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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32510 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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What about, you know, having the grandparents living with their adult children, maybe unmarried siblings as well, or at least extended families living in relatively close proximity so you can go visit your sister/aunt/cousin and their kids and you get advice, help, and child minding where it's not you and your partner on your own with your first baby and only freakin' self help books to tell you what to do?

Sure, you could do this.

But this only kind of helps in some ways, and really hurts in others. Kids play well together; like cats, the difficulty of taking care of kids scales up nonlinearly. And many many people have iffy relationships with their families. One of the strengths of US life is that you don't have your parents breathing down your neck, which lets you make your own life and forge your own path and not constantly be taking care of your elders.

Finally, this exists in many parts of the world and empirically it is not working. If we're trying to solve the fertility problem, then I don't want to waste time and money on solutions that already aren't working.

The idea of "solve this problem" by making it so that a bunch of unrelated strangers all live in an apartment block is making me shake my head here.

The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. It doesn't take too much raising-children-together for those people to start feeling a lot like family; the tricky part, I think, would be figuring out how to match those people up in the first place.

The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb

That’s a made up saying from the 1990s lol

OTOH people have been saying blood is thicker than water since the 1600s

Makes sense in our atomised age that people look for made-up idioms to justify their atomization.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/147902/is-the-alleged-original-meaning-of-the-phrase-blood-is-thicker-than-water-real

That’s a made up saying from the 1990s lol

Maybe a bit gentler, if you please.

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