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her. Aroace.

12mo ago

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LillyPip @lemmy.ca 12mo ago

Lemmy needs /c/writteninblood. That sub was one of the highlights of education on reddit.

12mo ago

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LillyPip @lemmy.ca 12mo ago

Science is a whole lot of adjusting after someone died. Like, it’s mostly been that.

e: want nightmares? Here’s the Karen Wetterhahn Memorial Award. All the precautions and yet… not enough.

12mo ago

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LillyPip @lemmy.ca 12mo ago

Panel 3 makes sense both ways. (x_x)

12mo ago

I agree with you, but I wonder how much of this is that most of us are worked to our last nerve until we're at least 65, so many of us don't have the luxury to maintain our brain plasticity? Once we're 70ish, if we didn't have that opportunity when we were living hand-to-mouth, our brains are kind of set by that point.

We all have the potential, but not the opportunity until it's kind of too late? And then add that our society feeds us the equivalent of brain junk food for much of that time, rather than fostering continuing education...

12mo ago

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LillyPip @lemmy.ca 12mo ago

I think the people who are lifelong learners don’t stand out to us as much, because they’re not pig-headed cunts. Thus the societal bias.

And perhaps I’m an optimist because all the elders in my family are the plastic sort (my 89 year old father still works as an aviation engineer and still builds his own computers, for instance).

Anyway, I was talking about potential, not statistics. e: and I mean it's psycho-social, not biological.

12mo ago

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LillyPip @lemmy.ca 12mo ago

As long as you continue to learn new things, then no, it doesn't become harder with age. In fact, studies show that people who are lifelong learners can actually increase their ability to learn as they age. Learning, for example, a foreign language in later years has been shown to be just as attainable as in childhood, and might even give some protection against dementia. Your brain can actually become more plastic as you age if you continuously push it to do so.

The idea that learning capacity naturally* diminishes with age seems to be a widely accepted myth (which may have roots in sociological and cultural biases), and the opposite may actually be true.

e: those biases and environmental stressors may also contribute to people becoming less able – or less prone – to try, though, and if you don't use it, you might lose that plasticity. So keep learning.

12mo ago

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LillyPip @lemmy.ca 12mo ago

My thought at the first panel was ‘welp, time for the Motrin’. Then ‘ohhh’.

12mo ago

Feral children are everywhere

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LillyPip @lemmy.ca 12mo ago

That’s fair. People who are actively trying to parent will naturally be a bit more defensive, tbf. They may have encountered that guy more than once just today. It’s likely to be less raw a subject for the rest of us, honestly.

12mo ago

Feral children are everywhere

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LillyPip @lemmy.ca 12mo ago

Right, you haven’t. That’s my point.

You’re reacting to the worst parenting you’ve seen in public, but they’re thinking of the worst experiences they’ve had, too – which was people overreacting to relatively small transgressions.

Everyone is talking about a completely different set of people than who they’re talking to. Both of those different sets of people are terrible: the parents who haven’t even tried to teach their children, and also the people who overreact when a child steps out of bounds. You are neither of these, and it looks like neither is your interlocutor.

12mo ago

Feral children are everywhere

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LillyPip @lemmy.ca 12mo ago

Right, and if their child does only occasionally act out (as literally all children do at least a few times in their life), they might assume a commenter is that one guy who is overly put out over a minor social infraction, because just like you’re picturing the stand-out moments you’ve seen when it was bad, so are they. But their stand-out has been someone confronting you because your* eldest started stacking boxes in the aisle whilst you were tending to the baby for 30 seconds.

We’re all thinking of our own extremes and are kinda talking past each other. It seems that, unlike some conversations lately, everyone is kinda right, but it also seems that we need more empathy towards the fact that raising young children has been more societally difficult lately, and kids need less hostility to become emotionally healthy adults.

12mo ago

Feral children are everywhere

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LillyPip @lemmy.ca 12mo ago

My son was, too. I didn’t raise him strictly (I was a hippie mother, raised in the 70s), but gradually acclimatised him through smaller interactions (small groups to larger, to regional to public), because I had that luxury. Lots of parents over the past 10 years were deprived of that, and it’s been exceptionally difficult to get a child acclimatised to an increasingly hostile world.

People have been far less patient in public – which is entirely understandable, given the circumstances – so many parents and other caregivers (teachers, counsellors, etc) who are trying their best can’t help but be defensive when they hear negativity towards children online, because I’d wager everyone encounters people who are excessively put out by the slightest transgression of a child in their proximity.

It may not be the way the majority react, nor how you react, but it happens regularly enough to become exhausting.

So, in these conversations, I feel like many people are responding to children who are clearly being publicly misparented, and then there are many parents who are thinking of the times someone overreacted to a social faux pas by their child.