no contact best contact

Something that gets really lost in a lot of discourse is that what we would now call 'going low-contact' or 'going no-contact' with your family used to be so completely within the normal range of familial contact that there wasn't even a term for it. Sure, in the pre-IM pre-social media days some people were calling their parents daily, but I'd wager the vast majority of people were not. Long distance calling used to be quite expensive, after all. If your kid went to the big city to seek their fortune you might hear from them every few weeks, or every month, or once a year, and that wasn't particularly odd. This was even more the case before telephones were common, of course - people would send letters, but definitely not more than once a week and probably a lot less. It was just a normal, accepted fact that you'd hear from some family members who lived nearby often, and some who lived farther away very rarely.

children's movies love to set up parents and guardians as being cruel and unreasonable up until the child character is instructed by a third party to apologize or tell the truth or confess some kind of secret about themselves, and then all of a sudden the parental figure will learn empathy be like "wow... I didn't know you felt that way... don't worry, I'll always love you". and it really set some unrealistic expectations for me as a kid, where when I tried to follow that script irl I ended up getting told something more along the lines of "wow... you're really manipulative and spoiled... do you want me to apologize or something? I won't. it's your fault if you decided to feel 'unloved' or something. and if you don't start following my demands perfectly soon, you're going to ruin your life beyond repair and never be happy again. so consider that :)"

"mothers of this species abandon their young to fend for themselves from birth, and even attack and cannibalise each other regardless of age or relation, how heartless :'(" "females birth and rear the young while males defend the territory, as is the natural order of things" "this fictional alien species with no concept of gender sexuality or social hierarchy as we understand it nevertheless forms familial units comprising of mother, father, and child archetypes" "i spent years worldbuilding my fantasy realm but every culture i invented conforms to nuclear family ideals, except for the totally-not-a-racial-stereotype primitive tribes" "incest is a universal taboo" okay. cool. cool. no that's fine. it's fine. you've paved over so much interesting and valuable sociological discourse we could have had with an unimaginative negatively + punitively reinforced status quo but it's literally fine.

Hello!