As a non breeding SParent, the failed family progeny is not our problem.
Even if we bring our own to the blended marriage, the failed family progeny of our mate .... is/are not our problem.
While our marriage certainly is our problem.
Our job is to define and engage in the marriage as an equity life partner to our mate. As their job is to do the same with us. Any kids each brings, if well parented, are a non issue.
It is when drag along spawn are shit, ill behaved, ill raised, and tolerated to continue their crap that the cesspool existace starts to suck in the SParent. When the mate is a shit parent, the stench never ends. It is eternal. At the minor child level through the kidult level.
I cannot imagine being in this kind of situation. I would not allow it.
We see it nearly constantly in our communty, it is all over media, TED talks, coddled college students, etc.... At breakfast with a friend this AM we discussed an article and the growing cultural situation where kids raised with arthritic thumbs and screen brain are increasingly entering and progressing into their 20s and beyond never having had an SO relationship. Few date IRL in HS. Few date in college/university. At best they have a herd dating experience in HS. They have their group, the all go to prom together, no actually dating even if there may be a few in the herd who have a BF or GF label with another herd member.
Aparently this cultural characteristic is part of trainign for realtors. If you can gain the trust of one of the herd and close a deal with/for them, you can lock in the entire herd and close a number of deals within the herd.
Instead of living, kids and kidults are online gaming, dating, friending, etc... to the point that real life is scary as hell for them and they have no idea how to spend time with a real person in the flesh 1:1.
My own SKid struggles with this. he "dated" in HS. Though he never actually went an a traditional date. It was always a group activity. As a young adult I have seen him and a short term SO sitting on a sofa together having a text conversation .... WITH EACH OTHER..... instead of actually talking. When I ask him about it in conversation later... normal for them. They cannot communicate in real time. They need the delay of typing to adjust, edit, and then send.
Blessedly my kid is in a profession that requires him to be physically at work every work day, to interface with people, and actually do a job. If not, he would never leave his apartment and his only IRL interface would be with his cat.
We have failed our kids so badly that I fear for the viability of our way of life.
I picked a bad decade to get healthy and stop drinking.
Fortunately it is not me and DW and our peers who will suffer. We have the resources, training, and ability to provide for ourselves and defend what is ours.
The 32hr work week, no benefits, business is mean, it's not fair, why work so hard, screen brains are going to find life to be extremely difficult when the cultural backlash starts. And it will. At some point. Our culture and economy can't sustain this indefinately. When they have to start working, earning, housing, feeding, etc.. themselves, it is going to be extremely entertaining for those of us who are retired. When teachers start pepper spraying idiot parents who rant at them and assault them because their pweshious child actually got a real grade, when kids start getting a swat to the rump or ejected from class and failed for the year because of their noxious behavior, when colleges start ejecting students who to not make the cut perfornace, wise, when employers stard terminating immediately for attendance issues, performance issues, and behavioral issues, etc.
I forsee a re-emergence of front porches, cocktails and horsdoerves laughing our asses off at the whiney following generation or 4 as they gain clarity. Or crying. I will probably do both when we get there culturally.
Even more frightening will be when there is a next global conflict, our volunteer forces will not be adequate and the selective service system is activated. These kids are not going to know what hit them.
I hope that I am the one that is delusional.
This is frightening
But I am fearful that you are indeed correct in your assessment of what today's youth are like. I just got off the phone with a friend of mine, talking about SS19 and how he just doesn't want to work (probably because he doesn't want to do menial work, which is the only employment he might get seeing as he couldn't get past high school and doesn't want to do military or anything else). She told me her 22 year old daughter just lost her job (because she threatened someone for eating her candy at her desk), and is now depressed. We were wondering why these kids are so easily beat down by relative failure. We had it soooo much harder but it looks like when we make things easier for kids, it kicks us in the ass later on.
I am big on limiting screentime for DD9, and she is in a school where the other parents are like minded. I do want her to experience actual real life, not just internet experiences. It is very scary to think about our future right now.
Depressed over someone
Depressed over someone grabing an M7M out of her candy bowl on her desk? Really. Funny, the assumption is that if you have a candy dish on your desk it is there for people to enjoy. If she didn't want others to enjoy it, she can keep in her damned drawer.
Mommy needs to put this idiot spawn out on the curb on her ass and tell her to stop being a dumbass and threatening people.
Letting her wallow in her "depression" (most likely just more bullshit manipulating of mommy) is not helping this kid. Good on the company for shit canning that POS threatening moron.
These shit spawn kidults need to learn the lessons of hunger, thirst, being cold in the winter, and hot in the summer. Particularly when they do stupid shit like threatening people over taking a piece of candy or not working while expecting others to feed, house, clothe them.
Fortunately most kids do not require this intense of a lesson because they are not stupid. Kid dumb brain farts are a transient thing usually addressed by time, experience, and maturity. Stupid, is sadly far more permanent.
I’m trying to post a response and it keeps coming up with error
message. I typed the longest response, and it isn't going through. I have found that to be with certain posts in the past, including where the original post was by me. Argh.
My SKs (older primary school age, highly intelligent academically, excelling at team sports) had a lovely weekend with me, then as soon as father got back, one promptly had a meltdown with him climbing up on the roof and angrily stomping non-stop. My BF told me to ignore it "to avoid feeding it" and that the roof is strong enough. There was no way I was going to ignore this feral and dangerous behaviour in a built up, busy residential area in the middle of a major city. I very firmly told him to get down and when he didn't I pretended to be calling the police. He got down pretty promptly. My BF never challenges me over parenting differences, and this time he was trying to say that he wouldn't make false threats. I made it very clear that it was not a false threat, because I was going to actually call the police if this continued., as the SK was inching himself towards the edge and my BF was already trying to talk him down as emergency services do with crazy people.
The problem is that for the past 20 years it has all been about "gentle parenting". It came from a good place, I know, I drank that Kool-Aid myself, until I saw what adults this lack of leadership produces - those with zero resilience, whose feelings take precedence over facts, and they are the ones that ultimately suffer the most, bar the parents, stepparents, employers of anyone that somehow ends up being responsible for them.
Here's a fantastic article: https://lawliberty.org/the-case-against-gentle-parenting/
Great article.
Great article.
It is always interesting to me that kids who are actually parented rather than coddled with total parental dedication to the kid's fee fees are confident, high performing, and have far closer relationships with their parents and sibs than the coddled entitled fee fee accomodated spawn of idiots who had no business breeding in the first place.
If I were the parent at the playground and this toxic ill behaved shit toddler spawn of an idiot parent kicked sand in my kid's face my kid, my kid would not have done a thing about it. Sadly. Neither would I as a kid. I did not gain clarity on how to end a bully until I was late elementary school aged. As such, I woudl have parented the little sand kicking shit berfore his idiot mommy started with her coddle fest parenting.
"Get the hell out of the sand box and do not kick sand in people's faces. NOW!"
We had our version of this sitaution at a Mc D's play scape when SS was about 4yo and my DW was working on her undergrad while I was in grad school. I would take SS to Mc D's for lunch together then we would go into the indoor playscape space for him to play with whatever kids were there while I did my reading and study. No problem. Usually. One day after we had eaten and were in the play scape area a family came in. They had a little girl who was a year or so older than my kid. She was a shreeker. One of those kids with an ear splitting shreek that insists on blasting it out at inappropriate times. It was nauseatingly loud. So loud my ears buzzed and my back teeth ached. She ripped the shreek a couple of times, I gave her parents a look and a head shake. They snootily ignored me. This was in an enclosed space that amplified her shreek. After a couple of her ear exploding shreeks I bellowed "KNOCK IT OFF!" pointed at her parents and gave them the look and head shake. They collected their shreeking shit spawn and left. I had a couple of parents come up to me after that and thank me. There were a couple of new born-ish aged babies there with parents of older toddler aged kids. The babies were obviously in pain from the shreeking hellion shit spawn of idiot parents who thought that everyone would enjoy the shit behavior of their shit spawn. Two wailing babies on top of the shreeking crap. I was fine with the wailing babies. I agreed with them
I have never seen a society where there so many
Sick people. Restaurant with menus for gluten free, that free this free food. Like there nothing left. Plant base food, something wrong with eating fake food is healthy Or every person is mentally challenged, or has PTSD . How are we going to survive??
Watching movies gets me thinking. Could this generation fight WWII ? " I want the C-ration with the fake ham in it." A"No air conditioning "??
It isn't all fake, Harry. I
It isn't all fake, Harry. I have a daughter who has celiac. It took until she was 11 to get her diagnosed. The doctors wouldn't listen to me and prescribed crappy stuff (probiotics, eliminating dairy, etc.) to shut me up and refused to test her. Meanwhile, I had a daughter who was in such pain that she was on the floor crying every.single.day. When you need to be gluten free, you need to be gluten free.
It's absolutely terrifying.
It's absolutely terrifying. All the branches of the military are reporting recruiting shortages, either due to a lack of physical fitness (obesity) or a lack of desire to serve. Fortunately for us, the previous generations had the forethought to invent nuclear weapons. Say what you want about the morality of that invention but the cold hard fact is that if we hadn't developed them, another country eventually would have. Our arsenal of nuclear weapons is probably the biggest deterrent against foreign invasion.
I am deeply concerned for the future of the country. Anyone who looks beyond domestic politics to world affairs know that the planet is quickly becoming a very scary place. Global democracy is in decline. An increasing number of truly evil men are forming alliances. Russia and China are cozying up, which is perhaps the scariest alliance of all. Global warming has just begun and will lead to instability, conflict and refugee crises. Technology is racing ahead, faster than we can put the necessary safeguards in place and it's falling into the wrong hands. This isn't the world order of our parent's day.
If we don't manage to accidentally blow ourselves up (an interesting read is on the history of nuclear war close calls) these kids are going to be fighting battles on many fronts I'm afraid... and by coddling them now we aren't doing them any favors.
AlmostGone834 , I have long
AlmostGone834 , I have long thought that our greatest power and security as a nation is the ability to provide entirely for ourselves. That has not changed. We can feed ourselves, produce anything and everything we need, we can be energy independent nearly instantly (when we have actual leaders in DC), we can defend ourselves, we have one border that we could relatively easily seal and defend. Tne N border is not a huge risk. Not enough people and a level of prosperity and security that does not pose much of risk of threat.
As the global melt down, no pun intended, progresses, this incredible position will become more and more prominant in world events. If it gets to the point that there is a major international explosion, we will still be geographically separate from the majority of the drama and able to nearly entirely insulate ourselves from 3rd world issues.
IMHO the key weakness is the younger and subsequent generations. Will they have the value for our nation and the character to step up when their country calls? Or will they go with their fee fees and tear it all down?
I am reasonbly sure that I will not be around when it all comes to a head. But I certainly could be. My kid likely will be and the children of my kid's generation will likely have no choice but to engage in solving these crises with direct tragic action. Or, isolate and thrive while much of the world goes up in flames or under water, or starves.
8Billion people and increasing daily is daunting. Capitalism has driven this massive explosion of population and coresponding significant reduction in poverty. Though we are approaching the tipping point where resources will not be able to maintain support for the ever increasing population. Something has to give.
When it does, I forsee that N America will continue to be a beacon of security, stability, and prosperity... for a moderated and limited number of humans. Immigration will have to be managed to address the needs of the nation and not to provide safe haven for everyone.
Not a comfortable thought by any means.
As for climate change, it is cyclical. While we have certainly influenced it, the cycle is natural. We can readily remove any additional GHGs we introduce to the natural cycle, we can even remove more than we produce. Filtration and capture technologies exist that would allow us to capture a massive amount of the GHGs that we produce. The natural Vs anthrogenerated GHGs are roughly equal. Upsetting the balance is on us. However, The issue is, as with anything, what are the unintended consequences? Those we do not know, until we know. No one foresaw the unintended consequences of the industrial revolution environmentally or socially speaking. No one foresaw the results of the early human quest for fire. Etc. The butterfly effect in action.
You described my SS who, in
You described my SS who, in his 30s, is an educated "digital nomad" who refuses to work more than PT and who has no home, no car, no health insurance. He's also an entitled moocher who has never had a romantic relationship last more than a few months. Rules and social norms don't apply to him. His mother coddled him to the extreme and treated him as mini-hubby, and his father rarely called him out on his pure crap behavior and disrespect.
Recently, he calls Daddy hinting that he needs somewhere to stay next month. No, your welcome here was worn out by you. DH and I are on the same page.