Posts tagged “The parent's feelings”

Piano, math sheets, sight words. My kid skips a couple days and tries to throw the whole streak out. TodoFarm logs what he actually did, not a yes/no — 5 minutes counts as 5 minutes, and a zero day doesn't erase the past. Notes from our house on dropping the 0/1 mindset.

My kid hits me with 'ten worksheets for game time, remember?' and I genuinely cannot remember if I said it. TodoBank parks the deal in a passbook instead of my memory, so 'three more to go' shows up as a balance — and on a low-energy day, the balance covers it.

When the school keeps calling, six months in your memory is mush — who was that kid, what happened, did I apologize to that parent? TroubleNote is a parent-only log for incidents, organized by friend, by date, by place. No advice. Just lays it out. And when the data shows your kid is actually hitting less than last year, you breathe a little.

7 p.m. on a Tuesday, kid on the floor at Trader Joe's, and the grandma behind us smiles and says “they grow up so fast.” Same cliché as “things were better back then,” I think. So I went home and did the math. We're past 50% already. LastDays is the app I built so I'd see that number on my phone every day.

WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. And my kid won't listen, but I want him happy. I lined up the 1984 slogans next to my own, and turns out I'm running doublethink in my living room every day. Nobody made me do it.

Same kanji, same wrong stroke, third time this week. I already hit this wall 30 years ago. I'm trying to hand him the history. He's not taking it. A note on Bismarck, Piaget, and a parent's late-night plea: please, just be the wise one.

My kid brought home a 60. I felt the lecture rising and stopped it — barely. Turns out the rage isn't about the score. It's about him not doing what I want, when I want. A note on parent burnout, process vs. outcome, and why treating your kid as a separate person is mostly for your own sanity.

Half the stuff my kid won't even try isn't about skill — he's decided it's out of reach, like a hoop bolted to a roof. On lowering the rim instead of cheering louder, and self-doubt as a parent.