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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7589 thread views

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.

Someone also quote tweeted that with a quote from Naomi Wolf's book Misconceptions:

When Nico was about 9 months old, I was in the floor with him playing the way you do with a nine-month baby- sorting cubes. We were doing this for what seemed to me to be a really long period of time. Ed came in, saw this scene and said, "Oh you're just entranced." And I said, "Are you out of your mind? I am bored silly." And he was stunned- he had no idea.

I am not myself a parent but I have a lot of experience being around smaller kids at various ages due to having siblings with kids in a wide age range. Playing with younger kids is definitely something I often found boring or tedious, both as a teenager and adult.

I don't think there's anything wrong with him (or any parent) feeling this, nor does it make him a bad parent. I suspect most parents feel this way some of the time. The things that are entertaining for kids are just not that entertaining for adults!

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