site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22774 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Apparently my whole feed is late 30s bloggers writing about child rearing now, even the ones I subscribed to for the AI news.

Today it's Zvi, continuing last week's discussion from ACX about free range kids, with a side of Aella's very odd childhood and perspective on allowing children agency.

Zvi, as usual, has dozens of somewhat interesting links, and is worth checking out. A lot of it is related to the issue that reporting parents for potential abuse or neglect is costless and sometimes mandatory, but being investigated imposes fairly high costs, and so even among families that are not especially worried about their kids getting hurt walking to a friend's house or a local store, they might be worried about them being picked up by the police, and that can affect their ability to do things other than stare at screens or bicker with their parents. I have some sympathy for this. When I was growing up, inside the city limits, there weren't any kids I knew or wanted to play with in the immediate neighborhood, or any shops I wanted to go to, and my mother was also a bit worried about getting in trouble with the law, so I mostly played in the yard. But perhaps there would have been, if wandering were more normalized? I asked my parents about this, and they said that when they were younger, they also didn't necessarily have neighborhood friends they wanted to visit, and also mostly played in their own yards and houses, but they could have wandered around more if they'd wanted. That was in the 60s, and I'm not sure it's heading in the same direction as the ratosphere zeitgeist or not. My dad does remember picking up beer for his grandma as a kid, which is also mixed.

My impression of the past is mostly formed by British and Scottish novels, where lower class children would rove around in packs, causing trouble (a la Oliver Twist), and upper class children would have governesses, tutors, or go to boarding school, where they were supervised a bit less than now, or about the same amount, and the boys would oppress each other a bit. Upper class girls could go for a walk in the garden with their governess. The police probably have an interest in stopping children from forming spontaneous gangs, which the suburban families were seeking to avoid. The not firmly classed rural children (educated, able to become teachers, but not able to enter high society) are represented as roving the countryside a bit (Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, George Macdonald novels), and get into a bit of trouble, but there were only a few families around, and everyone knew who everyone was. My grandmother grew up in such a place, then divorced before it was cool, and taught in the South Pacific. I can't tell if wandering through the heather or prairie a lot is better or worse than reading lots of books and playing in the backyard.

The free range stuff, while it may be important for some people, seems a bit orthogonal to the Everything is Childcare problem (probably more about lack of extended family), since the age at which a child could feasibly be wandering the countryside or neighborhood (8? 10?) is the same age when they can be quietly reading novels or playing with their siblings or being dropped off at events while their parents drink a coffee or visit a bookstore or something. Unless that's also not a thing anymore?

Anyway, I don't necessarily have a firm conclusion to present, other than that that people are talking about it. @Southkraut gave me a bit of pushback for writing on screens in my daughter's presence, which I felt a bit bad about, but also not. I do agree with Zvi and Scott that it's probably bad if Everything is Childcare, and parents aren't allowed to read an article and post about it because the children might be infected by the proximity to a screen. (The children are painting. They have used their agency to decide that they want to paint, asked for the paints and supplies they need, and the older one has made a little notebook full of concept sketches)

Once when my husband was playing with our toddler in our driveway, a police officer showed up saying someone had called about "an infant by the side of the road" at our address. He had been in physical contact with our kid the whole time...so now we joke that he's invisible. :D

Meanwhile, as a city kid I was allowed to cross the street at 3, walk 1/4 mile to the park at 4, walk generally around the neighborhood within about a half mile radius at 5, and ride the bus home from school as a latchkey kid at 6.

My impression of the past is mostly formed by British and Scottish novels, where lower class children would rove around in packs, causing trouble (a la Oliver Twist), and upper class children would have governesses, tutors, or go to boarding school, where they were supervised a bit less than now, or about the same amount, and the boys would oppress each other a bit.

What first comes to my mind is the Five Children and It series--they had a governess but were allowed out on their own (weren't they?).

Then there's Understood Betsy, which...could be taken as a "city kids are starting to be less free-range, that's bad" novel from 100 years ago. (Though that's really an oversimplification. But for the purposes for this discussion...)

Then for American history, well, see the "Schoolhouse Blizzard" or "Children's Blizzard"--so named because it hit just when school was letting out, so many of the victims were children trying to get home from school. David Laskin's book about it argued that it made Great Plains settlers of the time (1888) conclude they had "trusted the land too much" or allowed children too much free range. (Little House on the Prairie and Anne of Green Gables are both set before this, in the 1870s; The Long Winter was 1880-81.)

the age at which a child could feasibly be wandering the countryside or neighborhood (8? 10?) is the same age when they can be quietly reading novels or playing with their siblings or being dropped off at events while their parents drink a coffee or visit a bookstore or something. Unless that's also not a thing anymore?

IDK but I do know there's controversy in Girl Scouts over whether parents should be (a) allowed at or (b) required to be at Daisy meetings (K-1st), because some feel that kindergartners are too young to give a coherent account of what's happened to them so parents should always be there... Meanwhile, a constant source of angst in parenting groups is "What age is old enough to assume a party is drop-off rather than parents-attend?" This freaked me out when I first saw it because I'm old, I didn't know "parents-attend" was even a thing. (Remember in Beezus and Ramona (1955) where preschool Ramona invites neighborhood kids over for a party and they all get dropped off?)

There's a big post on Substack making the rounds talking about similar ideas:

It is not healthy for children to be locked in their homes, only to leave it to go to school and come back. It is also not fair to children to keep them away from society on remote farms and homesteads in order to safeguard them from criminals and sexually corrupting media. But this is what parents have been reduced to offering their children in the modern world. Residents of the city of Birmingham report on conversations on X that when they were children in the 1970s, they could walk around the whole town perfectly safe, but now, their grandchildren cannot go beyond one block or even leave their own backyards because, practically, it is just not safe anymore. Children can no longer enjoy the vibrant culture of cities like London, Paris and New York as they could even in the 1980s because the people who run such cities have more empathy for criminals than for children.

Foremost, it is children who have a right to cities.

Cities should be constructed to be safe and hospitable to them primarily. When children have access to safe cities, they develop more independence, courage and can develop more maturity. They can make friends and do projects in the real world. They can be more involved in their local community and therefore exist more in the real world which they stand to inherit. Instead of this, however, due to the leftist concept of “rights” for homeless crackheads, children only have the right to play video games in their bedrooms and develop toxic social media addictions.

I like this conception, especially with regards to child independence. I think the fact that we care more about the rights of gay and trans people to express themselves in public than the rights of children is very telling about our priorities as a society.

Children can no longer enjoy the vibrant culture of cities like London, Paris and New York as they could even in the 1980s

...

When children have access to safe cities, they develop more independence, courage and can develop more maturity.

He's suggesting that NYC should be made safe again... like it was in the 1980s?

Cities are not fucking safe, yo -- navigating them despite that fact is what actually develops independence, courage and maturity.

(the country is not safe either, but in different ways)

Aella did have a weird and indeed abusive childhood, but mixed in with it there's bits where the parents were not being unreasonable. A kid that is so sensitive they burst into tears because "people will be looking at me" does need to learn how to handle being in public. When one of my nephews was a kid, they were very sensitive and lacking in confidence, so his parents signed him up for a taekwondo class. And he did like it, and it made a huge difference in coming out of his shell. So for "burning with shame and tears streaming down my cheeks" Aella, the parents were not in fact being cruel to insist "you have to do this or else".

Also for someone smart, she acted kinda dumb. "Oh no, if I do this thing, I'll be punished" but she can't figure out - e.g. with the spankings - "okay, grit my teeth, suffer this one, and then I'm free". Instead it took eleven beatings until she worked out "do it and get it over with". I'm sorry for her, but she definitely was not the sharpest tool in the box when figuring out how to deal with the situation. Probably because she was so over-sensitive and over-emotional, hence the karate lessons were the kind of outside distraction she did need to learn how to toughen up.

I know that sounds unsympathetic, but there really are parts of her story where I can't help but go "okay, this thing here? this was in fact good for you". Like this little anecdote:

And I had very normal hygiene habits for many years after leaving home - it was only after meeting a girl with gorgeous hair who told me “oh my secret? I just don’t wash it” when I started experimenting with weird stuff.

Yeeeeah. Someone who stops washing because somebody else said they didn't wash their hair (probably meaning they didn't wash it every day, or didn't use commercial shampoos rather than their own homemade blend of eggs and beer) is someone way too easily influenced and without any sense of "is this going too far?" I probably would have forced baby Aella to go to karate classes, too.

When one of my nephews was a kid, they were very sensitive and lacking in confidence, so his parents signed him up for a taekwondo class. And he did like it, and it made a huge difference in coming out of his shell.

That might be one of the strategies that's kind of male coded, and much more likely to work on a boy than a girl. As annoying as it is in adventure stories, there are valid reasons why the male characters go through training that has elements of hazing, and the female characters generally don't. (So I would prefer to have less of the silly "classic adventure story, but now a WOMAN who realizes she's actually great already and doesn't need to be trained all that much" films). Aella really likes being valued more for her innate characteristics than for accomplishments she has to work hard for, and I'm unsurprised she didn't connect with the prospect of working hard at karate to advance swiftly past the toddlers around her. But I guess I'm also unsurprised that her father would be annoyed by that, and want a young Aella training montage instead.

I read your post and this led me to then read Aella's. I don't know, the points made by others responding to you are valid--she was just a kid. She seems to have had a very messed up childhood and I feel for her. This doesn't change my mind about her--it is, in fact, exactly what I might have expected had I ever given it much thought. I have known women with backgrounds that are variations on the same violent/controlled theme, and they have all been, unfortunately, intolerable to me (and some themselves given to violence). Which is odd because I have had a savior complex most of my life (I'm using a popular term here, I don't know or particularly care what the psychological term is).

I've never been interested in finding out more about this woman. I don't wish her ill, but I find the terminally online male obsessive fawning over her a strange sign of the times. Not a good one.

After “aella is dumb, because child aella was afraid of pain”, OP chimes in with “aella is lazy and superficial, because child aella cried after being publicly embarassed”. After these two unflattering bits of psychoanalysis (by two women), you lament the “male obsessive fawning“ over her.

This doesn't change my mind about her--it is, in fact, exactly what I might have expected had I ever given it much thought.

Is it, though? Would you say: religious conservative upbringing leads to damaged girls?

Or perhaps: abusive parenting leads to sexually liberated women?

But someone’s worldview must be in shambles, and maybe all.

I am not sure characterizing the experiences she had as a child as "religious conservative" is accurate, or at least it's drawing the Venn diagram a bit large to encompass what I'd consider pathologic violence. The getting whacked with the stick bit repeatedly when told "come here" is far more a weird, violence and control for the sake of it experience than simple religious conservatism at work.

I have no idea if religious conservativism leads to damaged girls. I do know absent or distant father figures, and in particularly violent and/or emotionally manipulative ones, do very much lead to damaged girls. And that's what she described in her partial memoir that was linked.

Also your characterizing Aella simply as a "sexually liberated woman" seems off here. Something something motte and bailey.

If I were her friend ot acquaintance (I'm not) I expect she'd not be able to tolerate me, as I'd be telling her all this LSD and free love isn't going to work out well for her in later life.

Also your characterizing Aella simply as a "sexually liberated woman" seems off here. Something something motte and bailey.

That is the point. It’s supposed to be a dilemma. The conservative tends to favour an education similar to aella’s, but detests what she has become (“damaged”). The liberal otoh detests aella’s education (“abuse”), yet finds she ended up fine (”sexually liberated”) .

So the lesson is: do the opposite, like George (not you). Every instinct they have, was proven wrong.

As to my own opinion, I don't think she's damaged, because for one, she doesn't think she's damaged. She also seems to have a pleasant undamaged personality, not bitter, mean or aggressive.

And I don't think parenting matters much, so that's how I escape my own dilemma.

My opinion is just my opinion and is not meant to represent the macro level worldview of the group you're labeling "conservative." I'm speaking from my own experience of the world, particularly over time, and my views have evolved since I was much younger and the world seemed an eternal spring.

I've read on this very forum the view that parenting doesn't matter much, possibly related to a widespread view that nature trumps nurture. I think parenting most definitely matters--I'm absolutely certain of it--and also because of my own experiences and from watching people grow up around me.

I wouldn't suggest a certain parenting style will produce particular results all the time, but that's different from saying it doesn't matter.

I am not a psychologist thank god, and am not charged with having any particular view of this woman's psychology, damaged or not. I would suggest that her lifestyle at 30 is probably not sustainable in any sort of happy fun time past, say, 40 or beyond. Thankfully it's none of my business.

My read is that Aella’s problems are a combination of:

A: Pretend Patriachal Upbringing

I. Her father wants to fulfill his role as leader of the family. This social technology has basically been lost by the 80’s and 90’s, so he fills the gap with a untested hypothesis.

II. But he’s not actually the leader of the family, the government is, and deep down, everyone knows this. It’s why the image of the father subtly threatening his daughter’s garbage boyfriend is an image of hilarity in the modern era. Everyone knows Dad is completely emasculated.

III. He can try to raise her right (and be bad at it, possibly, but directionally correct.) Also, being blunt, he seems ignorant of certain commonsense items, such as paying to send his daughter to a college in line with his ideals, whether he thinks he’s the perfect daughter or not. Better to send your “troublesome” daughter to Pensacola Christian where she can meet a good man, than throw her to the world’s lions.

IV. But once she’s 18, at the latest, she is free to do anything she wants, and as a young attractive woman, in a world where women are wonderful, she discovers she can wrap a lot of people around her finger and potentially is naive to the fact that they may very much not have her best interests in mind.

B: Women are Human Beings

I. As was alluded to elsewhere in the thread, it’s not surprising that Aella wants to be valued primarily for her innate characteristics. She’s a woman, that’s par for the course. Hence the joke about battle writing in women’s fantasy novels vs. men’s fantasy novels.

II. Aella eventually and unsurprisingly discovered that her most marketable asset is her sexuality. This has been common knowledge, although not phrased that same way, for all of human history prior to the last 100 years or so. 

III. As I previously mentioned, at this point no one in her family has any capability whatsoever to pull her back from the brink, either by force or by reason. For example, we would have much less of a drug problem if parents could bring their children of any age back into the family home, legally and by force, to separate the kid from the drugs. A good, or even mediocre, father is very likely to think the same way about his daughter and prostitution, but is in the same fashion stymied to prevent it.

IV. Aella, at the center of a number of failures and bad incentives, turns to sex work because then she doesn’t actually have to accomplish anything to earn her money, and can receive market value for her innate characteristics. 

V. One of her innate characteristics is being an undeniably smart wordcel, so she is able to justify all this by making it sound cool and empowering, and she is in the Bay Area sphere where lots of excellent rationalizers both live and want to fuck her.

VI. *Et voila*, here we are talking about her.

To summarize, mostly I just feel bad for her. If she converts to traditionalist Catholicism in her 60’s, it won’t surprise me at all. I think she is papering over many terrible things with her mental firepower, eventually it will all catch up to her, it will turn out the money and the fame were fleeting, and she will turn that high IQ to higher things at last.

Additionally, as a father myself, I think fathers should be very aware of the very real limits placed on our ability to lead our families. I don’t know what the best solution is, but cosplaying as Abraham ain’t it. Be as unemasculated as possible, without going to jail, I guess.

Not George, but religious conservative upbringing does not combine well with sexual liberation in adulthood and this making a damaged woman is… not a weird thing.

So would a less restrictive, less religious childhood, combined with sexual liberation, be less damaging then? If not, what does your theory predict? Everything, based on anything?

If her parents were blue tribe perverts who raped her and beat her and she grew up without a father, would that not be easier for you to explain? And even easier for your worldview, if aella was more of a trainwreck than she is. I think this is part of the reason why so many conservative people complain about her (and ‘have never been interested in finding out more about this woman’), because for all her whoring she doesn’t seem all that damaged. Weird for sure, but not more than other rationalists.

I am not interested in the personal lives of eccentric prostitutes(quite literally, I noped out of learning about Aella at the ‘showered 20 times a year’ stat- this was also the first time I heard much about her). It’s entirely possible that she’s less screwed up than I’d gotten the impression of. I am simply noting that girls raised in a sheltered, conservative manner often emerge from experimenting with hookup culture as broken women.

I'm mildly interested in her due to the overlap of Christian homeschooling, which my childhood was adjacent to, and the Bay Area Ratosphere, which I became interested in from Scott's writings. I want one of them to write a social novel, something like Tom Wolfe, about their culture. And there are several fine writers there, but as far as I know they're all bloggers, not novelists. (Unsung excepted, but it's philosophical fantasy more than social observation)

Adding:

“aella is lazy and superficial, because child aella cried after being publicly embarassed”

Something that I find interesting about her stories is their ambiguity. It's unclear whether she was being publicly embarrassed (by her parents enrolling her in a class of much younger children), or if they were doing the normal thing, she would have worked her way out soon enough had she chosen to pursue it, and she just felt embarrassment due to social anxiety or something. I took it as the latter, because she related it to not liking to hit a piñata because the other kids would look at her, not to something most people would find humiliating. The freaking out, crying, begging her parents to let her leave, probably in front of the instructor, and trying to run away does sound very embarrassing, for both her and her parents.

Ah I may as well simp to the end.

Aella really likes being valued more for her innate characteristics than for accomplishments she has to work hard for

I don’t think that’s fair. Who doesn’t value being young and attractive? She merely wants to advertise and enjoy all the advantages and opportunities being young and attractive confers upon her, without being slowed down by old rules no one really understands, and the self-interest of less desirable rivals.

Why can’t you be valued for both, innate characteristics and accomplishments (innate consciousness, ha) ?

I don’t think that’s fair. Who doesn’t value being young and attractive?

Sure.

I don't necessarily think that she's wrong. When four year olds are asked what they want to be, and the boys say firefighter, and the girls say princess, they aren't wrong, even if the boys could literally become firefighters whereas the girls could only metaphorically become princesses.

The karate story is weird. Plenty of parents would be upset and embarrassed if their seven year old walked into a trial karate lesson, saw that the other kids were smaller, and proceeded to throw a tantrum about it, then hide in the bathroom sobbing. That's significantly worse than the average public school kid who's parents spent way less effort instilling discipline into. It's more in line with the public school kids who have behavior action plans in place. It's not too surprising that her parents would be pretty shocked, they must have actually believed in the early obedience regime, or why go to so much trouble? It turns out they were wrong, and would have gotten better a psychological grounding by reading Notes From Underground.

Who doesn’t value being young and attractive?

Confucian societies?

Aella is at an intersection of being in ratsphere, actually having a rat mindset at least by my standards, and being a conventionally attractive woman as opposed to someone you picture when you hear "poly". I find that explains the interest, and I don't really think it's all that excessive, or fawny. When people repost Aella here it seems to lack signs of simping that aren't present in e.g. reposting Hanania or Jim or any other substacker.

Whenever she's referred to here it seems more meta-, as opposed to reddit (or even ACX) where the fawning I refer to is more evident.

As for Richard Hanania I don't get a sense of the needle sharply in his favor here, that's interesting. I feel like I regularly see posts suggesting he either used to be reasonable but lost the plot, or is as wrong as he is right, i.e. he "has a few good points." I'm afraid I don't know the Jim you refer to; that's probably on me. I often feel like the guy at the party who came to the wrong house but stayed for the refreshments.

Also for someone smart, she acted kinda dumb. "Oh no, if I do this thing, I'll be punished" but she can't figure out - e.g. with the spankings - "okay, grit my teeth, suffer this one, and then I'm free". Instead it took eleven beatings until she worked out "do it and get it over with". I'm sorry for her, but she definitely was not the sharpest tool in the box when figuring out how to deal with the situation. Probably because she was so over-sensitive and over-emotional, hence the karate lessons were the kind of outside distraction she did need to learn how to toughen up.

Not being yet conditioned to instantly come over for more beating right after being beaten does not sound like a failure of intelligence to me.

I wouldn't say that's intelligence, per se, but evolutionary instincts doing what they're supposed to.

Also for someone smart, she acted kinda dumb.

She was 8 years old at that time. I know I wouldn't be able to do any better at 8.

I seem to recall that free range parenting was heavily dunked, particularly by small-c conservative types, in the 90s as hippie bullshit where negligent parents were allowed to turn their kids into unsupervised, uncivilized little menaces that would go on to terrorize their fellow citizens without reprimand. Surely discourses of that sort were one factor why we've swung so heavily into the other extreme.

It might also contribute as much, if not more, than child safety concerns: free range parenting dismissed not so much due to the potential harm to child but the potential harm to the rest of the society. (Many fond memories of childhood spent outside on bikes without supervision often do include tales of mild or not-so-mild vandalism and other lawbreaking in it, after all.)

Surely discourses of that sort were one factor why we've swung so heavily into the other extreme.

Oh no, the safety discourse is the same people, it's just that the "uncivilized" discourse has taken a backseat because most of their pet demographics do it. Being overly concerned about "muh order" is basing your public moralfaggotry on fathers overstepping their bounds; being overly concerned about "muh safety" is when you do that based on mothers overstepping theirs.

free range parenting dismissed not so much due to the potential harm to child but the potential harm to the rest of the society

Everyone has always hated the liberal types: either because they're incapable of doing it properly/just like the aesthetic and actually end up doing that damage, or because they're worthy to do it and hence resented by everyone else/crab bucket mentality.

I think you’re mixing two things under one label: the so-called ”vapaa kasvatus” where no limits at all are placed on the children ("to not stifle their creativity" or some such bullshit) and the one where you allow kids to come in and go out as long as they’re back for dinner and you have a decent idea of where they are (with a neighbor’s kids / school friend / nearby forest) but do your best to teach right from wrong and how to be responsible. The first was derided by the very early 90s when I was a teen and old enough to be aware of the public opinion. The second was how I and pretty much all of our neighborhood and my school friends were raised in the 80s and early 90s. The idea was that parents taught their kids how to behave but didn’t have to watch after them every waking moment (and other parents would report to yours if you got into trouble). A sort of trust but verify kind of thing.

The thing you are talking about seems separate to me - in Germany, "anti-authoritarian parenting" is associated with the '68er/local echo of the summer-of-love hippie movement, and was satirised by stodgy bourgeois types like Loriot since the '80s if not earlier. "Free-range parenting" is at least two fashion cycles down: tiger-mom helicopter parenting rose just as public criticism of anti-authoritarian parenting peaked, and the free-range movement now is a backlash to that.

I don't really remember that. People didn't talk much about parenting in the 90s in Sweden and when things heated up at the end of the 90s and in the 00s all the negative discourse seemed to be about the opposite: "helicopter" and "curling" parenting.

Talk about parental neglect emerged later with "latte moms" and then more recently about parents using smart screens as a baby sitter. That mostly concerns babies and preschool aged children though and I don't think that is what people are talking about when they say "free range parenting"

Once again, everyone is forgetting Gen X 😁

Latchkey kids. The backlash to the (perception) of emotional and psychological neglect, not physical abuse. Parents who provided for their children's material needs but were literally or emotionally absent, distant, unengaged so the children were left to raise themselves.

This then led to calls for Something Must Be Done, which is where the legal repercussions for "unsupervised children" came in:

The legality of the latchkey children's "alone time" varies with country, state and local area laws. In the United States, state and local laws typically do not specify any particular age under 18 when a child can be legally left without supervision. Some states do have specific age restrictions, but most of the US states have no minimum age for leaving children unsupervised.

Parents can be held accountable by child welfare, child protective services organizations, or law enforcement if children come to harm while left without supervision if, in the opinion of the agency, the children's age or other considerations made such a choice inappropriate. Legal issues also continue to be important concerns for those who work in libraries. They worry about the potential liability should an unattended child be hurt, molested or abducted while at the facility. This issue becomes critical, particularly at closing time when "parents who are late picking up their children also create safety, and, possibly, legal problems."

Look at the parents in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (a movie which I loathed the first time I saw it and continue to loath because I think Ferris is an absolute brat whom I would love to beat senseless). The kids there are in their late teens, almost adults, so there is not the same ramifications as allowing a set of twelve year olds to roam around the city without adult supervision. It also allows for his mother to leave him home alone when she believes him to be ill, because he's old enough to look after himself (his mother doesn't need to go out to work so it's not due to the family's socio-economic situation that she is absent). But look at the parents in their lives: the ones most closely associated are the authority figures such as the school principal, not their parents. Ferris' parents are benignly neglectful, easily fooled by their son (whom they don't know well enough to realise he's chronically truant from school). Cameron's parents, or at least the only one we hear of (his mother is conspicuous by absence of any reference) are malignly neglectful, his father being a figure of fear but also absent from his son's life. Sloane's parents seem to be so invisible, that Ferris simply dressing up in a bad disguise is enough to pass as her father when he's getting her out of school.

The movie ends with an alliance between the hitherto hostile siblings and Ferris' parents remaining in their state of happy ignorance. The entire plot relies on the assumption "your parents won't know because they're not around enough to be involved in your life and know what is going on with you". Ferris is cocky and unlikeable (to me anyway) and gets away with it because the one adult aware of his behaviour is rendered powerless to do anything about it. But a deeper reading would indicate Ferris is like this because of lack of parental involvement; the only one aware of what is going on and trying to hold him accountable is his older sister. His parents are kind fools, even though (presumably) they are successful adults in the world of work and society. They are unaware of what their son is really doing and in a way don't care enough to find out, maybe he pulls off stunts like this because at least if he's caught and they hold him accountable, they're active in his life. Ferris is still a child, or at least immature; his Big Plan to reset the car's odometer and keep Cameron's dad ignorant fails horribly. It's the first actual consequence to their actions that happens, and even though it's the catalyst for Cameron to confront his father, we never see the fall-out of that. So we're left with "Ferris had a great time and successfully got away with it all", and no follow-up on "but what happened to Cameron and Sloane?"

And since the movie is set in the week before they graduate high school, they'll all be going off to begin their adult lives, to be out of the family home, to formally separate from their parents, and there will never be that opportunity for them to be seen as who they are.

Oh, well: that was too deep for a fun movie very much of its time.

Latchkey kids.

There's a term I haven't heard in a while. But I do remember hearing a lot about it in the early 90s, including, iirc, actual TV commercials denigrating it, presumably paid for by some kind of advocacy group.

Discourse on the latch key phenomenon only briefly occured in the 50s-60s in Sweden and didn't amount to much. It completely died down once the municipalities were required to offer after school activities.

As far as I'm aware the majority of kids just went home anyway and that was completely normalised. Practically everyone had a key and went home before their parents from like age 10.

This has been going on for some 60 years now without any drama.

Same here in Finland except from 7-8 years old unless one parent was stay at home or had only a part time job. We were surprised when we found out kids in US stayed so late at after school activities and figured it’d be very exhausting if we had to also do that.

I'm an American. Starting age 9 I had my own key. I biked from school to home. Sometimes took the bus. Got home a lot earlier than my parents.

I seem to recall that free range parenting was heavily dunked, particularly by small-c conservative types, in the 90s as hippie bullshit where negligent parents were allowed to turn their kids into unsupervised, uncivilized little menaces that would go on to terrorize their fellow citizens without reprimand.

Was that about "free range parenting" or about other trends that promoted not disciplining children or letting them do whatever they want ("stress-free upbringing", "unschooling")? The only controversy I remember about "free rage parenting" was a mother that let her kid ride the NY subway on his own, to the horror of safetyists throughout the country. I don't recall the safetyists having a particular political lean.

To be fair I'm mostly referring to local discourses, I'm not sure if "vapaa kasvatus" that was the bugaboo referred to here is the exact same thing as free-range parenting even though it's a fairly close translation.

In any case I'd say it was less safetyism and more a concern about whether kids would be getting properly civilized and steered into proper members of the society.

It is not. What you’re describing sounds like hippie bullshit of the sort Americans would call ‘child led parenting’ or something of the sort. The stereotypical free range parent in America spanks their kids, expects chores, etc- either in a negative stereotype of being borderline neglectful, or in a positive stereotype of that’s how to train a child for extra independence.

I'm enjoying all the content on kids! Feel like I'm learning a lot. (Don't have kids but want them.)

What are some of the most important things you've learned since having kids?

What are some of the most important things you've learned since having kids?

I'm not sure. Parenting advice tends to be either vacuous, or too specific to be worth giving out generally.

Enjoy your free time and hobbies now. You won't have nearly as much with kids.

It may be slightly delusional, but I am confident everyone is just incompetent and I could do parenting in like one fifth of the regular time. Modern parents are like those people who are constantly in credit card debt. Just spend less … time on your kids.

Mothers should stop nursing early. Put the kids in a progressively bigger cage while you do other stuff. Then you let them in the garden, and after that you give them a key so they've reached their last cage-level, and voila, you go to their graduation, fire off a "well done, son/daughter" and you're free.

Fundamentally all the time and money invested in them beyond the absolute basic minimum has no influence on their outcomes. Could even make them worse: neurotic and coddled, or suicidal like koreans from education.

Man... I had so many dreams of giving my child the same childhood I had. Biking 15 miles to the nearest strip mall with my sister, playing in the woods all day, ranging through countless back yards. Once I found this weird heavily vandalized abandoned cabin in the middle of nowhere. My parents never cared, and it all seemed totally normal in the 90's.

Unfortunately, times have changed. Putting aside the sociological factors, apparently ticks in my area are up 4000% since a decade ago, and my daughter has already caught Lyme Disease and Alpha Gal Syndrome. Any tick bite she gets could make her AGS symptoms worse, and causes my wife to have a week long panic attack. I didn't appreciate how much the world had changed in that regard, and how much worse just playing in the fucking woods was.

Also, I swear to god if the rumors that Lyme Disease and AGS escaped from a bioweapons lab are true you may very well see me on the news.

That said we try our best. Lots of tick spray, twice daily tick checks, tick treatments for the yard. Breaks my heart that she can't play in the woods and the creek I bought. Virtually every time anybody goes into them they come out with 2-5 ticks, so that's not even a hypothetical problem.

That said she fucking loved the 2 acres of yard we do have. Climbs the shit out of trees, plays with the chickens, has her own garden with her mother. She loves to pick herbs and leafy greens to add to her fresh eggs in the morning. Skips around the yard in her night gown saying good morning to the chickens. Makes my heart swell.

Her peers... well... I donno man. A friend of mine has a kid about her age, a boy, tall as fuck. He spends an hour on a tablet at his preschool to get him ready for the tablet as a learning device in elementary. Cause I guess that's what public schools do now? He can't ride a bike, climb a tree, he still has an awkward toddler gait despite being 5, and still has very soft speech. I'm reading Lord of the Rings to my daughter, he's seen all the movies along with Star Wars, The Hobbit, and countless other shows.

My wife and I constantly discuss, is our daughter just "advanced" or have we just not hobbled her with screentime and being locked in a townhouse? We may never know, but the differences we notice are stark.

My kid almost died of a tick two years ago. He woke up one morning paralyzed from the waist down, could not walk, just collapsed into a pile if he tried to stand. We took him to the ER and they were totally confused. Out of desperation they decided to admit him with GBS and would have put him on a ventilator in a day or two while he got worse and died.

While this was unfolding, wifey was talking with wife friends and one of them suggested we check him for ticks and we found one in his head, covered by his hair. It was a species of tick that secretes a neurotoxin to numb the host to its presence. It paralyzes and kills small kids, usually girls, because people can't ever spot it in their long hair in time.

We pulled the tick out and he was walking again the next morning, and 100% fine about two days later.

We had been camping about a week earlier. Our area is not supposed to have endemic tick diseases which is why the ER was so confused, though ChatGPT nailed it in the diagnostic when I presented his case to it.

We were already hyper wary about ticks when traveling to other parts of the country but did not expect them when camping locally. CDC guidance is apparently out of date.

Ticks have really increased our anxiety about going out into nature, something we really loved doing. Whenever we do go out mom makes the entire family strip naked at home and we do full crevice checks (including butt cracks, including adults) for ticks.

You have my sympathies, friend.

That sounds terrifying. I'm glad your son fully recovered.

Doctors working with outdated information is the most frustrating part. We're seeing a local doctor who's kept abreast of the changes, largely due to so many of her patients having tick born diseases in recent years. My daughter's school does a pretty good job too because several kids there have AGS, including kids of the staff. It's getting kind of out of control in my area if "I never knew anyone who had this and now I'm encountering it everywhere I go" is any measure.

It depresses us to no end the fact that the outdoors feels so threatening now. We're trying to keep up the love of nature too with the hiking and camping. But then our daughter gets another tick and my wife spends a week contemplating selling everything, moving to a concrete jungle, and getting rid of the dog in case she tracks ticks in too.

Supposedly the AGS gets better after a few years, but the big if is that you have to not get bit by more ticks. That's proving incredibly difficult since we've found 2 more on our daughter just from the yard (or the dog) this spring.

We live in the PNW and thought we were spared from this stuff. I'd never seen a tick irl before the one in my son's head. Guessing we're only a decade or two away from fighting them off by the handful.

My kids ran through a path in a park the other day with shorts on and the path had tall grass hanging into it and I freaked out, rather irrationally.

Moving to a place where ticks can't survive is starting to sound appealing to me as well.

Lyme disease was supposedly improved by US army bioweapons dudes.

There's a whole documentary on it. Burgdorf allegedly cops to doing so.

Although it's unclear why the new & improved Lyme disease would be everywhere or spreading. There's a world of difference between molesting bacteria in a lab to get worse ones to said bacteria living in ticks worldwide.

Also, I swear to god if the rumors that Lyme Disease and AGS escaped from a bioweapons lab are true you may very well see me on the news.

That would have to be some kind of bioweapons program run by the Ancient Astronauts, because a 5300 year old mummified ice man had Lyme disease.

You could probably dial that back to a bioweapons program run by George Washington, because, shock and amazement, that study failed to replicate.

To confirm LMAT’s ability to analyze large (real) metagenomes and provide new biological insight, we downloaded the Tyrolean Iceman sequence data (Keller et al., 2012) from the SRA, which constituted 150 giga-bases of raw genomic data. While 78% of the sequenced reads were reported to be human, only a small percentage (0.84%) of the reads was reported to originate from bacteria based on a sample of 8 million reads. Our hypothesis was that LMAT could examine all the reads on a single large memory compute node and efficiently provide a more complete analysis of the microbial contents. For this application, the human genome (v19) was added to LMAT’s database to classify human and microbial reads simultaneously. The analysis on the raw 150 giga-base dataset (2.3 billion reads) ran in <20 h on our single node large memory computer (see Supplementary Material for additional details). LMAT output agreed with the published finding that the vast majority of bacteria were from the phylum Firmicutes and under the class of Clostridia. Similarly, only a small fraction of reads were reported to be from the Spirochaetes phylum. LMAT results did not show evidence for the presence for non-phage, non-retroviral viruses, fungi or protists after adjusting for previously unidentified human contamination in draft eukaryote genomes present in the LMAT reference database. The key observed difference was in the Borrelia species previously reported to be the first documented case of Lyme disease in humans. Although LMAT’s findings support the presence of the Borrelia genus with 16 180 reads assigned a read label score greater than 0, a more complex relationship is shown between the new Borrelia sequence and previously sequenced Borrelia genomes. Although Borrelia burgdorferi was previously reported to be the likely species present, LMAT shows that among the reads assigned to the Borrelia genus, the majority of the reads are assigned to non–species-specific genomic regions with species-specific reads assigned to several Borrelia species, including B.burgdorferi, Borrelia garinii and others. The Borellia reads were compared against all sequenced Borrelia genomes to compute an SNP-based genetic distance matrix. The phylogenetic tree given in Supplementary Figure S10 supports LMAT’s finding that the Borrelia variant is divergent from B.burgdorferi.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3753567/

A movie about George Washington’s secret bioweapons lab would be dope, though.

Is this really a failed replication? It seems that:

  1. Borellia samples are present

  2. Most reads are in non-species specific regions

  3. There are B. burgdorferi specific reads, as well as reads for other Borellia species

So they conclude that the Borellia variant (and I think they implicitly assume there's only one?) is not identical to B. burgdorferi. Maybe, but it's not only B. burgdorferi that causes Lyme disease. B. garinii (also found on the ice man) also causes Lyme disease, and there are other species whose relationship to Lyme disease is just not clear. So I don't view this as contradicting the claim that the ice man had Lyme disease.

You know what, I stand corrected.

I was under the impression that B. burgdorferi was the only Lyme disease causing bacteria. If that had been the case, I would stand by this as a failed replication, but with the new information, I think you are right.

Caveat for: All “Science!” seems prone to fakery in general, but I can’t see why anyone would fake these particular results, so it seems reasonable that I was wrong.

George Washington’s secret bioweapon program would still be dope, though.

apparently ticks in my area are up 4000% since a decade ago, and my daughter has already caught Lyme Disease and Alpha Gal Syndrome

Where did you find out about your tick population? And your daughter can no longer eat red meat?

It sounds like something omitted from your books is all the child labor. For most of human history, most of human labor was agricultural. Children grew up working alongside their parents, first through useless imitation ("play") and, as the years passed, through making small contributions, then large ones. Children qua children have been culturally loved and cherished to varying degrees depending on a host of factors, but only comparatively recently has childhood been idle. Everything really is childcare, when your work can be performed while you care for your children--and, as they grow, performed with your children. Well, in the 19th century we sort of collectively decided that child labor is bad, but was it bad because it was bad for children, or was it bad because it was exploitative? There are presumably non-exploitative ways for children to labor--otherwise there would be no children in film. Would it be a bad idea to extend that to other industries?

I'm not sure what, if anything, that adds to your analysis, it just struck me as maybe worth noting.

Yeah, I don't think you can go to 19th century European literature for a read on this, because non-upper-class children didn't really have free time, they were supposed to be working. Even in Oliver Twist, it wasn't that the kids were wandering around getting into random mischief and menacing society -- that was their job!

Looking at Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn/Great Brain, non-farm kids in late 19th c. America seem to have much more like what we might think of as a free-range upbringing.

There are presumably non-exploitative ways for children to labor--otherwise there would be no children in film. Would it be a bad idea to extend that to other industries?

Here, there are exceptions for kids working for their family's business (provided the family business does not employ 10 people or more), newspaper delivery, tutoring, babysitting or working for a nonprofit.

Yeah, that's true. And, indeed, a lot of homeschool moms of daughters, especially, still do a lot of tasks that are sort of like labor -- they'll garden, sew, raise and milk goats, make dairy products, bake, and so on. I suppose Zvi and Scott didn't talk about it because apprenticing children as writers or psychiatrists wouldn't really happen until they're well into their late teens, and able to drive and be independent anyway.

There are plenty of cultures that never had that many free range girls, but did have a lot of obligatory embroidery, lacemaking, and whatnot. There appear to have been respectability arms races in the past with who could make the most elaborate clothing that might have been about as onerous as the current saftyism idleness race.

I do want to go to art markets with my kids when they're a bit older, make crafts, raise eggs and whatnot, especially since we have summers off.

I think free range is good for kids simply because it allows for kids to grow into adulthood. If you are a safety first society and prevent kids from doing anything dangerous or going out on their own, they never learn to navigate that. If the kid is never allowed out of sight of an adult, he can’t learn how to navigate without an adult. If you never allow them to cook, they’ll never learn to do so.

Other countries are much more relaxed about this. Kids in Japan can ride public transport by themselves without a problem. European kids do stay outside in some cases in carriages. It works fine and I think the kids are better and less neurotic for it.

I think free range is good for kids simply because it allows for kids to grow into adulthood.

A quote that stuck with me: "You aren't raising a child, you're raising an adult who happens to be a child right now."

Some people have learned very well how to be children, and have 20+ years of experience in that role. Others have already gained experience with adulthood before they get legal recognition at 18, and are already (somewhat) prepared for the challenges they will be facing.

Yeah, and tbh I feel kinda bad for the kids coming up today. They’re unhealthy because of what adults are doing to them, and will likely grow to be even worse. They’ve been taught they can’t handle the outside world without help, so not only are they not learning how to deal with the real world, they have a fear of it, they don’t think they can handle it. They end up neurotic, anxious and depressed. Why wouldn’t they, they’re being sent out into a world they’ve never experienced and have been shielded from because they can’t handle it.

Yeah it's like if you're gonna create an environment where kids can never get served by better dancers, then you're not giving them any reason to get funky. May as well tear down the community center and make it a strip mall at that point.

Yeah, it seems like it would certainly be desirable both for the kids to have somewhere they want to walk/bike, and to be allowed to do that.

Other countries are much more relaxed about this. Kids in Japan can ride public transport by themselves without a problem. European kids do stay outside in some cases in carriages. It works fine and I think the kids are better and less neurotic for it.

I had heard about that, though some people push back that it works because Japan is full of Japanese people, and a lot of places in Europe have also stopped allowing it lately. Like the the map about the historic childhood ranges near Rotherham.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats