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RE: I felt a flow in a reply on X today and I thought I'd share it here...

in Deep Dives11 months ago

"They don't realize that person was named Mom, or Dad and didn't actually properly teach them about reality because they sheltered them in little fantasy land safe spaces."

Homeschooling was difficult. I figgered the job of a father was to make sure sons could safely handle dangerous tools, so I undertook to do so. My instinct was to keep my little snowflakes as far from dangerous things as possible, so this created an internal conflict in me of considerable impact. It wasn't so much math and grammar that was valuable to men, although it mattered and was tended to, it was easy on my mind having them pull tape on drywall jobs or write reports on self-selected topics of interest. It was things like chainsaws, heavy equipment, cars, and firearms that stretched my courage when deciding at what point I could trust my kids to use those tools without hovering and being ready to intervene should they err in judgment.

Creating trust turned out to be a comprehensive matter. They demonstrated good judgement, or the lack of it, in every aspect of their lives, from how they tended to chickens to how they handled money, and there was a turning point about 8-10 for each of them in which I could be assured they would apply what they learned without fail. Before that I could steal their money when they left it laying around. After that they kept their cards close to their chest. Before that they would borrow my tools to repair their cars, or pull them out of gullies they'd crashed them in. After that they only had to do maintenance and replace stuff that failed because it was worn out. That's when I trusted their judgment to use chainsaws and firearms without supervision.

Puberty isn't just when hair sprouts in weird places. Behavioural changes are far more significant than the physical changes we undergo then, and the millennia of war that acted as a gate only the competent passed through on the way to managing homesteads seems to have created a sort of 'ready or not here I am' application of judgment to life thereafter. If you haven't taught good judgment by then, you won't.

That good judgment and the natural application of it was the core of my curriculum homeschooling my kids, and I learned more than they did from it, honestly. Nothing will lay bare your own faults than trying to teach others how to do things flawlessly. It was a harrowing process, amongst the most difficult mental challenges I have undertaken, because it was so meaningful and I was so inadequate to the task. My sons tell me that I was not inadequate every day they live their lives admirably, and they are such good men my flaws mattered little to them, because they didn't have them.

As the world descends ever further into the madness of safe spaces and muh pronouns, I note my sons do not, instead becoming ever more admired by their peers through demonstrating the inutility of such things and what men should be in a predatory world. Those taught to demand pronoun use by others aren't actually in a safe world. They've just been taught to be easy prey by predators. Not all men are easy prey.

Some of us are hard to kill.

Thanks!

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