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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Once you've got a 17-year-old on Life360 (Slogan: "Family-proof your family"), you've pretty much fouled up completely anyway. If you want your children to achieve independence, making lax rules for them is insufficient; you need to actually allow them some actual independence. Or at least enough that they don't know you're still watching.

In contrast, I think even moderate drinking or drug use is fairly risky for developing brains, and I think the laissez-faire attitude towards it is dangerous.

Drinking, at least, has been done by people possessing developing brains more or less forever. The "developing brains" meme is mostly an excuse for infantilizing younger people anyway -- look in the past at what young people were capable of and compare it to now for evidence. I'm not saying that drinking is GOOD for teenagers, but I'd be willing to bet it's less harmful than keeping them in a cybernetic panopticon.

Once you've got a 17-year-old on Life360 (Slogan: "Family-proof your family"), you've pretty much fouled up completely anyway. If you want your children to achieve independence, making lax rules for them is insufficient; you need to actually allow them some actual independence. Or at least enough that they don't know you're still watching.

This is good advice for a son. Not so much for a daughter.

Giving your daughter independence is how you ensure she gets her cherry popped by a fuckboy.

Since we do not, in fact, live in a society where women are transferred from the custody of their father to the custody of their (arranged and vetted) husband, it is as necessary for daughters to grow up as it is sons.

Then you don't let her go to sleepovers at all. You don't let her go then track her every second.

See, the trick in that situation is that he doesn’t actually have the power to stop his adult daughter from doing that. And he knows it. She can trivially acquire a boyfriend that can support her and physically defend her from her father when required.

Parents are naturally anxious about that, because if you’re going to pay the bills for the kid you are owed power (and power used to make true what just ain’t so is still power), hence the obsession with chaperoning (virtual or physical in times gone by).

Chaperoning isn't a practice of times gone by, it is still very much practiced in religious communities. My cousins all "courted" that way. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, it's much better than Life360.

But I will say that any restriction you can think up, there's a daughter I knew that grew up under than restriction and turned into a slut. It's life. Having kids is a gamble. The obsession is with trying to pin down outcomes that are ultimately random, and only mildly related to your actions as a parent.

Monitoring your teenage daughter out of the house is lindy and normal.

Finding out from other parents what your teenage daughter has been up to is lindy and normal. Keeping an electronic leash on her is anything but.

That’s because electronic leashes are new technology, like air travel or dishwashers. If people in 100 AD had the ability to track their unmarried daughters electronically they would have done so.

But they could not, so they did not, so it is not lindy.

Correct, they used 24/7 chaperoning. One of these things is less invasive than the other.

Sometimes, as with laparoscopic surgery, newfangledness is an improvement.

There are societies with social classes which had 24/7 chaperoning. But certainly not many; it's far too expensive a luxury.