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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:
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:
Very interesting. 11 million views on this.
My first thought is to look at how much time primate fathers spend with their children. They do spend more time playing with their own children than with those not their own. However, I can’t find how many minutes they do this. This study indicates that for hunter gatherers, after toddlerhood, it is rare for fathers to play with their children, as they have similar-aged playmates in the neighborhood.
I would say we are in a society “where children have little access to playmates”, because in primitive societies children play pretty much all day, but today they have school and don’t have access to playmates to do this unless they are in a lucky neighborhood. And even then, it’s an insufficient amount of play. To throw another variable in, hunter gatherer children play based off of what they see their fathers and elders doing. Our environment is double unnatural: they never get to model behaviors from their elders, and they never get to play. This leads me to believe that father-child play is an essential replacement activity to the sort of play that children typically enjoyed with other children in their ancestral environment. Play with their father today is now essential because (1) he is the only male elder they will ever get to have rich personal experience with, (2) the child gets to model the father’s accumulated social-emotional wisdom, eg learning motivation and emotional processing and planning even just in a simple game of catch.
Another thing worth noting is that Christianity is unnaturally (supernaturally?) concerned with the Father-Son bond. It is possible that Christian culture boosts the interest that a father has in the wellbeing of his son, given that this is a microcosm of the Christian’s relationship with God, and that the decline of this culture corresponds to less interest in the father-son relationship.
I don't have kids, but I always imagined that's what it would be like for me. I feel very awkward around babies and little kids. I like the general idea of having kids, and I think I'd be decent at raising older kids, but with little kids I'm totally lost. I just don't feel that sense of cuteness that other people seem to feel.
I think it's OK to be honest and admit that's how we feel (although you probably shouldn't say it publically or admit it to your family). I feel like that's a very natural state of affairs for men, really. Just let it be. We'll step up for the big emergencies, but we really don't want to be there in "house husband" mode babysitting the kids nonstop. We'd probably have more kids if society in general was OK with us being mostly hands off in child rearing.
My dream is to have kids, then spend most of my time hanging out at some old school mens' social club talking business over cigars and brandy, seeing the kids only briefly for the big events.
Hypothetical future college seniors will absolutely love your hypothetical future freshman daughters with daddy issues, Jesus Christ.
"I want my children to grow up with attachment issues"
Have some respect for your children and their wellbeing.
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I was like this when I was young, but I didn't realize what became obvious in hindsight: your own little kids will be your own little kids. They'll be genetically half you and half your spouse, and environmentally some mix in which (especially when they're little) you're still a plurality.
My oldest kid binge-read the Harry Potter series when she was 5 and decided that my reading to her for 20 minutes a night was way too slow. When her little brother was 8 or 9 he thought my home group-theory lessons during Covid were amazing. Their little sister picks Babylon 5 episodes for her every turn at Family Movie Nights lately. Now, you may be thinking, "wow, what unbelievable geeks", but that's exactly the point - I'm kind of an annoying geek, and my wife isn't annoying, and it's not much of a coincidence that we got a trifecta of exactly the sort of non-annoying geeks we're thrilled with, even if they might not stand out as positively to other random adults. Whatever personality/subculture you may have and/or have fallen in love with instead, that's what you can probably expect instead, and even if you're not a big fan of little kids in general you might be much more enamored of your own little kids in particular.
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