Splurge or Save Thursday: Moisturizing Cream

Huge, huge, huge parenting win. I have a teen son who has been battling anxiety for years, and it has been impacting his performance in his favorite sport for almost a year. We both have been working on getting our anxiety under control, and I’ve seen the impact in our home life — but for the first time this week, I can see it impacting his performance in a HUGELY positive way. No one but us would have seen the difference (he did *better* but not like amazing), but it’s the first time he hasn’t played scared in a really long time.

I know people will ask, so I’ll share what worked/didn’t work for us:

1) We worked for a long time to recognize when we were ruminating (spiraling, getting stuck, etc.), and came up with a visualization technique when we couldn’t stop thinking about something. Lots of ways to do it – imagine throwing it away, imagine burying it, etc. After you do it a bunch of times, it gets easier, and thoughts are less likely to get stuck.

2) From there, after we both got ruminating thoughts under control, we worked with a technique to bring down baseline anxiety that creeps up. super simple, just really deep breathing five times with a trigger word. after a while, the trigger word is enough to bring down your heartrate as you feel it rise and feel yourself centered into the ground. If either of us is getting amped up, it helps to look into the eyes of a person who is deeply grounded and calm and breath together. So, when we did something that made me really anxious, he looked into my eyes, said the trigger word, and breathed with me.

3) Therapy, for either of us, did not work. It was too abstract, and I didn’t believe the techniques would work, so I couldn’t apply them. I just issue spotted and googled as we both were having a hard time.

4) clearly, from this long report, it helped that we did it together. I didn’t realize until I started parenting him that I have been wildly anxious my whole life, and was always doing something to react to an anxiety trigger. Every time I read about something, it helped me to say to him “hey, I’ve felt this my whole life, and this is really helping me.” The best way to describe it is that if you think of your anxiety level as a pitcher of water, our anxiety level was right at the top a few years ago. By first killing ruminating thoughts, and then working on a technique that brings down baseline anxiety, our water levels went way back to the bottom of the pitcher. Now, when something happens that is anxiety producing, there is room in the pitcher for it to go up a little, but it doesn’t spill over and impact everything else.

Paging GCA- I would love to hear more about how you parented that kid! Could you email me at
[email protected]?

Antiperspirant for kids? My 10 year old (girl) has been wearing deodorant for a little while, but has recently started being bothered by sweaty pits. From what I understand, the current research doesn’t point to risks associated with antiperspirant/aluminum. I guess just curious if there are really any alternatives to a standard aluminum based antiperspirant, or if we just try various drugstore ones and go from there?

To continue yesterday’s discussion about boredom in school, am I the only one who thinks that school curricula are just boring and counterproductive for all children, not just the ones who are gifted? After college I tutored dozens of not-gifted kids in math, reading, and writing. My observation is that many kids are both bored and lost in school because the material is presented in a superficial way that is not engaging and does not lead to true mastery. For example, in math kids are taught to use algorithms by rote without understanding how they work. I used to have my students derive regrouping in addition and subtraction, converting fractions, adding and subtracting fractions, and all sorts of other operations using manipulatives. The task of discovering the algorithm for themselves was engaging and empowering, and once they truly understood how it worked their confidence and performance soared. To head off arguments that this must just have been a bad school system, these kids came from very wealthy and well-regarded districts in New England, and a few from fancy private schools.

Yet schools don’t teach math this way until calculus, by which time it’s usually too late. I remember hating math because it was repetitive and boring. In tenth-grade precalc our teacher taught us to take derivatives but refused even to explain what a derivative was. That was deferred until the next year. By that time I was already set on studying humanities because math and science were obviously just useless busywork. After high school I didn’t take another math course until grad school.

Similar problems exist in every subject. Kids are not taught English grammar, so they have trouble learning world languages. Kids are not taught to read and analyze literature, just to find the answers to multiple-choice questions about short passages on standardized tests. No wonder they are all bored and disengaged and don’t understand anything. No one is actually teaching them.

Does anyone have advice for navigating your parent’s separation as an adult? I wouldn’t say it was exactly a happy marriage and “came out of nowwhere” but at the same time, I just figured if they’d made it almost 50+ years, they would just stick it out. There are a million complicating factors (and at least they plan to stay married on paper) but the big thing for me is that the “issue” she’s most upset about (signing up for a scammy “dating” site) seems like a major red flag for dementia or impaired mental status. I’ve been asking them to have him see a neurologist for almost two years and she agrees he has memory issues but won’t make him go in because “there’s nothing they can do for him anyway”. To her, the weird online stuff is “a pattern” because I think there were issues in their marriage in the past, but to me it seems to be a flag for a neurological issue. I mean, she can do what she wants either way, but it seems weird to say the two are definitively not linked. I’d like to be very, very uninvolved but I have serious concerns about my dad living on his own that I think my mom might be unable to see.

I’m kind of struggling today. I was the poster from a while back who was having difficulty managing constant daycare illness with a small shared PTO pool and as discussed there, I’ve been working more nights, which I struggle with, to make up hours. It’s taking a toll – that time before bed was my only reliable “free time” or time to spend with my husband and I find I have so much work time to make up that it’s getting swallowed day after day, week after week, so I can move some documents around and send some emails no one will read. The job market has been a non-starter (my field is badly affected by Trump), but I’m doing my best to find something, anything. This just can’t continue – I can’t be a good mom, my best self, or a good wife this way, putting off my own medical care and emotional needs to save my little bit of paid time off. Plus, my son has been having nonstop tantrums, which can be so tiring – I simply need one hour to not be “on” each night.

Not looking for advice, by the way. Trust me, I’ve thought through every option already and we’re working towards what we think will be best. Just wanted to vent on yet another difficult morning.