This is clearly a plea for reassurance that, actually, parenting is really fun & parents are exaggerating how tough it is. I’m sure some people will respond in exactly that way. The whole question of how enjoyable parenthood is has become weirdly politicized and some people...🧵

https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1906051244248187208

...have made “parenthood is great if you aren’t a wimp” their whole shtick. But I’m going to be annoying & suggest that if u are looking for reassurance abt whether to have kids, asking ppl to sell you on kids as commodities/parenthood as an end in itself, is the wrong approach..

As someone who very much does want a village and indeed has it (I currently have 4 neighborhood kids under 6 at my house joining us for dinner. Part of a baby swapping system I started in 2021), after having pretty painstakingly built it over years, I want to make two points...

https://twitter.com/CartoonsHateHer/status/1845825096440517004

First point is to just confirm that I think @CartoonsHateHer is basically right. I have been mulling an essay about my own village building experience, the main lesson of which is that intensive parenting is pretty much incompatible with village building.

Several books & articles published lately argue that the factors holding people back from having kids are not economic, but cultural, & thus low fertility can't be reversed through financial support. In my latest for @TheAtlantic I explain that that's not how culture works.

First of all, I’m going to reiterate that there is little economically mysterious about the trend toward low fertility when you take stock of the degree to which the economics of child rearing have changed over a relatively short time span.

Today, kids are practically forbidden in the street. But a century ago, the street was the primary locus of kids' play. What happened? & did we lose anything by moving play from public streets into private yards & gated playgrounds? I tackle these Qs in my latest for @TheAtlantic I’m hoping this piece will help clear up some misconceptions about the loss of children’s freedom to roam the streets around their homes. First, it did not begin in the 1980s/90s, but much earlier when cars first emerged on city roads in large numbers.

theatlantic.com/family/archive…

This by @moveincircles gets at something I've tried to articulate before: there's a subset of conservatives whose main worldview seems to be that liberalism/capitalism would've worked out just fine if only women hadn't started participating in it.

reactionaryfeminist.substack.com/p/everything-c… It's sort of an interesting position to take. I get being pro-liberalism/capitalism--for all their faults, I do think I'd rather live in this era than any previous one. I also get having a problem liberalism and capitalism--for all their strengths and advantages...

I got an interesting email about my recent piece on family policy and education. She asks some interesting questions. Here is the piece, ICYMI.

theatlantic.com/family/archive…

When one of my daughters hits the other, it's usually the hitter that cries loudest. And when I talk her through her feelings -- do you feel bad that you hit your sister? -- the hitter often loses her mind at the suggestion, insisting that they DO NOT feel bad, that they... ...are upset about something, anything, else: they are tired, they miss grandma or Dad or someone else. Even as the weep and kick and scream, they just can't tolerate acknowledging what they actually feel: guilt. That's what's going on here.

proteanmag.com/2022/03/22/mot…

Emily Oster should just move to Norway. They agree with her on everything.

regjeringen.no/en/aktuelt/vac…

https://twitter.com/md_wallach/status/1505614217256255492

*Obligatory (in the U.S.) I am vaxxed + boosted + happily mask + will vaccinate my kids when I am able to because it still seems worth it to me clarification tweet*
But there shouldn't be anything controversial about acknowledging the cost/benefit of vaxs is different for kids.

Jesus this is one hell of a correction.

theguardian.com/world/2022/mar… The CDC should make it much much much clearer what the data tracker is supposed to be used for (broad trends, not granular analysis). They should have done that a long, long time ago.

Yikes

https://twitter.com/apsmunro/status/1504365158373773314

For context, yesterday the Covid data tracker was reporting 1755 cumulative covid deaths among kids age 0 to 17. Then it revised it to 1339, citing a coding error.

You guys have no idea how weird it is to read stories like this from outside the U.S.

dailyposter.com/how-dark-money… Just imagine you are a parent in Norway (w/ one of the lowest cumulative covid death rates in the world), where schools reopened in April of 2020 and school kids have never worn masks, reading this piece about an evil dark money campaign to reopen schools and unmask kids.

It's interesting how many people think it's more reasonable to suspect that all the SLPs I consulted are mistaken about masks disrupting speech therapy than simply entertain the possibility that there are some situations where masks actually do get in the way of things.

https://twitter.com/mycherieamour25/status/1500834745684426758

You could still think masking young kids in school is good but conclude from the piece that we should have made exceptions for kids w/ speech disorders, or even just exceptions w/in speech therapy. But, like, no one is doing that.