u/CaptainThrow123

It's almost 7am and I'm just awake, thinking about this topic. A topic of parenthood I never even thought about. Friendships are an amazing thing, all of my kids have amazing friend groups. I have always tried to be the parent who doesn't become too controlling over who they are becoming friends with. But so far they have always made friends with people who are kind people with good values.

Until yesterday when my 14 year old son invited some new friends over. Which is fine. But I could immediately tell his new friends did not have a lot of respect for rules but also they seemed to not have a lot of respect for girls and women. They walked into the house, saw my 7 year old daughter and said to her (as a joke but still) "Make us some lunch whilst we're here". Obviously I gave my son a dad glare, to tell him to make sure his friends stop with those jokes towards the other people in this house. But that got my guard up immediately, I've tried to raise sons who respect women and understand that men and women equally are in charge of keeping a household running. They we're all hanging out in the upstairs living room and I overheard them talking a lot about red pill content online (My son doesn't have social media but they were showing him videos of some "alpha male" podcasts). Just overall podcasts videos talking about treating women terribly and how men have to be a certain way. Then more podcast stuff that was very bigoted.

Yeah that was my last straw. I went in the room and politely asked his friends to leave the house, they did but they did think I was joking at first. Obviously my son was annoyed at me, I understand that. But we did have a talk. He told me he met those friends at a birthday party for one of my sons friends from theatre. I think my biggest concern was that my son is very much the opposite of those friends. As far as I can tell, he respect girls and women, he knows men don't have to fall into societies stereotypes. So I do think he did become friends with these people to try and fit in with them. However, as a parent, I just don't want my son exposed to people who clearly will have a bad influence on him, especially cause at his age he would so easily be influenced.

I did tell him that he is not allowed to hang out with those people anymore. We had a long conversation as to why and trust me he definitely understands and agrees that those people were not a great influence. So he did block them and delete their numbers. But what he is upset about is the fact that I stepped in, he says he would have figured out eventually that those friends weren't good influence. However, I feel like I did the right thing, his brain is still developing, right now I think he could very easily be influenced by people like those friends.

This whole situation is just replaying over and over again in my head. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad he isn't friend's with them anymore but I'm still wondering if I was right to step in and tell my son to end the friendship. He's 14, I want to trust him, but at the same time it is my responsibility to raise kind individuals, and I know my son hanging out with that group of people would have led him to gaining some views that are straight up bigoted. I am raising free thinkers, but I do draw a line somewhere. You can be a free thinker, but under my roof I'm raising children who are kind and accepting of other people. That's non negotiable.

Our 6 month old daughter slept through the night last night! My wife and I feel so refreshed and awake this morning. My baby woke up at like 3am for a bottle which was fine obviously but she managed to sleep through the night. From 9pm to 3am, and then from 3am to 9am. I got woken up by my other 5 kids today, which never happens usually because usually I am up from like 5:30am because the baby is awake. She is happy as can be, eating her breakfast (Baby-led-weaning is this kids favourite thing in the world. She literally will eat any meal we put in front of her lol 🤣). What a great start to a Friday morning.

And before people ask, we do sleep train but we do NOT use the "cry it out method". We have sleep trained all our other kids and they are all okay. Honestly finally getting a good night's sleep has made me and my wife the most joyful people ever this morning.

Every single year without fail. I'm white and my children are all half black half white, but during the summer they get extremely tan to the point people assume they are fully black. So nobody assumes they are my kids.

We went to the beach earlier today, I took my 7 year old to the nearby store to buy some snacks. My 7 year old was just in a bad mood so I was holding her hand so I didn't lose her in the store and she just looked miserable and annoyed. Then I notice a random mom looking at us concerned for a minute, she kept looking at my daughter. The lady only walked away once my daughter called me dad whilst complaining that she wanted to go back to the beach.

Happy summer to all the dad's who feel like they are being accused of kidnapping when they are simply parenting. We will survive the usual summer stares 😅

My wife and I have had a rule since our oldest children were born, in order to help raise kids who love reading we made a rule that if our kids ask for a book, we will always buy the book (As long as the book is age appropriate obviously).

This has worked for years, we go to the book store sometimes, but most of the time we go to the library and borrow books from the library in order to prevent over-buying books every year. Because our kids read a lot, if we bought every single book they have read, we wouldn't have any storage space left in our house.

A few hours ago I took my 7 year old daughter, my 14 year old son and my 16 year old son to a book sale event at our local book store, I also had my 6 month old daughter with me too. Basically now that school is closed for summer break, the book store wants to encourage kids to read more over summer so they set up this fun event and basically all the books were on sale. My kids are homeschooled but we still went to the book sale because anyone can attend. Cause the environment was lively, that somehow encouraged my kids to think that they needed to buy half the book store. Safe to say we left the book store with about 20 books. I'm not even joking. I bought 20 books today. My wife isn't even home yet, she took our 16 year old daughter and our 3 year old son to their grandma's house...I'm 100% getting yelled at by my wife later, wish me luck guys 😂

Edit- I should add, I didn't say yes to all the books because of the rule, I genuinely just did not realise we had picked up so many books until we went to the checkout stand. I'm more or less just making a joke about the "We buy every book our kids ask for" rule. We do actually have boundaries in place in regards to the rule, I genuinely just thought the amount of books we bought was hilarious and I'm making a lighthearted reference to our rule. And we did buy books for everybody in the family, all 6 kids have got a few new books each, I got myself a new book and I got my wife a new books, so 20 books for 8 people isn't that insane, the total number of books just sounded crazy when I counted lol

I'm curious. We personally homeschool year round. For our younger kids, they learn through living life. Yes we teach them maths, english, science, geography and history but we never sit down at a table and do workbooks. Well we never force them to do workbooks. For example, my 7 year old daughter learnt about how to calculate percentages today by online shopping with her mom and having to figure out the price of each item. Obviously this was intentional, me and my wife knew we wanted to teach her percentages so this was the best way to introduce her to percentages. My teenagers all want to get their high-school diploma so they are currently working with their own personal tutor, because me and my wife do not feel equipped to teach them what they need to know to get a highschool diploma. And they have a meeting with their tutor once a week but they can choose when and where they complete their school work. Cause they are doing school work all year round, they don't have too much work to complete each week in comparison to how much work they would have if they had a summer break. Like...I think daily they spend maybe an hour and a half or two hours on work maximum, and they still usually are done with all their schoolwork for the week by Thursday. So this means their lives aren't put on hold by schoolwork. I know two hours of school work a day doesn't seem like much for highschoolers but because they are homeschooled all year round, the work is spread out over a whole year instead of just 9 months.

So honestly, for our family it just would not make sense to take a summer break, the younger kids learn by living life and the older kids are perfectly happy homeschooling year round.

However, I'm very aware that every family is different! Every family homeschools differently. And I just wanted to hear about what works for other families!

Me (41M) and my wife (41F) are quite strict about devices and screen time in this house. We have 6 kids (16M, 16F, 14M, 7F, 3M and 6mo F). We've always had a rule that Friday is family movie night and our kids can watch a movie on Sunday mornings too. This keeps screen time predictable but also limited. Our younger 3 kids also aren't allowed any personal devices like ipads. Of course as our older kids grew up these rules changed a bit for them. We got them each a phone when they turned 13. But we got them those smartphones where they don't have access to web browsers and social media, they also can't download apps without me or my wife approving the apps. Yes they hated this at first, trust me they wanted proper phones, but me and my wife said no. When they are 18 and can pay for a phone themselves thats when they can have a regular phone.

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We do have open and honest discussion about social media often though. My oldest 2 kids are at a point in their lives where they are grateful to not have social media. Cause they aren't addicted to their phones like most people their age. Trust me, my 14 year old son is definitely still annoyed we don't let him have a proper phone.

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My 7 year old however has no personal devices. She recently went to a sleepover at her cousins house. Her cousin does have an ipad and apparently those two spent like 90% of the sleepover playing on the Ipad, the other 10% was them eating dinner, watching a movie and going to sleep. Now my 7 year old is convinced she needs an ipad. My kids are homeschooled so my teenagers have laptops for school work, so my 7 year old told her 14 year old brother about the ipad debate. He helped her create a PowerPoint trying to convince us that she needs an Ipad.

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Hope you guys had a less chaotic fathers day than I did 😂

Edit: Some people didn't like that I call this day chaotic. My kid was running over to me every 5 minutes with new facts about the benefits of her having an ipad. I felt like I had lost my mind by the end of the day. The dramatic PowerPoint presentation was enough for me to be done with the whole day. Also, I do have 6 kids, this was all going on whilst I was parenting my other kids, me and my wife were trying to schedule the week ahead, we did our weekly grocery shop, we were meal planning for the week, we were trying to clean the house, my wife was rebraiding our oldest daughters hair. Sunday's are chaotic for our family anyways, this situation just made the whole day more chaotic.