This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Birthrates: It's not (just) money, it's time
For over a decade now, sociologists have noted a curious quirk to birth rate data when sorted by income. While total fertility rates do decline with rising income (as has long been popular wisdom, depicted in eg. Idiocracy and so on), they do so only to a point. After a certain threshold, fertility rates shoot up again, as this chart shows. In the US (the above research is from 2022), this inflection point happens, depending on data, somewhere between $250,000 and $300,000 for white couples.
One interesting thing about fertility rates is that people always say they want more children than they have:
This is usually ignored because it is undone by revealed preferences in the richest societies on earth, or it is used as argumentative fodder for the left when they argue that fertility rates have declined because people can't afford as many children as they want (sometimes ridiculed given that people are vastly richer than in other nations or at other times when TFR has been much higher).
But maybe these two pieces of information do, together, tell us a little bit about why many PMC types in the West don't have more children, or children at all.
What happens at, say, $500,000 a year (in most of the US) that makes having three children so much easier? The answer seems obvious to me - affluent people can afford to spend time away from their children, and therefore feel more comfortable having (more of) them.
100 years ago, when up to a quarter of the working class in developed countries were employed as domestic servants, a middle-class mother who did not particularly want to spend all day, every day with her children did not have to do so. There were other women to handle that kind of thing. This was before most of these kind of women worked much, but even so, spending all day, every day with the children wasn't interesting. My grandmother, who grew up bourgeois in Berlin on the eve of the Second World War, remembered rarely ever seeing her mother as a young child until they had to flee to the US.
I grew up with rich people, and one of the interesting things one notices is that the people from the very wealthiest families, centimillionaires and billionaires, often marry very young and have children young. I know a number of (completely secular) rich white couples with three children aged 27-30, the time when many professional Americans are barely out of graduate degree programs or still stuck in a tough junior role or in residency. I'm still friends with a few of them, and the big thing that strikes me is how unchanged their lives are from many childless late-20s PMC people. They have nannies for the kids, so they can go back to work within a few months if they choose to. They have maternity nurses when the babies are first born, so they never need to wake up at night. They have people to look after the kids if they want to go to a summer wedding in Italy, or to a week skiing in Aspen. They can come and go from their homes as they please without worrying about who will look after the children, whose food, clothes, hygiene, trips to and from school and so on are handled by others. They see their children when they want to hang out with them, on their terms.
I understand, also, the British upper-middle and upper class urge to send kids to boarding school at a young age. Freed from daily parental obligation, relationships often grow stronger, not weaker. And parents are freed, again, to enjoy life on their own terms.
I think a substantial proportion of would-be parents, particularly in the PMC, don't particularly want to raise their own children, at least not all the time. They don't want to do the dirty work. Clearly the deal the super-rich have isn't economically viable to give to everyone else. But maybe some things are. State-funded boarding schools from a young age, state-funded daycare (open 24/7, not just during daytime on weekdays), state-funded maternity nursing so you can drop your baby off and visit it (or take it home occasionally) instead of not sleeping through the night for a year or two. I know this sounds insane, but I genuinely think this might lead more people to have (more) kids in the West.
How does this actually work? (Genuine question.) Are there specific agencies that get involved in this?
You would have a nanny or nannies who would do look after the children full-time while you’re away.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Since this is this week's general parenting subthread, I was just recently thinking about how having kids automatically makes you more of a normie than you were before.
Normie in the sense that the society still considers the normal mode of being to be having kids at some point, sure (even if this is fraying) - but also in the sense that, no matter what your political opinions, cultural and subcultural communities, religiousness or irreligiousness, place of living, level of neurotypicality etc., your baby will still eat, crap, sleep, cry and have to be bathed and clothed the same way as all other babies everywhere, and you suddenly feel affliation (and have an eternal topic to discuss) with all the other parents (particularly with kids the same age as yours) everywhere, no matter their political opinions, cultural and subcultural communities, religiousness or irreligiousness, place of living, level of neurotypicality etc.
Of course much of the previous also requires more free time to maintain (participating in meetings, going to gigs etc.) than one also has as a parent, even if you're the parent not directly in charge of the kids' day-to-day life, ie. usually the man. And no matter how many punky kids' clothes etc. you might buy as an affection, beyond a certain age kids just won't wear them. I'm reminded of occasionally seeing, at a playground near our old place, a couple with a man and a woman wearing basically a full black metal getup short of a corpsepaint - and accompanied by a daughter with your typical pastel Frozen Elsa princess shirt and a similar dress.
Of course, there's also going to be differences in how likely one is to have children on the basis of politics, subculture, religiousness etc. I remember seeing a Finnish comic where the main character of the comic and a friend are out and about, observing that one frequently sees hippie couples with kids but almost never goths with kids, and why is that? (The comic ends with a passing beautiful goth woman showing sharp vampire teeth and saying that goths have other methods of reproduction...)
More options
Context Copy link
I'd add this comment from the old subreddit by Dangerous_Psychology. It brings up an important aspect to all of this. After all, I'm sure there are many couples who want more than two children but cannot afford an SUV.
Also, and this is pure speculation, I think the pool of potential reliable and good nannies is relatively smaller everywhere due to the opioid epidemic, just the overall abuse of drugs both illegal and legal, rising rates of alcoholism and mental illness among single women etc., and the few who are available aren't cheap.
I also assume that the elderly are much less likely to suffer from mental and physical decline if they're upper-class, which means they're more available to help out with childcare.
But anyway, I don't think it's realistic to expect any married couple to do the dirty work of childcare all the time by themselves. Because this has not been the case historically anywhere.
I mean some of that is just high expectations. Illiterate centracas without papers are reasonably available as nannies and they're the same people that middle class families in 1900 employed to change diapers and the like, just browner. It's just now widely accepted among the sort of people who can afford any childcare assistance that working with children requires a college degree, when in 1900 even the royal family and the Rockefellers would've laughed you out of the room for suggesting it.
I am uncertain. I have not survey data to back me up, so maybe I am fooled by fictionalized portrayals, but I'd imagine a 19th century nanny (/ domestic servant doing nanny-adjacent tasks) coming from a lower-class background could still be a conscientious, quite functional person: live very "clean", possibly both she and employer finding it acceptable for her to live in a room room in employer's home, likelier than not to go church every Sunday morning and act with moral fiber of believing the sermon in her everyday tasks. In contrast, I have hard time imagining I could find a working class let alone genuine underclass person who is both still poor enough to accept the limited salary a person who is not a quite comfortable indeed can pay and yet trustworthy enough of a person to let them in my home. On the other hand, in context of the late 19th century, it is much easier to imagine to able to find that sort of person from "lower classes", considering how during the time frame in question, domestic service was still one of largest forms of employment, especially for women, considering the whole national population. Today a capable, conscientious woman has many other equally or better paying and certainly more respected jobs to consider.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Time is money. It seems a little strange to me to talk about all this while ignoring the context of the 1% having stolen all the economic growth of the last 40+ years for themselves (in the US at least, and to some extent in other places too).
This is a popular claim, but I don’t think it is true at all. People today are more prosperous than similar people 40 years ago, comparing like for like, ie. comparing non-divorced, employed, married people 40 years ago to similar people in same age range today.
See this, for example: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A794RX0Q048SBEA Top 1% of population is physically unable to consume so much.
More options
Context Copy link
I think part of what @2rafa is getting at is that it's more complicated than this. Yes economic growth in real wages has stagnated, but things are even worse than that because while economic growth has stagnated, social ties have also fractured. This means that especially for those who want to raise a family, the economic picture is not the whole story.
There are plenty of articles and well-sourced studies complaining about the economic disparity, but the disparity in time and help when it comes to raising children and starting a family is much more hidden and illegible. It's important to call attention to this phenomena as well.
Absolutely. I don't imagine that the social dimension can be viewed very much apart from the economic dimension though. Building ties take time. And to have time you need to have money. People also need the "third place". To establish a friendship you need to meet a person regularly in two or more places. For instance, home, work, or a 'third place'. If you get on well with someone at work, you cannot only meet them at work to take things further. And it may be impractical or feel weird to invite them straight home. Meeting them at a third place outside of work and home is often needed. There may be fewer third places than in the past, or less use of them, due to how cities and surburbs have been built, and also due to the internet I guess. In the US especially, there is far too much need for cars. It would be simpler to establish social ties if you could walk for 5 minutes to meet them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This doesn't sound insane, this sounds a lot like what the USSR was trying to do. For one thing, it didn't really work, as the birth rates kept falling even there. For the other thing, these places will be on average just as bad as state-funded regular schools or even worse. Maaaaybe it could work better as a charter system with a hard cap on the size of the facility. Like, one wet nurse for seven babies, no more than 50 babies per daycare.
As far as I know, state-funded boarding schools from a young age weren't widespread anywhere in the Soviet bloc.
You are correct, their widespread adoption was first stopped by Stalin, reintroduced by Khruschev and then stopped again by Brezhnev. The ones that remained as an option for neurotypical students were either aimed at nomadic people or were extremely selective magnet schools, even though Khruschev's original plans included their wide availability for single mothers.
And, I suppose, also introduced by him a couple of decades earlier. Or?
Less than decade, and by Lunacharsky and/or Kollontay, back when Stalin was people's commissar for nationalities.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My wife and I really enjoyed this post, after the wives club post I've finally explained this "online forum" I talk about sometimes. Anyways, it hit close to home.
I have always remained cognizant of how necessary it is to have breaks from watching a child all day and not getting to a point of frustration or annoyance with the task. I try to make sure I give my wife as much breaks as I can and try not to be selfish. Saying that I wish I could afford a nanny or something on a part-time basis.
Something that many of us with a working class background lean on is the support of family when it comes to balancing work, life, and childcare. We tried for awhile to have my MIL watch our son during the day. This worked for awhile until unfortunately she had a heart attack. My MIL is doing better now however caring for a now 18 month old during the day is off the table. My mother unfortunately has schizophrenia so it was always off the table to lean on her for childcare.
My BIL and his wife just had their second child. He is in the space force of all places and lives halfway across the country without any close family support and it sounds like a nightmare. His wife stays at home and their oldest child is autistic as we are learning. I'm happy to raise a family close to home because I cannot imagine not having any support, even for a few hours, especially with an autistic child.
A related thought I've often pondered since the WFH revolution is the broader effects it will have in child rearing. At first I largely thought that it would be a huge positive to young families at a time when its most needed. WFH allows a family to spend more time with their kids and potentially balance work and childcare, the best of both worlds. My wife and I tried to do this at first juggling work commitments and coordinating shifts, but eventually it became unsustainable and my wife decided to quit to care for our son, freeing me from time constraints and leaving me our families champion career wise. So maybe WFH is not the silver bullet I thought it would be to raising a family and both parents maintaining a career.
With respect to WFH I can only offer an anecdote. Young married couple in an apartment with two small children. The man is working from 'home', but everyday he needs to go to his mother's place to work from home, because the presence of the children make that impossible at their own home. Again, it's just an anecdote, but I'm sure there are many, many similar cases.
Yeah that's my experience as well. We have a larger home but the noises are distracting if I have to focus. I manage but maybe not that well.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
WFH is indeed not the silver bullet, although it does help. What's more interesting to me about WFH is what it allows for in terms of new possibilities.
The only real way to make raising a family make sense economically, without massive economic surplus or redistribution, is to live very closely beside people you trust enough to take care of your kids, and vice versa. Due to the fracturing of cities and dense communities into suburbs, as well as the hypermobile youth culture in the U.S., many young parents lost this close and tight knit group of fellows.
However with WFH becoming more standardized, it is far more feasible than any time in the past to have groups of like minded adults move into a neighborhood together, and build some of these communities. It will be difficult perhaps to convince like minded adults without some sort of coordinating framework like religion, but it is certainly possible. If birth rates continue to crater I suspect this type of situation will be the only way that non-religious cultures will survive the next century or so.
I agree with all your points. I traveled for work a lot before I settled down so I got that out of my system early fortunately. I thankfully had the foresight to know how much I would have to rely on my parents or my wives parents for childcare help and I moved equidistant between the two families. However as you have highlighted its important to be very close. Both of our families live about an hour away and while its manageable for them to come over (or vice-versa) every now and then, it becomes burdensome for any sustained period. It's only about an hour so maybe I am just being picky but I feel like that's right on the border of convenience for distance.
+1 on the young family commune though. We live mostly by retired boomers and the only young couple around so it would be nice to have others close by. My wife has been reaching out actually to other moms she buys used toys and clothes from on facebook marketplace for play dates so I am hopeful we can have other young family friends soon. We're also joining the catholic church so we're trying.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Look into a Mother's Helper - someone in middle school who is interested in small children but not old enough to babysit on their own. They can play with younger kids while your wife cleans up or sits. It can be a pretty affordable arrangement.
On the converse of the WFH thoughts - I have found WFH + Au Pair to be a very good combination. I'm able to nurse a baby while taking a meeting on my phone while the Au Pair plays with the older bunch. When things are quiet I can practice Hooked on Phonics with the kids. I'm there to handle disturbances, illnesses, etc. I have a good idea of how the kids are doing any given day, unlike at preschool which was like a black box to me. But if I need a day of focus I can get it.
That's not a bad idea I'll recommend it to my wife.
I am unfamiliar with the Au Pair business relationship however I imagine I cannot easily afford it, or would want to stretch my budget like that. Nonetheless it would be a non-starter in our home to have another female staying in the house. We tried that combination with my MIL and it was the only way I could see WFH + quality child-rearing working out and I wish we could have that again, but alas we have depleted our free childcare resources. I'm about to get a new job with a 25% travel req and a modest raise so maybe I can afford some sort of part-time nanny soon.
Anyways its good to see mothers on here and we enjoyed your other posts on this thread :)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yet there was also much more time in general to be devoted to childrearing, since there were clearly more children back then. Back in the 1900s, women weren't supposed to be in the workforce. Many were, especially poor women (and one could add domestic servants). But in general, they weren't supposed to have normal jobs like we have now and if they did, they were mostly dead-end jobs like being a secretary that they're expected to leave when they get married.
The total amount of time devoted to child-rearing has fallen significantly, as the female participation rate in the economy has increased. The male participation rate has fallen a little but not as much. If people are spending more time raising the GDP, they must be spending less time raising their children. Furthermore, time needed per child seems to have increased especially in middle-class settings. Children have more activities and structure in their lives now than they used to. Learning instruments, extracurricular learning, sports... as opposed to running around outside unsupervised.
You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. US Census has been running time use surveys for many decades now, which give us good data on what people actually spend their time on.
The trend is obvious: people spend much more time on active childcare today than they used to. Today, a mother working full time spends about as much time on childcare as stay at home moms used to 50 years ago. Hard to believe it, but it’s true.
In my personal experience, time spent on childcare doesn’t scale linearly with number of kids, and indeed plateaus pretty quickly. For example, when I visit my friends who also have kids of age similar to hours, I basically don’t need to do any child caring at all, they just play together and don’t need anything from me aside from occasional conflict resolution. This is a huge glaring contrast compared to times when we only had one, and it demanded constant attention, because it simply did not want to be left to play alone. As you get to 4-5+ kids, I imagine the older ones can be very helpful in caring for younger ones.
Thanks for pointing that out. It's a rather relevant issue in this context. I'd only add from experience that this, however, doesn't fully work when 3 or 5 children are together, as one will get ostracized or neglected by the others.
More options
Context Copy link
Exactly. There's pretty huge economies of scale in managing young children, whether it's between siblings, cousins or general neighborhood factors. Families drifting apart from each other, and the reproductive rate dropping as a whole, have essentially killed a lot of the positive feedback loops
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, this has been obvious to me for so long that I am surprised more people do not point it out. Until pretty recently, it was considered normal for people who could afford it to have hired help do a lot of the work of raising children. It is also possible that, as you suggest, in the past this was affordable for not just rich people but also some middle class people, and it is possible that it is not as affordable nowadays unless you are willing to cut the kind of corners that most people do not want to cut when hiring people who will be spending a lot of time around their children.
Nowadays, in the West at least, hired help usually has a more limited role in child-raising. Basically it is limited to babysitting when the parents are away and to schooling. The so-called K-12 education system is in large part just government-funded daycare.
An obvious at least partial solution to low fertility rates, if one cares about them, is to spread the annoying/boring parts of raising any one child among more people, whether those are relatives, friends, or hired help.
More options
Context Copy link
Personally I believe that solution to low birth rates will be state funded industrial production of human capital via artificial wombs(if AI won't make it irrelevant by this time). Women often don't want to struggle through pregnancy, parents don't want to spend time on necessary work related to children and automation in the sphere of humanoid robotics is very far from achieving affordable replacements for servants.
Facilities created for raising these state children could be used by individual parents, so would be similar to your idea of 24/7 daycare. This can be a great time to reform our "modern" education system that was largely created in 19th century Prussia to something more applicable to current technological environment and honest of it's role as basically daycare for teenagers.
I don’t think artificial wombs will have any effect on the birthrate because fear of pregnancy is a very minor contributor to low fertility. The vast majority of it is the costs of raising a child, which is less automatable.
I also think birth control/modern contraceptions allowing spontaneous, unplanned pregnancy to be massively minimized is a large factor, and the artificial womb doesn't really change that.
Couples are waiting till 'the time is right' to actually try and have a child, and the time is either never right or arrives at a point where the child is a lot harder to create due to fertility issues etc. The artificial womb doesn't do a ton to change that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Huxley's dystopia has many more problems apart from artificial wombs. Caste system and pacification of population by drugs do not necessarily stem from destruction of traditional family structure. But generally to me, this theme of "terrible utopian technology destroying traditional way of life" and "loss of authenticity/connection to nature" repeated ad nauseum by dystopia authors such as Huxley or author of The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is disgusting in its denial of how much better our lives are compared to our ancestors because of technologies and how their imagined societies are often better compared to us in the same way and for the same reasons.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A lot of this - distressingly - tracks with my middle class mom and family (of three). There was always a cadre of maids that functioned as elder sisters or aunts while she worked or ran the household (so much so that I allegedly had a feminine way of speaking as a kid, or so people told me). IIRC she was really intense with the young babies though. And then life goes on.
I never felt neglected, I guess there were just different expectations. Parents didn't have to be your best friend or around the clock caregiver. Kids were expected to be things you could let roam or throw at extended family members for
daycarefun. It especially helped cause we were relatively clustered and we had larger families. I imagine a ton more American middle class families were distant from their parents and other family too.More options
Context Copy link
I've talked about this before, but me and my wife have had two kids at a comparatively late age, ie. the younger one is 11 months and the older one is 3 years and we are around 40. If we could magically become ten years younger we might have another child, now there's no dice - not just because the age makes it unlikely, but because we just wouldn't have the stamina for three little ones.
While we don't have that much money (especially when compared to my assumptions about the general earnings of this forum), the time and energy issues are absolutely more crucial as to why we feel burdened, not only because we are getting older but also because the most natural "extra nurses" apart from day care - the grandparents - are old too, around 80 (and my father dead), and also live on the other side of the country.
Once one's a parent, one quickly realises that your friend circle just isn't that much help - the childless ones just don't seem reliable enough, and the ones with children tend to have their hands full with, well, their children, who are often equally as young as yours.
One less-discussed fertility thing might be the culture where it's almost a rite of passage, at least in educated circles, to not only move away from home but frequently to a whole different city from your parents. It's fun when you can go out drunk and party without fearing you'll run into your older relatives and they disapprove, but once you're a parent, the far-away grandparents thing starts getting acutely more real.
Is it normal in Finland for pensioners to troll the local bar district late at night?
But anyway, what I'm actually somewhat curious about is whether you and your spouse have the social expectation that your children and your married friends' children will regularly play together in (maybe) a few years or not. (I suppose they're currently too young for that.) I'm sure this is a relevant question, as this'd be a large help for everyone involved. But again, I don't know what the social mores are there.
My childhood hometown has 50 000 people and my wife’s has like 2 000. Neither has a bar district, as such.
My wife has sometimes had friends with kids over to play and the three-year old goes to day care, but we also just moved to a different part of the city, haven’t been able to switch day care yet, and the friends with kids live in different parts of the city or elsewhere in Finland.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I feel your comment. My wife and I are mid 30s with a 3 year old and a 1 year old. Luckily I think we have enough time to have one more. But looking back at my own childhood, I’m struck by how much more assistance my parents got from their parents than we get from mine (wife’s parents aren’t in the picture). I spent a whole lot of time with both sets of grandparents up to age five or so, every weekday really.
Same. It makes it a lot harder. It’s also crazy how unwilling my MIL is to help.
For now, it's a combination of "my wife sees asking my parents for help as a failure and imposition on her part" and "my parents just retired and are traveling literally all the time."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My mom visited my family recently and kept commenting on how busy I was, while I ran around trying to take care of my four kids (one a infant) while on maternity leave. She spent most of the time on the couch or "cleaning up" (really, messing up the careful system we have to make sure everything gets cleaned up.) She spent almost no time with the kids, let alone in a way that would have taken them off my hands. She was mostly determined to take posed photos of the kids, culminating a very staged attempt at getting a video of her reading a book to all the kids, keeping two of them up past their bed times. I don't think she learned anything from the experience, though the video is hard to watch with all the crying from the younger two.
I had an Au Pair, but she left the weekend before my mom showed up. It was a month early, and we would then have a gap between Au Pairs, but we didn't question her decision to leave too much. A week before she left, the Au Pair started asking me about my mom's visit. It turns out she had been under the impression that my Mom was coming over to take care of my kids, because that's what happened in her country when a new baby was born. I could only laugh.
My mom had me when she was 33. She has struggled with her weight since bearing kids and has low energy, was diagnosed with something wrong with her thyroid at some point. Playing with the kids would be hard for her on a physical level. I don't think she even has the strength to carry the 2 year old.
There are a lot of factors in lower fertility. Increased maternal age has effects for multiple generations, overall decline of health in the older population means less help to the next generation of mothers.
As someone with five kids (one special needs) and a mother in law who is similarly useless / kind of narcissistic, I was filled with second-hand rage reading this. Hang in there, that's really hard.
Yeah, I don't know why she thought the two month old would be interested in listening to her read... I think she has forgotten most of what it is like to have small kids. That thought gives me weird feelings. On the one hand, I know that one day most of my kids will be able to feed themselves breakfast and lunch, take their own baths, entertain themselves, and my role as a parent will be very different. I look forward to the role changing.
On the other hand, I want to be there for my kids when they have kids. If I forget what it's like, I will not be able to help as much. I'm already disappointed in Future Me's inevitable failure.
This was just the example that was easiest to convey. The most enraging thing was on a zoo trip. The zoo has a ski-lift-like ride where you can get a better view of the animals. My oldest, A, and second oldest, C, were tall enough to ride, but short enough that they needed a riding partner. My husband took C first, they got on the lift without a problem. I stayed with the younger two and the strollers.
My mom took A. While waiting for the chair lift to come up behind them, my mom kept trying to get A to look at me, yelling at me to take a photo, trying to get A to smile. The chair came behind them, my Mom sat on it easily, kept looking over my way trying to get me to photograph her. My daughter did not sit on the chair easily and was pushed forward. I kept shouting, "A! A!" helplessly behind three layers of steel gates and a long line. A ride attendant caught up and got my daughter on.
I was furious, muttered, "Stupid fucking woman cares more about photos than the life of her grandkid!" Mothers with young children heard me and glared. I was anxious, worried my daughter would fall off, pacing around until finally they came back around.
Not as bad, but we took my MIL with us on a very expensive kids vacation to a certain place in Florida.
It was amazing how negative my MIL was most of the time and how little she seemed to want to interact outside of taking “photos.” Her grandkids were having the time of their lives but she seemed incapable of connecting. I just don’t get it.
The modern west has rejected any sort of religious or moral system and replaced it wholesale with individualist, materialist nihilism. It shouldn't be a surprise that many people act this way.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is this meant to be a 'men are idiots and bad parents' thing? Why wouldn't the mothers be on side?
One can quite easily tell that you’re responding to a woman by the writing style.
And also the fact that /u/OracleOutlook mentioned that she was on maternity leave in a previous post in this subthread.
And also that on that same post the story began with ‘and my husband took c first’.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm a woman. People glared because I cursed in front of their small children.
I am not a smart man.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link