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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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A post is blowing up on my part of twitter where a guy is saying he only wants to spend 10 minutes a day with his kids.. This has a surprising amount of scissor power, with people coming down on all sides.

Relevant quote:

My feelings of love toward them are perfectly strong, but if I have to watch them or entertain them for more than about 10 minutes my blood starts to boil. I just want to be working, or accomplishing something. I try to be grateful, but it doesn't work...

Am I a terrible person? Or is my feeling within a certain range of historically normal and it's modern parenting norms that are off? Whether it's my fault or not, I don't even care, I just want to figure this out. Something is wrong and I no longer have the excuse of being new to this.

The one straightforward argument is that, well, he's a shitty dad. Especially since he says he wants to be working, accomplishing something, and what is his work? Well, he's a creative director at some random tiny crypto business working on "building digital gold." So... easily mockable.

The other side says that modern parenting norms are fucked, as he aludes to, and that kids used to be a lot more free range. Normally I'm sympathetic to this, but the guy's kids are below five, so idk. I think infants and toddlers definitely need a lot of attention.

Either way I'm curious how parenting norms might break down along culture war lines, and what people here think?

ETA: Also, a great and extremely sassy quote tweet:

This post has everything I despised about Silicon Valley: the narcissism paired with extreme neuroticism, the intense focus on “how you feel” on a meta level, the inability to appreciate anything non-“productive”, the therapeutic public confession, and finally, the utter selfishness towards the needs of children when it is you who are the adult and should take responsibility for yourself.

I like playing with kids, always have, and I totally get it. No, he's not a bad dad- but maybe saying the quiet part out loud(kids games are usually rather dumb, even if you like being a human jungle gym. Few adults particularly like hide and go seek) is a bad idea. And I think he might want to give it a few more years, see if he likes kicking around a soccer ball with a seven year old a bit more than whatever make believe a four year old comes up with.