People who risk their baby's life because they want a home birth and refuse to treat their anxiety.
People who homeschool out of a desire for control, rather than educational reasons. |
People who talk about "toxins" but never volunteer to help me advocate for removing lead from playgrounds and the water supply. |
People who criticize their school or their teacher in front of young children. Seriously, a preschooler does not benefit from that knowledge! Do not burden them with it! |
People who think because their charter school has a good preschool it'll be great through 8th grade.
People who think they're philosophically committed to DCPS rather than charters and have no idea how sorely DCPS will test that commitment. People who think their child is extremely smart just because they have early reading fluency. |
I don't get co-sleeping past a certain age. My colleague said their 5 year old still co-slept with them. Why?
Each time my 5 year old co-sleeps with me (in a hotel or camping), I get the worst sleep ever. So that one is a "you do what?" trigger for me. |
baby swaddling/strapping down a baby's arms for the snoo.
My kids are all in their teens and 20s now, but for some reason these videos keep popping up in my instagram feed: A baby is "swaddled" with his arms pinned tightly at his side...slowly the mom unbinds him and his arms quickly reach up for a stretch. The stretch is cute...but I'm not a fan of these tight swaddles. The babies don't look happy either. |
Diapers on tweens |
Because the kid has anxiety and they're not willing to recognize or treat it. |
My kid was one of those who needed a seriously tight swaddle. It was amazing to see how she just settled right down. Something about the deep pressure hug of it, or that she couldn't really control her arms and was basically keeping herself awake. |
Travel sports for 8 year olds |
People who spend a lot of their spare time doing math enrichment and math summer school and then complain the school math curriculum is "too slow" or not advanced enough for their math genius. If they need all that extra tutoring and time, they aren't that advanced. |
Yes! People who complain that the school devotes too much resources to children with special needs, and then also complain that their school has bad test scores. I dunno what they want. Magic, I guess. |
People who think they're philosophically committed to DCPS but send their kids to resource rich WTOP schools that are not materially different than suburban schools (in some cases, they're much richer/whiter). |
So I get that those parents are annoying when they complain, but math education in this country is really slow compared to some other countries. And it translates into U.S. kids not being able to fill the high demand for quantitative jobs. When we recruit for quant positions, 75% of the candidates that pass the initial HR screen did K-12 in a foreign country. Some parents think that the public school math curriculum is just not age appropriate - they worry that they're wasting their kid's potential by not teaching them early. The only "solution" I really see if to have multiple tracks for math from early on (because some kids struggle with the pace of the school math curriculum) but there are definitely other concerns with that. |
Public v. Private school
Making kids go to church v. Not |