sarker
competency crisis actor
Suddenly I cannot remember the color of your eyes
Or the things we said as we stood together for the last time
User ID: 636
sarker
competency crisis actor
11hr ago
Nybbler, come on. You know the Haredim do not till the earth. Food comes from the grocery store, as far as they are concerned.
sarker
competency crisis actor
11hr ago
I don't actually believe that parents should be able to do whatever they want with their children without limits, so this line of argument isn't convincing to me.
sarker
competency crisis actor
11hr ago
It's quite simple. There needs to be a line drawn somewhere, and 18 is as good a place as any.
sarker
competency crisis actor
22hr ago
Too much of an age gap and it ends up where the younger partner is more or less the caretaker for the older one while the younger partner is still near their prime.
Well sure, it's ill advised, but I hardly see why it's anyone else's business, unlike the 25/17 situation.
sarker
competency crisis actor
22hr ago
Social status, and the economic and political benefits, tend to be "sticky".
Stickiness and mobility are opposites - if status is sticky, then reversion to the mean is not a concern.
This isn't a problem with meritocracy, it's a problem with heirarchy, which meritocracy is supposed to streamline, but cannot entirely avoid.
Indeed, unless we RETVRN to hunting and gathering we need to have some kind of hierarchy for society to function (and even then...). Certainly meritocracy delivers results and I don't believe that it necessitates people having fewer kids (and in any case the present fertility decline is mostly driven by the marriage decline so I'm not sure that anxiety about children's status is even the important factor here).
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
I'm totally against 25/17 and the OP but this logic doesn't hold water either.
Are you against a 30 year old marrying a 50 year old? When the 50 year old was 30, the 30 year old was only 10! Nevertheless, it seems quite clear that a 30 year old can consent to marry a 50 year old.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
The middle class fertility shredder is a natural consequence of social mobility.
Not quite. It is, at least in your model, a consequence of downward social mobility. As far as I can tell, few systems have totally eliminated the threat of downward mobility (except perhaps for a very small slice of the population, like the Tsar's family), so it's not clear to me why meritocracy is uniquely bad in this respect.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
In fact, only about 20% of America voted for Donald Trump, and about 14% of France voted for Le Pen in 2017.
Most residents of a country do not vote.
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
Did you soak them before cooking or is that an hour and a half starting from dried beans?
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
Musk wants to cream skim the smartest people of the world so they come to America.
It just so happens that the same programs that enable that also enable migration of ZMP, or maybe even NMP, WITCH employees. Very few people seem to be interested in drawing a distinction between these groups for immigration purposes.
sarker
competency crisis actor
3d ago
I don't see the simple present as less formal than the present continuous. They simply mean different things. I could believe that one is being eroded by ESL speakers not using it, but it's not a question of formality.
sarker
competency crisis actor
3d ago
I’ve almost never encountered a true 3-language polyglot OPOL situation outside of like Switzerland, Luxembourg, or those African countries (and to some extent India) where speaking 3-4+ languages is semi-common.
There are plenty of families like this in the bay area.
you speak English together at dinner
This would indeed be a non-issue. However, it's not the approach usually taken.
sarker
competency crisis actor
3d ago
I've only ever seen the "actively avoid speaking the other language in front of the child" kind when the children are toddler / pre-school age.
It's not about avoiding speaking the language in front of the kids. It's about avoiding speaking the language to the kids.
Happy to provide a counterexample. There's many such cases, this is simply the first result I found with kids older than 6.
sarker
competency crisis actor
3d ago
The belief that you shouldn't expect to understand conversations between your wife and children is certainly A Take. I don't think you can get away with making this out to be a ridiculous American desire. In most times and places people married people of the same sociocultural background and there was no familial language barrier to speak of. In fact, in most times and places everyone in your community spoke the same language. Mixed multilingual environments were always limited to areas with a lot of people coming and going, it's just that now there's a lot more people living in areas like that.
sarker
competency crisis actor
3d ago
You're drawing a distinction that nobody I know applies and that I have not seen applied on the subreddit. The people I am seeing have kids who fully understand the distinction between languages and that some people speak one language but not another.
sarker
competency crisis actor
3d ago
I'm not sure why you say it's a non-issue after I laid out how the cases I encounter IRL keep having this issue.
Successful Mandarin/whatever-speaking parent supplement it with some Mandarin kindergarten, later hopefully some Mandarin school or other classes, perhaps spending some time in the native country, hopefully establishing a friend circle in the relevant language, and most importantly, access to Mandarin/whatever-speaking media that seems cool.
You can probably make this work for Mandarin in areas of the country that have a lot of Chinese people and if the home languages are Mandarin and English. But if you don't have those things, or you are trying to raise kids trilingual with a third language that doesn't have schools nearby, you are going to have to make some tough choices. As far as I can tell, the choices usually involve fracturing family communication for uncertain benefit.
sarker
competency crisis actor
3d ago
Parents want 'good things' like their kids knowing multiple languages, being pitch perfect and doing well in school or sports, but they don't know why.
I'm actually going to go ahead and disagree with you there. They maybe can't exactly articulate it, but I think the fundamental reason, at least in the circles I'm in, is status. Very original take, I know. But the fact is that having multilingual kids "in touch with their culture" is high status among the generation having and raising kids today (I'm thinking basically people in their 30s and early 40s).
Same goes for perfect pitch. Are they ever going to need it? Maybe not, but it impresses others (and it preserves some optionality, what if Sally does want to become a musician after all? Of course, it would be better for her to be a surgeon). It's not just Grandma and Grampa that are being impressed, it's also your friends with kids, with whom you (as a mother) are trapped in a bitter status war in which quarter is neither asked for nor given. It's absolutely critical that you have the most well rounded little angels in the mom group. Husbands are typically dragged along and are happy to just grill.
sarker
competency crisis actor
3d ago
it doesn't mean that if Mom and Dad talk to each other in English in front of the kids that you've ruined their bilingual education.
That's not the salient question. The question is how Mom and Dad have a conversation with each other and the kids at the same time. Clearly such conversations are a significant fraction of language use in the home and having these conversations in English is compromising on the amount of language practice that the kids get, as well as encouraging the kids to be lazy in talking to Mom in Russian. There's no free lunch here.
I do know a lot of kids grow up regretting that their parents never taught them their native language.
UMC children of immigrants who grew up in a weird halfway culture and never developed their identity as Americans hold all kinds of regrets about their parents. They forced them to learn an instrument, or they didn't send them to music classes, or they didn't teach them their native language (despite fighting tooth and nail as children to speak English), or they taught them their native language but they didn't pass down the secret cooking techniques, or they taught them the native language and passed down the secret cooking techniques but didn't cultivate a relationship with the extended family, etc etc. These are mostly window dressing around the anomie of not fitting in.
sarker
competency crisis actor
3d ago
I try when parking to leave as much space as possible
Parking space is unfortunately a zero sum game and leaving more space on one side usually means less space on the other. I suppose I leave as much space as possible by virtue of driving a car that's narrower than average.
sarker
competency crisis actor
3d ago
The more reasonable approach would be that everyone defaults to the shared language in joint discussions
I have not found many OPOL followers who do this.
Other reasons for teaching your kids two languages are if you are uncertain in which country you will stay.
Fair, though this is not a consideration in the cases I've seen (basically zero chance my sister moves to Russia or these WMAF couples move to China).
sarker
competency crisis actor
3d ago
Opol Ra
Or: Which way, Hapa parent?
I.
Have you guys ever heard of One Parent One Language? Basically, the idea is that if a parent speaks a second language that they want to pass down to their kids, they should speak to their kids solely in that language. So, for example, if you are a German/Spanish speaker and your wife is a French/Spanish speaker and you live in Spain, you speak to the kids only in German, your wife speaks to the kids only in French, and you and your wife speak Spanish to each other (and, of course, the kids learn Spanish in school). The ultimate goal is to have the kids be fluent in German and French as well as Spanish as adults.
Sounds simple enough, but there is a snag. How do you have conversations with the whole family? In the happy case, you and your wife speak, or at least understand, each others' second language (in our example, you also speak French and your wife also speaks German), and there's no problem: you understand what the kids say to your wife and she understands what the kids say to you.
However, that's rarely the case outside of highly polyglot areas of Europe (Switzerland?). In America, or at least my corner of it, the most common pairing that isn't two monoglots is an English monoglot and a diglot. So Father speaks to the kids in English and Mother speaks in, say, Mandarin, but Father can't speak a lick of Mandarin. This doesn't much matter when the kids are preverbal, but what is the future for such an OPOL family when the kids are old enough to have meaningful, grammatically complex conversations with a variety of vocabulary, spoken at normal adult velocity (or even faster, if passions are inflamed or someone is a naturally quick talker, or a mumbler)?
We can lay out a few possibilities:
- Father learns Mandarin and we're back to the happy case. The US foreign service estimates 2200 class hours to learn Mandarin. Father doesn't need to speak Mandarin, he only needs to comprehend it, but he's also not taking classes, he's trying to pick it up from "immersion" that happens whenever the family is all together. This is rare. Mandarin is among the hardest languages for native English speakers to learn, so maybe this could work for, say, Spanish, but I doubt that this works in the long run. It's easy enough to pick up ve a bañarte ahora but I doubt that you can work your way up to actually substantive conversations as an adult with such minimal exposure.
- Mother and the kids say everything twice, once in Mandarin and once in English. This is an unbelievable pain in the ass and completely destroys conversational flow. I seriously doubt that anyone can keep this up over a decade and a half. I suspect that this scenario degenerates into one of the following.
- Father guesses what Mother and the kids are talking about based on picking out a few words he knows. This is only practical for the most basic conversations ("baño! I know that one!").
- Father checks out of the conversation when Mother and the kids are talking.
- The family avoids having any substantive conversations when together.
A cursory perusal of threads about dinner table conversations on /r/oneparentonelanguage bears out that these options seem to be exhaustive. Tellingly, very few people discussing this problem have kids older than six or so; presumably the details of their life become too embarrassing to publicize or they compromise on OPOL.
II.
To put it simply, any option besides option 1 (and maybe option 2, but it's not a stable equilibrium) entails the total obliteration of joint family life. Mother addresses the kids or she addresses Father, but she does not ever address her children along with her husband. This seems to be just fine in the eyes of many women who I bin as "type A elder millenials" who seem to treat the kids as royalty and the husbands as the help. These women would trade off adult social cohesion in favor of a little more comprehensible language input for their kids all day every day. These are the women who, if their kids interrupt an adult conversation, tell the adults to wait while they talk to the kids.
A word about my own situation: my parents both speak English and Russian, which I and my siblings all learned since Russian was all we spoke at home. My sister married a man who doesn't speak Russian and had kids, and I married a woman who doesn't speak Russian either. Any time we're together and I say something in English for the benefit of all the adults present ("should we think about lunch?"), my sister badgers me about saying it in Russian unless I was specifically addressing someone who doesn't understand Russian. Meanwhile, her husband's Russian skills have been eclipsed by his kids, and I don't think he's ever going to catch up, so option 1 and 2 are basically off the table. The only remaining question is how far down the list the family is going to end up. I've seen Chinese/American couples where the parents bring kids to the park and the Chinese wife finds other Chinese women and chats with them in Chinese while the husband looks off into space (they are also doing OPOL). I expect we are going to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future and I don't think it's going to be pretty to see the products of marriages like this. The /r/aznmasculinity poster problem is only the beginning.
III.
This naturally raises the question: why bother? Why not just teach your kids English at home so you can have conversations as a family and forget about all this nonsense? Some might believe that there's cognitive benefits from multilingualism, but I'm pretty sure those are bunk, and my sister has never brought them up. The arguments I've seen are:
- This allows them to have a shared language with their grandparents. I think this is fair, certainly our parents are less comfortable in English than Russian. Of course, my sister is constantly on the outs with our parents, so I'm not sure how practically useful this is. Even so, it seems insane to prioritize the kids' relationship with their grandparents over your relationship with your spouse.
- It's a matter of passing down the heritage. This one I find objectionable. I do not see much value in possessing "Russian heritage" and I hope that my kids see themselves as Americans rather than Russian-Americans or whatever. Our family came to this country because it is better than the place we left, why do we want to preserve the vestiges of the bad old country?
- Access to Russian culture. I'm glad I can read Russian literature in the original and I get a lot out of it, but I don't know that it's worth torpedoing my family life so that my kids can get the same benefit.
The base rates for language retention in second generation speakers (besides Spanish) in the US are quite poor. The overwhelmingly likely result of doing this to your family is that your kids don't speak your language as adults and they do not have a sense of the family as a cohesive unit. The odds of their kids speaking your language, even if it's Spanish, are effectively zero. Is it really worth splitting your family for this?
I think any reasonable person has to say no. I knew that marrying my wife meant that the odds our kids speak Russian is basically zero (at the time I didn't consider the simple solution of alienating my wife to pass on the language). If I wanted my kids to speak Russian, I should have married a Russian. If my parents wanted my kids to speak Russian, they should have stayed in Russia. This is America, you don't get to raise your kids in an insular culture unless you go fully Amish. You don't get both the freedom to come to this country, love a woman from a background different than yours, marry her, and start a family AND somehow pass on your idiosyncratic foreign background without compromising the relationship that is the bedrock of the family, namely, that between the wife and the husband. And I think that's basically as it should be.
sarker
competency crisis actor
3d ago
I appreciate your dissenting opinion. My kid is young enough that he can't get out of the car on his own, so I have to carry him out, making it pretty much infeasible to spare a hand to save the other car. I can at least feel superior for not driving an SUV.
There's plenty of things that we don't allow people to let their kids do.
Pal, you don't have a daughter. This whole post is about how you want to coom in underage pussy. Let's drop the "no, you're weird!" act.
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