#childrearing

On this Mother's Day I'm thinking about Lilith (the best mom ever!), so this is a work of devotion to her, but it's not really about demonolatry.

I'm thinking about how most people raise their children and how I was raised. There are a lot of people who think of themselves as progressive parents, but there aren't a lot of people who seem to be raising sensible children.

Our construct of childhood in this culture is a very strange beast. Childhood has always existed and the culture of childhood is quirky and conservative. Yet, I think that children are capable of far more than we give them credit.

Treating children like children was pretty much invented in the last few centuries. Before that, even though they played these quirky children's games which endure for centuries, they were treated as miniature adults. It was uneven but by the early 20th century compulsory schooling and child labor bans became pretty much universal.

Yet, it's as if, when we decided that children should not work in coal mines, machine shops and garment factories, we also decided children should not be taken seriously or given freedom. In fact, starting with millennials, a lot of people can never get jobs, or can't get good jobs, or can't buy a house, and thus there's a perception that we are children well into our 40s.

I have lots of neurospicy friends who say things like, "When I was a kid I was just as serious as I am now, and I like cartoons, video games and stuffies just as much now as when I was a kid. Certain impulses and life lessons aside, I'm pretty much the same."

I think the idea that children can't make good decisions - and that adults can't make good decisions well into their 30s - comes from living in a dystopian hellscape with helicopter parents.

I figured out that I was trans, figured out that I would need a career to fund my transition, developed my study habits, and started to tackle an eating disorder before I was 12. My birth mother takes way too much credit. She hindered me far more than she helped.

I don't think i'm so much gifted as, at an early age, I was handed a big problem to solve instead of shunted into a consequence-free environment, or a chaotic mixture of high academic expectations and low social consequence.

I think this is a perfectly normal attitude for a child to have. In ages past, all children had a problem to solve: helping their desperate families make a living as soon as they were able. Whether that was being farmhands, housemaids, apprentices, vagabonds, or young nobles in training, I'm pretty sure every kid barely needed to be told "you have to learn to help keep the family going," because even for the nobles I don't think you could say it was easy. Like, watch Romeo and Juliet; nobles are basically gangsters with institutional power.

Instead, they have school. School is a profoundly repressive institution that has become so much more evil in recent decades. Schools are little prisons, where children learn to survive like little prisoners: by playing incredibly traumatizing, violent power games. Schools are places where children either learn to conform or learn that they are worthless.

The American school system is a tool of class repression, which fails to teach practically anything because most of our children stubbornly refuse to behave like Nords, Swedes, the Swiss, Chinese, Koreans or Japanese. Rich people get private schools with small classes, interesting cirricula and good teachers.

Everyone else gets put into a ridiculous little Orwellian social experiment where an inexperienced, underpaid, white, female, utterly mid 4-year university graduate tries to teach a rigid curriculum to too many students, many of whom would be better served by a different academic environment and consequently set about punishing the queerest and nicest students for existing.

I think it's normal for children to like games, but it should be normal for everyone. Children like games because games teach more important lessons in a more fun way than school. Not just the necessities of the craft like art, statistics, programming, but also history, mythology, religion, literature, cooperative problem solving, design and interior decoration, fashion, management, production, geology, physics, economics, gaming, microlending and entertainment; it's all there.

Each of these is a problem to be unpacked that could naturally lead to careers from agronomy to astrophysics if we were allowed to do anything in any way not approved by some capitalist.

In October of 1945, ten-year-old Elvis Presley sang “Old Shep” in a talent competition at the Mississippi-Alabama State Fair and Dairy Show in Tupelo and was elated to come in fifth. He recalled in later years that he “ran off” later in the day and “got a whipping from my mama. Blew my ego completely.” On first reading that story, I immediately thought of an incident in the life of Jesus,…

Parenting is not just a private family activity. It’s shaped by social structures like class, race, gender, and public policy. What counts as “good parenting” depends on cultural beliefs, economic access, time, and what institutions expect from families.

In theory, parents are supposed to nurture, protect, guide, and support their kids. But in practice, parenting styles differ dramatically based on resources and social pressures.

I wanted your opinion on this because you're a black woman and will probably understand this more than me

Also, I'm gonna give a little bit of my opinion, women need more support in families. They need support from their mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, brother, sisters, friends just anyone they know. Women with kids get so much put on them and it's unfair that everything is put on them

Hi, thanks for the ask!

This took me a long time to answer because I spent quite some time thinking about this, because frankly I'm not certain what thoughts you want from me, but I'll try.

First of all, I should say I'm not a black American. I'm Nigerian, and the man in the video seems at some points to be talking from a black American perspective. Nevertheless, I do have opinions.

Women do need support from families, yes. But more than that, women need to rely less on men when it comes to childrearing, not more. That may seem contradictory, but let me explain.

One of the problems I have with mainstream feminism is that it encourages the idea that there's nothing wrong with doing certain things that put you at higher risk of being hurt or let down, because men should be better people. Indeed, men shouldn't be as awful as they are, but also we can't force them to be better. When they decide to act out, there's very little we can do to prevent that.

Knowing that, why would I have kids I don't want because of a man? Okay, say I figure out I don't want them after I have one. Why would I have more? Barring instances of abuse, where the woman is put in more danger by trying to leave, why would I stick around and keep having those damn kids?

I've always been an advocate for women having children when they want, how they want, that they can support themselves. Married or single, I don't believe a woman should ever factor a man into her childrearing plans, except the conception. He can pitch in, and if he's in your life and home, he should be pitching in. But I believe that when a woman has a child, she should have considered what her life would be like if she does it on her own. She should consider what it would be like if that man dies, leaves, becomes abusive, loses his job, starts drinking, goes insane. And she should only have a child if she believes that she'd be able and happy to raise that child in any circumstance no matter what the man does. If he stays perfect, helpful and involved, she wins. If he behaves like men typically do, she loses very little.

The first video where the man was filming and mocking his partner for crying because she didn't want their 2 kids and was pregnant with a third was sad to watch, but he said something. He said "we're not doing no abortion", implying that an abortion was an option. Why then would she sit down and tell that man that she was pregnant, but also didn't want it? The correct thing to do was to pop down to the clinic and get that baby out.

Yes women deserve more help from their families, especially the fathers of those children. But when that help isn't coming, what can we do? We can't sit around and cry and wail about it. We can't force them to give us what we deserve. We need to do something, anything we can. And sometimes that's an abortion.