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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:
This is a remarkably good scissor statement, in that I find the people being mean to him insufferable, and even inasmuch as I might find the Sillicon Valley Crypto Guy of it all mockable, I still have an innate rage at people dismissing him as a shitty dad.
So despite knowing that I'm falling for a scissor statement and starting a fight for no reason, I'm going to do it anyway: if you want to call this guy a shitty dad I don't want to hear you bitch about the TFR.
There was a letter to the editor in the WSJ this morning that I took a picture of to remember, from Leah Libresco Sargeant, replying to a prior article by William Galston title "America Needs More Husband Material" about how men need to shape up so they can get wives. Sargeant cites surveys of high school seniors showing that a declining percentage of young people feel that they will be "very good" spouses. The money quote that stuck out to me:
((She goes on to say kids need more self organized play to develop into marriage material, citing her homeschooled husband's experience running a youth theater company. I should look her up and see what her arguments are outside two paragraphs of newsprint.))
My brother-in-law is a fantastic dad, he spends a ton of time with my niece and nephew, he dedicates himself to them, they are always the number one priority, he values nothing else. My own father, who was a great father to me*, frequently jokes that BiL makes him feel bad about the time he spent with us growing up. Frankly, if I couldn't have kids until I wanted to be a dad the way my BiL is a dad, I will never have kids. I will never want to spend all day with my two year old. If that's the standard for having kids, I will never meet it, and a lot of other people won't either.
If we are trying to convince people to have kids, especially conscientious neurotic high achieving people who we really want to have conscientious high achieving kids, then setting impossible standards will not achieve it.
As to the "this is distasteful and shouldn't be shared" thing, it feels very odd to me, like a blue haired wokie screeching about misogyny because of a bland "women be shopping" joke. Just a massive example of the political correctness commissars telling people what they are and aren't allowed to feel, and what feelings they are and aren't allowed to talk about. "YOU WILL PLAY WITH THE TODDLER, YOU WILL ENJOY IT, PARENTHOOD IS JOY!"
When parenthood was more normalized, bitching about it was too! Don't start the politically correct cycle of gatekeeping who is and isn't allowed to be a parent and how they are allowed to feel about it, it will not increase the number of people having kids one iota.
*Your opinion of the results may differ.
I don't think this is a scissor statement, I think it's a different (and more traditional) social failure mode.
Plenty of things in life everyone knows but can't say, in an increasingly feminized society this is way worse.
It's the "all my girlfriends are perfect 10s dressed impeccably all the time and even look great without makeup!" bullshit.
Yes having kids sucks. It is also great. Society has decided some parts of having kids you are allowed to complain about and some you are not. Society has decided nerds are fair game to criticize. Etc etc.
This is just a matter of what thoughts are approved to be voiced in public, and what types of people are allowed to be supported.
The most scissorish bit is the way it triggers a bunch of other conversations, but that also happens with "you can't say Sara looks fat in that dress!" "But she clearly does! She weighs over 300 pounds! And she asked!"
"Spending time with small children is boring and I hate it and would prefer to do as little of it as possible" is a classic scissor statement: some large portion of the people who read it think it is obviously true and no right thinking non-lobotomized person could think otherwise, and some large portion of the people who read it think it is obviously false and no right thinking person with a soul could think it was true.
Isn't the answer "this is obviously true and you have no soul" ?
Small children are frequently annoying, and frequently not very stimulating. Sometimes they are interesting and stimulating, but anyone pretending that is common is biased.
On the other side, spending quality time with your children isn't optional, and to complain that the life you brought into the world, with the full knowledge that kids are attention black holes, is stupid? And cruel, and soulless.
If you hate kids, don't have them. If you have kids, give them attention so they don't develop attachment issues, even if that's annoying. Complaining about it just makes you sound stupid or evil.
gr8 b8 m8 8/8
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Again, most people hearing that statement both agree and disagree with it to some extent, and have a variable level of feeling across their lifespan both acutely and chronically (ex: I'm pissed at my kids right now so I say X) and also have a wide disconnect between how they feel about it and what they are saying in public.
It is a sliding scale of both interpretation of the statement and also of disconnect between private and public presentation of beliefs.
Scissor statements are more binary Yes or No, Left or Right, Up or Down.
Just because something creates argument doesn't mean it is a scissor statement.
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