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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   2532 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 6, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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This came up in a meeting with whitehairs. I claimed that setting up childcare on site would help attract parents. To which one replied, "Well, I'm a parent, and I don't see how that helps me any!"

My primary impulse is still "No, you were a parent." And there's some background wars of framing that go into this.

Seems to me like the term “parent” covers more than you intended even without expanding it to cover parents of adults.

Wouldn’t your childcare proposal only benefit a certain subset of parents? I’d avoid confusion by stating directly: instead of “parents” maybe consider using “parents of small children”?

I agree with the whitehair in the abstract, to the extent that if asked without context "are empty nesters parents?" my answer is yes. But from what I can tell from the context you've provided, he was simply being an overly sensitive ass. If you say "providing childcare will help attract parents" it's obvious to everyone but pedants with axes to grind that you're using shorthand for "parents of young children" (afterall, everyone would agree that the parent and primary caregiver of a 16 year old is a "parent," but they are also implicitly excluded from your contextual use of the word).

No, you were a parent.

If I heard "Bob was a parent but is no longer", I would take that to mean that he'd outlived his offspring.

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