With the first 5 days of primary school, this week has been about adjusting to new, yet long-term life rhythms. The school bus now decides our life’s wind-up and wind-down schedules - esp. for the adults! The school, and everything associated with it, is a welcome metronome in what have been a rubato-esque few months.
Thematically, this week’s art-as-a-habit-and-not-just-a-hobby comes to you from the bus, where I sat behind a pre-schooler and his dad.
It’s also been a week of being up close with parental anxiety - not just ours, but the people we meet, and the wider malaise that has infected millennial parents in particular. So many are worried about their kids making friends. Some were concerned about their kids ability to open their own lunchbox. Some wanted to already facilitate playdates even before the kids have met each other. I’m not going to waste ink on the validity or necessity of these - everyone’s feelings are valid to themselves and there is no chosen school of parenting - I’m more interested in how we got to this place? When did a kid’s process of living their life become a project for their parents to manage and worry about? We noticed this on our world trip too - no matter what continent we were in, the compulsive need of many parents to hover near the sandpit was ever present - infusing adult instructions where kid instinct was probably enough. Everyone wants to get everything about parenting right, leaving no room to question what right even is.
One of the finds of the day is about what this does our collective psyches. That, and four other finds for the week:
- VEXED PARENTS “Stress, loneliness and exhaustion can easily affect people’s mental health and well-being. And we know that the mental health of parents has a direct impact on the mental health of children. All of this is compounded by an intensifying culture of comparison, often amplified online, that promotes unrealistic expectations of what parents must do.”
- DRUG BIRDS Following peaks in cocaine seizures between 2007 and 2018 (the more cocaine seized, the larger the enforcement action was deemed), the likelihood of important bird habitats becoming space for drug trafficking shot up
- SCREEN APNEA Are you breathing properly as you read this now? What happens to our breath when we type, tap, scroll?
- NET NUTRITION How creatively nutritious is your internet feed? “To keep the web alive, we need all the tiny, personal and silly websites. They are the foundation of the internet”
- WUKONG ERA By now you probably have heard about the phenomenon that is ‘Black Myth: Wukong’. We often think about soft power in terms of movies (France), TV (Anime from Japan) and music (K-Pop). This is China flexing its soft power through gaming.