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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:
What's stopping him from letting his kids be free range ? The restrictions feel self-imposed.
I don't have kids, but I was the elder cousin that was responsible for keeping the kids alive through the holidays. Kids are so much fun. They allow men to experience power and wish fulfillment like nothing else. It's the only time you get to legally play God.
Maybe it is just me, but very few emotions match the unbridled joy of watching kids frolicking. Little puppies, Sunrise hikes, a cold summer breeze. It is a feeling of wholeness, harmony, of being at peace that nothing else matches.
Some classics:
I went off on a tangent, but sounds like someone with a lot of anxiety. I have had periods of my life when I've been unable to exist in a moment, and the urge to escape was usually rooted in an external source of instability that was causing me anxiety.
Percentiles are a better way to look at it. Divorce is the most destabilizing thing a child can go through. Only about 50-55% American kids grow up with their biological parents, who stay married to each other through their entire childhood. If the dude stays happily married, financially stable and doesn't abuse his kids, he is already above average.
So no, not a shitty dad. Above-average is all. Not good. Not bad.
It's a different world man. I checked the FBI crime statistics, and in my home town, when I was allowed to bike 30 minutes as google map says, probably 60 minutes as a kid bikes, down the bike path on the parkway to the nearest shopping center for a slushy, the murder rate in my county was 0-1 per year. Entirely domestics. In the year 2025 it's closer to 50, and lots of gang deaths. To say nothing of other random tragedies caused by associated rises in drunk driving, drug availability, and the general third worldification of my homeland. In 30 years we went from random murder literally not being a thing that ever happened where I lived, to constant low level gang violence.
I get the arguments about per capita. But I think when it comes to the loss of quality of life due to violent crime, the incidents per 100,000 residents matters a lot less than the proximity to incidents. If I'm in a crowd of 100 that gets randomly fired into, versus being in a crowd of 100,000 that random gets fired into, I sincerely doubt my perception and attendant stress levels will be much different between the two. I'm thinking "I could have been killed!" either way.
And so it goes with our kids. When I was a child, it was major news when a neighbor's child wondered off and drowned in a lake. A tragedy the likes of which hadn't been seen in decades in our town. Now teenagers show up dismembered in public parks and it's a Tuesday.
I'm really baffled as to where you grew up, Petersburg? As far as my experiences in Virginia, it's overwhelmingly been one of gentrification - admittedly limited to NoVA and Richmond. I can't speak to Norfolk or Charlottesville. In DC, the majority of the city is unaffordable to anyone but wealthy professionals and the politicos, with the poors being pushed across the Anacostia. H street is a filthy den of hipsters (or may have progressed to a fully upscale neighborhood since I left, I don't know) and you have to go pretty far to the northeast to get anywhere grungy. NoVA is a gleaming mass of towers full of consultants milking the feds (where you possibly work making useless software?) and I'm not even sure how far you have to drive outside the city before you stop seeing Mcmansions and nice suburbs.
I don't know Richmond as well but The Fan and Jackson Ward both gentrified pretty heavily. Nice downtown core, UVA seems to be metastasizing, lots of mcmansions and farmers markets.
Are you confident that your quiet suburbia was invaded by illegals rather than most of the successful, law-abiding people being siphoned off by the gentrifying cities? Brain drain to the city cores will hollow out the suburbs and revitalize the downtowns which seems to be what's happening (although I haven't noticed the apocalyptic degradation of the suburbs you write about extensively). It's surprising that I lived in fairly similar areas to you without ever hearing about Teen Dismemberment Tuesdays. Why do you think we had such different experiences?
It's remarkable the things you can be oblivious to if your news diet doesn't tell you. Then one day your coworker and their mother are murdered in their apartment (in one of the gentrified parts of town) in a gang killing. At least, that's how my wife's illusions were shattered.
My local news bends over backwards to not cover crime. Itty bitty little articles, no photos of perps, they usually even decline to provide descriptions of the suspect, though they'll mention the police have released one and if anybody has seen them to call. Never makes their front page either, you have to specifically go to this little "Crime" section that has the feel of a subsection they are just about ready to delete entirely. Sometimes a particularly heinous crime will get some attention on the regional subreddit, but usually posts about crime just get deleted because reddit and agenda pushing.
So yeah, I don't really take your lack of noticing as a proof of absence. You and a million like you.
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