For thousands of years, babies slept with their mothers. When they cried, they were attended to. Then two men came along: Dr. Holt and John B. Watson. They said babies should be trained. That babies had to fit the assembly line schedules of their parents. "Newborns must cry to expand their lungs," they claimed. "Simply let them cry it out." And that's how the "cry it out" sleep training method was born. Watson treated babies like experiments. "Never hug or kiss your child," he wrote. "Shake hands with them in the morning." After all, mothers needed rest, to attend to their husbands and households. Watson had four children. Three attempted suicide. One succeeded. And we still follow it today. Because once you convince a mother to ignore her baby's cries, you've broken something primal.
Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build his show. She shaped everything: every script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child's nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it.
The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children's Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children, the part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention, takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child's nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state.
What ended it had nothing to do with child development science. In 1984, Reagan's FCC chairman Mark Fowler abolished the advertising limits that had protected children's programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased by 300%, from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it.
Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in Pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 60 four-year-olds across three groups: one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds; one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds; and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem-solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure.
In the 1970s, children began watching television around age 4. Research from pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to 4 months, as the content got faster and the audience got younger. Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages 1 or 3 raised the risk of attention problems at age 7 by 9%.
A college swimmer caught red-handed assaulting an unconscious girl behind a dumpster gets sentenced to just 3 months in jail because the judge "didn't want to ruin his Olympic potential." Once again, a man's hypothetical career is worth more than a woman's actual life.
What broke me was the night my boyfriend and I were watching a news segment about an inheritance dispute where a man lost everything to a greedy relative. He laughed, shook his head, and said, “Honestly, if my own dad ever got sick or went broke, I’d probably just put him in the cheapest, worst nursing home I could find and forget the address. It’s just survival of the fittest, right?”
He chuckled like it was some edgy, dark joke, but the room instantly felt freezing cold.
Weeks later, my dad suffered a minor stroke. While I was frantic, crying, and trying to organize his medical paperwork, my boyfriend complained that I was "killing the vibe" and asked why I was spending so much energy on someone who was already on the decline anyway.
That night, I remembered his "joke." I looked at him and realized it wasn’t a joke at all. It was a glimpse into a hollow, completely ruthless soul.
When I packed my bags and left the next day, he called me dramatic and said I couldn't handle his "dark sense of humor."
And yet, our mutual friends still tell me, “He was just talking shit, he didn’t mean it. You threw away a three-year relationship over a hypothetical comment.”
No. I threw away a monster before the hypothetical became my reality.
"deriving pleasure from being attractive in the third person" is exactly how I felt in my experiences with men. In the clinical world, we call it dissociation.
curiosidade: só mulheres transmitem DNA mitocondrial, que pode permanecer praticamente inalterado por milhares de anos.
então, tecnicamente, a única linhagem contínua é a da mulher.
é por isso que conseguimos rastrear uma ancestral comum a todos os humanos vivos.
landlord butchered the wildflowers in the yard for no reason and the only thing i’ve learned is that half of women i know have some experience of men pointlessly killing flowers either by accident or on purpose and not getting why it’s an issue
Women: “I find your behavior creepy and I’m uncomfortable.”
Men: “Actually, it makes no logical sense for you to find me creepy. Stop being uncomfortable.”