ignoring your own wants and needs is not a healthy way to show love
people worth loving will respect your boundaries
people worth loving will not want you to set aside your own wants and needs to make them more comfortable
‘having no boundaries at all’ describes a person who is very hurt, not a person who is very virtuous
suffering for others’ comfort is not how you be a good person, it is just how you become very hurt
sometimes you need to make others uncomfortable in order to get your needs met
your needs are more important than others’ comfort
your comfort is equally important to others’ comfort
making other people uncomfortable is not, in itself, ethically wrong or morally dubious
can i add a thing:
what really helped me with boundaries is to realise that not having/showing them didn’t just hurt me, but also hurts my friends. and that interacting with someone that doesn’t state their boundaries is not at all ‘comfortable’ or ‘easy’. that’s a perspective that was so alien to me, i never realised other people might genuinely want to know about boundaries, and be genuinely distressed about overstepping them. but when i did, it really changed how i approached this!
‘my needs are more important than others’ comfort’ is absolutely true, but can be hard to embrace. but what about: ‘if i don’t state my needs, that makes interacting with me more difficult and hurtful’? we don’t usually want people we care about to hurt for our sake. if we find out that they did, we’ll feel really bad and guilty, like we should have been able to prevent it by being more attentive. guilt ping-pong can happen. everybody gets to feel toxic. that’s not good!
also, if i don’t state needs and wishes, i leave the onus of steering everything to the other. if they care about my needs and wishes, it is now their job to gently pave the way for me, to make me feel safe enough to express them, or, worst, to somehow guess them, and none of this is making it especially easy for them, on the contrary!
it can be very hard and it’s okay that it’s hard. (like you’re not being “unfair” by being bad at stating boundaries forex.). but, basically, establishing boundaries and needs isn’t just good for me, but it’s good for both, and
in healthy relationships
will often make both equally more comfortable. sometimes it’s not ‘my needs vs. your discomfort’, sometimes it’s a win-win.
This is actually really good for babies’ brain development. You’re laying the groundwork for conversation, teaching them through example that people take turns talking and listening.
Did you know that babies from affluent families hear an average of thirty MILLION more words before age 5 than babies in families below the poverty line? For context, Les Miserables is about 650,000 words and it looks like this:
So it’s like reading this book 46 times.* And that’s not the total number of spoken words, that’s the GAP between affluent and poor babies. And these are the years in which the brain undergoes the most development. It’s mind-boggling.
So what I’m saying is: keep doing the thing. Do it to all babies, all the time. Narrate your day. Ask them for opinions. (“Should we buy the large bag of potatoes or the small bag?” “Gaabooglagje.” “Yes, just as I thought.”) Point out colors and shapes and letters. Let them scribble outside the lines and treat their babble like talk. Sing them nursery rhymes and Raffi songs and songs from the radio. All of these things are going to build their brains to prepare them for kindergarten and beyond.
*Please do not read Les Mis 46 times to an infant. They don’t even care about the Parisian sewer system.
And they never will with THAT attitude
Actually the “word gap” study is kinda garbage, with crap methodology and so, so many structural flaws that all you can really say about it is “their science is bad and they should feel bad.”
Also kinda racist, pretty ethnocentric, hella classist, weirdly privileges Anglo-monolingualism (which is absolutely counter to like … all the other research, ever) and generally not a great thing to use as your frame:
Michaels says, “The deeply destructive, pernicious thing about the Hart and Risley study is that it presents what seems like totally rigorous, careful, objective science (what under careful inspection is nothing more than pseudo-science)—that gives teachers, educators, policy makers the ‘proof’ they need to believe that these poor kids aren’t smart, aren’t good learners, don’t have adequate language to think well with” (p. 35). As librarians, when we cite the 30 Million Word Gap, we run the risk of continuing to enforce the bias and classism that this study did, as do some of the initiatives that have cropped up around this study. “In effect, the word gap interventions propose that improving social and economic outcomes for poor and minority families can be as simple as training them to act more white and middle-class (and monitoring their compliance with a ‘word pedometer’)” (Saiyed, 2015). While Babies Need Words Everyday does not go as far as to install word pedometers on parents, and instead simply encourages them to speak with their babies, the issue is very different – but by using word gap and deficit thinking, we may be treading in dangerous territory.
Also they, like. LITERALLY coded their data-analysis so that only “good” word-interactions were counted, where “good” = “matched white American middle-class politeness structures”. I am not even joking.
I super recommend reading not only the ALSC post I linked above, but also a lot of the stuff she’s linked in it
That said, talking to your babies is a great idea! Interacting with babies is fantastic! It’s very good for them. You’re modelling communication and helping to build actual literacy skills, and the more you can do that, the better. They don’t actually need to “understand” exactly what you’re saying: the point, as the poster above correctly notes, is that you’re establishing how communicating by language works, what the STRUCTURES of communicating by language are, and all the other things about how it works.
It’s the framework of that stupid study that’s pathological in a lot of ways: firstly the idea that you can hammer the whole thing down to numbers of words at all (which is a bad idea and ignores visual literacy and other factors that are extremely important to both language acquisition and emergent literacy when they’re older which can often be much more important than straight up word-exposure) and the idea that somehow just sheer volume/quantity of vocabulary is the important part; secondly the idea that this is intrinsically linked to poverty or working-class status (see: deficit thinking above); thirdly that it’s useful to frame this as “omg SOMETHING IS HORRIBLY WRONG HERE IS WHAT YOU MUST DO TO FIX IT!” rather than “hey you know what’s important and awesome for your kid? talking to them and interacting with them and mimicking and back-and-forth like conversations with them! Do it lots!”
TEAL DEER: Yes that pattern is totally great, continue to talk to your babies like that! But at the same time, the word-gap study is garbage and toxic and should not be cited!
I get so mad about people who insist that doctors went to med school so they can never be wrong about your health like ???? Some Doctors hate fat people??? Some doctors hate the mentally ill or give Helpful NT Advice instead of treatment??? My ob/gyn took four years and a strong arm from my mom to figure out I had pcos???
Doctors are not gods??????
I am a med student, literally currently going to medical school, and doctors are about 15% wonderful people who Care So Much It Hurts, about 60% Eh I Was Optimistic But Ill-Informed When I Chose This Life, and a solid 25% What The Fuck Is Wrong With You You Fucking Fucks Get The Fuck Out Of Medicine Oh Wait You’re Just Going To Retire After Decades Of Being A Bigoted Fuck-Up.
Doctors need to be held accountable. Right now, doctors are virtually never held accountable.
There are doctors who tell lesbians not to worry about STDs because they “can’t get any.” There are doctors who tell fat people to lose weight when what’s wrong is actually a) completely unrelated to weight and b) fatal. A doctor once refused to give me an IUD because I should “marry a nice young virgin man” instead of being a big ol’ queer slutbag. In my summer job reviewing medical records, I’ve seen three patients who were sent home with a disease that almost immediately killed them because the doctors (three different ones!) didn’t take CHEST PAIN seriously. One of my classmates, a future doctor, told me I was overreacting to the murder of Michael Brown and when I said the hell I am he said I must not UNDERSTAND THE ISSUES. Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot my master’s degree in social psychology is just there to decorate my shelf! My tiny lady-brain can’t possibly comprehend anything important! I once heard a doctor brag about having forcibly sterilized a Latina woman who didn’t consent because she was an undocumented immigrant and “she had too many already.” He was receiving a LOT of federal research funding for his work with our research group. I’ve WATCHED doctors be horrible, bigoted fuck-ups.
Like, if these are things someone like me, who passionately believes in medicine to the point where I’ve willingly sacrificed a reasonably comfortable job, my free time for at least seven years of training, and my right to decide where I spend at least three years of my life (because we are obligated to go wherever we’re matched for residency), is seeing at one of the top academic medical centers IN THE WORLD, what the FUCK do you think is happening in the REST of the country, where they HAVEN’T attracted “top talent”?
Doctors are not better than other people. We just have less transparency and less accountability. That needs to change.
Not to mention the rather abundant percentage of people who solely go into the medical field because it makes money. I mean really, how many times have your parents suggested you go to college to be a dentist, a doctor, a nurse, or some technical field that for some reason is tied to the medical field and requires you to work in a hospital or a clinic?
don’t forget how a lot of doctors believe they went to med school to earn authority and social prestige
i wish i could go back to when i was a child and i would make magic potions, collect flowers and line them up in a little rows, and make fairy houses out of sticks and leaves in the garden. everything felt so real then
queerhomestuck 