Scold Fold
You can turn your mean thoughts into something beautiful by writing them and doing origami on their paper
you can put lipstick on a duckstack
If there’s one1 thing we know, its that emails are innocent. They flit from inbox to inbox, or from outbox to inbox, do they still call them outboxes? I don’t know. But they do it innocently. Even spam end phishing emails radiate purity, which is why you can use them to ward off vampires. But I digress.
Imagine yourself as an email. Any email will do, but you can’t be a duckstack, because I’m already a duckstack, you have to pick something else. Now. How do you feel. You radiate innocence, right? You live in a state of blissful contentment, excited to go somewhere, excited to stay. How does it feel, to have all your needs attended to? I like to imagine2 it feels kind of like reading The Duckstack
Science experiment, do toddlers respect daylight savings time?
Putting daylight savings time in beakers to study it with science
nope
The Way You Teach Children
Well. Maybe not the way *you* teach children. You psychopath
Millennials invented a parenting idea where kids are supposed to be given lots of choices and you have to get the child’s consent for everything and they are expected to have opinions on everything and this is taken as a sign of respect. Probably Millennials felt railroaded and lectured a lot and they’re overcompensating for it. It will lead to an interesting generation of children that’s for sure.
I think this is probably fairly harmful. Of course, every parenting style is fairly harmful. But ideally you harm your kids in a way that prepares them for the world. I believe that basically a ton of harm is done in the world by treating people as more capable than they are. God said “it is not needful that man should run beyond what he has strength.”
For example, loan companies basically stay in business by relying on predatory loans to people who aren’t intelligent enough to understand what they’re getting into3. I worked at what’s called a “sub-prime” loan company once, I regularly saw accounts with over 20% APR for very expensive cars- some of these accounts can accrue upwards of $5 in interest per day. There are unintelligent people forced to make all sorts of high-discernment choices for themselves constantly who would simply function much better with someone having guardianship over them, and they wouldn’t even mind either, but that’s illegal. So instead society throws them to the wolves and expects them not to get into abusive relationships or slob housing or dead end jobs or drugs and then society has to retroactively shoulder the burden of their poor choices in the name of agency or whatever, its all very libertarian and I am not at all convinced it is somehow more righteous than “discrimination”. In fact from my perspective, all the horror stories about various forms of discrimination basically function as desperate self assurance that the horrors we wrought4 are necessary evils. Like yeah you could make absent fathers illegal specifically for blacks and improve their situation somewhat, but that would also be horribly racist, so hopefully they enjoy having 50% of their race not knowing what a father looks like and rampant gang affiliation and drug use and stuff like that. Because of antidiscrimination law you can’t even attempt to solve most societal problems without equally offloading most of the burden onto healthy people, rendering solving just about anything prohibitive.
Which is to say “standards and guide rails are good, actually.” Forcing children to constantly make adult decisions mostly just makes them feel lost. It hampers their ability to learn. Why? Because people don’t learn by theory, they learn by doing.
Like most parents, I force my kids to ask nicely, and I make my son say out the whole sentence every time. “papa, can I have a glass of juice please” or whatever. He has no idea why I’m making him say it out and for all he knows I’m just messing with him to deliberately be annoying. But this habit will create a principle later. He won’t understand that saying my name denotes a respect for my time, and being specific respects my boundaries, asking instead of demanding respects my preferences and autonomy, and saying please expresses friendliness and love. But when he repeats the pattern to people outside the house, he’ll still reap the benefits whether he understands it or not, and when he sees people trying to communicate by grunts he’ll recognize the contrast, and perhaps then he’ll understand. And also, he will be significantly more capable of generalizing each of these principles to other interactions with people. That’s the hope.
In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, we explicitly have a concept of “scaffolding revelation”. The idea that God doesn’t just reveal everything in fully pounded out load bearing principles, but instead builds temporary structures for the saints to act upon to gain solidity and experience, and then once we have a basis for understanding then he gives the true principle or broader picture. I would say this basically reflects how God has acted throughout history, but more importantly it harmonizes with this natural principle. You can’t build grand structures without temporary supports. And to an alien, perhaps it would look very odd- “why would they build this part of the structure, only to tear it down again later?” But in reality it was just scaffolding- essential to the building, but not to the final product. This in part explains the difference between the Old and New Testaments. You do not need to understand the principle behind a rule or action for it to still be useful. Indeed, for little children (as we all are), such understanding may be impossible5. But if you join as a worker under God, and follow his instructions, put up the scaffolding here, remove it there, eventually a grand design begins to come forth. In my experience. If you’re less than the sum of your parts, then it would actually be unjust, punishing, tyrannical- to force someone to build without scaffolding. The rails are essential. Just explaining the full blueprint isn’t enough!
In summary: Once upon a time a millennial was asked to change their child’s diaper. The Millennial replied, “the baby must consent.” And the baby died of being stinky, and everyone thought that was wrong, but expects God to treat us a different way. With humility, the truth becomes apparent.
History
Name one thing better than renting a carpet cleaner to deep clean all your carpets and then having everyone throw up on them
The kid, grinning, explained to me that “his mom gave him candy!”, with like 10 dots spilling out of his mouth
We set a table outside for cleaning and it had food on it and when we brought it in it was full of frozen bees, which felt the comforting warmth of our house and woke up. What a wonderful surprise! Bees everywhere! Thankfully they were quite docile and I could just let them walk onto the fly swatter and let them outside. Which right at the start of winter might not actually have been that merciful but I was just running on autopilot. To any bees reading this: I might be sorry.
The child informs us: “If you cut off a mole you will bleed. If you cut off your nose you will bleed. If you cut off your fingers you will bleed. If you cut off your eyes… uh… I think you will bleed? If you cut off your knees you will bleed.” Good info. Write that down.
He knows hot water kills germs. He jumped in the shower with mama and asked her “Can we do a cold shower? This one kills… too much germs.”
The primary program was this week. The child has been memorizing his line for weeks, which is “the temple is a special place.” He had it memorized pretty fast and repeated it to me before going up to the stands, and all the kids in his class gave similar short quotes about the temple, and he was last, and he gets up and belts in his loudest kid voice: “Jesus died and then he came back alive!” and then sprinted off before his teacher could say anything. He still knows his line. But it is in his character to ad-lib.
Kid: “I’m hungry”. Mama: “I’m still doing the laundry.” Kid: “Its like you’re doing the laundry forever!” You know, she feels that way too I bet
“Where’s my hot pad?” “I don’t know.” “What, don’t you know everything?” “I do know everything. Five plus five makes ten!”
“I kind of like this nativity scene. Do you?” “No. Neither does papa. Or my sister. My brother’s dead.” He certainly didn’t run it by any of us first and that didn’t stop him before!
He played hide and seek with grandpa, but with a twist: His sister would immediately point at wherever they were hiding. So helpful!
Kid Culinary Corner: New Pie
Fresh from the imaginary oven
Our kid has invented a new kind of pie that even kids can make. Its healthy and can be made small or large and is cheap on top of it. Get out your pie pans!
Ingredients:
water
yay!
What’s the Matter With You
You’ve got the wrong atoms
You’ve heard of dark matter. The invisible stuff of the cosmos which everybody talks about nonstop in our politics. Have you ever seen someone vote? Its pretty rare, I’ll tell you what. So where do all the votes come from? That’s right, space. The votes come from dark matter. Behold, the guts of our political machine laid bare. But there’s a problem6. Have you noticed what it is? You guessed it: Dark is not the only color of matter. There is also grey matter. in your brain. How did it get there? Democracy.
Democracy is the process by which resources are converted into votes. Obviously you have to stick matter into people to do that. You can’t use dark matter obviously, since that’s in space. So you use grey matter for it. Grey matter is squishier and more flexible and you can pack it into humans very easily, which is just what Democracy likes. But you and I both know color theory7. You can’t make grey matter without white matter.
What does white matter do? White matter is what the votes go to. The votes have to go somewhere, right? Did you think everyone was casting ballots into the void? No, white matter eats them. And its still hungry. If it doesn’t get enough votes, who knows what it will turn its hunger upon. The Aztecs knew.
Ducksnax
pea
just picking one at random here
I have such a rich imagination
I wouldn’t even know where to begin figuring out the present tense of this word
Unless you are very precocious. Since you’re reading The Duckstack, I would personally consider you a “precocious child.” You can tell your parents this.
“just one?”
I am just assuming color theory has not evolved since I was in kindergarten
Probably the best parenting advice I was ever given, "Ask once and follow through." Kids learn you mean it when you ask and quit trying to find your real limit (when mom screams and turns crazy it is time to finally obey.)