![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
harm to children
Related to some observations from the last spate of book posts: wow, uh, the way we treated kids as recently as a century ago seems incredibly fucked?
I mean, obviously I knew this on some level; orphanages are fuckin' horror shows whenever you read histories about them, child labor laws are a thing we had to pass, and so on. But I was surprised at the utter brazenness of child abandonment in two cases, and the brazenness of Stepparent Fuckery that went along with it. In The Boys in the Boat, Joe Rantz is just straight up kicked out of the house when he's like 12, entirely because the stepmom hated the shit out of him, and that's, like, fine? No one seems to find this absurd and unconscionable and chews the parents out? Guess there isn't Child Protective Services in a mining town in 1920s America?
And again, in Why Fish Don't Exist, Miller describes how, after David Starr Jordan's first wife died in 1885, he remarried a bit later, and as soon as he got remarried, he packed the kids off to boarding school, basically as the rich dude way to get rid of your kids, because Sorry Kiddos But The New Wife Hates You So You've Got To Go. Ugh.
This probably reveals some level of middle-class naivety on my part, but like, the modern consensus seems to be, "stepparents may not necessarily love their stepkids, but they're the fucking adults so they have to at least pretend and try to be nice," and you're generally gonna get kinda judged if you just dump the kids right off. And I definitely know some people who got disowned or ditched or whatever at some point, but... again, there was just a lot more social censure, CPS would look askance, and so on.
Though, I only found out a year ago that, apparently, the grandpa-who-died-before-I-was-born was married with kids before he met my grandma, and he just, like, ditched the other woman? I asked mom "wait wouldn't there be like alimony or child support payments or something" and, nah, he just left one day and never saw them again. Back in the day you could just ditch super hard and owe no one nothin'.
Which, like, gross. But, yeah, society!
I mean, obviously I knew this on some level; orphanages are fuckin' horror shows whenever you read histories about them, child labor laws are a thing we had to pass, and so on. But I was surprised at the utter brazenness of child abandonment in two cases, and the brazenness of Stepparent Fuckery that went along with it. In The Boys in the Boat, Joe Rantz is just straight up kicked out of the house when he's like 12, entirely because the stepmom hated the shit out of him, and that's, like, fine? No one seems to find this absurd and unconscionable and chews the parents out? Guess there isn't Child Protective Services in a mining town in 1920s America?
And again, in Why Fish Don't Exist, Miller describes how, after David Starr Jordan's first wife died in 1885, he remarried a bit later, and as soon as he got remarried, he packed the kids off to boarding school, basically as the rich dude way to get rid of your kids, because Sorry Kiddos But The New Wife Hates You So You've Got To Go. Ugh.
This probably reveals some level of middle-class naivety on my part, but like, the modern consensus seems to be, "stepparents may not necessarily love their stepkids, but they're the fucking adults so they have to at least pretend and try to be nice," and you're generally gonna get kinda judged if you just dump the kids right off. And I definitely know some people who got disowned or ditched or whatever at some point, but... again, there was just a lot more social censure, CPS would look askance, and so on.
Though, I only found out a year ago that, apparently, the grandpa-who-died-before-I-was-born was married with kids before he met my grandma, and he just, like, ditched the other woman? I asked mom "wait wouldn't there be like alimony or child support payments or something" and, nah, he just left one day and never saw them again. Back in the day you could just ditch super hard and owe no one nothin'.
Which, like, gross. But, yeah, society!
no subject
I don't disagree with any of this, but the thing that's always absolutely boggled my mind is the pass the other parent gets in this scenario. Like, these are your actual biological offspring and you will happily dump them out of sight, out of mind, to go make new biological children with a different person.
Like, I can understand the stepparent's ambivalence or even reluctance to take on the responsibility of someone else's kids (no, it's not selfless, but it's understandable). But mentally dealing with the actual blood-and-DNA parent wiping their hands so easily is where my naivety comes in.
no subject
yeah, v baffling over here, too. the past sure is another land, sometimes...!