12-24-2024, 04:38 PM
(12-23-2024, 06:59 PM)Maxmars Wrote: I feel like I'm not in harmony with some of what you offer, I mean that respectfully.
It could be my own errant considerations but I'm not inclined to see the useful correlation between what can be observed in children's organic play with application to "society."
Children (presumably)) have some very distinct constraints in mimicry, which is part of the trinity of 'play' to my mind... mimicry, modeling, and synthesis. Kids operate from a truncated vantage point... their "society" can be fairly summed up with one word... "family." As a child's activities extend beyond family... to include friends and "adults," they haven't really experienced enough time to internalize "social order." This is natural, they are children. (Innocence is bliss... which children truly require to thrive.)
Perhaps I'm too simplistic, but I contend that "identity" is not a part of growing up; identity is the result of growing up.
Subjecting children to bizarre externalities and observing what happens seems to say more about the researchers than the research, to my uneducated mind.
But I admit, the results might prove useful to any willing to infer the narrative that in every child their is a crisis of gender brewing... (and there always has been.)
We will respectfully disagree then. I come from families where (there's always one, I think) people grow up to be so different than the others in the environment that formed them. That disjoint between self and family means that my lot were usually "disinherited" (either by themselves or the family) for being "wrong."
I was too "strange" for my parents to be entirely comfortable with (I may have mentioned that I'm autistic and that they thought about institutionalizing me at one point) -- in spite of society and hardcore reinforcement, I simply couldn't conform for more than a half hour at a time. With a husband (and now family and friends) who allowed me to be what I am, I am comfortable with myself, happy, and engaged with life. I have a family and dear friends who love me for the weird, over-educated autistic person that I am.
At one point I was married to a man who (like my parents) wanted to train me into a Perfect Womanly Wife... and he, like my parents, found me intolerably "wrong." I was miserable in that role. I could do it, but there was no joy in it. If he hadn't divorced me, I would probably be dead (inside and probably actually dead) by now.
Not everyone's experiences, of course, but perhaps you can see somewhat why my experiences give me this viewpoint. But... it's okay to disagree, eh?
In any case, it's the Christmas holiday... so merry-merry to you and yours. We're going to have Christmas Eve dinner with our daughter (since she doesn't have a partner) and sushi, and I intend to make this a tradition to brighten her holidays. :)
