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People on here have been commenting a lot about women not showing up for dates, which does sound frustrating, but apparently they're not showing up for each other either. I was reminded of this phenomenon by this Substack post, about women preparing home cooked meals for each other in their homes, then having people not show up last second. So my initial theory that maybe young women are scared of men from outside their social circle is not the main thing going on.
What's going on?
I tried going to a local ACX meetup, and it was fine, but after six people initially wanted to do it, only two besides myself ended up coming. Meanwhile, my daughter's pre-K teacher has invited herself to my house. She called today, and went on about a "mandatory home visit", next week, with highly inflexible weekday hours. I did not like it. She said she was going to drop off paperwork and meet my daughter. I said that I would rather bring my daughter to pick up the paperwork. We fought about it. I was perhaps more prickly than is altogether advisable when speaking to a child's teacher. I tried researching how this could be considered an appropriate thing to, not offer, not ask, but mandate. Something, something, building trust, Head Start, maybe the norms of black Americans? Clearly, they have the wrong order of things. If I trust you, I will invite you over. If I don't trust you, I will want to meet at your office. Even social workers know this. Is this related to parents not actually coming to their appointments somehow? It's juxtaposed in literature withattendance, more than understanding.
Also, meanwhile, my older daughter hasn't been invited to anyone's house. We haven't managed to invite anyone to our house. It seems terribly fraught somehow. I mostly do things with one or occasionally two other families with a stay at home mom and a mom who works two mornings a week, respectively.
Also, just because I found it odd, here's Keturah complaining about a situation where someone invited her into the hostess's home, and Keturah came, and then they judged each other for their stance on shoes, that Keturah wanted to keep them on, and the hostess wanted her to take them off.
I liked the culture of Georgians (Kartveli) and Albanians that homes are sacred, guests are from God, and that guests and hosts have important mutual roles and responsibilities.
What's the sociology here? Why are Americans like this, despite seeming deeply unhappy about it?
What the hell? No one gets to enter your home without an invitation (except maybe rent inspections that are highly regulated with advance notice or police with probable cause). Has this teacher appointed themselves as a child protection officer that MUST inspect the living conditions of each and every child? I'd tell them to go pound sand.
I'd frankly report her to the principal. This is completely unacceptable.
I read the public message from the state program, and it does indeed say there's a mandatory home visit, though I think in this teacher's case she was not delivering the news as intended, because the material goes on about cultural responsiveness and learning about the home culture of the child and building family connections and whatnot. She offered to have me talk to her "manager," whoever that is (she is the only licensed teacher, working in a daycare that is not like that), but I said to just send me an email for now while I consult about our schedule.
I could sort of imagine why it might be a thing, but, also, it is absolutely not culturally responsive to... American culture. And I am in America.
I’m with CertainlyWorse here — is this a mandatory program you have to send your children to for public education, or is this like a preschool with public subsidy or something?
I was in preschool before kindergarten, it was a white house run by a religious group. We played with blocks and there was naptime. No one did a welfare check on my parents’ house. Or if they did, my parents never mentioned it.
Edit: I looked it up, I guess this is a Head Start thing, and it’s mandatory for receiving the funding. It’s true that in America a teacher coming to your house is considered impolite, but the other thing about America is that surveillance of welfare recipients is normalized. There’s no “manager” who can override the home visit requirements. The Head Start program absolutely insists on it.
All the nonsense, as CertainlyWorse puts it, is obviously a welfare check figleaf, it’s transparently so. This isn’t a “black culture” difference thing, unless you count “being a recipient of federal social program funding” as a part of black culture.
What this particular thing sounds like is you’re accepting subsidized pre-K, which is oriented towards low-income families and designed to get children who might not make it to school at all to attend.
You don’t have to explain your financial situation, and I don’t judge anyone for taking advantage of resources in place. But I guess I’m a little surprised that you’re putting your kids in a program that my immediate mental association with, even before looking it up, was poor families while balking at the hoops that US welfare programs put poor families through, which suggests an unfamiliarity with the welfare system that Head Start hews close to. Is choosing a private program for pre-K not an option for you?
Edit 2: Is this actually a private pre-K after all? I’ve read some more and it’s possible that the pre-K you’re applying to also takes money from Head Start, and for reasons that I can presume rhyme with “equity” and “we did research on poor families and it helped”, some pre-Ks apply the same home visit rules to private pay families as to ones receiving the subsidy. That would explain the faintly ridiculous situation. But I don’t know that they’re going to bend it for you, even if that is the case.
It might be worthwhile to find another program, but I know childcare is scarce.
No, not really.
For context, I live in New Mexico, which is full of poor people and oil revenue. I had forgotten until I looked it up just now that it produces more than four times as much oil as Alaska, though still half as much as Texas. Unlike Alaska, which gives people money directly, New Mexico invests in various forms of welfare for all, so median income families qualify for pregnancy and early childhood medicaid with no fuss (I was shocked, this is worth tens of thousands of dollars per baby, and I just uploaded a couple of forms, and in the cases of the babies, the hospital uploaded the forms for me). They have a bunch of nice hispanic American ladies (many from the days when the territory literally belonged to Spain) who run nice warm daycares. All the normal daycares are now state funded (with no copay as of a year or so ago), and they have the pre-K program as an optional add-on with more curriculum, or they'll instead pay for regular daycare for four year olds, whatever the individual place decides on doing, which has also been, in my experience, fine. Finding daycare for a 1 year old and a 4 year old at the same time and the same establishment is the main impediment, which has worked out surprisingly well.
This situation has resulted in having a third child, where in another state we probably wouldn't have. As a member of the lower middle class, I like it a lot. If someone institutes low fuss UBI, it will probably be here. And it's democratic without being all that progressive, on account of all the influential people who's parents or grandparents were ranchers, so in general I like it. Also, I didn't save for a house at all, or even think of owning a house, and then a nice local organization said that, yes, we can buy a house, and just led us through exactly how to do that, then sent a non-commissioned realtor who also got up on our roof to show us how to fix the swamp cooler and stuck his hand down the food processor to fish out some broken glass that was inside.
I was more caught off guard by being called up suddenly, out of the blue.
Interesting.
Unfortunately my research seems to suggest that states who universalized state-run daycare and pre-K, such as New Mexico, imported the "two home visits a year" formula from Head Start, and it was brought up suddenly and without asking because it's required by the state. It's a bureaucratic thing, not a cultural difference. And of course like every fad in education they've got a zillion studies proving that it's the greatest thing since the alphabet, and nobody in the education-industrial complex wants to disagree with "research." Especially not in such a way that would provide more autonomy to parents.
I'm no libertarian by any means -- state funding handed out like candy to families approximates my own political preferences -- but the libertarian critique of state programs like this always includes the caveat emptor that taking the state's money makes you the state's servant, and mandatory intrusion into your private life is what comes with the territory of state-run social programs, even if the state has been nice enough so far as to make its programs easy and non-intrusive. The tax man doesn't politely ask if you might be interested in putting funds into social security, and neither do the state education agents politely ask if you might be interested in a home visit.
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People do often seem to say that crime is pretty high in New Mexico, though, especially around the large towns and cities (and especially around Albuquerque). Are you very rural?
Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard it about parts of Chicago as well, and in both places, I don't drive with the windows down or leave my car for large stretches of time or walk alone, and so on.
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Things must be pretty bad for them to mandate something like that. I'd be curious to investigate how this mandatory visit came to be. Is the state program voluntary?
This sounds like complete nonsense made to be a figleaf for a welfare check. I can't see a teacher flipping out over the importance of 'learning about the home culture of the child' and deciding to die on that hill. They could figure that out over a half hour parent and teacher discussion in their office.
I don't clearly remember how things went down with my previous child, but I think they suggested meeting at my house, I suggested meeting at the school, and she pretty much immediately agreed.
The program itself is voluntary, and my older daughter liked it, so I figured to do it again. They have a bit more curriculum than the regular preschool, which is also completely state funded and exists in the same building. I'm not sure how much more, actually, since the regular program is also run by a large national daycare chain and has official stations and activities. I think it's somewhat based on Head Start, which specialized in teaching poor children with parents who would give excuses about not having transportation to parent teacher conferences or something. I'm not sure about the welfare check side of things, I think it's illegal to enter a home under false pretenses, but maybe they do try to get more district resources by finding all the potential IEP kids or families who want extra services or something. The public pre-Ks here do turn some families away, but are explicitly required to accept all children with disabilities.
Perhaps I'll make the appointment. I was mostly put off by how she kept arguing with me about how extremely REQUIRED it was in an annoying and unwelcoming way, and the short notice.
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I'm a zoomer.
I've had a lot of trouble getting friends to hang out and keep to a set time and place to meet up. Actually, as I think about it, women I've gone on dates with have been better at showing up than my male friends have been at keeping to a hangout time. That said, when friends don't show up, they generally call or text and have an excuse (sometimes a good one, sometimes something you can tell they made up off the cuff), while when dates don't show up, they ghost about half the time, and the other half is split between "has a good excuse and agrees to reschedule" and "has a good-sounding excuse and never indicates a desire to reschedule," with the latter presumably indicating a lack of desire to move forward with the connection.
I had some friends in the neighborhood when I was growing but none of them were good people -- my parents are white-collar professionals but the neighborhood is on the wrong side of town and very working-class, though there isn't violent crime and I never felt unsafe. The neighbor kids to the left tried to steal from me, the girl across the street nearly got away with stealing from me, and the neighbor down the street gave me the sense of a schoolyard bully. I consider that it may not be a good idea to be above the socioeconomic average of the neighborhood, much less to be seen as such.
The kinds of things you see depicted in old movies and TV shows -- meeting friends from the neighborhood, schoolyard playmates, sleepovers, friends calling each other for hours in a night and taking up the phone line, knocking on your friend's door and showing up unannounced, coming over for
teaa drink, neighborhood barbeques... none of these really reflect any of my life experience. It seems nice to have that kind of thick social community.I guess it's a combination of two things. First, Anglo culture in general is more reserved about hospitality than Southern European, Latin, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, Asian cultures in general. I can't speak to the careful divisions in Europe, but what I see online suggests the English are more hospitable than the Danish, but less so than the Spanish.
But the English at least have a tradition of having someone for tea, whereas in the US someone comes over and unless a party was prepared for the standard beverage is "uh, I think I have like a flat 2-liter of Diet Coke in the fridge." Americans pour a lot of social emphasis into the event, the party, the special occasion, and there are high expectations indeed for cleanliness, decor, even theme -- the neurotic curse of the middle class. I presume that poorer or more socially transparent cultures are more comfortable with a relaxed attitude towards socializing and entertaining, without the expectations of having a tip-top living space. "Keeping up with the Joneses" runs deep in the American consciousness.
Of course, it's regional, and temperament-based. My aunt from Oklahoma has a large family room and a dining room with many tables, and she has cousins and neighbors and church members and people I don't even recognize coming in and out of her house every time I visit her. She's gregarious, and socially transparent, and you go to her house, and you're family.
She's also a landlady, and most of her work is maintaining her properties (she's a landlady who cleans and maintains the properties herself, sometimes enlisting my cousins to help), so she's home much of the time, and can be socially transparent because she invests much of her time into cleaning and maintaining her home as much as her rentals.
That's probably the biggest explanatory factor -- people's homes and entertaining have traditionally been the provenance of the homemaker, and contributing to third spaces, leading private societies, entertaining guests, and general hospitality were the recognized space for women to hold up the social order. With the entrance of women into the workplace and the two-income trap that makes this a requirement instead of an option, the intertia of middle class entertaining expectations on top of working feels to many like exhaustion rather than pleasure.
"I'm working a 40-hour job, caring for the children, and maintaining the home all at once and my husband doesn't help" (the "double burden") is almost a stock phrase in "why I divorced" stories, and to stack the expectations that people feel about properly entertaining guests on top of those tasks means they're the first to get cut. Not to mention the tension that men and women working 40+ hours a week leaves very little time for anyone to socialize, stacking children on top makes that harder, and then everyone is exhausted and who wants to go do a thing when you could not do a thing, or catch up on sleep over the weekend?
Women from cultures where there is a greater division between men's and women's roles, even if the women in question work or live in a western country, tend to follow that blueprint, and so entertaining and maintaining social connections are higher on the priority list. It isn't irrational the patterns that have occurred, and most people are cutting what I also would cut given the constraints people have been handed, but there are knock-on effects like the decline in entertaining and hospitality.
Mass media also contributes significantly: first radio, then television, then video gaming, now the internet. I'm sure some critics of mass entertainment (which were probably women's groups -- women have been talking about social issues much longer than they've been voting) at the introduction of each of these technologies were sounding alarms about how in the future people wouldn't talk to each other any more, and society would degrade as a result. Cyberpunk as a genre is partially a sustained criticism of the concept of being 'jacked-in' to media at the expense of flesh and blood.
And while the warnings of critics are often overblown or exaggerated, they often have a seed of prescience, even one that is never realized or acknowledged until the time is far too late.
It's easier to entertain yourself now than at any point in history, and when people can entertain themselves, 'entertaining' others feels like effort unnecessarily expended. And given the crunch on time I explained above, why would anyone expend effort unnecessarily?
When the magic internet rectangle supplies nearly endless content, literature, social concepts, news, and parasocial connections with people far brighter, more gregarious, and more attractive than anyone in your immediate social circle, why would anyone go outside and touch grass, or stop to chat with the neighbor? What do I, an introverted Catholic-lite who quotes internet memes the way my forefathers quoted the Bible, who's more familiar with esoteric technical specifications than local restaurants, and whose opinions are so far outside the Overton window they might as well be called defenestrated... well, what do I have in common with my fundamentalist Pentecostal neighbors who hate the Catholics nearly as much as the gays? About what am I supposed to talk to them? The weather? That sounds far less pleasurable than throwing internet comments out into the void at all of you.
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I think a lot of people are basically pretending they have social lives now but in fact spend all the time they can bedrotting with a screen. The men you just don't hear about, they drop out of the offline world completely, but many women still accept invitations from friends, go on dating apps, etc. when they're as stuck inside as a junkie in a traphouse.
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How old is she? If she has friends she should be getting invited, if not then you have bigger problems.
When it comes to flaking, apparently that's just bay area things. People have to cancel when things come up but in general if somone saw the time and place, and said they're coming, then they put it on the calendar, don't double book something else, and show up. Never been anywhere where this isn't the case.
She just turned seven, so I think it's the age where the protocol was for me to exchange numbers with her parents, they don't do things directly yet, but also I don't want to invite her and her parents, because that gets into awkward adults failing to get to know each other while their kids come over to have something solved every five minutes, which is probably why they also didn't.
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Presumably you want your daughter in pre-k more than the teacher does. What's with the high pressure sales tactics?
It's not often you get to see orientalism in the wild in AD 2026. I suppose she has never actually met an individual of the oriental persuasion, much less visited their house, much less visited a house in the orient, and might actually believe that when you attend a party in Shanghai the host will take your shoes off and wash your feet (happy ending presumably not included).
I've already signed her up for the Pre-K program six months ago, and would be happy to bring her in without siblings to introduce her to the teacher. It's the local public school, not like the bespoke private ones that are trying to keep the riff-raff out, it seems to be based in some idea from the legislators that it's easier for parents and less intimidating for the child for the teacher to come to them, and with all the language around cultural responsiveness, I want to say that this is not my culture.
Haha, yeah, it sounds more like what a pastor would say about Jesus washing his disciples feet.
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Entirely possible. Publicly funded preschool is dealing with a different crowd- and unlike many crowds, this is one where the institution often knows better than the parent(s)(and this is a very different thing from knowing best).
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I'll just say that I have never once had a woman not show up for a date after agreeing to a time and a place. Every other popular complaint seems valid, but this one is fake as far as I can tell.
Its common if you date using the apps, which is what I assume is going on.
Everyone uses the apps now. Are y'all only swiping right on Flakedy Ann or something?
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I think we've literally just had it too good for too long and people have gotten soft. You'd need WW2-style mass mobilization conditions to knock some sense into people.
I guess that tracks with community in former Yugoslavia and the former USSR areas staying intact better.
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