u/toxbrarian

Hello ID family ❤️ I wanted to take an informal survey to maybe help my daughter who is struggling a little with her confidence. She’s been competing in full PW since April in mid America region. She’s moved 3/4 dances up (some of them multiple times now) and is stuck on one. I was hoping to give her some anecdotes about how long it’s taken others to move up so maybe she doesn’t feel so alone. She’s a lovely dancer and she’s gotten really close with seconds and thirds multiple times. As her mom I know in my bones that she’s going to get it soon, and I also know there’s no rush, and the longer she stays in PW the more ready she’ll be for PC, but all of that is hard to hear when you’re in middle school and everyone around you seems to be moving up. To me six months in this giant region and being 75% to PC is a huge accomplishment, but I’m her mom and super biased 😂

So any anecdotal evidence you have to help my girl would be appreciated. Thanks in advance ❤️

Cross posted in r/parenting but flagged for having the word ADHD, so while I wait for moderator check I thought I’d post here too.

First of all, yes I know that lying is developmentally normal. Everyone lies. Some lies are worse than others. My daughter is ADHD and ASD. Medicated with highest dose of azstarys daily.

My 11 yo daughter is lying more and more. We’ve had on and off struggles with her lying about screens, like saying she’s not watching TV and then we walk in and low and behold, she is. We’ve always explained that if she was honest and told us the truth there wouldn’t be a punishment, we would just remind her when she’s allowed to watch tv and when she’s not, but when she lies we take some of her allowed screen time away as a consequence. She always acts like she understands what we’re saying.

We also are really, really careful about food, as in we don’t want to demonize ANY food or cause eating shame. We have always allowed dessert after dinner and she really gets to choose-serving of ice cream, a few starburst, etc, as long as it’s not an amount that will make her sick or replace nutrients she needs to get at dinner with sugar, we’re cool with it. But all of a sudden we noticed Oreos disappearing en masse, gummy bear bags that were full being empty. I refuse to shame or punish around food so for this I’ve just limited what we have easy access to to things that are already wrapped in single servings and that seems to help her self regulate. I’ve not even mentioned this change or brought up why we’ve done it-just sort of naturally shifted what we’ve bought. All that being said, as a kid who grew up with a lot of shame about what she ate it concerns me deeply that she felt the need to sneak food. I don’t want her to ever feel bad about what she’s eating. We never ever ever talk about weight, we DO talk about giving our bodies what they need to work optimally before we have our treats. She is a very athletic dancer so this is very important for her especially.

And finally, back to the screens. She has SO MUCH online homework that I would trust her to take my computer to her room to work on it and I would even let her do some YouTube kids when she was done as long as it wasn’t too much because we are pretty strict about screens during the school week. She mostly wanted it for music anyway so I compromised on this. Yesterday morning I heard her laughing in her room at 5:30 am and called down the hall to ask if she was watching something and she of course said no, but the browser history tells a different story. Nothing she’s watching is dangerous or age inappropriate, but she was exhausted all day at school and at dance tonight because she didn’t get the sleep she needs. I discovered all of this after she went to sleep. I’ve changed the passcode on my computer so I can work out what to do. I never want to shame her but this isn’t just being sneaky, it’s doing things that can harm her academics and her physical health by not getting adequate rest.

My impulse is to say:

1. For a while she has to do her homework in the room with me so I can make sure it’s actually getting done and not just YouTube
2. Reverting back to the strict absolutely no screen time during the week limits we had before, because while some of the web history was music it was also a lot of videos that aren’t music based.

She’d have to basically turn the laptop back in to me when she’s done with homework so I don’t find it in bed with her like I did tonight.

3.

1. Take away this weeks Friday afternoon screen time for the lying. And emphasize it’s not that she watched screens when she should be sleeping, it’s that when she was asked about it she chose to be dishonest instead of telling the truth, in which case we would have said she needed to shut down the screen and go back to sleep and that would have been that.

Inevitably I feel like I’m handling everything wrong. I don’t need tech support about parental controls, I just need to know if my plan is too harsh/not enough. The last thing I want to do is to push her to where she lies to us even more and gets sneakier about this stuff. Because she’s right at the age where the internet starts to scare me more and I want her to be honest with me about it.

Im listening to the books with my daughter after having read them and on my second time through it occurred to me that Pierce says he was attacked by British soldiers but doesn’t want to tell Emma more about it-I have this theory that it’s because Maxwell was one of the soldiers. Anyone else had this thought?