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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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You can expose her to both points of view and educate her about the risks and rewards of each. Give her the tools to be her own person, however that turns out.

Without bragging, that was how I did with my three kids (adults now) and they all turned out to be well adjusted, either with families of their own or heading that way. You don't have to run from one extreme to the other.

If they are adults now, they weren't raised in the environment we now fear. You weren't contending with the Kindergarten curriculum including propaganda about how you can choose your own gender. Or the fact that it's being done in secret as much as possible. How do you counter lessons you don't even know are being given? Once a teacher who may spend more time with your child than you do inculcates an evil world view unopposed in a four year old's mind, it's fiat accompli.

If you are dealing with teenagers, sure, you can present both sides of an issue and maybe they can make an informed decision. This simply does not exist with 4 year olds.

To say nothing of the fact that while it may be possible, we feel atomized, afraid, and alone. We want a community that can back us up and help us not feel like we're the lone holdouts against this new state religion.

If they are adults now, they weren't raised in the environment we now fear.

No they were raised in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and the Culture war I was trying to stop infecting them was a rather more deadly one. Hatred of Catholics was very common (given I grew up in about the most Loyalist areas there are) and many kids ended up in the paramilitaries, which was the thing I was striving to stop, that particular pernicious influence.

But I think you are wrong, you can start from a very young age to explain the things you want them to understand, kids absorb things from their surroundings and you have to get ahead of that whether it is explaining what a Taig or Fenian is, to what the word trans means (obviously very simplified) You are not going to be able to control everything they learn, so you have to make sure you are ahead of whatever they are going to get exposed to, and that means you have to start young, whatever it is you fear they are going to pick up. By 3 kids can certainly understand the concept of private areas and bad touches, by 5 to 6 they can understand much more. They can't reason through the socio-political implications of the IRA, and the UDR, but they can tell you if someone was calling the lone Catholic boy in the school a Fenian, or talking about how their Daddy has a baseball bat with nails in for Catholics, or if someone tries to talk to them about their body not feeling like their own or what have you.

Community is valuable, but if part of the point of a community is to raise your kids better, one that drove your own family away with (in your own words) bonkers behaviours may not be the one to pick. We must learn from the histories of our forebears after all. I could have gone back to the Plymouth Brethren sect my Dad left, and certainly it would have avoided the paras..because they would have had no tv, no radio, and virtually no contact with the outside world. It is a tight knit community. But it is also a very restrictive one, and I think attempting to raise my kids in a belief system I do not personally believe in is also likely to be fairly corrosive.

I sympathize, and I hope you find a good solution for you and your family.