Child-rearing in the 21st century
I’m old enough to remember the rigid boundaries that these movements were supposed to be correcting, and I’m glad the worst of them have been removed. But it’s been an awfully slippery slope, hasn’t it?
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
How is not exposing a kid to any masculine influence considered gender neutral? Seems kinda one sided. If it was a girl, what would they force her to do or wear? I think they cooked up this bullshit when they learned it was a boy.
They have moved from one extreme, real and perceived, to another more progressive extreme. They are the generational progressives. The rebels with a cause and without a clue.
Its worth noting that today’s progressive is tomorrow’s conservative. No one in their right mind seeks to perpetually destabilize society or the natural order for its own sake.
Politically Correct is Progressive Corruption.
My own suspicion is that the greater likelihood going forward is for the pendulum to swing …with a partial return to something our grandparents (at least), wouldn’t be that unfamiliar with.
…and if I’m reading the tea-leaves correctly, the model for parenting in the 21st century may be the French one (yeah: go figure).
At the WSJ recently: Are French parents betters.
And Macleans: Why the French are better.
…dimes to donuts there’ll be few dissenters here with those articles.
I would expect that the “traditional” millennia-old customs and mores of the majority of people on this planet have been time-tested and proven.
When some idiot decides to play with their kids head, thinking that they are so overwhelmingly brilliant and that their actions along these lines will contribute to their kids happiness, I begin to err towards tyranny and think that child protective services should move in (as if that might be productive).
At the least though, society should shame these fools.
Those parents will be killed by their child. Now here is a different, very different, style of parenting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl1ujzRidmU&feature=player_embedded
This is simply weird. Poor kid, I hope he makes their lives hell come puberty and the years of teenage angst.
I’m old enough to remember the rigid boundaries that these movements were supposed to be correcting, and I’m glad the worst of them have been removed.
…
That’s my teachers in a nutshell, with no “but” to follow.
Heck, what is laughingly called my “education” can be summed up like that: totally reaction to what somebody sixty years ago thought was just horrible.
Not Impressed.
The mother talked all through the neutering article, not a peep out of the father. I also noted that the only forbidden clothes were masculine outfits.
Interesting.
And yes, it is neutering to rear a child as a neuter. Just twisted.
I’m not sure things were so bad in the days of Ozzie and Harriet. I was certainly raised to be competent in skills that were necessary for mothers in those days, but I don’t remember ever being told I couldn’t do something because I was a girl. Even in my Catholic schools, the separated playgrounds of elementary school didn’t older guys and girls from being friends and ganging up on our incompetent geometry teacher who was too illogical to prove a theorem. And no one thought the nuns who ran the schools were wimps.
I wonder how much of this gender stuff came from from a very status conscious class where women worried about using the right knife and fork, but really were lacking in meaningful work. Where I came from, a woman who could line the basement shelves with canned fruits, vegies, and jams for the winter really was recognized for her work, and the more skills she had, regardless of their traditional gender assignment, the better. Didn’t Betty Friedan come from the Emily Post set? Thanks Betty. You freed generations to become womens’ studies majors and nutballs like the gender freak.
skipped a word: didn’t stop older guys and girls
This is simply child abuse. The authorities should remove Sasha from his parents control.
I’m going to guess they were not inspired by Johnny Cash’s “A Boy named Sue” …
“I knew you’d have to get tough or die
…
– and Son, it’s that name that made you strong!”
(No smiley here as I don’t know what to say.)
–
Biology usually prevails. It has been around a lot longer than the latest version of “new age” parenting.
We know that with our relatively new found technology, biology can be changed, so to speak. But, it is both expensive and problematic to try to do it.
Tinkering around the edges by denying biology seems to be a trip on the path to inevitable disaster.
The Who 1966:
One girl was called Jean Marie
Another little girl was called Felicity
Another little girl was Sally Joy
The other was me, and I’m a boy
My name is Bill and I’m a headcase
They practice making up on my face
Yeah, I feel lucky if I get trousers to wear
Spend ages taking hairpins from my hair
Chorus 1
I’m a boy, I’m a boy
But my ma won’t admit it
I’m a boy, I’m a boy
But if I say I am I get it
Put your frock on Jean Marie
Plait your hair Felicity
Paint your nails, little Sally Joy
Put this wig on, little boy
I wanna play cricket on the green
Ride my bike across the street
Cut myself and see my blood
I wanna come home all covered in mud
Chorus 2
I’m a boy, I’m a boy
But my ma won’t admit it
I’m a boy, I’m a boy, I’m a boy
I’m a boy, I’m a boy, I’m a boy, I’m a boy
I’m a boy, I’m a boy, I’m__ a__ boy.
No one in their right mind seeks to perpetually destabilize society or the natural order for its own sake.
Your statement, while absolutely correct, turns on the first proviso.
This is yet another example of what I
rantedtalked about on a recent thread: the superficially plausible argument, based firmly upon dorm room philosophizing, to replace the wisdom of the ages with something utterly, obviously moronic and unworkable.Boys are not girls. Girls are not boys. Some are still figuring that out.
On the bright side, parents engaging in this sort of nonsense are probably pluckng their (dodgy) genes out of the gene pool.
No one in their right mind seeks to perpetually destabilize society or the natural order for its own sake. >>>
Yet this is the essence of the Left. Whatever exists deserves to perish. I think of the Left as a giant rototiller, perpetually chewing away at the boundaries of society—and always in only one direction. Sometimes what is eliminated is for the best, i.e. the civil rights era changes. But they never stop, they NEVER STOP. If one achieves a virtually perfect society (which I think we had after the basic civil rights were established), they still will not stop. Opinions and behavior that put one squarely in the “liberal” or “progressive” camp one year will be declared insufferable and bigoted by the left vanguard after a time. Wasn’t it just five or so years ago that to be in favor of civil unions for gays was A-OK? Then it just suddenly changed to a vehement assertion that if you had any reservations about government-sanctioned gay marriage, you are nothing but a bigot, straight-up.
There’s a lot in Jewish Law on family matters that long ago had me perplexed and asking, “Why make this rule? Isn’t it obvious?” Over the years, however, those instances of astonishment vanished one by one with each experience of reality showing me how they are not obvious at all.
Consider even that passage from the beginning of the Bible: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24). Half a century ago it may have been obvious even without a Biblical education that a man of breeding age should move out and find a wife, but no more.
And no, “evolutionary” pressure is of no help in this regard either. It has to be nurtured, taught, ingrained.
I wish I had met these “rigid boundaries” when I was a child. It is awfully confusing for a young boy to became mature without them. Not only confusing, but really scary.
A lot of Baby Boomer parents, in an attempt to insure that their children were “Free to be You or Me,” attempted to treat their children in a gender-neutral manner. Boys should be encouraged to play with dolls. Girls should be encouraged to play with toy trucks. Gender neutral clothing.
What was the result? Children tended to gravitate towards toys that were “stereotypical” of their sex: girls to dolls, boys to toy trucks. Yes, there were exceptions: these were trends.
Many preschool girls wanted to wear dresses, with no encouragement whatsoever from their parents.
expat: except that the women’s movement also freed women to do other things that really had been closed to them before.
I’m old enough to remember this. And as I was growing up, I was an intellectual type, which was a real no-no for a girl at that time. When I was growing up the choices for girls really did seem to be: teacher, stewardess, secretary, actress, salesperson, homemaker. There were very few women in academia or most of the professions (which was more my bent), for example. And most of the best schools were closed to them.
It was certainly possible for the most driven, aggressive, and motivated women to enter fields that were essentially closed to them, but very very difficult, and most women didn’t see how to do it. There really was discrimination, both in school (professors telling women to quit the field, or making it hard for them in other ways) and in hiring questions and practices. There was indeed a lot of misery for some women at the restrictions they faced.
For an example—see the early career of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. You can agree with her or disagree with her politics, but she is a brilliant legal mind nevertheless, and was at the top of her class at Harvard Law School (one of very very few women in the class, by the way, but she excelled overall). Nevertheless, “In 1960, despite a strong recommendation from the dean of Harvard Law School, Justice Felix Frankfurter turned down Ginsburg for a clerkship position because she was a woman.” And that was the explicit reason, not a supposition. Is it any wonder that a lot of her subsequent career focused on sex discrimination?
Who wants to take bets on when that kid displays a love for musical theater and other ghey things?
Lord, I pray right now that this young lad is protected from his parents’ horrible influence, rebels, enlists and serves this nation as a patriotic man.
And has a godly love for his parents still.
Neo,
I know that many paths were closed to or difficult for women, and I supported NOW for that reason. I just turned off when they became the man-hating womens’ studies types who failed to see that for lots of men in the 50s, the jobs were also boring and hard. And I hate it that they don’t recognize the accomplishments of women in traditional roles. I hate that they have sold the you-can-have-it-all baloney to a generation of women who blame men because they can’t be in two places at the same time.
expat: yes, I always thought feminism would also celebrate the traditional roles for women as well as the paths traditionally closed to those who wanted to follow them.
And of course some feminists do. But so many of the leaders seem to have a different agenda, and there is so much animus.
I always thought feminism would also celebrate the traditional roles for women as well as the paths traditionally closed to those who wanted to follow them.
If you believe the marketing, you’d think so, but organized feminism = communists + lesbians, so no dice.
Whenever I think of Marlo Thomas and “Free to be… you and me”, I always wonder if she would have been free to be herself if she hadn’t had a plastic surgeon change her whopping huge (“You sure can tell she’s Danny Thomas’s daughter”) honker into a cute pixie nose.
But I digress. Perhaps….
And don’t even bring up “Chaz” Bono. Free to be … whatever the hell she/he/it is.
Glad Free to be you and me included Michael Jackson.
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