#i'd accept this behavior from like middle schoolers but no more

[navree]

imma be real with you...being a latchkey kid was the highlight of my 90s childhood. video rentals after school, maybe riding bikes around the neighborhood park, inviting schoolmates or neighbor kids over to play videogames until the parents came home and the streetlights went on. was it lonely? occasionally, but it was never THAT BAD™️ to the point of leaving me moping in a corner. hate to sound like a boomer...but kids today are soft.

Like, the thing is, I'm not a millennial, but I'm definitely on the older side of Gen Z by being born in early 1999, and this trend of "latchkey kid" stuff is BAFFLING to me. Like, parentification and child neglect are real things, with real and negative impacts on the children involved, but that's not what people are talking about half the time; they're literally just talking about being left alone on occasion. And it feels like a lot of it comes from two places: 1) from people who didn't actually have two parents who worked and so view the idea that sometimes kids are left alone or with babysitters as akin to child abuse (I made mention of this with one of my complaint about Tim Drake fans wanting his parents to be abusive because they went on business trips for work, y'all clearly had stay at home parents because otherwise that concept would not be shocking) or 2) from people who, I'm sorry, want to feel more put upon than they actually were either because they want to be more interesting or because they feel aggrieved and are grasping for a legitimate reason for it. Maybe I'm mean and crochety but you were not, in fact, criminally treated because sometimes your parents weren't around. My dad went on months long business trips for work when I was a kid, he missed multiple birthdays of mine, my parents both working meant that a lot of times during summers my sister and I were put under the care of babysitters until I was twelve and deemed old enough to be in charge and we were thus left alone. And that was occasionally an issue, because it wasn't nice to have a parent miss a birthday or sometimes the babysitter was definitely not a right fit (we still make jokes about a sitter my sister absolutely hated) or situations arose where an adult was needed (like my sister locking herself in our bathroom by accident, where the lack of readily available adults meant I ended up calling 911 about it, it's a story my parents love me to tell and did result in some rule changes in our house regarding when doors are allowed to be locked and when you should be calling emergency services vs just leaving a message for mom). But it didn't mentally scar me or make me feel abused. The only material consequence it left me with was that by high school I was coming home first cuz my school was within walking distance from my house and therefore I was the first one returning to our dog who had been bereft of human companionship for the day and it made me his favorite for a time.

I also feel like a lot of this also comes from a recent need to pathologize everything. It's something I've noticed with that fucking eldest daughter shit people do, where there's a legitimate idea at the root of it (ie that the eldest child does have to put up with more stuff than younger siblings and if that child is a daughter that gets compounded with societal misogyny and the expectations placed on women and girls and their roles) then balloons outward into this thing where every eldest daughter on the planet has suddenly suffered more than Jesus. And again, as an Eldest Daughter, I am intimately aware of how my being the first born influenced my upbringing; I was far more harshly treated than my sister because my parents didn't know while raising me what was normal behavior for my age vs what was behavior that was unacceptable, whereas they had a baseline for when she reached similar milestones. But it's not something that's left me rocking back and forth and in need of psychiatric care, any more than being left alone did. And with latchkey kid stuff, it's doubly stupid because it really feels like it comes from a position of privilege. Most families need dual income, most families need both parents to be working, and as such that means that sometimes most families are going to need to rely on childcare or, eventually, leaving the kid in charge of themselves for some afternoons. And most kids understand that, the reason I find this shit stupid is because I'm aware of the fact that my parents not being around sometimes was due to the fact that they were doing their jobs, so that we could all live, because that's how the world works especially when you have children and are thus responsible for them as well as yourself. But now everything needs to be some Big Deep Issue, so the fact that a two parent household will involve two parents who either need to work or honestly want to work (don't think I'm not missing that a lot of this stuff completely ignores that mothers should be entirely able to return to the workforce and have their own independent lives outside of being wives and mothers, cuz I see it) is now a harmful thing to do to one's children. Completely ignoring, of course, the lived experience of people over the age of 20 who were "latchkey kids" and were completely fine with it, or even view those early moments of freedom as fundamental happy memories and part of their journey into becoming their own person.

[nny11writes]

I'd love to read your answer to 29!

, it I am not sure which ask game this is for. :| I probably should space these out more lol!Unusual Asks: 29: Have you ever liked someone who your friends hated?Yes! In middle school I accidentally outed myself (my parents did a great job making queerness seem totally normal and acceptable, which it is, but my dumb ass literally didn’t realize anyone wouldn’t agree so when asked in class if I liked 00, 10, or 11 best I immediately said 00 and maybe 10 (hello self enforced herteronormativity!)) and ended up going from having basically no friends to having a lot of friends. It was like the reverse of what a lot of media might lead you to believe. One of the people who was attracted to my apparently brazen confidence, aka my heart of gold dumb of assness, was a boy I’m gonna call Tom. Tom is asd among other things, and the rest of my friends didn’t know how to “handle” someone like him. I didn’t and still don’t get why, he was super cool! Guy knew anything you could ever want to know about golf and opera and he was always happy to lend a hand for anything. I loved Tom and I still think super fondly of him for interrupting class to complain about a book scene of characters dancing on a golfing green (”You don’t understand how expensive it is and how much time it takes to make that grass pristine and they just want to dance on it!? That’s not allowed!)That all said, what really made other’s not like him is that Tom had absolutely no brain to mouth filter. I had started a GSA with a few teachers backing me and we posted a lot of informative and creative stuff around the school (mostly to stop me from re posting the definitions of homosexual, gay, and faggot on all the doors b/c I was creating fire safety hazards as kids flocked to read it). But part of what all the kids who joined (aka all my queer friends who flocked towards me and were all 100% in denial about being queer) wanted their participation to be secret. Tom literally couldn’t keep secrets. He wanted to, he just couldn’t. It created a situation where all of my friends started to hate him and behaviors that before they found a little annoying were suddenly intolerable.

It sucked.

I volunteered and talked with him privately about being in the GSA. He’d been part of the founding group and I didn’t just want to boot him. We spent a couple hours after school talking in the hallway, and he ultimately said he understood why it was an issue for the other kids. Some of them were in unsafe homes and if their parents found out it could have gotten really bad really fast, and Tom is an amazing and caring guy. So he said he understood and would stop going to the GSA so he couldn’t blurt out anyone’s names.He was so sweet and kind about it, so humble and not angry, just sad that everyone talked and we came up with a system so that the kids who were safe would attend meetings with Tom one week, and the next week he wouldn’t attend so the kids in unsafe homes could. I gave him updates and helped him participate in all the creative things we did.

My other friends got over their “hating” him, but most of them never seemed to like him despite all his amazing heart and knowledge and humor. 

I still don’t know how I feel about the situation. It was complex and hard, especially for middle schoolers, and while everyone seemed totally happy with our arrangement at the time, I still sometimes wonder how Tom feels about it now. At the time he was okay with it, but I wouldn’t blame him for being bitter or angry. We lost contact during high school since we went to different schools, and I know he stopped hanging out with the rest of the middle school crew by sophmore year (me and one guy went to a different high school than everyone else), but I also know he found a group of friends that were really more genuinely /his/ friends instead of being my friends.

I didn’t do a great job of being a really good friend to him, I tried but at the time really had no concept about mental health or special needs. I was too short with him and looking back I always feel awful that I sided with the GSA kids who didn’t want to get outted instead of looking for a better solution. I know I was young and I know back then being queer was A Really Big Life Ruining topic for a lot of people, and I know that at 12 years old there’s no way I could balance out the needs of some peoples safety over his well being. Still, I feel bad about it.

I hope he’s doing well.

Fanfic Writer Asks: 29) Do you have a story that you feel doesn’t get as much love as you’d like?

Oh yeah! Actually a lot of the one chapter fics I posted recently fall into this category where I’m just dissapointed over how into them I got and for some of them how much research and planning I did only to get a handful of views/kudos/and maybe a comment or two. I think the one that hurt the most was “Bon Appetit!”, I got way invested and spent a good hour actually researching out the menu for the fic. Like, I get why a lot of folks might not like it, but man I attached hard lol.

I think the biggest fic that falls into this though is “Ghosts”, it has more love than the ones I just mentioned but I am so emotionally attached to my OCs and the world building I was doing. I knew it wouldn’t get a lot of attention because it was literally all about an OC and had the known characters mostly referenced. It’s picked up a little more steam but it’s still one that I wish more people liked.