Gaashk
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr ago
It would certainly depend on what the attempts to fit in with women consist of.
Gaashk
1yr 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
1yr 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.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I think Russia is actively working on something like that, so maybe we’ll get another chance to see how it works out.
Gaashk
1yr ago
How far back do I have to go for a water-cooler chit-chat to still be a thing? 90's?
Before 1890s, probably. It sounded like everyone was reading Dickens for water cooler chit chat reasons.
canceled / retired your student loans
I did not take out loans. They have so far offered $0 payments to my husband for having children in his household. We will be in bad shape if they rescind that, but it's not like we can take the kids back.
mortgage debt
Maybe! But that sounds like the sort of thing that wouldn't be long term sustainable, due to the market adjusting.
No income tax for the rest of your life?
I'm pretty sure I'm net negative in this respect already. And to the extent that in the future I make more money while having less children at home, this will not be good for them. If they're going to subsidize me later, it should be directly, not through the government.
The elderly giving up their seats for you on public transit
That sounds embarrassing and awful. But, also, my area doesn't have functional public transport.
boy scouts, police and other public servents saluting you?
Ugh, no, that sounds like a negative thing
You get the veterans and first responders discount at Lowe's?
Meh. I don't consider things to be on sale until they're at least 30% off, but also I don't think we've bought anything from Lowe's in years, and don't have any plans to do that. I bought a bag once with a Peace Corps discount of 40% off or something. Best bag I've ever bought, I still use it every day. Apparently there are already teacher discounts that I don't bother using.
Gaashk
1yr ago
That’s more succinct than what I was going to say, but yes. More than half of women are still having children.
It’s a bit odder in Korea, which still has mandatory conscription for men, but fewer than half of women are having babies. Seems related to almost their entire childhood being stressful, not just a year here or there.
Gaashk
1yr ago
But while women might have had the same legal rights for a while now, their social and economic power continues to increase.
That's one way to look at it.
Another way to look at it, however, is that as wages are equalized, the wife's income is more likely to be essential to the household budget, such that she is expected and needed to go back to work as soon as possible.
Also, the prenatal programs are pushing breastfeeding. So she's expected (not able, I mean expected) to work until she gives birth, then breastfeed for a month or two, then drop her infant off at daycare and pump at work, and still get up in the middle of the night to feed her infant, while also working a full day outside the home. Even elementary teachers are struggling with this, with a generally easy schedule/ They hide their children in windowless offices on "professional development" days, for instance, because they aren't allowed to organize childcare amongst themselves.
Gaashk
1yr ago
On the other hand, birth rates have been dropping especially fast over the past decade, when women have had choices for generations, and things like ultrasounds, epidurals, prenatal testing, formula, c-sections for the convenience of the doctors, and whatnot have been improving. Childbirth is less bad than before. Even feeding babies is less bad than before. Freedom of women is about the same, at least in the anglosphere. Yet birth rates continue to drop.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Yeah. I had a second partly because I wanted someone to eventually play with my older daughter. But I'm living in a 2500 sq ft mobile home on a half acre, with a wagon/SUV that fits three child car seats already, so have different costs/benefits than someone in a dense city with expensive housing.
Gaashk
1yr ago
It would be less weird, but much, much more expensive.
I'm not sure what the government could do at this point to get me to have another child. Maybe a year of maternity leave at my full salary and a vehicular upgrade. I absolutely did not like going back to work with a month old newborn, and having to hand deliver a check to pay back their side of my insurance for that time.
Gaashk
1yr ago
It's probably related to America not generally having many meaningful awards outside of the military, so it would kind of feel like it was coming out of left field. It would seem less weird to be part of some sort of ceremony involving the Georgian patriarch, even as an American, since he already belongs to an extremely ceremonial church (and culture more generally).
Gaashk
1yr ago
Oh yeah, that one is positive.
Along those lines, I guess a female boss or CEO sounds neutral to me, and like something I might say.
Since stay at home dad is even less a long term plan than stay at home mom, it comes across as non sequitur in the context of school. Kids know that by 9, even four old boys all say things like "firefighter" or "policeman" (the girls said "princess" at my child's pre-K). So they must be odd in some way, possibly effeminate or gay?
Gaashk
1yr ago
Most of my immediate family voted for Trump, but I'm still having trouble imagining anything he says or does increasing the social status of parents.
I guess if he actually succeeded at revitalizing jobs by which a man of modest ability can support a family of five. But even among the evangelicals and Christian homeschoolers of my youth that ship had already sailed, and the families with decent status needed the father to be an engineer at least, so that he could support his six children and still go on retreats that cost some amount of money, and send his wife and children likewise. Several of my friends also have at least three children and may have voted for Trump, and I still feel like if we got awards we would all laugh and think "that's so weird."
Gaashk
1yr ago
I imagine it in a Ferengi voice. Or with a similar vibe to "birthing parent."
Gaashk
1yr ago
especially given that no man I've ever heard of has had any problem with being called "a male."
I'm surprised to hear that, since in recent years "male" and especially the dreaded "cis het white male" seems like something of a slur, and I'm not sure in what other contexts people would call a specific man or boy "a male." Calling oneself "a male" comes across as an apology.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I've seen that article before. It's plausible, I suppose, but I don't think that in countries like the US, the government confers much status, so there's not much to do there. The Trump administration probably confers anti-status.
There's a lot about this on the message boards this week, including a link to a fairly interesting article on the Reddit (by CanIHaveaSong, who sometimes used to post here). DSL is going on about nannies and au pairs, because they're upstanding citizens like that.
Clearly, the transition to a post industrial economy has been bad for birthrates everywhere. But, also, the population of many of these places doubled in living memory, while the political entities, "good jobs," and "good colleges" did not double. At least agricultural output more than doubled, so we don't have famine, but if we really want to sustain the current population level, we should probably have more top tier institutions, more cities, more high quality corporate jobs -- twice as much of the things people aspire to and work for. Apparently Georgia's population sank by a million from 1993, and is about the same as 1960. Mongolia's rose, but the country still has fewer people than the Phoenix metro area.
Yes, in my case it’s before glow, first row of Browse. Glow and Frequency are half way down the full genera list.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Interesting.
My husband tended to be 99 F when he was younger, and also attracted way more static electricity than I do. He eats things like an entire pound of bacon, then just paces a lot, or walks around barefoot in the snow or something. My daughter seems to have inherited his metabolism, and actually was sent home from pre-K a couple of times for "low grade fever," but then she got home and didn't have a fever.
My body temperature is a bit below average (I don't check it very often, because I almost never run a fever), and I'm lower energy, but also have fewer random health problems -- things like almost never getting headaches or nausea, even when we eat something a bit off, getting over colds and flus faster, stuff like that. This has been good for pregnancy, which went smoothly all three times.
There seem to be trade offs involved.
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.
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