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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.
Busybody neighbors who call CFS to report "neglect" the moment they see anyone under eighteen out without an adult hovering over them "helicopter parent"-style?
How often does this actually happen ?
I didn't grow up here, but knee-jerk CPS reporting and HOA Karens are 2 of the most fascinating Americanisms. I have no calibration on how ubiquitous these types of people are. Are they real or one off bogeywomen ?
About 1 in 3 children will be the subject of a CPS investigation at some point: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0283534
I'm only a few paragraphs in and already getting strong "we wrote the conclusion first" vibes.
The repeated refences to disparate impacts and constant waffling between "children referred to CPS as infants", "children referred to CPS multiple times", and "all children referred" strike me as massive red-flags.
Without diving deeper into the raw data I bet that the actual situation on the ground is something like this; Close to 30% of all kids will be referred at least once in their lives. For most of kids who get referred it happens only once and it ends up going nowhere. However If MeeMaw is callin' cause no-good baby-daddy just got released from prison, or her daughter's off the wagon, and she's worried about the baby. The odds say that MeeMaw has called CPS before, and the probability of this referral going somewhere is much higher.
The conclusion of course is that CPS is racist and should stop trying to protect underclass children
We have now been referred to social services twice, both routine and in one case leading to a 15-minute home visit and a no-action letter, and in the other case to literally nothing at all. Plenty of mandatory reporters consider "Toddler with head injury of unclear origin" to be a mandatory report. It wouldn't surprise me if 30% of all kids get this kind of routine referral - and apart from the waste of CPS resources I don't see it as a problem.
The problem is where CPS see "free range 7-year old" as the kind of referral that needs more than a no-action letter.
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