Discover Top Posts Tagged with #childraising

My daughter just explained the current phrase, “Lost the plot.”

That characterizes my entire experience with child raising.

#LostThePlot #childraising #kidsarefun #kidsarefunnot #parentingfailures #parenting #mydaughtersaysimmean

Did you catch Noah Berlatsky's "parents are tyrants" thread? God, that fucking guy.

I kind of agree with him. Noah isn’t making an original point, its been brought up by child psychologists and educators before, even some Anarchist philosophers, there is a really messed up way in which families are structured. Have you ever wondered why dictators always call themselves “The father of the nation” or like how the Tsar was “The little Father”. Or the entire notion of the Father land? Real tyrants hope to emulate the “natural tyranny” of the home. After WWII a lot of people pointed out how German culture really internalized the idea of the father as a dictator, that fathers were encouraged to run their family as a mini dictatorship which then bled into the larger dictatorship of the state. If you ever study family abuse in any level, this is a major factor in terms of spousal or child abuse (often but not always by the men) is the idea of the parent (often but not always the dad) as a sort of monarch who gets to control the parents will, and the child should be punished for defying them. If you ever get into studying child raising especially pre like 1960 child raising, its pretty horrifying honestly, and the fact that children are seen as property of their parents is actually a big problem.

Actually if you study the history of progressive movements, in particular the notion of reactionary backlash, its tied a lot to the notion of family reform. The first three waves of feminism all hit a backlash point once men got scared this might effect their daily control over their wives, and a similar thing happens with children.

Also a lot of really shitty political movements today come out of the notion that parents like...own their kids rather than are their protectors. Like the Anti Vax movement is like “Oh MAH KIDS CAN”T LIVE A LIFESTYLE I DON”T LIKE” rather than “hey...maybe the kids would have wanted you to get a fucking vaccine once they get sick with preventable illnesses.” Or the entire Homeschooling community, or how the voting age hasn’t been been lowered to 16 (which I think is what it should be).

However if you look at anarchist writers, a lot of them point out is that if parents are the biggest influence on a child’s life (often the case) and if the parent basically has the final say over most of a child’s life, it sets the precident in their heads early on the inherent value of unchecked authority. Children don’t really have unions or representative goverment, outside full on open abuse Children’ don’t have much in the way of rights. And if that is your sense of normal, that makes a lot of people’s default world view very authoritarian. If you look at people who like dictatorships, one of the things that emerges really clearly is how much of this is tied to the idea of a strong father or daddy figure, even Trump plays that up in his propaganda.

To use a personal example

Like my parents allowed me a lot of personal freedom, I didn’t have a curfew, they never limited my access to media, and I was allowed to argue with and disagree with my parents but like...what if they didn’t? Like what if my parents didn’t allow me to form my own hobbies or argue with them and strictly monitored my free time? As long as they didn’t hit me or exploit me, that still isn’t abusive and so CDC can’t get involved but it is still shitty disrespectful parenting, and it would have made me a worse person. And that is 100% legal, if my dad basically said I wasn’t allowed to argue with him, that isn’t a law, if my mom basically forbade me to play video games or read the books I wanted in the house she could have done that, and it would have stunted me.

there isn’t like..a check on that. The entire notion of democracy is that people in power need to have some sort of accountability or check on said power, and parents really only have a check in extreme circumstances. The more you get into psychology of tyranny, the more you realize its based on a lot of unchecked assumptions that are built into us early one, and challenging those is good. I, like Noah don’t really have a solution to this problem (he tends to speak provocatively for the hell of it) I think he is unto something here.

#ask evilelitest #noah berlatsky #Childraising #Parents #tyranny #Abolutism #Dictatorship #Father of the People #Tsar #little father #fatherland #Sexism

Kids. The Footprints You Leave Behind

Raising kids is not a walk in the park. They keep you young, they keep you humble — and they call you on your crap.

“A hundred years from now it won’t matter what sort of house I lived in, or kind of car I drove but, the world may be different because I was important to the life of a child.”

Between escalating birthdays and widowhood, I reflect on a lot these days on both the meaning — and…

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#family #parenting #childraising #relationships #Women

"Does the child support program make money? No..."

“Does the child support program make money? No…”

Does the child support program “make money” for either the federal government or the states? The answer to this question, simply put, is no. Like most other social programs, the child support system provides to families a service that upholds a strong value-system of parents providing for their children, but does so at a direct high cost.[1]Table 2.4 [below] demonstrates that the program has…

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#child support #childraising #children #Fathers Rights Movement #welfare

The New Micro-Politics of Child Contact

The fathers’ movements … have obscured the structural basis of the gendered division of labour that supports and sustains women’s greater role in child care, and have turned mothers’ objections into an apparently self-interested, child-harming defence of the status quo. … In framing the issues as ones of justice, they have also turned to law to demand ‘fairness,’ [but] they have not sought to…

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#childraising #fatherhood #Fathers Rights Movement

The Meaning of Fatherhood

“…In Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’s analysis of 165 in-depth interviews with single mothers in the same Philadelphia and Camden communities from which we drew many of our fathers, the women had little motivation to stave off early childbearing, as young women in this environs see children as their chief source of meaning and identity, and other sources of esteem are in short supply.

We make the…

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#childraising #fatherhood #identity #masculinity