Huge rant
I am not anti-natalist at all and I am not making a case for such reactionary ideologies here. Just sharing what I have seen so other folks and point my mistakes or just listen.
I am witnessing the older cousins of my generation in the family have and raise kids and it is a little bit terrifying. I am talking about two couples of parents, each with one child. The older kid is about 3 years old and the younger one is about 1 year old.
The older kid does almost nothing but throw tantrums all day. It is near impossible to make them do anything they do not want to do. For example, making them sit down in their high chair and eat the food they are being fed is a Herculean task. The child has to be distracted somehow. Two things that I saw that work:
- Put on YouTube videos on an iPad. These videos are like crack-cocaine for a child's brain BTW. The creators are highly incentivised to make the videos as addictive as possible to boost their ad revenue.
- Have someone play with them. The kid seemed to like me because I was new to them and I made them laugh, so they would sometimes allow their parents to feed them as long as I played with them.
The other child, who is a year old, is starting to exhibit similar behaviour. In the morning and afternoon, they are looked after by their grandparents. Their grandfather is responsible for feeding them. The grandfather is a boomer addicted to cable TV news and the stock market. (Cable TV news in India is BTW extremely garbage and inflicts incalculable amounts of psychic damage. There are no words to describe how bad it is.) As he feeds the child, the child sits on his lap watching the TV while being spoonfed. On the other hand, if the child is sitting on a high chair with no distractions, they refuse to eat even as the one who feeds them talks to them. The child does drink milk from the bottle without fuss so I am not sure whether they are in a descend towards problematic behaviour or not.
I don't have the knowledge or experience to confidently say whether things have to be this way or not so I don't want to jump to passing judgement on the child's parents and definitely not on the child. Maybe it is just how it is. Maybe children just throw tantrums while being subjected to feeding. Maybe TV or YouTube videos have nothing to do with it. I admittedly do not like technology as it is sold to us so my cynicism definitely comes a biased standpoint.
Mostly it got me wondering though how there are no public services to help with parenting, which is a foundationally important task for not just the well-being of society, but also perpetuating it. For example, I was wondering if crack-cocaine-tier addictive YouTube videos for children are detrimental to the child's growth and the overall experience of parenting. This is the year 2023 and I am pretty sure god knows how many tens of thousands of work-hours must have been put into researching issues like this. To find out, I can try using a search engine and hope to god that I don't get ratfucked by dishonest or just low quality articles that have been pushed to the top of the results through SEO. If I am savvy, I can try searching directly for research on something like Google Scholar but very few people are capable of this. (Not even me.) I found a pediatric psychologist who has made it her life's work to extol the vices of electronic media addiction on children. She sells books and courses on this which makes me trust her a little bit less since she profits off of it. She could be a charlatan feeding off of technophobe parents' paranoia. There are pediatric associations in every country but their findings and recommendations don't reach the masses. I have heard some advertisements from my country's on the radio. But they are few and far between and not in-depth at all. This kind of knowledge is still mostly passed from parents to their children instead of being rooted deeper in collective scientific findings.
Electronic media, social media, and their effects on the brain and habits is something that I am maybe overly sensitive about. My brain has been fried by a combination of anxiety and social media addiction to the point that I really struggle to read books because of being attention deficit. The children's parents and grandparents are also hooked to their phones and TVs. But since they are comfortably upper middle class and with generational wealth, they do not introspect their habits and life choices because having wealth in a capitalist society means you are doing good so you don't need to change what you are doing. The only things you can do better are what will net you more wealth.
Lastly, the parents don't seem to find it problematic that they don't get the chance to spend much time with their child even if they wanted to. All these parents are employed and working, so they work most of the day and delegate childcare to the grandparents and nannies who are poor and underpaid. One of the mothers, did not even get paid maternal leave despite working at one of the biggest private hospital chains. She had to quit the job and find a new one when the child was just six months old. I feel like if I had a child, I would want to take care of them almost full time at least until they are a year old and likely even older. It feels terrible to delegate childcare to an underpaid servant.
I don't have a larger point to make because I was just ranting. I don't feel qualified to hold strong opinions in this realm. Parenting I feel is always going to be tough. I cannot imagine it being programmatic and straightforward to raise human beings with all their complexities. The problem for me is that there are no public institutions to try and make this easier. Parents are left to their own devices, like getting their child hooked to addictive YouTube video channels, or finding an underpaid slave that ends up spending more time taking care of your child than her own to be able to put food on the table, or maybe paying for an expensive private daycare so you can slave away and the execs at your company can buy their seventh yacht.
i feel you, my nephew was created by cellphone and youtube kids, he is very late on learn to read and write, and also i was a tv baby, nowadays i have trouble on maintaining focus to read, be it study, literature or marxist theory 😩
One of the problems is that we won't get to see the long term effects of children overdosing on social media and YouTube Kids until they are reasonably older. So both corporations and society are winging it right now. One time I was at a shop and I saw a child walking around watching YouTube Shorts on his parent's smartphone while the parents were going about their business. This child was eight years old tops in my estimation. Children significantly older than him did not have such easy access to dopamine bombs.
Yeah, I'm just not having them. Whatsoever. They won't let me get snipped yet because "oh you're still so young, you'll change your mind later" but uh. I'm just sayn right now, if someone gets knocked up off me because they won't let me snip myself and the rubber fails, the other better be down with aborting. I'm not trying to raise a kid in this era, especially not when they stop being your kids around the age of six and seven. Once their peers get into their head at the school you have no visibility into, anything you tried to teach them goes straight out the window, and I've been watching it happen with ALL of my in-law's kids.
I think you are being overly pessimistic. It should be possible to offset the effect of peers as a parent. It is not clear how obviously so I understand your pessimism. And I don't think the onus of discovering a working method should be on you or on any other individual parent.
I feel a sense of fear coming from your reply which is what I experience too. I am not sure if I am correct though. I'm a broken individual with anger issues so I wonder if I raise a delicate child or not. Sometimes I'm scared at the thought of a baby that would have to rely on me for primary care.
I still think despite my humility and dialectical materialism I would still be a terrible parent but others are chugging along despite being far worse.
I mean, you're not entirely wrong on the fear factor. There's a lot of physical and mental fuck that runs through my family's genetics that I don't feel I have a reason to be passing on; it's just so much worse watching the way my in-law's kids comport themselves compared to how I remember my generation doing it.
And if not for the much more vast amount of time a kid spends at school, than under your thumb these days, I'd agree that there SHOULD be a way to offset the deleterious effects of the rest of the student body... But if your kid is up and preparing for school at 7, and gone by 8, and won't be back from anywhere between 4 to 6, the state has your seed for at least 8 hours a day. Tack on an hour or two of homework to that after the second grade, that's 8-10. Tack on at least one extracurricular to that by high school, that's now 8-12 hours, maybe more if it's a sport extracurricular, or if your kid's like I was at that age and juggling two or more extras per year. You're left with like 4 to 6 hours of wakeful time at best to impart whatever you will on your seed, assuming you're not working multiple jobs, gigs, or hustles at one time to further split your capacity for unfucking what the school fucks up.
That's not enough time to unfuck the state's socialization. The parent is outweighed under this paradigm; especially if they work or have to maintain multiple hustles themselves. A kid's just a net loss in my estimation these days, under this system; and if you tell me that you can successfully inoculate your kids against Bebe's kids, when they're seeing Bebe's kids way more often than they're seeing you, I genuinely don't believe you from the absolute failures of parenting I've been privy to thus far.
Yeah you have a point about the number of hours spend in school and school's homework.
It's not looking good obviously.
An alarming pattern is that we learn about amazing individual socialist leaders (eg. Lenin, Mao, Che) (these are the ones I've read about) but not much about their parents or their children.
I don't really have a larger point that I can back with good arguments. I don't think we should give up though.
New parent. We know our child will probably have a harder and worse life than we did. But that doesn't mean we can't do our very best to give them a good chance.
If we ever find Grandma entertaining the kid with a Pregnant Elsa Spiderman Joker video, I'll smash her phone with a hammer in front of her.
You and your child will do fine I think. There will be problems of course. But nothing you can't overcome.
I was babysitting my cousin one time and she showed me an ass eating video on her phone
This is the more fucked up version of the Dave Chapelle baby-selling-crack bit
Sometimes you just get shitty kids. It may not have anything to do with being in a capitalist system.
I don’t think this behaviour has anything to do with capitalism, but rather the kids’ guardians don’t have any discipline. In my house, we have a rule with zero screen time, for both the kid and parents, while the kid is awake.
With regards to feeding, we learn what she likes and what she doesn’t like. But if she doesn’t want to eat, we don’t force her, even if she skips a meal. What’s the most detrimental is that she develops an aversion to eating because she’s being forced to do it all the time. The result is that she over-eats a bit and we’re often horrified at how much she’s able to consume.
Sometimes you just get shitty kids.
How does that work? I cannot imagine that some children are just destined to be ill behaved. How would that even work? Does some genetic configuration determine this? I find this hard to believe. Evolution cannot keep pace with the rate of change of human conditions. Behaviours like this have to be learnt.
I don’t think this behaviour has anything to do with capitalism, but rather the kids’ guardians don’t have any discipline.
When does a problem elevate from being an individual one to a societal, economic and political one? We can of course try and pressure and educate parents on raising kids "right", but if enough parents are uncritically relying on pacifying their children with technology then it probably means that there are societal currents that are pushing people towards these choices. How many people are able to identify this as a problem and do something about it? Very rare cases of this in my experience. The reason capitalism plays a part in this is that long working hours makes parents not have enough patience in the tank to deal with their children being difficult. This is not meant to imply that a turn to socialism will immediately solve this problem. USSR had problems with alcohol abuse like their capitalist contemporaries. But only a socialist arrangement endows us with the tools to solve these problems on a societal level.
I have no idea. Some kids are easy to take care of and others are a bit more demanding. My kid was amazing in that she started sleeping through the night at 4 mo. But my neighbour’s kid was horrible, and woke up 1-2 times during the night.
I’m not a biologist or a child development expert but I suspect it’s got something to do with the order of development of certain brain functions, so it’s got nothing to do with genetics, nor is it something that we can control.
I would say that it is societal paradigm or work stress to leads parents to neglect their kids but you did specifically mention it was the kids’ grandparents, who are presumably retired.
IMO, there’s not really a difference in societal problems and social problems. Having support systems in place does make it easier, and gives you more resources to work with, but in the end you still have to do it. Either way, taking care of your kid takes up 80% of your waking time if you want to do it properly, and you have to balance that with a job that takes up 50% of your waking time. So you have to compromise somewhere and that’s usually your hobbies and mental well-being.
I'm sorry if I confused you but I didn't want to draw a distinction between societal and social issues. In fact I don't even know what the difference between them is.
The problem I had with your response was that you overemphasised the role of individual responsibility. All societal/social problems like drug abuse can be wished away if we assume individuals to have more agency tham they do.
Having support systems in place does make it easier, and gives you more resources to work with, but in the end you still have to do it.
This is what I wanted to say. It's true what you say. You can't completely eradicate the existence the existence of bad parents with social services. But genuinely good social services will make being a good parent more accessible and easier.
I got two paragraphs in and can tell you the kid probably tests positive for ADHD (:
i disagree, not having focus, be unquiet and throw tantrums are common behavior for toddlers since their brains didn't yet learned how to deal with frustration and stress, this is why is hard to diagnosis infants with anything.
the problem is that parents for a number of motives (generated by capitalism ofc) don't know how to deal with this behavior nor have the patient or time to it, like sole mothers, so they surrender to electronics, i saw for my myself with my nephew, it work miracles in stopping tantrums and distracting, the same way they don't handle stress, they don't handle youtube cartoons, they are all stupid with exploding bright colors with the sole objective to capture the toddler's attention and literally hook the kid since they get money from watch time, this is ends up heightening those common behavior and turning it to a problem which make the child dependent on eletronics.
i hope a certified psychologist appers in here to explain better, my reading in the subject is quite low ans i don't know how to walk the line to criticize modern midia without looking like reactionary talk.
i don’t know how to walk the line to criticize modern midia without looking like reactionary talk
Not related to sounding reactionary but I get dismissed out of hand as if I am a Luddite if I try to bring up that there could be adverse effects of reliance on YouTube Kids and such. The parent thinks every child is as restless as theirs and there is nothing to be done about it. I am not sure of my hunches but I kinda know what I don't know and am willing to admit it. This kind of humility is absent from the parents.
To make matters worth, YouTube has apparently been relaxing their inappropriate content moderation, specially on shorts. It has happened a lot of times, mostly when I'd search for something kid-adjacent (specially cartoons and anime), so I believe the hornyposters are aware of it and doing it intentionally.
thanks for the info, comrade.
i was thinking about a deeper discussion about psychological issues, child psychology, behavior and etc.
and link with the current fad of giving prescriptions to everyone. the latest edition of that manual of psychological issues (i forgot the name) loose the diagnoses process to a point that anyone can get a diagnose and prescription, because of lobby in science, pill are being sold as candy
i hope a certified psychologist appers in here to explain better, my reading in the subject is quite low ans i don’t know how to walk the line to criticize modern midia without looking like reactionary talk.
I am not a psychologist, but Reactionaries only attack the technology itself and falsely claim that the progress of technology by itself is the problem, failing to (or even refusing to) realize Capitalism is to blame for the problems associated with technology. The real problem is how Capitalism affects the current technology; Capitalists seek profit over everything else, so they will use technology to do exactly that.
Technology has so much potential to bring a better future, but it is held back and used inappropriately under Capitalism.
I'm a parent, I have three offspring that are 13-20. I concur that parenting is a fuck.
Now that my kids are older, its easier. My oldest son was an extremely difficult toddler, pure destructive motive and endless physical energy. Now he's chilled all the way out, he's focused and disciplined and thoughtful. We learned at an early age that he benefits from a physical outlet, and he fell in love with sports.
My oldest has pretty severe ADHD, but as a child was very calm and sweet. My youngest we thought also had ADHD when he was younger but now he's like the most attentive and organized of the three. His mind was always in a million places making these crazy associations, and he was probably the most like me when I was a kid, and I have ADHD. But now that he's a teenager he doesn't have the struggles I had. But ov the three, hes the one least likely to "show weakness," or express those needs and struggles. Having older siblings he could just be very mature in ways that make it harder to detect. Its a rollercoaster.
I've been looking into care work as a site of struggle, and found all of these intersections of class and race and gender exploitation, etc., in the next 6 months we will build our labor organizing working group around care work, in addition to some of the more currently active labor work like UAW solidarity, sbwu, and other unique local struggles (including a unionizing dispensary, union weed let's gooooo!) Anyway, I'd encourage organizers to look at care work as a site of untapped potential to cut through several layers of identity-based exploitation and get directly to the oppressive material conditions.
Anyway, I'd encourage organizers to look at care work as a site of untapped potential to cut through several layers of identity-based exploitation and get directly to the oppressive material conditions
I would also like to point out that being the place tired parents can go to have support for toddlers brings an immense amount of social influence. Running programs like that is more or less the reason the catholic church was powerful enough to be politically untouchable for quite some time
I have no kids and my biggest fear is bringing a Kamala Harris into this world, I won't let my kids touch an iPhone or go near the Internet until I can't speak understandbly with them first. There's too much conditioning everywhere.
