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Comment by camgunz

5 days ago

> I love my daughter, but I’ve never been a little girl; it doesn’t bring anything back for me. It’s like Mudjekeewis says - you’ve got to have a son to see your youth rise up before you.

This feels pretty unnecessary.

> The online parenting community is large, opinionated, and vicious.

Extremely super true, and it's even worse for moms. You also have to add "predatory" in the sense that people will sell you all kinds of snake oil to solve your problems that will at best not work and at worst mess your kid and/or you up.

I think he is extrapolating from his daughter being like his wife and his son being like him to thinking that is a general rule.

I also find the idea of kids being "people who were basically me" worrying: I associate it with controlling parents who want to live their lives through their kids.

  • yeah, I noticed this too and thought it was interesting. Scott has always been prone to a form of what i'd call 'excessive rationality' where his quest for things to be hyper-logical and follow a perfect 'if-then' structure ends up being self-limiting, needlessly rigid, unimaginative, and close minded in somewhat random ways.

    i just had a little boy (a week ago!) but i feel very certain if i'd had a daughter instead i'd still feel all the same emotions i feel now. in fact, i'm having the opposite experience he's having - my son is the spitting image of my wife as a baby.

    • Yeah. I (male) have a daughter who is very much like me, to the point where my wife finds it hilarious when I get frustrated at her behaving in the same ways my wife gets frustrated at me for behaving.

If he has more children he may find he has a daughter just like him as well; but the joy of connecting with your children is worth appreciating and talking about in any event, I’d say