As one of 4 daughters, raising 3 boys of my own, I agree with your assessment of the sexes. I am also glad that I have boys to raise. Even though "white male" is a bad word these days, the job of growing up female must be harder in a world that can no longer answer the question "What is a women?". I am now almost at the point where I've spent equal time as the "corporate career woman" and as the "stay at home mom". The latter has by far been more fulfilling than the former.
But I disagree with the premise that the University is where your daughter will find the smart and motivated male. The University is where your daughter (and sons) will find the obedient, mask wearing Marxist. In the US, universities are still requiring masks and they are wholly liberal, gender ideology, Marxism factories. And any career in STEM will be to advance the Fourth Industrial Revolution....why do you think it has taken such a front seat in education and touted by the likes of Bill Gates, etc.? If you're on top, you'll be advancing the technologies; if you're on the bottom, you'll be operating the robots. But either way, the goal is to continue to diminish the trades, the whole of middle class, and let AI run the world while the children that grew up with STEM video games as their education in public school can simply guide and control the robots from their cells.
Our home education for our 3 boys consists of cleaning, cooking and general taking care of oneself as well as animal husbandry, gardening, food preservation and all things homesteading. As this world advances toward the WEF agenda (The Great Reset, Agenda 2030, Technocratic takeover...whatever you want to call it), self-sufficiency and working with their hands to care for themselves, seem to be the most important tasks for my children to learn - to be the adults in the new world that we are entering. We have no desire for them to go to any university, for it will certainly cost too much, provide them with completely different morals and values than those of our family, will most certainly require many vaccines for attendance (or a constant fight to retain a medical exemption which will only bring with it masks and endless testing)...all the reasons they are not in public school today would be thrown away for the "prestige" of a diploma that is not affordable, is never good enough, only requiring more and more education to be worth anything, and is ever being viewed by the eyes of most as a colossal waste of time. My children can read and write, we memorize poems and scripture, hand write letters to relatives, read gobs of books, learn a little Latin and spend most of our time outside, learning to work the land and become less dependent on the ever crumbling system.
Food in Ukraine may be easier to get in the collapse than it will be in the US, so that is our focus (as we already covered eating and heating without fuel when we purchased a wood cookstove last year). But how old are the farmers and vendors that you buy from? You may have food for your family today, but who is going to grow the food for your children? If they come to the US, it will be the meatless burgers with bugs and veggies grown in Bill Gate's indoor warehouses. We are returning to the "Little House on the Prairie" days, where the work is done by the family, for the family. Self-sufficiency of the household....I used to make $$$ to buy the organic, local food grown by someone else. Today, I spend the time growing the food instead of working to pay someone else to grow the food.....I see no other way!
I want to point out that we are both preparing to "heat and eat" without the system/grid/electricity. As are my friends in London and in France. This further points to the fact that we are all at war - 5th Generational warfare - that isn't as obvious as your guns and tanks in the streets, but the results are the same. It also points to the fact that "The Agenda" seems to be advancing. We need to be preparing our children to get out of the system - completely. There is no middle ground...you are out of it or you are part of it. And while being out of it will be hard work and will take immense determination (never thought I would learn to milk a cow at the age of 40), being part of it is not human nature.
Wonderful piece! We could buy a farm here and do the same.
I am happy to say that a lot of the young men I know understand what's going on and are just as wary as you are. I think more will be. With regard to STEM, it's very broad. Certainly does include the nasty stuff you name. My kids will be primed to recognize and avoid it. Hope that works.
I'm encouraging Eddie to study agronomy. Even on one's own organic farm it helps to have an education about how agriculture works.
What a wonderful comment! There is a constant struggle between parents and children, between the kids' desire for freedom and the parents' desire - obligation - to form them to be proper adults. It is as old as time, and there is no proper solution. Alison Gopnik has a good analogy - the gardener and the carpenter. We want to train them as to which directions to grow, but not shape them as a (German) carpenter into some predefined final form.
I've been following you with interest for several years. Your move to Ukraine, and your finding of a wife, and your having of another family, was an amazing and successful Hail Mary Pass.
But, if I may, and since you invited comments, what I see here in this essay would have been sufficient in 1950s America, where the surrounding culture exerted pressure on people to marry and have children. But when I google total fertility rate in Ukraine, I get numbers like 1.2, maybe 1.4. Isn't this objective evidence that Ukrainian culture no longer exerts pressure, or enough pressure, on people to have kids? If so, then *you*, and your wife, and grandma, must supply that missing pressure. You must imbue your children with an *obligation* to get married and have kids---that not doing so would be unacceptable, a betrayal of their mother and father, an act of shameful ingratitude to all their ancestors and for all that has been given to them and for all that they now enjoy, for their very existence on earth, that they have a responsibility to carry on the line, and not let the family end in failure. And that they must imbue this same obligation in their own children. And secondly, you must repeat and instill in them that life is far more fulfilling and meaningful when one has children, it is the creation of more people that you love and who love you in return, and that hedonists who never have families, after their youth is gone, and as they age, end up alone, miserable, wretched, empty, and without meaning. This must all be taught to them, as much as you teach them reading and music.
I didn't see any mention of this in what you wrote, and I fear without it, your ancestral line will peter out with your Ukrainian children, as it did with your American. Neither culture is doing its job anymore.
Some comments about Ukraine. First, it must be known that Ukrainians during the Soviet years lived in tiny apartments and had no opportunity to improve their lives materially. The fact that they lived in such tight quarters affected their view of life and their desire to have a family. Housing was so tight that a divorced couple had to continue to live together for years because it was impossible to find another place to live. In addition, it must be noted that Ukrainians because they were deprived of material opportunity became the very materialists that Stalin tried to stamp out. For the past thirty years, Ukrainians and Russians were only interested in material success. They wanted what the west had: cars, vacations, clothes, bigger houses. They became far more obsessed with material goods than those in the west, because they had been deprived for generations. They felt that life under the Soviets was a misery and life after the fall of the Soviets was worse and caused more suffering. Every Ukrainian girl that I have ever known wanted one child and no more. The maternal instinct was there, but more than one child created an impossibility. A life without comfort. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been no stability, no sense of security, a disappointment for those who saw the glitter of the west. It's no wonder that Ukrainians and Russians do not repopulate the world. Life had been ugly and a misery for them. Right now, they are fighting a war to simply have the opportunity to survive. If they survive and prosper afterwards, the birth rate might go up, but on the other hand, the war is killing the future of the country, because the soldiers who die fighting will never have more children. The young men who would have fathered the future are dying in the trenches of Donbas. Their women have fled the country and may never come back, because life in the west is far better than life in Ukraine. For a very few, life is grand in Ukraine, but for most it is hard work and suffering.
I note that many will disagree and if they are male, may I suggest you just made them very uncomfortable? I think many issues you present have their origins in the "suffrage movement" of the late 1800s. It was a time when men surrendered the role as head of household (the one who set the parameters for the family) and women abandoned motherhood (raising and training children).
In some cases, men outright abandoned the family and mothers took on the provider role while still raising and training children. However, the early suffrage leaders had maids, nannies, and other servants to take care of the raising and training of the children. Men stopped adoring the wife/mother of their children in favour of gentlemen's clubs, gaming, hours in the pubs, or other actual business pursuits. Men no longer needed to be home, just like the mother who now had various servants to assist.
This was followed by WWI and then WWII. Men went off to war, and mothers went to work and came home to raise children exhausted. The washing machine was invented and now the need to be home for this one daily time-consuming chore vanished. Many more time saving inventions followed, creating more time freedom and manufacturing profits.
Men either now deceased, suffering war trauma or injury were now readily replaced by a workforce who found meaning outside of the home. The government, business, and society, in general, approved of working mothers. Early school entry age or nursery care establishment became an acceptable industry often with government oversight and subsidy.
People like the Rockafellers and Getty's can share the burden by promoting the lowering of wages so it took more than one wage earner to provide for a family. Yes, I think many men reading this will be made very uncomfortable.
I can see we agree but that may be a function of our ages. I've not been burned by my previous errors in marriage but my last was a real partnership with an accomplished women, once a well placed executive that experienced the glass ceiling. In our marriage she elected a new career as an educator. My grand children are a joy and seem to be on a good path. I like to think my children grew up in a traditional family much along the lines you are defining.
When my daughter was about three, somebody in Kyiv asked me what I wanted for her. I said, I don't want anything for her. I want her to decide what she wants to do with her life. I want her to make her own decisions about what she wants.
When I was a boy, I fought for the freedom to be myself. My dad was a builder, a building contractor, and of course he took me to work sites where I did a lot of the dirty work that he didn't want to do. I resented it and I chose an entirely different life for myself. I don't think my dad ever read a book. I remember him criticizing me for having no ambition, but he couldn't see the drive that was within me. When I was in college, I used to send him the letters that I received from the University Administration congratulating me for getting a 4.0 GPA. (All A's for those accustomed to a different grading system.) I didn't really care about the grades, but I sent those letters because he had disrespected me for my entire life, and because I didn't live the life that he wanted me to live. I didn't measure up to the standards that he held to be important. In the University, I competed against myself. I used to get my papers back from professors without grades, because as they said, I had grown beyond grades. Those who gave me grades, gave me an A or better. Sometimes, my papers were read to the class as an example of what a good paper should be.
I think it is a great danger for parents to try to force their values on their children. Kids need to be free to make their own choices. My mother, for example, held the French at the highest level of culture and sophistication and thus she forced my sister to take ballet lessons from some old French lady, because she wanted my sister to fulfill the dreams that she never achieved. She convinced my sister to give up a four year scholarship to a prestigious University to attend a finishing school that my sister hated. This hurt my sister, and I think it harmed her that my mother tried to live her life through my sister.
Right now, my daughter is in high school and she hates it. She hates the drudgery, the mindless memorization, the pedantry of German schools. I have suggested that we move to the US so she could go to school in a place that is more free. The German idea of education is to train every single individual to be an engineer, whether they like it or not. I don't agree with this German concept that everyone must study and fry their brains. My daughter doesn't want to be an engineer or some sort of mechanical type. Like most females, she likes interaction with people and wants to find a place in human society, not the life of a 9-to-5 factory robot. I worry about the harm being done to her psyche by Germans regimentation in this world of thoughtless cruelty. And make no mistake, it is cruelty to steal the youth of a human being and make them suffer because of some inhumane value system.
I for one feel that we should give children a choice. We shouldn't force them to study. We shouldn't enslave them in a school system which sucks the life out of them. If they want to do math and science, fine, but we shouldn't force our beliefs on them. It's their life, let them live it without the tyranny of compulsion to a value system that they may never share.
I rebelled against my mother who tried to get me to take stupid dancing lessons so I would be an upright young man and thus be an attractive partner to some young lady. I rebelled against my father using me as cheap labor when he had dirty jobs to do. I rebelled against the regimentation of the school system. I ended up in college because I had perseverance and grit, and I did well in the University because I got to choose what I wanted to do as soon as all the mindless required classes were behind me. I excelled when I was free to make my own choices. I was no longer stifled by the rules and regulations of the insane adult world.
Freedom from tyranny, my friends. It's the only answer to life.
No, even if you are self-assured and not going to buckle, it gets old. There are better things to do in life than listen to a nagging wife.
Or a nagging father.
As one of 4 daughters, raising 3 boys of my own, I agree with your assessment of the sexes. I am also glad that I have boys to raise. Even though "white male" is a bad word these days, the job of growing up female must be harder in a world that can no longer answer the question "What is a women?". I am now almost at the point where I've spent equal time as the "corporate career woman" and as the "stay at home mom". The latter has by far been more fulfilling than the former.
But I disagree with the premise that the University is where your daughter will find the smart and motivated male. The University is where your daughter (and sons) will find the obedient, mask wearing Marxist. In the US, universities are still requiring masks and they are wholly liberal, gender ideology, Marxism factories. And any career in STEM will be to advance the Fourth Industrial Revolution....why do you think it has taken such a front seat in education and touted by the likes of Bill Gates, etc.? If you're on top, you'll be advancing the technologies; if you're on the bottom, you'll be operating the robots. But either way, the goal is to continue to diminish the trades, the whole of middle class, and let AI run the world while the children that grew up with STEM video games as their education in public school can simply guide and control the robots from their cells.
Our home education for our 3 boys consists of cleaning, cooking and general taking care of oneself as well as animal husbandry, gardening, food preservation and all things homesteading. As this world advances toward the WEF agenda (The Great Reset, Agenda 2030, Technocratic takeover...whatever you want to call it), self-sufficiency and working with their hands to care for themselves, seem to be the most important tasks for my children to learn - to be the adults in the new world that we are entering. We have no desire for them to go to any university, for it will certainly cost too much, provide them with completely different morals and values than those of our family, will most certainly require many vaccines for attendance (or a constant fight to retain a medical exemption which will only bring with it masks and endless testing)...all the reasons they are not in public school today would be thrown away for the "prestige" of a diploma that is not affordable, is never good enough, only requiring more and more education to be worth anything, and is ever being viewed by the eyes of most as a colossal waste of time. My children can read and write, we memorize poems and scripture, hand write letters to relatives, read gobs of books, learn a little Latin and spend most of our time outside, learning to work the land and become less dependent on the ever crumbling system.
Food in Ukraine may be easier to get in the collapse than it will be in the US, so that is our focus (as we already covered eating and heating without fuel when we purchased a wood cookstove last year). But how old are the farmers and vendors that you buy from? You may have food for your family today, but who is going to grow the food for your children? If they come to the US, it will be the meatless burgers with bugs and veggies grown in Bill Gate's indoor warehouses. We are returning to the "Little House on the Prairie" days, where the work is done by the family, for the family. Self-sufficiency of the household....I used to make $$$ to buy the organic, local food grown by someone else. Today, I spend the time growing the food instead of working to pay someone else to grow the food.....I see no other way!
I want to point out that we are both preparing to "heat and eat" without the system/grid/electricity. As are my friends in London and in France. This further points to the fact that we are all at war - 5th Generational warfare - that isn't as obvious as your guns and tanks in the streets, but the results are the same. It also points to the fact that "The Agenda" seems to be advancing. We need to be preparing our children to get out of the system - completely. There is no middle ground...you are out of it or you are part of it. And while being out of it will be hard work and will take immense determination (never thought I would learn to milk a cow at the age of 40), being part of it is not human nature.
"In structuring her life such that she did not need me, she made it so I did not need her."
That's a great line, Graham. Truly.
Wonderful piece! We could buy a farm here and do the same.
I am happy to say that a lot of the young men I know understand what's going on and are just as wary as you are. I think more will be. With regard to STEM, it's very broad. Certainly does include the nasty stuff you name. My kids will be primed to recognize and avoid it. Hope that works.
I'm encouraging Eddie to study agronomy. Even on one's own organic farm it helps to have an education about how agriculture works.
What a wonderful comment! There is a constant struggle between parents and children, between the kids' desire for freedom and the parents' desire - obligation - to form them to be proper adults. It is as old as time, and there is no proper solution. Alison Gopnik has a good analogy - the gardener and the carpenter. We want to train them as to which directions to grow, but not shape them as a (German) carpenter into some predefined final form.
I've been following you with interest for several years. Your move to Ukraine, and your finding of a wife, and your having of another family, was an amazing and successful Hail Mary Pass.
But, if I may, and since you invited comments, what I see here in this essay would have been sufficient in 1950s America, where the surrounding culture exerted pressure on people to marry and have children. But when I google total fertility rate in Ukraine, I get numbers like 1.2, maybe 1.4. Isn't this objective evidence that Ukrainian culture no longer exerts pressure, or enough pressure, on people to have kids? If so, then *you*, and your wife, and grandma, must supply that missing pressure. You must imbue your children with an *obligation* to get married and have kids---that not doing so would be unacceptable, a betrayal of their mother and father, an act of shameful ingratitude to all their ancestors and for all that has been given to them and for all that they now enjoy, for their very existence on earth, that they have a responsibility to carry on the line, and not let the family end in failure. And that they must imbue this same obligation in their own children. And secondly, you must repeat and instill in them that life is far more fulfilling and meaningful when one has children, it is the creation of more people that you love and who love you in return, and that hedonists who never have families, after their youth is gone, and as they age, end up alone, miserable, wretched, empty, and without meaning. This must all be taught to them, as much as you teach them reading and music.
I didn't see any mention of this in what you wrote, and I fear without it, your ancestral line will peter out with your Ukrainian children, as it did with your American. Neither culture is doing its job anymore.
Some comments about Ukraine. First, it must be known that Ukrainians during the Soviet years lived in tiny apartments and had no opportunity to improve their lives materially. The fact that they lived in such tight quarters affected their view of life and their desire to have a family. Housing was so tight that a divorced couple had to continue to live together for years because it was impossible to find another place to live. In addition, it must be noted that Ukrainians because they were deprived of material opportunity became the very materialists that Stalin tried to stamp out. For the past thirty years, Ukrainians and Russians were only interested in material success. They wanted what the west had: cars, vacations, clothes, bigger houses. They became far more obsessed with material goods than those in the west, because they had been deprived for generations. They felt that life under the Soviets was a misery and life after the fall of the Soviets was worse and caused more suffering. Every Ukrainian girl that I have ever known wanted one child and no more. The maternal instinct was there, but more than one child created an impossibility. A life without comfort. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been no stability, no sense of security, a disappointment for those who saw the glitter of the west. It's no wonder that Ukrainians and Russians do not repopulate the world. Life had been ugly and a misery for them. Right now, they are fighting a war to simply have the opportunity to survive. If they survive and prosper afterwards, the birth rate might go up, but on the other hand, the war is killing the future of the country, because the soldiers who die fighting will never have more children. The young men who would have fathered the future are dying in the trenches of Donbas. Their women have fled the country and may never come back, because life in the west is far better than life in Ukraine. For a very few, life is grand in Ukraine, but for most it is hard work and suffering.
Thanks for adding to the discussion. Yes, all part of the equation.
Graham what a refreshing essay.
I note that many will disagree and if they are male, may I suggest you just made them very uncomfortable? I think many issues you present have their origins in the "suffrage movement" of the late 1800s. It was a time when men surrendered the role as head of household (the one who set the parameters for the family) and women abandoned motherhood (raising and training children).
In some cases, men outright abandoned the family and mothers took on the provider role while still raising and training children. However, the early suffrage leaders had maids, nannies, and other servants to take care of the raising and training of the children. Men stopped adoring the wife/mother of their children in favour of gentlemen's clubs, gaming, hours in the pubs, or other actual business pursuits. Men no longer needed to be home, just like the mother who now had various servants to assist.
This was followed by WWI and then WWII. Men went off to war, and mothers went to work and came home to raise children exhausted. The washing machine was invented and now the need to be home for this one daily time-consuming chore vanished. Many more time saving inventions followed, creating more time freedom and manufacturing profits.
Men either now deceased, suffering war trauma or injury were now readily replaced by a workforce who found meaning outside of the home. The government, business, and society, in general, approved of working mothers. Early school entry age or nursery care establishment became an acceptable industry often with government oversight and subsidy.
People like the Rockafellers and Getty's can share the burden by promoting the lowering of wages so it took more than one wage earner to provide for a family. Yes, I think many men reading this will be made very uncomfortable.
I can see we agree but that may be a function of our ages. I've not been burned by my previous errors in marriage but my last was a real partnership with an accomplished women, once a well placed executive that experienced the glass ceiling. In our marriage she elected a new career as an educator. My grand children are a joy and seem to be on a good path. I like to think my children grew up in a traditional family much along the lines you are defining.
When my daughter was about three, somebody in Kyiv asked me what I wanted for her. I said, I don't want anything for her. I want her to decide what she wants to do with her life. I want her to make her own decisions about what she wants.
When I was a boy, I fought for the freedom to be myself. My dad was a builder, a building contractor, and of course he took me to work sites where I did a lot of the dirty work that he didn't want to do. I resented it and I chose an entirely different life for myself. I don't think my dad ever read a book. I remember him criticizing me for having no ambition, but he couldn't see the drive that was within me. When I was in college, I used to send him the letters that I received from the University Administration congratulating me for getting a 4.0 GPA. (All A's for those accustomed to a different grading system.) I didn't really care about the grades, but I sent those letters because he had disrespected me for my entire life, and because I didn't live the life that he wanted me to live. I didn't measure up to the standards that he held to be important. In the University, I competed against myself. I used to get my papers back from professors without grades, because as they said, I had grown beyond grades. Those who gave me grades, gave me an A or better. Sometimes, my papers were read to the class as an example of what a good paper should be.
I think it is a great danger for parents to try to force their values on their children. Kids need to be free to make their own choices. My mother, for example, held the French at the highest level of culture and sophistication and thus she forced my sister to take ballet lessons from some old French lady, because she wanted my sister to fulfill the dreams that she never achieved. She convinced my sister to give up a four year scholarship to a prestigious University to attend a finishing school that my sister hated. This hurt my sister, and I think it harmed her that my mother tried to live her life through my sister.
Right now, my daughter is in high school and she hates it. She hates the drudgery, the mindless memorization, the pedantry of German schools. I have suggested that we move to the US so she could go to school in a place that is more free. The German idea of education is to train every single individual to be an engineer, whether they like it or not. I don't agree with this German concept that everyone must study and fry their brains. My daughter doesn't want to be an engineer or some sort of mechanical type. Like most females, she likes interaction with people and wants to find a place in human society, not the life of a 9-to-5 factory robot. I worry about the harm being done to her psyche by Germans regimentation in this world of thoughtless cruelty. And make no mistake, it is cruelty to steal the youth of a human being and make them suffer because of some inhumane value system.
I for one feel that we should give children a choice. We shouldn't force them to study. We shouldn't enslave them in a school system which sucks the life out of them. If they want to do math and science, fine, but we shouldn't force our beliefs on them. It's their life, let them live it without the tyranny of compulsion to a value system that they may never share.
I rebelled against my mother who tried to get me to take stupid dancing lessons so I would be an upright young man and thus be an attractive partner to some young lady. I rebelled against my father using me as cheap labor when he had dirty jobs to do. I rebelled against the regimentation of the school system. I ended up in college because I had perseverance and grit, and I did well in the University because I got to choose what I wanted to do as soon as all the mindless required classes were behind me. I excelled when I was free to make my own choices. I was no longer stifled by the rules and regulations of the insane adult world.
Freedom from tyranny, my friends. It's the only answer to life.
In this sentence "Even a man with a strong ego will grow tired of being nagged and look elsewhere." did you mean without a strong ego?