Parental forgetfulness run amok

I've blogged before about the concept that I call parental forgetfulness, where the instant people reproduce they seem to lose the ability to identify with children or to recall first-person memories of how they thought and felt as children.

But this is the worst example I have ever seen.

Like every distressed woman, I did what came naturally. I called my friends. "You wear high heels and makeup," said one, a psychiatrist and mother. "You are clearly not opposed to feminine things."

"I went through that when I was a kid; I turned out okay," a Bay St. lawyer said.

"Just don't tell her it's bad," advised senior bureaucrat mom. "People always emphasize boy things as good and girl things as bad."

Partway through the frantic dialling, I realized I'd hired the wrong advisers. Who knows what their kids will grow up like? I needed to speak to their mothers. Their parenting decisions have paid off. They raised strong, independent, successful women, despite Disney's insipid infiltration.

The author knows exactly what these people turned out like, she's talking to them as adults, they're her friends. And they're giving her first-person memories of what their parents did and how that made them think and feel. Information straight from the source, from right inside the former child's head complete with the big picture of how they turned out as an adult and whatever drama they might have gone through in between. And the disregards all this and goes to their mothers, who can describe the empirically observable outcomes but can't tell what was going on inside the kid's head.

Sometimes I wonder which is cause and which is effect. Do people forget what it's like to be a child when they have children of their own? Or do people who remember what it's like to be a child choose not to have children of their own?