flâneur

attention is the beginning of devotion - by Lilian Caylee

liliancaylee.substack.com · 508 words · saved by 1 readers

Two weeks after our ~wedding and two months into my second trimester, we moved into a new home, spacious, light-filled, somewhere we could see our family in. A friend came to see us and, surrounded by cardboard boxes, our conversation inevitably converged on childrearing. He told us that a mutual friend’s philosophy was, in short, throw money at the problem—pay caretakers to attend to the needs of their future children, whenever possible—and asked our opinion. Aside from the reality that we can’t afford a wholesale export of childcare responsibilities, we grasped at a sense that something essential would be lost. In How Will You Measure Your Life, Clayton Christensen notes that outsourcing domestic work prevents us from developing “the skill to develop skills,” to be able to solve complicated problems independently, to have the confidence to confront hard and unfamiliar things. Parenthood is complex and multidimensional, full of unexpected grooves and ridges. The parent-child relations

Two weeks after our ~wedding and two months into my second trimester, we moved into a new home, spacious, light-filled, somewhere we could see our family in. A friend came to see us and, surrounded by cardboard boxes, our conversation inevitably converged on childrearing. He told us that a mutual friend’s philosophy was, in short, throw money at the problem—pay caretakers to attend to the needs of their future children, whenever possible—and asked our opinion. Aside from the reality that we can’t afford a wholesale export of childcare responsibilities, we grasped at a sense that something…

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