I usually avoid commenting on American child-rearing strategies because the rejoinder is obvious and entirely correct: "Claire, go raise a child yourself before you lecture us." But this article seems dead-accurate to me. theatlantic.com/family/archive…
I sure see a lot of American parents making themselves needlessly miserable--and their kids unbearable--by using the strategies she discusses. It's true and it's obvious, if you've lived elsewhere and seen how parents in other countries do it, that it doesn't have to be this way.
I don't think I've ever seen a French kid have a tantrum in public. I watch what the parents here do, and I'm not sure I fully understand it, but it looks pretty much like what she describes. They're much more low-energy and low-involvement.
Kids are supposed to adapt to the adult world, not vice-versa. And the way Americans create whole spaces exclusively for kids but inherently loathsome to adults has always struck me as a huge mistake. Most other countries don't do this.
It keeps kids from learning how to function, socially, among adults, and worse, it infantilizes adults--who become childlike in their tastes and affect. You can create public spaces that are appealing to kids and adults alike.
The Paris plage, for example: city-journal.org/html/paris-lif…. These are wonderful additions to the social fabric. But spaces designed *only* to appeal to children are exhausting for parents: Why would parents want to suffer through the time they spend with their kids?
Why is this expected of American parents?

Or worse, they're appealing to the adults, but only because they've so long given themselves over to pleasing the kids that they've regressed to childhood and lost contact with adult sensibilities.
(Adults who are drawn to marketing like this, for example, have been over-immersed in spaces designed for children.) Image
I'll now cease pronouncing judgment upon the way other people raise their kids; I know nothing's less welcome than lessons on child-rearing from someone who's never done it. I only point this out in case you're making yourself miserable with guilt--
--thinking that you *must* keep your kids praised and entertained. Most people, the world around, see no reason to feel they have to praise and entertain their kids around the clock. The kids turn out fine. Probably better, frankly. All that praise turns them into little beasts.

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More from @ClaireBerlinski

10 Mar
Here, I think, is the main point, now that I've slept on it. There is an adult world. There is a children's world. The adult world is characterized by restraint, impulse control, a developed sense of the emotions and needs of others, and by sophisticated and educated taste.
Adults prefer quiet, order, and conversation to noise, chaos, and screaming. Adults dine, rather than eating like animals. Adults are sexual and cynical, not innocent.

Children are hilarious, exuberant, innocent, full of wonder--and monstrously narcissistic.
A kid finds chasing a pigeon all afternoon *delightful.*
Chasing a pigeon all afternoon would properly strike any adult as completely dumb.

A kid will happily nourish himself on Ho Hos.

Adults don't think Ho Hos are edible.
Read 28 tweets
9 Mar
C'est absolument faux. Étude après étude, dans le monde réel, montre que la vaccination avec Pfizer-BioNTech ou AstraZeneca entraîne entraîne une diminution *massive* des hospitalisations et des décès: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
Même une seule dose de l'un ou l'autre vaccin est efficace de 85% à 94% pour réduire les hospitalisations. Dans l’étude ci-joint--une parmi tant d’autres--ils ont comparé les données de près de 600 000 personnes vaccinées à un groupe de taille similaire-
-ne l'ayant pas reçu. Après deux doses, le vaccin était efficace à 92% pour prévenir l'infection et, parmi ceux qui ont été infectés, 92% efficace pour protéger contre les symptômes, et 92% efficace pour protéger contre des maladies graves.
Read 4 tweets
7 Mar
Are you aware that your behavior makes it more likely that other people will die? Does this concern you? Or do you think, "That idea triggers me, so I won't think about it?"
Don't reply with some airy argument about "Death comes for us all," or "We all kill each other every day if you think about it, innit?" Very specifically: If you become a vector for this disease, you could kill many people--much loved by their families--in a super-spreader event.
Old, fat, sick people, perhaps, but also maybe some people who just got unlucky. Would you want someone else to be that careless about the life of someone you love? To speed blind drunk down the freeway right when your daughter is driving home, say?
Read 10 tweets
3 Mar
I don't think this is the fundamental profile. I think the fundamental profile--and it underscores all three types, and even the fourth type, "just stupid as a sack of hammers" is "People enamored of death." The real message of the anti-vax movement is Thanatos.
The real message of the anti-vax movement is that Freud was right: There is a death drive. It is as powerful, in human affairs, as Eros, the life drive. We underestimate its potency to shape human events at our peril.

Freud wrote this watching the rise of the Nazis.
But we can see the same drive at work today. We really can. There's no adult, in the modern world, who's *genuinely* confused about the efficacy of masks and vaccines. Truly there isn't. It's all a pose. If you were that stupid, you'd be unable to tie your own shoes.
Read 8 tweets
2 Mar
Above all, it's terribly sad. The NYT is in the hands of people who are both stupid and vicious. The idea that they would even for a moment take seriously the complaints of these pampered, self-righteous little shits is depressing.
Pampered, ignorant, spoiled children, callow and ignorant of life, are now running the cultural show. The adults--who are supposed to teach them and set limits on behavior like this--are instead cowed by them, turning them into petty tyrants.
Obviously this is terrible for both the children and the adults. But it's terrible above all for our culture. These girls will be weak women, uneducated, incapable of thinking straight.
Read 6 tweets
2 Mar
Are you serious? This is a wedding. She's 33. We're American: We don't have titles. We're all equal. Italian-Americans kiss people at weddings. He even asked, first! From the photo, it was a paternal, affectionate kiss--*completely* appropriate, at a wedding--not a sexual one.
Don't people see that the culture we're creating here is *horrible?* It's joyless, stripped of all affection, human contact, and spontaneity. Isn't it bad enough that the pandemic has robbed us of all of that?
What man wouldn't decide it's safest to avoid any flirtation, any gesture of affection, all mildly ribald or bawdy humor--even in a completely appropriate context, like a wedding? It's one thing to say, "Not at the workplace."
Read 5 tweets

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