Huge rant
I am not anti-natalist at all and I am not making a case for such reactionary ideologies here. Just sharing what I have seen so other folks and point my mistakes or just listen.
I am witnessing the older cousins of my generation in the family have and raise kids and it is a little bit terrifying. I am talking about two couples of parents, each with one child. The older kid is about 3 years old and the younger one is about 1 year old.
The older kid does almost nothing but throw tantrums all day. It is near impossible to make them do anything they do not want to do. For example, making them sit down in their high chair and eat the food they are being fed is a Herculean task. The child has to be distracted somehow. Two things that I saw that work:
- Put on YouTube videos on an iPad. These videos are like crack-cocaine for a child’s brain BTW. The creators are highly incentivised to make the videos as addictive as possible to boost their ad revenue.
- Have someone play with them. The kid seemed to like me because I was new to them and I made them laugh, so they would sometimes allow their parents to feed them as long as I played with them.
The other child, who is a year old, is starting to exhibit similar behaviour. In the morning and afternoon, they are looked after by their grandparents. Their grandfather is responsible for feeding them. The grandfather is a boomer addicted to cable TV news and the stock market. (Cable TV news in India is BTW extremely garbage and inflicts incalculable amounts of psychic damage. There are no words to describe how bad it is.) As he feeds the child, the child sits on his lap watching the TV while being spoonfed. On the other hand, if the child is sitting on a high chair with no distractions, they refuse to eat even as the one who feeds them talks to them. The child does drink milk from the bottle without fuss so I am not sure whether they are in a descend towards problematic behaviour or not.
I don’t have the knowledge or experience to confidently say whether things have to be this way or not so I don’t want to jump to passing judgement on the child’s parents and definitely not on the child. Maybe it is just how it is. Maybe children just throw tantrums while being subjected to feeding. Maybe TV or YouTube videos have nothing to do with it. I admittedly do not like technology as it is sold to us so my cynicism definitely comes a biased standpoint.
Mostly it got me wondering though how there are no public services to help with parenting, which is a foundationally important task for not just the well-being of society, but also perpetuating it. For example, I was wondering if crack-cocaine-tier addictive YouTube videos for children are detrimental to the child’s growth and the overall experience of parenting. This is the year 2023 and I am pretty sure god knows how many tens of thousands of work-hours must have been put into researching issues like this. To find out, I can try using a search engine and hope to god that I don’t get ratfucked by dishonest or just low quality articles that have been pushed to the top of the results through SEO. If I am savvy, I can try searching directly for research on something like Google Scholar but very few people are capable of this. (Not even me.) I found a pediatric psychologist who has made it her life’s work to extol the vices of electronic media addiction on children. She sells books and courses on this which makes me trust her a little bit less since she profits off of it. She could be a charlatan feeding off of technophobe parents’ paranoia. There are pediatric associations in every country but their findings and recommendations don’t reach the masses. I have heard some advertisements from my country’s on the radio. But they are few and far between and not in-depth at all. This kind of knowledge is still mostly passed from parents to their children instead of being rooted deeper in collective scientific findings.
Electronic media, social media, and their effects on the brain and habits is something that I am maybe overly sensitive about. My brain has been fried by a combination of anxiety and social media addiction to the point that I really struggle to read books because of being attention deficit. The children’s parents and grandparents are also hooked to their phones and TVs. But since they are comfortably upper middle class and with generational wealth, they do not introspect their habits and life choices because having wealth in a capitalist society means you are doing good so you don’t need to change what you are doing. The only things you can do better are what will net you more wealth.
Lastly, the parents don’t seem to find it problematic that they don’t get the chance to spend much time with their child even if they wanted to. All these parents are employed and working, so they work most of the day and delegate childcare to the grandparents and nannies who are poor and underpaid. One of the mothers, did not even get paid maternal leave despite working at one of the biggest private hospital chains. She had to quit the job and find a new one when the child was just six months old. I feel like if I had a child, I would want to take care of them almost full time at least until they are a year old and likely even older. It feels terrible to delegate childcare to an underpaid servant.
I don’t have a larger point to make because I was just ranting. I don’t feel qualified to hold strong opinions in this realm. Parenting I feel is always going to be tough. I cannot imagine it being programmatic and straightforward to raise human beings with all their complexities. The problem for me is that there are no public institutions to try and make this easier. Parents are left to their own devices, like getting their child hooked to addictive YouTube video channels, or finding an underpaid slave that ends up spending more time taking care of your child than her own to be able to put food on the table, or maybe paying for an expensive private daycare so you can slave away and the execs at your company can buy their seventh yacht.
How does that work? I cannot imagine that some children are just destined to be ill behaved. How would that even work? Does some genetic configuration determine this? I find this hard to believe. Evolution cannot keep pace with the rate of change of human conditions. Behaviours like this have to be learnt.
When does a problem elevate from being an individual one to a societal, economic and political one? We can of course try and pressure and educate parents on raising kids “right”, but if enough parents are uncritically relying on pacifying their children with technology then it probably means that there are societal currents that are pushing people towards these choices. How many people are able to identify this as a problem and do something about it? Very rare cases of this in my experience. The reason capitalism plays a part in this is that long working hours makes parents not have enough patience in the tank to deal with their children being difficult. This is not meant to imply that a turn to socialism will immediately solve this problem. USSR had problems with alcohol abuse like their capitalist contemporaries. But only a socialist arrangement endows us with the tools to solve these problems on a societal level.
I have no idea. Some kids are easy to take care of and others are a bit more demanding. My kid was amazing in that she started sleeping through the night at 4 mo. But my neighbour’s kid was horrible, and woke up 1-2 times during the night.
I’m not a biologist or a child development expert but I suspect it’s got something to do with the order of development of certain brain functions, so it’s got nothing to do with genetics, nor is it something that we can control.
I would say that it is societal paradigm or work stress to leads parents to neglect their kids but you did specifically mention it was the kids’ grandparents, who are presumably retired.
IMO, there’s not really a difference in societal problems and social problems. Having support systems in place does make it easier, and gives you more resources to work with, but in the end you still have to do it. Either way, taking care of your kid takes up 80% of your waking time if you want to do it properly, and you have to balance that with a job that takes up 50% of your waking time. So you have to compromise somewhere and that’s usually your hobbies and mental well-being.
I’m sorry if I confused you but I didn’t want to draw a distinction between societal and social issues. In fact I don’t even know what the difference between them is.
The problem I had with your response was that you overemphasised the role of individual responsibility. All societal/social problems like drug abuse can be wished away if we assume individuals to have more agency tham they do.
This is what I wanted to say. It’s true what you say. You can’t completely eradicate the existence the existence of bad parents with social services. But genuinely good social services will make being a good parent more accessible and easier.