Does this happen outside the white-bread middle-class 'burbs?
I’m not driving trollies, I swear. Having done the cloth diaper thing, you have to have your own washer and dryer, obviously, because using an apartment complex or laundromat washer and dryer is totally out of the question.
Being in rural lower-middle-class white-bread America, gender roles are a bigger deal imho. Employers are starting to favor women here for some jobs (a pleasant surprise!) so there’s actually more couples where the guy might agree to stay at home. Been there, done that: you’re both looked down on, her for “wearing the pants”, not staying home with the kids, and so on, and him for, well, not wearing the pants. For bonus 21st Century points against her, though, if the family is able to uphold that Judeo-Christian ideal of her staying home and him working, she’s going to be looked down on all over again because precious few of us are able to afford a single-income household, and him to a much lesser extent for being some kind of 1950s monster.
I cringe almost as hard at Childfree as I do at MRAs, both because of Reddit.
One of those subreddits had a killer getting tips on how to commit murder before he did it. I’ll let you guess which, and this being BoingBoing, I’m betting that unless you’re familiar with the story, you’ll guess wrong.
Well, also in gentrifying cities now. But that’s a good question and points to the complexity of changing gender roles in society more broadly. I’d say that in working class families, both parents are more likely to work and you have to do what you need to do to pay rent, put food on the table, so the sort of theoretical discussions are put aside for survival. I would say that being able to break or conform fully to gender roles are probably a function of various kinds of privilege, class and racial.
But why is this the ideal? Should it be the ideal? Can we figure out something better that allows both parent to both spend time with their kids and do something fulfilling as a career? At the end of the day, we need social conditions that works for families instead of against them. People shouldn’t feel they have to fulfill any particular unrealistic norm.
Overall, it tends to be mothers who are on the hook for being bad parents, regardless of class, though.
Maybe reddit just functions as a magnet for assholes?
Honestly, I’ve had eight years of trying to keep up with the super parenting thing, and I’ve just tapped out. The kids are fine. They’ll be fine. Parenting is demanding enough without trying to achieve some kind of ISO9000 standard. I’m getting my identity back as a human being again, and parenting like normal people used to do in the olden days.
Of course, my wife is a crazy obsessive super mum, the type that pisses off every other mother in a ten kilometre radius, so I can let a fair bit of slack go before anyone will notice.
Still, I think she could let go a lot too, and it would have zero negative impact on the kids. Probably a positive impact, they are fairly dependent at the moment.
That’s the problem isn’t it? It’s so competitive. I’ve moved from inner city Sydney out to a semi-rural town, and that is probably a big part of the reason I’ve changed my attitude, there’s so much less pressure out here.
That’s probably where the greatest pressure is, in the gentrifying urban cores. but of course, there must be something wrong with you if you don’t want to live in the gentrifying core.
I don’t know… are Australian cities have the same phenomenon that’s happening here in the states, with gentrification? Maybe not. But either way, there is a stigma in not living in cities.
Cloth nappies are terrible. They LEAK and absorb, and need you to clean them and oh my god its worse than working in an abattoir. We had a nappy Service for a while… Put them in a big sealed bin and someone else washes them… HAZCHEM. A bin of ultimate horror.
Disposable nappies are the go. Get those mutherfukken nappies out of my house.
You’ve got facts on your side (meet minimum standards and your kids will probably be okay), but there’s an interesting conundrum here. Kids usually end up the most important thing in parents lives for obvious reasons. Having a child fail in a serious way is probably the most tragic thing that can happen to a parent’s life and the reality is that not all kids turn out okay. Some end up in deep trouble, others have terrible lives, and a few even end up dead.
What you are telling parents is that in the single, most important thing of their entire life… they have no control.
And as any psychologist can tell you, having no control over the thing most able to destroy your life is a recipe for madness and despair.
So, of course parents lie to themselves and pretend that they actually have some say over the children’s outcome - it’s simple mental self defense against a reality too terrible to contemplate :-).
Oh hell yeah! Sydney is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in relative to income, property prices are crazy.
The suburb I used to live in was kind of bohemian / working class when we moved in, we left about 15 years later as the techies and merchant bankers were moving in. The latest report from friends who still live there is that it’s become home to celebrity chefs and T.V. personalities, some of whom have taken to wandering around the public school there handing out pamphlets about the catchment area.
Sure. It’s tough accepting reality sometimes, but that’s really part of being a grown human being and you have to do it eventually. We all struggle with worrying that we’re fucking our kids up and we’re probably not doing so, but on the other hand, your (not YOURs, you know what I mean) kid could be a real jackass through no fault of your own. I’m sure that Jeffery Dahmer’s parents relived every second of his childhood, trying to figure out what they did wrong, but maybe they did nothing wrong.
But at some point, you have to accept that you just can’t control the whole world and make it a safe and perfect place for your spawn. I can’t make the world a safe and perfect place for my spawn, as much as a rail against the world as it is. I can only equip her with the tools she needs to go out there and fight for the world she wants.
That being said, the best thing to do is not to throw expensive pre-schools, toys, and language lessons at your children. The best thing you can do is to BE there for them, be engaged with them, and be honest with them. Mostly, just love them, because there is no guarantee that they’ll find any sort of love out there in the “real” world.
It’s totally insane. There’s been a running prediction of the property bubble bursting there since before the Olympics in 2000. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger…
