Kirk Johnson says a few late utility bills and a dental bill that “fell through the cracks” were the first clues that his “brilliant” wife, a 50-something senior executive, would be diagnosed with dementia years later. Ann in Atlanta says her family became aware of cognitive problems in an elderly relative when he began writing “$10 or $20 cheques to any charity that asked — real or fake”, long before his diagnosis.

It’s a story that loved ones tell repeatedly about Americans living with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease: a father who pays bills more than once, long before other memory problems surface; a mother with “terrible anxiety over the administration of her finances”; a normally frugal widow who runs through a nest egg by shopping compulsively online.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Patti Waldmeir

It was mid-morning, midweek and midwinter in the remote Badlands National Park of South Dakota — about as far as one could get from a schoolhouse. Yet throughout this surreal Midwestern moonscape of rainbow rock formations, I repeatedly ran into families with school-aged children. Why weren’t they in class? The reply was always the same: This is our classroom. We are homeschooled.

While many of the world’s children are back to the old routine — and many parents are horrified at the idea of ever having to teach them at home again — an estimated 3.7mn US households are home-schooling children. The proportion of homeschooled children in the US nearly doubled from 2.8 per cent before the pandemic to 5.4 per cent in 2020-21, according to the US Department of Education.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Patti Waldmeir