the decision to parent
✶ “opted out of kids because i want to remain protagonist of my own life” — some reddit thread
✶ it’s not that I want people who don’t want kids to have kids…but it feels like it will get harder to create or maintain a culture in which children can thrive, as fewer adults have meaningful experience with the other side of the parent/child dynamic
parenting style
✶ Since our 2nd kid was born, I’m increasingly in favor of what I’d call training wheels parenting. Yes, training wheels aren’t the best way how to learn to ride a bike, but if my whole generation had them and we all learned it eventually, surely it’s not that much of a big deal?
- Other things that weren’t that much of a big deal for me growing up: sugar, TV, seed oils, ugly plastic toys, kids getting into fights with each other, dumb / inconsiderate songs and nursery rhymes, scraped knees, sharing rooms with siblings
✶ if you want a “village” to help with your kids, you have to expect and accept that they won’t have the same parenting/authority style that you want your kids to receive.
- 🌷 your village will include imperfect people, with their own opinions and inputs. you can’t curate a perfect village like in the sims!
✶ Both too much and too little mothering will mess a kid up. Specifically, their nervous system and its conditioning to appropriately detect threats and self soothe.
- “Care work” can be lots of things but it always involves co-regulation, which is the loaning out of your nervous system to someone else to help settle them. If you don’t have a strong nervous system to begin with, this task, when it comes to children, is crushing.
- Ideal child-rearing is inexact but involves a gradual transition from total co-regulation for the newborn to ad hoc co-regulation for the youngish child. Too little mothering and the child is left to their own devices too soon. Too much and the child never gets their own devices
- “Good enough” mothering through this lens is mothering that broadly accepts the need for co-regulation in infancy and the need to gradually pull back to allow the child to learn to regulate themselves. A long game view will trust that this process will work even w many mistakes
✶ was talking with a fellow dad who was struggling with making certain decisions, like when to be tough, when to indulge, how do you know if you’re going too far, etc. I found myself saying: just imagine that your child’s adult self is in the room watching you. in a sense, they are
- there will be times where your child feels you’re being unfair, but their adult self will understand and there will be times where your child accepts some bullshit you just did, but their adult self won’t
behavior management
- be generally a Yes person - they need to explore. pick your battles. ask yourself “is this really a limit, something I’m willing to hold consistently, 100x if need be?” if not let it go
- 🌷 saw someone else talk about how they understand why babies gets frustrated when you intervene in their explorations, so OP tries to design the world around baby in such a way that they won’t have to do that so much — such is the purpose of babyproofing a house
- when they do cross an unacceptable limit, maintain that boundary. they will freak out. be firm and calm. practice this skill over and over (the opportunities will present themselves)
- connect and support. you’re stopping and correcting the behavior, not the emotion. hold the emotion with them and help them move on
- don’t try to verbally reason or negotiate with a young toddler. they seem way more reasonable than they are, because they can speak (kinda like an LLM lol). use physical ways to regulate, humor, silliness
screens
✶ Kids with unlimited access to screens usually spend very little time doing other things, even with a wealth of other fun engaging options. Every adult I know (including myself) spends WAY more time on their phone than they would like and struggles to replace phone time with healthier, more fulfilling activities. Why would I expect a kid to be better at this than me??
✶ I have pretty strict parental controls on 14 year olds phone and I offered to give him $20 every time he figures out a way around them. So he gets paid but then I also learn how to shut down the workarounds. It’s basically paying him to spy on himself.
- He is not even a devious kid and he doesn’t obsess about the phone like a lot of kids do but he can still run circles around controls. In fact he’s an extremely bright boy who knows that his parents have his best interests at heart and also knows that tech is a pretty perilous gateway to a lot of sociopathic dysfunction
- Parents you have 3 options:
- NO SMARTPHONE
- constant work and monitoring
- porn and social media binging kids
- Option 1 is the best and easiest but there is a point at which you have to start allowing them access and teaching them how to handle it so you don’t just drop them with a nuclear device and no self control practices when they are 18
- 🌷 i don’t know if i believe there are only three options. i get that the digital landscape is pretty different from how it was when i was growing up ALSO in the digital age, and possibly worse off, but. hmmm.
memory-making
✶ I remember some years ago, we were at a family reunion, and my great aunts and uncles and my mom’s cousins would always address my kids first. They’d get down on their level, hold their faces in their hands and marvel at them. When the child felt fully seen, they’d then say hi to me.
- When I pointed out to one of the older relatives that it’s interesting how this side of the family treats kids at family functions. It’s so…intentional. She smiled. “We do these gatherings for them. We have our memories. They need some too.”
meaning
✶ “Everybody has it wrong way round. Parents don’t make children—children make parents. They shape our behavior from the first wail. Mold us into what they need. It can be a pretty rough process, too.”
✶ I didn’t know having a daughter would feel like getting to meet a smaller, braver, funnier version of myself, someone who carries my weird quirks like treasures instead of flaws.