Just a little (link) love: SDCC week edition
July 19, 2018
Small win: I transferred cash being held for large expenses throughout the year, and my small pile of accumulated rental property profits, over to Ally’s online savings earning 1.75% APY. Those accounts need to stay cash and liquid since they’re all going to pay bills this year, but at least the money can earn its keep in the meantime.
Still making slow progress with the weeding – I’m making it a point to get out there at least a few times during the week, and we’ve cleared a small patch that’s safe for Sera to do her zoom-zooms.
What were your small wins this week?
***
The isolation of special needs parents.
Positive masculinity! Men choosing to take their wives’ names.
I would love the limited edition Totoro watch.
I’d never heard of America’s most prolific female serial killer.
Side hustlin’ friends: Declare all your income.
The Original American Dogs Are Gone: The closest living relative of the precolonial canines isn’t even a dog. It’s a contagious cancer.
I really really enjoy this brooch warfare
I learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment in high school but hadn’t read about all the flaws inherent in the experiment including: “Once the simulation got underway, Jaffe explicitly corrected guards who weren’t acting tough enough, fostering exactly the pathological behavior that Zimbardo would later claim had arisen organically.”
and
“We have been taught that guards abused prisoners in the Stanford prison experiment because of the power of their roles, but Haslam and Reicher argue that their behavior arose instead from their identification with the experimenters, which Jaffe and Zimbardo encouraged at every turn.”
This article on kids and playing unsupervised bugs me a little bit because there’s no way I’m sending my kid when ze’s five out to play alone in this neighborhood. There’s no one ze could safely play with around zir age to begin with. And just this weekend, we caught a horde of 8-10 boys anywhere from ages 8-14 with completely foul mouths playing at the local playground this weekend, trying to scale the fences like they were looking to vandalize it. I would NOT feel even one bit ok with letting zir get surrounded by those kids, solo. We do walk zir to the playground instead of driving, unless *I* need to be driven, and we encourage zir to be daring and try activities that are tougher while we’re supervising. We just can’t make up for the lack of kids zir age to play with and the idea that we’re not preventing a kind of necessary growth bothers me a lot. Then again, a whole lot of psychology studies aren’t reproducible so maybe I shouldn’t let it get under my skin so much.
SDCC!!!
It is this week.
There is a book called Playborhood about the phenomenon of there being no kids out to play with, and what to do about it. There are twenty children under 10 on our block, and mine are the only ones we ever see out in the front yards. My daughter asked if a neighbor girl could come over to play once, with our encouragement/strong-arming, which is the only time I have seen that happen here. We have been making efforts to befriend the other kids and parents and make our house a place that they can come over to see if someone can play to try to create an inviting neighborhood environment, but it’s slow going.
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll look it up.
We’e going to slowly work on doing the same where we can, see what happens.
I’ve started transferring all early in the month paychecks to savings right away since we don’t budget until the 1st. It buys a small bit of interest. I love hearing stories of men taking their wives last names – that’s the only way to counter the societal expectation of women changing to me. Enjoy SDCC!
Leigh recently posted…I plan on being a tech-departing statistic.
I would very much love to pocket our first checks, that seems like it would feel so satisfying, but I think I’d have to do a bit of fancy juggling to make that work. 🙂
Oh we aren’t pocketing the first check – I just transfer it into savings to earn some interest until we do the budget on the 1st and then it almost entirely gets transferred back into checking because we need basically all of both checks for cash flow right now.
Leigh recently posted…I plan on being a tech-departing statistic.
OH I get it now!
Here’s the thing about the kids and outdoor play article.
There have been a lot of different ways to parent over the course of history, and this particular one–as so many parenting things do these days– romanticizes a very specific sort of white suburban experience from the mid-to-late 1900s.
I personally think that a reasonable amount of adult supervision is a good idea for elementary-age kids, if for no other reason, than because I have a very good memory of my own childhood and the behavior of other kids. Kids have bad ideas that they think are good ones and– with the best intentions– they can get into dangerous situations easily. Random other kids on the playground can be really mean, and someone inevitably gets hurt. Do the adults need to be all up in the kids’ business? No. But they can and should be a protective influence.
I grew up as a white suburban kid in the late 70s/early 80s, and I would characterize the “ok, you kids, go outside” method of parenting that this guy is advocating and that I experienced as a sort of benignly meant neglect. Easy for the parents, not necessarily the best thing for the kids. And quite frankly, when I hear my husband’s tales of head injuries and broken bones, I think it can go pretty badly, depending on the kid. It’s not like he got those injuries being beaten up by other kids– he got those injuries doing dumb things that were fun until he got hurt. And they were ALL dumb things that a halfway attentive adult would’ve told him to stop doing.
A part of how I parent is in reaction against how I myself was parented, and the same is true of my husband. We want better for our daughter, and part of that is being more attentive. Along with a bunch of other things.
So yeah, I disagree with the article. I think kids need to play, of course. I just also think that it’s okay for there to be an adult around to tone down the excesses.
Thanks for coming by and chatting! I suspect I’m more in agreement with you that it sounds.
I grew up in white suburbia close to the same time but our parents were immigrants who worked all the time. That means that we were allowed to run about to play with older cousins but it amounted to the same sort of “go outside and play until the lights come on” freedom.
I don’t know if it was better or worse than what we do with JB now. As kids PiC and I absolutely did stupid things and sometimes we learned from them and I think we’re trying to balance that against our impulse to supervise everything a little too closely. I see JB have the same impulses to make bad decisions and I let zir do some of the things in a semi-supervised way so ze can have the fun but also perhaps start to learn to make better decisions. I won’t always be on hand, and for certain the preschool teachers won’t always be attending to them one on one, so I am hoping that ze will slowly start to make slightly better and fewer bad choices.