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Showing posts with the label childrearing

Frenemies

Child abuse doesn’t get talked about much by progressives these days—the prevalence of it, especially. When we hear of abuse against a single women, the story is usually expanded so that it illustrates how women in general have been suffering. When we hear of abuse against a minority, the same. But when we hear of a horrid case of child abuse we rarely are encouraged to think of its prevalence. Instead, we row against the perpetrator. Or, if it’s one of those women driving all of her children into a lake, balk back from it exploring it entirely—no thanks! But the case of Adrian Peterson was different. It was going along its normal route—how dare he, stuffing leaves into his child’s mouth and then beating him bloody with a belt! Destroy the beast! But then something unexpected occurred. This story of child abuse got innocently expanded, and you could feel in its brief flash of a full expose of the nature of childrearing across a broad swath of Americans, not what occurs when th...

Older but nicer--Having babies when you've sorted things out (8 April 2009)

A lot of people I know become not just mellower but nicer as they age. (I sense this, perhaps, most especially in novelists -- where main protagonists are obviously more patient, sweeter, to other characters in later books than they were in the novelists' very vibrant but more charged and angry earliest works.) I have some suspicion that what happens with those who have self-esteem-enriching experiences of validation and attendance when they were young, but also hampering experiences of abandonment and sadistic treatment, is that they still have it in them to acquire more of what they were lacking and deal with some of what has tended to haunt and stop them, while they go through life. This may in fact be -- without them being consciously aware of it -- what a great deal of their life endeavors are mostly about. And if they end up getting some of the attention they were needing, learn not to denigrate but work to satisfy their own needs, they no doubt end up being better able to ...

I'm not saying (15 February 2009)

Re: "I'm not saying having 14 kids isn't crazy" No, you're not, but please soon develop the stuff to declare it such: if you have more than a few kids, no matter your best, there's no way you'll be able to well attend to them. They become lonely, lost -- they become what we're trying to get the hell away from: neurotic, unconscious -- animals. You're always stepping away. We notice. Please stop; find out what watches overhead and beat it into mulch; and become the more interesting person we all sense you to be. Link: The Tyee