Robach and Holmes: Responding to the world's worst parents

[BLueRibbon]

Last week, I wrote about the drama surrounding LifeLine Chat, including one particular commentator's absurd attacks on the service and its press release. Since that article was published, I've come across quite a lengthy discussion on the topic, one which is calmer and slightly more professional, but not altogether more insightful. While trying to minimize the extent to which I repeat myself, today I'm going to deal with a podcast by disgraced former reporters Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes.

https://www.brianribbon.com/home/robach ... st-parents

[Scorchingwilde]

...merely talking about an attraction to children was enough to be canceled, to have people call for death and other forms of violence on social media, to be treated as far worse than a literal rapist. If people are demanding you be brutally murdered for merely talking about your feelings, for having a particular sexual orientation, you are very much a victim.

Best line in the article. Not being able to have an honest conversation with anyone is draining and demoralizing, and most of the time I don't even want to talk about sexual feelings, but all the research and theory-reading I've been doing, and the hypotheses I'm generating or analogies to other marginal communities I'm interested in discussing with members of those groups. It's intellectually stifling to our community as much as it is emotionally damaging.

I do disagree with some of the discussion around divorce here, not about these two assholes, but more generally. I've known children parents who admitted to be they'd stayed together 'for the kids,' and decades later I think separation would probably have been much better for their kids and them than toughing it out and building resentments. I'll admit that outside of the west the financial side of things can become more of an issue, child poverty is a serious concern and if the family lives somewhere with a lot of societal misogyny and/or shame around divorce, that's going to limit their options to healthily separate and keep their kids fed and safe. It's very rarely the case that any marriage ends because of a single affair that came out of the blue from wild lust without any prior problems. There's usually either emotional disconnection in the relationship or feelings of unsafety from abuse or unhealed trauma, and sometimes the external emotional support systems enable that dysfunction instead of pushing the couple to work on their issues when they actually want to try and stay together. That last one sometimes is the medium for an emotional/romantic affair, coming out of one partner's codependency with a friend in their wider circle of acquaintances, which can then become a sexual affair and knock over the entire house of cards. I've seen it happen to a couple that didn't have kids and it was still shitty for them and their friends who felt they had to take sides. I think that's probably one of reason so many straight people are afraid of their partner having friends of the opposite sex, or feel uncomfortable not segregating their friend groups by gender. Then there's the issue of some divorced parents gaslighting their kids about their-ex partner or using them as a pawn in custody battles, and that kind of abuse is neither inherent to divorce nor exclusively found in kids of divorcees. Partners who stay together while hating one another and having irreconcilable differences can seriously fuck up a kid by going behind one another's back to pushing two conflicting sets of values and moral beliefs onto their children, and then punishing them for the behaviors or traits that resembles their spouse. With sibling dynamics it gets even worse, you and your sister can both be the golden child and the scapegoat simultaneously, just swapped in the minds of each parent. That one's a recipe for the kind of dissociation issues and teenage nihilism of the distinctly unfun kind, at least in my experience. I also remember a study that among other variable, showed how a couple with different parental orientations toward authoritarianism and punishment, rather than, say, two really strict parents or two lenient and supportive ones, or even two neglectful ones, was correlated more with teen alcoholism in a statistically significant way. That was years ago though, and it's too early in the week for me to do actual research here than spout off a few anecdotes, sorry for the ramble!