A dispatch from a creepy birth-rate convention, an excerpt from a new book on school board culture wars, and other stories I'm reading around the parentsphere.
There's a lot that can be said about natalism but it's fascinating to me how people can approach reproduction with the explicit assumption that you can control and shape the person who gets produced... Of course parents and families set the stage and have a dominant influence for a while, but in this framework there's an assumed ability to penetrate the mind, to make "like-minded" people, that just doesn't seem like it bears out in reality. I wonder what they think about the perpetual tide of young people fleeing conservative or religious families. I wonder about the statistics on this. Maybe I'm wrong and adolescent flight from it is an outlier phenomenon by numbers. But I'd also guess the fear of giving people an inkling of escape is a part of the struggle over schools and culture. I've just met so so many people from deep conservative sheltering backgrounds with so few ladders out who still somehow found ways to break out (after suffering a lot)... I've always thought it's specifically this delusional ambition to control the 'minds' of the children you've produced that's the crux of a lot of the violence that project entails...
There's a lot that can be said about natalism but it's fascinating to me how people can approach reproduction with the explicit assumption that you can control and shape the person who gets produced... Of course parents and families set the stage and have a dominant influence for a while, but in this framework there's an assumed ability to penetrate the mind, to make "like-minded" people, that just doesn't seem like it bears out in reality. I wonder what they think about the perpetual tide of young people fleeing conservative or religious families. I wonder about the statistics on this. Maybe I'm wrong and adolescent flight from it is an outlier phenomenon by numbers. But I'd also guess the fear of giving people an inkling of escape is a part of the struggle over schools and culture. I've just met so so many people from deep conservative sheltering backgrounds with so few ladders out who still somehow found ways to break out (after suffering a lot)... I've always thought it's specifically this delusional ambition to control the 'minds' of the children you've produced that's the crux of a lot of the violence that project entails...