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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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Children benefit from stay-at-home moms; I did, anyway.

I believe you, but I would still argue that there are opportunity costs. A one-year-old requires a caretaker 24x7, and presumably might benefit from that caretaker being their mother. A ten-year-old requires much less adult supervision. Someone to cook dinner and make sure that they either attend or have called by then is certainly helpful, but 24x7 supervision would be actively harmful.

Now, if your model stay-at-home mom starts having kids age 18 and then has a child every other year for as long as nature will allow, I will grant you that she will have her hands full taking care of her kids for a significant fraction of her work life. But in most Western marriages, it is not like that. Instead, she will have two or three children, which will keep her occupied for a decade, but once her smallest child goes to school, she will have a lot of time on her hands for the better part of her work life.

I am not arguing that working 40h a week is the only valid model of how to spend your life, and if someone is happy playing video games or join some club or have an OnlyFans career or dedicate their life to gardening, who am I to tell them that they are wrong? Still, having opted not to have earned a degree seems somewhat likely to limit your options at self-actualization, and earning a degree remotely at age 40 is likely going to be harder.

And if your values differ from those of the broader culture, daycare is likely to drag your kids at least part way to that culture.

I think that this is unavoidable in general. I would advise to raise kids in a culture you are at least halfway comfortable with. Even with homeschooling and everything, you can not completely shield your child from the local culture. Sure, there are some who try, like some Muslim families trying to raise their daughters according to Sharia law in the middle of Western cities, but I think that their success is mixed at best.

Personally, I would not fret overly much about it. I was raised (mildly) Roman Catholic, and it did not stop me from seeing the light of Igtheism at 15 or so. While I am sure that there are some horror stories about some overachieving kindergarten teacher telling white kids to hate themselves, I think the median version of the SJ creed taught to kids is much less harmful. Like Santa Claus, blank-slatism is the sort of lie which is unlikely to harm the development of a kid much. They can still learn about the Ashkenazi intelligence hypothesis and HBD later.