Don't forget racists. Plenty of those are drawn to the Mensa labels, too.

This is worth the entire post and more. I'm chuckling while my kid gives me weird looks from the other room.

10 years ago I wouldn't have imagined this, but this is me every time I have to use Windows (e.g., occasionally for work) or help someone else with it.

Kids with ADHD often have days and weeks and months and years in which almost every interaction with a parent or teacher is mostly negative. It doesn't take long for this conditioning to make kids feel bad about themselves--e.g., see themselves as stupid and lazy--and feel bad about the parents and teachers. They often become secretive or otherwise avoid the people they've had thousands of bad experiences with.

If there's any way to shift that balance, it will be powerful for your daughter and for your relationship with her later. Sometimes this means just letting go of certain things. Sometimes it means letting her get away with stuff. If she has siblings, it probably means looking like you're treating your kids unfairly. Sometimes it might mean reaching out with love and kindness when there seems to be no chance that will be received well. You can potentially be one of the best things in her life, but the path of least resistance--and the path that "normal" parenting leads to--is a world where you are an agent of unpleasantness or punishment for her more often than of happiness and comfort.

As she grows up she will learn lots of things adults need to know; some quickly, some very slowly. She'll need help at a lot of points, and if you can be a person she asks for help, her life will be better. When she's 20 or 30 she'll be independent and living a life, no matter what your parenting style was. At that point, the relationship she has with you depends a lot on her accumulated memory and gut-level conditioning from years of being around you.

I'm choking up as I write this because I have a daughter and I know I'm not a perfect dad. I want very much to have a good relationship with her as she grows up, and I know I don't always make that easy. It's a huge challenge. I say this because what I wrote sounds really preachy; I'm preaching to myself as much as to anyone else.

I think ADHD often does to us sort of what some other conditions do to others: beats us down. By the time we reach adulthood, we've learned from millions of experiences not to bother with certain things. At the same time, many adults I know with ADHD are much more anxious, especially in social or work situations, than they appear.

I have a very good friend who is brilliant and has slogged away slowly shifting the sometimes-shitty politics of a swing state's drug and alcohol and youth corrections policies from within. She is amazing, but she has a reading disorder and is a bit neuroatypical. Social niceties and honest emails that don't piss her bosses or colleagues off are difficult for her. She jumped on ChatGPT to write her emails as soon is it was available, and has never looked back. It's been a complete game changer for her. She no longer spends hours every week trying to craft emails that strike that just-right balance. She uses that time to do her job, now.

You're doing the dangerous thing: identifying fascism where Americans have been taught it's clearly not possible because it's "our team."

You're right, of course.

I would watch the shit out of this YouTube channel.

Yeah, people who grew up with boomers as parents, teachers, bosses, weird aunts, etc. Find the ultra- reductiveness to be very silly. The labeling of the entire post war generation as incompetent neocons has never fit well except in the minds of people whose only knowledge of history comes from tiktok. Where do they think their anti- establishment ideas came from? Do they think the hippies and civil rights activists were millennials or something?

We just never invested in that with our kid. We said things like, "it's fun to pretend" and "some other families believe..."

It isn't hard. I grew up believing Native Americans were Israelites and there were ancient records written on metal plated under a hill in central New York. Many families believe our don't believe certain things.

Thanks for checking. I'm sad to be right about this.

Yup. And the people living in deep south Texas have, in some cases, been living there since long before the USA was a country.