Being a communist and a dad is one of the difficult experiences. It makes you acutely aware of how everything exists to ground families into hyper-alienated individuals. If I wasn't doing good at my job, every expenditure on my kids would engender resentment. Parents are supposed to be caretakers, tutors, teachers, disciplinarians, coaches, best friends, and...busy adults with productive lives...all at the same time. Everything costs so much fucking money. Want to teach your kid how not to drown in pools, 80$! Want to enroll them in gymnastics, 80$! Daycare, $299 a week. Your kid's grandparents are working 9-5s and they can only see them every once in a while. Your siblings and cousins, are too young and broke to be of any help and live in some other shitty state.
Then there's the constant bombardment of "research". Kids are behind, they are not reading enough, doing enough math, writing enough. Their literacy is in the toilet! They are obese, they are rude, they wanna kill you. Your kids are doing marijuana, or coke, or blowing random dicks on the internet, they renounce christ and worship satan, they have pink hair and go by they/them pronouns. They'll never find a job or will have to work 3 jobs at once. If your kid is an angel or an asshole, they will get kidnapped either way and be sold to Epstein-like child rape islands.
It's enough to make you go insane.
The only thing a parent can do is their very best. And that's dragged down by the sometimes insurmountable amount of trauma you have had heaped on you by your own parents, and their parent's parents. I yell, I get really loud and agitated. Even when I'm not mad, I'm loud as fuck. Because that's how my mom and dad dealt with things; they also spanked and beat the shit out of me, but I made a point not to ever do that to my kids.
So when I yell, even if unintentionally, at my children. I feel like a humongous piece of shit. I think the only saving grace is that they behave well enough the vast majority of the time, that I'll never have to get really really mad at them.
But have you tried learning how to be a "good parent"? Learning programs cost hundreds of dollars. There's a million different books on how to be a parent. And you read them, you try them out.
Do you know how difficult it is to go about this on your own, often times without even the support of your own spouse? You read books like "How to talk to kids so they'll listen and listen so kids will talk" and you feel so stupid. Acknowledging emotions, while the child is still bawling his eyes out. "Yeah, it makes you upset?" yah "you are really mad dad said no to extra cookies" yaaaaah "Oh what a shame, it just makes you want to yell real loud and scream and bawl". You sit there, trying to do your best when every traumatized fiber in your body just wants to smack them in the face for being a mewling little baby. It sucks so much fucking shit. But you don't lay a single hand of them other than to comb their hair or wipe their tears. And you look deep within yourself to give them the very type of love and nurturing you wish you had as a child. You try very hard to be patient and understanding, and joyous, even when there's nothing to be happy about. Because your child is your child, he is your heart outside of yourself. Why would you be mean and nasty to your love made manifest?
Yeah, I hope I didn't come across as shitting on parents. The nuclear family hurts you too. It's insane to expect two people to shoulder all that work, much less one person. A lot of people don't have that restraint.
It’s a hilarious meme. Good bait. And applies to a vast majority of people. My critique is that this is all a systemic failure. Like it sucks mad shit it’s just a microcosm of everything about America.
Major solidarity, comrade. I can barely be a good father and I’m somehow also expecting myself to help my kids navigate all the propaganda that’s spewed in American schools. Just spending time with them is hard. All they want is positive attention and I can se them turning to seeking negative attention because I can’t seem to provide enough positive. I just want to be able to have my hard work pay off ever.
You don’t know how many times I wish I could adopt some of ya’ll
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.-Philip Larkin
I think we are not brutally honest about parenting and a lot of people go into being a parent as if they were getting a pet instead of a whole human being whose life is not yours to own.
Yes, the hard part is replacing it. It's literally built into the ground.
Just last night I had 8 friends over for dinner and a craft night. You can do it
True, I guess having grown up without a nuclear family scenario I didn't exactly view it as systemic.
Individuals can organize and propagate those mitigations and they can eventually lead to systemic change. Many people don’t need to stop thinking of their individual actions as revolutionary. They just need to see that revolution within a social context
Kids will stay awake as long as possible to the point where it harms their own health and development. Justified hierarchy, motherfuckers
Wasn't that just a twitter thing? I don't remember seeing any serious discussion about that here.
It was here too for a quick second. I'm not on Twitter so I wouldn't know about it otherwise
Always chuckle when I see people APAB posting. I wonder how much of it is posters here having legitimately terrible parents, vs how much is just stupid teenagers getting mad because they were grounded.
Edit: I think a big part of the problem is that parents are forced into wage labor that keeps them away from their kids for most of the day. Completely unnatural situation.
I get that the meme is kind of over the top but my issue is the suffocating, boring and isolating nature of the nuclear family and the abuse, big and small, it permits. I think parents being away from their children is good actually, at least after a certain age. Being around the same two people constantly can easily drive you crazy.
the nuclear family is a recent invention and hasn't existed in its current form for more than a century. it's not about the individual moral character of this or that parent, but the entire structure of family that puts the entire onus of raising a child on two people with exclusive, unquestioned, unrestricted control over that child.
rape and incest
this is why rape is so common within a family. structuring society around a nuclear family, where kids are left to a particular caretaker whose authoirty cannot be questioned by outsiders, enables rape. every time an institution puts children in the exclusive, unchecked control of adults - and more specifically adult men - the result is usually a child sex abuse scandal. it's why the catholic church has a sex abuse scanadal, because priests can have that exclusive, unchecked access to children that have to obey them. boy scouts, same thing. and why would that not hold true for the nuclear family?
the unchecked authority of parents over their children is also why we get people raised to be fucking awful. youth liberation doesn't mean that as a child you don't get to live with your mom and dad, but that your mom and dad would be but one facet of your upbringing - much like how the aforementioned issues brought up earlier tend to get reported when kids go to school, where there's a lot more checks and so the teachers there can serve as something of a check on parents, assuming they notice signs of abuse, have the energy to fight it, or have any power at all to change anything that isn't legally recognized child abuse.
there's plenty of good people who even make good parents, but even then it's placing a massive burden on just these two people who have to be the only ones funding their kid's upbringing. grandparents, neighbors, autns and uncles, the larger community being able to raise kids so that parents don't have to bear the entire burden, connecting children to a larger community so that they aren't growing up isolated and without connections and then forced into utterly alienated adulthoods where they just live alone in apartments they can barely afford.
I appreciate the generous appraisal but I'm actually dumb and was saying a little bit of both.
I have my apprehensions about the nuclear family but you gotta admit it's better than the fossil fuel family
just because it takes 2 people's genetic material to make a child doesn't mean that they should get to isolate the child from society. it takes a whole village to raise a child. when the only thing people have power over is their child, even if it doesn't end with abuse, it's still a messed up power dynamic. enlarge the family, combine families, hell even return to communes. 2 authorities are way too few
Did your parents lock you in the house until adulthood? Normal parents don't isolate their kids from society, they usually realise that they will become adults who will need to live in it. We also don't live in villages for the most part and a city is an awful parent. Most kids still spend times with extended family and family friends. They also go to school and socialise with other kids and tend to go visit their friends houses and shit as well. Children aren't typically isolated from society by their parents.
That's the ideal case yes, but a lot of links in that chain can break. Fearmongering creates paranoid helicopter parents. The village is a metaphor for the fact that 2 people will get absolutely exhausted from shouldering all the responsibility themselves while working full time (the fatigue also damages the relationship). Celebrating holidays with extended family a few times a year is no substitute for having more people be part of the household. If parents don't like who their kid hangs out with, they can ground them, and nobody can stop them. Even if most parents are reasonable, they still shouldn't have a monopoly on that power.
Wouldn't having more family in the household mean that your parents have to live with their authoritarian parents even longer? How about parents shouldn't have to work full time? Your solution to bad parenting seems to be throwing more parents at the problem,. And grounding isn't real, you can just not listen, they have no legal ground to enforce a grounding.
It doesn't have to be multigenerational, it doesn't even have to be blood relatives. But even a multigenerational family would be better simply because there are more authorities that can disagree and discuss, which would hopefully end with better decisions, or at the very least teach the child that authorities aren't absolute and there can be conflict. I wouldn't only throw more parents at the problem, I would throw more children too. Grounding is very real, the parents can enforce it themselves, or have punishments after the fact. The power dynamic doesn't even require enforcement in many cases, the child will have learned to obey.
I have, and while that has its own problems I still find it vastly preferable.
Well, I'm glad your group living situation was harmonious enough to not be awful for a child. That's not the universal experience and making it so seems way harder than decent housing, shorter work hours, paid parental leave, Les car centric planning and a plethora of other much more practical things than telling everyone to live together in giant family units and help raise other people's kids. That's a hard sell.
I sort of took all that for granted but you are correct that under current circumstances it's a hard sell. Although you wouldn't only be helping raise other people's kids, they would also help you raise yours. I think in Full Communism(tm) you'd have a hard time arguing why you should get to keep your family out of everyone else's sight, they would suspect abuse.
Or people just like having some privacy within their own home? Our proximity to Full Communism is distant to the point that imagining its functions is speculative fiction. What about people that don't have kids? Do they have to raise other people's kids? What if your kid is an annoying little shit and no one wants to deal with them? What if the same applies to you? This just feels like you're describing Amish people with video games at best and a cult at worst.
I'm all ears if you have better suggestions, I'm just throwing shit at the wall. All children are annoying little shits, those who get spoiled by their parents even more so. The children could spend more of their day at the community center, that way the parent being an annoying shit wouldn't be a problem. Maybe if nobody wanted to move in with your family that would be a warning signal to make you reconsider and change something about yourself and the situation.
In another comment I thought, what if you help another couple raise their child before you have your own? That way their burden is lessened and you get valuable experience without full commitment, and it makes helping each other out a responsibility.
I'd reduce precarcity and increase leisure time. Probably a lot of home life issues would fade pretty quick right there. My ex had a bunch of hippies for family and they operated pretty similar to how you describe things as being ideal and it wasn't good for anyone. Kids got contradictory guidance and adults would fight over it. Some of the kids didn't get along with some of the other kids or adults and vice versa.
All of this 'if no one wants to live with you and your family you should do self crit' or 'under communism a family that values privacy would be suspected of abuse' is some creepy cult shit. Who cares if the person is an asshole? Should they be cut off from this communal child rearing? Wouldn't that be unfair to the child?
The way you write about your friend's family doesn't seem like problems unique to hippie families, blood siblings don't necessarily get along either and parents argue all the time. I'm trying to think of a family arrangement that doesn't have culty elements, but it's hard, and it's not like the nuclear family is an exception. When children are involved everything has extra weight.
There probably isn't a one size fits all solution. Kids can be victimized by pretty much anyone that wants to, they're weak and dumb.
That is the 'normal' TV representation of what kids lives are like. There's a lot of kids that don't live that life. You're not doing ANYTHING under the age of like 13 if your parents don't want you to. By that time you're going to have a super warped outlook on life .Your parents can get you sent to juvenile detention for disobeying them even.
Except for the people who don't have shitty parents. They have those.
Who said you wouldn't know them? Enlarging doesn't mean procreating, it can be as easy as having your sibling or friend move in for a while. Idk if couples would make more sense. It might be good to have some experience of raising a child before you get your own.
The solution is to make parental education and training free and widely available. Also mental healthcare for the parents who are passing on generational trauma because they haven’t dealt with their own shit. And ideally the ability for people to socialize more so they can support each other’s kids as well in short bursts
The emotional commitment issues are worth taking seriously, but I wonder if we should compare it against the unhealthy obsession with the Love Of Your Life that comes with the nuclear family. Half of marriages end in divorce, and those that stay married often end up resenting each other.
They probably intended more of a "everyone rotates nannying roughly equally" which wouldn't have that problem. I wonder if something can be salvaged from their attempt or we need an entirely new form.
are the commitment issues really issues though
being different in that way does not have to be a bad thing
my family isnt nuclear so that means my commie grandma can bully the rest of my family into being less libby as the matriarch
I think most of the criticism comes from the fact that it's a real coin flip
Like, my family has always been fine but I know plenty of people that definitely didn't have the same experienceMine has also been great, though I recognize that for many comrades their family is an oppressive force, rather than a supportive one.
if you say anything about family or parenting you must be some kid that's mad you got grounded
this is the only possibility
While we're at it, I think the Soviet and East German creches were pretty cool. There were probably other similar systems elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc but those are just the ones I've read about.
Like an extended day care where parents volunteer in shifts, as I understand it. Seems nice and pretty easy to integrate into people's regular lives if you have the social infrastructure (i.e. socialism) to support it.
Also on the subject, I would like to learn more about what life is like in Venezuela's communes.
