My wife and I have a son who is 24. We supported him through the long journey of primary and secondary schooling, paying attention to his interests and what we thought would be good, which largely didn’t end up involving academics.

We started by putting him in Waldorf/Steiner-inspired schools in preschool, kindergarten, and elementary school, where the parents and the school shared the view that young kids should be using their imaginations and not constantly be exposed to images in media. Also, he had a nature day there, where one entire day of the week was devoted to being in nature.

Support for respect for individual paths ended around 5th grade when his school decided that it was hazardous to their future to not keep their students up with the public school students because students transferring to public schools were behind public school students in progress and that seemed to make the school look bad, which wasn’t our concern. As a result, my wife home-schooled him for 6th and 7th grades, which he enjoyed. He attended an outdoors program one day a week, took a ceramics class, played music, traveled to out-of-state museums focused on the natural world, and also did some academic work, including a fair amount of math. That ended when he decided he wanted to play baseball in high school, and wanted to attend public school for 8th grade to get to know more kids.

High school was both inspiring and disappointing. His favorite class was auto shop. He swapped a couple of engines and transmissions, including an engine on his own truck, which he drove home on the last day of school in 12th grade. This class ended up being the only thing keeping him in school.

He was not able to take wood shop because the facility was taken over by an academic program in which he was not interested and to which all students who worked in the wood shop must belong. My wife volunteered at the school attempting to resurrect the cooking program, in a classroom with 10 ranges, which ended up being turned into a computer lab. There was also a sewing program, with multiple sewing machines, that got canceled as well with the sewing machines stuffed into a closet. The school was favoring high-tech over basic life skills.

On the academic side, he learned how to write and enjoyed that he could write reasonably well, maybe even more because his 5th grade teacher had ridiculed him about how little he wrote. He liked learning U.S. history and politics, but didn’t care for teachers with what he saw as obvious biases toward a particular political side.

More of his focus and interest was outside of school. He stopped participating in baseball. He worked for a summer as a carpenter’s assistant building a garage. He got a job in the equipment rental department of a local hardware store and learned how to fix small engine-powered devices. He bought a series of diesel pickup trucks, fixed them up, and sold them. He did the same with multiple small powerboats.

Community college was canceled during the pandemic, so he was not able to study welding beyond the first year. He got jobs working construction for a sewer line company and a remodeler. After a couple of years, a neighborhood friend suggested he work at the local water district where he worked, so he applied for a job there and got hired, first reading meters and then fixing water main breaks. A lot of that water main repair work was at night paying overtime and getting a paid day off the next day when he worked long enough at night. He gets promotions and is valued for his work. He made over $100K last year and expects to do the same this year.

It was a continuous set of experiments to figure out what worked and what didn’t. We had to keep trying stuff and evaluating how the stuff turned out for him. As well, we had to keep focused on what was working for him even if it didn’t work out so well for the schools.

Hi Penelope,
I’ve been reading your blog since I was 16? 18?. It was a big contributing factor in purposefully deciding against big career ambitions. So after my undergrad in [redacted] (stupid major unless you want to purse a PhD) I did my teaching qualifications to teach high school math. Had my daughter 2 weeks before graduation and have been a stay at home mom ever since. Also moved from [expensive city non US] to [expensive city US] bc husband is American.

I would love to homeschool? Who are these women who are working for fun? I definitely prefer to stay home bake bread and not send the toddler to daycare. Hubs come from a double income family. MIL thinks the kind of income required to have a SAHM is 500 000. Hubs works in computer science in big tech but is still fairly junior (we are late twenties).
So anyway I’m going to work next year as a teacher.
We waiting to have kid number 2 bc housing prices are insane.
I underestimated how much of an outlier I would feel socially. I am the youngest mom I meet everywhere, by at least 5 years if not 10. And most families we meet can afford 30k/year daycare for 2 kids and international vacation for toddlers etc. (usually dual income families in tech who are senior or principals.

Am I crazy?

Are some women more likely to want to have more social interaction/or want more social interaction than their partners/husbands at the end of the day or end of the week? And are some men more content to just not caring as much to the extent that some of their partners/wives do at the end of the week? Are they more likely to lean on their wives and maybe children because that’s enough of what they need, and during the week their career/job friends give enough to them — but maybe for some women that’s not enough?

Hi Penelope,

My fiance (40m) has been fired from his last two tech sales jobs in the past 2-3 years. Both times for not meeting his quota. He has been insanely stressed (and taking it out on me/bringing it home) and wants to switch to a less quota-based role with a different kind of stress. He had been doing quite well in sales up until that point (well, actually until he was PIPed in early 2020). But the company he worked for and the general tech working environment was a lot easier at that point in time.

He tried to apply for channel management roles (where you are managing the relationship with the channel partner that sells for you) and even almost got in by being an internal hire at his last company, but they ended up going with an external hire with 5 years of experience. The hiring manager told him he wowed them in the interview and that there wasn’t anything he could’ve done differently, just that they needed someone with more experience for how the company is doing at this time. His former coworker who he worked with at two jobs has vouched that she thinks he’d be much better suited to channel management than to tech sales. But he can’t seem to get a foot in anywhere (he’s applied elsewhere too).

He hates personality tests, but he is extremely extroverted and everyone’s best friend at the office. A “personality hire”, if you will. Not only that, but he’s extremely tech savvy. Coming from a family of teachers, I feel like he has that rare gift of being able to explain and clarify complex tech to people in a way that isn’t patronizing or insulting. He also knows quite a bit about personal finance.

Part of his issue is also that he never finished his college degree and left after two years, so some of the temporary jobs that might be available to someone else (i.e. substitute teaching) aren’t available to him.

So my question is, what should he do next? What type of job should he look for? Or should he start doing something on his own? Are there any certificates he should try to get?

Thank you in advance,

E