Sep 3·edited Sep 3Liked by Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)
>> Do you want your son to have such anxiety about girls that he just sits in his room playing video games every weekend, stewing about why he’s such a hopeless loser?
That was basically me in elementary school.
My parents didn't send me to daycare or kindergarten (my mother was - and still is - a lazy depressed NEET), and provided me no opportunity to socialize with any kids - no friends with kids that would come over, no playdates, no birthdays, no kids in the neighborhood (there were some but we didn't know them), no cousins or siblings (my only brother was born when I was 6). Then I went to school and I had to start figuring out all of my social skills at the age of 7. It was a HORROR.
The only people I've really interacted with up to that point were adults. Thus, I would talk like an adult, and do things that pleased adults: show off that I know stuff, learned stuff or can do stuff, like reading or maths. My parents have always told me I was very smart. Then, other kids made me realize that in fact, I was an idiot. The cognitive dissonance was huge. Eventually, I felt like my parents lied to me.
>> Parents have always given terrible advice on this topic.
My parents' advice was along the lines of "other kids are stupid" and "don't care what other kids say". Which was exactly the opposite of what I needed to understand: that social norms and customs exist and I need to learn about them and conform. Fit in.
The advice in this post is also in the lines of "be a nonconformist". That's a strategy I eventually employed by middle school, and it was somewhat effective in terms of pushing me from being the worst to low-middle status - being a class clown only gets you so far.
I believe this only works if you a) have already figured out the basics of social skills (I have by middle school, but I haven't yet in elementary school) and/or b) you are an attractive young girl, which gives enormous social credit and also room for error - you can mess up and be actually cringe, but no one cares because you're still young and hot.
As a parent, I persisted to send my daughter to daycare and kindergarten as soon as possible. I also try to double down on playdates, meeting and inviting friends with kids over and family meetings with her cousins. We often visit our in-laws who live in a rural area which allows my daughter and her cousins to play and run freely all day. I also tried to replicate this environment by moving away from the city and building a house in the countryside.
Sometimes, my wife tells me we should spend more time on doing exercises from a book or trying to teach our daughter to draw, read or speak a foreign language. I always reply that my priority is to make her happy, and I believe that we should just allow her to spend as much time playing with other kids as possible - provide her the opportunities my parents failed to provide me when I needed them the most.
My parents said exactly the same type of thing, and never gave me any sense whatsoever that socializing and networks are actually an important thing in life, especially for jobs. According them, grades were all that mattered. Then I grew up and found out that everyone who got jobs and clients got them through friend and family networks, and that it was just as important as having the grades/competence.
That's a shame you didn't have that when you were young. I honestly can't even imagine how terrifying entering school would be at that age without it. But it sounds like you did okay making up for it, and are doing right by your daughter to start her off with a good foundation.
Sep 3·edited Sep 3Liked by Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)
Entering school wasn't that bad, as I was totally unprepared for what was coming. Having no actual friends, my only source of knowledge about children's social relationships were cartoons for preschool kids, in which protagonists always had lots of friends. Even if they felt scared or anxious, their friends were always there for them, and most of the time everyone was happy and had a lot of fun adventures together.
The trope of nerds getting rejected and bullied does not really appear in cartoons for little kids. It only appears in teen/tween drama movies/shows, and more often than not, it doesn't really matter because the protagonists turn out to be wizards, vampires, superheroes, time travelers, secret agents, greek gods, friends with an alien or monster, having access to portals to alternate dimensions or other cool weird shit that DOESN'T EXIST.
Hence, it was natural for me to expect that I will have lots of friends when I go to school. Only after some time, I was like WTF IS THAT SHIT? and then WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME?
> The trope of nerds getting rejected and bullied does not really appear in cartoons for little kids. It only appears in teen/tween drama movies/shows, and more often than not, it doesn't really matter because the protagonists turn out to be wizards, vampires, superheroes, time travelers, secret agents, greek gods, friends with an alien or monster, having access to portals to alternate dimensions or other cool weird shit that DOESN'T EXIST.
That’s like the useless advice to ignore bullies or not to think about your problems. Unfortunately, we’re particularly ill-equipped to learn to read these nasty and treacherous messages between the lines: “I don’t give a shit about your problems; just leave me alone”, but also “Yeah, I refuse to say this openly because I’m more interested in maintaining my plausible deniability than in helping you the tiniest bit. See how little of a fuck I give about your problems”, and even “Yeah, this is the kind of behavior that would get you universally despised as a coward, but you won’t see me suffer such fate. Sucks to be you”.
Kids instinctively know parents are useless at certain things. Having been part of kid packs it’s just a fact that inside the kid circle little to nothing parents say has any effect. That’s actually a good thing. Kids operate on instinct and it’s often correct. Kids also wonder (at least I did) why adults are so clueless and cringe. Now that I’m clueless and cringe compared to the kids, I’m not exactly sure how it happened! But it must have to do with the many occasions you’re required to learn how to bullshit in order to please those clueless and cringe grownups.
>>> Do you want your son to have such anxiety about girls that he just sits in his room playing video games every weekend, stewing about why he’s such a hopeless loser?
> That was basically me in elementary school.
That was not me, but only because
1) We didn’t have any video games around. My parents wanted nothing to do with them, blamed them for all kinds of social ills and considered them a social ill in themselves.
2) I was far too isolated to realize I was a pathetic loser at all. Everything seemed to be just fine, if boring. And I did go to kindergarten, but it doesn’t seem to have done me much good.
> Then I went to school and I had to start figuring out all of my social skills at the age of 7. It was a HORROR.
I only experienced that horror as an adult. Before, I was too clueless to realize there was so much to learn. The fact that other people’s behavior made little sense to me should probably have alerted me, but didn’t, and I don’t think I could have done much anyway.
> My parents' advice was along the lines of "other kids are stupid" and "don't care what other kids say". Which was exactly the opposite of what I needed to understand: that social norms and customs exist and I need to learn about them and conform. Fit in.
Mine’s was more like, “I’m in charge here; I can’t be bothered with kids’ silly social rules, and if you’re worried about what they’ll think of you or how they’ll treat you, that’s on you for your shyness and cowardice”. On the other hand, that didn’t stop them from criticizing my lack of social skills.
Not disagreeing with the general message, but there are statistics showing that kids that went through daycare are doing significantly worse on many metrics than kids that did not.
Modern daycare does not sound like your daycare, but I imagine that spending half of the day in a room with a lot of other same-age kids (as retarded as the individual kid…) that are non related to you and an adult that is probably too fragile is bad for the development for most young kids.
You also have some stats where kids that are homeschooled or went in charter schools are not really doing quite ok or better.
I think what truly matters is that they have enough social interactions with other kids to not be scared of it. Ideally it is a relatively small, mixed-age group and the activity is done outside. There is no need to force social interactions much more beyond that.
I didn't get into it because it would've been too long, but Mary's house was truly an ideal situation. She was excellent at enforcing manners and rules, and she had been a military nurse who could handle the inevitable scrapes and sprains, but she let the older (i.e. non-toddler) kids play mostly unsupervised. Plus she lived near a dead-end so it was perfectly safe for us to be running around outside and on the street.
Of course, the irony is that some time in the late 90s, she got shut down for a year by the state, for operating outside of the licensing requirements and not having taken their required courses, etc. Which is ridiculous because that woman knew more about kids than anyone I've ever met in life.
The laws do matter. I live in Utah now where the legislature adopted a free-range parenting statute, and they also make it very easy to operate this type of family-based daycare from your home. Other states basically make it impossible.
But you're right, when I said "daycare" I didn't mean some institutional room where every kid is exactly the same age and constantly supervised in strict ratios by an over-educated and underpaid woman who's been trained in all the worst modern theories of child development. It doesn't even need to be daycare if there's kids in your neighborhood or family to hang out with. But my siblings are so far apart from me in age (10+ years) that I didn't have that at home, and definitely needed to go somewhere to get in social time.
The difference is the lack of adult supervision. Too much adult oversight is harmful actually. Kids need to relate to other kids without adults in the middle. Adults need to be there, but only in the background, and available if there are problems.
Yes!! Great advice. Having friends help you navigate this stuff is so important. I've also known many people who started much later and seen it just become exponentially harder to integrate into normal romantic adulthood.
And my first kiss was also totally a set-up orchestrated by me and two of my friends, too, hahaha. It was the summer just before high school, though. We all wanted to kiss the same boy (Josh with the blonde 90s JTT haircut) so we decided to "camp" in my friend Katie's yard down the block and sneak in Josh and his friend into the tent after dark and then innocently bring up spin the bottle after someone finished their bottle of whatever. It totally worked 😂 I even got Josh's hat out of the deal. I cherished it and wore it religiously until the following winter when he denied having kissed me to my other dude friend who asked at the ice arena we'd all congregate at. Then I cut it into pieces and dramatically threw it in the garbage. Lol.
Camping in Katie's yard is an example of this "free range" kid behavior, too. We grew up in the middle of the city, but Minneapolis was full of parks and lakes and wooded areas, so we'd take our bikes and explore everything or take over parks and pools and organize neighborhood water fights and stuff like that. There was a nearby cemetery that me and that group of friends would explore all the time, and we'd make forts in the little secret parts of the wooded areas near lakes and the river. Backyard camping was also just a weirdly common thing for us as kids lol. I did it a lot that year with different friends, looking back. Ah, the good ol days 🥲
And also destroyed things when boys offended us. A boy Eric had given me a white teddy bear for Valentine's Day, but later dumped me. I pulled out its eyes, wrote I HATE YOU all over it, stuck a screwdriver in its back, and gave it back to him. That was a bad move, and one that taught me to dial-down the bunny-boiling Fatal Attraction energy and chill out a little. Because I remember thinking it was kind of a cool way to reclaim my dignity and show him I didn't care anymore, and instead he just looked at me like I was a complete psycho, lol. Lesson learned!
Did you also burn pictures of the boys who had wronged you? That was, like, our favorite thing to do. We'd sit in my room with one of my mom's baking pans and just light them on fire, cackling like psychopaths. I've got a great picture somewhere of me holding an actively burning photo of Jimmy, a guy who would not date me, grinning like a maniac as the flames ate the picture lol
I don't think I had any photos to burn, but my yearbook is definitely full of boys' photos who initially had a heart drawn around them that was later crossed out along with X marks on his eyes and I HATE U and CONCEITED written all over it, lol.
I'm also envious that you mentioned water fights, because one of my abiding dreams as a child was to orchestrate a massive water battle with everyone in the extended neighborhood. I wanted stockpiles of water balloons, hidden garden hoses, water guns, and two large armies with coordinated positions and walkie talkies. I used to draw maps with battle plans and I would bring them on the bus to campaign for my war plans.
But despite my best efforts to convince everyone this was a great idea, I was sadly never successful in making it happen. We did have some small-scale water fights, but I was always fantasizing about a planned-out multi-hour epic war. Always with the grand schemes.
It’s so sad that this seems to be rare these days. As the author hints, once childhood is gone you can’t get it back. You gotta be a kid when you’re still a kid.
Sep 4·edited Sep 4Liked by Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)
I kind of want to write about all the chasing minge with my friend and the excitement of it all 15- 19... but then I know I would write things like " Washing it off in the sink so her friend wouldn't know..." and I just cringe... "
I grew up on Penthouse forum... remember that ? I diddnt care for the pictures of the naked gals.. I wanted the stories!! that was LIFE!
Hey, if a contented middle aged person can't enjoy reveling in the humor and good times from the stories of their youthful misadventures, then what the heck are we even doing in this life? I was cracking up when I was looking through my old diaries for this post. There are some gems there.
I really fear for gen alpha. I was on a walk the other day and passed a group of them comparing each others jaws to see if they had the ‘chad’ jaw. I think their socialisation has been completely ruined by covid and the toxic memes spreading unchallenged on the internet. Lockdown meant they wouldn’t have even had a chance.
And there’s definitely a profound social skills difference between gen x women and gen z.
Ug. I'm starting to think we really need to just ban the internet for kids. Or at least, make a kids-only extremely limited form of internet that's the only one they can access. I shudder to think of what would've become of me if social media and the internet were around when I was that age.
Taking options away will never make non-free-range kids free range. For the latter, the Internet will become one more cool forbidden thing. Access to it will grant them status, and all kids who can will flock to the homes of their peers with such privilege. Meanwhile, the nerdy isolated kids with nowhere to go in real life and no chance to socialize with anyone their parents don’t command them to, for whom the Internet is basically the only window on the outside world and the only hope of doing things that might slowly enable you to get to know someone you perhaps can meet in real life a few years in the future, won’t even have that.
What’s wrong with playfully bullshitting and teasing each other about who has a Chad jaw? This sounds a lot like the ribbing we used to do in my pre-internet friend groups.
That's true, however that comes with moralization as well. You rag on a friend to make them less insecure. You say insults to each other so when you're faced with real enemies you can handle the damage.
It's also that social spaces have broken down, these young guys have no counter examples. Short term dating which occurs in fragmented spaces is indeed very looks heavy. The beaver pond doesn't exist to these guys.
It’s not how it was done in the Good Old Days, so we’ll always tend to see it as a corruption against the natural order of things, not realizing that the main change is that we’re no longer young. But young people are young today, not in the past.
I grew up on a council estate (housing project in the USA). I remember being six and some of the kids would be allowed to go wandering while others would be restricted to our “block”. By the time we were 8, some of us would ride our bikes to the park a mile away. At 10 we caught the train to London and at 16, I left home and joined the Navy. It seemed to me that some of those kids never caught up and even in their early 20s were still living at home and going to the doctor with their mum. Same story with snogging. I was kissing at 10. As you say, it took away some of the fear when proper romance came along. It seems to me that the Youth of Today get very good at playing their Nintendo Wii in their teen years but are intimidated by everything else until well into their twenties. It's a shame.
I could feel the blood draining from my face as it turned white while reading your article.
I was picked on in elementary school to the point I was home schooled for the middle school years. I also landed an autism spectrum diagnosis, which I internalized as "you'll never have any friends, so why even try". I went to high school in person, but avoided other people while definitely having some social anxiety going on.
In college I was shocked when people tried getting to know me. I did eventually end up with several friends, but there was a lot of creative destruction in the process, to the point I'd be able to give surprisingly good relationship and breakup advice despite never having been in an actual relationship at the time!
Sep 7·edited Sep 7Liked by Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)
> _Everyone_ is paranoid no one likes them and everyone worries they’re too lame, ugly, or uncool. _Everyone_ is constantly on high alert to pick up on the social signals of what’s cool and what’s not, and petrified of being put in the uncool category.
No, really, some of us are blind to status and have no clue that there’s something to pick up on to begin with. Of course, then we wonder why it’s only a matter of time for any new acquaintance to lose all respect for us. But I get it’s natural not to take us into account; we probably look mentally retarded to normal people.
> And if I had just been left to my own devices, at home with my mom, I would have sat in my room reading my entire childhood, and it would’ve been a social disaster for me. That’s what happened to my older sister, and she had a miserable time in middle school and high school.
I got both for the price of one: the social disaster and the vague feeling that sitting or lying down and reading, reading and reading, occasionally stopping to read, which I very much wanted to do, was _wrong_, so I didn’t even read all that much.
> Parents naturally tend to coddle their children, worrying far too much about their feelings and favoring them above other kids.
Ho, ho, ho, the children’s or the parents’ feelings? I’m sure both cases happen. Or do you mean they care about the children’s feelings insofar as they chastise them for having the wrong feelings?, because this happens, too.
> You learn not to be AFRAID of other kids,
I learned to be afraid of them, because they would attack me at any time, for reasons I could not fathom, and I always lost, unless I was cowardly fighting a younger kid or someone else with a legitimate reason to be weaker than me, and then I’d be promptly shamed for my villainy. In contrast, my weakness was never legitimate: when someone showed their strength by beating me up, I always seemed to be at fault for not being stronger.
I also learned to be afraid of adults denying my everyday experience, blaming me, giving me the stock useless advice and telling me off for being afraid.
> or the opposite sex,
Now you mention it, I didn’t learn to be afraid enough of girls. I was too thick to gather much beyond the fact that they beat me less often than boys did. It didn’t occur to me that talking to them aggressively or telling them things I wouldn’t tell boys was effectively abusing them, creating an excellent reason for their suitors to earn points by putting me in my place, or, for extra humiliation, for the girls themselves to beat the crap out of me.
> I’ve noticed a tendency among the very-online, autiste-adjacent crowd to have hated school, and to be motivated to help their children avoid the same pain by sheltering them from the social world. I strongly believe that’s a terrible idea. Figuring out how the social world works is far more painful at age 8 than it is at age 3, and even worse at age 12 or 18. The older you get, the harder it is to just intuit social dynamics. If you throw them in and let them take the hits young, it all comes naturally. I wasn’t afraid of boys at age 12 because I’d been playing with them my whole life. I was a little afraid of mean girls, but I also knew how to handle them.
Unfortunately for the kids, parents have every right not to give a crap about that, and only a totalitarian state would dream of taking it from them.
> I distinctly remember the first day of kindergarten because there were two kids who cried in the corner. They had never been away from their moms before, and were scared. This did not go over well with the other kids. Do you want that to be your kid, or do your want your kid to come home from the first day of school crowing happily about all the new friends he’s made??
> *And this is critical for success in the realm of romance.*
Oh, oh, you’ve just given parents who don’t think their kids should be romancing an extra reason not to give a crap.
> Friends are there to act as intermediaries and sounding boards. They soften the blow of rejection. They give you models to emulate, and examples to avoid. They pre-gauge interest for you, so you’re not just going in blind when you ask someone to the dance. They evaluate your successes and failures, to give you feedback. They help you calibrate what certain behaviors mean, and what would be the best response. They’re the ones that you scheme with together, to make sure that the summer party will be EPIC, and that your crush will be there. They’re the ones that INVITE you to the party. They give you a reality check and tell you when it’s hopeless and you’re pining for someone out of your league. And they tell you you’re clueless about the person who obviously likes you but you somehow didn’t notice. They deliver messages and gather intel. And they make it all fun and take the edge off, and give you someone to laugh about your foibles with. Utilizing your friends, and the friends of your love target, was the standard way things used to work.
Ouch. I’m so used to the idea that romance, and anything else more or less related to sex, is this extremely serious, extremely grown-up thing, demanding an extreme degree of responsibility, that what you describe feels like cheating to me. You see, this is sexual selection we’re talking about, itself part of natural selection. If you’re a complete failure as a living being, like evidence has consistently shown me to be, what’s the point in helping you? Betraying the species?
> But kids today are being deprived of this, and that’s a tragedy. If they’re missing this crucial part of normal development, it’s a societal problem that deserves to be fixed. And it’s not a trivial matter.
Not for the kids, ...
> Because I have seen the results when people miss this crucial developmental stage. They’ll still go through it alright, just when they’re 25 or 30, which is years too late and devastatingly painful at that point.
... but it can be trivial for the parents. See? No longer their responsibility!
> You’re supposed to do your practicing when the stakes are low, and you can easily brush off a failure and find someone new to crush on a week later. Read my diary, I liked a different boy every day. So did all my friends. There were no stakes. Sometimes they didn’t like me back, and it wasn’t the end of the world.
I liked a different girl every year or two. As in, I spent the whole year thinking of her before falling asleep, and, if she was nerdy, when studying, too, and let her inspire me. I never told them; I didn’t know what to tell them, and there never seemed to be a legitimate reason for me to try to get close to anyone I wanted to. Still, at least some of those girls could probably tell, and they probably laughed at me heartily.
> I’ve had some conservative traditionalist types chastise me and say that all the current chaos in sex-relations is because no one involves their parents anymore, or listens to their advice. I’m sorry, but no. Parents have always given terrible advice on this topic. Their social sense is either calibrated for the adult world, or based on their half-memories of a completely different time. Teenagers have not been listening to their parents’ advice on matters of love for at least a century. I’m astonished that any grown adult with children could have such amnesia about being young that they’ve deluded themselves into thinking that parents should be a primary source of guidance on such matters. They should not. That’s absurd. Give your children basic principles and values, and be there for them if they’re in danger, but don’t try to help them land a date for God’s sake.
Kids probably need more than ever to ask explicitly their parents for permission or resources for essentially anything. I was a forerunner.
> What kids need is friends, and free time to hang out with them and get into a little trouble.
Uh, uh, when people have talked to me about _free time_, they usually meant ‘time for you to do what I want’, not ‘time for you to do what you want’. They were usually criticizing me for not having enough “free time”.
> Do you want your daughter to have so little ease with boys that when she gets to college she just resorts to getting black-out drunk to quell her terror, and ends up going home with whatever boy has morals low enough to take the easy-pickings?
Be careful: to the aforementioned parents, you’re making a case against female education.
> Do you want your son to have such anxiety about girls that he just sits in his room playing video games every weekend, stewing about why he’s such a hopeless loser?
Nah, no video games and demand that he have some “free time” for you. Hopefully, by now he’ll have learned to value his studies as his own self-interest. Refuse to reason with him, make sure he never knows how much “free time” you’ll demand of him, and soon, in order to protect his studies, he’ll be forced to give up any other ambition, such as having a social life with his own generation, let alone any dreams of romance or sex.
> Meanwhile, my legs grew about a foot while the rest of me stayed exactly the same, and by 8th grade I’d reached my present height just shy of 5’10”, and resembled a praying mantis. I looked like I was walking around on stilts, and towered over virtually everyone in my grade, including almost all the boys, by a good six inches.
My first kiss was set up with a group of us from the same class. How it came about, who organised it and how you made it onto the list is still a complete mystery to me all I knew was that after school finished for the day I was to be at the willow tree at back of the school after the last class, the bell went for end of class and off I trudged. Nervous and excited, butterflies definitely roiling.
There was about 8 of us ( 4 boys, 4 girls) , there was numbers written on a piece of paper and tossed into a cap and we all reached in and grabbed a number to get paired up. Her name was Jane Moyes, she had long black curly hair and an olive skin complexion, she was what we called them back in the day a “ black” Scot.
( time for a wee history lesson: in 1588 the Spanish sent a fleet of ships to attack England, there was a huge storm and many of the ships blew off course and to get back to Spain they had to go around Great Britain, meaning they had to sail up the English coast then around Scotland then back down towards Spain, many of the ships would sink or crash into rocks that littered the west coast of Scotland, this led to many Spanish settling in Scotland, mingling with the locals and given rise to dark skinned, Mediterranean looking scots who from then on were knowing as black scots)
Anyway, we were paired together and I remember leaning forward and us pressing our lips together for what seemed ages but was probably only 5 seconds, my most distinct memory and it shocked me at the time? I could taste what she had been eating beforehand, which threw me I just never thought that would be a thing.
As for kids growing up, I’ve always remembered what it’s like being a kid and tried not to embarrass my own children ( unless I did it deliberately) and my philosophy has always been and I stick by is. My children are mine until they are 13/14, I make the rules and decide what is best for them but there comes an age when your kids look outside the family for acceptance and guidance, they pay more attention to their peers and friends. So, from the age of say 13 until 18 I just hope that what I’ve taught them, what moral compass I’ve put in place gets them through those wild years. They will learn and hopefully survive and I always let them know that no matter what I was there for them.
This story is awesome. Also I guarantee it was the girls who came up with this plan and the marching orders regarding meeting at the willow tree and who was involved. They had probably been planning it all out for weeks!
Haha, this is true!! I wrote this out weeks ago, but could never get the AI to make an image that was what I was envisioning. I finally gave up this weekend and pulled out my old box of diaries and photos instead. But that's okay because that ended up being a rather hilarious walk down memory lane. I did not remember that I actually had a diary entry about the Beaver Pond incident, so I was psyched to find that. I guess I can thank AI for not letting me be too lazy and getting me to haul out an old box from my garage, because I think it worked out better in this case. :)
Absolutely spot on brilliant. I testify as a natural bookworm who would be hopeless had I not had a bunch of siblings and the opportunity to run around with friends throughout my childhood. But I still didn’t figure out what you did at 12 til much later. (PS damn those legs are long!)
Back then they did not make girl's pants in different inseams, they were all standardized, so ALL of my pants were either 6 inches too short OR gigantically baggy and belted on - nothing fit me. I'm not trying to claim that being too skinny was as bad as being too fat, because it wasn't, but I did get made fun of a lot and didn't look normal. A few times the school nurse sent home notes because I was so out of whack on the height/weight charts. Later in high school I filled in, so even though my femurs are still abnormally long, it was fine after that point and I no longer looked like a human hockey stick.
I don’t know about fashions, but, to a boy who likes you, more leg is more leg (he wishes) to play with. More heaven. Or is this just what a boy clueless about fashions and other social stuff would say?
I don't think it is up to the parents. When my parents brought other kids as guests so I socialize more, I simply went to play alone in the other room. It is something the kids will decide themselves.
Mary basically forced socialization, or at least made the other options even worse. She had lots of books at her house and I DID spend more time than the other kids reading, but if she saw that you were never participating with the other kids you had two choices: (1) go play with them, or (2) sit on the couch alone in the living room with no books, toys, or TV, and just have to sit there alone doing nothing. I did get the couch treatment a few times and would pout and try to tough it out, but a few hours of that boredom, and playing with the other kids is the more appealing option.
>> Do you want your son to have such anxiety about girls that he just sits in his room playing video games every weekend, stewing about why he’s such a hopeless loser?
That was basically me in elementary school.
My parents didn't send me to daycare or kindergarten (my mother was - and still is - a lazy depressed NEET), and provided me no opportunity to socialize with any kids - no friends with kids that would come over, no playdates, no birthdays, no kids in the neighborhood (there were some but we didn't know them), no cousins or siblings (my only brother was born when I was 6). Then I went to school and I had to start figuring out all of my social skills at the age of 7. It was a HORROR.
The only people I've really interacted with up to that point were adults. Thus, I would talk like an adult, and do things that pleased adults: show off that I know stuff, learned stuff or can do stuff, like reading or maths. My parents have always told me I was very smart. Then, other kids made me realize that in fact, I was an idiot. The cognitive dissonance was huge. Eventually, I felt like my parents lied to me.
>> Parents have always given terrible advice on this topic.
My parents' advice was along the lines of "other kids are stupid" and "don't care what other kids say". Which was exactly the opposite of what I needed to understand: that social norms and customs exist and I need to learn about them and conform. Fit in.
The advice in this post is also in the lines of "be a nonconformist". That's a strategy I eventually employed by middle school, and it was somewhat effective in terms of pushing me from being the worst to low-middle status - being a class clown only gets you so far.
I believe this only works if you a) have already figured out the basics of social skills (I have by middle school, but I haven't yet in elementary school) and/or b) you are an attractive young girl, which gives enormous social credit and also room for error - you can mess up and be actually cringe, but no one cares because you're still young and hot.
As a parent, I persisted to send my daughter to daycare and kindergarten as soon as possible. I also try to double down on playdates, meeting and inviting friends with kids over and family meetings with her cousins. We often visit our in-laws who live in a rural area which allows my daughter and her cousins to play and run freely all day. I also tried to replicate this environment by moving away from the city and building a house in the countryside.
Sometimes, my wife tells me we should spend more time on doing exercises from a book or trying to teach our daughter to draw, read or speak a foreign language. I always reply that my priority is to make her happy, and I believe that we should just allow her to spend as much time playing with other kids as possible - provide her the opportunities my parents failed to provide me when I needed them the most.
My parents said exactly the same type of thing, and never gave me any sense whatsoever that socializing and networks are actually an important thing in life, especially for jobs. According them, grades were all that mattered. Then I grew up and found out that everyone who got jobs and clients got them through friend and family networks, and that it was just as important as having the grades/competence.
That's a shame you didn't have that when you were young. I honestly can't even imagine how terrifying entering school would be at that age without it. But it sounds like you did okay making up for it, and are doing right by your daughter to start her off with a good foundation.
Entering school wasn't that bad, as I was totally unprepared for what was coming. Having no actual friends, my only source of knowledge about children's social relationships were cartoons for preschool kids, in which protagonists always had lots of friends. Even if they felt scared or anxious, their friends were always there for them, and most of the time everyone was happy and had a lot of fun adventures together.
The trope of nerds getting rejected and bullied does not really appear in cartoons for little kids. It only appears in teen/tween drama movies/shows, and more often than not, it doesn't really matter because the protagonists turn out to be wizards, vampires, superheroes, time travelers, secret agents, greek gods, friends with an alien or monster, having access to portals to alternate dimensions or other cool weird shit that DOESN'T EXIST.
Hence, it was natural for me to expect that I will have lots of friends when I go to school. Only after some time, I was like WTF IS THAT SHIT? and then WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME?
> The trope of nerds getting rejected and bullied does not really appear in cartoons for little kids. It only appears in teen/tween drama movies/shows, and more often than not, it doesn't really matter because the protagonists turn out to be wizards, vampires, superheroes, time travelers, secret agents, greek gods, friends with an alien or monster, having access to portals to alternate dimensions or other cool weird shit that DOESN'T EXIST.
That’s like the useless advice to ignore bullies or not to think about your problems. Unfortunately, we’re particularly ill-equipped to learn to read these nasty and treacherous messages between the lines: “I don’t give a shit about your problems; just leave me alone”, but also “Yeah, I refuse to say this openly because I’m more interested in maintaining my plausible deniability than in helping you the tiniest bit. See how little of a fuck I give about your problems”, and even “Yeah, this is the kind of behavior that would get you universally despised as a coward, but you won’t see me suffer such fate. Sucks to be you”.
Kids instinctively know parents are useless at certain things. Having been part of kid packs it’s just a fact that inside the kid circle little to nothing parents say has any effect. That’s actually a good thing. Kids operate on instinct and it’s often correct. Kids also wonder (at least I did) why adults are so clueless and cringe. Now that I’m clueless and cringe compared to the kids, I’m not exactly sure how it happened! But it must have to do with the many occasions you’re required to learn how to bullshit in order to please those clueless and cringe grownups.
In the wise words of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince:
You know parents are the same
No matter time nor place
They don't understand that us kids
Are going to make some mistakes
So to you, all the kids all across the land
There's no need to argue
Parents just don't understand.
I remember one year, my mom took me school shopping
It was me, my brother, my mom, oh, my pop,
We all hopped in the car
And headed downtown to the Gallery Mall
My mom started bugging with the clothes she chose
I didn't say nothing at first, I just turned up my nose
She said, "What's wrong? This shirt cost $20"
I said, "Mom, that shirt is plaid with a butterfly collar!"
The next half hour was the same old thing
My mother buying me clothes from 1963
And then she lost her mind and did the ultimate
I asked her for Adidas and she bought me Zips!
I said, "Mom, what are you doing, you're ruining my rep"
She said, "You're only sixteen, you don't have a rep yet"
I said, "Mom, let's put these clothes back, please", she said NO
You go to school to learn, not for a fashion show.
I said, come on Mom, please, I'm not Bowzer
So please put back the bell-bottom Brady Bunch trousers.
But if you don't want to I can live with that,
But you gotta put back the double-knit reversible slacks.
She wasn't moved - everything stayed the same!
Inevitably the first day of school came.
I thought I could get over, I tried to play sick.
But my mom said, No, no way, uh-uh, forget it.
There was nothing I could do, I tried to relax,
I got dressed up in those ancient artifacts
And when I walked into school, it was just as I thought,
The kids were cracking up laughing at the clothes Mom bought.
And those who weren't laughing still had a ball
They were pointing and whispering as I walked down the hall.
I got home and told my Mom how my day went.
She said, "If they were laughing you don't need them,
cause they're not good friends."
For the next six hours I tried to explain to my Mom
That I was gonna have to go through this about 200 more times.
So to all you kids all across the land,
There's no need to argue, parents just don't understand.
>>> Do you want your son to have such anxiety about girls that he just sits in his room playing video games every weekend, stewing about why he’s such a hopeless loser?
> That was basically me in elementary school.
That was not me, but only because
1) We didn’t have any video games around. My parents wanted nothing to do with them, blamed them for all kinds of social ills and considered them a social ill in themselves.
2) I was far too isolated to realize I was a pathetic loser at all. Everything seemed to be just fine, if boring. And I did go to kindergarten, but it doesn’t seem to have done me much good.
> Then I went to school and I had to start figuring out all of my social skills at the age of 7. It was a HORROR.
I only experienced that horror as an adult. Before, I was too clueless to realize there was so much to learn. The fact that other people’s behavior made little sense to me should probably have alerted me, but didn’t, and I don’t think I could have done much anyway.
> My parents' advice was along the lines of "other kids are stupid" and "don't care what other kids say". Which was exactly the opposite of what I needed to understand: that social norms and customs exist and I need to learn about them and conform. Fit in.
Mine’s was more like, “I’m in charge here; I can’t be bothered with kids’ silly social rules, and if you’re worried about what they’ll think of you or how they’ll treat you, that’s on you for your shyness and cowardice”. On the other hand, that didn’t stop them from criticizing my lack of social skills.
Not disagreeing with the general message, but there are statistics showing that kids that went through daycare are doing significantly worse on many metrics than kids that did not.
Modern daycare does not sound like your daycare, but I imagine that spending half of the day in a room with a lot of other same-age kids (as retarded as the individual kid…) that are non related to you and an adult that is probably too fragile is bad for the development for most young kids.
You also have some stats where kids that are homeschooled or went in charter schools are not really doing quite ok or better.
I think what truly matters is that they have enough social interactions with other kids to not be scared of it. Ideally it is a relatively small, mixed-age group and the activity is done outside. There is no need to force social interactions much more beyond that.
I didn't get into it because it would've been too long, but Mary's house was truly an ideal situation. She was excellent at enforcing manners and rules, and she had been a military nurse who could handle the inevitable scrapes and sprains, but she let the older (i.e. non-toddler) kids play mostly unsupervised. Plus she lived near a dead-end so it was perfectly safe for us to be running around outside and on the street.
Of course, the irony is that some time in the late 90s, she got shut down for a year by the state, for operating outside of the licensing requirements and not having taken their required courses, etc. Which is ridiculous because that woman knew more about kids than anyone I've ever met in life.
The laws do matter. I live in Utah now where the legislature adopted a free-range parenting statute, and they also make it very easy to operate this type of family-based daycare from your home. Other states basically make it impossible.
But you're right, when I said "daycare" I didn't mean some institutional room where every kid is exactly the same age and constantly supervised in strict ratios by an over-educated and underpaid woman who's been trained in all the worst modern theories of child development. It doesn't even need to be daycare if there's kids in your neighborhood or family to hang out with. But my siblings are so far apart from me in age (10+ years) that I didn't have that at home, and definitely needed to go somewhere to get in social time.
The difference is the lack of adult supervision. Too much adult oversight is harmful actually. Kids need to relate to other kids without adults in the middle. Adults need to be there, but only in the background, and available if there are problems.
Yes!! Great advice. Having friends help you navigate this stuff is so important. I've also known many people who started much later and seen it just become exponentially harder to integrate into normal romantic adulthood.
And my first kiss was also totally a set-up orchestrated by me and two of my friends, too, hahaha. It was the summer just before high school, though. We all wanted to kiss the same boy (Josh with the blonde 90s JTT haircut) so we decided to "camp" in my friend Katie's yard down the block and sneak in Josh and his friend into the tent after dark and then innocently bring up spin the bottle after someone finished their bottle of whatever. It totally worked 😂 I even got Josh's hat out of the deal. I cherished it and wore it religiously until the following winter when he denied having kissed me to my other dude friend who asked at the ice arena we'd all congregate at. Then I cut it into pieces and dramatically threw it in the garbage. Lol.
Camping in Katie's yard is an example of this "free range" kid behavior, too. We grew up in the middle of the city, but Minneapolis was full of parks and lakes and wooded areas, so we'd take our bikes and explore everything or take over parks and pools and organize neighborhood water fights and stuff like that. There was a nearby cemetery that me and that group of friends would explore all the time, and we'd make forts in the little secret parts of the wooded areas near lakes and the river. Backyard camping was also just a weirdly common thing for us as kids lol. I did it a lot that year with different friends, looking back. Ah, the good ol days 🥲
We did the camping in our backyard thing too!
And also destroyed things when boys offended us. A boy Eric had given me a white teddy bear for Valentine's Day, but later dumped me. I pulled out its eyes, wrote I HATE YOU all over it, stuck a screwdriver in its back, and gave it back to him. That was a bad move, and one that taught me to dial-down the bunny-boiling Fatal Attraction energy and chill out a little. Because I remember thinking it was kind of a cool way to reclaim my dignity and show him I didn't care anymore, and instead he just looked at me like I was a complete psycho, lol. Lesson learned!
Did you also burn pictures of the boys who had wronged you? That was, like, our favorite thing to do. We'd sit in my room with one of my mom's baking pans and just light them on fire, cackling like psychopaths. I've got a great picture somewhere of me holding an actively burning photo of Jimmy, a guy who would not date me, grinning like a maniac as the flames ate the picture lol
I don't think I had any photos to burn, but my yearbook is definitely full of boys' photos who initially had a heart drawn around them that was later crossed out along with X marks on his eyes and I HATE U and CONCEITED written all over it, lol.
I'm also envious that you mentioned water fights, because one of my abiding dreams as a child was to orchestrate a massive water battle with everyone in the extended neighborhood. I wanted stockpiles of water balloons, hidden garden hoses, water guns, and two large armies with coordinated positions and walkie talkies. I used to draw maps with battle plans and I would bring them on the bus to campaign for my war plans.
But despite my best efforts to convince everyone this was a great idea, I was sadly never successful in making it happen. We did have some small-scale water fights, but I was always fantasizing about a planned-out multi-hour epic war. Always with the grand schemes.
It’s so sad that this seems to be rare these days. As the author hints, once childhood is gone you can’t get it back. You gotta be a kid when you’re still a kid.
Man its so weird. I did all the same tactics your talking about - but as a guy.
Im also throwing my kids into the most intense social beatdowns very early.
I loved that.
I was also insanely girl crazy... and that made me hustle :)
Well we know you have LOTS of good stories. 😉
I kind of want to write about all the chasing minge with my friend and the excitement of it all 15- 19... but then I know I would write things like " Washing it off in the sink so her friend wouldn't know..." and I just cringe... "
I grew up on Penthouse forum... remember that ? I diddnt care for the pictures of the naked gals.. I wanted the stories!! that was LIFE!
Hey, if a contented middle aged person can't enjoy reveling in the humor and good times from the stories of their youthful misadventures, then what the heck are we even doing in this life? I was cracking up when I was looking through my old diaries for this post. There are some gems there.
I really fear for gen alpha. I was on a walk the other day and passed a group of them comparing each others jaws to see if they had the ‘chad’ jaw. I think their socialisation has been completely ruined by covid and the toxic memes spreading unchallenged on the internet. Lockdown meant they wouldn’t have even had a chance.
And there’s definitely a profound social skills difference between gen x women and gen z.
Good advice here.
Ug. I'm starting to think we really need to just ban the internet for kids. Or at least, make a kids-only extremely limited form of internet that's the only one they can access. I shudder to think of what would've become of me if social media and the internet were around when I was that age.
Taking options away will never make non-free-range kids free range. For the latter, the Internet will become one more cool forbidden thing. Access to it will grant them status, and all kids who can will flock to the homes of their peers with such privilege. Meanwhile, the nerdy isolated kids with nowhere to go in real life and no chance to socialize with anyone their parents don’t command them to, for whom the Internet is basically the only window on the outside world and the only hope of doing things that might slowly enable you to get to know someone you perhaps can meet in real life a few years in the future, won’t even have that.
What’s wrong with playfully bullshitting and teasing each other about who has a Chad jaw? This sounds a lot like the ribbing we used to do in my pre-internet friend groups.
It’s looksmaxxing. It’s black pill ideology. The problem with it, is it’s total demoralisation. A toxic meme spread by despair.
Someone demoralised won’t even take the first step.
It all depends how you’re talking about it. Ragging on your friends looks is a long-standing tradition among guys
That's true, however that comes with moralization as well. You rag on a friend to make them less insecure. You say insults to each other so when you're faced with real enemies you can handle the damage.
It's also that social spaces have broken down, these young guys have no counter examples. Short term dating which occurs in fragmented spaces is indeed very looks heavy. The beaver pond doesn't exist to these guys.
It’s not how it was done in the Good Old Days, so we’ll always tend to see it as a corruption against the natural order of things, not realizing that the main change is that we’re no longer young. But young people are young today, not in the past.
I grew up on a council estate (housing project in the USA). I remember being six and some of the kids would be allowed to go wandering while others would be restricted to our “block”. By the time we were 8, some of us would ride our bikes to the park a mile away. At 10 we caught the train to London and at 16, I left home and joined the Navy. It seemed to me that some of those kids never caught up and even in their early 20s were still living at home and going to the doctor with their mum. Same story with snogging. I was kissing at 10. As you say, it took away some of the fear when proper romance came along. It seems to me that the Youth of Today get very good at playing their Nintendo Wii in their teen years but are intimidated by everything else until well into their twenties. It's a shame.
Such a good story.
I could feel the blood draining from my face as it turned white while reading your article.
I was picked on in elementary school to the point I was home schooled for the middle school years. I also landed an autism spectrum diagnosis, which I internalized as "you'll never have any friends, so why even try". I went to high school in person, but avoided other people while definitely having some social anxiety going on.
In college I was shocked when people tried getting to know me. I did eventually end up with several friends, but there was a lot of creative destruction in the process, to the point I'd be able to give surprisingly good relationship and breakup advice despite never having been in an actual relationship at the time!
> _Everyone_ is paranoid no one likes them and everyone worries they’re too lame, ugly, or uncool. _Everyone_ is constantly on high alert to pick up on the social signals of what’s cool and what’s not, and petrified of being put in the uncool category.
No, really, some of us are blind to status and have no clue that there’s something to pick up on to begin with. Of course, then we wonder why it’s only a matter of time for any new acquaintance to lose all respect for us. But I get it’s natural not to take us into account; we probably look mentally retarded to normal people.
> And if I had just been left to my own devices, at home with my mom, I would have sat in my room reading my entire childhood, and it would’ve been a social disaster for me. That’s what happened to my older sister, and she had a miserable time in middle school and high school.
I got both for the price of one: the social disaster and the vague feeling that sitting or lying down and reading, reading and reading, occasionally stopping to read, which I very much wanted to do, was _wrong_, so I didn’t even read all that much.
> Parents naturally tend to coddle their children, worrying far too much about their feelings and favoring them above other kids.
Ho, ho, ho, the children’s or the parents’ feelings? I’m sure both cases happen. Or do you mean they care about the children’s feelings insofar as they chastise them for having the wrong feelings?, because this happens, too.
> You learn not to be AFRAID of other kids,
I learned to be afraid of them, because they would attack me at any time, for reasons I could not fathom, and I always lost, unless I was cowardly fighting a younger kid or someone else with a legitimate reason to be weaker than me, and then I’d be promptly shamed for my villainy. In contrast, my weakness was never legitimate: when someone showed their strength by beating me up, I always seemed to be at fault for not being stronger.
I also learned to be afraid of adults denying my everyday experience, blaming me, giving me the stock useless advice and telling me off for being afraid.
> or the opposite sex,
Now you mention it, I didn’t learn to be afraid enough of girls. I was too thick to gather much beyond the fact that they beat me less often than boys did. It didn’t occur to me that talking to them aggressively or telling them things I wouldn’t tell boys was effectively abusing them, creating an excellent reason for their suitors to earn points by putting me in my place, or, for extra humiliation, for the girls themselves to beat the crap out of me.
> I’ve noticed a tendency among the very-online, autiste-adjacent crowd to have hated school, and to be motivated to help their children avoid the same pain by sheltering them from the social world. I strongly believe that’s a terrible idea. Figuring out how the social world works is far more painful at age 8 than it is at age 3, and even worse at age 12 or 18. The older you get, the harder it is to just intuit social dynamics. If you throw them in and let them take the hits young, it all comes naturally. I wasn’t afraid of boys at age 12 because I’d been playing with them my whole life. I was a little afraid of mean girls, but I also knew how to handle them.
Unfortunately for the kids, parents have every right not to give a crap about that, and only a totalitarian state would dream of taking it from them.
> I distinctly remember the first day of kindergarten because there were two kids who cried in the corner. They had never been away from their moms before, and were scared. This did not go over well with the other kids. Do you want that to be your kid, or do your want your kid to come home from the first day of school crowing happily about all the new friends he’s made??
This looks to me like a textbook question people ignore, berate you for asking or answer with a fabricated option (<https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gNodQGNoPDjztasbh/lies-damn-lies-and-fabricated-options>).
> *And this is critical for success in the realm of romance.*
Oh, oh, you’ve just given parents who don’t think their kids should be romancing an extra reason not to give a crap.
> Friends are there to act as intermediaries and sounding boards. They soften the blow of rejection. They give you models to emulate, and examples to avoid. They pre-gauge interest for you, so you’re not just going in blind when you ask someone to the dance. They evaluate your successes and failures, to give you feedback. They help you calibrate what certain behaviors mean, and what would be the best response. They’re the ones that you scheme with together, to make sure that the summer party will be EPIC, and that your crush will be there. They’re the ones that INVITE you to the party. They give you a reality check and tell you when it’s hopeless and you’re pining for someone out of your league. And they tell you you’re clueless about the person who obviously likes you but you somehow didn’t notice. They deliver messages and gather intel. And they make it all fun and take the edge off, and give you someone to laugh about your foibles with. Utilizing your friends, and the friends of your love target, was the standard way things used to work.
Ouch. I’m so used to the idea that romance, and anything else more or less related to sex, is this extremely serious, extremely grown-up thing, demanding an extreme degree of responsibility, that what you describe feels like cheating to me. You see, this is sexual selection we’re talking about, itself part of natural selection. If you’re a complete failure as a living being, like evidence has consistently shown me to be, what’s the point in helping you? Betraying the species?
> But kids today are being deprived of this, and that’s a tragedy. If they’re missing this crucial part of normal development, it’s a societal problem that deserves to be fixed. And it’s not a trivial matter.
Not for the kids, ...
> Because I have seen the results when people miss this crucial developmental stage. They’ll still go through it alright, just when they’re 25 or 30, which is years too late and devastatingly painful at that point.
... but it can be trivial for the parents. See? No longer their responsibility!
> You’re supposed to do your practicing when the stakes are low, and you can easily brush off a failure and find someone new to crush on a week later. Read my diary, I liked a different boy every day. So did all my friends. There were no stakes. Sometimes they didn’t like me back, and it wasn’t the end of the world.
I liked a different girl every year or two. As in, I spent the whole year thinking of her before falling asleep, and, if she was nerdy, when studying, too, and let her inspire me. I never told them; I didn’t know what to tell them, and there never seemed to be a legitimate reason for me to try to get close to anyone I wanted to. Still, at least some of those girls could probably tell, and they probably laughed at me heartily.
> I’ve had some conservative traditionalist types chastise me and say that all the current chaos in sex-relations is because no one involves their parents anymore, or listens to their advice. I’m sorry, but no. Parents have always given terrible advice on this topic. Their social sense is either calibrated for the adult world, or based on their half-memories of a completely different time. Teenagers have not been listening to their parents’ advice on matters of love for at least a century. I’m astonished that any grown adult with children could have such amnesia about being young that they’ve deluded themselves into thinking that parents should be a primary source of guidance on such matters. They should not. That’s absurd. Give your children basic principles and values, and be there for them if they’re in danger, but don’t try to help them land a date for God’s sake.
Kids probably need more than ever to ask explicitly their parents for permission or resources for essentially anything. I was a forerunner.
> What kids need is friends, and free time to hang out with them and get into a little trouble.
Uh, uh, when people have talked to me about _free time_, they usually meant ‘time for you to do what I want’, not ‘time for you to do what you want’. They were usually criticizing me for not having enough “free time”.
> Do you want your daughter to have so little ease with boys that when she gets to college she just resorts to getting black-out drunk to quell her terror, and ends up going home with whatever boy has morals low enough to take the easy-pickings?
Be careful: to the aforementioned parents, you’re making a case against female education.
> Do you want your son to have such anxiety about girls that he just sits in his room playing video games every weekend, stewing about why he’s such a hopeless loser?
Nah, no video games and demand that he have some “free time” for you. Hopefully, by now he’ll have learned to value his studies as his own self-interest. Refuse to reason with him, make sure he never knows how much “free time” you’ll demand of him, and soon, in order to protect his studies, he’ll be forced to give up any other ambition, such as having a social life with his own generation, let alone any dreams of romance or sex.
> Meanwhile, my legs grew about a foot while the rest of me stayed exactly the same, and by 8th grade I’d reached my present height just shy of 5’10”, and resembled a praying mantis. I looked like I was walking around on stilts, and towered over virtually everyone in my grade, including almost all the boys, by a good six inches.
Didn’t you want to be scary? Well, there you go.
I _so_ envy your freedom.
My first kiss was set up with a group of us from the same class. How it came about, who organised it and how you made it onto the list is still a complete mystery to me all I knew was that after school finished for the day I was to be at the willow tree at back of the school after the last class, the bell went for end of class and off I trudged. Nervous and excited, butterflies definitely roiling.
There was about 8 of us ( 4 boys, 4 girls) , there was numbers written on a piece of paper and tossed into a cap and we all reached in and grabbed a number to get paired up. Her name was Jane Moyes, she had long black curly hair and an olive skin complexion, she was what we called them back in the day a “ black” Scot.
( time for a wee history lesson: in 1588 the Spanish sent a fleet of ships to attack England, there was a huge storm and many of the ships blew off course and to get back to Spain they had to go around Great Britain, meaning they had to sail up the English coast then around Scotland then back down towards Spain, many of the ships would sink or crash into rocks that littered the west coast of Scotland, this led to many Spanish settling in Scotland, mingling with the locals and given rise to dark skinned, Mediterranean looking scots who from then on were knowing as black scots)
Anyway, we were paired together and I remember leaning forward and us pressing our lips together for what seemed ages but was probably only 5 seconds, my most distinct memory and it shocked me at the time? I could taste what she had been eating beforehand, which threw me I just never thought that would be a thing.
As for kids growing up, I’ve always remembered what it’s like being a kid and tried not to embarrass my own children ( unless I did it deliberately) and my philosophy has always been and I stick by is. My children are mine until they are 13/14, I make the rules and decide what is best for them but there comes an age when your kids look outside the family for acceptance and guidance, they pay more attention to their peers and friends. So, from the age of say 13 until 18 I just hope that what I’ve taught them, what moral compass I’ve put in place gets them through those wild years. They will learn and hopefully survive and I always let them know that no matter what I was there for them.
This story is awesome. Also I guarantee it was the girls who came up with this plan and the marching orders regarding meeting at the willow tree and who was involved. They had probably been planning it all out for weeks!
Now you’ve got me thinking it was rigged lol and I had a wee shine for Jane Moyes
The evil force of the nanny state cannot be overexaggerated. No serious childhood friendship can form in earshot of an adult.
I notice that you gave up on trying to make the AI Art work 😁
(Beavers playing spin the bottle)
Haha, this is true!! I wrote this out weeks ago, but could never get the AI to make an image that was what I was envisioning. I finally gave up this weekend and pulled out my old box of diaries and photos instead. But that's okay because that ended up being a rather hilarious walk down memory lane. I did not remember that I actually had a diary entry about the Beaver Pond incident, so I was psyched to find that. I guess I can thank AI for not letting me be too lazy and getting me to haul out an old box from my garage, because I think it worked out better in this case. :)
Yes.
Absolutely spot on brilliant. I testify as a natural bookworm who would be hopeless had I not had a bunch of siblings and the opportunity to run around with friends throughout my childhood. But I still didn’t figure out what you did at 12 til much later. (PS damn those legs are long!)
Being a tall, thin, long legged teenager in the 90's was probably not the worst thing, considering the fashion trends at the time.
Back then they did not make girl's pants in different inseams, they were all standardized, so ALL of my pants were either 6 inches too short OR gigantically baggy and belted on - nothing fit me. I'm not trying to claim that being too skinny was as bad as being too fat, because it wasn't, but I did get made fun of a lot and didn't look normal. A few times the school nurse sent home notes because I was so out of whack on the height/weight charts. Later in high school I filled in, so even though my femurs are still abnormally long, it was fine after that point and I no longer looked like a human hockey stick.
I don’t know about fashions, but, to a boy who likes you, more leg is more leg (he wishes) to play with. More heaven. Or is this just what a boy clueless about fashions and other social stuff would say?
I don't think it is up to the parents. When my parents brought other kids as guests so I socialize more, I simply went to play alone in the other room. It is something the kids will decide themselves.
Mary basically forced socialization, or at least made the other options even worse. She had lots of books at her house and I DID spend more time than the other kids reading, but if she saw that you were never participating with the other kids you had two choices: (1) go play with them, or (2) sit on the couch alone in the living room with no books, toys, or TV, and just have to sit there alone doing nothing. I did get the couch treatment a few times and would pout and try to tough it out, but a few hours of that boredom, and playing with the other kids is the more appealing option.