passing along secrets..........

     As a child, I became intent on learning the names of everything, from cars (there was a Chevrolet going by; our car was a Ford) to the fact that the tree in our front yard was an oak.  I was fascinated by the revelation that a car could have many names—it could also be a Buick or a Pontiac or a Chrysler.  Our tree was an oak, but the tree in our neighbors' yard was a maple.  They looked the same to me, but they had different names, and for a while it seemed that every individual tree must have its own name, which would be a lot to remember.

     I went so far as to believe that my parents, in giving me all those names, were passing along secrets.  Other people were unaware of the names within the names.  The knew the work "tree" but only my parents and I were able to call this tree oak and that tree maple.  I felt like an insider, a secret comrade to trees and cars, birds and flowers, and shoes and books. 

-Michael Cunningham, Unsayable: A Life in Writing

thanks David

better memories...................

 

Let us build memories in our children,
lest they drag out joyless lives,
lest they allow treasures to be lost because
they have not been given the keys.
We live, not by things, but by the meanings
of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords
from generation to generation.

-as culled from here

the divide..........................

 

Two children are looking at screens.

One has an infinite iPad: videos, feeds, colors, and recommendations carefully designed to ask nothing of her other than her attention. The other has an AI tutor: patient, demanding, adaptive, and often hard work. It asks her what she thinks and why one answer is better than another.

It’s the same rectangle and the same general class of technology, but it is doing opposite things to the child. That is the divide I care about: how AI deployed two ways can form two different people.

-Brendan McCord, as quoted here

Life its ownself.....................

 

.................................sharp teeth and all.

Applies to grandparenting as well......

 

Being a parent, Johnson insisted, isn’t about nobility or beauty, pride or pleasure. Rather, it is “the simple, nerve-wracking, mindless, battering-ram process of trying to teach a savage to use a fork.”

-Daniel Smith, from here

via

the soulful gamble known as trust......

 

     Raising our children under the telescope of our permanent gaze is costly.  If you are trusting, you win some encounters and lose others, but in the long-term, you gain much more than you would from distrusting, which results in lost opportunities, says Hardin.  A panoptic culture teaches our children that we cannot take a chance on others.  Unintentionally, such a culture also teaches children that they are to be distrusted, and that we cannot take a chance on them.  Cameras, breathalyzers, software monitoring, GPS tracking, and other far-reaching paraphernalia of the eye take away our children's brief chance in life to gradually, with inevitable stumbling, to learn to take responsibility for their actions.  Surveillance erodes their freedom to fall.  "What I always say to parents is if you are giving your kids appropriate freedom, it will feel like neglect in our culture," says psychologist Wendy Mogel, author of The Blessings of a Skinned Knee.  We're setting up safe zones that are cages.  And we're substituting instamatic fragments for the homegrown mutual knowledge that slowly builds into the soulful gamble known as trust.  We've mistaken the monologue of surveillance for the dialogue that is care.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

To distracted to answer the question.......

 

Civil War historian Shelby Foote, when asked to cite anything about the American Civil War he did not understand, often replied, “I still don’t know how they did it… How does a starving man march 20 miles, then go into a 3-hour battle?”

That’s a great question. Each generation, in raising the next, has to wonder how much toughness to pass along and whether the deprivation of hardship is doing harm.

-Michael Wade, from this substack

My parents.....................

 

.......................and Rob's parents could have been neighbors.  The one big thing missing from his list is the command, "Go play outside."

The peace........................

 

..................................of vulnerability.

Not so subtle parenting......

 

     This was obviously directed at an audience beyond that of his son, who was already 40 and the governor of New Jersey.  There was, however, a subtext directed at him:  William had taken on airs since becoming governor, and he was far more enamored of the aristocracy and establishment than his father.  The autobiography would be reminder of their humble origins and a paean to hard work, thrift, shopkeeping values, and the role of an industrious middle class that resisted rather than emulated the pretensions of the well-born elite.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

a terrible lie...................

 

And a terrible lie settled deep into my heart: you are on your own.

-John Eldridge, Fathered by God

parenting...........................

 

     My dad and I fished together when I was young, and those are among my most treasured memories of him.  He taught me first to fish with a worm on a bobber, and then to cast a spinning rod.  He was not a fly fisherman, but I wanted to be.  Around the age of twenty-five, I bought myself a rod and reel and began to try to teach myself—a pattern by which, unfortunately, I have learned most of what I've learned in life.  We often speak of a man who's done this successfully as a "self-made man."  The appellation is usually spoken with a sense of admiration, but really it should be said in the same tones we might use of the dearly departed or of a man who recently lost an arm—with sadness and regret.  What the term really means is "an orphaned man who figured how to master some part of life on his own."

-John Eldredge, Fathered by God

The joys (and agony) of parenting.............

 Sometimes you provide the most help with the assistance you withhold.

-Morgan Housel

The spirit..............................

 

..........................of life its ownself:

                             thanks Kurt

bad parenting........................

 

     However, government's responsibility for the depression was not recognized—either then or now.  Instead, the depression was widely interpreted as a failure of free market capitalism.  That myth led the public to join the intellectuals in a changed view of the relative responsibilities of individuals and government.  Emphasis on the responsibility of the individual for his own fate was replaced by emphasis on the individual as a pawn buffeted by forces beyond his control.  The view that government's role is to serve as an umpire to prevent individuals from coercing one another was replaced by the view that government's role is to serve as a parent charged with the duty of coercing some to aid others.

-Milton & Rose Friedman, Free To Choose: A Personal Statement

Congratulations...........................

 

...................................are in order.

Wisdom......................

 

.........................from our friend at Sippican Cottage:

Time marches on. You can never put the toothpaste back in the tube. You can never put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The past is another county. Whatever. But I’m sure glad I didn’t forget to have kids in the first place.

If you believe the system....................

 

...............has your best interest at heart, you might consider reading this post from our friend at Sippican Cottage.

On the importance........................

 

................................................of example.

I consider myself..........................

 .........................................privileged.   I suspect Greg Mankiw would concur.