I think that ' s probably the best way to retort . That I will have kids when I want to . I will not be guilted into having a child . I will not have a child because someone wants me to . A child is a person . Not a fucking Christmas gift . <| sep |> Your book is likely trying to stress the octet rule if you ' re in the beginning . The question aligns with the beginning of the chapter , but it goes over the exceptions to the rule only like less than 10 pages later in the same chapter . The question was from an endofchapter set so I had assumed that we should apply everything we learned from the chapter to all the problems , but I guess not . Interestingly enough , the d orbitals in the video apparently don ' t contribute to the hypervalency of the Cl . So the video isn ' t technically correct either . My book pointed this out it said that it had been assumed that the d orbitals come into play in these cases , but that this has been challenged and is likely not true . It seems so intuitive , though , it ' s hard not to think of it this way . The book does stress that the weirdness if formal charges indicates that the Lewis Structure is wrong . What are the other ways to figure out that it ' s wrong ? I don ' t know if the book mentioned anything beyond oh , those formal charges look off . Thanks a bunch for explaining it to me . It ' s just a gen chem class at a community college , so I ' ve got to take what I can get from where I can get it as far as my education is concerned . I don ' t know how my professor came up with the oxygen as a central atom thing . It looks so wrong . And it goes against the rules we were taught about creating the Lewis Structure . I was actually handing in some homework and she said I was wrong so I had to go back and redo it her way . She was insistent that chlorine could never be a central atom . When I showed her a counterexample from the book she said that it was probably just an example to show us how unstable such an atom would be in real life . Which makes sense , but unstable elements still have Lewis Structures , yes ? I mean , the book literally drew the Lewis structure for it Chlorine tetraflouride , I think . Idk , it ' s driving me bonkers .