Gaashk
8mo ago
That makes sense. American Orthodoxy selects heavily for people with Byzantine preferences. When I was Evangelical, some that stood out are Peter, Christian, Bethany -- the Johns that spring to mind are from my parents' generation
Gaashk
8mo ago
We went with a moderately common girl's name from my ethnic background, a variant of a common girl's name that is itself uncommon in the US from my husband's background that we like the sound of, and a fairly common boy's name associated with a historical figure we like. Middle child will have to tell everyone how to say her name, because it isn't obvious from the spelling, but it's only two syllables so I don't expect a problem. There are names we ruled out because we don't like the sound, for instance Olga. Their last name is Polish, but short and easy enough to not sound notably foreign.
We did not consider any names that the same as immediate relatives for first names (though we do have some middles). We're both very high in personality trait openness, and generally don't like anything to be the same; we like visiting new places, moving, making things we haven't before, new foods we've never tried, and are more attracted to names that are new to our respective families. We didn't consider anything like John, George, or Mary because they were overused in our parents' generation. I think there's some kind of cycle there, and maybe someday we'll have a grandchild named Mary and it will seem right again. Baby boy has a common enough name he could conceivably end up in a class with another boy of the same name, but apparently that's a risk we're willing to take.
The departure from traditionally common names like Mary/John/Peter in my lifetime obviously has a lot to do with falling religiosity
I'm not sure they're related. The very religious people I know are naming their kids things like Euphrosynos or Xenia or something.
Gaashk
8mo ago
I've heard it referred to as an "eating the seed corn" situation at a societal level. A civilization can get high growth by having all its potential mothers do other things instead, but then in addition to not having enough children in the next generation, you also don't have as much social cohesion, because when the kids aren't absolute babies, those were the women volunteering for the churches, organizing social occasions, running the children and youth clubs, sending out cards to recognize everyone's birthdays and holidays and so on. Now, if you want those services, you get to pay market rate for it -- and the market rate is high!
Technological change is busy clearing out a bunch of female heavy positions just now, anyway. Society will lose nothing by a bunch of graphic designers running a household instead, for instance. If they want to. Running a household is harder than graphic design, and as there has been much opining about lately, harder to get status from. Some of the things making women not want to marry the men that would be willing to marry them seems a more pressing issue.
Gaashk
8mo ago
But they also have better teachers(more experienced mostly, but also higher percentage of in-subject graduate degrees for high school teachers)
This reminds me that it's probably a good idea to optimize for different things in primary vs secondary education. As far as I can tell, in lower elementary it's fine to do Montessori or Waldorf or unschooling or whatever else will deliver a pretty good childhood experience. The teachers should teach phonics, but otherwise it's mostly important for them to be able to get all the kids settled and not constantly bothering each other. There are a few elementary students who are so wild even a decent teacher can't get them to cooperate, but it's pretty rare.
Then in high school the quality of peers and academic ability of teachers becomes a lot more important.
Gaashk
8mo ago
I was homeschooled, and... it depends. In general, I liked it. My mom is disposed to be a decent teacher, and went on to teach lower elementary in the public schools. I ended up very well educated in literature, because a Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky book club is my parents' idea of a good time. Math didn't go so well. This is fine, since I don't necessarily want to be a Woman in STEM, but also very common among homeschoolers I know, even with engineer fathers. I think math just inherently requires more structure and pushing for a lot of teens than reading and writing do.
Gaashk
8mo ago
On the issue of property taxes and school funding, this varies by state. The state I'm in puts everything into one budget, subsidized with oil taxes, and funds the Title I (low income) schools more, but the better off schools make some of it up in better parent-teacher associations and less need for things like social workers.
There's probably a dynamic where better teachers like teaching better students, and will move to the charter or private or high income schools disproportionately. I'm not sure how big the effect of that is. The teachers having to spend all their energy on disruption and children who are behind is something that happens, and I'm not sure how big of an affect it has at normal ranges of children.
Mainly because id like to give my offspring the best advantage possible, and select the optimal school district and educational system for him/her.
This probably varies a fair bit by child. There are some children (I've heard it's about 40%) who will learn to read competently based on the kind of exposure that it's almost impossible to avoid in the current society. My mom says she learned to read at three by her father reading the newspaper to her. There are other children who need explicit instruction in phonics, though I think most schools are back to teaching that so it's probably alright. I am not sending my own child to the school I work at because I am involved in workplace drama there, and don't want to get my kids pulled into that. But they'd still make friends and learn to read and add there, probably.
There are schools that are kind of a drag on kids' natural curiosity, which might be more of a long term problem, though I'm not sure if there's any research on that, or how to go about researching it.
Gaashk
8mo ago
Many companies discriminate by having separate lines for standard and plus size. The brands I shop from regularly stop at XL or XXL, and people larger than that have to buy from a different brand altogether. When I looked into it, that seems to have as much to do with certain styles not even working as intended on larger figures, as much as amount of fabric used. That makes it hard to compare costs, since many items are simply unavailable in larger sizes, but brands that cater to explicitly carrying all sizes at the same price point, such as Universal Standard, are pretty expensive for what you get.
Yeah, even in the 90s that take was significantly behind the times in the US, when Christians were adopting toddlers from Korea, Africa, and former USSR countries, but then there were scandals about how many of those children weren't actually "unwanted" either, their relatives were lied to by adoption agencies.
I've known several families try to adopt, and one ended up with a toddler after many years in the process, another ended up with a surrogate carrying an IVF fetus from another family, and one still hasn't succeeded at adopting, despite being willing to adopt older kids, siblings, and go through the court process with parents who are unable to keep them.
Gaashk
8mo ago
I don't know what pro-life people Pastor Barnhart knows, but the ones I've known are the same people doing a bunch of stuff to help out single mothers ("widows," lol), and adopt or foster abandoned children ("orphans" would be way easier to help, there's a lot of court input around the kids that is a huge drag on these relationships. My impression is that actual orphans are usually immediately adopted, often by relatives).
Balancing the needs of the current community and the needs of lawbreakers is indeed complicated, and I'm not surprised that what is mostly a coalition of mothers or would be mothers doesn't have a good solution for that.
Once I tried going to an Arab church, where the pastor spent the whole homily complaining about men who prefer to smoke hookah with their friends, rather than going to church. He didn't seem to be addressing them directly, so I suppose they were not there that morning, either. Did he think their wives and daughters would go home and shame them, and they would start coming again? Seems unlikely. We didn't go back. This feels like that. Somewhere, there are probably some people who might be like he describes. It's a big country, with a lot of different flavors of hypocrite in it. But aiming sermons at someone, somewhere, hoping it'll be shared on social media until they find it seems... bad. Immoral, maybe. In dereliction of his duty as a pastor. My impression of him as a pastor, based on this, is very, very poor.
Gaashk
8mo ago
Interesting, I wonder what's going on there? And whether social pressure would get him to eat more variety, or just cut him off socially? It seems like it might be a problem if they have kids, though now the schools offer free lunches even on breaks I guess.
My uncle once talked my father (baker at 5 star restaurant, foodie of the French and James Beard tradition) into eating more wasabi with his sushi than he preferred. He talked for several days about how much he regretted it, and how annoyed he was.
Gaashk
8mo ago
People’s comfort music is usually reminiscent of what they listened to as teens. Not sure why they’re so over the top about it, but the preference is unsurprising.
Gaashk
8mo ago
Not really. We went to one with a wooden ship play fort in Louisiana, and it was lovely until we got rained out. I think Chick fil-a has them here.
Gaashk
8mo ago
I don't think personally cooking one's own meals was ever the standard for men living in cities. Or women with money, running a moderate household. I'm not sure how meaningful it is that they would hire a cook directly, rather than a courier. But Freddie, at least, is a communist, and probably opposed to the ways of wealthy households.
Gaashk
8mo ago
I find that - Michelin starred restaurants aside - I can do better in thirty minutes in my own kitchen than pretty much anyone available on the apps.
I'm not in a position to have food delivered, but I find that almost any pre-prepared Costco meal is better than one I cooked (they keep up with the trends; they have birria now). We still cook from raw meat and root vegetables about half the time, but unless it's a taco or something, there's a marinade, some kind of eggs and crumbs or else cooked in a pan and deglazed, then some kind of roasting for one to six hours. The tacos are not bad, but also not better than from a food truck, and with less variety. I absolutely cannot cook proper beans, but I think it takes 8 hours and a piece of pork fat. We can't bring ourselves to eat enough beans to justify that.
Gaashk
8mo ago
I think this is inadequately handled.
https://www.thecut.com/article/gen-z-ipad-kids-generation-screen-time.html I just clicked through to his first link about iPad kids. On the issue of raising children in a big city like New York, my impression is that in the past the norm was to live near relatives and trusted acquaintances (co-religionist or co-ethnic, for instance), and let bands of roving kids wander the neighborhood with little parental involvement, to be called back for dinner. Now, they know people from different parts of town, meet up at a park, then go out to lunch together at a restaurant. That is not inherently lower effort than the previous arrangement. They might not have to keep their apartment clean or cook lunch, but now they have to keep children quiet in a restaurant, which doesn't really allow adult conversations.
The kids don't have permission to do what they would prefer, such as playing a game, so they settle for the permission they can get, to watch a show on a phone, which is still better than fidgeting and getting dirty looks. That is not necessarily permissive, though, since their first choice of running around, playing, and exploring is denied them. I don't get the impression that kids are eager for permission to watch more shows. They're much more eager for permission to take small risks. I offered some kids the opportunity to look at stuff on their chrome books or chip away at little pieces of soapstone. They strongly preferred the stone, but I stopped because it's too loud for the adults. That is not permissive. There is no permission to make noise and accidentally hurt a finger. It would be more permissive in the case of the restaurant to give them a little playground like fast food places used to have.
As a teen and young adult, I read Classics. Lately, I've been reading Brandon Sanderson novels. This is because I had a lot of free time then, and don't have it now. The Motte and Sanderson novels are compatible with brain fog from waking up every few hours to feed an infant, and interacting with other young children every few minutes, while Kant is not. I don't really have a good model of what's going on with Taylor Swift or Marvel fans (are there still Marvel fans left?). As I recall, Don Quixote was basically a spoof about a man who read a lot of Star Wars novels, thought that Jedi were real, and then decided that he was one. I gave up because the second hand cringe was too strong, not something that I can recall happening with any other novels.
I'm not sure that it makes sense to talk about reading Sanderson instead of Dostoyevsky as permissiveness. The latter is, of course, better, but I'm tired and my memory is bad. I'm unable to read it after working and caring for children. My parents are retired, and reading Dostoyevsky again. They have a little book club. They have permission to spend time on good books, permission to spend the best part of the day on that, instead of on working.
Again, a lot of people don't seem to feel permission to be an ordinary person, doing a slightly below average 9 - 5 job, sending their kids to the ordinary public school, to themselves become an average person living an average life. Who can work a stable job at Kodak for 30 years? "Many people have lamented that kids these days say they want to be famous YouTubers instead of astronauts." Sure. The only astronauts I know anything about are the ones that got stranded because Boeing messed up bringing them back. Which was a story entirely about how unreliable Boeing now is, and not at all about the astronauts themselves.
I was chaperoning a kids' dance party this week. The kids don't know how to dance, even things like the Cupid Shuffle, where they literally call out the moves. Some attempts were made to do that dance where they squat, bounce, and throw their legs out, kind of like in Russian dancing. The dance they attempted was harder than normal folk dancing, but at least known. This was because they don't know how to dance, not because we're so permissive we let them dance however they want. They probably want to be taught how to dance. The adults might even prefer to teach them a dance, but didn't necessarily have permission to do so, or knowledge of how to go about it.
On clothing, I likewise don't necessarily find the mess that is our current clothing choices to be permissive, so much as burnt out or depressed. People mostly aren't dressing in clothing that they love and find beautiful for their own idiosyncratic reasons. Straight men don't seem to have a ton of choice for what to wear in public, outside of special interest clubs. They're dressing in jeans and hoodies because that's the cultural norm, to which they are dutifully adhering. I like Uniqlo clothing and follow their collaborations. There was a surprising amount of buzz this fall about slightly less terrible looking sweatpants. They sold out! They come in not only grey and black, but wine! So exciting. Theoretically, people have permission to wear all sorts of things. Actually, they are so confused and guilt ridden, they wear the same dress a hundred days in a row. That is not a sign of permission.
I'm not sure what's going on with the adults eating exclusively chicken nuggets and Mac & cheese, but it sounds like depression again? Or an eating disorder? It certainly doesn't sound enjoyable.
Gaashk
8mo ago
Mine is lower than last year, we are involved with fewer childcare situations and got everything last year. Currently I have a cold, but this is the first one and fairly mild.
Gaashk
8mo ago
I’m from Arizona, and mildly prefer no DST. The swamp cooler is/was on all day either way, and Abq can’t even upgrade form swamp cooling to AC in their schools due to old roofing and such.
This is tangential. But I'm Eastern Orthodox, my husband is open to it, and we have not managed to get past the standing quietly for two hours part of being to church with young children. I want the children to have godparents! I keep aspiring to take them. St Nicholas day was last weekend! But I still haven't managed to make it work. I suppose I should embrace church-as family-social-project, vs church as opportunity to sing and pray, as I experienced it before (I was the Christian hobbiest type before, going to vespers and akathists and studies and everything).
I would still go to my church acquaintances first if I needed help, though. Despite failing to attend, they still found me a place to live, free furniture, and let me borrow a car for a week.
Gaashk
8mo ago
It would certainly depend on what the attempts to fit in with women consist of.
Gaashk
8mo ago
The sentiment among Christian Syrians when I visited a decade ago was "we're worried America will get in solved and make things even worse." They seem to have been more correct than not.
Gaashk
8mo ago
That’s basically the status quo for traditional multi generational households, except the mother in law actually provides physical benefits, like a floor of the house, pooled cooking, and childcare.
Yeah, the opposite of xenophobic.
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