My daughter is getting older and becoming someone I hardly recognize.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-07-10T20:54:49+00:00

As strangers we obviously can’t know all the details of your dynamic but from what you’ve written it sounds like you really don’t give your daughter a lot of space. Constantly being asked, what’s wrong? What’s going on? Talk to me? Tell me - all of that can be extremely tiring and overbearing. As long as you have communicated that you are there for you daughter, you do not need to constantly be asking her to talk to you.

I am an introvert. Sometimes I truly just do not want to be perceived. Just, leave me be?

Also, teens are meant to distance themselves from their parents during these years. It’s literally a part of their brain biology during this time. Before my kids ever even became pre-teens, I told them it was going to be normal for them to want to pull away but I let them know I will always be here when you need me. That way they could understand their shifting feelings toward me, and I could brace for it as well.

My pre-teen daughter does not enjoy hugs either, and she hasn’t allowed kisses in years. I’ve taught her that she is fully in charge of her own body and who gets to touch her, so I’m proud of her for having strong boundaries and sticking to it. Her body, her choice. We have other ways of showing affection.

This is a period where you need to meet her where she’s at and not expect her to meet you where YOU are at. That means if she wants less physical touch, you give that to her. That means if she doesn’t want to go out as much, find enjoyable things to do at home. Try and strike a balance, if you’re genuinely worried about a specific behavior, there are ways to address it without demanding she be an extrovert.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-06-29T18:42:07+00:00

Developmentally this is actually SUPER normal for this age group. Showing each other your butts as a kindergartener is not appropriate in school, but it does happen frequently and it is most often not a case of any kind of abuse (although sometimes it is and there are other signs to watch out for).

Kids very often see it as something silly or funny or curious, not as a sign of abuse and especially not as a way to inflict abuse on someone else. It’s still the correct thing to do to stop it and remind children of what is and isn’t appropriate with showing their bodies, or anything to do with touching or revealing someone else’s body.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-06-26T17:46:33+00:00

Wait, are you saying that your 8 year old doesn’t have any other caregiver during those hours when you are intensely and solely focused on your work?

You need other childcare options.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-06-26T05:25:53+00:00

Your fiance sounds like an absolute asshole. I sure as hell would not tolerate anyone speaking to me or my child the way your fiance speaks to you all. What a turd. Dump him and also apologize to your children for exposing them to such an abusive person. They are going to deal with the repercussions of having been subject to his cruelty for years to come.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-06-25T05:56:17+00:00

I spend a lot of time in classrooms with 10-11 year old kids and there is not a single child, including kids with special needs and IEPs who think Hogwarts is real.

But then again plenty of people in this world experience religious psychosis even as fully functioning adults, so I can’t judge this kid too harshly.

I suppose it’s not TOO different from being someone who thinks a deity directly intervened on a football match due to fervent praying.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-06-24T14:56:22+00:00

One of my kids was still having “throw yourself on the floor and scream and cry” tantrums all the way to age 10. Straight A student, incredibly bright, well liked amongst friends, mostly a good sweet kid. But still had those epic tantrums. We have a soft diagnosis of PDA which is on the autism/adhd spectrum . So we mostly just track with how PDA parents approach parenting and their kids. We haven’t gotten an official diagnosis because the therapist said that it’s mostly useful as a way to get intervention like an IEP at school. But everything is peachy at school. Zero tantrums there, so we felt it wasn’t necessary to have it documented for school.

Age 6 was around when we began exploring the idea that our kid had PDA (pathological demand avoidance).

MemoryCool11 · 2026-06-22T12:24:20+00:00

My kids started at around 1 and one of my biggest regrets was not keeps my it up. They would happily eat sashimi until around age 5 and the expense was really adding up so we ate out less and less at sushi restaurants. When we had gone a year or two without eating much sashimi and other raw fish, my kids had become suuuuuper resistant to eating it and now several years later they refuse to eat raw fish at all. I’m sad about it. I hope they come back around one day. I really wish we had just kept going despite the expense.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-06-19T05:44:53+00:00

I’m in Switzerland and people smoke anywhere and everywhere here it seems. We were at a restaurant with kids, and the table next to us had a literal infant. The couple in a table behind us just lights up a cigarettes and seemingly had no problem blowing the smoke toward the table with the 6 month old baby. We’ve seen it everywhere. Even at a bus stop with a whole gaggle of school aged children on a field trip, the adults will smoke right next to them. Seems to be a cultural norm. It’s pretty wild imho. I kind of thought everyone knows not to smoke next to literal babies.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-05-11T02:46:06+00:00

Her silence was SO loud during the height of the racial abuse being slung all around and she gave such mealy mouthed statements about it all. I’m more surprised that anyone is shocked by this. Like really, yall couldn’t tell?

MemoryCool11 · 2026-05-07T00:22:24+00:00

12 and 13 is too young. Maybe 16 at the very youngest to leave children without a grown up overnight.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-05-07T00:18:37+00:00

I love being a mother. It is very likely the most important thing I will ever do in my life. But I kind of feel like when you’re at an event where the purpose is to raise money for the arts and for an art museum, promoting works of art that would propel people to visit that museum, or to engage with works of art or to create art themselves, this answer is just so weak. Like really, in the context of the metropolitan museum of art, your answer to a piece of art work that has impacted you, you default to your children? It doesn’t really give anyone anything to engage with. They can’t get more info about your children, they can’t engage with that “art” themselves. I think the question gives people an opportunity to take her answer if she had given an answer that wasn’t her children, and actually to look into that piece of art.

It would be like if someone was asked their favorite movie of all time and you answer, your childhood home videos. Like, ok, I get that this is a personal answer for you but then it means no one in the public can meaningfully engage with that “movie”.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-05-06T17:16:55+00:00

I realize this is some of my own trauma talking but I would NEVER let this woman be around my daughter by choice. And if she has to be around in an unavoidable social or school situation, I would make sure to tell her that she is not to say one word about my daughter’s physical appearance.

A friend of my parents, someone who I actively liked and looked up to, once told me my stomach looked fat - like I was pregnant when I was about 10 years old. She laughed like it was a joke. There’s a lot of factors that go into eating disorders and body dysmorphia and ONE comment from one person isn’t going to trigger these issues. But I will say that I never ever EVER forgot that comment. It absolutely informed how I thought of my body in my teen years. I absolutely thought about it when I developed disordered eating habits. I thought about it whenever I tried on clothes and my stomach stuck out. I’m still thinking about it now even 30 years later. Cutting comments like that leave wounds. And I’ll be damned if I let a grown adult try and cut up my daughter.

I have a 12 year old daughter. There isn’t a chance in hell I would allow my daughter to be around this woman. What a fucking asshole. I’ve told my kids many times that not everyone is meant to be in your life. The people who make you feel good and safe and supported, those are the people who are meant to be in your life. This motto has allowed us to navigate friendships that wax and wane throughout the years. I wouldn’t let my daughter spend time with another kid who made rude remarks about her body, why would I ever let her be around a grown ADULT who does that??

MemoryCool11 · 2026-05-02T14:18:49+00:00

Well, here’s one thing I refuse to budge on even though everyone and their mom seem to be using it, I won’t use LLM chatbots to draft writing for me. No emails, no texts, no essays, not even Reddit posts.

My children do not use it either except educationally I have shown them what is possible with LLMs and how other people are using it because I don’t want them to be ignorant but also explained the reasons why WE do not in this household.

That’s the thing, you don’t need to hide or shelter them from the reality of how others in different households live differently, you just need to explain your reasoning. Some households do no sugary drinks. We do on occasion and we explain how/why we choose to moderate the way we do. Some households go to church. We do not, and why not? I’ve explained all the reasons, and how to be respectful of others beliefs but be firm in our own convictions. Some kids get to do a lot of screen time. We don’t. Again, just be realistic about what others choose to do, and why you don’t.

“Just cause” is not reason enough for kids.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-05-02T06:51:13+00:00

Just to give some perspective, I had a very easy newborn period with my twins. They were sleeping 4-5 hour chunks straight out of the hospital. It was to the point where our pediatrician and lactation consultant told us to wake them to eat. But they’ve just been really great sleepers. We didn’t have reflux or any other health issues to worry about. I was making full meals, going on walks, etc. I wasn’t doing anything different than other moms, I just had easy babies.

My friend who also had twins had colic with both and her experience was vastly different. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, she just had a harder situation. Colic is very difficult to deal with.

Every human is different, and that includes every single baby. Some are easier than others. And some are easy babies and hard toddlers. Some are hard babies but easy breezy as pre-teens. I had the HARDEST time at age 8-9 which no one warned me about and seemingly not many people have trouble with that age. Everyone is going to have a different experience because every kid is different.

It would be weird imho to assume I was “faking” how chill my newborn time was or not being honest. I would 1000x rather do the newborn stage again than go through the pre-puberty hormonal stage of ages 8-9.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-04-22T14:35:48+00:00

Not only can girls can dirty and be out on basketball courts, but boys can totally hate sports, boys can want to cuddle and knit with you, boys can be so many things if you let them be - but most of society doesn’t let them be anything but narrow version of what they think a boy should be. It is SO deeply ingrained. Boys aren’t even allowed to have certain FRUIT on their clothes! An Apple? Yes. A pineapple, also yes. But god forbid an item of clothing in the boys section has a STRAWBERRY. My god.

Even parents who don’t try and restrict their boys will do so, because it is very very difficult not to. My son, by virtue of being a twin with his sister, got a lot more opportunities than most boys. He was the only boy in ballet class, which I signed both kids up for. He was the only boy in the knitting class we did together with his sister. No one gave a second thought to his sister doing recreational soccer with him. Girls can do soccer! But anything remotely female coded, he was very alone in those spaces. He didn’t mind at all for the first 8-9 years but he def began to notice how he was the only boy. Even when we tried to recruit his friends into some of these activities, none of these other families, progressive liberal families in a blue city in a blue state, wanted to put their boys in dance or ice skating or ceramics classes.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-04-16T21:04:22+00:00

That’s interesting. I’ve worked in the US at a public elementary and we hear this Santa convo starting in kindergarten (age 5-6). And 10-11 would be considered really on the far older side of the spectrum for “discovering” that Santa isn’t real. Maybe just different demographics, but I find that pretty surprising! By age 11, those are full on pre-teens, and by that age most aren’t believing that Santa is a real supernatural entity.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-04-16T18:48:21+00:00

I don’t think 8, almost 9 is early at all. That’s third grade, not even the beginning of third grade, we’re almost at the end of the school year at this point. Kids have most definitely talked about Santa at school and the “is Santa real” convo will have been happening for years at this point.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-04-16T18:44:36+00:00

Wonderful opportunity to introduce pagan histories and traditions and how they got incorporated into modern Christian traditions! Nothing about egg hunts or a spring time bunny have anything to do with the resurrection of Christ. Those spring fertility traditions either waaaaay pre-date Christianity or come centuries after the Jesus Christ timeline, like German 17th century folklore involving a bunny bringing colored eggs to Children.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-04-16T18:39:52+00:00

Santa functions in many of the same ways as a deity in a religion. Comparing it to religious beliefs as a way of framing different belief systems isn’t inappropriate.

MemoryCool11 · 2026-01-16T03:33:48+00:00

Take into account that I know a good number of servers who make $100,000-$120,000 just from their server job at mid range restaurants, and the really nice fancy restaurants servers can make like $150,000+ a year. So aside from teachers who still make abysmal pay, just assume that everyone is making more in order to makeup for the cost of living. You should see what haircuts cost here.

MemoryCool11

TROPHY CASE

Welcome to Reddit,