Changeling [it/its]

I swing violently between whimsical and cynical. This bio should suffice for both.

  • 3 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 25th, 2022

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  • Potential explanations for this behavior:

    1. Confirmation bias
    2. The father is quicker to complement the daughter
    3. The mother is quicker to criticize the daughter
    4. The mother already knows how pretty the hair is because she was the one brushing it
    5. The mother was taking pictures of the process and seemed distracted
    6. The father participates in less care tasks (brushing hair can uncomfortable and boring and explaining why it’s necessary can be upsetting, so if the mother is taking on all that work, the father gets off the hook implicitly and doesn’t suffer the negative backlash)
    7. The father is normally the one who brushes her hair
    8. This behavior is modeled by the mother showing off her hair to the father

    Note that none of these explanations involve the innate sexual preferences and desires of literal children












  • That’s a good point. There’s an old school attitude that children will only ever behave because they’ve been dominated by their parents and therefore any “overindulgence” in a child’s desires is actually bad for the child because it violates the “natural” dominance hierarchy of the parent-child relationship and that’s why they misbehave.

    There is a natural dominance hierarchy in the sense of “my child wants to run out into the street in front of traffic and I physically prevent them from doing so”. But the idea that a misbehaving child is misbehaving because they simply haven’t been dominated enough by authority figures is ridiculous. There are personality types which react to dominance with the exact undesired behavior (it me). And that’s to say nothing if the neglect that inevitably occurs when a parent-child relationship is damaged like this.