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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

#841

Look at the way that people attack Jordan Peterson. Jordan comes out and says, basically: hey men maybe yoj aren’t actually the worst thing in the world, eh? Maybe you have some things to contribute to society. And look at how he is attacked for that. Think of all the people who are warming up to type out how wrong I am and post some out of context clips of him saying something provocative. Here’s a guy who started s…

He is "attacked" because he started attacking communities that weren’t buying his views that men are oppressed. He started attacking feminists, then women in general, then anyone who doesn’t share his angry views, calling them "woke".

His tone has become more and more aggressive, now he’s just a shadow of himself, drowning in hatred and paranoia. That’s sad because 10 years ago he sounded like a reasonable guy with sane advices. He was saying stuff like "the battle between his and evil starts in oneself. We all are capable of the worst and we must fight it inside ourselves." Now he just considers he’s 100% good, right on everything, he’s oppressed and his "attackers" are evil. What a letdown.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#842

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…

> How about some minimal coaching so that all parents are aware of the state of the art in child psychology and techniques to do better as parents. 1. We don't know as much as people think we do about what constitutes "good parenting". At best, we know some behaviours which are typically harmful (molestation, violence), but everyone already knows that, and the people exhibiting those behaviours need therapy themselve…

2 is tricky because we live in a society where the group is responsible for an individuals bad parenting decisions.

Our options are to keep creating support programs to cover for bad parenting (not nearly as effective as good parents) or to stop “bad” parents from having kids (not super moral).

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple answer (the one other developed countries tend towards) would be to emphasize / invest more in rehabilitation than in retribution/deterrence in the criminal justice system. Another set of approaches would be to fund pro-natal/pro-family initiatives such as child income tax credits, to make it easier for fathers to participate in family life; at the margin economic instability drives families apart among othe…

[flagged]

>Your idea of rehabilitation is "hey, we're going to try to be nice to lowlifes, and they'll suddenly become upstanding citizens"

This is a strawman. You have no idea what their idea of rehabilitation is, in fact they only shared that our balance is out of whack.

And it is. What we are doing now, with mass incarceration and barely-humane conditions DOES NOT WORK. In fact, it would be hard to intentionally design the system in a way that does a better job of increasing recidivism and overall human misery.

Forget all this talk of "being nice to lowlifes", how about we stop shooting ourselves in the foot first?

>Do you really believe that would work? Like, how much can you afford?

Our government spends billions and trillions of dollars on things which have less utility. Resources are not what is lacking, prioritization and political will is.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#844

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is annoying ( effectively being excluded ), but do we need social validation to do our job ( raising kids )? Now, if the teacher is withholding information, that is a different story.

It’s not only about how the father feels in a situation like this. It’s also about the message that sends to the child, who has now seen (and will continue to see throughout their childhood) subtle messaging about the role and responsibilities that each parent takes on, and the perceived value of each parent in caring for them. A message that is heavily imbalanced, yet will influence their own view on things as they…

Value is in the eye of the beholder.

Granted, I absolutely hear what you are saying. Not to search very far, I have cousins, who managed to get bamboozled their father was an absent father, because he was a trucker and clearly did not love them enough ( apart from ,naturally, securing their future several times over, but as kids they could not understand it -- and their mother certainly was keen to capitalize on it ).

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From things like "my son left his math book in school, can someone send a picture of page 23 so we can prepare for the test" to "my daughter didn't write down the homework assignments; can someone send them" to organizing the class outing, discussing general issues with teachers or the schools organization.

Doesn't this just delay learning about responsibility and consequences until later, when the consequences might actually be real? Parents getting this involved in the children's learning seems really, really weird to me.

There are loads of reasons its useful for parents to communicate which have no bearing whatsoever on the long term psychological health of the child. I feel you might be reading a little too much into the implications of having that channel that simply aren't founded.

Like: My son loses his sun hat. I could make a point about personal responsibility and let him get sunburnt for a few weeks until he saves up his non-existent pocket money to pay for a replacement, or I could just ask if anyone has it and find out that Joe accidentally took it home and that Joe's mum is going to leave it on the fence post at drop-off.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#846

Parents should not have to earn money at all. They should all stay at home and take care of their children. At (pre-)school there should be no more than ten students in a class, taught by the best teachers earning the best salaries, 50/50 male/female across all subjects. What I want to say is: for me, this is mostly an economic debate, and boys vs. girls always seems like a red herring to me.

And pigs should be able to fly to the moon. Parents are already extremely subsidized by the rest of society. _Someone_ has to do actual work and make money.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From things like "my son left his math book in school, can someone send a picture of page 23 so we can prepare for the test" to "my daughter didn't write down the homework assignments; can someone send them" to organizing the class outing, discussing general issues with teachers or the schools organization.

Doesn't this just delay learning about responsibility and consequences until later, when the consequences might actually be real? Parents getting this involved in the children's learning seems really, really weird to me.

Why is this weird? I can make sure my child faces consequences for this myself. If I don’t get the learning material on time, the consequence is that my child doesn’t learn what they need to, has a slightly harder time keeping up in the next day’s lesson. I don’t want my child’s punishment to be “insert obstacles to learning”.

Also that might not even be an very unpleasant experience for them. In my kid’s school the teacher has plenty of other things to deal with so their practice is generally to have kids do the missed work quickly in the classroom and move on. I’m not sure my child is going to learn much about responsibility that way.

Instead, I take the time to make sure my child is able to get their work done on time. But that costs me time. This is where the consequences and learning responsibility comes in. Because I value my time, and the ways I make my children compensate me for my time when they have been irresponsible is much more memorable what they’d experience being unprepared in school.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t meaningless. Those children are being told and showed repeatedly that their moms are their primary parents, and dads are an afterthought. Men are secondary parents in a lot of households, and it’s not okay. Both for dads themselves and their kids.

…and unfair to mothers, too!

Great point. So long as it’s unbalanced, it’s a detriment to everyone including the kids.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t meaningless. Those children are being told and showed repeatedly that their moms are their primary parents, and dads are an afterthought. Men are secondary parents in a lot of households, and it’s not okay. Both for dads themselves and their kids.

After decades of fathers spending their lives at work, and leaving the household and childcare to the mothers, I guess the solution might be easy enough to figure out.

I’m not sure if it’s intended, but this makes it sound as though the solution is an individual one that easy to uncover.

Apologies if I’m misinterpreting that. If I’m right though, I’d say that it isn’t easy at all, and there are many systemic pressures which make the solution difficult for individuals.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#850

This comment will probably be lost but hey maybe someone will read it: We inherited a world where for many generations, men were hostile to women. It was unfair and needed rectifying. But increasingly, we fixed it by normalizing hostility to men. Overemphasis on "toxic masculinity", hyper focus on promoting outcomes for girls while doing nothing of the sort for boys. Plenty of various "Women in X" supporting each oth…

> men were hostile to women Were they really though? I mean, yes there always were and always will be some abusive men, but men _as a group_ have been more associated with protecting and caring for women than being hostile to them. Until very recently in human history, women actually couldn't physically survive without men - it's only been in the past few generations that the nature of work has changed to where women…

> I mean, yes there always were and always will be some abusive men, but men _as a group_ have been more associated with protecting and caring for women than being hostile to them.

As much a slaveowner has been "protecting and caring" for his slaves.

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