harm to children

[queenlua]

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!

Comments

[ioplokon]

Yeah. I was involved in researching a thing on feral children, which is essentially the mythologizing of extreme child abuse.

[queenlua]

that sounds like a... rough research project, emotionally speaking. (and important, of course! but yeah.)

[lebateleur]

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.

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.

[queenlua]

But mentally dealing with the actual blood-and-DNA parent wiping their hands so easily is where my naivety comes in.

yeah, v baffling over here, too. the past sure is another land, sometimes...!

[brainwane]

This is in India so, various differences, but in my own family history, fewer than 100 years ago, a step-parent kicked out her teen stepson and his pregnant wife, who was, I believe, 12 years old, and they basically had to wander homeless for a little bit. I feel very very lucky, on multiple counts, to reflect on how different my life and expectations have been.

[queenlua]

Wow. That's... yeah, wow, what a doozy!

[lassarina]

The concept of like, childhood and intensive parenting seems so relatively new in a really weird way. Like, in the past you could just...fuck off! You could move to a whole new town in the same state and it was entirely possible no one would ever know where you'd come from and what you'd left behind. It's wild.

[queenlua]

Yeah! Like, I knew the whole helicopter-style parenting thing is relatively new, and the whole "childhood as a special protected time in one's life" ditto, but I guess it never consciously occurred to me the far-end-opposite of all that would be... "yeah just ditch 'em whatever who cares" lol