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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)
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:
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.
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.
Her description of her childhood rearing is indeed terrible, but I can see ordinary not-terrible parents deciding that an over-sensitive child who (for instance) is reduced to fits of tears at a birthday party simply because "other people are looking at me!" needs something to toughen them up a bit, and that the kid has to be compelled to do this for their own good (cruel to be kind). "If you don't do X, you won't get Y" is part of ordinary child-raising. If you gave up on "oh no, they hate it, they're crying and begging, we won't do it" and let the kid off, then there's a good chance they'll just become ever more introverted and sensitive, won't learn how to deal with adverse events or "I don't like this but it has to be done" and you'll end up doing more harm in the long run.
The parents didn't force her to keep doing karate, and I think she doesn't understand why. It wasn't "oh they weren't totally cruel after all", it was that the aim had been achieved: she learned to power through and do something she found personally unpleasant. That was the lesson: no, even if you are 'burning with shame and have tears pouring down your face' the dreaded outcome isn't that bad after all. You didn't die. People were not laughing at you. You got through it and the world did not end. Think of exposure therapy. It needn't have been karate class, it could just as well have been a dance class and young Aella was working herself up into imaginary fears of "the others are toddlers! people will think I'm a toddler! they will be laughing at me for being so stupid and dumb and useless that I have to go in with toddlers!"
That doesn't mean that beating a child eleven times is a good thing after all, but rather that some of the treatment was normal child-raising. My parents made me do things as a kid that I loathed, and in the long run they were right. I have to do things even today that I hate (going out in public and mingling with people, for one) and that early experience has given me the tools to cope. If my parents had let me off because 'burning with shame and tears pouring down', I'd be a news story by now about "hoarder hermit had to be rescued by social services, never set foot outside front door in thirty years, house is condemned as unfit for human habitation".
Yes, and overly sensitive and socially non-compliant children are a big problem in public schools as well, who have to take them if their parents choose to send them. The staff talk about how it's because nobody is allowed to give any consequences that matter, but Aella's stories, along with other people I've heard from who grew up under the GKGW regimen suggests otherwise -- that there's really no amount of consequences that will prevail over certain very noncompliant personalities. They'll spend four years fighting with their parents about their internet friends and then run away, if necessary. Actually I want a Dostoyevsky novel about Aella's family more than a Tom Wolfe one.
I can't find it right now, but there was a post on Darcy's blog (not an influencer, kind of a small blog) where she was taking her kids to a natural history museum, and was breaking down (an adult, a mother), experiencing PTSD triggers, thinking about how her own mother believed in young earth creationism! So terrible! Very scary! My own mother was also into creationism things, and it was totally fine. Maybe they were wrong. They were probably wrong. But they were nice, and liked to talk about Mount St Helens and the way eyeballs work and whatnot. My theory is that very intense parents, who get all worked up over geologic ages, produce very intense children who get all worked up over all sorts of things, from both nature and nurture sides.
That anecdote is what I meant about her being stupid for being so smart. She wasn't good at working out loopholes around the rules; an ordinary kid would have figured out a way to notify her friend that "I'm grounded, can't see you" without using the computer (because expressly forbidden to use the computer and if found out it'll be bad). Aella didn't - maybe she didn't have another way, but anyway she headed right into the trap. Then spent four years running her head into the same brick wall of "gotta use the computer to talk to my friends - get found out - get grounded - finally work off the punishment - do the exact same thing to get me punished all over again".
That's not stupidity because of lack of intelligence, that's a blind spot of personality that indicates she will always make things harder for herself because she won't be able to figure out the signals.
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