this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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This is great for you to write this. I agree with what you said 100% but just want to say that since it is so long and you must have put a lot of effort into it
♥ Thanks for the kind words comrade! Honestly, a lot of this information lives in my head rent-free. As a family with a comfortable dual income, we're still treading water because of childcare costs. Where we live the age to enter kindergarten has been pushed up (for sound academic and social-emotional reasons) without any measures to ease the burden on working families who understand the objective reality that public education is also a form of free child care and had been budgeting against that reality.
Being a parent is hard work, and the systems we live under only make it more challenging. This is a perspective I didn't have until I had kids of my own. If anything, having kids has been the strongest radicalizing force in my life, and is the reason I consider myself a Marxist.
I am surprised to hear about kindergarten age being raised (being 4 here I think was and is a good age as it helped me learn to read faster as it supplemented what I learned at home) But yeah, I try to read and think about the stuff you said due to wanting to have kids (in the future). Why do say that having kids make you a Marxist? (if you don’t mind answering)
Our state was allowing students to enter into kindergarten at age 4 in January as long as they were age 5 by September but that's now a hard requirement of 5 years old in January. I think every other state does 5 as the minimum. It's impacting something like 11,000 kids going into the 24 school year, and impacting every daycare center in the state since they only have training and curriculum for students up to age 4.
As for having kids and Marxism, I will say this: You, as a parent, want to leave your kids in a world better than the one you grew up in. You hope that the struggles you endured are ones they never have to. For a long time, I didn't know how to build a better future, but through reading Marx and listening to other Marxist thinkers, and understanding that all of the things I enjoy today were built on the backs of the struggles of the past, struggles endured by working-class families who ALSO were looking to leave their children in a better world than they had, the HOW became more clear. Marxism is like a north star, pointing me toward safe harbors, toward a better world not just for me and my kids, but for all of us, and all of our kids. It's a whole other thing to plan for the future of your kids, you start to look at the world over a longer timeline, and you have to anticipate where things might be and hope that what you're doing now will offer your kids a springboard into a fulfilling and successful life. Reading Marx and planning for the future came up in parallel to each other, but without Marx, I think that planning would have led to fear and pessimism. Marxism provided me with a framework for which to make those plans, or at least, provide my kids the tools they need to critically navigate the world so that they can be better about planning their own pathways.
I don't know that I would have gotten to this place in my world view with out my kids, because they force me to look beyond the horizon I can see and off to the horizon they can see.
Your post is so inspiring that it has a negative downvote.
Can't be everything to everyone I guess!
That means the number of people who downvoted you is less than 0. I have no idea how that works, but I think that's supposed to be a good thing.
No, it means that less than no one disagrees with you haha. I have the glitch too, if I downvote the comment it brings it up to 0 dislikes. So weird
It was to late in the day for math, clearly!
A statement so touching it got -1 downvote somehow.
I agree totally though, the cornerstone of Marxism is wanting to leave the world a better place when we leave it than when we arrived.
Yeah that gave me a good chuckle 😄.
Okay, that makes sense. I had a similar notion about the need to improve the world for future generations but of course that’s different. Thanks for elaborating!