As though Joe Schmoe from New Palestine, Indiana who went to the School of Hard Knocks with a profile photo of himself in camo cargo shorts holding a fish should be privy to all of the information being gathered in a criminal investigation

I got off Facebook mid-2016 as well. Not only do I not miss it, but I affirmatively feel my life is better by not being on it.

I agree with all you’ve said. I think there is also a distinction between being a child abuser and a parent who occasionally spanks, or once or twice spanked with a belt. It cannot be that every single thing that isn’t nice or positive immediately falls over into “abuse.” There are degrees, and those distinctions…

Accepting that one’s parents are not perfect is not the same as accepting that they were abusive.

I read it differently. I thought her piece was intended to show her evolution, so she wrote how she felt at the time, not how she feels now. She went from an angry, defensive parent whose kids had been taken away to a staunch defender of other parents to an experienced advocate who understands that every case is…

It amazes me that people don’t know how to read. 1) you don’t get to define my experience for me, nor my relationship with my parents. If you want to call yourself an abuse survivor, by all means go for it. Its your experience to tell. However you don’t get to define my experience with my parents as yours. Just like I…

I read her own story as acknowledging the complexities, but I didn’t read it as a clear argument that CPS did something wrong in her case. She believes that with more assistance and more clarity from CPS, she could have been reunified sooner. But she also acknowledges that she reacted in harsh, scary ways and the…

I’m not going to take the position that the system is perfect or even good. But I’ve worked in it as a guardian ad litem and I promise you that for a lot of people it does cause self reflection.

Same here, I’ve only ever been “too high” like twice. Once was after my first mega bong rip... coughing, coughing, coughing. Now I am such a regular smoker I wonder what it’s like to feel that way .... sigh. “High” tolerance :)

Whenever couples (in any walk of life) who have been together that long break up, it freaks me out. I’ve been married for almost a year now (and together with him for 3 years) and even though I love him dearly and have no desire to be without him, I always panic at couples like that because it reminds me that there is…

Yeah, the first year isn’t hard because you’re taking intro classes. Go out and have a little fun! Someone tell her that work happy hours are never as exciting as college parties and once you get further into your 20's your friends will start having children and moving away and falling off of the radar, forcing you to…

When the majority of your social interaction happens electronically, what need to you have to go anywhere?

Teen-aged fun is over-rated. Have fun now! You have the skills, the means, and the confidence.

My 18 year old cousin uses her mom’s credit card (that her mom gave her) to take Ubers and pay for lunch or brunch with her friends at restaurants so they can practice for their post-college future in the city using their parent’s credit cards for brunch

That’s great that it worked out for you. I just struggle to imagine how I would have done it. I didn’t know who I was yet and I was making some questionable life choices (even while in grad school and doing all the adult things.)

BWHAHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHA

It’s advice in the sense of “here are your (utterly obvious) options.”

I know nothing about this family, but given that the two removed kids were from a previous relationship, is it possible that the other three were too young to be exploited in the videos?

Fuck that, let me mainline my show without having to fast forward through the credits, go a few seconds too far, hit the exact right moment, have the picture come up but miss a couple seconds of sound while that buffers, then go back into the final few seconds of the intro and THEN watch my show.

You’re absolutely right—as I say, I think it is because society reduces women to their fertility so often, and so anything that causes them to be unable to go through the rituals of motherhood is seen as failure on a moral level. Consider sterility and the terms associated with it—”barren”, “infertile”, all sorts of…