But again, screens, you know. We went to the library this morning and met Klara’s earliest friend. She’s in a public school, and she and Klara grew apart because they don’t see each other that often. The girl was at the library with her new best friend, a they/them. And with the they/them’s mother whom I do not want anywhere in the vicinity of my child because the reasons behind the they/themness of her 8-year-old are written with glowing neon letters all over her.
So let’s say you avoid screens. How do you avoid all this in actual life? People aren’t even waiting until the poor children enter puberty. They unleash all this on them from the cradle.
Clarissa's Blog 
you can’t. Sooner or later your child will come into contact with people/ideologies you despise and have shielded them from. And then, the horror, they might adopt positions opposing yours.
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Sooner or later we are all going to die. Death is imminent. It’s the sooner or the later part that we are all making efforts to control, don’t we?
Said I, feeling like a preschool teacher.
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When it comes to children, I don’t think it’s as simple as the likelihood of them adopting views contrary to those of their parents being inversely proportional to how long they have been shielded from them. There are more variables in play.
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You do seem to have a problem with analogies. Death is final. A person’s life, after coming into contact with a certain ideology continues. The contact may have no effect whatsoever.
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Why do so many people seem to revel in the idea of corrupting the children of intact, conservative, religious families? There’s something deeply pervy about that.
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Well, ethyl, corrupting the innocent is one of the main male sexual fantasies. It makes sense evolutionarily.
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This argument that kids will find out eventually so what’s the point of delaying it is exceptionally bizarre. Did your own parents not do that for you when you were a child? Was the knowledge of every nasty side of human life revealed to you when you were a toddler? Of course, we all eventually find everything out. But different ages call for different experiences. Why is that a novel idea?
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“Why is that a novel idea?”
Just as russia coopted a very big section of the right in the US, predators have coopted the childcare (including educational) sectors.
There might be a nicer way to put it, but that’s what it is.
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It’s not novel. It’s that *they* wanna be the ones doing the exposing. “It’s inevitable” is the rationale of van-candy goblins and trenchcoat-flashers.
We (religious parents) get accused of “sheltering” our children. What are we supposed to do? Watch porn and do drugs with them? Of course we shelter them. It’s our job.
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One of the most important missions of a parent is to protect the children’s innocence and introduce them to life in age-appropriate stages. Nobody, for example, narrates to a child the actual physical process through which the child was conceived. Eventually, he’ll find out. But a parent who inflicts such a narrative on a child is a pedo perv.
It’s totally the flasher type of behavior.
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Responding to
”This argument that kids will find out eventually so what’s the point of delaying it is exceptionally bizarre. Did your own parents not do that for you when you were a child? Was the knowledge of every nasty side of human life revealed to you when you were a toddler? Of course, we all eventually find everything out. But different ages call for different experiences. Why is that a novel idea?”
Are we talking about toddlers now?
My parents didn’t explain in detail what happens when adults molest kids when I was a little child, no. But by the time I started 1st grade, I knew there are starving children in the world, that there are wars, that criminal adults kidnap and murder children, that alcoholism and drug addiction exist. I didn’t particularly worry about any of those and wasn’t traumatized.
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We aren’t talking about vague general knowledge that a child can’t fully process. Read the OP. Did your parents inflict the company of alcoholics and drug addicts on you? Did they drag them home to make sure you got a full exposure?
What’s the point you are trying to make here? That I should seek the company of child abusers for my child? Because that’s what we are discussing: how to avoid actual child abusers. Not the vague knowledge that they exist but tjeyr actual presence.
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Responding to the question about my point.
First of all, I acknowledge that I made a mistake. I responded with a general statement about how you can’t ensure your children grow up in a particular way by just shielding them from views you disagree with, without regards to the age of the child, others replied still speaking about children only, and I should have kept that in mind. The tone of the conversation hadn’t changed.
My point is that the more dangers a mother feels she is protecting her child from, the better she can feel about herself. The dangers don’t have to be real.
I think your child being irrevocably harmed by finding out there are lesbian families or meeting a child (with a dysfunctional mother) who identifies as they/them are some of the imaginary dangers.
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https://x.com/andrewtwalk/status/1975349759314731248?t=nAfd_Nigx5bxGRcMGa04jg&s=19
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What is your point, Clarissa? That as a mother you have to work very hard and be vigilant to prevent your child from becoming Mx Benson?
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Trying to point you very gently towards your tribe. You might be very happy around your own people.
My child runs zero danger of being “a desperate girl”, so no need to worry.
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“It makes sense evolutionarily”
So does eating your own feces, if you’re an ape, and rolling in rotten fish guts, if you’re a dog.
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In 99,9% of cases, it’s the mom who is they/theming a child. And almost invariably, she’s not successful at keeping a man around, let’s put it that way. Which is what causes the they/theming.
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oooh, I’d like to hear more about this.
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“Sooner or later your child will come into contact with people/ideologies you despise and have shielded them from”
Of course, the parents’ job is to give them the tools to see through shams and defend themselves from predators. That’s best done gradually in small, imperceptible doses.
The goal of predators is to gain access to children before parents can give them the protection they need.
“then, the horror, they might adopt positions opposing yours”
I’m not gonna call you a predator (out of politeness more than anything) but that’s exactly what a predator wants.
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Cliff, are you saying someone bringing the good news of Jesus Christ to a person raised by heathens and trying to get them to accept salvation is a predator?
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Yes. As a Christian, I don’t try to proselytize other people’s kids against the wishes of their parents. It would be a huge boundary violation, and creepy as heck.
Stop being a perv.
-ethyl
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Neither did I rush at the they/them child with a Christian sermon. People project their weirdness on us for creepy reasons.
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“Stop being a perv”
For some folks, that’s a lot easier said than done….. especially when being a perv has been sanctified by the media-complex and pervs are beatified.
It’s hard to not notice that some are trying very hard to be pervs… they’re just not very good at it.
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—“then, the horror, they might adopt positions opposing yours”
—I’m not gonna call you a predator (out of politeness more than anything) but that’s exactly what a predator wants.
Cliff, maybe Anonymous did not phrase it well, as it has certain aftertaste of almost wishing it to happen… Or of mocking attempts to protect the children. But it is a legitimate concern. Yes, Clarissa brought a sex/trans/etc related example in her post, but ultimately there are all kinds of positions on various topics that are against the values of this blog but that have nothing to do with sex or anything transgender… What if one finds buddhism, or becomes a liberal, or a socialist, or rejects any number of conservative positions I cannot think of right now? (All of the above is perfectly compatible with reading a lot, by the way.)
From my experience, too much protection from “undesirable” people or concepts does not necessarily turn one into the fan of all those undesirable things, but may damage the relationship between the parent and the child.
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Pay attention to the subtext.
It’s not effing Buddhism or socialism or mercantilism or rationalism or materialism or capitalism or atheism that makes us block a line of sight and go “Hey kids! Golly where did I park my car? Help me find it!” when we walk out of a shop downtown.
It’s sex and drugs.
Nobody talking the perv talk about “exposing kids to the real world and different viewpoints” is talking about Buddhism.
Don’t be a sucker about it.
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Exactly.
I confirm that I have no problem with having my child hang around Buddhists.
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OK, I see your point.
But speaking of subtext, this post sounded as continuation of the previous post on Netflix, that turned into a discussion on screen time in general, reading, ways of the kids to have fun in real life, etc. The discussion seemed more general to me than being just about sex or drugs.
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That’s because pervs always try to make it general. It’s a deflection tactic. They want everybody to think that talking to other people’s kids about sex, or trying to deconvert them from their family’s religion, or getting them to try drugs, or detaching them from their family connections so they’re easier to exploit, is not what they’re *really* getting at, so they try to hide it behind other stupid things, like Buddhism.
It *is* the same discussion as Netflix– that shite is pervy.
it’s the narrator from Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young” out there IRL trying to pretend it’s about something, *anything* other than them personally wanting access to other people’s kids, and taking joy in corrupting them. Because if they told the truth that would set off all the alarm bells. No, it’s clearly about kids hearing about *Buddhism* of all things.
Again: don’t be a sucker. That’s a spade, and it’s OK to call it one.
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Ethyl, I phrased my post very generally. It was about the limited control parents have over their children. I thought of adding “Ancient Greeks or Romans may have written something about this”.
I’m sure perverts exist and you’re welcome to worry about them.
Clarissa, I wasn’t talking about the they/them kid. I had older people in mind. College students meeting more people.
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Once they are of college age, the responsibility for them is firmly in their own hands. Obviously, whoever she hangs out with in college is not on me.
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College students are adults.
You brought up, in an otherwise civil discussion, male sex fantasies about corrupting the innocent.
Now you want to backpedal that shite and say that wasn’t about kids?
Because none of the rest of us are trying to make adults out to be innocents in need of protection from the big bad world.
Don’t be a weasel.
-ethyl
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I feel like I’m playing catch up with Methylethyl’s comments but yes, why are we suddenly not understanding the difference between 9-year-olds and adults?
There’s a ton of books and movies that if I were to show them to elementary school students, I’d probably be visited by police. But I bring them to class in college, and it’s fine. I wonder what causes such a difference. Hmm, a mystery.
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“weasels gonna weasel”
At present weasels are either predators or they try their best to facilitate predators under all sorts of maskirovka.
“Why do you not want drag queens around your children?!?!?! Would you be so hung up about people from a different religion?”
I honestly don’t know if most of them realize what they’re doing….
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People are hypnotized by the idea of choice. “If you are against the people choosing themselves into they/them, how will you react if your child chooses herself into Buddhism? If choices are not sacred, then what is?”
It’s an empty category that has been invested with outsize importance it most certainly doesn’t deserve.
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I have an imaginary ticker on my desktop counting down the time it takes for Senor Weasel to make the “But seventeen is practically an adult” argument.
They all do it.
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–and since I’ve never yet had someone try to use those gross rationalizations on me IRL, I’m assuming they *do* know what they’re doing, because they at least have enough self-preservation instinct not to do it in person, around parents.
-ethyl
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Ethyl,
I made a general statement about how children will sooner or later come in contact with ideologies their parents despise and had been shielding them from, and even adopt them.
You spoke of pervs wanting to corrupt the children of religious parents. I responded to your specific statement.
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As has been explained a dozen times already, normal parents make sure that children come into contact with unseemly sides of life later as opposed to earlier. Why is this proving such a complex notion?
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This child is being abused. Abused. What it will take for him to crawl from under this is hard to imagine. Especially if the mom makes the abuse physical. We aren’t talking about an “undesirable concept.” If the mom were raping or beating this child and there were no recourse because we decided as a society to permit this form of abuse, should I hang around it then and act like it’s normal? That would make me complicit. In child abuse.
This is an abused child. You don’t need any particular values to want to not participate in something like this.
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—This is an abused child. You don’t need any particular values to want to not participate in something like this.
Do you explain somehow to Klara why you are not associating with certain people, or are you just trying to distract her in ways that do not require explanations, or are you trying to do something else?
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I don’t think she would have played with this kid even if I tried to make her do it. This is a miserable kid. Mine would have no reason to want to hang around this dysfunction.
She always plays with a Downs kid at the kid’s gym because the Downs kid is very loved. Children have a radar for this type of thing.
I’m definitely happy that I don’t have to start explaining child abuse just yet. I already had to explain about drug addiction after a visit to Montreal where we saw a homeless man defecate in the middle of the street.
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My kids are older than Clarissa’s, and yes, I absolutely warn my kids away from certain other children, and we discuss in excruciating detail why, what’s going on there, how to respond appropriately, and why they need to protect themselves and others when they encounter this specific pathological behavior pattern in other people. We talk about the specific behaviors we observe, why they’re a problem, and how to recognize the same pattern in other situations/people.
We do it because right now, when they’re young, the stakes are low. But people exhibit the same pathologies as adults, and then the stakes can be very high. If they can learn to recognize it and avoid the attendant trouble as kids, it’ll serve them well all their lives.
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That’s a great approach. Of course, I’m going to tell her about they/thems and what it means and how it happens. But I don’t want to do it just yet. It’s too early.
And it does make me angry that I have to feel rushed and beseiged with this dysfunction that I in no way caused and that now I have to explain away and put some sort of a positive spin on it.
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Ugh.
That’s worse than figuring out what to say when my fresh new reader starts puzzling out all the STD billboards while we drive around town.
“But Mama, WHY are they advertising a disease? Nobody wants to get diseases…”
It’s very mysterious. I have no idea.
-ethyl
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Every time we enter Illinois from Missouri – which is 20 minutes away by car – there are these billboards advertising cheap, easy abortions. Over the years, I have resorted to a very wide arsenal of distracting tricks every time we hit that stretch of the road.
It’s like they do it on purpose. Surely, nobody consults a billboard for an actual abortion. Why, why is it necessary to stick it where every child will see it? It’s like they are torturing parents on purpose.
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“too much protection from “undesirable” people”
Projection! I just met a word called Projection!
And suddenly that theme will always be a meme for me!
Anyway…. two issues:
The job of parents includes arming (in psychological terms) their children against predators and scammers and to give them tools for determining who/what is safe and who/what isn’t.
Parents also have the obligation of making it clear to children what their (the parents’) values are and, within the limits of the law, compell behavior that is in conformity with same (go to church/temple/synagogue, clean your room, don’t swear at home etc)
Of course as children get older they will encounter predators, scammers, crappy people of various kinds and different value systems.
If the parents have done their job the children will suss out predators and scammers more easily (crappy people can be harder to detect).
And, of course they will flirt and/or experiment with diffferent value systems and may adopt some that are in direct conflict with their parents (at some point that will be their entire allure). They may adopt those long term.
How this affects their relationship with their parents or other family members is a matter for the family and not pushy outsiders (within the limits of the law I add, certain that you are, even now, searching for counter-arguments…..)
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We hang out with other homeschoolers and church people. This is hard for me, because it involves being sociable, making playdates, hanging out with other moms, driving a lot. I’m a natural hermit: it’s a strain.
Yeah, they are absolutely going to encounter all that stuff. The later the better. I want to make sure they know where to find a spouse, once they’re of an age to start looking, and that we’re all used to thinking about long-term outcomes, reflexively, before anybody offers them the sales pitch for short-term acceptance.
So far so good. I showed my eldest the stats for teenagers and reading: he was aghast. How was it possible that only 13% of teens read books, for fun, nearly every day… when ALL the kids he knows do? Yeah, kid, that’s deliberate.
It’s not like they don’t get exposure to real-world dysfunction: we’re not the sort who go no-contact with family just because they’re going through an idiot phase or make bad decisions. But it’s different when you’re looking at the backside of that tapestry: nobody thinks “yeah! Dependency, failure, and heartbreak! That’s cool and I want to do it too!”
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I’m very grateful for our small Christian school where normalcy is the default. I’m not asking for much. All I want is for people to be normal around my very young child. Happy families, doing the normal family stuff together.
Today at the event at my university, even the extremely curmudgeony and habitually pissy Chancellor thawed when he saw Klara and behaved like an adult who understands the value of childhood and the need to treat it as childhood. If even he can dredge up some shreds of humanity from his neoliberal soul, then not all is lost.
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Prayer, love, and age-appropriate honesty.
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The child is so young he wouldn’t have found out about they/theming by himself. This is completely engineered by the mother. And we all know exactly the kind of pathology that makes her want to castrate her son.
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This is downthread from the question in the OG post w/respect to managing one’s own child’s exposure:
“and we discuss in excruciating detail why, what’s going on there, how to respond appropriately, and why they need to protect themselves and others when they encounter this specific pathological behavior pattern in other people. We talk about the specific behaviors we observe, why they’re a problem, and how to recognize the same pattern in other situations/people”
Is a well-expressed example of the “honesty” part of the answer.
The first two are generally applicable, of course.
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“we all know exactly the kind of pathology that makes her want to castrate her son”
Not all of your readers do. I’m sincerely confused and wouldn’t know where to turn to begin to figure this out. If you’d be willing to write more about it I would certainly benefit. It’s sort of consequential to me as we do know one couple whose son “Came out as a girl” and , like you, I’m not exactly comfortable with being complicit in child abuse but also don’t want to hurt my friends feelings, and I also have terrible social skills.
One of my oldest female friends is FtM trans but transitioned in adulthood. His “coming out” was definitely a shock to our parents but not to us (we are in our forties), because he had always been open (with friends) about wanting to transition. I guess the parents were too busy making a living and figuring their own lives out to pay much attention to what was going on with their child, and when they did find out, seemed more concerned with what their circle of friends would think, rather than with the medical impact on their child.
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@Clarissa:
“People are hypnotized by the idea of choice.”
That may be why the hypnotized go along with it, but I don’t think that’s the origin of the thing. You can see it even in some fairly old writing by “education experts” talking about the need to pry children away from their parents and fill them with “better” ideas that their parents would naturally resist. One of the things that comes up over and over in these vintage discussions is the necessity of getting hold of the kids while they are still kids, before they’ve settled into their places as adults in the family.
So propagandizing them while they’re still children is one prong, and prolonging childhood well into the 20s so that they’re still childishly susceptible to it straight through college is another. This was done deliberately, a long time ago, by people who knew exactly what they were up to.
It’s much much harder to propagandize a child who has reached real maturity in the context of his family, community, and religion, and has successfully navigated into an adult role in each. They’re too sure of themselves, they know their own importance, they have multiple loyalties to things other than the latest social fad, or a corporate employer, and overall just aren’t *squishy* like kids who’ve been ground up and processed by the school system.
Just because those discussions are over a century old now, doesn’t mean they’re less relevant, or have been left behind. Current discussions in education follow exactly the same lines. Some values and goals have shifted, but the idea that families inculcating their own children with their own values is *a problem to be solved* through the education system… that is still very current.
-ethyl
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Hi Ethyl,
Do you have any thoughts/observations on how churches/communities can effectively help vulnerable kids when there are challenges to the immediate family. Shit happens in families that can leave kids vulnerable. Some communities seem to be more effective at shielding their members from self-destructive social fads than others.
-YZ
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I don’t have much insight into how communities can do that *deliberately*.
My immediate family wasn’t the most functional, but I benefitted hugely from the buffering effects of an enormous, closely-connected extended family, and a stable community of friends, neighbors, friends’ relatives who also happened to be neighbors, etc. The family I grew up in involved dozens of aunts and uncles, armies of cousins (first and second cousins), most of whom I knew personally (there were a few outliers who’d moved to the west coast or something). Between the indulgent neighbors who lived nearby for my whole childhood (and whose houses I haunted), and the great-aunts and -uncles who functioned as bonus grandparents, I had oodles of kind, competent, generous adults in my life, whom I used as models for functional grown-up relationships and home life.
That was a healthy system of community functioning well. Resilience and buffers and stuff. But it kind of required that a large fraction of people living in our neighborhood, and in our town, spend 30 or 40 years living in the same house. People move around too much now.
Our church community was negligible in this picture, largely because church was one of those places my mother went in order to preserve her self-image of being Nice Middle Class People (downward mobility is hard on the ego), so… people we went to church with were ‘rich people’ by our standards, and we were unable to relate to them. Country Club Aliens.
So… short answer: I don’t know if it can be done now. We don’t have that kind of stability anymore. But I think that will be one of the real benefits of the continuing economic decline: reduced material wealth keeps people rooted to the same place. We will probably have stable communities again in my lifetime.
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I hope so also, both my wife and myself had the benefit of growing up in an extended family.
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“Ethyl,
I made a general statement about how children will sooner or later come in contact with ideologies their parents despise and had been shielding them from, and even adopt them.
You spoke of pervs wanting to corrupt the children of religious parents. I responded to your specific statement.”
Again: You brought up male sex fantasies in this discussion. Stop trying to weasel out of it.
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Oh, I absolutely brought up male sexual fantasies. You don’t seem to have the same reaction when Clarissa herself brings up women not getting enough sex all the time in relation to completely non-sexual stuff.
You want to obsess about adults wanting to corrupt the children of religious parents. I responded with what I saw as psychological evidence backing you up.
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You’re a creep. Everybody understands that based on your current, already-posted statements. End of discussion.
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Definite creep vibes.
I wonder if creeps fully realize how obvious it is they are creeps.
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Going by the ones I’ve met IRL… they know, and they have a whole pre-prepared set of strategic excuses, rationalizations, deflections, and justifications they’ve prepared ahead of time for the occasions when they get caught creeping.
Those often work on normie women who like attention, sadly. Flatter, distract, expose belly. Accuse someone else. etc.
This guy’s already exhibited the classic dance up to the boundary and touch it, to see if the electric fence is on, repeatedly. If it were IRL, I’d have already notified the other moms, the security team, and the organization’s child safety admin.
-ethyl
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For fuck’s sake, ethyl, I’m a woman, have no sexual interest in children, or innocents, but you’re welcome to fantasize.
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Boundary testing behavior is boundary testing behavior, no matter who does it. You think the only creeps are men?
-ethyl
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