Posts Tagged ‘parenting’
Posted by Irresponsibility An ex-bodyguard alleges he saw Britney hit her son(s?) with a belt. Tabloid hue and cry ensues. Now, I’m passionately opposed to any form of corporal punishment. If an adult pisses you off and you slap them, it’s assault and you can go to jail. But it’s okay to do it to [...]
Posted by Irresponsibility It feels weird to be this enthusiastic about Americans but I have to say, to the parents of 16-year-old sailor Abby Sunderland, well played! Contrary to the over-protective, blame-culture tendencies of their nation in general and state in particular, the Californian couple have shown themselves to be parents of a rare and [...]
Posted by Irresponsibility “I wanted a baby at any cost” is the headline to Claudine Farmer’s story in Grazia magazine. A prime example of the Victorian-throwback, middle-class British obsession with children as a form of emotional and spiritual fulfilment, Claudine and her husband ransomed five years of their life and remortgaged her home to pay [...]
Posted by Irresponsibility Another red-letter day for women as a panel of Dutch judges imprison a 13-year-old girl and order her to undergo psychological analysis for having the gall to want to sail around the world singlehanded. Born at sea, Laura Dekker lived on a boat till she was four and has sailed solo across [...]
Posted by Irresponsibility I Blame The Patriarchy choragus Twisty says quite simply and beautifully in her Invasion of the Babyists post what I was trying to express in my earlier post on children at risk: For crying out loud, if a kid is what gets ejected, by all means set it free. Don’t shake it [...]
In Lewis’s imagination a child would make her life perfect and happy and rosy – which terrifically wrong-headed. There is nothing inherently selfish about wanting to have a child. But there is something wrong with wanting a child to make you happy.
Posted by Irresponsibility I wrote the following thoughts on control versus freedom a couple of weeks ago, not intending to post them. It was a personal meditation. However, listing in the icy wake of a few days in miserable, cold, control-freakish Britain (thou shalt not! thou shalt not!) I’m motivated to share it as it [...]
Posted by irresponsibility I am finding it increasingly hard to justify buying woman’s magazines. They read like self-hatred indoctrination manuals. And they are insidious. The crude “look who’s put on five pounds!” Heat-style covers have given way to the sinister sophistication of magazines like Grazia (“Voted magazine of the year”) – a de facto weekly [...]
I am trying to get out of the habit of burdening other people with my assumptions. What is obvious to you isn’t necessarily obvious to everyone else, I remind myself regularly. But every time I feel like I’m approaching some absolute limit. The point where surely everyone can agree on this, I’m left slack-jawed at [...]
Poor Britters. Almost every vile idea western culture has cultivated about women in the last two centuries has come home to roost on the half-bright pop starlet from a trailer trash town in Louisiana. She was a fried-chicken loving, Bible-believing, pre-pubescent beauty queen once. Now she’s a combination of Ophelia, the mad woman in the [...]
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