Earlier today, I served as the “young woman’s voice” in a panel of local experts at a Girl Scouts speaking event. One question for the panel was something to the effect of, “Should parents read their daughter’s texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?”
I was surprised when the first panelist answered the question as if it were about cyberbullying. The adult audience nodded sagely as she spoke about the importance of protecting children online.
I reached for the microphone next. I said, “As far as reading your child’s texts or logging into their social media profiles, I would say 99.9% of the time, do not do that.”
Looks of total shock answered me. I actually saw heads jerk back in surprise. Even some of my fellow panelists blinked.
Everyone stared as I explained that going behind a child’s back in such a way severs the bond of trust with the parent. When I said, “This is the most effective way to ensure that your child never tells you anything,” it was like I’d delivered a revelation.
It’s easy to talk about the disconnect between the old and the young, but I don’t think I’d ever been so slapped in the face by the reality of it. It was clear that for most of the parents I spoke to, the idea of such actions as a violation had never occurred to them at all.
It alarms me how quickly adults forget that children are people.
Apparently people are rediscovering this post somehow and I think that’s pretty cool! Having experienced similar violations of trust in my youth, this is an important issue to me, so I want to add my personal story:
Around age 13, I tried to express to my mother that I thought I might have clinical depression, and she snapped at me “not to joke about things like that.” I stopped telling my mother when I felt depressed.
Around age 15, I caught my mother reading my diary. She confessed that any time she saw me write in my diary, she would sneak into my room and read it, because I only wrote when I was upset. I stopped keeping a diary.
Around age 18, I had an emotional breakdown while on vacation because I didn’t want to go to college. I ended up seeing a therapist for - surprise surprise - depression.
Around age 21, I spoke on this panel with my mother in the audience, and afterwards I mentioned the diary incident to her with respect to this particular Q&A. Her eyes welled up, and she said, “You know I read those because I was worried you were depressed and going to hurt yourself, right?”
TL;DR: When you invade your child’s privacy, you communicate three things:
You do not respect their rights as an individual.
You do not trust them to navigate problems or seek help on their own.
You probably haven’t been listening to them.
Information about almost every issue that you think you have to snoop for can probably be obtained by communicating with and listening to your child.
Part of me is really excited to see that the original post got 200 notes because holy crap 200 notes, and part of me is really saddened that something so negative has resonated with so many people.
It alarms me how quickly adults forget children are people.
and it’s a zeugma where one of the words is literal and one is metaphorical which is the BEST KIND
I didn’t know about zeugmas until just now! That is so awesome, everybody:
zeug·ma
ˈzo͞oɡmə/
noun
a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g.,John and his license expired last week ) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts ).
on the one hand there are many aspects of academia that should be criticized but on the other hand i’m concerned about the rise of anti-intellectualism as a tool of fascism
Hey yo what the fuck does this say in English? Because if you can’t explain in layman’s terms you’re not doing a good job of getting your point across to everyone.
1. we are right to criticize the many problems in higher education
2. fascists manipulate people into hating anyone involved in higher education for supposedly looking down on them and being worthless to the “real world.” as a result, funding for education is cut, especially for the arts, no one listens to historians who point out that history is repeating itself or speak out against the regime, freedom of speech is lost in favor of the party line, and/or climate change kills us all since no one listens to scientists.
3. therefore, when we criticize higher education, we should be careful not to contribute to fascist tropes that claim that having knowledge is bad/smug/out of touch/useless to society.
Let me try:
1. Universities and colleges with long histories often keep using the power structures they began with: favoring the rich and ruling classes, while society changes around them (That’s how we get phrases like “The Ivory Tower”).
2. It’s good to question this, and to finally get these universities and colleges to be more open to students from less privileged classes (economic, racial, gender, orientation, disability, etc.).
3. But instead of criticizing the power structures, fascists demonize learning and thinking, and say that people who try to learn too much (or learn things “above their station”) can’t be trusted, and are “enemies of the state.”
4. When this happens, people become afraid to question the government or government-appointed “experts,” and tyrants move in and start doing whatever they want (making it even better for the rich and ruling classes, and worse for everyone else).
So I found out a few months ago that wanting to ‘not exist’ or wishing you could ‘just sleep forever’ is also considered suicidal (specifically suicidal ideation). It shocked me cause I used to think that way when I was younger but had previously thought that being suicidal meant explicitly wanting to die.. but it actually involves wanting to not live too.
I think its an important thing to note cause it might allow someone to realize the severity of their condition earlier.
im not INTERESTED anymore in seeing men’s perception of what female leisure time looks like, how we lounge around hairless and small and beautiful on our beds and couches in oversized shirts and lace underwear, unaware and unassuming and all the more beautiful for not Trying to be beautiful, i’m TIRED of it. even our most basic freedom of privacy, time alone with the self, has been butchered and ripped from us by the gaze of male photographers and artists
Not to turn mental illness into relatable content but is there anything more hilarious then spending an entire day vamping up to do something like spending ALL day thinking about it and putting it off and dreading it and then you finally, FINALLY do it and it takes 6 seconds and you realize that was your whole day plan
Anonymous /
lightening thief!annabeth having a crush on percy is basically that tweet of op talking abt them having a crush on some kid in elementary school and not knowing how to deal with it so they wrote them a letter that said “get out of my school” LMAOOOO tell me i’m wrong 😖✊🏽
I learned in a Latin Studies class (with a chill white dude professor) that when the Europeans first saw Aztec cities they were stunned by the grid. The Aztecs had city planning and that there was no rational lay out to European cities at the time. No organization.
When the Spanish first arrived in Tenochtitlan (now downtown mexico city) they thought they were dreaming. They had arrived from incredibly unsanitary medieval Europe to a city five times the size of that century’s london with a working sewage system, artificial “floating gardens” (chinampas), a grid system, and aqueducts providing fresh water. Which wasn’t even for drinking! Water from the aqueducts was used for washing and bathing- they preferred using nearby mountain springs for drinking. Hygiene was a huge part if their culture, most people bathed twice a day while the king bathed at least four times a day.
Located on an island in the middle of a lake, they used advanced causeways to allow access to the mainland that could be cut off to let canoes through or to defend the city. The Spanish saw their buildings and towers and thought they were rising out of the water. The city was one of the most advanced societies at the time.
Anyone who thinks that Native Americans were the savages instead of the filthy, disease ridden colonizers who appeared on their land is a damn fool.
just a note, we don’t think of old european cities as ruins, because those civilizations continued and kept building over the old–there are no abandoned ruins for us to visit & photograph. when we picture those old cities, we have only mental images drawn from our own assumptions & prejudices–images that tend to glorify ‘civilized’ europe.
since victors write history, our image of native american cities was created by colonizers motivated to uphold the ‘native savage’ myth. when we think of these civilizations now, we think of ‘uncivilized’ (rough, broken, abandoned) ruins, because that’s what remains. ruins are the only thing left. because of the destruction wrought by western invaders, these civilizations never had a chance to continue building. they were destroyed, and all we have left is an unimaginative shadow of their former glory.
went to peru and visited some of their museums and learned inca history that american schools don’t teach you. basically you know why they were beaten out by the spanish invaders? because incas were mostly scientists and not warriors. they had advanced medicine, farming and science technology. THATS what they were good at - tech - not building weapons to most efficiently kill people. the spanish were good at that. so they won. basically the real savages and thugs won and murdered a bunch of scientists, and their technology and advancements are lost forever. it took into the 20th century for colonizer technology to advance in the field of medicine and agriculture to the level of the incas. colonizers literally set human knowledge back like 500 years.
