Help! The Indepedent reckons I'm a bloke!

[OrmIrian]

www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/confessions-of-a-bad-parent-1783354.ht ml

According to Simon Carr I parent like a man! "But I did get them out alive. Bruises heal and bones mend. The best way of learning caution was to test your thresholds and your limits. It wasn't a theory so much as an instinct"

All well so far...OK I'm a bit more like that than some mothers but it goes on... "It's not that we care less but that we ... actually, it is that we care less, and that's the truth of it. "

And then it just got silly:

"The child in the womb has an actual, physical, flesh-and-blood connection to her body. It is part of her. Not in a romantic, or metaphysical or ideological way. She shares blood supply with the creature. She feeds it. When she suckles it, she passes life from herself to this other part of herself now operating remotely.

She knows the vulnerability of the child because it has been ? and in some sense still is ? part of her physical being. Of course when the little thing falls over in the playground a mother may clutch at her own knee. "

What, no opinions?

Ah, I've been looking for your abortive Simon Carr thread for days, Orm!

Funnily enough, I've just come back from spending the summer in Scandinavia. A place full of children jumping from rocks and swimming in choppy seas and indulging in behaviour that would be considered absolutely hair-raising in this country

And yet the one thing it did not seem full of was females hovering anxiously on the edge quavering 'oh do be careful, dear'.

Otoh I also saw a fair few fathers who seemed to come fully supplied with "that armoury of individual caresses that children need" that Carr seems to think is the special prerogative of mothers. Blokes are simply less blokish. And far more involved with babycare.

So I suspect Simon Carr's genetic hardwiring would have taken on different aspects had he been raised in a different culture. Wonder what he would make of those African communities I've read about where no-one really speaks to babies or plays with toddlers because it's not what you do: they are well cared for by the whole community and breastfed by any women around but there is very little interaction. So would that mean that something had gone wrong with the genetics? A lot of what he calls hardwiring is just cultural expectation.

Aha!

The thread still has a faint pulse.

Yes of course it's cultural. I've always found that exclusive clingy 1-1 mum/baby thing quite claustrophobic TBH. I love my DC more than anything else. But so does DH. So do their GPs and aunties and uncles. The obsession with the sc-called blood link is so handy to keep mothers where they belong. I watch my DC doing slightly dangerous things and I exalt in their strength, daring and agility - it doesn't occur to me to imagine them getting hurt. And they don't. So far. . If I ever do get a bit nervous I don't look

SO glad youn found me cory

Perhaps we should holiday in Scandinvia next year....

The thread has a faint pulse, lol.

But an active brain is required to engage with it - I fear that is where you may be going wrong as another Saturday approaches wine o'clock...

You've no sense of adventure bof That is when arguments get interesting.