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Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

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Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#501

Here's a thought and I am writing this as I don my kevlar flame retardant jacket. For most things in life where we could impact the lives of other people materially - driving is a good example - we ensure some minimal amount of training before letting people perform that activity. However with parenting we have nothing and the result it seems is we pay with a ton more resources downstream in the way of therapy, deten…

It's exactly what my father did. He took parenting classes at the library, because he wanted to learn more and didn't think that just because he considered himself successful in business and life, he would necessarily understand pedagogy. To that, I am eternally grateful to him. It's very hard for people to swallow their pride and admit humility, to say "I don't know" and listen to the experts. I have an immense amou…

Also you were a bit lucky. Over the years there has been an insane amount of bad advise from "health specialists".

I was born in a time when kids were supposed to sleep with their backs up and mothers were supposed to wash their nipples using antibacterial before breastfeeding...!

Sometime before that there was a time (at least around here) were kids were supposed to eat sour cream porridge from early life.

Of course kids died left and right, but the logic was, if so many died following the best practices, how many wouldn't have died if babies were left drinking only milk! (Retold as best I can describe it from what an older person in the family told me.)

All this is before we start talking about parenting fads like "no rules parenting" (not sure about the exact English term) which must have caused untold harm.

So creds to your dad for finding the correct advice and sticking with it.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#502
post #473

Here's a thought and I am writing this as I don my kevlar flame retardant jacket. For most things in life where we could impact the lives of other people materially - driving is a good example - we ensure some minimal amount of training before letting people perform that activity. However with parenting we have nothing and the result it seems is we pay with a ton more resources downstream in the way of therapy, deten…

It could be that parenting isn’t as much of a factor as growing up poor.

Oh, parenting is absolutely a factor and this can be observed in underdeveloped or developing countries.

Kids in families with good parenting, a focus on education, etc are the ones that make it out.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#503
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love them, no. Make their peace with what happened, accept that they can't change it, and move on, yes.

This is a lot easier said than done. I say this from first hand experience. I've been screwed a few times so far and generally managed to make my piece with most of those experiences except the abuse and apathy from my parents

Right. Just as some people who were abused by their parents will never be 100% physically well as adults, some will never be 100% mentally well. (And of course in neither case is that something they should be blamed for).

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (that humans are sexually dimorphic and ramifications of that) We're actual a bimodal distribution. Even not accounting for intersex folk it's a lot less binary than most people assume or was covered in 8th grade bio.

[flagged]

You're talking about gametes and OP and GP are talking about dimorphism, which is generally considered the difference in forms not including gametes. It's a very specific word to do with size differences, body hair etc. That is absolutely a bimodal distribution. Even just in height it is not binary.

Sex does have several meanings, and form is one of them.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The daylight between instituting a parenting license and eugenics is not very much.

that's a hell of a leap - saying take some basic classes (likely not that much unlike how catholic churches require couples classes prior to marrying folks) to understand how to properly care for a child is nothing like eugenics and gene manipulation.

All eugenics requires is reducing to fertility of a target undesired population to below sustenance. It's actually extremely easy to do because of how 'invisible' it is. Imagine there was a society where literally every single woman had an average of 1 child. It'd be quite weird to claim they were being driven extinct as everybody loads up on diapers, yet that society's population would indeed be trending towards 0 at an exponential rate, but with an 80 year 'lag' in the first wave of deaths that would mask the impact.

And country after country has demonstrated how relatively easy it seems to be to reduce fertility. Iran is a not so well known example. Back in the 80s Iran started to feel that their fertility was a problem. Their population was growing far faster than they had the resources to sustain, so they instituted birth control availability and mandated 'marriage classes' [1], not entirely unlike what's being suggested here. And in these classes they worked to try to reduce overall fertility.

It succeeded far beyond any expectation. Their fertility went from 6+ to 2 in less than a decade. And then it just kept dropping. Today it's down to below 1.7 and it keeps falling. They've long since tried to reverse this trend and started an equal but opposite pro fertility program, but like China also showed - it's far easier to reduce a population's fertility, than it is to bring it back up. These sort of programs work as a perfectly viable proof of concept of a practically invisible eugenics program, and that's quite dangerous.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning_in_Iran

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#506

Here's a thought and I am writing this as I don my kevlar flame retardant jacket. For most things in life where we could impact the lives of other people materially - driving is a good example - we ensure some minimal amount of training before letting people perform that activity. However with parenting we have nothing and the result it seems is we pay with a ton more resources downstream in the way of therapy, deten…

[flagged]

Rather than sterilizing people, I've often thought that maybe we should rather have things like means-testing. Originally it was more in the context of not letting poor kids suffer, but perhaps we expand it to make sure kids will have a healthy and safe and loved childhood.

There is something very visceral that comes out of people when you suggest that procreation should perhaps not be a universal right. And don't get me wrong, I think parenthood is integral to a society, but we're broken atm and need to get to a place where we have an upward trajectory.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (that humans are sexually dimorphic and ramifications of that) We're actual a bimodal distribution. Even not accounting for intersex folk it's a lot less binary than most people assume or was covered in 8th grade bio.

[flagged]

> When you're able to produce a 3rd kind of gamete, or a human that can produce the other kind too or in sequence, then you can change my mind and claim your Nobel prize

Many people result a null in this category in this without any medical intervention. Unless you intend to imply that someone is genderless if they produce no gametes?

> FYI, intersex is a misnomer because it gives those who don't seem to understand the basics of human biology the idea that there is a 3rd sex (at least) when actually, it means that someone may have ambiguous gender, but they are still either one or the other.

That is inaccurate. Humans can be born with both, or neither, sets of genitals, and chimerism can occur resulting in different portions of the body containing different genetics - it's possible for some portions to be XX and others to be XY. In addition, conditions such as klinefelter syndrome typically lead to individuals appearing closer to the XY end of the scale, their genome is actually XXY and doesn't match either.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#508
I don't get this thread

The article is saying that I, as a man, need to jump through a bunch of hoops to become "emotionally mature"?

The comments in this thread are saying that I, as a man, am being persecuted?

Okay. Cool. Too many stereotypes for me personally. Can't say I've gained anything from sifting through all the political signaling and angry baggage

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without evidence, I'll suggest that this is an oversimplification. In a model where boys require masculine modeling from older, adult figures, "absent fathers" are most an issue when a boy's regularly-accessible social unit has been whittled down to the nuclear family. That seems to be a crisis in-and-of-itself. When I look at socially-successful men, they often have had multiple older men in their lives to model the…

There is no such thing as an extended family unless there are strong nuclear families to begin with. this concept is lost on so many people... But it's simply easier to raise your kids with their grandparents aunts and uncles if grandma and grandpa had a good relationship and aren't divorce to begin with. Divorce is ultimately at the root of so many social ills but it's verboten to even mention

> Divorce is ultimately at the root of so many social ills but it's verboten to even mention

Divorce is frequently mentioned but as usual life is a compromise.

I was reading recently about suicide and depression numbers for women, especially, going down significantly when divorce became socially acceptable.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#510

Here's a thought and I am writing this as I don my kevlar flame retardant jacket. For most things in life where we could impact the lives of other people materially - driving is a good example - we ensure some minimal amount of training before letting people perform that activity. However with parenting we have nothing and the result it seems is we pay with a ton more resources downstream in the way of therapy, deten…

[flagged]

This would extend a prisoner’s punishment beyond their sentence. The goal of incarceration is to reform, not take revenge. That’s if all goes well and the system is not motivated by perverse incentives or overwhelmingly targeting a specific group of prisoners (like the poorer ones) with a deal they can’t really refuse.
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