Not doing my kid any favors

My daughter accuses me of being softer on her brother than I was on her at his age. I can see her point but isn’t it always like that with the babies? Also it’s hard to be strict with a disabled child. I have a disabled brother and I accused my Mom of the same thing. Truth is I’m not doing my son any favors. When he was little his therapist would say, “let him fall he has to learn to balance himself.” So I let him fall from small heights but instilled a fear of going high. Now he’s a teenager with a healthy amount of self preservation but still enjoys small thrills like skiing and via ferrata (somehow I didn’t fuck that up). He’s a smart kid but I don’t do him any favors by letting him take giant 20 minute youtube breaks after each homework assignment. It’s hard to move teenagers to another school but even harder to move to another part of the world entirely. Of course he hates his school, having repeated a math class at a lower level that he aced the year before at an honors level because the school couldn’t figure out how to get him into a high school math class while in the middle school which are in buildings very close. His math teacher said, “You aren’t here to learn math, you are here to learn social skills.” This literally broke my son because math is his favorite. So he hates the school and he hates that we tore him away from his friends and his D&D community to a place where he doesn’t even speak the language. But he did learn some social skills last year, which I hope will allow him to have friends this year. Is one friend asking too much? So I protect my son too much and most days I do the dishes for him and I let him do his homework on his bed instead of making him clean off his desk or sit at the kitchen table. I want him to succeed but I’m not doing him any favors. I can do better!

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