mandarine

An announcement

#2 will celebrate its zeroeth birthday sometime around end October.

This is an opportunity to recycle an old post that probably not everybody has read. If you have, you are welcome to read it again.

Introduction

A couple of years ago, I heard a heated argument between my brother-in-law and his cousin. The young mother of three had hinted something about my in-law still being single at age 35+ and having no active plans to found a ‘real family’. The accused righteously retorted that the cultural model of the normal family with kids is slowly drowning our planet in overpopulation, and that his choice was the reasonable one. He was this close to saying something like ‘as far as sustainable development is concerned, having kids amounts to owning a SUV’.

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I was tagged for this parenting meme. I am afraid I will have to translate some of the questions so that it applies more adequately to my situation. A few context items: I have one son, and he is three and a half.
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This is the fourth installment of the till death do us part series, to mark my ten years of marriage (only three weeks before the eleventh anniversary).

There is no autopilot

When one drives a car, when one pilots an airplane, when one rides a bike, one finds that even on the straightest road, in the stillest air, or on the smoothest track, one still has to make constant tiny adjustments. If one stops adjusting for a couple of seconds, one has an emergency situation. And if one misses this last opportunity to alter course, one crashes.

I am under the impression that lots of couples believe that their relationship is on autopilot. [more]

How do you carry your baby?

If you live according to western standards, chances are you use a stroller. It is funny how the stroller perfectly fits in western parenting culture and society standards:

• your baby is at a safe distance from your smell, your breath, your voice, your warmth.
• your baby is thrust into the world, boldly faces his future, and can rely on a pacifier for occasional comfort.
• your baby gets used to travelling on four wheels with minimum effort, disconnected from any walking motion
• your baby sees all adults from below, learning his place as a child
• your baby stays away from adult discussions, and patiently chews away at a gooey biscuit while you are talking with your friend/husband/neighbour
• your baby learns that the world is cold and unforgiving, especially in winter, especially in the hands and feet

And yet, the western world seems to take great pains to make life impossible for stroller-pushers:
Do you sigh and swear when you have to climb on a crowded bus and one of the castors gets caught in a handrail? when you have to go down a subway entrance? when you have to fight your way upstream a rush-hour crowd? when you have to slalom around canine excrement, upturned trash cans, badly parked vehicles or demolished sidewalks? when you want to walk along an uneven unpaved road or a hiking track? when you have to pack the stroller into the never-big-enough trunk of your car?

If you’re still living like semi-apes and are from a primitive culture, chances are you carry your baby on your belly or on your back with a mere piece of cloth. It is funny how a baby sling or a wraparaound perfectly fits a primitive parenting culture and society standards:

• your baby clings to your body and cannot dissociate from your smell, your breath, your voice, your warmth.
• your baby faces backwards, looking into your chest or above your shoulder into the past, and takes comfort from raw skin contact
• your baby gets used to the rhythm of walking and will believe walking is the best way to get around
• your baby sees all people at eye level, and will believe children are as important as adults
• your baby can eavesdrop on all your conversations, and could even be tempted to participate long before he can use proper grammar
• your baby thinks the world is a warm fuzzy place, even in winter when he is comfortably protected under your coat

And yet, the western world seems to be particularly friendly to babywearing parents: Climbing on a bus? Running down a subway entrance? Walking through a crowd? Avoiding obstacles? Hiking in the wild? Packing? Not a problem.

I’d love to be able to use a stroller and teach my baby the true modern life, but seriously: it is too much effort. I think I am too lazy and too parsimonious to choose the stroller. I prefer to stick to primitive parenting, whatever harm it might do to the balance of my child and his place into this unforgiving world.

Believe it or not, school is a very egalitarian system.
However elitist a given school may be, kids with better grades do not have fancier uniforms, they do not eat nicer food at school lunches, they do not get better chairs in classrooms or better spots in the schoolyards. This absence of objective short-term reward in return for a learning effort is probably why so few schoolkids are eager to learn more and better. This is totally rational: if there is no reward, why bother. If you do, you are stupid and are treated as such. School excellence is frowned upon by popular kids, and bland mediocrity is the golden standard if one wants to get respect from one’s teenage peers.

In addition, this egalitarian system gives kids the wrong idea about society: when they leave school, they will be totally inadapted to today’s economic system when one does not get anything for nothing. Unless one strives to be among the best, one is gradually sucked down into the economic drain. The sooner they learn this sad truth, the better armed they will be.
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Boldly borrowed from Pierre Rahbi:

How wealthy are nannies (who take care of our children)?
How wealthy are bankers (who take care of our money)?

‘For as long as we both shall live’: how long might this be? To back up Litlove’s recent illustration of this question, let me point out that a couple of centuries ago, people who had survived to the age of marriage could reasonably expect to live until 40. This means that roughly half the people died before that age. Therefore, the probability that someone would stay married to the same person for more than 20 years was at most one in four. Nowadays, the probability that both husband and wife
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Co-sleeping is bad for you and your kids. You will stop making love and they will grow more dependent. It will undermine your couple and hinder their balance as future adults. At least, [more]

Life looks like the course of a marble on a sloping nail board: the trajectory is generally straight, as the marble follows the slope, until it hits a nail. Then it bounces to the right or to the left, depending on exactly how it hit. Such repeated bifurcations can significantly alter the course of the marble, and tiny deviations in the initial trajectory and bounce conditions can result in considerable changes further down the board. [more]