From & To Sathish #7 - Page 62

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-birth-rates-are-falling-but-the-answer-isnt-to-have-more-babies/

What Falling Global Birth Rates Really Mean for the Future

Steep population declines in most countries are expected to have negative effects over the next several generations, but adaptation is possible

Grandmother says... Carrots, Eggs, or Coffee; "Which are you?"

A young woman went to her grandmother and told her about her life and how things were so hard for her. She did not know how she was going to make it and wanted to give up. She was tired of fighting and struggling. It seemed as one problem was solved a new one arose.

Her grandmother took her to the kitchen. She filled three pots with water. In the first, she placed carrots, in the second she placed eggs and the last she placed ground coffee beans. She let them sit and boil without saying a word.

In about twenty minutes she turned off the burners. She fished the carrots out and placed them in a bowl. She pulled the eggs out and placed them in a bowl. Then she ladled the coffee out and placed it in a bowl. Turning to her granddaughter, she asked, "Tell me what do you see?"

"Carrots, eggs, and coffee," she replied.

She brought her closer and asked her to feel the carrots. She did and noted that they had gotten soft. She then asked her to take an egg and break it.

After pulling off the shell, she observed the hard-boiled egg.

Finally, she asked her to sip the coffee. The granddaughter smiled, as she tasted its rich aroma. The granddaughter then asked. "What's the point,grandmother?"

Her grandmother explained that each of these objects had faced the same adversity--boiling water--but each reacted differently.

The carrot went in strong, hard and unrelenting. However after being subjected to the boiling water, it softened and became weak. The egg had been fragile. Its thin outer shell had protected its liquid interior. But, after sitting through the boiling water, its inside became hardened.

The ground coffee beans were unique, however. After they were in the boiling water they had changed the water.

"Which are you?" she asked her granddaughter.

"When adversity knocks on your door, how do you respond? Are you a carrot, an egg, or a coffee bean?"

Think of this: Which am I?

Am I the carrot that seems strong, but with pain and adversity, do I wilt and become soft and lose my strength?

Am I the egg that starts with a malleable heart, but changes with the heat? Did I have a fluid spirit, but after a death, a breakup, a financial hardship or some other trial, have I become hardened and stiff?

Does my shell look the same, but on the inside am I bitter and tough with a stiff spirit and a hardened heart?

Or am I like the coffee bean? The bean actually changes the hot water, the very circumstance that brings the pain. When the water gets hot, it releases the fragrance and flavor. If you are like the bean, when things are at their worst, you get better and change the situation around you.

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-use-philosophy-to-overcome-the-fear-of-your-own-death?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=2658ee501c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_08_29&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-8e23a7006c-838120577

How to not fear your death

You exist, but one day you won’t. An Epicurean perspective can help you feel less afraid, and even grateful for life’s finitude

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/aug/26/movie-reviews-cultural-criticism-erasure?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_08_28&position=5&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=b25c9516-8d6e-438f-8dbf-808ad259c20f&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fculture%2F2025%2Faug%2F26%2Fmovie-reviews-cultural-criticism-erasure

The death of the review? Cultural criticism is at risk of erasure

Recent announcements at major publications have seen critics losing their positions, an ongoing shift that we should all be alarmed by

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/aug/28/bland-easy-to-follow-for-fans-of-everything-what-has-the-netflix-algorithm-done-to-our-films?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_08_29&position=2&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=1e41815b-b33e-4fd7-92cd-96221cced0ba&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fmedia%2F2025%2Faug%2F28%2Fbland-easy-to-follow-for-fans-of-everything-what-has-the-netflix-algorithm-done-to-our-films

When the streaming giant began making films guided by data that aimed to please a vast audience, the results were often generic, forgettable, artless affairs. But is there a happy ending?

https://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/society-international-politics/2025/08/millennial-parent-trap?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_08_29&position=7&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=f8f3c2da-32a5-41f4-b054-a1b9e195ce2e&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newstatesman.com%2Finternational-politics%2Fsociety-international-politics%2F2025%2F08%2Fmillennial-parent-trap

The millennial parent trap

This generation are desperate to raise their children differently. Why?

By Kate Mossman

“My life, my choice,” said a tiny voice in the dark. They’d been studying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in reception. “Why did you have a child if you don’t want to look after me?” she added, from the cabin bed. She’d been going for an hour and 40 minutes, as she did every night, getting in and out of bed, as I took her back and tucked her in, saying odd, sing-song phrases like “Rest your body!” with rising mania.

I typed “five-year-old sleep regression” into my phone – a term we modern parents use for the disrupted sleep that occurs at different stages of a child’s development. You can find anything you want on your phone, and my search told me there was indeed a sleep regression at five – just as there had been at nine months, 18 months and three years.

If we ever called our 1980s parents to complain about sleep regression they would say, “Sleep regression? Never heard of it. We never had this trouble with you!” At which point we’d whisper: “Well that explains a lot, doesn’t it! You just threw us in a room and slammed the door!” Only we would never say it, because we didn’t really know what they had done and we were still scared of our 1980s parents.

Back in my daughter’s bedroom, I tell myself I’ll do it my way. “Don’t worry baby, I hear you! I know you’re just still awake because you want to be with me!”

A long thread on Mumsnet in June this year discussed “gentle parenting”, a phenomenon that defines the millennial generation and has become a favourite topic of right-wing press throughout the Western world, with its critics predicting societal collapse, as we raise entitled future people unable to cope with hearing the word “no”. Of the 237 comments on the thread, most of them were arguing about what gentle parenting actually is. Some claimed to be raising wonderful humans. For those who said it was failing them, the verdict was, “You’re just not doing it right.”

The difference between the millennial style of parenting and that of our own parents’ generation might be summed up in the image of the supermarket trolley. When I was a child, our Saturdays were spent being dragged along to Sainsbury’s, sitting in the little shelf inside the trolley with our thighs chafing on the bars, then perhaps a sweet at the checkout if we’d been “good”. Today, in many branches of Lidl and Budgens, the child has a miniature trolley of their own, often with a flag attached, and is followed around by parents, congratulated when they choose food for the family table. (They will not be allowed sweets, because what a gentle parent may allow in many other ways, they make up for with their deathly hard lines about sugar.)

Rather like the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, gentle parenting puts the child and their feelings at the centre of things: an idea that, surprisingly, has only been part of the parenting conversation for the last 25 years. At best, this means that when a child is distraught and having a tantrum, we empathise with their struggle and validate their emotions. This helps the child to understand these feelings and, over time, learn to regulate them – without resorting to the demeaning tools of threat, reward or punishment. At worst, gentle parenting has turned into an extraordinary test of personal resilience, increasing the anxiety of an already anxious millennial generation. One’s own needs are negated in service of the child’s, and parents are sucked dry with the effort to be empathic and patient – left less like actual mummies and more like the wizened Egyptian ones in the casements of museums.

Sarah Ockwell-Smith is at home in Saffron Walden, Essex. Modest, with a knitted brow, she seems less like the guru of a global movement and more like a woman who needs to set a few things straight. Ockwell-Smith brought gentle parenting into parlance: her books have been translated into 30 languages. “I wrote so many books with ‘gentle’ in the title that I just couldn’t handle it any more,” she says. “If I knew where it would end up, I would have really strictly defined it. People are going on TikTok these days with no training whatsoever and doing things that I find very permissive and weird.”

Born to Generation X, she had her first child in 2003, shortly after the loss of both her parents. It was a traumatic birth. She then read books by Gina Ford, the parenting guru of the late 1990s known for her strict routines and control crying. Ford’s thinking clashed so much with Ockwell-Smith’s maternal instincts that she became depressed.

“Gentle parenting is a form of self-therapy,” she says. “It’s about listening to your instincts, which will impact your relationships with everyone else.” She gives me a long and short definition. Short: raising your children in the way you wish your parents had raised you. Long: understanding, empathy, respect and boundaries, “Which does mean saying no, saying stop, picking them up and not letting them hit their siblings – but not filling it up with punishments and consequences.”

It is still a fringe movement, she insists: “In England, 20 per cent of parents still smack their children. Go on to any high street on a Saturday and look at what parents are doing to kids – shouting, bribing, punishing. The biggest way of raising kids in this country is still Supernanny – look at her Instagram feed and look at mine!”

Clips of Supernanny Jo Frost, with her two-piece suit, notepad and naughty step, have 17.7 million likes on TikTok 20 years after she appeared on TV, in the era of Big Brother and Pimp My Ride. Now working for families privately all over the world and too busy to talk to the New Statesman, she instead sent a 1,240-word manifesto in reply to my questions, written curiously in the third person: “Jo Frost wasn’t trying to squash a child’s spirit,” she says. “She was trying to strengthen it!”

Frost worries about the less authoritative approach to raising children favoured by millennials: “We’re seeing the long-term effects of that cultural shift. Emotional intelligence is much higher, therapy is normalised and kids know how to name their feelings, but something else has taken hold. Rising anxiety, emotional fragility, entitlement, anxiety and overthinking.”

Parents, she says, are victims too. “This generation of parents is unsure and confused about how to set limits without guilt. In an era that has become hyper-focused on feelings, too many believe that any correction is shaming, any rule is repression and any consequences are traumatic. They overshare like equals, giving kids too much information and making them grow up too fast. There’s an overexposure to adult concerns, mental health talk and identity questions. Kids worry more and play less!”

Yet if thousands of people are still using Supernanny’s naughty step, they’re not talking about it. “The problem with the naughty step,” Ockwell-Smith points out, “is that it presumes that naughty behaviour is a motivational problem – that children have the ability to be good, they’re just choosing consciously not to.”

It is a psychological law that sooner or later, everything turns into its opposite. In an American survey by the Lurie Children’s Foundation conducted in 2024, 73 per cent of millennials said they thought they were doing a better job raising children than their parents had done. In one sense this is entirely natural, something we need to tell ourselves. But an obsession with “what our parents did” defines this generation. So, what did they do? Were they really so tough on us? Why is it that, when we share our parenting problems and our fears of getting it wrong, our parents don’t seem to remember ever worrying at all?

I observed a vignette of my own parents’ struggles last Christmas. My daughter had a chest infection, and antibiotics were sourced out of hours at great effort. The medicine was a very bitter variety, and it came back out again in a fountain of vomit. Concerned that her condition would worsen, with no doctors open for three days, I mixed it with custard: she tried again. As a last resort I suggested she held her nose – that didn’t work either. So we gave up.

Suddenly my mild-mannered father suffered an internal change. “You’re letting her run rings around you!” he boomed. As her hysteria escalated, so did my parents’. They were distressed at what pushovers we were. Above all, they seemed to be physically unable to handle my daughter’s heightened emotion. What did they think we should have done, we asked later – sit on her chest and force it down her throat? My dad said that, in truth, he had no idea.

The story circulated by millennial parents about the “boomers” before them is that they were authoritarian. This generates a laugh from Sue Gerhardt, the pioneering neuroscience writer whose 2004 book Why Love Matters had a great influence on modern parenting theory. Gerhardt had her first child in 1980, when every household owned a copy of Your Baby and Child by the parenting guru Penelope Leach. Leach wrote: “Whatever you are doing, however you are coping, if you listen to your child and to your own feelings, there will be something you can actually do to put things right or make the best of those that are wrong.” Sounds pretty modern to me.

Gerhardt, now 71, was an active part of the women’s movement in the 1970s: she was involved in consciousness-raising groups (spaces for women to share their personal experiences of oppression and discrimination) and once campaigned for 24-hour nurseries. “We were really keen on egalitarianism, trying to combat our own tendencies to passivity and second-bestness,” she explains. “We were not authoritarian – but we were more focused on ourselves. We weren’t really thinking about the needs of babies in particular. Women have got to work, so what do we do with babies? Stick them in the nursery. It was the science that turned my attention in a different direction.”

Her work popularised huge advances in neuroscience in the 1970s and 1980s, which showed that time spent with babies in the first 1,000 days would influence their mental health for life. The work focused on the concepts of attachment theory and “emotional regulation”, revealing that the development of a child’s orbitofrontal cortex – the part of the brain that manages emotions – was directly dependent on the nature of interaction with their main carer. Our earliest experiences translate into neurological patterns of response that are laid down forever. As Gerhardt wrote in Why Love Matters, “Babies need continuous care from adults who can attune to their states, regulate them, and feed back to them who they are.”

It is not possible to sketch broadly a generation, to say how they parented and how they didn’t, when that parenting is dependent on money, opportunity and a thousand other variables far bigger than family. My parents were northerners – one from a refugee family displaced by the war – who moved to north London in the 1970s, entering a middle-class world. They lived on a single teacher’s salary, which enabled them to buy a flat thanks to special teachers’ mortgages available during Harold Wilson’s second government. My mother went out to work, while my father was a househusband – highly unusual at the time. Like so many of their generation, they had no input from their parents, because they had moved away; they were young – in their early twenties – and they didn’t have a single night out without us for my entire childhood. We were the centre of their world: they look at each other when I complain I am left with the “childcare” all day, a favourite phrase of my generation. I would consider my childhood idyllic. Yet there was smacking, and there was much shouting, and I was often scared of them. There was being “bad” if you were naughty. And we would never have had an apology or an explanation for anything that was said or done.

While boomer parents were anything but distant, Gerhardt agrees that they themselves often struggled with emotional regulation, “which is what is happening when people are hitting and shouting. Science shows that in very early life you must teach some basic skills, like being able to recognise emotions and talk about them as a way of regulating them.” If our parents were raised before neuroscience had illuminated the importance of a balanced stress response on the development of the brain, it was not knowledge they could consciously “parent” with. While we, some might suggest, have gone too far in the other direction.

My generation is trying to heal through raising children. Hot on therapy and faced with knowledge of our own, inner “wounded child”, we project our wounds on to our babies, and parent with an acute connection to what we were.

The word “parenting” only came into popular use in the 1970s. It coincided with the movement of women into the workplace, according to Andrew Bomback of Columbia University, who wrote a cultural history of it in 2023. “Parenting shifted from something you ‘fall into’ naturally, to another job involving work and practice and levels of performance,” he says. “There is much more transparency about the exhaustion level and the mixed bag of parenting these days, but the problem is going through all the material. There has never been this much parenting content. The generation above us had a different guiding principle. The dominant theme was: trust your instinct, you know a lot more than you think you do. Our parents didn’t agonise. They asked their own parents for advice, and they viewed that generation as experts when we view them sceptically. I mean, there’s even that book in England called The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read!”

Philippa Perry, who wrote the 2019 best-seller, won’t even use the word “parenting”. “I don’t like verbing people. We are relating to people. Children and babies are people. ‘Parenting’ makes the child into a chore.”

In her time as a psychotherapist, Perry has seen a striking number of people cutting off contact with their parents for the perceived wrongs done to them in childhood. “It’s down to a lack of nuance in every area of our lives,” she says. “It’s Instagram therapy: these six things mean your mother was a narcissist. It’s not an individual explanation of somebody’s psyche.”

On Sundays, she walks on the seafront at Eastbourne and does her “observations”, as she’s done for 30 years. “What I do see is parents trying very, very hard to be nice beyond their limits,” she says. “I see a woman carrying two scooters, pushing a pushchair with three children and trying to placate them all, rather than putting herself first which might be a better idea. I’m all for feeling with the children – but I’m not for sacrificing myself to the extent that I start resenting them because I’ve not said no to anything. Why would you avoid saying no to a child?”

But people do. Like the home-schooling mother of six in New England whose online brand Extremely Good Parenting compares mothering to farming, “tending to a meaningful life”. Kara Carrero is a deep thinker, writing blogs about the passage of time and human obsolescence – her throat gets dry when she mentions the parts of her approach that are “controversial”. She says we need to avoid using “no” because children aren’t listening like we think they are. “If my daughter is too close to the street I am not about to yell, ‘Don’t go in the street!’ because I don’t want her to just hear the last half of it.” She also thinks showing children alternatives to “no” prepares them for adult life: “They may lose their job, but here are other things they could do.”

Many “mumfluencers” make the mistake of projecting adult understanding on to children’s brains. While some are driven by sharing knowledge, others are making entertainment – like the American mom Olivia Owen who claims to show “the comedy in raising eight children”. Though she uses the term “gentle parenting”, she has invited controversy for filming a tiny tot on the naughty step, or trying to get a one-year-old to say please. She makes more videos to address the inevitable “backlash” and gets up to four million views a time.

For many more, sharing “advice” on parenting is directly connected to mental health. There was a time when parenting blogs only showed absolute perfection, but after the pandemic, social media started to unleash the unspoken, under-reported truth of motherhood, and with it came the old wounds and the childhood traumas.

“Our moms were our first bullies,” says a post on Ambas Life, a Facebook page that covers the subjects of birth trauma and postpartum depression. “So please, don’t try to argue with women like us… We don’t argue for fun. We argue because we had to fight to be heard our entire lives.” Heather Hurt, another Facebook mom, writes: “Some of us are parenting with trauma in our bones… So no, I’m not sorry if I watch too close. That’s not overprotective. That’s called parenting in 2025.” With the emotive posts comes tremendous pressure. The Facebook page Ausome Life, which is ostensibly there to raise autism awareness, shares a “first person” account of what it feels like to be left alone in a dark room, from the point of view of a baby, to deter new parents from training their child to sleep by themselves.

Three in four millennials go online for parenting advice. Exhausted women see these posts at 3am and feel guilty for wishing the difficult days away. Our increased knowledge of what children need in the first years of their lives is frustrated by the fact that most of us live in households where all adults are required to work. In the absence of working structures that meet our needs, we turn the heat up on ourselves. Then there is the post-hoc analysis of how we handled a moment with our children, and what we might have got wrong. Somehow, overthinking has undermined the very thing that parenting is made of: instinct.

When I was a child, I was given a book by the children’s writer Allan Ahlberg called Bad Bear. It featured a crazy-eyed teddy in a frilly dress riding her scooter into people and stealing their ice creams. The reason I remember the book so well is that my parents called me “Bad Bear” whenever I had a tantrum, which was often. Though the book was published in 1982, it is really a Victorian piece of work. The last page shows the bear asleep. When she’s asleep, says the rhyme, she’s almost good, “Yet still she tries, sometimes it seems, to be a bad bear in her dreams.”

“Good” and “bad”: those are two parenting words from the past. The concept of “bad” behaviour is, alongside smacking on the high street, the greatest indicator of the way things have changed between this generation and the last. It is well understood these days that if you tell a child they’re “bad” when they’re having a tantrum, they will very possibly grow up confused and guilty when they have strong feelings. This is one of the tenets of Becky Kennedy, a clinical psychologist, who is probably the most famous practitioner of millennial parenting in the world. Her brand, Good Inside, is predicated on the idea that whatever demons come up between parents and children, it is always from a place of love. If kids are having tantrums, it’s because they’re hurting. Anger is a surface emotion for us all.

Kennedy also describes her work as therapy for children and parents, as parents confront strong unconscious reactions to the way they themselves were raised. There is allowance for parental anger, as long as there is “repair”: if you apologise to your kids for blowing your top, they see that big feelings are OK to have, and that they will pass.

Yet there are aspects of the approach which stretch a parent’s capacity to its limits, as we act as our children’s therapists as well as our own. When my friend restrained her tantruming son, telling him he was a “good kid”, it only made him angrier: “No I’m not!” he screamed.

Kennedy says we should no longer tell children we are proud of them, only that they should be proud of themselves. “When you orientate a child to focus on the impact of her feelings on you instead of the reality of the feelings inside herself, you are wiring a child for co-dependency,” she says. Meanwhile, other kinds of co-dependency emerge, with parents – as Jo Frost says – “oversharing like equals”; or with the father who says “that hurts daddy” rather than “don’t pinch!”.

Back on Mumsnet, primary school teachers complain about the legacy of the modern “gentle parenting” style. Discipline is going down the pan, they say, as kids turn everything into an endless negotiation: how will these people cope with the world?

Sarah Ockwell-Smith says that, these days, around 30 per cent of children aged nought to five are “gently parented”. Her once fringe movement is on the rise. Does she have hope for them? “Yes, it’s about raising decent adults, not obedient children. If you are trying to get well-behaved kids you’re going about it the wrong way. Look at girls. We were raised to doubt what we wanted; now we raise girls who know what they want. Which would you rather have? It doesn’t mean it’s easy.”

Day by day, I see another side to it all. Every Friday morning at my daughter’s school, the classroom opens for parents to come and read stories to their kids. Unfortunately this often ends in tears when it comes to the point at which parents have to leave. Last week I noticed that one of the children had adopted the role of class therapist when the difficult moment arrived. She scanned her friends’ faces for emotion. “Do you need to go to the calm corner? No? You’re feeling green?” Green is their emotional thumbs up.

The next day, my daughter had a play date at our flat, and at one point she got upset when things weren’t going her way. She stalked off and left her five-year-old friend alone in a house she’d not visited before. “I’ll just go and check on her,” said the small guest.

When I found them in the kitchen, looking at lollies, talking quietly, I thought: they have no shame about their feelings. Anger is seen as something normal, a wheel we fall upon; it will pass, we can help a friend with it, even when we’re right in the thick of it with them.

It is hard to look at scenes like this and think millennials are doing parenting wrong. I remembered a line from Mumsnet. “Down at the supermarket, it’s not the young people you see losing their shit when things don’t go the way they want.”