Quote from my son age 7

I know what the problem is with school Mummy.
They group everyone by age.
Why do they do that?

Popular posts from this blog

Who is making things worse? A comment on a fb support group got me thinking. The person asked what about when the pda parent does everything wrong and makes everything worse. She commented that nobody writes that article. I have always tried to write practical, real suggestions that might help because that was what I couldn't find when I was struggling. It doesn't help to know how hard things can be, I thought, because I'm living it. But the comment got me thinking. I remembered a time when I felt like everyone else was making progress, except me. Parenting pda is counter intuitive. Things you feel you should do usually have the opposite effect to the one you want. It is extremely difficult to explain this. You look like a parent who never says no. You never say no not because you don't care or because your child is spoilt, but because that is often what it takes to enable your child to function. I am making school optional today because
Read more
What home schooling looks like in our house. Don't Replicate School People often ask how do I manage to home school? Does it take up a lot of time? What curriculum do I use? Am I qualified as a teacher? I imagine I thought the same things before I started. That there was only one way to do it, and that was to copy a classroom and try to be like a school. Except we weren't home schooling for religious reasons, or location reasons. We were homeschooling because school didn't work for my son. So why would anyone think replicating a classroom would work? When my son was first out of school, I made efforts at timetabling the mornings for learning, and buying books, and using online lessons. The meltdowns I thought were caused by school continued at home. But once I understood PDA was the challenge, I changed my approach and gradually things started to work and the meltdowns stopped. Priorities Remember education is broader than academic lea
Read more
Pathological Demand Avoidance.  Avoidance is the default. My son avoids the everyday by: ignoring me (He says sometimes he tunes me out, and sometimes if he's concentrating on something else he doesn't hear) talking about his game (I'll talk about socks, he'll talk about game weapons, back and forth, back and forth) saying 'wait', 'in a minute', 'I can't', 'I'm too tired', 'go away, go away, go away' pretending to be a rock, so he can't move, or a soldier arguing about why he doesn't need to, shouldn't bother negotiating if he gets something he'll do it, or promising if he just does something else first, but even if he gets his way, he never does the original thing making loud vocal noises, squeaking, walking away, going to another room, going to his bed, hiding going as if to do it, but ending up somewhere else doing someth
Read more