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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   25745 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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I think people are still in willful denial about how much the unforced costs of childrearing have increased in the past decades. Starting around age 2, I would routinely be left with a grandparent for the day or multiple days while my mother went to work (harder nowadays since mobility in upper strata of society increased, and nobody I know lives within 100km of their parents anymore). Starting around age 7, I would spend large stretches of the day home alone, or playing outside (in the streets, or the abandoned gravel pit beyond our housing development) alone or with any number of neighbourhood kids who were also outside unsupervised or could be easily summoned by just walking up to their apartment block and ringing the doorbell. (Much of this is probably illegal an/ord might result in loss of parenting rights nowadays in most Western countries.) If I needed something from my parents, I would take the bus into town to find them at work (another CPS case?), where they would probably get me some food at the university cafeteria and then drive me home (in a way that is no longer legal, since Germany now mandates child seats in cars up until age 12 (!?)). I got into a good free public school just based on an admissions exam, and into a series of very good universities just on strength of grades and math/science olympiad participation; nowadays I gather you have no chance without an array of eclectic extracurriculars that also need to be found, organised and paid for by your parents. As a result of this increase in safetyism and credentialism, I now see little possibility to raise children and give them remotely as good a life as I had without investing a much larger fraction of my money and time than my parents (really: my single mother and her series of boyfriends) had to for me.

"Status" is only relevant insofar as I think it would both be low-status to raise kids that are obviously miserable and have no prospects, and we would also coincidentally have to sacrifice other things that convey us status (like having full-time academic jobs) to make it not so. To overcome this, you wouldn't just need to fix some putative recent drop in the status conveyed by parenthood; rather, you would need to socially engineer a status reward for it that exceeds all the novel status penalties, which would require entirely new and hypothetical types of machinery. To roll back the cost increase seems like a hopeless ambition - while there may be groups of people (especially here) who could be convinced to oppose the credentialism ratchet, the consensus for safetyism is entrenched to the point that the tribes mostly wage war against each other in the language of harms and dangers that their opponents have not done enough to address.

Starting around age 2, I would routinely be left with a grandparent for the day or multiple days while my mother went to work (harder nowadays since mobility in upper strata of society increased, and nobody I know lives within 100km of their parents anymore).

This made me wonder how many American TV series with multigenerational non-Hispanic White households I could come up with. And the number is... zero? The protagonist of Hey, Arnold is an orphan who has to live with his grandparents. Chris Hansen's Jim Henson's Dinosaurs weren't dinosaurs of color quadrupedality, so I guess they should count?

The Waltons (of course)

Mama's Family (very dysfunctional, but happy families make bad sitcoms)

ChatGPT suggested The Waltons as well, but it's a series from the seventies about the Great Depression. Are there really no series about the Great Recession instead, with a Millennial couple forced to start a family in the same house one of them grew up in?

Here where I live, in the same damn village I grew up in, kids get to play outside unsupervised just like they used to. But good luck convincing my wife that there isn't a ruthless violent pedophile lurking behind every bush - our daughter will never be allowed to go outside without a chaperone.

Social media and anxiety disorders fuck people up.

My daughter's in college, and based on the Facebook parent groups, having your daughter tracked with a phone app is completely reasonable, and not some bizarre invasion of privacy for an 18-22 yr old. I understand we've extended childhood, but if my 18-22 yr old can't navigate college without me knowing her location every single second, I've failed. When young adults, who should still be in their "nothing can harm me" phase, are so willing to surrender independence in the name of safety, it seems to signal something seriously wrong.

And back to the child thing. How does a 22 year old go from "my parents are tracking me on my phone" to "I'm ready to marry and be totally responsible for an infant" without it taking years?

That’s basically the status quo for traditional multi generational households, except the mother in law actually provides physical benefits, like a floor of the house, pooled cooking, and childcare.

I mean, we let very young teens babysit. ‘Taking care of a baby’ is not actually beyond the capacity of a 22 year old being tracked by her parents.

No one in my experience of raising my child let very young teens babysit. I babysat when I was young, but I am genx. I would have been considered a neglectful mother if I had ever allowed someone younger than college aged and infant/child CPR certified to watch my genz child. Several of her peers - a couple of whom are now in Ivy League schools - weren't allowed to cook anything on the stove in HS ... You think those parents would have allowed a 14 yr old to babysit a 2 yr old (with their child on either side)?

We live in very different worlds.

Wasn't the latchkey kid phenomenon basically peculiar to Generation X and thus a historical anomaly in the grand scheme of things?

Also, I just had to look up that car seat thing on the interwebz and actually found this: "German law requires children up to 12 years of age who are less than 1.5 metres (59 inches) to ride in an approved car seat or booster. If all other restraints are being used by other children, the child may ride in the back seat with a seat belt."

Much of this is probably illegal an/ord might result in loss of parenting rights nowadays in most Western countries

It's more of an Anglosphere (particularly American) thing. In continential Europe children have tons of freedom. Here's Norway, the Netherlands, France, Japan (admittedly not western, but still WEIRD).

Japan seems much, much less WEIRD than Western Europe, similar to the deep deep red dirt part of the red tribe or Galicia or something. It just emphasizes education to a peculiar degree.

Surely Japan is, by global standards, and even compared to Western Europe, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (that last one is debatable). It’s hard to argue that they’re on the whole more Westernized than Western Europe, the literal birthplace of Western-ness, but certainly in some respects Japan is very Westernized.

I think you are arguing that Japan is not as woke/culturally Blue as Western Europe, which seems broadly true to me. But this is, strictly speaking, distinct from WEIRD-ness, and more importantly there are senses in which Japanese culture displays the same lack of memetic antibodies against wokeness as Western European cultures (namely, relatively low emphasis on extended family/clan relationships, and “pathological altruism”).

I’m really struggling to see how Japan is culturally much closer to deep Red Tribe. Respect for ancient traditions perhaps? But Red Tribe (like all of America) doesn’t really have much in the way of ancient traditions. And if Japan is so culturally, whence their much-lower-than-US-Red-Tribe TFR? Do you think that’s entirely explained by their greater emphasis on education?

It’s far less individualistic than Europe or the Anglosphere; the idea that an adult can be obliged to obey a family member is normal there. It’s not western and is generally socially conservative.

My comparison was of degree, not kind.

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