Gaashk
4d ago
I don’t think hate is necessarily the word, either. Maybe contempt or disregard. But probably not better than nothing in terms of romantic interest, even if he’s rich and hot.
Gaashk
4d ago
Maybe there is something to that.
I liked my grandmother better, because she stayed and raised my mom and siblings while my grandfather moved to another state and didn't communicate with or visit them. My grandmother had everyone over for all the holidays, and it was nice. But she never babysat us, even for an hour, and that was probably stressful for my parents. I think she inherited money and didn't work, other than raising children. My other grandfather died when I was a baby, and we visited my other grandmother and stayed at her house, which was at least nice. I don't think she ever worked while I knew her, and she was fine, but I got the impression she mostly watched game shows and walked around the neighborhood once a day. The TV was never off at her house. I suppose my family made me feel neutral toward having children.
A couple of people in the thread brought up Korean mothers in law specifically, as being demanding and expecting their daughters in law to serve them, which seems interesting in a context where marriage and childbirth are very low. I would guess that they had to work for their husband's family when they were younger, and expect it to be paid back, but were less likely to work an 8 - 5 kind of job outside the home? I don't know what the actual facts are, not being very familiar with Korean culture.
Gaashk
4d ago
That does seem like an issue. In my own family, it seems like grandparents are getting too old to safely lift babies and toddlers right when I have them. We've had kids in late 20s/early 30s.
Gaashk
4d ago
How are proficiency standards determined for K-12 education?
I've tried looking it up a couple of times, after seeing a lot of angst about how less than half of students are proficient in reading or math, and have only found super vague verbiage like "The achievement levels are based on collective judgments about what students should know and be able to do relative to the body of content reflected in each subject-area assessment." That is not helpful at all. I can look at grade level standards to see what they are, and practice tests to see what the state expects that to look like, but it kind of just sounds like some board of people (Department of Ed? State Level? NCLB Commission?) got together and thought about what they wanted, and now every child is measured about that, and every state is panicking all the time about how the actual children aren't living up to it.
But maybe the kids are actually doing very badly? My neighborhood school has less than 50% proficiency, and they're above median for the state. Should I be worried? Did kids do better at some point in the past? When? Are there non BS sources of information about it?
Gaashk
4d ago
They exhumed her body this weekend, that’s why I was reading about her, but I’m not quite sure how it works.
Gaashk
4d ago
There's some battle of the sexes going on, but 44% of women still voted for Trump, and an actual majority of white women. The very active pro-life organizations that are out running crisis pregnancy centers, right to life dinners, and petitions for heartbeat lives are largely supported by women.
(unedited, meandering thoughts)
Something seems to be going on, not just between men and women, but just as importantly, women and their mothers. There seem to be a lot of women, of the making histrionic remarks on Facebook variety, who are into looking at the faults of their mothers, and "re-parenting" themselves at 35. I've heard from acquaintances about their mothers gently nudging them about how if they want a family, now is the time to do it, they're in their 30s, there won't be another chance -- and the women getting frustrated and offended about that. Why are Korean mothers in law so demanding? It sounds like they've had hard lives, but also they're not stupid, and should have noticed their bad reputation, and that they're scaring the younger women. From the thread below, LLL has been important partly because mothers stay out of their daughters' business when it comes to childbirth and feeding of infants, though sometimes they step in to babysit every now and again.
I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago, where they were talking about the female archetype with Maiden, Mother, and Crone, and how the Mother and Crone archetypes are currently rather broken. There aren't very many older women I respect and want to be like. My own mother is fine, and it's basically fine if I'm like her, but I feel this in general, like older women are kind of just playing around, with very little purpose. Perhaps this is related to the trivializing of women's work and running the household. I was reading the other day about Matushka Olga of Alaska (1916 - 1979), who's community considers her a saint because she was well loved, a good midwife, and was always making warm clothing to give to people. They talk about people in the other villages wearing socks and mittens she made for them, and how happy they were about it. George MacDonald is a lovely writer, who's books are full of very old but still lively grandmothers and great grandmothers at their spinning wheel. Sometimes they spin wool, or magical thread that will let the adventurers always find their way home. He said he remembered going to his grandmother's little cottage, where she was always spinning, back when that was important and necessary work, and loved the sound of the spinning wheel, and the stories of his grandmother. My godmother knitted me a huge wool scarf that I would wrap up to my nose when the cold winter winds blew, for years. I moved a few times with only a suitcase since then, but it was the coziest scarf I've ever warn, with both wool and effort.
It's nice that I can just order a totally adequate coat online for less than four hours of labor and have it delivered to my house, where my dishwasher and laundry machine are running in the background. But despite quite a lot of training in home economics sorts of tasks, I don't make much of anything, because it feels redundant. Many of the women in my community make art, and sometimes I go to the local gallery, or the studio tour. It's nice to paint the hills, or "work with printed textures" or whatever, but it seems disconnected and trivial, like it's a visual expression of a crisis of meaning. The whole lifestyle of sending a six week old baby to daycare so you can go file papers in an office to pay the mortgage in the neighborhood with the adequate schools so that your daughter can get a college degree so that she can send her newborn infant to daycare while she sends emails thing is... not ideal. And then you retire and go to workshops where you paint the hills or make abstract acrylic collages or something, and babysit the grandkids a couple of times a year, if you're fortunate enough to have any grandkids. It sounds a lot worse in S Korea. You work in some dull office all day to send your kid to cram school at night so that she can go to college to get a job that lets her send her kid to cram school. Nobody receives love and recognition for vacuuming her mother in law's house every day.
Maybe I'll take my kids to church tomorrow. Apparently they had a tamale making event today, and a potluck tomorrow. They built a new building, with a metal dome that's still under construction, and it looks rather nice. Someone is hand carving an iconostasis.
Gaashk
5d ago
Mostly, modern formula is basically fine, the effects are there, but small, and almost no fathers are willing to go to the lengths necessary to try producing milk rather than relying on donor milk and formula.
Gaashk
5d ago
They can. But it's kind of against their core mission, which is about less reliance on medicalization and corporations for childbirth and feeding. So they'll advocate for things like placing the baby on the mother's chest immediately after birth, without taking them to weigh or clean first, starting breastfeeding as soon as possible, because it's way harder to breastfeed when starting later, and babies get nipple confusion, slow flow bottles so mixed fed babies don't get impatient with the breast, being patient with growth spurts and cluster feeding, and so on. This is related to breast milk being a better food, immunological interactions, and not being reliant on formula (I was very glad to not be trying to buy it during the shortage a few years ago, for instance).
(I am currently doing mixed feeding, about 1/3 formula, 2/3 breastmilk, both because baby was in the ICU a few days his first week of life on formula, and the hospital was making me do some terribly depressing triple feeding, and because I'm working full time. I am not a breastfeeding purist, and have found some lactation consultants press too hard and have caused problems for my babies when I returned to work.)
On the other hand, modern formula isn't all that bad, actually. Adoption and surrogacy at very young ages are central examples of times when donor milk or formula are good choices. LLL has a video on their homepage showing someone who's face is cut off (unusual in their materials, which usually feature an entire mother and baby), a "baby" with a full head of hair, and something about dripping milk down the breast from a syringe. It is an extremely non-central example of breastfeeding. Then there's an article about non-gestational parents breastfeeding, which admits that it's quite hard, and most parents who do it are not able to do exclusive breastfeeding.
The whole regime of taking hormones, pumping, getting a partial supply, trying to get an adopted baby who's more than a few days old and not previously breastfed to go along with it, but still supplementing a lot, maybe more than half... sounds terrible, exhausting, expensive, and just probably like a bad idea for most people. I do not think it's a good idea to be advocating for breastfeeding among parents who are not the birth mother for "bonding". Babies bond with caregiver fathers just fine. Formula is fine. They look like they've lost the plot with breastfeeding extremism.
To the extent that there are breastfeeding trans women willing to participate in a study, then yes, someone should do the study. Not necessarily LLL.
Gaashk
6d ago
It may not be good for the babies. Hormones around childbirth and breastfeeding are fairly complex, and show up in the milk.
Gaashk
6d ago
If you prefer pumping every two hours day and night to cuddling a baby. But, also, it’s pretty hard to pump enough, since babies are more efficient after the first week or so, and they cluster feed to increase production. Mixed pumping and formula is, of course, an option, but less convenient, at night especially.
Gaashk
16d ago
Yeah, that's the big thing. He feels ambivalent, like the pros would be good, but not if it makes things worse for the baby.
Should I put my 4 month old baby and 3 year old in daycare for working purposes?
Pros: reduce instead of expand debt, father might prefer random resulting job to watching the baby full time. I think the three year old might like it, she did last year.
Cons: I think babies find daycare stressful? It would cost more than we would make, but most of the financial costs are dispersed to the taxpayers. It would complicate our schedule, and make us more likely to get sick.
Gaashk
17d ago
On general dining experiences, I nominate the Supra, from the Republic of Georgia. It’s a feast/symposium, with elaborate toasting rules, homemade wine and cognac, and a nice assortment of dumplings, meat dishes, bread and cheese dishes, etc.
Gaashk
18d ago
Wabi Sabi Painting with Cold Wax. The examples are more abstract than I prefer, but the colors and marks are attractive. Some of the text is interesting and useful, though most is generic.
Gaashk
18d ago
That's been my impression of most people who work full time and above.
30 hours a week is enough to get most of the benefits of having a set schedule, without the downsides of not getting to do much else. Higher than full time seems mostly employer driven, probably with some small business owners who don't want to go out of business and people getting started in competitive professions as well. I'm not sure that the medium difference between the US and Europe calls for more explanation.
Gaashk
27d ago
In some sense, we do engage in that much specialization, it's just that we're specializing in reading, so it doesn't register. I'm sure I read 10,000 hours in my youth, starting at 4 or so. But, like video games, it isn't completely useful. I was homeschooled, and my mom spent a lot of time reading books, while we kids also read books for 8 hours at a time.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Since it's one of the Big 5 personality factors, extroversion has been studied a moderate amount. One version I was looking at a while back broke it down into assertiveness (what you're mostly talking about) and enthusiasm (I was looking into it because I attended an Evangelical youth group, where enthusiasm was heavily valued, and I just couldn't muster it). So I suppose not exactly the same as the way some people use it, but still mappable to something like social energy.
Gaashk
1mo ago
That’s what I remember. I think all the OCEAN traits are bell curve, they give results by percentile.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I wouldn't necessarily read too much into it. If I were going to make a culture war statement, it would be about saftyism, rather than willingness to walk, even with the two year old (though it's really annoying to walk with a tired two year old). The kids went on a two mile hike with us to find an ancient cliff ruin that we heard about from a stranger in a bar the other day. They can probably go trick or treating when they're old enough to take initiative about it.
Gaashk
1mo ago
We were Evangelical homeschoolers when I was Trick-or-Treating age, and also didn't have any neighborhood friends, so I guess I don't have any trick or treat golden age to look back on.
My impression is that there's an ideal age range for real trick or treating, and that my kids (5, 2, and not eating solids yet) are a bit young still. I saw some kids doing it last year, I think three total, so it would be a bit of an adventure, people don't signal if they're giving treats or not. I haven't had a single kid try at my house in four years.
Scott also has a good essay about BPD https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/16/borderline/
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