Wednesday’s Workwear Report: Poplin Midi Shirtdress
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Our daily workwear reports suggest one piece of work-appropriate attire in a range of prices.
Chico’s has become one of the few remaining mall stores where I can consistently find solid workwear pieces. (Both Ann Taylor and J.Crew have recently departed my local malls, but Chico’s and Talbots remain steadfast!) Many of the pieces skew towards an older demographic, but I've found some great basics and some fantastic dresses, including this beautiful green shirtdress.
Add some great jewelry and a neutral flat, and you’ve got yourself an outfit that’s appropriate for almost any work occasion.
The dress (which has pockets!) is $159.50 at Chico’s and comes in sizes 00-4, which are equivalent to XS-XXL.
Looking for more dresses with pockets? As of 2025, some of the best brands for work dresses with pockets include M.M.LaFleur, J.Crew, Lands' End, Elie Tahari, and Boden. Some of our latest favorites are below! If you're on a budget, Quince has a great basic, this business casual Amazon dress has pockets, and Amazon seller VFShow has a number of dresses that fit the bill! Both Amazon and Etsy make it pretty easy to find dresses with pockets, as well.
Sales of note for 7/8/25:
- Amazon Prime Day! I just finished our full roundup — check out deals on hair tools from Shark and Dyson, leather jackets from All Saints, classic makeup like Black Honey, as well as deals from Lo & Sons, Rothy's, Theory (love this lady jacket), Levi's, Kate Spade (love these shoes, this tote, and lots of tech gear), Club Monaco, and Gap — full roundup here
- Nordstrom – 2,700+ new markdowns for women — and the Anniversary Sale preview has started!
- Ann Taylor – Semiannual sale, 30% off your purchase and extra 50% off sale styles
- Athleta – Last Chance Semi-Annual Sale – Up to 70% off + Extra 30% Off (cute gym bag!)
- Banana Republic Factory – July Fourth Event, 50-70% off everything + extra 25% off
- Boden – Final call sale, up to 60% off + extra 10%
- Eloquii – Flash sale, extra 60% off all sale
- J.Crew – End of season sale, up to extra 70% off sale styles with code
- J.Crew Factory – All-Star Sale, 40-70% off entire site and storewide and extra 60% off clearance
- M.M.LaFleur – Sale on sale! Extra 25% on already discounted merchandise! Try code CORPORETTE15 for 15% off
- Rothy's – Up to 50% off seasonal faves, plus new penny loafers and slingbacks
- Spanx – End of season sale, get an extra 30% off sale styles
- Talbots – 40% off your entire purchase, + free shipping on $150+
Morning all, do any of you have a favorite restaurant or fun things to do in Quebec City? I’ll be visiting for the first time in September.
it’s an obvious one, but a drink at the bar at the Chateau Frontenac. We also went on a historical boat tour that was fun. If you’re a cozy murder mystery person, there’s at least one Louise Penny/Inspector Gamache novel set in the city; I’d read that before you go! (I think it takes place in winter, though).
Thanks! I listened to Bury Your Dead long ago, so probably need to revisit.
Me too! Following…
I would definitely see the Montmorency Falls, it’s just outside the city and very quick to get to if you’re coming by car. The Plains of Abraham park is nice, and if you’re into history the Citadelle is great as well. In terms of restaurants in the tourist area, I love Sagamité and Nina Pizza Napolitaine !
Thanks! We were thinking of renting e-bikes so maybe we can see all of your recommendations.
I did a bike tour to Montmorency Falls and loved it.
Bar Jjacques was amazing if you like seafood.
I do. I made a reservation at Albacore hoping that would be a good choice. I will check out your suggestion. Thanks!
Strom Spa is nice!
I need a new sports bra, and my feeds are inundated with random companies. Who are we liking for front-close sports bras for larger sizes (36G, to be precise). I’m not actually running, but I do need to stay comfortably contained during activities. Thanks in advance!
SheFit
Seconded. If you measure yourself and fit into two of their sizes, my recommendation is to go with the larger one.
I’m a 36K and HATED SheFit with a passion.
Did you find a different option? I am an F or a G and I have a she fit bra and it is just a lot of being strapped down in thick fabric, but I will admit it does its job when I run.
I run in a Brooks bra that they’ve since discontinued. I bought four when it went on super clearance in like 2022, and two have already had their bands or straps snap, and one is held together with prayer at this point. Not looking forward to the last good one giving up!
Assuming you’re OK with back close, I’ve liked Anita a lot and was lukewarm on SheFit. Similar size to you.
Loved my SheFit bras when I was 34H. Front zip and Velcro for the band and arm straps.
Not necessarily front close, but look at Anita.
38 GG here. I like Wacoal Simone. It runs small so I size up on the band.
I’ve been looking for something lately too — I liked this one
https://www.nordstrom.com/s/yogi-convertible-sports-bra/8431815?origin=keywordsearch-personalizedsort&breadcrumb=Home%2FAll%20Results&color=220
Need help navigating a situation at work-a peer level coworker asked for my help on a highly visible project and sent me his rough draft. I reworked it and wrote three quarters of it. He accepted all track changes and sent it up to senior management as his own work. He received lavish praise for it and said nothing about my involvement.
I plan to have a talk with management to advocate for myself. I really don’t know how to handle working with my coworker anymore, we work very closely, but I don’t trust him at all.
This is where I would be direct. I would contact your supervisor via email showing the attachments and explain what happened. “Hi Sue, I wanted to get your advice on something. As you know, I’ve been working on advocating for myself more [insert mention of your last performance review if this was discussed there] and a situation has come up that would be good practice, but I’m not sure of the best next step. Joe recently asked for help with his rough draft on Project A (see attached) and it needed extensive editing and rewriting. After I returned the revised version to him (see attached), I found out later that he submitted it without mentioning my contributions and that it was very well-received. I’m debating whether to raise this with the review team directly or with Joe himself and wanted to get your advice.”
That’s not direct that’s passive. You don’t need help you’re just calling out your coworker which is fine. I would never put this in writing and instead mention it in a conversation with my boss and tell Joe directly that if he wants me to help he needs to give me credit.
This
No, it’s not passive. It’s directly asking for advice, which OP needs if she’s posting here, and indicating that she plans to raise it with either party. Passive would be forwarding the email with no plan of action or muttering under your breath.
Yikes. No.
My exact reaction.
Horrible advice.
The goal in this is what? Because it’s going to come off incredibly petty and like you have no respect for your boss’s time. Your boss isn’t there to play traffic cop, especially after the fact.
If my report spent significant time on helping a colleague but, per the OPs clarification below, was explicitly promised attribution and then stiffed, that’s a potential impact on my report’s morale and productivity if it happened repeatedly. I’d definitely want to know about it.
+1.
I don’t know that running this up the chain is going to get you much after the fact. Maybe if your boss mentions the project you can say, “oh yeah, I actually helped Jim Bob redraft the section on blah blah blah – I’m glad it was well received.” If it were me, I would just wait until this colleague asked for my help again and I would say, “Happy to help, but when this is done, I’d like to submit this jointly to leadership so they know I worked on xyz piece.”
Yeah – team dynamics are really important here. In some organzations, this would be pretty normal and calling it out would be seen as not being a team player. Do you feel that you are otherwise appreciated and valued by leadership? I would tread carefully here. I think you would be better served by following the advice of “insurance says” above.
If that’s normal in some dynamics, it’s because they have normalized sexism.
No—it’s normal in regard to edits. I’ve seen this dynamic regardless of gender. It’s seen as normal parts of the development process. I’ve worked 20+ years in editing, research and marketing roles and this expectation of a heavy edit without byline sort of relationship is not only totally the norm but expected of teams.
How does your team work, and what kind of project was this? Did you over-function by doing his thinking for him when he merely asked for suggestions or feedback? Or does your whole team regularly collaborate like this in each other’s projects, and when you do, everyone’s names go on it?
Agree, context matters. I would also potentially bring it up with your boss that presumably took a lot of effort on your part that wasn’t spent on whatever other projects you typically do and make sure it’s a good use of your time.
I wondered this, too. Did you do more than was needed? If I thought something needed a complete rewrite, I would probably share that with my colleague and offer suggestions, rather than completely redoing it myself.
OP here – we usually keep track changes and mention who worked on which part in the email.
He asked me for help in a panic and privately thanked me for saving him. He also said he would let leadership know oh my involvement, but didn’t, not even when the positive feedback rolled in on emails. If it had been me, that’s when definitely when I would have chimed in and said that Joe was a significant contributor, if not before.
Yeah, that’s sh!tty of him. I might say something to our mutual boss, but I would not put anything in an email.
I don’t think he did anything wrong here. You were very extra by writing that much and doing that much to his project. I’m all about giving credit where it’s due, but in this case it’s not a group project, you just did more than you were expected to.
You’ll find that people on this board are extremely cautious about ever sticking up for yourself in the workplace – nowhere else overestimates the cost of standing up for yourself as much as here. There have been times when I’ve posted asking for advice and been told to keep my head down and I decided not to and it was completely completely fine/my issue got resolved. If you want credit for that work, speak up. No one else is going to give it to you.
Curious how far up the chain you’ve made it at work.
Senior staff, tasked with highly visible projects and client relations, well-respected. I promise you, you don’t need to be a doormat to get ahead. It’s such an unfortunate myth.
Being a doormat was OP rewriting an entire project that wasn’t hers.
You need to play well with others. I far outrank you in the career ladder.
Congratulations? You’re probably a lot older than me.
Yep. And wiser.
FWIW, I’m VP level at a 1000+ employee company. There is a big difference between standing up for yourself and your projects and some of the behaviors suggested here.
Expecting a boss to compare tracked documents so you get some sort of minor “credit” for a heavy edit that you weren’t even asked to do? That looks like a horrible waste of everyone’s time.
Advocate for your own projects, speak up with your views, and publicly celebrate your own achievements. But don’t confuse those things with this. You were doing what a good team member should do. Yes, folks should give credit to the team. But going out of your way to point out that you were on this team and feel like you didn’t get that celebration is bad form. You’ll stand out more for looking insecure and not being a team player than any sort of shine for the work.
I’m curious whether, if the response had been extremely negative, there would still be urging to try to have your boss spend time comparing documents. That’s exactly how bananas that advice sounds.
100% this.
I completely agree.
Why did you do his work for him?? I don’t think he did anything wrong.
Since it’s about mid year, I’d include it in my performance discussion as an accomplishment.
In the future, did you do maybe too much work on the draft? If someone asks you for feedback, consider if it’s your job to rewrite 3/4 of the report. Instead maybe give the feedback on what needs to change. It sounds like you did a great job, but perhaps it wasn’t your job. Or if it was, consider whether or not the person who “owns” the task is the one that gets the main credit. It works like that in many places.
so did he actually do the work of the project but wasn’t great at polishing up slides or a summary? or did you reshape the project entirely?
advice is different depending on what part of the credit you deserve here.
So sorry this happened. Definitely chat with your manager about it, esp if it’s both of your manager.
I ran into something exactly like this recently, where a peer asked me to “look over” a document before he submitted it to our manager. I told him, I’m happy to chat through the issues with you, but do you mind if we actually confirm with Manager before I actually take a look at the doc? I don’t want to jump into the middle of an ongoing project without their visibility. He immediately backed down and was like oh no that’s alright, I’ll handle it. And I later told my manager about the exchange, in the tone of, just want to make sure you agree with how I approached this, and they were like, yes, absolutely you did the right thing.
Rewriting 3/4 of a paper is not peer review. You overdid it. Peer review would have been something like – this part isn’t clear, you should reorganize and reword it.
Agree. I would take this as a lesson learned and leave it at that. You will look petty otherwise.
+1 Let it go.
I’d ask your boss informally in a week or two “what was the outcome of XYZ project? I had spent a fair bit of time helping Joe but never heard how it went”.
Except she obviously did hear how it went because she knows about all the praise he got.
Now that is an example of a passive aggressive response.
Anyone tried the Rothy’s Mary Jane heels? I’m eyeing a pair on sale but they aren’t returnable. I have and like a pair of the point toe flats but I know their sizing and fit can be inconsistent.
Not the heels, but wearing the Mary Jane’s right now. Love them- I did not expect to, but they are my go to shoe. The insoles are, tbh, not great, though. I replaced them with Allbird flats insoles, which work really well because they’re thin but cushy.
Oh and to add- I am an 8 in the points and a 7.5 in the Mary Janes.
You wouldn’t happen to (…or, anyone?) buy a pair of size 7.5 leopard print Rothy’s point flats right? Mostly joking but not entirely, they’ve been listed on polyvore for weeks with no interest.
Question for women with textured natural hair re: helmet wearing.
My daughter has the most gorgeous curly hair that we put into protective styles. She’s also an active girl and it feels like the inside of her helmets (bike and ski) is causing frizz (and I’m concerned possibly breakage). Would it be crazy for me to like… sew a satin liner in them? Is there a product for this I am not thinking of? Google is failing me. Slap cap? Bonnets are too bulky but maybe a durag?
Is helmets causing frizz a problem that needs solving? Does your daughter even care? Unless she herself has complained, just let her be active and have fun (something girls don’t get enough of) without an appearance-related worry added to her list.
Frizz can be hair damage and not just aesthetics. My fine white hair can depuff with a tiny bit of Vaseline but not everyone’s hair works like that.
Sorry – should add that this is more about the breakage issue.
I’ll add that my daughter has 3B type curly hair and there is a different standard for me as a white mom of a not totally white kid.
Smartwool used to sell (maybe still does) a very thin liner hat that goes under ski helmets.
Patagonia, Smartwool, and Turtle Fur all make liners designed to fit inside ski helmets. I’d opt for natural materials (wool) or tech fabric for slip.
My bald husband uses something like a fabric swim cap under his helmets to protect his skin. A satin version of that may help (maybe plus a spray on conditioner because salty sweat can be bad for hair)? But IDK what people do but a bonnet type approach may be a good mental starting place.
In the winter, I wear a light helmet liner which keeps my hair from snagging/keeps me a bit warmer. In the summer, I just go without, I don’t think there’s a good solution that doesn’t add warmth.
There are thin caps designed to go under helmets. Search for “helmet liner cap.” I use one to add warmth in winter, but I just searched and see there are also some marketed as cooling. I can’t speak to whether they would prevent hair damage, but they would add a layer and prevent direct friction with the helmet so may be a good place to start.
I know very little about helmets, but if you add a slippery liner, would it make the helmet slide around and maybe not be as protective?
Just a thought – I don’t really do anything that requires me to wear a helmet.
I feel like if a helmet slips, it is too loose. Bike helmets though. And motorcycle helmets are probably closer to ski helmets where to protect your head and face they are aggressively form fitting and your head sweats.
Actually the most current research shows that helmets should have a liner that slips a little inside the helmet shell. It allows the head to keep moving a little bit after the helmet hits a solid surface. This in turn slows the rate of deacceleration of the brain in the skull, and helps prevents the devastating shearing injuries in the brain. It’s called MIPS technology. If you’re buying your kid a helmet, you should get one with MIPS.
Good to know, I learned something new today!
If you don’t know anything about the subject maybe it would be best not to say anything . . .
She didn’t; she asked a question. This was fine.
Sorry I am not all-knowing like you.
Here’s another thing: it’s okay to ask questions and it’s okay to express a thought that turns out to be wrong, and then listen to why it is wrong. I wonder what kind of sad life you live where questions are not allowed.
actually her question led to the most interesting response on this thread.
Hi! I’ve recently considered the same thing, but just haven’t figured out how to do it yet. My hair is superfine and the helmet’s interior causes breakage. I want to commute by bike AND still look put-together when I arrive! Im going to get a bit of silk +thread in the same color as the helmet and anchor it in as well as I can, with the edges folded under (maybe I’ll hem, if it looks rough). I’ll tell you how it goes!
Buff Wear makes a helmet liner for cyclists. If you go to their website (buff dot com) and search ‘helmet liner’ it comes up.
For skiing, she can wear a balaclava. My entire family does and it has nothing to do with our hair :).
Doesn’t solve the bike helmet other than if you don’t find a solution they make some that are super well vented and maybe a different helmet would be a solution.
I’m white and have long curly hair (2c/3a) — I find all of the sleeping things too uncomfortable except for gaiters. Like, neck gaiters. I push them down on my neck like a necklace, than push them up to my hairline like a headband and start pulling up. I don’t bind them in any way. I’ve tried to find silk gaiters without luck, but there are a lot of “cooling” gaiters.
Okay, this I am going to try – I do have the cooling ones which are a smooth fabric… thank you! We do use a balaclava for skiing but somehow she likes to push it up so she gets hairline rubbing of the helmet. Maybe this will get better with age?
Plenty of cycling apparel companies make helmet liners that work great! The primary customer is bald guys who dont want weird helmet tan lines, but they work just as well to protect hair! Google cycling helmet liner for plenty of options.
Headsweats has great liners to go under helmets.
When I was in school, it was drummed into me to take no school loans totaling more than your first year salary and then plan to repay in 10 years. That seemed like sound advice then. Is that how it’s discussed now? Trying to help discuss with my kids now and IDK who talks about this or how it’s even discussed.
LOL, I assume this is a joke. You know that we’re not in the student loan debt crisis because people are discussing that and living by it now. What’s the average first-year salary for a college grad, $40K? That doesn’t cover even one year at most schools, public or private. You know that.
Yup.
If your first year salary is only gonna be 40k dont go to college.
Ive been in non profits snd government my entire career, I’m in a MCOL, and thats still way way low.
Yeah that’s a really low salary for a college grad anywhere except like rural Alabama.
I live in a very LCOL area and first year teachers in my city make ~50k. And that’s a famously underpaid profession.
+1. Don’t go to college and definitely don’t take out loans just to be broke on the other side. If you’re smart enough to go to college, surely you’re smart enough to realize that that’s a bad plan.
A huge part of the student loan crisis is that students were getting loans, and colleges were taking their money, even though they were not prepared by their educations for college or for making good decisions about college. This is also why so many people with debt don’t even have degrees.
I don’t disagree that the population in general doesn’t seem to follow this rule…but the point is not to borrow every cent. So maybe they borrow $10K a year (equaling that $40K), and have to choose a cheaper school/school that gives merit for the balance. I’m also assuming the people on this board can cash flow some, with salary and 529 savings…so let’s say we’ve got $20K cash and 10K loans a year, and then find a non-elite school that will give you merit to get it close as possible to $30K a year.
And $40K may be a bit of a low bar for starting salary, so adjust those numbers up accordingly.
We’re in it because people made bad financial decisions that this rule would’ve prevented.
This is nonsense. The cost of college has increased far, far faster than inflation or any increase in wages. It’s not the fault of dumb borrowers.
If you’re taking out $100k to become a social worker, that is, in fact, being a dumb borrower.
If low paid professions require college degrees, how is this supposed to work out?
People who can afford to do low paying jobs will do them. “Afford” here might mean that they got scholarships, worked during school, and/or went to the cheapest possible school. Or it might mean they’re married and their partner has sufficient cash flow to pay for schooling and subsidize their life.
Going into debt for the opportunity to make poverty wages is just stupid.
Exactly, and colleges soaked up every cent they could get. So now there are new limits, with the hope that colleges can get their act together, bring costs down, and be honest about the ROI.
I’ve never heard that. I think it makes sense to consider how you plan to repay student loans and what kinds of jobs you might want. But some reductionist formula seems unhelpful.
It’s not reductionist to make sure the math works when you take out debt and to have a realistic estimate of your salary after college. There is only so much you can do with a given income and if it has to go to debt service, you should know that going in. Too many people think they’re going to live a very different life than is possible when reality hits.
I’ve never heard of that. But why don’t you sit with your kids and go through actual numbers? Cost of their target schools, what you will pay, the amount of loans they’ll take out, what the interest will come to, average first year salaries of different fields, what their total monthly payment will be.
As far as “who talks about this” that would be you, the parent.
Yup this. My parents also talked about how much our lifestyle cost. Like, if you want to live in a nice house and take multiple nice vacations a year, you won’t be able to afford that unless you focus on getting a high paying job. Not in like a mean way they would have supported me being a teacher but in a realistic way.
+1 to this – we’ve already started talking with my rising HS freshman about the ROI of certain careers and the hidden costs/benefits. For example – trades can be a great choice but there is more wear/tear on the body so you may not be able to work as long as an office worker. Lots of white collar jobs come with (or did come with) better health insurance/401k plans/etc.
We’re also upfront about how much we can afford to pay and that student loans are not discharged in bankruptcy.
Know your kid…we initially tried this approach with ours when she was in early high school. We found out she was having panic attacks behind closed doors and was seriously looking at enlisting in lieu of college because the numbers were unfathomable for her. Once we found out we were able to help her work through her anxiety, but the urge to flee still comes up when she is confronted with costs that she cannot handle herself. She’s halfway through college now, which we are fortunate to be able to pay for without student loans. The vast majority of her classmates have so much debt because they have no family help, and have no idea how they will pay off their loans while also affording life basics. It’s a crippling fear for some of them.
I’ve also never heard that specific rule. My parents paid for undergrad and encouraged me not to take massive debt for law school but I was prepared to – I just avoided it by getting lucky with a last minute merit scholarship – and I never heard this specific rule of thumb.
I feel like I was a mark because I just paid tuition at my law school. Like whatever the bill was.
Given the student loans provisions in the big beautiful bill, are we going to have a shortage of doctors? the max is now 200k and med school costs way more than that most places
IDK but my kid wants to go to med school and even before the bill was looking at only schools where she could spend as little as possible for college and at every single scholarship / automatic merit opportunity (so no Ivys, etc.). The message has sunk in.
My daughter is 8 and we’ve already started the conversations about how if she thinks she wants to be a doctor or lawyer she should go to one of our very affordable state schools for undergrad so we can use the rest of her college fund for professional school. Obviously just mentioned in passing at this age, but will be a much more serious conversation once she’s in middle and high school. I wish my parents had done this for me instead of paying full freight for my Ivy undergrad and then telling me there was no money left for law school.
I have already seen doctors and med students freaking out about this, so I think yes, unfortunately…
Unlike law school or other grad programs, medical school is the one area where the math works even if you borrow every penny (and don’t come in with loans from undergrad), even in lower paid fields. My money says there is a carve out by September.
Lobbyist here. Ain’t no way Congress is doing anything that big in the ~13 business days they have left til August recess. Recess takes you past Labor Day, so no, nothing “by September.”
Ok, then “with urgency once they are back.” No wonder people hate DC.
this is just going to make school more expensive so schools have money to give more financial aid to some, while others pay full freight to offset the financial aid packages
he answer is simple: people need to just say no. Say no to the 100K sticker price for the prestige brand. Say no to the middle-of-the-road college that charges luxury prices because it has amazing dorms and a shiny student center. The solution is not to keep letting student loans go unchecked. That’s how we got here in the first place. Universities are insatiable. They will keep raising prices as long as we keep paying them. The only thing that will stop this is enough families walking away from the scam.
Yeah, I regard myself as the consumer on the college tour vs my kid. They really need to sell me on why their school may be worth delaying my retirement and funding. What my kid thinks isn’t unimportant, but they get it and realize I could buy them a nice condo or college and every dollar not spent on college could be spent on something else (grad school, car, etc). Money is finite. College is 4 years. Debt is forever.
Currently a lot of people want to be doctors, and my understanding is that we already put more people through med school than ever get a residency.
Your Local Epidemiologist did a newsletter on this, and she argued the difference will be who becomes a doctor, what kind of doctor, and where they practice. If there are fewer med school students from less advantaged backgrounds and from lower cost of living parts of the country, and if more of them have larger private loans to repay, then the incentive will be to pursue higher pay to address those loans.
So the prediction is that it will worsen the primary care shortage specifically and possibly the regional distribution issues as well.
Of course there are already a lot of interest groups pushing NPs, PAs, and even NDs as PCPs whether or not that is always a good idea (I have nothing against my primary care NP, but I am aware that this model tends to make healthcare systems more money while increasing costs for patients).
What percentage of med grads don’t get residencies? That is terrifying.
I just looked it up — at a quick glance 6.7 percent don’t (as of 2023 and with worse numbers for international or non-citizens).
it depends on what they want to do. They could probably get a residency in primary care, but getting a dermatology residency or an ophthalmology residency, etc., is more competitive.
I know someone whose husband this happened to. He ended up with a great career eventually using some of his medical training but it was a rough two years.
That’s obviously wrong. It will make it harder for people in HCOL areas to go to medical school.
Cost of tuition in state at University of Nebraska medical school: $28k. Iowa: $36k.
UMass in state? $46k. UC Davis? $43k. Harvard is $71k.
Not to mention, it’s a lot cheater to live in a LCOL area than in a big city, which means the room/board portion of cost of attendance is markedly lower.
The expensive schools can issue or back the loans themselves.
most of the top surgeons, researchers, etc. come from those places. my mom had to have 4 brain surgeries. she was operated on at Hopkins. there was no way we were going to go to Nebraska for an operation. her surgeon did go to his state school for undergrad, but Hopkins for med school and is now head of neurosurgery at Stanford. for more minor stuff i’m sure that the medical education at one place is equivalent to another, but no matter what type of doctor you are seeing, you want a doctor who is exposed to a lot in their training and that happens more in urban areas. and someone who is up-to-date on all of the research
I think the thing is that in HCOL areas currently, there are seriously rich people who send kids to med schools, and that won’t stop, while families in LCOL are generally also lower income and will balk at bigger loans. I don’t know if that is what will happen, but I thought it was the pattern with increasing loan burden and stale salaries in medicine before now.
Exactly. The kids who are going to expensive schools aren’t going into primary care, so I’m not sure why they should get $400k of federal loans. Yes we need surgeons, but if the students are that good, the school can back the loans.
This will make expensive mediocre private medical schools untenable, and I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.
What are the mediocre med schools? I feel that I don’t personally know of one. Maybe some of the mission-driven ones, focusing on serving poor, rural, or BIPOC populations? Not that they are bad, just not Hopkins?
I’m also curious what’s an example of an expensive private mediocre medical school (do you mean the Caribbean schools? That’s not how I would describe them).
I usually think we need more med schools and hospitals, not fewer!
Scroll through US News. There are plenty if third tier medical schools charging close to $100k a year (tuition, fees, living expenses) for a degree, and it’s not like most of their graduates are becoming neurosurgeons.
To Anon at 10:33. As someone closely associated with the University of Nebraska Medical Center, just because the doctors train and work in “fly over country” doesn’t mean they are not up-to-date on research. UNMC is a leading research institute in various cancers (pancreatic specifically) and is home to one of the most well-known solid organ transplant programs around. It is internationally known for having the nations largest biocontainment unit and the chancellor was an advisor to the White House during the Covid pandemic. Fair enough to say you wouldn’t want that specific surgery for your mom in Nebraska, but shame on you for blanket assertions that the you can’t get physicians who are up-to-date on research and thoroughly trained there.
Medical schools will still fill every seat, but the composition of the student body may change so that it is mostly students from wealthy families— another perk in the bill for the top %ers.
But also – fewer smart kids are going into Medicine. The stress and dysfunction in medicine is just getting worse, with the pressure to see more patients in less time. And medicine has just gotten more complicated (and expensive) as we make more and more discoveries. Making more subspecialists a necessity.
So fewer of the rich smart kids are going into medicine because it is not worth the long training path for the stressful lifestyle. And kids with less money will not be able to afford college + med school with more restrictions on loans.
Honestly, it is crazy what we are expecting children/young adults to take out in loans to become doctors. No other country in the world does that.
So what will happen? We will be taking more and more immigrants to be our doctors! Foreign trained doctors who are eager to come to the US, and who already fill many of the locations in the country that many US trained doctors refuse to go. Rural areas, great plains, the South etc… Those foreign trained doctors come without carrying any debt, since they their medical training was often free or a small fraction of what we charge for college/medical school. And sadly, that means we are often draining talented doctors from countries that need them to stay (and subsidized their training).
It’s all crazy.
We desperately need to do something about insurance requirements. We didn’t train these same subspecialists for so many years so that they could spend hours learning the minutia of every patient’s insurance company’s required prior authorization forms, and writing letters of medical necessity, and doing peer to peer appeals.
More patients could get care if we didn’t ask real physicians to justify even textbook on-label medication prescribing to non-physicians or less qualified physicians.
Here’s how we presented it to our kid: Here is how mom’s relatively modest law school loans have affected our financial lives, including your current lifestyle and our ability to save for your college. Student loans are very bad and will ruin your life. If you want our money for college, the condition is that you will not take out any loans. Here’s what we can afford. You can go anywhere you want where this will pay for everything or where you can get merit scholarships and/or need-based grants to cover the difference.
This worked because our dollar amount would have covered full freight at our very expensive flagship state U. She chose to go to a SLAC on a merit scholarship.
I think that this is the right approach. Spending is out of control and some otherwise smart people must think that all wants are needs. Overspending on education is no different IMO than other spending and the urge to is strong though, even self-righteous.
I agree with you completely. We have been saving for college, but we plan to be very blunt with our children about the long-term impact of choosing a school they can’t truly afford, if they start thinking in those terms.
I agree with this as it pertains to massive debt. But I think low five figure debt is ok and even desirable. I took law school much more seriously than undergrad and part of that is undoubtedly maturity, but a lot of it was because I signed my name on five figure loans which was fairly terrifying at that age. $10-20k total debt is repayable on a modest salary (and parents can even help, if the kid being responsible and the parents can afford it), and it’s good for kids to have some skin in the game.
I’m not sure how well that logic applies. The first kid in my daughter’s high school circle to flunk out of college was paying her own way with student loans.
We are requiring our daughter to have some “skin in the game” by earning her own spending money, which will include covering her own car insurance payments when she brings a car to campus. We have also made it clear that if she flunks out or is suspended for disciplinary reasons there are no second chances at the Bank of Mom and Dad.
This is what we did with our kids. My daughter graduated I. 2023 and my son will graduate this fall with no loans. We saved enough for in-state tuition, room, and board. They graduated from state u’s with no loan burden.
They’ve known it from the time they were old enough to talk about college. We were totally up front about it.
I remember my daughter complaining to me that several of her friends’ parents told their kids they could go anywhere they wanted and to aim for the stars. I was a little sad for my own kid that we didn’t have the funding her friends’ parents had. But now that they’ve graduated, it turns out her friends have substantial loans to pay. And one of them wants to be a pastry chef.
With regard to your last sentence, my daughter is dead set on teaching high school for 5 years and then going back for a doctorate so she can attempt to get a tenure-track job in a low-paying field. No way could she do that with undergrad loans to pay.
I hate this attitude but I guess it makes sense if there are other options. I would not have been able to go to college or law school without student loans. I graduated into the recession (making way less than I took out for state schools with some scholarship money), did my 10 years in government for pslf, and now am a partner at a mid-law firm. People should be careful with student loans, but they are a tool like anything else.
I am the person to whom you are responding. I attended college on Pell grants, state grants, merit scholarships, and a small amount of student loans. I had the maximum merit scholarship my law school offered but still had to take out some loans because tuition nearly doubled but the scholarship did not. I do not regret the undergrad loans because there was no other way I could have gotten my bachelor’s degree. I very much regret the law school loans and wish I’d pursued the PhD path instead, with the expectation that I’d only attend if offered full funding. I wasn’t eligible for any relief through PSLF even though I’ve worked in public interest my whole career because I have an employed spouse so the income-based payments were the same as the regular 10-year plan.
A new grad’s budget is so tight that even $500 a month in student loan payments will make the difference between staying afloat and sinking.
Yeah, I think this thinking is way too black and white. Is massive debt, especially for undergrad, generally a bad idea, yes. But I don’t think some debt is the end of the world and there are a lot of situations, like law school and medical school, where you can expect to pay off the debt in a reasonable time frame if you perform decently in school and it can be a logical risk-benefit calculation to take it.
I’m not sure how the BBB impacts the lending structure, maybe they blew this all up, but currently students can borrow a very limited amount themselves (like $5500-7500 a year). The rest has to be taken out by parents. And I’ve got a bridge to sell you if you think you can “make” your kids pay back loans you took in your name! So really, parents have to be honest about what THEY can afford and set the budget
I mean, pretty much the only higher ed left will be places like Liberty and Bob Jones anyway.
That’s just not true. I took out the max federal loans and then I had to take the rest in private loans at 13% interest, in my name, with no protections. My HS guidance counselor was convinced I would get scholarships and that didn’t come through, and my parent refused to pay or co-sign my loans. It’s kids like me that end up being screwed. I would have made different decisions now but as a 17 year old child I followed the advice of adults to my detriment. My first years out of college were painful when my student loan payments were 1/3 of my take home pay.
It’s a different time. Nobody is lending to kids with no income or credit. So, functionally, most students can not get private loans without a co-signer (parent)
This is gorgeous but I wish it was in a less wrinkle-prone fabric. I have few poplin dresses that I rarely wear because their ironing needs are way too high.
Agree! Poplin looks terrible so quickly.
Does anyone here have a Hydrow who can comment on it? I love the rowing part of OTF and have been considering a rower. I see they’re on a good sale for Prime Day and am trying to decide whether to pull the trigger.
I had one until I screwed up my neck/shoulder (not from the Hydrow but I couldn’t do it anymore after that). Loved it, the rows on the water were super nice.
My dad has one that he loves. I’ve used it a few times when visiting and also enjoy it.
No but check out Wardrobe Oxygen, I think she had one in a recent Instagram story so there’s probably a post somewhere about it.
it is not hard to find inexpensive lightly used rowing machines secondhand, IMHO.
My nepotism hire intern (got his internship because his dad is the CEO of a company that works closely with us and knows our CEO well) told me yesterday that he doesn’t want to do the project he’s working on because it’s too hard and asked me to find him something else. It’s literally the easiest most straightforward thing I could think of, and he did an exceptionally poor job tracking his to-dos and being on top of the things I had already asked of him. We had a talk about how he needs to take notes, for example, and at not point thereafter did he start taking notes. I’m mostly just venting. This is super annoying
Interns are a pain in the….. Can he just be like…someone who shadows you? Without doing anything? I know that’s not helpful but neither is trying to find stuff to do.
Or, if you are just over it completely, ask him what project he wants to work on. He may very well tell you it’s your problem. But he might say “I just want to….” And then you can figure out a way to keep him busy doing that.
This is what I would do.
“This is a very typical project that you would be assigned when working here. Since this internship is about getting an understanding of the work, I think you should give it a try. This particular project is a good example of (something he is going to learn). Let’s talk about where you are stuck and break it up into steps together.”
If the CEOs are generally hard working serious people, then I would try to treat him like any other intern for now. If they are entitled manbabies, then you can at least fantasize about pushing back.
oh, another useful thing: your general attitude should be’he took this internship to learn about our work, so I’m just doing my job well when mentoring him and not letting him slack off ‘. I know people here love to hate on askamanager, but her frequent approach of ‘obviously we all agree on this reasonable thing, and if you are angling for a silly thing then I am going to be oblivious to your subtext until you spell it out ‘ has been effective for me.
Call him out. I have to do this regularly w our interns. It’s kind of age appropriate, too, so it’s annoying, but it just means you have to be annoying, too.
“You aren’t taking notes, go get a notepad” “I’m giving you a to-do, did you write it down?” “Yes, this project is annoying, but it’s good for your professional growth–keep working at it.”
This, and perhaps wrap it in a dose of “This is one of the easiest projects we have; it won’t be difficult for you considering your background.”
Agree. If an intern ever said they didn’t want to do a task because it was “too hard”or “too much work” they would be told to suck it up and do it. Work is hard. Work isn’t fun. That’s why they pay you money to do it. (Assuming the internship is paid, and even if it were unpaid it’s still a job the person agreed and committed to do so shut up and do the work!)
Interns just suck generally. You need to decide if you want to burn your energy on him or not. If not, get him a project that could be useful and he can get lost in (eg. “Here are some boring ass tasks we do. Can you research any options for automation?”)
If you want to actually manage him, have the conversations suggested elsewhere.
I was a nepotism intern. I was so determined to prove my worth that they voluntarily kept me on in subsequent summers, my boss fought for me to get raises, I got sent to conferences, and I still keep in touch with my managers.
Get it together, nepo babies!
Ha, I was just reminiscing about the nepo intern I worked with many years ago (his dad was friends with our ceo). He was really smart, conscientious, and hard working. He was a pleasure to work with and has gone on to become a functional and successful adult as far as I know.
Anyway, OP’s intern doesn’t sound so great. But as others have said, I would try to mentally shelf the nepotism issue and assume (or pretend to assume) he is sincere in wanting help. Assure him that you wouldn’t have assigned the work if you didn’t think he was capable of it.
Yeah but you’re also (I’m assuming, forgive me if I’m wrong) not a man.
I’m a woman!
It’s also cultural. The particular company I was at tended to hire a lot of nepotism interns; however, there was also a belief that the intern reflected on the family or family friend who recommended them. It was a family friend in the C-suite who brought me in, and that recommendation was only made because he believed I would do very good work.
More broadly, nepotism connections are an incredible gift. I felt incredibly fortunate and wanted to make the most of it.
My son is a nepo intern right now, on his third summer with them! He works for a friend. My son is always telling me that the work is too easy, but I know from my friend that they love him and plan to offer him a full time job. Work ethic is a thing instilled by the parents or learned the hard way.
In OP’s example it’s going to come down to the hard way at some point, I assume.
Tell him right now his lesson is that work won’t always be desirable & he needs to step up and do hard things in order to be employable/develop skills/get through to the next project.
Oh man, you just reminded me of my nepo intern (son of an important client) who vanished for several days. We were actually worried! He turned out to be in jail/sobering up after getting arrested for some drunken shenanigans at a concert. The group went out to celebrate his last day (not with him).
lol I needed to hear this today!
Ha. That reminds me of a summer student in big law who sent me the most half a**ed memo ever. Just copy pasted the relevant legislation basically. And then I was like ok but how has XYZ been interpreted by the courts? And he was like “oh that would require more research and I’m very busy”. Um, yes? That’s literally your job? He wasn’t hired back but I see that he is now GC of a mid-size local company. Terrifying.
My story isn’t about an intern but an entry level hire. I was building out a new department and the entry level guy started two weeks before his new manager was able to start, which entry level knew about.
So I gave entry level person some stuff to read (like previous work of the type expected from his position) and things to look up and learn about.
New manager started and not too long after came to me and asked what I had entry level person working on. I said, basically nothing, we were waiting for you.
New manager had asked entry level to complete a task (an easy one) and entry level said he was “too busy.”
Turns out entry level thought he was playing some sort of clever game to position himself as reporting directly to me and thought he could accomplish that by refusing to work on anything his actual manager assigned him.
That guy lasted about six months, which was five months too long.
Actually laughed out loud.
Leave aside any expectation that an intern will produce something useful or do a good job. That’s a bonus IF it happens. The internship is for the benefit of the intern and is a burden on the FTEs.
That being said, just find something to keep him busy and let it go. Some research he can do on google, a presentation he can put together for a small team meeting, whatever. It may be better to give him something complex than something easy and straightforward, since he will inevitably do a bad job either way.
How do you calm yourself down in the moment when you’re feeling a physical reaction to stress? Work has been insane for a few months- grueling hours, round the clock availability, everything is an emergency all the time. Things are finally starting to dial down, but as soon as something urgent or frustrating comes up my heart is racing and my chest is burning. It’s like I have PTSD and fight or flight mode kicks in immediately. The sensation doesn’t go away when the issue gets resolved- I feel like that all day until I can exercise or take a bath after work.
What can I do in the moment to calm my body? Deep breathing doesn’t help. I can’t get up and go for a walk because the fire drill requires my immediate attention. Honestly I feel like having a drink would help but of course I won’t do that in the middle of a workday. I’m taking a long vacation soon so I just need some tips to get me through the next six weeks.
Breathing, green tea, therapy, talk to your doctor if it’s bad enough. Drinking will feel like it helps momentarily but will make everything so much worse, so put that idea out of your head entirely.
One word of caution on the green tea – it is high in caffeine. Adding caffeine to these symptoms could kick someone into panic attack territory. I’ve made this mistake too many times in my life.
Yeah. I wasn’t going to respond but there is nothing relaxing about green tea. I have tried.
I think the Nagoski book on Burnout has a bunch of different exercises for completing a stress cycle. I like to do a big stretch, wash my face/brush my teeth, and alternative nostril breathing.
Drop your jaw. Drop your shoulders. Do some grounding exercises- 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste. Instead of just deep breathing, make it more focused- box breathing or something that takes focus. Does the fire drill not allow you to even “go to the bathroom” and add on a one minute lap of the hallway? If you aren’t in surgery, I’d argue that you probably can take a quick walk, even if just on your floor or literally even just to the end of your driveway and back. Read one or two pages of a book not related to work. Listen to a favorite song. Watch a favorite funny video.
You need to get the stress out of your body, so take that 5-minute walk and you’ll be better for it. Progressive muscle relaxation is something you could do at your desk.
Take a couple of days off before your vacation.
Ah yes, just retire immediately and drink pina coladas on the beach in the Bahamas.
I’ve found the 5-4-3-2-1 technique very helpful for this.
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/behavioral-health-partners/bhp-blog/april-2018/5-4-3-2-1-coping-technique-for-anxiety
Not in the moment, but lifting heavy weights really helps me reset my nervous system.
Box breathing actually really works for me to break the fight or flight physical response.
Oh I didn’t know it was called this but I do this too. It really helps me but OP said deep breathing wasn’t doing it.
I find that box breathing works in a way that regular deep breathing doesn’t.
Obviously you can’t take a bath in the middle but I find doing some small self care things helps a lot. Usually you can still make a cup of your favorite tea in the office – and physically getting up and making the tea is a good ritual too. Or a favorite hand ritual. A small ritual you can do at work. Make your desk comfortable – the right temperature, a cozy sweater, clean and organized, whatever helps.
If you have your own office, I used to literally lay on the floor in the dark and listen to my favorite song for 5 minutes.
I got a prescription for propanolol to manage the physical symptoms of stress/anxiety. It does nothing to help your mind (it’s a beta blocker), but it does help to block the out of control physical reaction. I only take them as needed. No side effects I’ve noticed. For example, I was on a transatlantic flight with my toddler and realized we were going to miss our connection. I started panicking (somewhat irrationally – it all worked out fine, we got a hotel), took one, and felt much more in control.
Also in the past when I feel like too much adrenaline is running through my body, I do some very hard exercise (mountain biking, for example) that gets me very out of breath. That seems to help process the adrenaline.
This is actually a good idea, and is something a family member does. There is a reason propranolol is a favorite amongst performers, anxious before a show/concert!
And it isn’t habit forming/addictive like benzos (ativan etc…). It can affect your blood pressure slightly.
Instead of having an alcoholic drink, consider an ice-cold drink.
Also instead of “deep breathing” I just find that breathing in through my nose, holding my breath for a count of 4, then exhaling s-l-o-w-l-y through my mouth with my lips pursed like I have a straw, is really helpful. I do this 3 times and each time I feel progressively better and more relaxed or at least calmer in the moment
I had this feeling while in big law, and buying a treadmill deal for my office was the solution. I am sure there are some firms that won’t allow one, but mine was very permissive since it facilitated me remaining a big biller.
Treadmill desk. Glad I’m not in big law anymore if I’m making typos like that!
My therapist taught me a coping technique for panic attacks that relies on your five senses. Basically when you feel a sévère stress response, find something you see, something you hear, something you smell, something you touch, something you taste (can be a sip of water or just touching your teeth with your tongue). Obviously these shouldn’t be the thing that stresses you out – so in the fire drill example I would focus on the other senses. It’s not perfect but it helps with grounding and I find it helpful.
have you tried holding an ice cube for like 30 seconds? i’m mom to an autistic child and that’s advice to help someone break out of a meltdown — it shifts the focus to the physical and away from the mental. my kid actually asks for it now.
If it’s an immediate thing, I take a slow drink of water. If it’s appropriate, I do a downward dog.
I switched from regular coffee to half-decaf (or matcha!) and it made a huge difference for me.
Most of the time I come here it’s because I got overwhelmed with something at work and needed to check out for a minute. I’m assuming that’s why people get so worked up about nothing here – channel that anxiety into spouses filling gas tanks or whatever.
I’m sorry you are experiencing this. I have experienced similar reactions and have some thoughts that you may find useful:
* It is likely this is in fact a response rooted in your fight/flight/free response. It is wise that you recognize that. You’re pumping cortisol and other similar biochemicals, resulting in this response. I find it useful to remember it is just a biochecmical reaction – say that to yourself in the moment. It takes some of the initial bite out of it.
* A technique I’ve used: Tense up your entire body, every muscle you can think of, for about 5 seconds. Then release. See if that helps. Try again. Up to 3xs as needed. Helps me every time I’ve experienced this.
* Vagus nerve: There are techniques to engage your sympathetic nervous system. I like the ones involving the ears and the vagus nerve. Youtube it. The key when you do these is, you need to embrace it fully. Give into the sensation it can give you. It is a big help.
OP here. Thanks for all the suggestions. The five senses thing, muscle relaxation, and holding an ice cube are great ideas. I quit caffeine a few months ago when I realized it was making things worse and I don’t drink on weeknights. To the person who said to take time off before my vacation I actually am taking an extra PTO day soon to go to a spa! It just can’t come soon enough
i have been an absolute mess since the flooding this weekend in TX. i just cant stop thinking about those little girls and all of their last moments. how does something like this happen? they must have been absolutely petrified.
obviously not productive now, but from looking at the pictures of the water line, it looks like they would’ve had better luck if they’d stayed in their cabin and tried to float on their mattresses like another cabin did and waited for the water to recede. i’m sure the instinct is to try to get out. it is just so incredibly sad and tragic
Wait no stop. We are not having another huge victim blaming thread where in people try and point out all the ways they could have survived like the wild mom’s thread on swim lessons yesterday.
This is an insane take away. Are you the poster from yesterday who was pushing swim lessons for little kids as a way to survive flash floods?
Teaching kids to swim or float on mattresses is not how people will survive extreme weather events which will occur with increasing regularity. Proper warning and evacuation systems are how people survive.
Obviously those are important, and it’s also important for individuals to be personally prepared as much as possible. For things like this, that can include emergency drills, making sure kids are mature enough to follow instructions, and giving guidance on how to swim if you’ve trapped in water (keep your feet up, float on your back, try to grab something). I don’t understand this argument/belief that individuals can do nothing – it’s simply not true. Individuals should receive education and training that might help increase their odds of survival. That’s why schools do earthquake drills with kids getting under desks and evacuation drills even though we also need warning systems and building codes.
These kids have tons of emergency drills in schools already thanks to gun violence. They know how to follow directions.
Drills are useless if camps and schools don’t get warnings. Tornados have sirens and so should floodways. But issuing the warnings requires better science and forecasting which requires investment not cuts and not double digit job vacancies because jobs are not being filled. We were warned this kind of disaster would happened if there were cuts and it did.
No one disagrees with you on that! Everyone with half a heart agrees that senseless cuts that increase the risk of death are bad. Don’t count on Trump to save the day, though, and start thinking of what you can do to face the reality that those institutions are done for right now.
There is no individual action in the face of wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and flashfloods. Just like we expect government to continue to operate highways and airport security, government needs to continue to provide weather forecasting and warning systems.
People need to start demanding action on this specific issue and states need to start state level agencies if they can’t rely on NOAA or NWS. The Florida weatherman recently warned his forecasts on hurricanes will be less accurate because of the cuts and vacancies. You can’t out run or out swim a hurricane.
– from https://apnews.com/article/weather-texas-floods-trump-doge-cuts-noaa-nws-commerce-hurricane-4740019969a6b7a1b566e98dcb85562b
” In an unusual broadcast on June 3, longtime South Florida TV meteorologist John Morales warned his viewers that the Trump administration cuts meant he might not be able to provide as accurate forecasts for hurricanes as he had in years past. He cited staffing shortfalls of between 20% and 40% at NWS offices from Tampa to Key West and urged his NBC 6 audience in greater Miami to call their congressional representatives.
“What we are starting to see is that the quality of the forecasts is becoming degraded,” Morales said. “And we may not know exactly how strong a hurricane is before it reaches the coastline.” “
What government “needs to do” and what it’s “going to do” are two different things.
Right, it’s wild to think that kids would be able to swim their way out of a flash flood. You need proper emergency notifications and an evacuation plan. But I do also find it somewhat surprising that a camp in a flood zone didn’t have someone whose job it was to pay attention to the weather and when the weather service issued a flash flood warning, figure out how to move kids to higher ground. One of the camps down the road did this, and nobody there died, so it’s not like it was completely impossible to have been prepared and reacted better in this scenario. I understand why random vacationers might not be familiar with the risks of this environment, but I expect better from a camp that had been there for decades and whose job was to protect children.
Some kids did swim to safety and survived. BBC reported that some swam for upwards of ten minutes in floodwater in the dark. It’s absolutely unbelievable to me that kids of that age could do that.
I don’t know the layout of these cabins, but anything in a flood zone should probably have a hatch opening to the roof.
Nature is brutal.
This reply is also brutal, fwiw.
I’m sorry OP, it’s really sad and I hope you are able to get some support and digest this.
I’m not sure if you meant it literally when you said how does this happen. Flash flooding is a well known phenomenon, and the camp location was in FEMA flooding maps, and there surely will be more discussions about officials not having invested in notification systems that could have conveyed the NWS warning to more people rapidly.
yea i did not mean it literally. I understand how flash floods happen. and most people are not awake at 1 or 2 am am watching the water levels. if this had happened during the daytime it seems likely they would’ve been able to notice in time. the person above who mentioned they should’ve stayed in their cabins has a point. our friends were staying at a friend’s home in that area over the holiday weekend. they said they did not receive any warning on their cell phones until 9am and that the landline at the home where they were staying never got a phone call. my heart just breaks for all of these families whose lives are forever changed for the worse. i don’t know how you come to terms with something like this. and not just the kids who were lost, but even all of the survivors. reading about the father who tried to get to his two daughters who were with their grandparents only 5 houses down, is gut-wrenching. i kept hoping this would be like one of those tv shows or movies where they miraculously find a bunch of survivors a few days later, but i guess that’s what differentiates reality from tv.
They did find a few girls in a tree! But yeah its not going to be like the movies.
I think every parent’s worst nightmare is knowing their kids are in mortal danger and being so close but unable to help.
Climate change + cuts at NOAA and NWS at a time when they needed more staff and a funding boost in order to improve science on rapidly changing weather systems and predictions to improve warnings.
We’ve lost the battle on slowing climate change, and now we’re losing the battle on climate change adaptation by not preparing for the increasing extreme weather events. Extreme drought means flashfloods. Flash floods are rarely survivable if there is not enough warning to evacuate.
I’m having a hard time with it, too. It’s awful.
same. We picked our nine year old up from her summer camp this week and on the way home she started singing some of the same songs that the girls on the bus were singing as they were being evacuated, and I pretty much haven’t stopped crying every time I look at her since. Not sure why this is hitting me so hard, I’m usually not so affected by tragedies that have nothing to do with me.
children’s deaths hit differently.
i read somewhere that the turning point for america was after the stonyfield shooting and all of the fake conspiracy theories – the refusal to acknowledge and believe that someone could do something so awful.
As an American, I truly thought that Sandy Hook might be the thing that got us a change in our gun laws. But now I don’t have any hope on that front – there are too many powerful people and groups that are committed to keeping things as is (or worse, making sure every idiot in our country has dozens of weapons).
i know this is not logical, but it makes me angry that there are so many things we could do to save children’s lives – gun control, vaccines, etc. – yet as a country we do nothing. we can’t control the weather, but we can control those things
Texas officials basically ignored and doubled down on evading any meaningful response to Uvalde. Yet, they are all over this flooding because the victims were largely white and wealthy, including a member of the Hunt family. This country is depraved.
There was an outpouring of sympathy after Uvalde too. It didn’t lead to action on gun control and we don’t know if this will lead to action on flood control and EWS.
Yeah I don’t really see this differently than Uvalde or Sandy Hook. It’s always devastating in the immediate aftermath and then nothing happens. I will be shocked if there’s meaningful change from this.
I’m still angry that there are higher air quality standards for livestock in barns than for kids in school.
Also if we want to talk about which specialties in medicine don’t pay well, pediatrics comes with lower pay.
There are endless examples and it’s getting worse.
There are so many reasons why this happened. I know a lot of people like to process tragedies by saying that nothing could’ve been done or it was god’s will, but unfortunately there were so many preventable errors leading to deaths. It’s absolutely terrible. One thing that gives me hope is the stories of how the young counselors, most of whom were in their young teenage years, stepped up and saved lives of their younger charges. For some young girls to be able to swim to safety with a counselor in those conditions, the counselor must have shown such bravery and leadership. Gives me a little hope for future generations even in this darkness.
I am far (far!) from “god’s will” person, but I also am firmly of the mind that sometimes awful, awful things happen and hindsight is 20/20 and we can likely figure out things that would have prevented the horrible event, but it’s magical thinking to believe that we can prevent all terrible events.
+1
Yes… but we do have the option of preventing future terrible events once we’ve figured out how to.
Just because we know how to doesn’t mean we can afford to. You can’t fund everything or hope to prevent everything. Sometimes a tragedy is a tragedy.
Some of the fixes aren’t that expensive. A camp can install its own rain gauge or water level gauge that issues a warning if more than 2 inches of rainfall or water level rise is detected. I absolutely don’t think we can rely on authorities to come to our rescue.
It’s just a question of priorities; we afford all kinds of other things.
I think it’s a tragedy when adult society fails children because they chose to spend money on other stuff.
We do fund other things at the expense of funding child specific things–roads, human services, public defense. Communities have a lot of needs. But if you have good ideas, run for office, make the change.
I was so impressed by the young counselors. They did all they could
1000% this.
I help with scout camping and summer camp a lot and commend the teen counselors. We spend so much time on safety and it’s with an eye to preventing stuff like this or at least doing what we can. V
Can I ask whether flood safety or water safety is included? I whitewater raft and if you go with guides, there is always a safety talk about how to handle it if you fall out and find yourself swimming in fast-moving water.
There are so many camps along those rivers. The fact that the tragedy is not worse is a testament to all the counselors.
I wonder if there is anything specific we can learn from them. Was it a recent training that made the difference? Hiring counselors with familiarity with the camp layout? Just a really good batch of counselors who could be cool under pressure? They deserve any recognition they can get and any positive lessons should be disseminated.
I read about at least one other camp that moved people to higher ground before the flooding started, because they were monitoring the weather reports. That’s a far better way to respond than relying on people to be cool under pressure and try to swim away from a flood. And while I do think there should be a better emergency alert system, I do find it fairly shocking that there aren’t people at a camp paying attention to the weather. When I attended camp as a kid, we certainly had to go to the lodge at night due to storms at least twice and I only went to camp for a couple weeks total.
What was different? Luck.
No, it’s not luck. It’s different actions and levels of preparedness that led to more survival.
Maybe, but I saw some videos of the flash flooding, and I’m sure there are instances where some were hit more brutally than others. That’s just bad luck.
The story of the two girls whose bodies were found holding hands haunts me.
Also the rescuer saying that the campers asked if they could bring their stuffed animals with them.
I am having a really hard time with it and am not sleeping well. I am also so frustrated with the local/state government’s failure to invest in a siren system. My husband went to one of the camps down the road from Mystic. The camp he went to straddles the river. He was once stranded on one side for three days due to flooding. This was twenty five years ago! Flooding at these camps has been a known problem for a long, long time.
I could not agree more about this siren system.
Tornado prone areas often have sirens. Sure people have cell phones, but cell phones run out of battery, are out of sight whole people work, have notifications silenced, etc.
Yes, tornado sirens are normal to me, even in places that are not generally well resourced.
I’m seeing people talk about how frequent “blue alerts” led a lot of people to silence alert notifications in TX.
Check out Governor Abbot’s response to a reporter today where he talked about football and how only “losers” ask who’s to blame.
Can’t risk learning anything. Then action might be required and can’t risk any action that isn’t tax cuts or arresting people.
Yup. Saying that survival was only due to luck is also a way to avoid determining what went wrong and what went right.
I just learned that the camp was not American Camp Association (ACA) certified. While this wouldn’t have protected them from the flooding itself, there would have been someone awake, counselors would have had walkie talkies to contact the director for guidance, and it probably would not have had cabins sited in a regulatory flood zone. Having worked in the outdoors education field for most of my career, I know the importance of this type of oversight and never sent my child to a camp that wasn’t ACA accredited because of their health and safety requirements. So making sure that the places you send your children are accredited is one action you can take that is actually useful and will make you feel better.
I had no idea this was a thing. I just checked my children’s summer camp – fortunately it is accredited.
This is one of the few things about this tragedy that I can agree with. Still reeling from yesterday’s post about how swimming lessons could’ve prevented 8-year-olds from an effing flood.
Get over it. Just because you disagreed didn’t mean it was a traumatic moment for you.
What a strange response. She didn’t say it was traumatic. It’s always safer to know how to swim and always safer to be fit, but floods are incredibly dangerous even for strong swimmers.
It’s self-centered as hell to say you’re “reeling” from a post you disliked on a fashion blog when young girls lost their lives.
Yeah it’s wild to me that this storied, very well respected, elite summer camp lacked both accreditation and any type of their own water gauge system, especially given their location.
This is something I will take more seriously in the future – my kids’ camp is accredited but I never thought. much about it other than “oh, that’s nice.” It’s an Episcopal camp and I generally feel like our denomination takes safety stuff pretty seriously, but I can imagine just assuming that a camp that’s been operating forever is safe (or safe enough).
In our area, fire, not flood, is the chief concern, and having a fire evacuation plan is key.
Honestly, now that I have kids. Sometimes I just have to look away and not think about how horrible something was because I have a personality/body type to spiral. It impacts my sleep and makes me a worse in the day. I would send thoughts for them to the universe or God, whatever you think, and then listen to a Calm app.
If you really want to do something, look up how to support weather warning systems and think about what structures are in place in your own community for whatever is relevant (flood, fire, tornado, hurricanes). And make sure your own family is prepared.
If you live in an area with any type of natural disaster like hurricanes, the answer is multilayered. It’s accurate weather forecasting, better alerts like sirens, updated building codes, etc. Many of those things are like insurance a balance of what people believe to be risks and what they are willing to spend money on to prevent those risks. At the end of the day, many people gambled this wouldn’t happen and they were wrong.
It also requires individual actions like following risks. It’s a good idea to teach your child to be a strong swimmer, including dealing with rip currents. Drowning is the 2nd largest cause of injury death in children so it’s not that rare even if a flash flood is rare. And yes, some of it is luck.
Advice on dealing with rip currents and how to position yourself in moving water to minimize the risk of traumatic injury are both important. We all need layers and layers of risk reduction here.
Does anyone have any experience with the perfume brand Ffern? I got a FB ad and said, OK i’ll bite and sign up — but then they wanted my CC just to be “on the waitlist” and said I’d be charged automatically? didn’t even say how much lol
Run away, obviously.
+1
I do not understand buying perfumes you’ve never smelled online.
That’s how it’s all done now. Through influencers.
My daughter bought one of Bella Hadid’s new scents and she actually got lucky. It’s beautiful. But there was no way she could have smelled it in person first.
When shopping involves a little bit of a gamble, some of the same psychology applies (the psychology of intermittent rewards).
Samples?
Any suggestions for a 4 day couples trip in February? We prefer to leave the US but I’m not sure we’re up for Europe on that timeframe. We thought about Quebec City or Montreal but the weather is a little daunting, even coming from the Midwest. My husband does not want a trip that’s just beach. Not Mexico City. Any other ideas?
San Miguel de Allende
Depending on flights from your airport, Belize or Costa Rica might work. Both have great nature/wildlife tourism, and you do not have to deal with an extreme time change. The weather is going to be a challenge for Canada and Europe is a long flight for such a short trip.
We fly out of Chicago for intl trips so we should have flights most places. I did think about Costa Rica but not sure we want to do it without our kids since I’ve heard it’s such a family friendly place.
Be mindful of putting your kids’ hypothetical future needs/wants ahead of your and your partners’ immediate need and desire for a wonderful couples trip in February. If you want to go, go without the kids! They will have their chance later.
Oh, I’m not putting their needs above ours. If we felt a strong pull to go to Costa Rica without them, we would go. I just think it might be more fun to do it as a family and our childfree time would be better spent on a destination where there’s a lot of stuff we want to do without the kids, like fine dining.
not really leaving the country, but San Juan (old city, national park, and beach)? Some Caribbean islands are also known for hiking or history in addition to beach time – Antigua, St. Lucia, etc?
That’s a great time to visit New Orleans, which is in the US, but not totally of the US. Same for Puerto Rico.
my best friend did Oaxaca with her husband this spring and had an amazing time – ate a lot of great food, nice weather, very cool sightseeing. It was not on my list before her trip but it is now.
It’s not gonna be super warm, but So Cal is great. You can fly into Los Angeles or Burbank and drive up to the wine country in the Central Coast — Santa Ynez and/or Paso Robles. Maybe hit Hearst Castle while you’re there.
Our oldest is going to be getting a cell phone this summer. DH and I are trying our best to do this right. Hit me with your lessons learned and advice for it.
She is almost 12, but heading into 6th grade. I was shocked to realize this but she will be the last or second to last in her very large friend group to get a phone. Her BFF goes to full summer sleepaway camp and is getting one at the end of the summer. Bestie has two older siblings so I am also going to chat with her mom and see what guardrails they are using because they’ve been down this path before and we are pretty aligned on stuff like this. Her middle school has a pretty strict phone policy so I’m not really worried about the in-school stuff. More like- what kind of stuff was allowed vs not, do you monitor it and how? Where does it live when at home (always on her? on a main table? not allowed in bedrooms?). We do not plan to allow social media apps on the phone for now- but IDK when that becomes something she needs to learn–we are dabbling slowly but for sure keeping it off phones for a while. For example, she has a tiktok account now but the rules are that she can’t post things of herself and we are connected so I see all her stuff. Most of her friends are not allowed to post their videos to tiktok but a few are so I have also had to talk to her about her friends posting videos of her, but now they are supposed to ask her permission (and they do) and she usually asks them not to. She also knows that if anything is posted it is forever and should be something she’d be fine showing her grandparents or having on display for the entire school and should also not have any identifying stuff (this came up when they wanted to post something in their town sports uniforms and I asked them not to).
I remember getting my first cell phone and all the drama about using shared minutes…but this is a different ballgame. She primarily needs it to (a) communicate with me and DH when she’s out and about (b) make plans with friends/ communicate with friends while out (c) coordinate stuff with adults that she is doing work for (she babysits our neighbors who do not have a landline, she is also pet sitting and it’s proving hard to touch base with the pet owners without using my phone which means she has to take it with her and it isn’t practical) and (d) take photos of her and her friends.
Not what you want to hear, but seriously, don’t do it. And if you do, don’t get an iphone. Parental controls are pretty lax and super easy for any kid to get around. My 12 year old (rising 7th grader) has an apple watch and that’s going to get her to high school. I don’t care if it’s uncool. She can’t take photos or post anything with it, or access social media. When they say “wait until 8th” (or longer) they mean it.
Yeah, my partner’s 13 year old is glued to her phone, and all the things the parents thought they’d restrict, they just got tired of fighting with her all the time and she does what she wants.
Better to just not enable it at the start.
OP here, and I guess I should have prefaced it that I didn’t want to get into the debate but…if you have found some workable solution I’d love to hear it. I posted above why we are doing it but if there is another means to solve for the problems please let me know!
We do know a few kids that have the apple watch and it has proven tricky. Our good friends have a daughter the same age as ours and they are both FBI agents and take this stuff really, really seriously. Their daughter has had a watch but it has had a lot of issues and they are moving her to a phone this summer as well.
For the apple watch, would that be an appropriate way to communicate with the parents of kids she’s babysitting? How does your kid take pictures of herself with her friends? She has an instax camera but that’s not at all the right thing. Is there a pocket sized digital camera on the market we could look at? How does your daughter make plans with all her friends? Is the texting interface enough to do a group chat? I’m open to finding a different way to solve the problems if you’ve found one.
Digital cameras are definitely making a comeback. I’ve seen the Nikon cool pix I had in college (….) being used by teens.
can’t she use an ipad (while at home) for group messaging. not saying to give unfettered access to an ipad, but she spends most of her day at school, when does she need to be able to communicate with her friends to make palns?l
This isn’t directed at you, because this is a brainstorm and maybe this suggestion works for OP. But I am laugh crying that the default of our society is all middle schoolers having an iPad at home (even a “family” one). My oldest is in fifth grade and we have no tablets or plan to get them anytime soon. Truly we are not missing out! A lot of the dangers of phones apply to iPads (both re: internet usage and impact on the developing brain).
OP here- right now she does have a chrome book and she uses it to chat with friends via messenger kids. The specific reason we are finding it’s no longer a solution is that she is starting to be very mobile.
– This summer, she spends all day at our swim club. She has to borrow a friend’s phone if she needs to get in touch with me for some reason. Last year there was a land line there but they got rid of it in a renovation.
– she bikes to/from friends’ houses and various places in town
Those two use cases could be fixed with an apple watch BUT she’s also starting to babysit and needs to communicate with families and have a way to communicate in case of an emergency (maybe could do this on a watch? The families she sits for have all been surprised she didn’t have a phone and she ended up having to use mine since nobody was comfortable leaving her home with kids and no way of calling for help!). She is managing her sports/babysitting/social calendar on paper now but *if* she gets a phone that will be put into a calendar app so she can see it all together. Also, she really wants to take photos of her/her friends which is completely reasonable IMO.
Yes, but also no with the iPad. An iPad can’t be used where there is no wi-fi, the screen is harder to hide from parents, and they can’t just default to being on it while they’re with friends/in public.
How would you have done those things when you were a teen? Those answers are still viable now.
OP here, and that’s not actually true which is the problem. I didn’t have a cell phone growing up, but every home I was in had a landline. My swim club had a landline. The mall and my school had payphones. Babysitting clients had landlines. My friends called me and I used three way calling to chat with them.
Now, payphones and landlines are gone.
I promise you the mall and pool still have landlines. And if all of her friends have cell phones, she can borrow one if she needs to reach you.
OP here- I have checked with our mall and I am at the pool daily. There are no pay phones or public use landlines.
They’re actually not, in a lot of cases.
Monitoring it is going to be a PITA, I can tell you that. Don’t allow social media apps, though be very aware that there are workarounds. Many TikTok videos are reshared on YouTube, for example. Limiting phone use in her bedroom is a good idea in theory but hard to enforce unless you’re on her all the time. However, I would highly recommend requiring her to leave the phone on a charger in a common area when she’s supposed to be sleeping and resting. Also think about what other types of games/apps you’re going to allow. Set time limits on her device (we still do this for our 15-year-old).
It’s a landmine, and I hate everything about phone use for tweens and teens.
I’m confused what the issue with TikTok videos on YouTube is. It’s not social media once it’s on YouTube, it’s just a video like any other video on YouTube?
YouTube is social media. It has an algorithm that serves up short videos to break your attention span and give you dopamine hits to endlessly scroll, and it includes the same potential for unsavory content
You can turn that off if you turn off view history tracking.
It’s the content in said videos that I hate.
Okay. There’s so much content on TikTok that it’s hard for me to imagine this as a categorical statement. I like to watch Dr. Glaucomflecken sketches, a few other silly comedians, cute animal videos, and some fandom content. I’m not on TikTok and have social media features disabled on YouTube.
I do realize there’s a lot of bad content on YT generally.
Reasonable people may disagree about this, but while that is fine for an adult, I don’t want my sixth grader spending her limited free time on that stuff. Read a book, play a sport, learn how to bake, watch an actual show on the TV with the family. All of that is better than scrolling and watching, siloed on a tiny screen.
OP here- I entirely agree that she shouldn’t be spending free time scrolling. She’s one of the busiest people I know- she reads several books a week, plays 2 sports a season, is always crafting, but is also hitting that age where she wants to spend time socializing with friends. If they can’t do it in person, which is my preference, they do it via phone/text. As a middle schooler I spent HOURS on the phone with friends.
Agreed about sixth graders then! What you’re describing is what sixth grade was like for me, and it was fine and better than scrolling on a screen.
I just think YouTube’s algorithm was toxic and promoted horrific content long before TikTok, so it’s strange for reshared TikTok videos to be the big content concern.
If she’s already on Tiktok I’d be more worried about what she’s seeing on her FYP and less about what she’s posting.
All phones/devices charge in our room overnight, downtime is on between 9pm and 7:30am for all kid devices (not just phones) and the kids can’t download any apps without approval from my phone. Phones/devices allowed in bedrooms but not with a closed door.
+100000000 The problem with social media apps isn’t her posting, it’s what she’s consuming.
God no TikTok. Literally the absolute worst thing. Why does she need a phone with apps at all? No one needs to learn how to use social media it is dead easy.
OP here, she does not need a phone with apps, other than boring stuff like maps. Are there text-and-call-only phones that you would recommend? Some of the people we know got their kids some of those gimmicky safety phones in 4th/5th grade and they are both garbage AND don’t work to keep kids off their phones.
They still sell flip phones.
Unfortunately a flip phone doesn’t really do it for the social(izing) stuff. I’m not trying to be difficult because we’ve been thinking about this from all angles. It’s a possibility but it having a text chat with anyone is really not practical on those.
Texting as a form of socializing increases depression, anxiety, eating disorders…
Maybe encourage your kid to actually spend time with their friends?
@ 1:19- do you have kids this age or older? I think there is a very clear difference in how people are answering based on if they have or have had kids this age. My 12 year old daughter *does* spend a ton of time with friends. As much as she possibly can! But do you remember growing up, getting home, and immediately calling your best friend to talk about the day? To coordinate outfits before a field trip? To help you prank call the boy you liked (sometimes while sitting next to you)? On the phone until someone had to log onto AOL and kicked you off? They do that by text now.
Or, if they are all together and are making plans, they text an invite over to anyone else that isn’t there.
Why can’t she text on a flip phone? I don’t get the issue
1:53, don’t be obtuse. We’re not parenting in the year 2000 anymore, unfortunately. We have to respond to the way things actually are.
I use Bark for my daughter. It works well. I would have preferred gabb but I am ‘co’parenting and compromised.
I agree with other to wait until end of 8th.
My sister has taken this approach with her middle schooler:
– no smartphone. Kid has a “dumb phone” for calling and texting family, friends, and baby sitting clients.
– while at home, the phone stays downstairs 100% of the time. Originally the rule was phone was turned in to my sister and BIL at home (their thought was we got the phone so we could contact you, if we’re home then you don’t need to use the phone). Since she started babysitting, she can now use the phone downstairs to coordinate with clients. She can also have phone calls on the phone with her friends and cousins – much like we did on the landline or on nights and weekends (free minutes!).
– phone is turned in to charge in mom and dad’s room at 8pm and she gets it back after shes gotten ready for school the next morning.
– digital point and shoot cameras are in now, so they have offered her one of those if she wants it for pics with her friends. She so far just uses a disposable camera.
this sounds like the best approach. a 6th grader doesn’t need a smart phone
Do you know what kind of “dumb” phone your niece has? I have yet to find one that would work for us. We know a bunch of people that have the bark phone and it’s awful.
This is a good list, thanks for sharing.
She should not have a phone. You will not be able to monitor it.
I was a prosecutor for several years and have unique insight into the harms that phone use at that age can and does cause. Lots of mothers sobbed in my victim/witness room because they monitored their daughters’ phones so closely, and yet here they were finding out from a county detective that their middle schoolers were sending nudes to adult men. You will say this is not your daughter! She makes good decisions! Those moms told me the same thing.
Not to mention all of the bullying, harm to self esteem, etc. I could go on and on.
Right. Do the hard thing and say no.
This is also what so many young adults are now saying (that they shouldn’t have had so much access to the internet, and that they weren’t ready for a smart phone), even in cases where nothing this bad happened.
Our rising 7th grader has an iPhone. So do all his friends. No social media, and we block certain websites (YouTube). He needs parental permission to download apps. I know his passcode. I also am logged into his Apple account on my iPad, so I see all his text messages. Phone stays plugged in the living room and downtime is set from 10pm to 7am. He can’t use it at dinner or when we’re at a social activity (like a bbq or trip to the pool). We mostly leaves it at home because he doesn’t like having it in his pocket all the time.
OP here- this is very helpful. We haven’t talked to her yet but DH and I are thinking this through. What I liked about messenger kids was that I could see her texts. We were planning to make sure she know the phone was not subject to privacy but I wasn’t aware I could actually see all her texts. I have no particular interest in doing so but knowing it’s a thing is helpful.
I don’t usually read her convos but sometimes I talk about them with her (esp if she’s using my phone to chat) and it’s been a good way to help coach her through friend drama.
I think this is a really hard topic, but I wouldn’t immediately jump to “don’t do it”. A lot of this depends on you, your child and your relationship. What generally works for us (two boys 14 and 16 and a 12 y/o girl) is that I have access to all of their phones, and they know this, I have access to all of their accounts (which works better or worse for some apps – e.g., I can only access Discord for one of them, but I have all the passwords and could log in if I had more time). Basically, I made very clear that there was no expectation of privacy upfront. Also, all photos are backed up to a shared family photo site.
We are constantly talking about what limits make sense – for example, my husband and my daughter both love the Libby app and are constantly reading on their phones. Is that OK? We go back and forth on that. So, there are definitely things we struggle with. Also about messaging with friends (especially for my oldest, who is less social, so we don’t want to restrict his access to messaging).
At some point we said no phones in rooms, but they use them as alarms and to play music, and they aren’t really using them after bedtime (we can track that using family on Apple). Again, something to monitor.
You know your child best, so I would say you really just need to keep on top of things and communicate with your daughter about it.
I’m the prosecutor who posted above and to be blunt, this is exactly the type of head-in-the-sand parent I met all the time.
—you acknowledge 2/3 of them are on Discord you can’t access.
—I assure you they know you’re not logging in regularly
—I can also assure you that there are easy ways to get around the photos being backed up to the family site
—the research on teens using messaging to socialize rather than actually socializing is alarming.
Everyone knows their child best until they find out their child has all kinds of secrets they don’t know about.
Just a comment that it might feel like you’re talking to a brick wall with the OP, but you’re hopefully getting through to people who understand the dangers and are willing to be unpopular w their kids.
Please, please do not do this. You are raising her risk of virtually every bad mental health outcome for stuff that can be solved by planning ahead, borrowing a friend’s phone, and getting a digital camera.
+1 I can see the adverse impacts smart phones have on me, a 37 year old adult. (I type on my phone, while browsing the internet when I have something much more urgent and important to do.) I can’t imagine what this would have done to my brain as a teenager.
Same. It would have been incredibly bad for me.
My friends and I comment to each other all the time that we are so lucky to have been adolescents in the brief window of dumb phones being accessible enough for high schoolers but smartphones were not yet ubiquitous.
Without a doubt I would have been a way more distracted, socially isolated teenager and young adult.
For that age, we’re planning (with our son) a basic flip phone or watch, but definitely no smartphone. It won’t be allowed in his room at night either. This is a hill to die on for us.
I don’t have great advice but I have had a middle-school age babysitter, and I liked the way it was handled: My mutual friend provided the mom’s phone number who texted with me a little before providing her daughter’s (the babysitter’s) phone number. The mom then said she wanted to be on all texts with her daughter, which I thought was a great rule. Food for thought!
OP and this is exactly our plan. Same with coaches (that’s actually a rule). Right now she just sits for the kids of one of my friends so it’s not a big deal but she’s getting referrals to friends-of-friends. She’s also watering plants at a neighbors and has had to come home to use my phone to text back and forth with them about it (it’s a hilariously complicated job and she’s making like $200 over the week doing it!).
Hi OP, I’m not at this stage yet but have been following Better Screen Time’s recommendations for myself (and filing away as a resource for kids down the road). They have guides to recommended devices as well as blog posts on topics for both you (how to model good phone habits) and how to discuss with your teen. Some of the guides required submitting an email to download.
Posting this link as a starting point: https://www.betterscreentime.com/is-my-teen-ready-for-a-cell-phone/
We got out kid a Bark phone last fall when she was 12 (almost 13 – 7th Grade), and she was, similarly, one of the last people in her friend group to get a phone. We got her a phone because she was going to be taking public transportation to an extracurricular activity. I will say, I was very resistant to letting her have a phone before high school, but my husband made, what I thought was a good point – he wanted to let her have a phone before she was in high school because he felt like it would allow us to have a high degree of control over her phone before she became wholly independent. Kind of like teaching your kid to drink safely at home.
The Bark Phone allows us to set different restrictions levels – ie. one level, she can only use her phone to call or text emergency contacts (this is what it is set to when she is at school), other levels restrict apps, internet access, ability to call/text contacts. It also sends us alerts when it thinks the texts contain concerning information. This last bit is kind of laughable – for example it flagged “medically concerning information” when she texted a friend that she had a headache. It did flag “bullying” when her friends were having a conversation about how much they couldn’t stand another peer. I did have a conversation with her about that one and about putting things in writing like that.
I will say, all the things that annoy me about her phone, aren’t necessarily specific to her phone. I think she spends too much time scrolling and playing games. When I lock down her phone, she just does all that on her laptop… so really we look at the phone as part of a bigger picture of expectations for behavior – chores need to be done, instruments practiced, homework done, and grades kept up in order for her phone to be unlocked.
Things we are strict about:
-Phone is primarily for safety and communication. Anything else is icing on the cake and not guaranteed.
-all contacts need to be approved. She needs to be able to tell us first and last names of people and who they are. I can’t believe the number of times she sends us a request where under name it says, “Pool Friend” Just get a name!
-no social media (I don’t think she wants this any way – she is pretty risk adverse and we frequently point out new stories of social media gone awry…)
-no entering personal information into websites/apps (this includes email address – and actually this is an internet rule we have in general.)
-we have the ability to lock her phone for any reason – poor grades, rudeness, lack of communication, failure to do chores, etc.
-zero expectations for privacy.
I do wish we had a rule about charging the phone in a public area, but for whatever reason, we don’t and she has her phone in her room way too much.
I will say, other than her constantly playing games and watching youTube videos, her having a phone hasn’t been terrible. She uses it a lot to listen to music and read books/audiobooks on Libby. It’s actually really cute to get texts from her throughout her day and she does share with us what she’s looking at. (it’s not a defined rule, but we do expect her to share what she is looking at with us.) The other thing I think is important to model good phone behavior ourselves. So we try to be very transparent about what we are doing on our own phones, and talk about things a lot and ask her to talk to us about what she’s doing. I kind of figure she’s got to learn to be on the phone, so starting from the beginning I want her to know how to be a good human both with a phone and without.
So make the rule.
I’m moving and for the first time in my life (including growing up), I’ll have a guest room.
I’m 30, single, live alone, and 99% of my guests will be college friends in town visiting for the weekend. These friends mostly live in studios or 1 BRs in more expensive cities, so we’re used to not having guest rooms and we just either share our host’s bed or crash on the couch.
I am renting a whole row home, so I have way more space than I’m used to!
I’ll prob have guests ~10x a year, so I’m wondering how else I should use this room / what to put in it? So far I just have a full bed (my old bed, I got a queen for my room) and a night stand. I will use the closet in this room for out of season clothes.
I don’t want stuff just for the sake of stuff, but having a room used approx one weekend a month feels like wasted space!
FWIW, I’m 100% in the office for work so dont need a desk (I’ll be using my current desk in the dining area as a bar, on the very occasional opportunity I can WFH I’m fine using my dining table).
I’ll put my workout equipment (peloton and weights) in my basement, is unfinished and will also have storage and laundry.
When I had the idea to get a 2BR, I thought it’d be an office and gym space with a day bed for guests, but that’s no longer the case!
Everything I’m seeing online about what to put in a guest room is, I don’t know how to describe it – prissier? More formal? That what I’d feel comfortable with.
Put a nice armchair and bookcases in there and use it as a library.
Give yourself time to let it evolve. My one caveat is that you’ll need to be vigilant about letting it become the place you stash things instead of dealing with them. (Says the woman who worked from the living room for 3 months of the pandemic before clearing out the crap in the spare room to make it an office.)
It sounds like you are in good shape and don’t need anything. Congrats on the new place!
We keep an amenity basket for guests with spare tooth brushes, deodorant, charging cables, etc. Nothing fancy but just the basics of what you might forget. I also normally have an extra throw blanket to cuddle up with in the guest room, and bought lamps like at hotels so they have plugs to charge your stuff.
Also I got one of those folding luggage racks for my guest room and the guests seem to really appreciate it. https://www.travelandleisure.com/best-luggage-racks-8401976?
Yes, this is a very nice idea.
I have a single friend with a similar guest room. As an occasional guest I appreciate she bought an inexpensive foldable luggage rack like hotels. It’s really nice to have a spot to put a luggage not on a floor. She just stores it in the closet when it’s not needed.
Congrats on the new place!
I agree with the idea to wait and see, but here are some ideas meanwhile:
–Do you collect anything? You can make all or some of the room a showcase for your collectibles. (Or, you can start collecting something you’ve always wanted!)
–Create a cozy corner for yourself in there. It can be a zone where you only go to wind down (or have long conversations, or read, or whatever) — a great chair, a table with candles and photos, cozy blankets, mood lighting — whatever!
–A library is always a great idea!
–A hobby space, depending on your hobbies.
–A memorabilia corner, with a display of framed photos, a shelf of photo albums and yearbooks, etc.
I finally went to having only an air mattress in my guest room. I had a full bed and then a daybed, but neither were used enough to justify me not having a usable space for myself. Mine has my workout stuff in it, but since you don’t need that, a good chair for reading and bookcases or space for hobbies are ideas. Some people change them into dressing rooms. If you have friends over for games or listening to music, you could set it up like that. Don’t feel you have to set it up like a hotel room if that doesn’t fit your lifestyle.
PSA: I found a 35% discount code for linen at Universal Standard. PRIME35 worked to order some cute linen pants.
I’m worried about Universal Standard, they’ve been having a big sale every week since April. I got a couple of the mystery boxes around then. I love their ponte work pants, but I have all three colors so unless they come out with new colors (and jackets to go with would be nice!) I don’t need anything from them right now.
I have complicated feelings about Universal Standard. I support the idea, and I like some of their pants a lot. But the tops I’ve tried all seem suited for a much bustier woman than I. Which is great if that’s you, but means I can only shop a small portion of their items.
I feel like retail overall is in a weird place right now. Tariffs on one side, inflation on the other. Like everything else, there’s a lot at the low and high ends, but the middle is hollowed out.
Kat, I’m having issues with my email address saving again :(
Same.
As part of a “wellness initiative,” my company was offering gift cards for attending various webinars–if only webinars could ameliorate my department’s toxic environment but I digress. I attended a stress reduction webinar that referred to tapping. I have not tried it (I am lucky that I can usually leave my desk and go for a short walk) but I wanted to mention it since I had not heard of it before the webinar.
I have a friend whom is practitioner and have used it. My experience with it has been a game changer…plus no meds!
Sorry–this was intended for Anon at 9:50 AM.
Headsweats has great liners to go under helmets.
When the US did not get gun control laws after Sandy Hook I gave up hope