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Elizabeth Doerr's avatar

Y’all are two of my faves! Thanks for watching so I didn’t have to 🤣

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Amy E. Harth, PhD's avatar

I definitely didn’t see the speech so thank you. I do wonder when society will start making room for a less binary conversation about caring for children. Currently, we have parents who are the people who give birth to and house children ostensibly for the child’s entire life. This is very much a Leave It to Beaver concept of the family. Divorce, death of a parent, step parents, queer, trans and nonbinary parents, polyamorous parents, multiple people raising children in the same house, grandparents and other family as the primary parents, none of this is normalized in our political conversation around parenting (or most others about raising kids).

I love my partner’s kids. I financially support all of us. I care to check up on and advocate for their well-being. I don’t consider myself a parent but if I was a man I’d probably be anointed as the best stepdad ever long ago because the bar is in hell. But it also means that I have no socially acceptable role here not even a convenient title especially as a nonbinary person. We can do so much better to encourage this village approach by actually acknowledging the villagers and making it easier for us to have a role in kids lives. Most people don’t want to do such hard work and be told that they aren’t really helping or worse be cast in some icky savior role.

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