June 24, 2021

"So, this morning, the baby woke up, and she had some kind of violence in her heart.... Stop trying to make her feel better. Stop responding to her tears. It's so interesting to see the conditioning of people responding to white girl tears..."

"We have to unlearn this whole business that women crying is going to get them what they want in life, because... that ain't it."

10 comments:

Ann Althouse said...

mezzrow writes: "Imagine that’s your mother. Count. Your. Blessings."

Well, back in the 1950s, mothers couldn't go on TikTok and expose their thinking to the world, but I think my mother and father avoided giving positive reinforcement to crying. Of course, they wouldn't have connected it to anything about being white. But I think it's a basically feminist position to refrain from training girls to get what they want through crying. You want them to learn strength and to figure out how to act and how to find balance within their own mind.

But this is just a baby. A baby must make its way in the world at first through crying. And this woman seems alienated from her own baby, calling her "the baby" and ascribing violence to "her heart" and understanding her behavior in terms of whiteness.

Ann Althouse said...

Adina writes:

"Ignoring a baby crying teaches them that their needs will not be attended to, which creates attachment issues. There is an idea that it is a bad argument to take ideas to their extreme in order to criticize them. However when people do it for you, I think it says something about the crazy that is CRT."

Ann Althouse said...

Temujin writes:

It's not 'white women's tears' we should be wary of, it's white women with degrees from 'fine' universities who have been turned into heartless, insane morons. Yes, this is systemic lunacy and it's not new. It's just that it's been focused in the past few years on their vision of themselves as 'white' first, human second, and their constant self-loathing over that first characteristic. (They used to view themselves as 'women' first, but not anymore.)

That 11 year old she spoke of has more compassion and empathy for another human than the so-called mother. I go back to a point I cannot help repeating (as suggested in the movie 'Parenthood') that while you need a license to do most anything in this country, any imbecile can become a parent, no skills necessary. I'm not actually suggesting a license to become a parent. But some people are so obviously bad at it, and show awful characteristics just as human beings before they are pregnant, one wishes there was a way to suggest to those people that they should spend more time picketing at activist rallies and don't even consider having children. The children will only take away from their cause.

Too late for this child. The mother will turn her kid into her vision of what a good progressive feminist should be and in reality that poor kid will be a miserable, hate-filled, hand-wringing, screaming meanie when she grows up. It's not a good way to go through life.

Ann Althouse said...

Joe writes: "My take is that a precocious 5-year old has realized that her parent does not love her and so is appropriately inconsolable."

Meade said...

Poor baby, and I mean that sincerely. I hope the “non-birthing parent” sees this video and has the wherewithal to seek competent help for his family.

Ann Althouse said...

cubanbob writes: "Is there a difference between white girl tears and girls of color tears? If so, at what age does the difference begin? Maybe the mother is doing her a favor in that presumably she will learn her mother puts ideology above her child and to resolve her problems without relying on a man, a woman or government to resolve it for her. "

Ann Althouse said...

Amadeus 48 writes:

If I recall correctly, I was an awful child—self-centered, given to tantrums, demanding attention. My parents, and particularly my mother, were loving but firm: I had to be considerate of others, I had to wait my turn, I wasn’t the center of the world. Eventually—too slowly—those lessons took hold.

My parents saved my life.

Ann Althouse said...

Jeff writes:

How to react to a crying five year old, male or female, white or not, depends on why he or she is crying. So first ascertain that. If it's physical pain, drop everything and tend to the child. If it's frustration with some inanimate object or situation, you talk calmly to the child and get her to explain what the problem is. Oftentimes, just doing that is enough. You may have to help her figure out that there's a way to deal with the situation, or that there's really nothing to be done about it.

However, a five year old is perfectly capable of using tears to try to manipulate a parent. If she's crying because she's not getting her own way, you could ignore it, but it's better to nip this kind of stuff in the bud. I used to make misbehaving children stand facing a corner for a minute or two, but the minute timer didn't start until they were still and silent. A minute of standing is no big deal, the important part is that the child learns that self-control really pays off.

None of this has anything to do with race or sex. It's just parenting.

Ann Althouse said...

Caroline writes:

As a person who grew up hearing “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about” from a father that didn’t make empty threats - I believe this is wrong.

Also, some of my early memories are of waking up to a cup of water in my face. I guess I had night terrors and if my mom couldn’t get me to stop crying my dad would deal with it. (My father would also wake my sister and I up by tickling us but that’s a different issue.)

Most likely as a consequence of these things I don’t cry. I will occasionally tear up during a movie but that’s it. I really believe this is wrong.

Ann Althouse said...

Mrs Whatsit writes:

One of the most bizarre things about this video is that the mother starts out calling her child “the baby,” giving the impression that she’s saying that a crying baby (who, of course, has no way other than crying to express its needs) should be ignored solely because the baby is white and female. Then, partway through the video, we learn that “the baby” is actually a five-year-old. If this child was, in fact, crying to manipulate her family and get what she wanted, and not because she was sick, in pain, or had some other genuine need that was being ignored, then yes, a five-year-old shouldn’t be rewarded for that, whether the child is male, female, white, black or Martian.

But I can’t help wondering whether there’s a connection between this particular child’s whining and the fact that her mother still refers to her as a baby, when in fact she’s old enough to go to kindergarten. If the mother thinks of the child as a baby, then maybe it’s not surprising that she acts like one! It’s sad and strange, not to mention racist, that this mother would rather blame her child’s bad behavior on her gender and race than take a second look at her own parenting skills. And I wonder whether she taught the older sibling – who seems to be a boy, and a boy with a kind and empathetic heart despite his awful mother -- that it was okay for him to cry to get what he wanted when he was five. After all, even if he was white, he wasn’t a girl.

One last thought: when my children were that age, if they woke up disconsolate for no apparent reason and kept on whining and behaving wretchedly all day, it usually turned out that they were coming down with something – often an ear infection, which can start with dull, low-level ear pain well before more obvious symptoms like fever appear. Whatever a child’s race or gender, illness or something like it is a more likely – and more loving -- explanation for a sudden change in behavior than an attack of “some sort of violence in her heart.”