Backroads

I think we're all guilty of it to some extent. I was catching up on this thread and felt prompted to reply here, so here we go: I do try to make an honest and earnest effort to love others, and to a degree I think I'm pretty good at it and can adopt a live-and-let-live attitude. The administrator directly over me at my job was a woman I initially worried about, however. Very progressive (which while common enough many people are surprised to see at a charter school), practically pioneered the pronoun inclusion in her communication, and while not exactly outspoken doesn't hide her views. At this point I'd take a bullet for that woman. She is amazing and truly loving and adores the LDS people (apparently an LDS family took her in during a hard time in her youth) and spoke up for our more conservative families when there was some issues with the curriculum. Yes, we love our ideologies and I think even the best of us have trouble seeing beyond our pet biases. But I think we can all make an effort.

We certainly have communities of faith, though some in different ways. But I feel it sometimes.

My understanding from friends in that area is that despite the many accommodations culture is still tricky to change. They may have, for example, lengthy maternity leave, but to a certain extent women aren't actually supposed to use all of it. All the working mother's accommodations in the world just aren't going to make up for not being active in one's career. So, yeah, you're right on that front.

There was a "The Good Place" meme I can't find in order to respond to this/bother @Vort but I can't find it.

I dislike when this is done with MLMs.

Honestly, my kids handled it better than, after all I mused about here, I thought they would.

*Bawls in trauma*

I spent a bit of the morning pondering on the parent/career thing. I know this may wax controversial, but at least in my area and circles I've seen an uptick in more family-friendly work positions. Love or hate the idea of working from home, I honestly think it works great for some people and companies, and I think communities are responding to that with more child-trading and whatnot. Which is all to say, you don't necessarily have to ditch your child at daycare for twelve hours.

I feel like those really address the spirit of the goal.

Proceeding with the conversation, I think, is key. Many people don't necessarily have all the info you think they have and they want to proceed to, oh, get more information, roll more information around, etc. I do a commitment pattern in my job (with actual paperwork) and it never works.

I hear this far too often. The trouble is that once you have a career you kind of have to maintain said career and that's not always easy when you start your family in the middle of it. I tend to advise having kids when you're still trying to figure some things out (I of course advise marriage and some semblance of a plan to keep body and soul together) as I think in some ways it's easier to bring in kids when you don't have this fancy settled life and kids can just fit into the growth. I have single female friends and family who are pretty much accepting they are realistically going to miss the childbearing years.

Yup, that one. My kids grew up watching the first two on various movie nights with us and love them. Loved the cartoon series. Hence wanting to see this one.

And this is one of the reasons I was talking to people: heard it was dark, it upset Friend, etc. I'm not still sure how to judge it on that rating scale (you likely have a better frame of reference than myself). I personally thought Multiverse of Madness pushed the envelope further. So, yeah, I was definitely wondering about taking the kids to it and trying to get a better feel for exactly what that meant. Visually I'd say I found Multiverse of Madness darker, at least as far as stuff one could see. Thematically this one was darker and more disturbing. @Ironhold still has better training on me to decide. 🙃 Overall I really enjoyed it and as a person who tends to enjoy Marvel movies (not the greatest of art but I know what to more or less expect and find it entertaining) I thought it was their best film in years, but it really did get me thinking about what goes into ratings and that those advance reviews were definitely into something.

I may have to be that parent...

I know my one friend would have appreciated more precise warning than she got. But even the she admitted she still went on knowing it might upset her.

I feel rather out of the movies myself. But my Cinemark club thing keeps reinstating itself no matter what I do so we've been trying the movie thing now and then.

Now I want to know what you would have guessed had I made you.

Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3, which I believe was @Godless's theory.

I remember watching that as a kid because my parents were nostalgic, and even as a tween I was weirded out.

This is one I usually check, but it still feels like the scene-that-bothered-me-most just wasn't recognized.

Today we went out on a family outing to see a recent movie of a PG-13 rating despite not having any children 13 and up. This was a movie my children wanted to see, having thoroughly enjoyed other movies of its kind. A friend of mine had actually walked out for about 5 minutes (until her husband texted her it was okay to come back in) of this movie, which led to me hemming and hawing and wondering if I should take my kids to see this movie. I went on various sites and forums and spoke with others (including aforementioned friend who happens to be insanely sensitive to certain things) including several ladies from my ward. After sifting through the information I was given and talking with Husband about it and usually hearing that if kids can handle similar movies and admitting they've been around a lot of other PG-13 movies in our household and I maybe tell them to shut their eyes at this one part, we decided to forgo my original plan to see the movie first without children and through caution to the wind. In the end, my kids loved it (as did myself and Husband. I mean no harsh criticism of the film itself). I instructed them (the kids) to close their eyes at the scene I was warned about, and generally found that as far as the visual stuff I was worried about, it was not nearly as gruesome as I feared. (I'm not sure where to put that on a line for anyone else, just that I was fearing one thing in my mind and was relieved to see something else). And yet, I wish I had been warned about other things. The worst stuff in the movie was definitely implied rather than showed, rather left up to the imagine to get worse the more one thinks about it. It's difficult to decipher just how much my kids properly thought about such things as it seemed they pretty much were going off the face value stuff, based on our post-movie conversation. But for my sake at least, I wish I had been warned about the scene that upset me the most. It was a scene that had been brought up in my research, but not once had it been one of the ones with a warning label. I found an article about said movie written by a dad who took his own kid (a few years younger than my non-toddler) who afterwards was concerned about what he had just shown his child. He pondered on the spectrum of family-friendliness and unfriendliness and it was a good article. But even then he talked specifically about the have-your-kids-close-their-eyes scene. So, graphic violence. That is so often a solid, easy line. Tons of harsh language. Another often solid, easy line. The scene that upset me, while still rather awful, doesn't quite fit the solid, easy line. It was part of the story. It drove some stuff forward. I certainly appreciate it in a story-telling perspective. I don't know if it upset my kids more than it upset me, but it was something that I would have liked to have been warned about to at least make that judgment call for my kids (and probably myself). To go back to my pre-film research, the stuff most friends and random interweb people thought was the worst and most disturbing was, again, mostly implied rather than shown. As far as the plot went, great stuff for storytelling and in my case, stuff I don't think my kids really thought much about beyond the obvious. This all leaves me obviously thinking more about the movies I take my kids to, but it also leaves me wondering about the stuff we worry about in media. It's not that I don't appreciate drama and wild escapades in my escapist entertainment, but I am amazed at the various things people find "the bad part". There it is, my random thoughts on the upsetting part of a movie I probably should not have taken my kids to but they'll probably be streaming anyway in a few months (another thing that's probably important to tackle with media) while I pick a few bones with a few gals in my ward.

We've been playing a campaign with the kids. Frankly, I love D&D. Or, rather, the fantasy role-playing general game system. D&D has all sorts of head-scratching events going on with it that it's very possible I'll one day shift to another system with less dramatics. But I think there's enough stubborn old people playing the game and ignoring the surrounding politics it has some life in it.

Ooh, I do this far more often than I should. Couple of years ago caused more drama than I intended. A mom wanted to take her kid's test for him. After she argued with me a bunch, I finally said my hands were tied (it was for a baseline assessment for state data, not even graded) and that maybe she could contact the ed department to argue her case. It didn't go well.

Oh, our admin at the meeting is very good at these kinds of remarks and actually addressed those first two in subtle around-about ways. She can't homeschool because she's a single mom to a bunch of kids who also has to take care of her sick and elderly relatives and she is the only one earning an income (this is actually why there was a truancy meeting as nothing was getting done because she was never home) and therefore can't afford to homeschool because who would earn an income and pay the bills? She also can't move out of state because of sick and elderly relatives she has to take care of. (Frankly, there was a collective eyeroll post meeting). ETA: I also should mention that because we're in Utah it's next to impossible to counsel people out of publicly funded schools due to our school choice laws, so that often makes for funny stories.

Had an event last week that can barely be qualified as an incident, but it has stayed with me for several reasons. It was with my work (an online school). We were having a truancy meeting with a family. Again, it was interesting in many ways, but Mom's big argument for why her family needs a way around the truancy issue is because of religion. Her family is very religious (not Latter-Day Saints) and do not want to attend in-person school due to problematic influences. Okay, I can totally respect that. Not an uncommon reason for people attending our school at all. She complained about stuff in our curriculum but how it was still better than she could see what was there and discuss these things with her kids. Again, very fair and understandable. The odd thing was that she kept saying "You Mormons just don't understand. I used to be Mormon and no one understands how important these family values are." The thing was, I'm positive I was the only church member at that meeting. Yet she just kept repeating stuff about how Mormons don't understand anything and referring to us as "those Mormons" just because we happen to be located in Utah just like her. Nothing came of it, but it was really strange for a professional setting.