Summary
The 1560 painting “Children’s Games,” painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Question: What did kids do before Gameboy?
Answer: Everything.
Annotations
Important works:
Nicholas Orme’s Medieval Children.
Barbara Hanawalt’s The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Children’s Games.
1/ Bringing Up Bebe, by Pamela Druckerman, is the book about how the French raise children. Achtung Baby, by Sara Zaske, is a similar book about Germany. There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather tackles the subject from a Scandinavian point of view, and The Danish Way of Parenting will help you bring up tiny happy vikings. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, by Amy Chua, is about how Asian (Asian American?) mothers push their offspring to academic success. There’s basically an endless number of these books purporting to tell parents the same secrets: how to get your kids to eat vegetables, do their homework, and occasionally let you talk to your spouse without interrupting so you don’t entirely lose your mind and sense of self. In my professional opinion, some of it works, some of it doesn’t, and whether you lose your sense of self is entirely up to you.
Jesse: The “weird” (and horrible) part is how integral colonialist and imperialist perspectives are to a lot of the views of childrearing that we are discussing at the beginning of this episode. A breathtaking sense of entitlement is required for anyone to hold the incredibly patronizing view that someone (probably a white, western woman) is “discovering” child rearing techniques used by non-western cultures (or even western cultures of which the aforementioned woman is not a part!). It doesn’t matter how many times the woman acknowledges her privilege, the whole concept is still colonialist nonsense.
Em: I looked up the chapter I’m referring to, and the writer’s claim is a bit more circumscribed–she merely suggests that births in small-group hunter-gatherer societies (which, as she describes them, are basically egalitarian utopias) are painless, relaxed, guided only by the wise elder women of the tribe, and also lead to babies that develop better moral sense than the poor babies whose mothers have things like epidurals and C-sections available. Relatedly, please, if you are ever looking at someone with a PhD and feeling intimidated, remember that there are a ton of PhD-having people who are basically idiots.
2/ Jesse: I just went to see Free Guy (with Ryan Renolds and Taika Waititi), and there is a nice discussion about the importance and fun of swings.
3/ Pet rock.
4/ A roulette wheel actually has 37, 38, or 39 spaces, depending on if you are playing the single/double/triple zero version. Please credit this podcast when you win $2 off a guy in a pub.
5/ In Terry Pratchett’s Snuff, young Sam (Commander Sam Vimes’s son) very happily collects animal poo.
6/ Hula hoops are most closely related to an Australian exercise hoop made from bamboo brought back to the US in the 1950s, but hoops have been used for various reasons throughout history, the hoop dance being only one example. Check out the Tiktok of hoop dancer James Jones for a sample.
The toy/toys mentioned in Gilgamesh is/are actually called “pukku” and “mikku.” They appear in tablet XII, which contains a story of Enkidu glimpsing the underw...