a bunch of kids, who may or may not yet know that it is inconsiderate, do it anyway or suffer punishment, is very poor behavior.

We don't have cell phones or social media accounts, and neither do the kids. They have friends. They're just local friends, to whom they talk in person or on the phone (or, occasionally, for ones we've moved away from, in letters or email).

I'd buy a woven label machine, one that handles cotton thread. Then I'd buy a lot of cotton thread. Then I'd buy an industrial space to house this contraption (they're big), and have it connected to a set of offices and whatnot. Then I'd build a house near the industrial space - maybe I'd need to buy some acreage first to build both of these spaces. Then I'd buy a machine that prints on cotton tape. Then I'd hire a few people. Maybe 10. Then I'd pay someone to build me a good standalone website. Then I'd make the million back in a year, and 2-5 million each year after that. I am so serious. Eventually I'd get into some other types of printing - recycled polyester labels, maybe.

I don't think a heads-up is enough; I think you have to ask them for permission (and even so, it's not cool).

And it doesn't matter whether your DS would care if he got spam emails from 20 different companies, or robocalls from 20 different charities, or whatever - he might care or he might not. It doesn't matter, because giving away someone else's information is making that decision (whether they would care) for them, and it is rude at least and morally reprehensible at worst. Now he could do this: he could call or email all of these people individually and say hey, my school wants to send you solicitation emails for fundraising for my baseball team. Can I give them your private email address so they can send you these emails? That would be rude, but it would be less rude than doing it without asking.

Companies cannot sell your email unless you've given them permission to do so. They cannot. Asking someone for a donation is not, actually, the same thing as giving away their private information to someone else to ask for a donation.

I just can't even believe they have made this request. Or maybe I can. When DD12 was in 2nd grade, they had a fundraiser that involved giving up your family and friends' email addresses and phone numbers and etc. There was no punishment if you didn't, but if you did, you got a stuffed penguin (in class, in front of the other kids). Of course every other kid in class brought in the email addresses, because the vast majority of people are inconsiderate. I wrote a long and very angry letter to her teacher (to be passed on to the administration, as I knew the teacher had no choice in the matter). Of course they had the same fundraiser the next year. Oooh, it makes me mad to think about.

I would make a huge gigantic fuss with the school and the team. You can't punish a kid because he refuses to sell out his family members and give away their privacy. Businesses aren't allowed (unless they inform you when you give it to them) to give away your email address and contact info to other businesses or entities to solicit you. It's actually illegal. To force kids to do something that most people recognize as so wrong that they have made it illegal for businesses to do is a stupid double standard and bad messaging. As for what to tell your DS - tell him that he doesn't have the right to decide who contacts or doesn't contact his friends and family to solicit money. They didn't give him their contact information with the expectation that he would give it to a stranger to send them spam, and he cannot, morally, give away their private information like that.

I like Mighty Leaf. the Chammomile citrus is very good