Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
We're currently undergoing a mass experiment in what happens to children if they are denied sun exposure. I guess we'll discover the outcomes in a few years.
Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks
851–860 of 1001 posts
Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks
#852Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The latter so, is completely up to the individual to ignore.
Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks
#853Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But increasingly, we fixed it by normalizing hostility to men. Overemphasis on "toxic masculinity" "Toxic masculinity" is self-criticism. We men are harming ourselves, and the article discusses this. For example, "Fathers are also more likely to sing to and soothe their toddler daughters at night when they cry." Both girls and boys have emotional needs, but we're ignoring the emotional needs of boys. We expect boys…
That is true, and the term could reasonably be interpreted that way, but it’s often a motte-and-bailey tactic. When the term is criticized, your definition is waved, forming an easily defensible motte. But in casual use, the term is very commonly used in its most obvious meaning, i.e. “men are toxic” (forming the bailey).
It's not about "bashing" men, it's about helping boys, who are in obvious need of help. I'm not seeing the level of self-reflection that the article ought to stimulate. "Criticism", for lack of a better term (maybe critical reflection?), is necessary for progress. If any criticism is interpreted as "bashing" and a defensive refusal to self-correct, then no improvement or progress will ever be possible.
Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks
#854Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Fathers should absolutely be there for emotional support, especially for small kids. A CEO should know about corporate finance but that doesn't mean he should also be the CFO. Both roles are important enough to have separate execs. Parenting is similar. I did not advocate for an emotionally shutoff and cold father, but rather the responsible person and the person the child runs to for emotional support is the femin…
If the mother isn't doing her job, yes, that sucks. And yes, I'd expect the father to do both things if that happens, for the sake of the child. The inverse is also true. I don't think you can force a distant mother (or father) to be more involved but knock yourself out if you think otherwise.
Force? No. Help/educate? Maybe.
Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks
#855> Fathers are also more likely to sing to and soothe their toddler daughters at night when they cry. 100 years ago father’s wouldn’t even talk to their kids. I don’t think dads even went into the delivery room Dad’s didn’t get time off from work to be with their wives when the baby was born or get bonding time Things are definitely getting better on this front
I was recently wondering about who was typically in the delivery room 50+ years ago. So when I saw my elderly grandmother last week, I asked her whether my grandfather was there when my father was born in the late 50s. She was a little offended by the question (itself interesting), but said it was just her and the medical staff. No other support people. She thought my grandfather was at the hospital, but wasn’t sure.
Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks
#856Parents 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
#857Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I do not disagree. Let me rephrase: I think it is much more important to discuss how much we want to spend to raise our children or how and how much we need to work, than discussing boys vs. girls.
Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks
#858Earlier quoted context omitted.
With respect, there are some errors in your thesis. Specifically, you're attacking some strawmen. Here's the steelmanned version of the ideas you're saying are causing issues: - Instead of defining men / women, think of each human as a person . There are no strong men, sensitive boys, intelligent women, vulnerable girls - there are only strong people, weak people, hard people, soft people. Our job as society is to co…
But these qualities are gendered. Women are in general not wanting to be leaders in the same fields as men, and these fields are generally in prominent prestige (think roles like banking, lawyers, leadership, etc). In fields like medicine where there is more gender balance and even more women at the lower roles (like Nurses), we see these fields have more qualities of care imbued as well as the leadership that a phys…
Here's one. When people collect datapoints and observe a difference in one case not present in the other, they sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that their dataset is exhaustive - that it captures all the variables that matter.
In other words, it's easy to start with the observation "women tend to be more represented in fields that exhibit qualities of care and less represented in leadership roles" and conclude that the absence of the variable "has leadership" makes up the core difference.
But this is a conceit that you, the observer, made. Your choice of variables to look at influenced your observations of what is different and therefore important.
Here's a counterpoint that contradicts your observed conclusion. Female heads of state and politicians have been increasing in number throughout the last century, and have done remarkably well in those roles. Has the nature and autonomy of executive power changed like medicine (according to you) has? It has not. It is a sign that you have not taken all variables into account.
Here's another error in your reasoning. Why those variables specifically? How do you know those are the variables your subjects are thinking about? When women sign up to be doctors and nurses and not CEOs, are they expressly telling you the shared decision making are the important variables? Or is it because you inferred that those variables are important because you can measure them?
In the interest of correct methodology, here are some other variables that people have suggested to explain the same data: women are conditioned or socialized into early expectations of caregiving roles; women are rewarded for pursuing caregiving roles in a way men aren't; there are more barriers for women than for men, and so on.
Now are these variables the correct answer? We don't know. It is a complex topic, because humans are complex. It is possible biology and perceptions of role play a part, as does socialization and others.
But what we can do is go a little meta and ask the likelihood that a biological variable is a good explanation in the first place. Consider what a good explanation has to do: it has to provide a causal mechanism, and be able to explain how the cause led to the effect you see. The trouble with every single biological explanation that's been proposed in this area is that they don't provide this causal mechanism. What exactly is it that makes women gravitate towards submissive roles? Is it estrogen levels? Hormones? Menstrual cycles? But then people on hormone therapy, people born with extra chromosomes, people with hermaphroditic parts, and so on should all display manifestly different behaviour and choices, which they don't. To explain these differences, you need to invoke more and more factors, until you end up with epicycles all over again.
More generally, the history of biological explanations simply don't fare all that well in comparison to sociological explanations. A reasonable prior is to assume that it may play a small part, but that larger effects are driven by how society treats and works with people.
Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks
#859Here'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…
Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks
#860not going to read it. i know how it always ends up: "men suffering...women most affected"
The effects onto men are more internal. Whereas effects onto women are normally more external. For example, a man could allow himself to be triggered into rage. And afterwards there will be no visible signs it happened within him. But his wife could've been around him, and now she has purple bruises. External signs are more easily measurable, and therefore reported more, therefore readers assume the most affected. If…