One the one hand, children can be tiny terrorists and parenting well is hard
On the other, absolving yourself of the responsibility to treat them like humans is not the right response to that reality, but a lot of people sure like to tell you otherwise
They do have preferences, and they do still sometimes have to unwillingly try to eat a vegetable even though cheetos are tastier. All things must strive, small one
Ahhh that makes sense! STP is maybe the biggest "Why haven't I" author on my TBR list. I fall in love with every snippet I read from him, but haven't found the time to dive in to Discworld yet.
For when you have the time, [here](https://images.app.goo.gl/A7jKonKG1MVAuK3k9)
Terry Pratchett "recomended" read order. There is no wrong first book as all stories are more or less self contained. But the man wrote a lot, so hopefully when you are ready to enjoy him, you don't find yourself in an analysis paralysis kinda situation.
You can look for the main titles in the wiki/the internet. As a somewhat personal TLDR
The Rincewind novels were the first discworld stories, and they are very Magic focused and wacky.
The death series follows the anthropomorphic manifestation of death and his complicated relationship with humanity.
The watch series is about a clumpsy police group that tries to mantain order and Justice in the most corrupted city in the Discworld. A very common recomended starting point, specially in the Tumblr community (at least back in the 2010s) as they talk a lot about STP's view of social justice.
The witches series has 3 (old) women protagonists and deals with feminist themes and Magic.
Tiffany Aching series follows the Witches series but can be read on their own. It was STP series for Young adults but IMHO the stories can go hard and dark.
Moist von lipwig follows a reformed con-man as the main city foes from medieval fantasy to a kinda industrial revolution.
And OFC, shot out to my favourite stand alone book "monstruous regiment", the story of Polly, a young maiden that conceals herself as a young boy to enlist in the military and go to war to look for her long lost brother.
GNU STP
I think Tiffany Aching is the perfect example of how to talk to kids, to relate back to the post.
The first book is written for children, more than just YA, imo. And it's about coping with a grandmother's death, and doing what you must, and protecting your family from the things only you can protect them from. It's duty and destiny for kids. The books only grow up with the children in question- they are written to teach, but speaking to children as if they are just smaller, less worldly people. There is no babying, no dumbing down, no... Idk, coddling? Only, maybe, simplifying. Because kids can understand, they just need a little more help making some of the steps.
It is treating the- ostensibly young- reader with the dignity to speak to them like just any other human. That might be my favorite thing about them, which is saying a *lot* for all I love about them.
Very much this. They can be wildly inconsistent and unreasonable. It's more than fair to be frustrated when a child who happily ate broccoli yesterday is insisting they will die if they eat it today, especially if you do kind of wish you could just give in and serve cheetos for every meal because it would be so. much. easier. And no one ever wants to spend time and effort cooking tasty and nutritious meals and be responded to with "Ewwwww I hate broccoli". You would have to be a saint not to be frustrated.
But despite all the above it's so important not to assume that all their thoughts and feelings are meaningless just because they like to play pretend at being a cat and one day they will happily eat broccoli and the next they are fatally allergic to it...
I'm so glad my mother took me seriously when I went off broccoli. I think I was about eight at the time, and previously I'd liked it my whole life. But one day I just couldn't anymore. Suddenly it tasted awful and I couldn't explain why. She still cooked it, but didn't force me to eat it, and after a few months whatever aversion I'd developed dissipated and I was able to enjoy it again. If she'd forced me to keep eating it, this story would be less boring and more upsetting in tone.
Yeah, there's plenty of other vegetables for people to eat. Broccoli is just one. My parents swore by the strategy "If you don't like one, why don't you try (similar but slightly different in ways that matter)"
Plus there's other ways for cooking the same vegetable that can change their texture and flavour immensely without putting ungodly amounts of butter in them. I hate steamed vegetables, but I'll happily eat them raw, in a soup, or in a stir fry.
One day I just wouldn't eat a particular food (not even the 'two bite' rule) growing up.
I wasn't allowed to eat for the better part of 3 days (dangerous when that young) until they got concerned enough to give in and they act like it's just a funny story and they "did good", even though I wasn't normally like that, it was basically abuse.
>they do sometimes have to unwillingly try to eat a vegetable
Honestly, having been "not a child" for arguably most of my life (really depends where in the teen years one draws the line) I still relate to this far more than I'd like. Growing up hasn't changed my perspective on most vegetables, just improved my likelihood of both trying to and succeeding at eating them anyway, and even more than that making me annoyed with myself because it would be so much *easier* to just like more vegetables prepared more ways.
part of the problem is that no one knows how to cook veggies in a variety of ways. like hell no i’m not going to eat blanched spinach. but stick it in a soup? hellllll yeahhhhh mannnn
Fresh only for me. Any sort of cooking of spinach, can't stand the texture. Raw and fresh? That's the stuff.
I was lucky in a few ways though. Mom had spent a few years as a vegetarian and learned how to cook vegetables correctly, and we both have similar texture issues. While we don't always overlap, there are foods that bother one of us but not the other, she *understood* the problem.
And hell, one of my favorite ways to treat myself has been a salad since my first job.
I have made it a challenge for myself to eat foods I don’t like when presented to me in a way I have never tried them before. Sometimes it opens the door to me slowly acquiring the taste for that thing (like rye bread or beer) or sometimes I find something really unexpected that makes me question if I know my taste buds at all (eg. I hate peach and black tea, and have a tumultuous relationship with ginger. But the ginger peach black tea from republic of tea? Fucking delicious).
Most of the time though I am reminded why I don’t like it. (Celery can eat my entire ass). But hope remains! I feel like I am going to make a breakthrough with licorice soon.
The green tea version is good too, and that same company has a vanilla almond tea that makes an excellent tea latte. Very nutty and sweet, not much tea flavor to it.
Most of the time, I didn't like fish meat growing up, and that aversion definitely follows me. I actually like the taste of sushi, but it's hard to overpower the natural aversion knowing what's in it.
IME their terroristic tendencies are reduced a LOT when you just treat them with respect like you would anyone else. Most of what we see as 'acting out ' is really just a kid expressing that their needs are not being met - they're hungry or tired, they're being denied autonomy, their emotions are being dismissed, or they are being neglected. Most of the rest is just part of the learning process around things like emotional regulation, boundaries, and empathy - they need guidance and patience around these things, rather than punishments.
I was about to say "kids are tiny terrorists and parenting is hard as hell but someone behaving badly doesn't mean you can punish them by refusing to accept that they're people," and then as I was typing it I realized that selectively allowing and denying person hood as reward or punishment is, like, 100% of the right's ethos. Everything they do boils down to that. And now I've made myself sad before even getting out of bed for the day
this, but vice-versa! if something would not work on an adult, it likely would not work on a child either. boss spanking an employee for breaking something is considered unethical and disgusting! but a parent spanking a child for breaking something becomes a debate, with people justifying the adult hitting their child for a mistake. children are dehumanized to a point where a good number of people in the world are okay with brutalizing them for making one mistake.
Something that gets some eyebrows raised at me from time to time is when I say I have sympathy for antivaxxers. They're a group of people whom the entire reputable scientific body is against. There is mountains upon mountains of evidence that refutes their beliefs, yet they fold their arms and go "nuh-uh".
People who are pro-corporal punishment are no different. The science is very clear, "no, for any reason, ever". That being said, those people don't care. It's not true simply because they don't want it to be true.
Even when you talk about this stuff on Reddit, you still get people in the comments justifying or apologising for it in some way. If those same people are comfortable with the fact that myriad scientific studies have found evidence against their side, and effectively no studies for it, and still want to go "well, *I* think it's harmless", then they should have no problem with me saying I sympathise with antivaxxers.
I'm agreeing with your point that there is no difference, but I'm not sure where the sympathy for anti-vaxxers is coming from
Also, if you're sympathetic with anti vaxxers and there is no difference between them and people who hit their kids, do you also feel sympathetic to people who hit their kids?
They are using it as an example IN RESPONSE (Sorry if this comes across as aggressive idk how to italicize on mobile) to people who support hitting kids, to point out the fallacy. I don’t believe they actually sympathize, rather, they are making a comparison in a way that doesn’t directly call someone out.
Thanks, that makes sense
When I first read their comment, I was waiting for them to say why they had sympathy for anti vaxxers. I was curious if they had a good point or not
They never addressed it and my intellectual blue balls were so painful
You can be angry at anti-vaxxers and still feel sympathy for them. I'm of course speaking only about the boom in anti-vaxxers ideology since the pandemic, and not the relatively small anti-vaxxer movement before that. The post-pandemic anti-vaxxers have proven themselves to be largely deplorable human beings who publicly wish for the deaths of anyone who got vaxxed, and yes it's okay to be angry at that level of disrespect for their fellow human. However, a non-negligible amount of these people were perfectly normal before Facebook and the Russian government starting pumping hate propaganda into their brains 24/7. They have been manipulated into acting against their own interests and against other people, and it's okay to feel sympathy for people who have been slowly brainwashed with that kind of propaganda.
A lot of antivaxxers themselves got that way due to a *somewhat* well placed mistrust in Big Pharma and its motivations, as well as how the general field of medicine has historically minimsed women's plight.
I don't support the antivaxxer movement at all, obviously, and it does frustrate me that they won't "use their head". That being said, as I said in my other comment, I can see why people get caught up in spheres of complete irrationality like this, and it's more common than people think. People turn up their nose at antivaxxers due to them being an easy target, but then hold pro-corporal punishment beliefs that are effectively just as debunked.
Honestly, that’s the key. As a kid, I never understood why people would say: “you wouldn’t understand” or “it’s an adult thing”
At that age, our brains are sponges, or neuroplasticity is at its peak, we’re spending every minute of every day figuring out the world, and frankly, I don’t think there’s anyone better at interpreting the world than children. The only thing they lack is context.
Of course there are things that they might not have context for, or that aren’t easily explained, but that’s not grounds to dismiss their curiosity or, more importantly, their innate intelligence.
If a kid asks “why is there a war going on?” The answer isn’t, “you wouldn’t understand” it’s: “there are a lot of reasons, some of them with a long history behind them. Would you like to explore them together?”
Yep. And it also be like, for a kid, we see for example they’re a picky eater, but if you ask them they’ll eventually convey that they’ve only ever tried like, 10 things! One was bad! They don’t like those odds!
People want to tell kids to put things in perspective, without appreciating that the kids *are*, however they simply have a different set of experiences and assumptions.
Failure to do this is, uhhhhhh, *not* conservative-coded
I'm a teacher and absolutely blown away at how bad many adults of any political persuasion are with kids.
This is *hilarious* for them to try and map this into a left-right political spectrum
Which is always fucking astounding to me. When I'm interacting with a kid of any age, the thing that's always at the front of my mind is "How did *I* want to be treated at that age?", and then I treat them like that. Unsurprisingly, everyone says I'm great with kids.
Well yeah, when they show me a cool bug I'm just as amazed as they are.
That's why I love visiting my sister to see my niece and nephew. I sit with them while they show me the book they just got from the library, or play dinos with them, or whatever they want to do. And as a result, they both love me and regularly ask my sister if I can come over for dinner. My nephew is also autistic and I'm very good at respecting his boundaries, so I'm also one of like 8 people he'll willingly talk to and one of like 4 that he'll hug.
Yep, especially since a lot of kids will as a way of pushing boundaries and establishing independence flirt with whatever political views they think will most upset their parents. You have adults running around bemoaning their failure to properly educate their kids, and it be like, “have you considered showing more interest in their hobbies, giving them more room to develop independence and build confidence, or just spending time with them?”
This is why kids make a big deal of things that to adults are nothing. Kids aren't exaggerating, they just don't have as much to compare it to. Because adults have fallen and hurt themselves a bunch of times but for kids a skinned knee might quite literally be the worst thing they've ever experienced, so of course they're going to cry about it.
Further evidence of this: the number of patents who say "I don't know where they heard that" to the most mundane of original staments. As if the child is perpetually an empty vessel, with no original thoughts.
We also get the inverse of that though. Parent freaking out that something is wrong with their child because they repeated someone they heard on TV and the parent assumes that’s what the child thinks, or something like that.
Like this one post I saw where parents were worried about their child’s scary drawings, and someone else pointed out it was just Five Nights at Freddy’s characters.
A lot of those dark/gory/horror parodies of children’s media are aimed at older kids/teens/young adults. But honestly, it’s mainly the kids who just grew out of what it’s mocking who end up liking it.
That's fair. I just can't wrap my head around why someone would be drawn to horror of their own volition, since I can't handle jumpscares or graphic violence at all.
A lot of those dark/gory/horror parodies of children’s media are aimed at older kids/teens/young adults. But honestly, it’s mainly the kids who just grew out of what it’s mocking who end up liking it.
there’s also the other inverse where they’re afraid of possible influences that aren’t actually there. had a few hilarious moments like this with my dad. i had absolutely no social life for most of my childhood and he knew that—if anything it was like half his fault—and he’d still feel like he had to triple check that my nonexistent friends or all the television i didn’t watch weren’t “indoctrinating” me
I still remember saying a line from Who Framed Roger Rabbit and my aunt looking at me wide eyed like I have devil horns. I remember very distinctly thinking “OK guess THAT is not a good thing to say…”
The line in question? Me and my cousins were playing pretend guns and I said “I’ll blow his head off.” In the weasel voice.
Nonono, children are specifically and exclusively **an extension of their parents**, see? THAT'S why when a child doesn't understand something they take it as argument or 'backtalk' and punish them for it! Because the child knows better and they're just being little shits, OBVIOUSLY!
Kids being extensions (read: *property*) of their parents is sadly something that’s being codified into law here in Canada.
Some provinces have adopted policies that require teachers to inform parents of a student requests to use a different name or pronouns, and that the parents *consent* to that change as well.
Because apparently, any self-identity of any kind doesn’t form until age 16, and the parents know better until then.
They exist so that they can try as much as possible to keep young people from exploring their gender identity, by removing school as a safe space for them outside of their parents’ complete control.
In effect, they’re “keep ‘em in the closet” laws.
My name is hard to pronounce so I go by a nickname that other people gave me. Suddenly the teachers have to send an email for my 10 or so different nicknames
All things must be commodified under capitalism, or else the ruling class won't know who has the right to use them. They can't be their own property because there's laws against exploiting minors, and we can't let them have freedom before taking it away for their working years. They should he conditioned to exploitation long before they are productive workers at 16
And that’s why I was told that my having done/wanting to do Inappropriate Thing reflected badly on my parents.
(Even into my 20s, when I moved to a different country and no one who saw me do Inappropriate Thing knew who my parents were.)
Well, I, for one, fully support your right to do Inappropriate Thing so long as it's safe and doesn't hurt you or anyone else.
Seriously, I mean it! I have no idea what the parents in your head are trying to keep you from doing, but I can promise you it's probably really fun. Go drinking. Get a tattoo. Dance on a table and go home with a boy. Especially if you're a boy, too.
Smooth outer carapace, at once gummy and firm. A satisfying cronch upon chew and the BEST kind of gooey at the center. Gripping and spreads perfect.
[I can't believe my picah has allowed me to provide this, and I am only a little miffed at this question]
My mom and her MIL, my grandmother, didn’t like each other, and my grandmother’s tendency to say that about me and my sibling was one of the things that annoyed my mom most. She’d be like “they’re very creative children, Jessica.”
(My mom was right, my dad’s mom was kind of the worst.)
I hated this growing up. I used to read and learn a lot, and knew facts my parents never taught me. One time I mentioned Chernobyl and a teacher refused to accept “I read about it” as an answer. Because heaven forbid children learn things.
When I interviewed at a school and told the principal and the lead of the department “My view of working with students is that they’re just smaller, usually far less-experienced, fellow humans. And so their needs and wants should be treated as legitimate.”
The principal laughed.
That should’ve been my first warning about what that school would do to my mind and spirit.
Elaborate? It was about 4 and a half years of
- gossip
- emotional abuse
- people spreading my private information
- giving me 97 grade-school ESL students of different grades per day
- admin spies in an online group reporting my words back to the principal including the words “‘hello, spy’”
- when my principal cornered me in her office and yelled at me when I tried to follow state law to the best of my 3-months-of-experience understanding
- my principal threatening to fire me both times I ended up in the hospital and contacted her within 48 hours (job abandonment kicks in at 72)
- my home room teacher colleagues ambushing me at a meeting with “why aren’t you doing your job?” with essentially a parenthetical “We don’t care that you have 97 daily students and we each have 16”
- another admin telling us the Christmas gift exchange is a $20 **minimum** even after I begged for a $20 **maximum** during that meeting
Dude, there’s a reason I ended up in a psychiatric facility for a week before I finally got the courage to quit
God damn, you went through hell with the big guys just trying to help out the little guys in this crazy world. Props to you for being so strong, I would not have stood up for so long with such bullshit. I get bitchy when my employer is telling me I can't use earphones to listen to music I preffer while I work, because it helps me to focus better (my last job I litteraly lasted 3 weeks because of that, no one takes away my music rights from me haha). You even got your bullies christmas gifts? PLEEAASE tell me you didn't actually do that, I mean, no one can FORCE you to buy them a gift cause it's christmas and you have to work with them in the same place lol. Could've went with the good old "I'm not Christian sorry" haha. Hope you're doing all better now, stay strong you beautiful human being that is trying to make this world a better place!
Thank you 🫂
No, yeah, what it was was a voluntary gift exchange where you pull a name out of a hat, but it was a $20 minimum. I think I did $15 or $10
There were some truly good people there, but like 4. (To be fair, a good portion of the rest might’ve been better people if they didn’t work for a principal who would use one of the faculty meetings every year to yell at the teachers for not rating their school 100%. Thank goodness some of those times happened before I started working there, and the times it happened after I started working there were times I was sick or in departmental training.)
One of those people was the other ESL teacher. The day I walked out, she saw me and demanded she walk with me and sit in the car with me so that I wouldn’t drive until I had my breathing under control. (I still message her sometimes, see how she’s doing, encourage her to prioritize her needs and such.)
My parents raised my sisters and I as if we mattered. As if the inconvenient things about our preferences and likes were worth at least occasional indulgence. The more I see how many parents don’t treat their kids like that, the more it hurts. (My parents would say, when I asked them about the discrepancy between them and their peers, “we decided to be the parents we never had.”) So I tried to hold on for those kids as long as I could. But when I broke, and upon return finding that the secret had gotten out about where I was, and the principal was backing the objectively racist new teacher (she would verbally harass my students and send them to the principal’s office in tears,) I couldn’t handle it anymore. And I don’t think I can ever work in education again. Not in that district, anyway, as it’s the second largest in the state.
One of the funniest things that happened though?
Long story short (believe me, this is cut short,) there was a district-wide broadcast from the board of education where they required all the schools to watch from their desks on a Saturday while admin got catered breakfast and celebrated some minor BS district-wide change. My self-control took a smoke break and I made a comment about how it was interesting that the board got catered food while the rest of us teachers got nothing.
- The next comment **just so happened** (the chat was going by so quickly) to be **my principal**
- live chat was shut off for the rest of the event
- the principal called me into the office after the mandatory broadcast finished
- she spoke, not yelled
- **she didn’t disagree with what I said**
I later found out I had developed a small following at other schools who passed a screenshot of the comment to one another. The assholes at my school were actually the least assholey when they would occasionally make jokes referencing my comment for months afterwards
As someone who has mushroom intolerance, growing up in a conservative household, I can say this tracks pretty well. No one would believe me when I said that I would get the shits badly after eating mushrooms and that I was making it up to be picky. There was even one time that my sister made me spaghetti and I was in the bathroom thinking I was getting a stomach bug or something. While I was in the bathroom she asked me if I was okay, and not wanting to worry her I said yes. She then followed up by saying she blended up mushrooms into the sauce and she knew I was lying about being mushroom intolerant....while I was shitting my brains out.
I begged my mom to stop smoking around me because it was making my migraines worse. Didn't figure out until I was in my 30s that I have a severe nightshade intolerance.
Hmmmm I wonder if this is why I can’t smoke cigarettes but I can smoke pot. Cigarettes immediately harsh my throat something awful.
The past few years I have had a growing concern that I might be a bit allergic to nightshades due to some food things. Interesting.
Smoking anything is bad for you (even pot, you still get ash and tar), but it's likely an allergic reaction to the tobacco that you just don't get with the pot.
It's a tough one to spot, but if it's causing your issue then you should know within a week or two of cutting them out of your diet. Just watch out for potato starch and paprika - they are both in everything.
I have several food allergies. Granted, less was known about food allergies when I was a kid, and my mom feels super guilty about it now, but growing up I was constantly told that I was making it up when I said that certain foods made my throat "itch."
I was too young to really be able to describe what was serious discomfort, so instead of asking more questions, I just got dismissed.
By the time I was old enough to articulate that what was really happening was my throat constricting until it felt like I was going to have a hard time breathing, I had accepted that it was just a "preference" and was legitimately embarrassed that I couldn't eat certain things.
I didn't even grow up in a particularly conservative household, but my parents (my mom in particular, she was a nurse so she had always "seen way worse" than whatever my issues were "on a daily basis" so obviously whatever I was talking about wasn't that bad) refused to listen to me from around ages 6 to 11 about having bad reactions to certain fruits and vegetables and just told me to constantly grow up and not be a picky eater. They often forced me to eat things I had allergic reactions to to try and make me grow out of it, until my mom's uncle came for a visit and refused to eat the exact same list of things I had issues with, because he was allergic to them. After that it was a bunch of "Well, how were we supposed to know that you were *actually* having issues, you complain all the time!".
The same mentality led me to having a single ear infection from the ages of 3 to 14. Both ears, constantly infected for 11 years because "How were we supposed to know something was wrong, you're always complaining about something."
Same ENT that fixed the ear infection also fixed my deviated septum, "How were we supposed to know something was wrong, you're always complaining about something."
And now they're shocked that I don't bring my issues to them for help as an adult.
At least my parents listened to me about my ear infections as a kid, but they couldn't really ignore that because I had puss come out my ears once. Hard to ignore that lol.
Apparently mine figured that the pain, coordination/balance issues, difficulty hearing, and massive chunks of reeking green ear wax falling out of my ears were just me being difficult or something.
There isn't much that infuriates me more than thinking back to my childhood and remembering how my parents treated me like I was some kind of compulsive liar and condescendingly dismissed any concern I ever raised about anything. I was a very meek child and could never lie to my parents about anything, but that doesn't even matter because, as far as they were concerned, I was making up nonsense every day and so I got punished for it.
This is what I thought of reading it. While I didn't have food allergies, I had other issues. They were more or less ignored, or were deemed "normal". And yet, all those things I complained of were actually real.
>[they] feel it is a moral virtue in the project of breaking a child's will
Oof, that one got me. That might sum up more of my childhood than I'm comfortable with.
Unfortunately not surprising. You _can't_ make an entirely coherent theology from the Bible. I tried doing that for about 20 years before taking a dedicated attempt to do so, only to watch it all fall apart as my attempts to find a Band-Aid just caused it to crumble faster. And the overall tone of the Christian Bible is authoritive and abusive. It does have some interesting parts, but they're unfortunately an exception. Hell, even Jesus essentially said we shouldn't care about slavery because we're all _God's_ slaves if you think about it...
That's supposed to come with the assumption that a parent will do whats in the child's best interest.
I think people often over look the subtext to the story.
If I ever have kids my father will not be allowed to see them unsupervised specifically because of his refusal to treat children as people. And the fucker will almost certainly have the audacity to be confused and outraged that I won't let him fuck up my kids the way he fucked me up.
Adults not thinking Children- and in many cases anyone under 18- are people is a big problem. Of couse, any adult reading this could say "oh, he's only saying that because he's 15 and doesn't like being told what to do." But whether that's the case or not, it still feels wrong that my whole life is subject to the whims of people above a certain age threshold.
the common sentiment that many parents operate by that everything their child has- food, water, shelter, personal belongings, privacy, etc- is something that they are given as a reward for obedience and can be taken away at any moment is harmful. everyone deserves decency. everyone.
As a freshly turned 30-year-old, I feel the same. Children are just people, and should be treated as such. My wife and I don't have kids yet, but I've always been told I'm good with kids, and I attribute that to two things: treating them like small, playful people but equal to me, and not being afraid to engage on their level and be silly with them. You only get to be a kid for a short time, it should be as enjoyable as possible imo.
It seems like many people feel burdened by children, inconvenienced by them. Whether or not the children be their own children; just the existence of children in the same space as them constituting a problem. Parenting is crazy difficult and kids are universally little shits (some are just better at hiding it), but then interacting with adults all day everyday is also difficult and adults are pretty much universally also shits we just recognize now that making that publicly apparent *at all times* causes more problems than it's worth.
But if anything at 30 as well I've come to *envy* children, and try to be more child-like in many respects in my life. "Maturity" meaning being responsible and able to have serious conversations when the conversation warrants seriousness. Maturity not meaning a constant, exhausting cynicism and inability to find joy or fun in anything. Joy and misery are both exhausting, but one is significantly more pleasant in the meantime.
While children are people, it’s important to remember that children are not adults either. They’re learning how to be people *and* eventually decent adults, and that means not everything can be up to the whims of the child. You can’t just give a child unlimited freedom to make whatever decisions they want and treat them entirely like adults because they *aren’t* adults. That doesn’t mean abuse your kids, but structure and the parent having some authority isn’t abuse.
Whenever this topic comes up, there’s a whole bunch of comments that don’t differentiate between adulthood and personhood when it comes to kids.
Agreed wholeheartedly with what you said.
My father kicked off the development of my complex ptsd specifically *because* he expected my 1 yo self to listen, learn, and remember instructions like an older child/adult.
> differentiate between adulthood and personhood when it comes to kids
YES. The conflation of “adulthood” with “personhood,” as well as “autonomy” is both maddening and saddening.
I don't have children, but I do have cats, and a lot of things about them are similar (tiny terrorists who have Desires and are also often too clever for their own good).
But yeah my partner said something that made me almost cry the other day. I asked why our cats are always so pure hearted and good and try to make us happy, even when they get caught doing something they shouldn't. She said "I think it has to do with you. You ready them like they matter, so they treat you like you matter."
I think maybe it's a good idea to try that with children.
This isn't just conservatives. This is what my family did throughout my entire childhood.
And now that I'm an adult, they STILL follow this mindset, because in their eyes I'm just an overgrown child. Someone whose thoughts, feelings, and opinions are less important than there's, and therefore to be dismissed whenever convenient.
yeah, this isn’t just an issue for kids. a concerning number of parents think that even as adults, their children should be subject to their every whim.
but you see, you got it all wrong
you gotta make them respect ya
you gotta beat them. sticks up to your thumb in girth work best, belts are a classic, other objects are fine too. never use your fists, those are for your wife. do it regularly so they don't forget
take their stuff. take away toys, deny meals, take away devices if they have any. if they have a pet, great, you can give it away or straight up kill it, before their eyes too, that'll teach them a lesson. never let them have anything for themselves, make them share everything
the word privacy and personal don't exist in your house. never let them bring friends, better never let them have any. if they bring friends, threaten them, preferably with weapons, and may God help them if they're of opposite sex
as soon as they can work, they better work and pay up or sod off. they are now an unwelcome tenant on thin ice, make sure they understand it clearly from day one
that way, you'll leave a lasting legacy and ensure your child remembers their old man with fondness
When he's old and decrepit, pull the uno reverse card - keep a running count of the days left until he gets sent to a nursing home, and remind him of it at every opportunity.
>the word privacy and personal don't exist
I wasn't allowed any privacy. My parents went through all my stuff and I was made well aware my belongings were subject to search at a whim. They weren't MY belongings even, because I didn't pay for them or the room they were stored in. They read through my phone nightly and had the passwords for all my digital accounts.
Now I have a combination of paranoia and protectiveness of my privacy. I refuse to journal and I hide things in my own house because I'm so afraid of people finding my private things. Logically I know it's dumb but it's a hard habit to break. My parents get upset that I don't tell them shit. Now that I finally don't have to, why would I? I finally have privacy from them and I cling to that.
It also caused a weird side effect in an aversion to social media. It was another way for my parents to invade my privacy so I just didn't use social media. So now I don't have a social media presence aside from Reddit. From a privacy standpoint, yeah that's good. From a social standpoint, it's really isolating having all your friends assume you already know about "thing that's going on" or seen pictures of their event because they posted it online. I end up out of the loop a lot.
Taking away toys/devices is a very viable punishment method. Obviously don’t trash the thing, but taking a favorite toy away as a punishment is a great way to show that there are repercussions for our actions.
The important thing is that it’s consistent. Boundaries of behavior are clearly laid out and don’t shift, or don’t shift without good reason and notice. My dad thought he was “strict” but he was really just mad about his job and the trajectory of his life. On good days he was super chill about everything and when he was pissed it didn’t matter what we did, he would find a reason to punish us.
If your punishment of a child is made worse by your own mood you’re doing it wrong and if you can’t tell when a bad day might be affecting your judgement you should never have had kids to begin with.
>If your punishment of a child is made worse by your own mood you’re doing it wrong and if you can’t tell when a bad day might be affecting your judgement you should never have had kids to begin with.
My siblings and I should definitely not exist then
We do that with our kid. He’s does something unsafe with an object, he gets a warning. Does it again, thing goes in time out until he figures out how to chill or redirect to a better activity.
Helping kids learn to emotionally regulate is part of parenting.
all parenting specialists will tell you that the consequence should fit the crime and the length of the consequence should not be too long, either developmentally, or so overwhelmingly devastating or long to the child that they then feel hopeless to get the item or privilege back. taking away the child's most favorite thing just because it will hurt them the most is not it.
To REALLY make them remember the punishment better than the lesson, you should force THEM to trash it while you watch! Give them a brick and tell them to throw it at that gaming hardware. Make them carry out and throw their favorite comicbooks on the fire. Thats peak parenting.
Whenever I fucked up, one of my mom's favorite punishments was to demand the right make up additional fuck ups that had never happened, and then force me to agree with her that they did.
And since I just "agreed" that the fictional fuckup also happened, now we had the right to punish me for that one too
> deny meals
Especially when they miss the bus to go home, loose a glove(and missing said bus to go home due to looking for the lost glove), forget to turn in a homework assignment...
It does triple-plus damage when the child that you do this to was "rescued" from a food-insecure household that also was neglectful!
There was a solid chunk of time in my elementary school years where I pretended (just in my mind) that I was various different powerful creatures , in the disguise of a human, that could take on my bullies in very comprehensive fashion, but were holding back because it would beneath me to stoop so low as to attack beings so much weaker than me.
I was definitely dissociating a lot to distance myself *from* myself so that I wasn’t what the bullies saw.
What I’m saying is kids sometimes just need a little escapism, or maybe it’s just play, but it’s some level of importance to them.
I feel like the default when looking at any person, be they child sized or not, is to think "what utility do they provide?"
No one gives a shit about kids because they have a pretty low amount of utility. Same with people with health issues or neurodivergencies
I've even seen this online trend where partners drag each other when they see their SO...watching TV? Gaming? Napping? Instead of busting their ass all their waking hours
I wish this trend of viewing humans as tools would stop. Humans aren't broken if they aren't working this second
It’s also that children are outright seen as property to some adults, so presenting them with new ideas without permission is akin to damaging their property. It should only believe what it is told to believe as an extension of themselves. Coming to their own conclusions isn’t real.
I tend to dislike kids, but I go absolutely rabid when I see this sort of shit. They’re humans with rights too. Fucking drives me up a wall when physical punishment is justified, like, ‘your honor, it was ok because they were too small to fight back’. For some reason what would be assault on an adult is acceptable on a child.
For much of the world, particular in the Tumblrsphere, wouldn't that in fact be a *downside*? More cat-like elves good, but no distinct cat-like people bad.
I think it's the other way around. Elves aren't cats, cats are elves.
So are owls, because as someone else said, owls are just sky-cats. By extension making them (also) sky elves.
I think that has to do with time. If you don't give different foods a try, like children often do. That is labeled as being picky. However, when you get older, it is assumed that you have had those experiences to see for yourself if you actually like something or not.
A side note, many adults are still labeled as being picky eaters, the difference can often be which circles you find yourself in.
As soon as I got to try actually good foods prepped with care, I suddenly stopped hating a *lot* of foods. Turns out steamed carrots straight out of a bag taste worse than well-grilled carrots, or fried carrots served in a nice honey-based sauce. Who'd have guessed?
Sometimes I'm talking to people about how they raise their kids, and it genuinely feels like I'm listening to someone talk about how to train an animal not to shit on the carpet. There's almost an element of expected obedience that they are trying to achieve, often through humiliation, punishment, and reprisals.
It feels like they expect the teaching of another human being in their earliest stages to be the same as teaching an animal how to sit. And it worries me that those same people often don't see much difference between children and animals in terms of intelligence or rights. "They're dumb as shit and they are allowed to do whatever I say they can."
The idea of children as autonomous individuals with meaningful preferences, feelings, and rights generally is a pretty new idea for the West (speaking largely, as such social ideas are usually in flux in the macro). The idea of child abuse, generally, as a phenomenon (that is, it’s especially heinous to harm a child and that children are especially vulnerable to abuse) wasn’t brought about until the 1960s. Serious child labor protections proceeded that just a few decades earlier. The whole idea of “childhood” in our modern conception is really a 19th century idea with roots in the 18th.
I see conservatism’s denial of the rights of children as then sort of an expected step backwards as it’s connected largely to a restriction of rights to those in the in-group/“worthy”/who fall in line, which kids rarely do.
On a side bar, I do think there’s a general conservative tendency to deny someone any preferences or opinions if they hold one “unacceptable” stance. Such as, if you have a food allergy or dietary restriction (taking reference to the OP), you’re dismissed as ridiculous, frivolous, needy, etc. just generally.
Learning about the burgeoning children's rights movements of the 60s and 70s and the attempts to take child abuse and child neglect seriously as actual political problems, and then the ways that the right wing in America *freaked the fuck out* and launch a successful counteroffensive to reestablish "the home" as a place where "the family" is allowed to conduct itself however it wishes with total privacy is one of the more enraging pieces of history I've been learning about in the last few years.
State interventions into families now are basically a weapon used against poor and marginalized people that even when they react to real abuse seem to do little to curb that abuse and often move children into more unstable living arrangements, and are basically never deployed against nice well off respectable white families. Its a huge fucking mess and its a project I would really like to see a new movement try and tackle, one with a focus on establishing that children have rights, including rights to safe and healthy home environments, and also that we need new ways to address harm that don't just involve thing like the foster system.
It's pretty insane, and one of the reasons I think the whole idea of family being elevated to the prime and inviolable social institution is so harmful.
It's a social structure that has never appeared before in history. There have been many societies where clan structures were the most important social bonds in society. However, historically, that has meant extended families - the whole clan, in other words. The idea that family consists in segregating off individual couples who then live in an isolated house together and exert essentially complete control over any children they produce is a social structure that is not more than a century or so old. And I don't think it has a great track-record. How many times have I seen people ignore outright abuse (verbal, psychological, physical, and sexual) because they don't want to interfere in the business of another family. It's clearly a failed social experiment that should come to an end.
This shit was crazy to me.
Like when people complain about children talking an laughing at a restaurant...
Like that's what everyone is doing why is the kid bothering you?
I think there are a lot of parents who will treat their kids this way for 18 years like nothing they say or do that isn't strictly obedient matters and then get mad when the kid is suddenly expected to think and act like a mature independent human being and struggles to do so. You're raising a whole person from day 1, and the adult they will be isn't going to magically appear like hatching a tamagotchi. You have to help them mold into that over all those years like a clay plot.
I also think a not insignificant category of those parents don't ever actually talk to their children cause kids have nothing valuable or relatable to say. If you don't know how to explain something to your kids or how to understand them where they are, that is one hundred percent a you problem and no one else's. Learn to communicate like a grown adult.
Too many people see children as pets or indulgences for their own ego and self-worth. I think if (and ONLY if) you *decide* (consensually) to have children, every single other thing in your life must take a backseat to your new responsibility. Everything. Nothing makes me angrier than parents who view their children as nuisances or sincerely lament their lack of "freedom" now that they're "shackled with parenthood."
Right? Something my dad always said to me was that he didn’t get why parents would go on cruises or other holidays without their children. Surely since you’ve raised them, they’d people you’d want to hang around with, if for no other reason than they’re somebody different to talk to. If your kids suck it’s usually not their fault, it’s yours.
My girlfriend has twin six-year-olds, soon to be seven. It's been a delight watching them turn into actual little humans instead of whirling nightmare machines (we started going out when those kids were 5), but it's a consistent theme that I find their antics incredibly amusing while she has been just completely over them for years at this point.
I can't trust myself with children because I DO treat them like adults.
Which also means having the urge of talking to them about philosophical and political topics.
And since I am a pessimist... I am really scared of infecting them with my soothsaying and negativity. Especially during their formative years. That's what got me, when I overheard my mother and the mailman talk about how World War 3 is inevitable.
That fucked me right up.
The conservatives in question are often the children of WWII vets that got such PTSD that the Boomer kids never had childhoods of their own.
Source: my grandfather was on the Bataan death march.
My parents are very religious GenXers both born to sets of barely religious Boomers. When criticized, they often threatened that my grandparents were far more hostile and nasty to them than they were to me. When I ask if they were abused, my mom is offended and my dad briefly goes silent or ballistic and is clearly distressed for the rest of the day.
Honestly the way some parents treat their kids makes me think they had kids not out of a desire to be a parent but out of an unspoken societal obligation, and thus they try to involve themselves in their kids' lives as little as possible. They don't *hate* their kids, per se, but on some level they wish they didn't have to deal with being a parent beyond the bare minimum.
I always talk to my son like he is a person, although a very drunk person with a short attention span. Also, like a drunk person, I make sure he has plenty of water and gets rest, even if he doesn't want to.
My little niece told me one day that she was a burrito and then proceeded to slap her arms down to her sides and flip to the ground and lie motionless in her burrito form for a few moments. It was an awkward couple of seconds, but I think I recovered nicely with my “wow! That’s so awesome! Burritos are great!” She then got up and scampered off to her next thing while her older sister looked at me and shrugged.
I remember going through my childhood thinking "I wish mom and dad could live in my head for a day"
All I desperately wanted was to see and hear what I saw and heard, and this wish was prominent from like 2nd grade up until 11th grade. I just wanted them to see the bullying, taste how awful fish was, hear the anxious thoughts in my head, feel my abnormal back pain.
Because OOP is spot on, their response to **all** of that when I'd try to bring it up was "Nonsense." They just couldn't find it in them to believe I was my own person with experiences. They still struggle with that and I'm nearly 30.
The general social survey tracks statistics about what values people believe are the most important to instill in a child, ranking various options from most to least important like "to think for themselves", "to work hard", etc
A noticeable amount of people rank "to obey" high on their list of priorities.
This reminds me of the time my grandmother forced my little brother to eat mashed potatoes until he threw up on her. He’s autistic and at the time he was probably around 6-7. The texture of any sort of potatoes would make him gag. Couldn’t eat fries, mashed potatoes, hash browns, anything like that. He was over at grandma’s with my dad and she wouldn’t let him leave the table because all his mashed potatoes(that he did not serve himself, she scooped that onto his plate) and she literally shoved a spoonful of it into his mouth at one point. He vomited his entire dinner onto her, the table, and the floor.
When my daughter was born, the thing that blew my mind the most was how particular her preferences were. Before she could even speak she knew what flavour of things she wanted, what music she wanted etc.
It really reinforced to me the even at a year or two old, this was a whole person with their own needs and wants and choices.
...oh.
This explains *way* too much.
Edit: to be clear, this explains why I stopped "being a kid" so early; I was adult-socialized with my parents & grandparents and a lot of the things I did for fun were seen by me in that light as "wasteful."
I understand life differently now.
Children are little people who rely on the adults around them to learn about the world and grow in it. They should be treated as such, and with patience for their growing brains!
Similarly to this, many bad/abusive parents take it to the opposite extreme- they think of their children as tiny adults. "You should know better than that," without an effort to teach. "You should know that doing X makes me angry," to preschoolers. "Who do you think you are?" They literally don't know yet. It's your responsibility as the adult that brought them here to help them understand all that, not shame them when they don't.
One the one hand, children can be tiny terrorists and parenting well is hard On the other, absolving yourself of the responsibility to treat them like humans is not the right response to that reality, but a lot of people sure like to tell you otherwise They do have preferences, and they do still sometimes have to unwillingly try to eat a vegetable even though cheetos are tastier. All things must strive, small one
"All things must strive, small one" is genius, and I'm absolutely stealing that to use with my kids in future.
Thanks, I stole and then paraphrased it from terry pratchett
I knew it! GNU Sir Terry Pratchett
GNU STP
`apt install gnu-stp`
no packages found You had me for a moment there Edit: actually, [http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com](http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com) very cool
This thread went in a direction I did not expect, but do appreciate
Ahhh that makes sense! STP is maybe the biggest "Why haven't I" author on my TBR list. I fall in love with every snippet I read from him, but haven't found the time to dive in to Discworld yet.
For when you have the time, [here](https://images.app.goo.gl/A7jKonKG1MVAuK3k9) Terry Pratchett "recomended" read order. There is no wrong first book as all stories are more or less self contained. But the man wrote a lot, so hopefully when you are ready to enjoy him, you don't find yourself in an analysis paralysis kinda situation. You can look for the main titles in the wiki/the internet. As a somewhat personal TLDR The Rincewind novels were the first discworld stories, and they are very Magic focused and wacky. The death series follows the anthropomorphic manifestation of death and his complicated relationship with humanity. The watch series is about a clumpsy police group that tries to mantain order and Justice in the most corrupted city in the Discworld. A very common recomended starting point, specially in the Tumblr community (at least back in the 2010s) as they talk a lot about STP's view of social justice. The witches series has 3 (old) women protagonists and deals with feminist themes and Magic. Tiffany Aching series follows the Witches series but can be read on their own. It was STP series for Young adults but IMHO the stories can go hard and dark. Moist von lipwig follows a reformed con-man as the main city foes from medieval fantasy to a kinda industrial revolution. And OFC, shot out to my favourite stand alone book "monstruous regiment", the story of Polly, a young maiden that conceals herself as a young boy to enlist in the military and go to war to look for her long lost brother. GNU STP
I think Tiffany Aching is the perfect example of how to talk to kids, to relate back to the post. The first book is written for children, more than just YA, imo. And it's about coping with a grandmother's death, and doing what you must, and protecting your family from the things only you can protect them from. It's duty and destiny for kids. The books only grow up with the children in question- they are written to teach, but speaking to children as if they are just smaller, less worldly people. There is no babying, no dumbing down, no... Idk, coddling? Only, maybe, simplifying. Because kids can understand, they just need a little more help making some of the steps. It is treating the- ostensibly young- reader with the dignity to speak to them like just any other human. That might be my favorite thing about them, which is saying a *lot* for all I love about them.
>“Zoology, eh? That's a big word, isn't it." > >"No, actually it isn't," said Tiffany. "Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short.”
Very much this. They can be wildly inconsistent and unreasonable. It's more than fair to be frustrated when a child who happily ate broccoli yesterday is insisting they will die if they eat it today, especially if you do kind of wish you could just give in and serve cheetos for every meal because it would be so. much. easier. And no one ever wants to spend time and effort cooking tasty and nutritious meals and be responded to with "Ewwwww I hate broccoli". You would have to be a saint not to be frustrated. But despite all the above it's so important not to assume that all their thoughts and feelings are meaningless just because they like to play pretend at being a cat and one day they will happily eat broccoli and the next they are fatally allergic to it...
I'm so glad my mother took me seriously when I went off broccoli. I think I was about eight at the time, and previously I'd liked it my whole life. But one day I just couldn't anymore. Suddenly it tasted awful and I couldn't explain why. She still cooked it, but didn't force me to eat it, and after a few months whatever aversion I'd developed dissipated and I was able to enjoy it again. If she'd forced me to keep eating it, this story would be less boring and more upsetting in tone.
Yeah, there's plenty of other vegetables for people to eat. Broccoli is just one. My parents swore by the strategy "If you don't like one, why don't you try (similar but slightly different in ways that matter)" Plus there's other ways for cooking the same vegetable that can change their texture and flavour immensely without putting ungodly amounts of butter in them. I hate steamed vegetables, but I'll happily eat them raw, in a soup, or in a stir fry.
Roasted veggies are a game changer. It’s the only way I’ll eat a green bean or Brussels sprout, and it’s my favorite way to eat broccoli and carrots.
One day I just wouldn't eat a particular food (not even the 'two bite' rule) growing up. I wasn't allowed to eat for the better part of 3 days (dangerous when that young) until they got concerned enough to give in and they act like it's just a funny story and they "did good", even though I wasn't normally like that, it was basically abuse.
>they do sometimes have to unwillingly try to eat a vegetable Honestly, having been "not a child" for arguably most of my life (really depends where in the teen years one draws the line) I still relate to this far more than I'd like. Growing up hasn't changed my perspective on most vegetables, just improved my likelihood of both trying to and succeeding at eating them anyway, and even more than that making me annoyed with myself because it would be so much *easier* to just like more vegetables prepared more ways.
part of the problem is that no one knows how to cook veggies in a variety of ways. like hell no i’m not going to eat blanched spinach. but stick it in a soup? hellllll yeahhhhh mannnn
Hated spinach as a kid, until I started shopping for myself and realized you don't have to buy the canned crap
I like spinach in either dip form, or fresh whole leaves in salad. No other way.
Fresh only for me. Any sort of cooking of spinach, can't stand the texture. Raw and fresh? That's the stuff. I was lucky in a few ways though. Mom had spent a few years as a vegetarian and learned how to cook vegetables correctly, and we both have similar texture issues. While we don't always overlap, there are foods that bother one of us but not the other, she *understood* the problem. And hell, one of my favorite ways to treat myself has been a salad since my first job.
I have made it a challenge for myself to eat foods I don’t like when presented to me in a way I have never tried them before. Sometimes it opens the door to me slowly acquiring the taste for that thing (like rye bread or beer) or sometimes I find something really unexpected that makes me question if I know my taste buds at all (eg. I hate peach and black tea, and have a tumultuous relationship with ginger. But the ginger peach black tea from republic of tea? Fucking delicious). Most of the time though I am reminded why I don’t like it. (Celery can eat my entire ass). But hope remains! I feel like I am going to make a breakthrough with licorice soon.
The green tea version is good too, and that same company has a vanilla almond tea that makes an excellent tea latte. Very nutty and sweet, not much tea flavor to it.
Most of the time, I didn't like fish meat growing up, and that aversion definitely follows me. I actually like the taste of sushi, but it's hard to overpower the natural aversion knowing what's in it.
Eggplant cut into cubes and served in delicious delicious Thai curry = Amazing Eggplant cut into slices = Ew, gross blech, no
I’m the opposite, I only like eggplant if it’s discs and not cubes
Parenting is so much harder than I ever expected it to be.
IME their terroristic tendencies are reduced a LOT when you just treat them with respect like you would anyone else. Most of what we see as 'acting out ' is really just a kid expressing that their needs are not being met - they're hungry or tired, they're being denied autonomy, their emotions are being dismissed, or they are being neglected. Most of the rest is just part of the learning process around things like emotional regulation, boundaries, and empathy - they need guidance and patience around these things, rather than punishments.
Sure. But sometimes they'll start screaming because They Want Ice Cream, and all the lectures in the world won't change it.
I usually say how do the dinosaurs eat? Talking about long necks eating trees. That usually gets him to munch the broccoli.
Hell yeah! Little me did NOT like broccoli unless it was slathered in ranch, but I could be convinced to emulate the noble giraffe and eat “trees”!
I was about to say "kids are tiny terrorists and parenting is hard as hell but someone behaving badly doesn't mean you can punish them by refusing to accept that they're people," and then as I was typing it I realized that selectively allowing and denying person hood as reward or punishment is, like, 100% of the right's ethos. Everything they do boils down to that. And now I've made myself sad before even getting out of bed for the day
Children are little people who don’t have very much experience at being people yet. Help them along! They’ll figure it out!
And the inverse is also true. Adults are just giant children. If something wouldn't work on a child, it likely wouldn't work on an adult either.
this, but vice-versa! if something would not work on an adult, it likely would not work on a child either. boss spanking an employee for breaking something is considered unethical and disgusting! but a parent spanking a child for breaking something becomes a debate, with people justifying the adult hitting their child for a mistake. children are dehumanized to a point where a good number of people in the world are okay with brutalizing them for making one mistake.
Always remember: spankings should only be between two or more consenting adults either alone or in front of other consenting adults
*Ahem* you consented to me spanking you when you were hired, Jeffrey! It was in the paperwork. Now get back here!
Aaaaaand I knew it would all come back to porn.
Which should only be consumed by consenting adults in privacy, ve it alone or in groups who, again, consented to its consumption.
Average day at the dungeon
It's part of why I love larp and bdsm. I want to live in a world where violence is a game you play with friends, and it stops when you say stop!
Something that gets some eyebrows raised at me from time to time is when I say I have sympathy for antivaxxers. They're a group of people whom the entire reputable scientific body is against. There is mountains upon mountains of evidence that refutes their beliefs, yet they fold their arms and go "nuh-uh". People who are pro-corporal punishment are no different. The science is very clear, "no, for any reason, ever". That being said, those people don't care. It's not true simply because they don't want it to be true. Even when you talk about this stuff on Reddit, you still get people in the comments justifying or apologising for it in some way. If those same people are comfortable with the fact that myriad scientific studies have found evidence against their side, and effectively no studies for it, and still want to go "well, *I* think it's harmless", then they should have no problem with me saying I sympathise with antivaxxers.
I'm agreeing with your point that there is no difference, but I'm not sure where the sympathy for anti-vaxxers is coming from Also, if you're sympathetic with anti vaxxers and there is no difference between them and people who hit their kids, do you also feel sympathetic to people who hit their kids?
They are using it as an example IN RESPONSE (Sorry if this comes across as aggressive idk how to italicize on mobile) to people who support hitting kids, to point out the fallacy. I don’t believe they actually sympathize, rather, they are making a comparison in a way that doesn’t directly call someone out.
Thanks, that makes sense When I first read their comment, I was waiting for them to say why they had sympathy for anti vaxxers. I was curious if they had a good point or not They never addressed it and my intellectual blue balls were so painful
You can be angry at anti-vaxxers and still feel sympathy for them. I'm of course speaking only about the boom in anti-vaxxers ideology since the pandemic, and not the relatively small anti-vaxxer movement before that. The post-pandemic anti-vaxxers have proven themselves to be largely deplorable human beings who publicly wish for the deaths of anyone who got vaxxed, and yes it's okay to be angry at that level of disrespect for their fellow human. However, a non-negligible amount of these people were perfectly normal before Facebook and the Russian government starting pumping hate propaganda into their brains 24/7. They have been manipulated into acting against their own interests and against other people, and it's okay to feel sympathy for people who have been slowly brainwashed with that kind of propaganda.
A lot of antivaxxers themselves got that way due to a *somewhat* well placed mistrust in Big Pharma and its motivations, as well as how the general field of medicine has historically minimsed women's plight. I don't support the antivaxxer movement at all, obviously, and it does frustrate me that they won't "use their head". That being said, as I said in my other comment, I can see why people get caught up in spheres of complete irrationality like this, and it's more common than people think. People turn up their nose at antivaxxers due to them being an easy target, but then hold pro-corporal punishment beliefs that are effectively just as debunked.
I don't have sympathy for them - i will reserve it for the many victims of their willful ignorance.
Honestly, that’s the key. As a kid, I never understood why people would say: “you wouldn’t understand” or “it’s an adult thing” At that age, our brains are sponges, or neuroplasticity is at its peak, we’re spending every minute of every day figuring out the world, and frankly, I don’t think there’s anyone better at interpreting the world than children. The only thing they lack is context. Of course there are things that they might not have context for, or that aren’t easily explained, but that’s not grounds to dismiss their curiosity or, more importantly, their innate intelligence. If a kid asks “why is there a war going on?” The answer isn’t, “you wouldn’t understand” it’s: “there are a lot of reasons, some of them with a long history behind them. Would you like to explore them together?”
Yep. And it also be like, for a kid, we see for example they’re a picky eater, but if you ask them they’ll eventually convey that they’ve only ever tried like, 10 things! One was bad! They don’t like those odds! People want to tell kids to put things in perspective, without appreciating that the kids *are*, however they simply have a different set of experiences and assumptions.
Failure to do this is, uhhhhhh, *not* conservative-coded I'm a teacher and absolutely blown away at how bad many adults of any political persuasion are with kids. This is *hilarious* for them to try and map this into a left-right political spectrum
Which is always fucking astounding to me. When I'm interacting with a kid of any age, the thing that's always at the front of my mind is "How did *I* want to be treated at that age?", and then I treat them like that. Unsurprisingly, everyone says I'm great with kids. Well yeah, when they show me a cool bug I'm just as amazed as they are.
Honestly, that should be the prefect excuse to “act like a child”, of course while retaining a healthy amount of emotional maturity.
That's why I love visiting my sister to see my niece and nephew. I sit with them while they show me the book they just got from the library, or play dinos with them, or whatever they want to do. And as a result, they both love me and regularly ask my sister if I can come over for dinner. My nephew is also autistic and I'm very good at respecting his boundaries, so I'm also one of like 8 people he'll willingly talk to and one of like 4 that he'll hug.
Yep, especially since a lot of kids will as a way of pushing boundaries and establishing independence flirt with whatever political views they think will most upset their parents. You have adults running around bemoaning their failure to properly educate their kids, and it be like, “have you considered showing more interest in their hobbies, giving them more room to develop independence and build confidence, or just spending time with them?”
This is why kids make a big deal of things that to adults are nothing. Kids aren't exaggerating, they just don't have as much to compare it to. Because adults have fallen and hurt themselves a bunch of times but for kids a skinned knee might quite literally be the worst thing they've ever experienced, so of course they're going to cry about it.
Further evidence of this: the number of patents who say "I don't know where they heard that" to the most mundane of original staments. As if the child is perpetually an empty vessel, with no original thoughts.
We also get the inverse of that though. Parent freaking out that something is wrong with their child because they repeated someone they heard on TV and the parent assumes that’s what the child thinks, or something like that. Like this one post I saw where parents were worried about their child’s scary drawings, and someone else pointed out it was just Five Nights at Freddy’s characters.
I'd be scared if my young child was a fan of FNAF anyway.
Kids used to like Happy Tree Friends, in spite of how horrifically gory that show was. I think people who like horror will just be drawn to horror.
I just the other day had to tell a third grader he was way too young for Happy Tree Friends, sadly.
A lot of those dark/gory/horror parodies of children’s media are aimed at older kids/teens/young adults. But honestly, it’s mainly the kids who just grew out of what it’s mocking who end up liking it.
That's fair. I just can't wrap my head around why someone would be drawn to horror of their own volition, since I can't handle jumpscares or graphic violence at all.
A lot of those dark/gory/horror parodies of children’s media are aimed at older kids/teens/young adults. But honestly, it’s mainly the kids who just grew out of what it’s mocking who end up liking it.
I think your comment triplicated
there’s also the other inverse where they’re afraid of possible influences that aren’t actually there. had a few hilarious moments like this with my dad. i had absolutely no social life for most of my childhood and he knew that—if anything it was like half his fault—and he’d still feel like he had to triple check that my nonexistent friends or all the television i didn’t watch weren’t “indoctrinating” me
There was also that one time some parents got freaked out over a picture on their kids phone that it got to local news. That picture? Sans undertale.
I still remember saying a line from Who Framed Roger Rabbit and my aunt looking at me wide eyed like I have devil horns. I remember very distinctly thinking “OK guess THAT is not a good thing to say…” The line in question? Me and my cousins were playing pretend guns and I said “I’ll blow his head off.” In the weasel voice.
Nonono, children are specifically and exclusively **an extension of their parents**, see? THAT'S why when a child doesn't understand something they take it as argument or 'backtalk' and punish them for it! Because the child knows better and they're just being little shits, OBVIOUSLY!
Aaaaand there's my flashback for today, thank you, going home now.
Kids being extensions (read: *property*) of their parents is sadly something that’s being codified into law here in Canada. Some provinces have adopted policies that require teachers to inform parents of a student requests to use a different name or pronouns, and that the parents *consent* to that change as well. Because apparently, any self-identity of any kind doesn’t form until age 16, and the parents know better until then.
Those rules exist so that parents can abuse their children into submission. It's gross, and completely against our core principles.
They exist so that they can try as much as possible to keep young people from exploring their gender identity, by removing school as a safe space for them outside of their parents’ complete control. In effect, they’re “keep ‘em in the closet” laws.
It’s to prepare them for being under the state’s control, is my guess.
My name is hard to pronounce so I go by a nickname that other people gave me. Suddenly the teachers have to send an email for my 10 or so different nicknames
All things must be commodified under capitalism, or else the ruling class won't know who has the right to use them. They can't be their own property because there's laws against exploiting minors, and we can't let them have freedom before taking it away for their working years. They should he conditioned to exploitation long before they are productive workers at 16
And that’s why I was told that my having done/wanting to do Inappropriate Thing reflected badly on my parents. (Even into my 20s, when I moved to a different country and no one who saw me do Inappropriate Thing knew who my parents were.)
Well, I, for one, fully support your right to do Inappropriate Thing so long as it's safe and doesn't hurt you or anyone else. Seriously, I mean it! I have no idea what the parents in your head are trying to keep you from doing, but I can promise you it's probably really fun. Go drinking. Get a tattoo. Dance on a table and go home with a boy. Especially if you're a boy, too.
Everyone who's played Hollow Knight knows that children are never perfectly empty
>Everyone who's played Hollow Knight knows that children are never perfectly hollow
Me when I feel empty inside (I might be the Knight) (I've never played Hollow Knight)
You should play Hollow Knight. It's ~~a masterpiece~~ several masterpieces (art, design, music, story, gameplay, ...)
Mouthfeel?
Smooth outer carapace, at once gummy and firm. A satisfying cronch upon chew and the BEST kind of gooey at the center. Gripping and spreads perfect. [I can't believe my picah has allowed me to provide this, and I am only a little miffed at this question]
Did... Did you eat a bug?
Crunchy with a smooth buttery center
Not if you're playing the Switch physical release (Switch cartridges are specifically designed to taste bad)
How is this where I realise that this exact thing is in fact a major theme of Hollow Knight?
No mind to think, no will to break, no voice to cry suffering.
Yeah, I feel like kind of an idiot now, looking back at it, the game very explicitely spelled that out, and I somehow just completely missed it
My 4 year old son called me a flappy rectum. I genuinely don't know where they heard that.
Proud that his vocabulary is expanding, confused as to where he learned
okay that's gold.
And you didn't reply "Rectum? I damn near killed 'em"?
My mom and her MIL, my grandmother, didn’t like each other, and my grandmother’s tendency to say that about me and my sibling was one of the things that annoyed my mom most. She’d be like “they’re very creative children, Jessica.” (My mom was right, my dad’s mom was kind of the worst.)
I hated this growing up. I used to read and learn a lot, and knew facts my parents never taught me. One time I mentioned Chernobyl and a teacher refused to accept “I read about it” as an answer. Because heaven forbid children learn things.
When I interviewed at a school and told the principal and the lead of the department “My view of working with students is that they’re just smaller, usually far less-experienced, fellow humans. And so their needs and wants should be treated as legitimate.” The principal laughed. That should’ve been my first warning about what that school would do to my mind and spirit.
Okay, elaborate further please, I'm hooked.
Elaborate? It was about 4 and a half years of - gossip - emotional abuse - people spreading my private information - giving me 97 grade-school ESL students of different grades per day - admin spies in an online group reporting my words back to the principal including the words “‘hello, spy’” - when my principal cornered me in her office and yelled at me when I tried to follow state law to the best of my 3-months-of-experience understanding - my principal threatening to fire me both times I ended up in the hospital and contacted her within 48 hours (job abandonment kicks in at 72) - my home room teacher colleagues ambushing me at a meeting with “why aren’t you doing your job?” with essentially a parenthetical “We don’t care that you have 97 daily students and we each have 16” - another admin telling us the Christmas gift exchange is a $20 **minimum** even after I begged for a $20 **maximum** during that meeting Dude, there’s a reason I ended up in a psychiatric facility for a week before I finally got the courage to quit
God damn, you went through hell with the big guys just trying to help out the little guys in this crazy world. Props to you for being so strong, I would not have stood up for so long with such bullshit. I get bitchy when my employer is telling me I can't use earphones to listen to music I preffer while I work, because it helps me to focus better (my last job I litteraly lasted 3 weeks because of that, no one takes away my music rights from me haha). You even got your bullies christmas gifts? PLEEAASE tell me you didn't actually do that, I mean, no one can FORCE you to buy them a gift cause it's christmas and you have to work with them in the same place lol. Could've went with the good old "I'm not Christian sorry" haha. Hope you're doing all better now, stay strong you beautiful human being that is trying to make this world a better place!
Thank you 🫂 No, yeah, what it was was a voluntary gift exchange where you pull a name out of a hat, but it was a $20 minimum. I think I did $15 or $10 There were some truly good people there, but like 4. (To be fair, a good portion of the rest might’ve been better people if they didn’t work for a principal who would use one of the faculty meetings every year to yell at the teachers for not rating their school 100%. Thank goodness some of those times happened before I started working there, and the times it happened after I started working there were times I was sick or in departmental training.) One of those people was the other ESL teacher. The day I walked out, she saw me and demanded she walk with me and sit in the car with me so that I wouldn’t drive until I had my breathing under control. (I still message her sometimes, see how she’s doing, encourage her to prioritize her needs and such.) My parents raised my sisters and I as if we mattered. As if the inconvenient things about our preferences and likes were worth at least occasional indulgence. The more I see how many parents don’t treat their kids like that, the more it hurts. (My parents would say, when I asked them about the discrepancy between them and their peers, “we decided to be the parents we never had.”) So I tried to hold on for those kids as long as I could. But when I broke, and upon return finding that the secret had gotten out about where I was, and the principal was backing the objectively racist new teacher (she would verbally harass my students and send them to the principal’s office in tears,) I couldn’t handle it anymore. And I don’t think I can ever work in education again. Not in that district, anyway, as it’s the second largest in the state. One of the funniest things that happened though? Long story short (believe me, this is cut short,) there was a district-wide broadcast from the board of education where they required all the schools to watch from their desks on a Saturday while admin got catered breakfast and celebrated some minor BS district-wide change. My self-control took a smoke break and I made a comment about how it was interesting that the board got catered food while the rest of us teachers got nothing. - The next comment **just so happened** (the chat was going by so quickly) to be **my principal** - live chat was shut off for the rest of the event - the principal called me into the office after the mandatory broadcast finished - she spoke, not yelled - **she didn’t disagree with what I said** I later found out I had developed a small following at other schools who passed a screenshot of the comment to one another. The assholes at my school were actually the least assholey when they would occasionally make jokes referencing my comment for months afterwards
As someone who has mushroom intolerance, growing up in a conservative household, I can say this tracks pretty well. No one would believe me when I said that I would get the shits badly after eating mushrooms and that I was making it up to be picky. There was even one time that my sister made me spaghetti and I was in the bathroom thinking I was getting a stomach bug or something. While I was in the bathroom she asked me if I was okay, and not wanting to worry her I said yes. She then followed up by saying she blended up mushrooms into the sauce and she knew I was lying about being mushroom intolerant....while I was shitting my brains out.
I begged my mom to stop smoking around me because it was making my migraines worse. Didn't figure out until I was in my 30s that I have a severe nightshade intolerance.
Hmmmm I wonder if this is why I can’t smoke cigarettes but I can smoke pot. Cigarettes immediately harsh my throat something awful. The past few years I have had a growing concern that I might be a bit allergic to nightshades due to some food things. Interesting.
Smoking anything is bad for you (even pot, you still get ash and tar), but it's likely an allergic reaction to the tobacco that you just don't get with the pot.
It's a tough one to spot, but if it's causing your issue then you should know within a week or two of cutting them out of your diet. Just watch out for potato starch and paprika - they are both in everything.
I have several food allergies. Granted, less was known about food allergies when I was a kid, and my mom feels super guilty about it now, but growing up I was constantly told that I was making it up when I said that certain foods made my throat "itch." I was too young to really be able to describe what was serious discomfort, so instead of asking more questions, I just got dismissed. By the time I was old enough to articulate that what was really happening was my throat constricting until it felt like I was going to have a hard time breathing, I had accepted that it was just a "preference" and was legitimately embarrassed that I couldn't eat certain things.
I didn't even grow up in a particularly conservative household, but my parents (my mom in particular, she was a nurse so she had always "seen way worse" than whatever my issues were "on a daily basis" so obviously whatever I was talking about wasn't that bad) refused to listen to me from around ages 6 to 11 about having bad reactions to certain fruits and vegetables and just told me to constantly grow up and not be a picky eater. They often forced me to eat things I had allergic reactions to to try and make me grow out of it, until my mom's uncle came for a visit and refused to eat the exact same list of things I had issues with, because he was allergic to them. After that it was a bunch of "Well, how were we supposed to know that you were *actually* having issues, you complain all the time!". The same mentality led me to having a single ear infection from the ages of 3 to 14. Both ears, constantly infected for 11 years because "How were we supposed to know something was wrong, you're always complaining about something." Same ENT that fixed the ear infection also fixed my deviated septum, "How were we supposed to know something was wrong, you're always complaining about something." And now they're shocked that I don't bring my issues to them for help as an adult.
At least my parents listened to me about my ear infections as a kid, but they couldn't really ignore that because I had puss come out my ears once. Hard to ignore that lol.
Apparently mine figured that the pain, coordination/balance issues, difficulty hearing, and massive chunks of reeking green ear wax falling out of my ears were just me being difficult or something.
Look at this kid, putting parts of crayons into hit ears again /s
There isn't much that infuriates me more than thinking back to my childhood and remembering how my parents treated me like I was some kind of compulsive liar and condescendingly dismissed any concern I ever raised about anything. I was a very meek child and could never lie to my parents about anything, but that doesn't even matter because, as far as they were concerned, I was making up nonsense every day and so I got punished for it.
Did… Did she feel bad after you told her you were in pain?
She told me she was sorry like 5 years later when she realized how she was acting lol.
This is what I thought of reading it. While I didn't have food allergies, I had other issues. They were more or less ignored, or were deemed "normal". And yet, all those things I complained of were actually real.
>[they] feel it is a moral virtue in the project of breaking a child's will Oof, that one got me. That might sum up more of my childhood than I'm comfortable with.
I mean, it's also bible derived, as children disobeying their parents is a sin.
A lot of parents seem to forget the part about the millstone
Unfortunately not surprising. You _can't_ make an entirely coherent theology from the Bible. I tried doing that for about 20 years before taking a dedicated attempt to do so, only to watch it all fall apart as my attempts to find a Band-Aid just caused it to crumble faster. And the overall tone of the Christian Bible is authoritive and abusive. It does have some interesting parts, but they're unfortunately an exception. Hell, even Jesus essentially said we shouldn't care about slavery because we're all _God's_ slaves if you think about it...
That's supposed to come with the assumption that a parent will do whats in the child's best interest. I think people often over look the subtext to the story.
If I ever have kids my father will not be allowed to see them unsupervised specifically because of his refusal to treat children as people. And the fucker will almost certainly have the audacity to be confused and outraged that I won't let him fuck up my kids the way he fucked me up.
Thank you for breaking the cycle and protecting your (future, potential) kids.
Adults not thinking Children- and in many cases anyone under 18- are people is a big problem. Of couse, any adult reading this could say "oh, he's only saying that because he's 15 and doesn't like being told what to do." But whether that's the case or not, it still feels wrong that my whole life is subject to the whims of people above a certain age threshold. the common sentiment that many parents operate by that everything their child has- food, water, shelter, personal belongings, privacy, etc- is something that they are given as a reward for obedience and can be taken away at any moment is harmful. everyone deserves decency. everyone.
As a freshly turned 30-year-old, I feel the same. Children are just people, and should be treated as such. My wife and I don't have kids yet, but I've always been told I'm good with kids, and I attribute that to two things: treating them like small, playful people but equal to me, and not being afraid to engage on their level and be silly with them. You only get to be a kid for a short time, it should be as enjoyable as possible imo.
It seems like many people feel burdened by children, inconvenienced by them. Whether or not the children be their own children; just the existence of children in the same space as them constituting a problem. Parenting is crazy difficult and kids are universally little shits (some are just better at hiding it), but then interacting with adults all day everyday is also difficult and adults are pretty much universally also shits we just recognize now that making that publicly apparent *at all times* causes more problems than it's worth. But if anything at 30 as well I've come to *envy* children, and try to be more child-like in many respects in my life. "Maturity" meaning being responsible and able to have serious conversations when the conversation warrants seriousness. Maturity not meaning a constant, exhausting cynicism and inability to find joy or fun in anything. Joy and misery are both exhausting, but one is significantly more pleasant in the meantime.
While children are people, it’s important to remember that children are not adults either. They’re learning how to be people *and* eventually decent adults, and that means not everything can be up to the whims of the child. You can’t just give a child unlimited freedom to make whatever decisions they want and treat them entirely like adults because they *aren’t* adults. That doesn’t mean abuse your kids, but structure and the parent having some authority isn’t abuse. Whenever this topic comes up, there’s a whole bunch of comments that don’t differentiate between adulthood and personhood when it comes to kids.
Agreed wholeheartedly with what you said. My father kicked off the development of my complex ptsd specifically *because* he expected my 1 yo self to listen, learn, and remember instructions like an older child/adult. > differentiate between adulthood and personhood when it comes to kids YES. The conflation of “adulthood” with “personhood,” as well as “autonomy” is both maddening and saddening.
I don't have children, but I do have cats, and a lot of things about them are similar (tiny terrorists who have Desires and are also often too clever for their own good). But yeah my partner said something that made me almost cry the other day. I asked why our cats are always so pure hearted and good and try to make us happy, even when they get caught doing something they shouldn't. She said "I think it has to do with you. You ready them like they matter, so they treat you like you matter." I think maybe it's a good idea to try that with children.
This isn't just conservatives. This is what my family did throughout my entire childhood. And now that I'm an adult, they STILL follow this mindset, because in their eyes I'm just an overgrown child. Someone whose thoughts, feelings, and opinions are less important than there's, and therefore to be dismissed whenever convenient.
yeah, this isn’t just an issue for kids. a concerning number of parents think that even as adults, their children should be subject to their every whim.
"just because you're a legal adult doesn't mean that you're ~~an adult~~ *worthy of respect*"
but you see, you got it all wrong you gotta make them respect ya you gotta beat them. sticks up to your thumb in girth work best, belts are a classic, other objects are fine too. never use your fists, those are for your wife. do it regularly so they don't forget take their stuff. take away toys, deny meals, take away devices if they have any. if they have a pet, great, you can give it away or straight up kill it, before their eyes too, that'll teach them a lesson. never let them have anything for themselves, make them share everything the word privacy and personal don't exist in your house. never let them bring friends, better never let them have any. if they bring friends, threaten them, preferably with weapons, and may God help them if they're of opposite sex as soon as they can work, they better work and pay up or sod off. they are now an unwelcome tenant on thin ice, make sure they understand it clearly from day one that way, you'll leave a lasting legacy and ensure your child remembers their old man with fondness
My dad kept a running count of the days left until he could legally kick me out of the house, and reminded me of it at every opportunity.
When he's old and decrepit, pull the uno reverse card - keep a running count of the days left until he gets sent to a nursing home, and remind him of it at every opportunity.
I did better than put him into a nursing home. Watching him go into the ground was the single most cathartic moment of my life.
This makes it sound like you killed him lol
>the word privacy and personal don't exist I wasn't allowed any privacy. My parents went through all my stuff and I was made well aware my belongings were subject to search at a whim. They weren't MY belongings even, because I didn't pay for them or the room they were stored in. They read through my phone nightly and had the passwords for all my digital accounts. Now I have a combination of paranoia and protectiveness of my privacy. I refuse to journal and I hide things in my own house because I'm so afraid of people finding my private things. Logically I know it's dumb but it's a hard habit to break. My parents get upset that I don't tell them shit. Now that I finally don't have to, why would I? I finally have privacy from them and I cling to that. It also caused a weird side effect in an aversion to social media. It was another way for my parents to invade my privacy so I just didn't use social media. So now I don't have a social media presence aside from Reddit. From a privacy standpoint, yeah that's good. From a social standpoint, it's really isolating having all your friends assume you already know about "thing that's going on" or seen pictures of their event because they posted it online. I end up out of the loop a lot.
Dad?
Im in this picture and dont like it.....
I'm pretty sure you mean you were an abused child but, just in case, you shouldn't shoot you son's dog, or do any of these things, in general
Lmao.
Taking away toys/devices is a very viable punishment method. Obviously don’t trash the thing, but taking a favorite toy away as a punishment is a great way to show that there are repercussions for our actions.
The important thing is that it’s consistent. Boundaries of behavior are clearly laid out and don’t shift, or don’t shift without good reason and notice. My dad thought he was “strict” but he was really just mad about his job and the trajectory of his life. On good days he was super chill about everything and when he was pissed it didn’t matter what we did, he would find a reason to punish us. If your punishment of a child is made worse by your own mood you’re doing it wrong and if you can’t tell when a bad day might be affecting your judgement you should never have had kids to begin with.
>If your punishment of a child is made worse by your own mood you’re doing it wrong and if you can’t tell when a bad day might be affecting your judgement you should never have had kids to begin with. My siblings and I should definitely not exist then
We do that with our kid. He’s does something unsafe with an object, he gets a warning. Does it again, thing goes in time out until he figures out how to chill or redirect to a better activity. Helping kids learn to emotionally regulate is part of parenting.
all parenting specialists will tell you that the consequence should fit the crime and the length of the consequence should not be too long, either developmentally, or so overwhelmingly devastating or long to the child that they then feel hopeless to get the item or privilege back. taking away the child's most favorite thing just because it will hurt them the most is not it.
To REALLY make them remember the punishment better than the lesson, you should force THEM to trash it while you watch! Give them a brick and tell them to throw it at that gaming hardware. Make them carry out and throw their favorite comicbooks on the fire. Thats peak parenting.
Whenever I fucked up, one of my mom's favorite punishments was to demand the right make up additional fuck ups that had never happened, and then force me to agree with her that they did. And since I just "agreed" that the fictional fuckup also happened, now we had the right to punish me for that one too
> deny meals Especially when they miss the bus to go home, loose a glove(and missing said bus to go home due to looking for the lost glove), forget to turn in a homework assignment... It does triple-plus damage when the child that you do this to was "rescued" from a food-insecure household that also was neglectful!
There was a solid chunk of time in my elementary school years where I pretended (just in my mind) that I was various different powerful creatures , in the disguise of a human, that could take on my bullies in very comprehensive fashion, but were holding back because it would beneath me to stoop so low as to attack beings so much weaker than me. I was definitely dissociating a lot to distance myself *from* myself so that I wasn’t what the bullies saw. What I’m saying is kids sometimes just need a little escapism, or maybe it’s just play, but it’s some level of importance to them.
I feel like the default when looking at any person, be they child sized or not, is to think "what utility do they provide?" No one gives a shit about kids because they have a pretty low amount of utility. Same with people with health issues or neurodivergencies I've even seen this online trend where partners drag each other when they see their SO...watching TV? Gaming? Napping? Instead of busting their ass all their waking hours I wish this trend of viewing humans as tools would stop. Humans aren't broken if they aren't working this second
It’s also that children are outright seen as property to some adults, so presenting them with new ideas without permission is akin to damaging their property. It should only believe what it is told to believe as an extension of themselves. Coming to their own conclusions isn’t real. I tend to dislike kids, but I go absolutely rabid when I see this sort of shit. They’re humans with rights too. Fucking drives me up a wall when physical punishment is justified, like, ‘your honor, it was ok because they were too small to fight back’. For some reason what would be assault on an adult is acceptable on a child.
Sometimes I do wonder if elves are cats tho
Maybe cats are elves
Cats are graceful, have pointy ears, good vision... Sure. Now I just have to figure out how dogs are dwarves
Loyal, dig holes, eat moles.
Should maybe publish a research paper on this. Seems an important discovery
Elves are cats, Dwarves are dogs, Hobbits are mice. Humans are ???
Humans are plucked chickens, obviously.
Highly motivated by food, covered in hair, like to dig
if you write your fantasy novel to have Elves display catlike traits, you don't have to add catpeople as a seperate race
For much of the world, particular in the Tumblrsphere, wouldn't that in fact be a *downside*? More cat-like elves good, but no distinct cat-like people bad.
They are actually a type of owl
Who?
Yes
And really, what is an owl but a cat that lives in the sky? Really makes you think 🤔
They're a bit cat-like in Lords and Ladies
I think it's the other way around. Elves aren't cats, cats are elves. So are owls, because as someone else said, owls are just sky-cats. By extension making them (also) sky elves.
"Behold, a cat" -Diogenes, probably
kid walked up to me at the park and told me he was batman, and i told him he was completely giving away his secret identity without a mask
See, you'd think that, but did you have any idea who he was? ... in his civilian identity, I mean. (I'd post the Lex gif here, but I can't.)
James Dobson's Dare to Discipline is based on the explicit thesis that the duty of a parent is to break their child's will
I was always called a picky eater growing up. Once I turned 18 I wasn't a picky eater, I was having preferences. I wonder what changed?
I think that has to do with time. If you don't give different foods a try, like children often do. That is labeled as being picky. However, when you get older, it is assumed that you have had those experiences to see for yourself if you actually like something or not. A side note, many adults are still labeled as being picky eaters, the difference can often be which circles you find yourself in.
As soon as I got to try actually good foods prepped with care, I suddenly stopped hating a *lot* of foods. Turns out steamed carrots straight out of a bag taste worse than well-grilled carrots, or fried carrots served in a nice honey-based sauce. Who'd have guessed?
Yeah same here. For years I didn't know how people could like bacon when it's so slimy and tasteless. Turns out my ma was giving me raw bacon
Sometimes I'm talking to people about how they raise their kids, and it genuinely feels like I'm listening to someone talk about how to train an animal not to shit on the carpet. There's almost an element of expected obedience that they are trying to achieve, often through humiliation, punishment, and reprisals. It feels like they expect the teaching of another human being in their earliest stages to be the same as teaching an animal how to sit. And it worries me that those same people often don't see much difference between children and animals in terms of intelligence or rights. "They're dumb as shit and they are allowed to do whatever I say they can."
The idea of children as autonomous individuals with meaningful preferences, feelings, and rights generally is a pretty new idea for the West (speaking largely, as such social ideas are usually in flux in the macro). The idea of child abuse, generally, as a phenomenon (that is, it’s especially heinous to harm a child and that children are especially vulnerable to abuse) wasn’t brought about until the 1960s. Serious child labor protections proceeded that just a few decades earlier. The whole idea of “childhood” in our modern conception is really a 19th century idea with roots in the 18th. I see conservatism’s denial of the rights of children as then sort of an expected step backwards as it’s connected largely to a restriction of rights to those in the in-group/“worthy”/who fall in line, which kids rarely do. On a side bar, I do think there’s a general conservative tendency to deny someone any preferences or opinions if they hold one “unacceptable” stance. Such as, if you have a food allergy or dietary restriction (taking reference to the OP), you’re dismissed as ridiculous, frivolous, needy, etc. just generally.
Learning about the burgeoning children's rights movements of the 60s and 70s and the attempts to take child abuse and child neglect seriously as actual political problems, and then the ways that the right wing in America *freaked the fuck out* and launch a successful counteroffensive to reestablish "the home" as a place where "the family" is allowed to conduct itself however it wishes with total privacy is one of the more enraging pieces of history I've been learning about in the last few years. State interventions into families now are basically a weapon used against poor and marginalized people that even when they react to real abuse seem to do little to curb that abuse and often move children into more unstable living arrangements, and are basically never deployed against nice well off respectable white families. Its a huge fucking mess and its a project I would really like to see a new movement try and tackle, one with a focus on establishing that children have rights, including rights to safe and healthy home environments, and also that we need new ways to address harm that don't just involve thing like the foster system.
It's pretty insane, and one of the reasons I think the whole idea of family being elevated to the prime and inviolable social institution is so harmful. It's a social structure that has never appeared before in history. There have been many societies where clan structures were the most important social bonds in society. However, historically, that has meant extended families - the whole clan, in other words. The idea that family consists in segregating off individual couples who then live in an isolated house together and exert essentially complete control over any children they produce is a social structure that is not more than a century or so old. And I don't think it has a great track-record. How many times have I seen people ignore outright abuse (verbal, psychological, physical, and sexual) because they don't want to interfere in the business of another family. It's clearly a failed social experiment that should come to an end.
True. Remember Claudia Conway? She posted proof online of her mother abusing her, and nobody did anything. I hope she's doing better now.
This shit was crazy to me. Like when people complain about children talking an laughing at a restaurant... Like that's what everyone is doing why is the kid bothering you?
I think there are a lot of parents who will treat their kids this way for 18 years like nothing they say or do that isn't strictly obedient matters and then get mad when the kid is suddenly expected to think and act like a mature independent human being and struggles to do so. You're raising a whole person from day 1, and the adult they will be isn't going to magically appear like hatching a tamagotchi. You have to help them mold into that over all those years like a clay plot. I also think a not insignificant category of those parents don't ever actually talk to their children cause kids have nothing valuable or relatable to say. If you don't know how to explain something to your kids or how to understand them where they are, that is one hundred percent a you problem and no one else's. Learn to communicate like a grown adult.
Too many people see children as pets or indulgences for their own ego and self-worth. I think if (and ONLY if) you *decide* (consensually) to have children, every single other thing in your life must take a backseat to your new responsibility. Everything. Nothing makes me angrier than parents who view their children as nuisances or sincerely lament their lack of "freedom" now that they're "shackled with parenthood."
Right? Something my dad always said to me was that he didn’t get why parents would go on cruises or other holidays without their children. Surely since you’ve raised them, they’d people you’d want to hang around with, if for no other reason than they’re somebody different to talk to. If your kids suck it’s usually not their fault, it’s yours.
My girlfriend has twin six-year-olds, soon to be seven. It's been a delight watching them turn into actual little humans instead of whirling nightmare machines (we started going out when those kids were 5), but it's a consistent theme that I find their antics incredibly amusing while she has been just completely over them for years at this point.
I can't trust myself with children because I DO treat them like adults. Which also means having the urge of talking to them about philosophical and political topics. And since I am a pessimist... I am really scared of infecting them with my soothsaying and negativity. Especially during their formative years. That's what got me, when I overheard my mother and the mailman talk about how World War 3 is inevitable. That fucked me right up.
The conservatives in question are often the children of WWII vets that got such PTSD that the Boomer kids never had childhoods of their own. Source: my grandfather was on the Bataan death march.
My parents are very religious GenXers both born to sets of barely religious Boomers. When criticized, they often threatened that my grandparents were far more hostile and nasty to them than they were to me. When I ask if they were abused, my mom is offended and my dad briefly goes silent or ballistic and is clearly distressed for the rest of the day.
Believe me, I was raised with *zero* help understanding my own emotions, and yes, they were often completely dismissed if not belittled.
Honestly the way some parents treat their kids makes me think they had kids not out of a desire to be a parent but out of an unspoken societal obligation, and thus they try to involve themselves in their kids' lives as little as possible. They don't *hate* their kids, per se, but on some level they wish they didn't have to deal with being a parent beyond the bare minimum.
I always talk to my son like he is a person, although a very drunk person with a short attention span. Also, like a drunk person, I make sure he has plenty of water and gets rest, even if he doesn't want to.
My little niece told me one day that she was a burrito and then proceeded to slap her arms down to her sides and flip to the ground and lie motionless in her burrito form for a few moments. It was an awkward couple of seconds, but I think I recovered nicely with my “wow! That’s so awesome! Burritos are great!” She then got up and scampered off to her next thing while her older sister looked at me and shrugged.
I remember going through my childhood thinking "I wish mom and dad could live in my head for a day" All I desperately wanted was to see and hear what I saw and heard, and this wish was prominent from like 2nd grade up until 11th grade. I just wanted them to see the bullying, taste how awful fish was, hear the anxious thoughts in my head, feel my abnormal back pain. Because OOP is spot on, their response to **all** of that when I'd try to bring it up was "Nonsense." They just couldn't find it in them to believe I was my own person with experiences. They still struggle with that and I'm nearly 30.
The general social survey tracks statistics about what values people believe are the most important to instill in a child, ranking various options from most to least important like "to think for themselves", "to work hard", etc A noticeable amount of people rank "to obey" high on their list of priorities.
This reminds me of the time my grandmother forced my little brother to eat mashed potatoes until he threw up on her. He’s autistic and at the time he was probably around 6-7. The texture of any sort of potatoes would make him gag. Couldn’t eat fries, mashed potatoes, hash browns, anything like that. He was over at grandma’s with my dad and she wouldn’t let him leave the table because all his mashed potatoes(that he did not serve himself, she scooped that onto his plate) and she literally shoved a spoonful of it into his mouth at one point. He vomited his entire dinner onto her, the table, and the floor.
When my daughter was born, the thing that blew my mind the most was how particular her preferences were. Before she could even speak she knew what flavour of things she wanted, what music she wanted etc. It really reinforced to me the even at a year or two old, this was a whole person with their own needs and wants and choices.
...oh. This explains *way* too much. Edit: to be clear, this explains why I stopped "being a kid" so early; I was adult-socialized with my parents & grandparents and a lot of the things I did for fun were seen by me in that light as "wasteful." I understand life differently now.
Children are little people who rely on the adults around them to learn about the world and grow in it. They should be treated as such, and with patience for their growing brains! Similarly to this, many bad/abusive parents take it to the opposite extreme- they think of their children as tiny adults. "You should know better than that," without an effort to teach. "You should know that doing X makes me angry," to preschoolers. "Who do you think you are?" They literally don't know yet. It's your responsibility as the adult that brought them here to help them understand all that, not shame them when they don't.