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Why Do I Loathe the Boston Globe?
Aug. 7th, 2018 03:24 pmI subscribe to several newspapers, including the Boston Globe, the NYT, NRC Handelsblad, the Seattle Times. I’ve probably forgotten something. Bloomberg / Businessweek probably doesn’t count as a newspaper. Oh, right: my favorite, the Washington Post. I subscribe to them for a variety of reasons (Three of them count on some level as a “local” paper for me or someone I care about a lot, NYT is paper of record, financial news is important to me and I loathe the WSJ too much to give them any money or much of my attention, etc. NRC is obviously there for language learning / extended family / heritage reasons). The one I persistently hate, however, is the Globe. Why do I hate it so?
https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2017/06/06/what-happens-when-parents-loosen-bit-look-dutch/mVmOHsADKLXwOFF2Y0ISCJ/story.html
Darnton writes another one of those excruciating parenting articles about How Parents In Some Other Country are doing things differently and we should do like them. In this case, she’s living in Amsterdam. And she’s like, hey, we should loosen up, too!
Here is a really important component of Dutch parenting that appears to have entirely escaped her attention: as recently as 2016, _half_ of primary schools in the Netherlands were still _sending kids home for lunch with their mothers_. That was a big drop from 5 years earlier, and it has surely dropped more since then, WHICH IS A GOOD THING because having to stay home and cook a hot lunch for the kiddos really made actually having a job outside the home pretty much impossible. You are not going to sell me on a They Leave Early And Get Home Late and Do the Grocery Shopping theory of Dutch parenting, if you don’t even know about this fairly important and Not Dead Yet feature of Dutch parenting.
Here is another feature of Dutch family life, especially in Amsterdam, especially NOT in Rotterdam, and an ongoing pickle that the Dutch keep trying to figure out how to improve: a built environment that favors pedestrian and bicycle travel over car travel. A world _built_ to favor bicycle travel is a world where 10 year old or 11 year old kids basically have the same transport options as adults.
It’s all well and good to suggest letting the kiddos in the US get themselves to school, but it ignores the fact that our laws and customs are still very, very car centric. Cars are super dangerous. Dutch people fixed that problem. We need to fix that problem if we want our kids to be more independent. It doesn’t go the other way around. We know it doesn’t, because the UK tried that, and they are currently mired in a massive legal battle over how liability works when a pedestrian is killed and whether or not the pedestrian’s failure to wear a high-visibility vest / clothing puts the blame entirely on the pedestrian, or only mostly. That’s just not going to work here: we’ll keep driving our kids everywhere, rather than have to be responsible for the fact that we forgot to put them in their high vis outfit one day, they are maimed or dead and it is All Our Fault and not the driver’s.
I really don’t much like the Globe.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2017/06/06/what-happens-when-parents-loosen-bit-look-dutch/mVmOHsADKLXwOFF2Y0ISCJ/story.html
Darnton writes another one of those excruciating parenting articles about How Parents In Some Other Country are doing things differently and we should do like them. In this case, she’s living in Amsterdam. And she’s like, hey, we should loosen up, too!
Here is a really important component of Dutch parenting that appears to have entirely escaped her attention: as recently as 2016, _half_ of primary schools in the Netherlands were still _sending kids home for lunch with their mothers_. That was a big drop from 5 years earlier, and it has surely dropped more since then, WHICH IS A GOOD THING because having to stay home and cook a hot lunch for the kiddos really made actually having a job outside the home pretty much impossible. You are not going to sell me on a They Leave Early And Get Home Late and Do the Grocery Shopping theory of Dutch parenting, if you don’t even know about this fairly important and Not Dead Yet feature of Dutch parenting.
Here is another feature of Dutch family life, especially in Amsterdam, especially NOT in Rotterdam, and an ongoing pickle that the Dutch keep trying to figure out how to improve: a built environment that favors pedestrian and bicycle travel over car travel. A world _built_ to favor bicycle travel is a world where 10 year old or 11 year old kids basically have the same transport options as adults.
It’s all well and good to suggest letting the kiddos in the US get themselves to school, but it ignores the fact that our laws and customs are still very, very car centric. Cars are super dangerous. Dutch people fixed that problem. We need to fix that problem if we want our kids to be more independent. It doesn’t go the other way around. We know it doesn’t, because the UK tried that, and they are currently mired in a massive legal battle over how liability works when a pedestrian is killed and whether or not the pedestrian’s failure to wear a high-visibility vest / clothing puts the blame entirely on the pedestrian, or only mostly. That’s just not going to work here: we’ll keep driving our kids everywhere, rather than have to be responsible for the fact that we forgot to put them in their high vis outfit one day, they are maimed or dead and it is All Our Fault and not the driver’s.
I really don’t much like the Globe.