Tag: parenting

highpriestessraven:

millennial-librarian:

jabbakiller:

i think this is obvious, maybe not to disney, but leia deserves better than kyle ron. she deserves better than a son who has blatantly disregarded everything she’s ever stood for, disregarded the fact that she’s a genocide survivor, and that the man he idolizes tortured her and made her watch the extermination of her people. why would you expect her to love him when he very clearly doesn’t give a shit about her? leia deserves better than an arc that uses her as a plot device catch-all (because if leia ‘thinks’ there’s still ‘good’ in him we can just completely ignore everything he does in the mean time, right? until his very unlikely and undeserved redemption?) and is disrespectful to her entire character & history. leia deserves better than a patricidal, fascist, white supremacist murderer of a child who abducts women, tortures them, and says nasty things like ‘i can take anything i want.’ leia doesn’t owe kyle a single thing and she isn’t a bad person for washing her hands of him.

I pretty much just head canon that Poe is her new son.

i love poe and leia’s relationship, and i love the idea of the two having a familial bond alongside a work one, but every time someone calls him her “new son" it erases poe’s actual mother, shara bey, and downplays just how heinous kylo has been to leia

Idk, it’s pretty common for people who have lost parents, like me, to attach to other figures in their lives as new parents. That doesn’t mean they honor their deceased parents any less.

And I certainly don’t think it erases how heinous Kyle has been to his mom to say that his actions were enough to destroy the relationship.

Question, how old is Kylo Ren supposed to be in TFA? I know AD is like 30’sh. But I just saw where he refers to Kylo as a ‘kid’ and RJ said that thing about relating to someone struggling with adolescence. So is AD playing a way younger person? Is he supposed to be a teen even though he is over thirty? I’m honestly confused.

absolxguardian:

lj-writes:

You know what’s sad? This isn’t even the first time I’ve seen people confused about Kylo Ren’s age due to Rian’s and Adam’s comments. I’ve seen someone ask a similar question on Reddit, too.

To clear things up, yes, Kylo Ren is close to 30, not much younger than the actor who plays him (Adam Driver is 33). Ren was born Ben Solo in 5 ABY (after the Battle of Yavin), and the events of The Force Awakens took place in 34 ABY, making him around 29 during the movie.

I think the following comments by Adam about his character in an interview for the December, 2017 issue of GQ add a bit of clarification (emphasis added):

“It makes complete sense how juvenile he can be. You can see that with our leadership and politics. You have world leaders who you imagine — or hope or pray — are living by kind of a higher code of ethics. But it really all comes down to them feeling wronged or unloved or wanting validation.”

So no, the character isn’t juvenile in physical age, he just acts that way. I hope that clears things up. And no, that’s not because he’s a sweet confused baby or whatever, the actor himself is very clear that it’s about a lack of ethics. In the same interview Adam talks about the absolute conviction of terrorists as another influence on the portrayal of his character.

Kylo Ren, much like the real-life morally bankrupt people Adam refers to, may have real struggles and pain in his life. Who doesn’t? The point is that he chose to deal with those issues, or rather failed to, in an immature and entitled way and that is why he comes across as so adolescent.

Heck, it seems in universe, people are confused about Kylo’s age. He’s literally the age of the New Republic (like he shares his birthday with the signing of the galactic concordance), but in bloodline (6 years before TFA, Kylo is 24) Leia sees him as too young to tell him about Vader. 

Kylo does have the feel of someone whose development stalled off at some point in the past, and I wonder how much of it has to do with personal trauma and how much with the way he was raised. I suspect both.

On personal trauma, Ben’s relationship with his parents already appears to be distant at the time of Bloodline and we’re still in the dark about what sent Han and Leia into separation and prompted Leia to send their son to Luke. LucasFilm officials have stated that the murkiness in Han’s past is due to necessity.

On the parenting side, Leia’s decision also strikes me as someone trying to protect a part of herself, projecting onto her son and trying to protect in him an innocence she never had. She had watched her home planet be destroyed, been tortured mercilessly by a fascist enforcer (who turned out to be her biological father, yay), and learned about the Skywalker part of her heritage before she was Ben’s age at the time of the novel. People who went through a lot at a young age sometimes cope by trying to protect their own children, and it seldom works well. It’s alternately stifling and alienating to be treated as younger than your age, and Ben may have reacted with corresponding petulance and distance.

Leia may also have feared what additional strains the revelation might place on her relationship with her son. In this sense it was the relationship she was trying to protect–again, not an effective  strategy that relied on a lack of communication and avoiding difficult subjects rather than facing them as a family.

I think there is room to talk about Han and Leia as loving but flawed parents who were not always coping well with their own severe traumas, while also squarely placing the responsibility for Kylo Ren’s crimes on himself where it belongs. I have so much sympathy for Leia because I don’t even know how she could have functioned with the magnitude of what she had suffered, and blocking things out was perhaps the only way she could work or even survive. But it certainly had a terrible effect on her family life and, I believe, her child.

chiefrosepetal:

furiousgoldfish:

terrifying your own child into submission makes you an abuser.

watching your child cry and screaming at them to stop and invalidating their pain and reasons for crying makes you an abuser.

staring at your child in disgust and contempt after they displease you makes you an abuser.

threatening to your child to take away their basic resources if they don’t give you exactly what you want makes you an abuser.

forcing your child to feel ashamed for not living up to your ideals makes you an abuser.

using slurs, hateful names and insults on your own child without any regard to what it does to their mental health makes you an abuser.

forcing your child to chase impossible expectations and making them feel like they’re worthless for not achieving them makes you an abuser.

acting like your child is a burden and a waste of space and blaming their illness/disability/depression on it makes you an abuser.

behaving like your child will never amount to anything and isn’t worth any resources and nurturing makes you an abuser.

making your child feel like they’re never good enough makes you an abuser.

if your child’s heart is hurting because they know no matter what they do and how hard they try they will always be a failure in your eyes, you are an abuser.

if your child can’t look at themselves without self hatred because they had to look at themselves from your perspective and all they saw is disgust and hatred, you’re an abuser.

If your child is struggling to believe they have the right to live and to be cared and loved, if they can’t stop hearing your hateful voice putting them down and using their every action to prove they’re worthless, you’re an abuser.

If you watched your child in pain and ensured them they deserved it, you’re an abuser.

If your child can’t love themselves from how badly you hated them, you’re an abuser.

Guys, this NEEDS more reblogs.

People go through this all the time regularly, I can hardly name a family in my town whose children don’t tell me stories like the ones above.

Emotional abuse is a real problem these days and the children in those households don’t know that it’s not normal, or at least it shouldn’t be normal, until they are older. If they ever find out at all, that what they went through wasn’t right.

It is not a tool of effective parenting.

And to those children and teens who are going through this today, you are not alone. I know feels like it but you aren’t. You have to do what is best for you sometimes, if distancing yourself from your parents makes it better, do that. If talking to your best friend about it makes you feel better, please do that. This won’t last forever, you will grow up and move out and see that the world loves you.

You are beautiful and strong and I believe you can make it through this.

thelibrarina:

tsreena:

baby: *incomprehensible babbling*

me: WHAT!? really??? no way :0

This is actually really good for babies’ brain development. You’re laying the groundwork for conversation, teaching them through example that people take turns talking and listening.

Did you know that babies from affluent families hear an average of thirty MILLION more words before age 5 than babies in families below the poverty line? For context, Les Miserables is about 650,000 words and it looks like this:

So it’s like reading this book 46 times.* And that’s not the total number of spoken words, that’s the GAP between affluent and poor babies. And these are the years in which the brain undergoes the most development. It’s mind-boggling.

So what I’m saying is: keep doing the thing. Do it to all babies, all the time. Narrate your day. Ask them for opinions. (“Should we buy the large bag of potatoes or the small bag?” “Gaabooglagje.” “Yes, just as I thought.”) Point out colors and shapes and letters. Let them scribble outside the lines and treat their babble like talk. Sing them nursery rhymes and Raffi songs and songs from the radio. All of these things are going to build their brains to prepare them for kindergarten and beyond.

*Please do not read Les Mis 46 times to an infant. They don’t even care about the Parisian sewer system.

How was Luke even affected by his “father’s” death? Vader was barely a person and never loved Luke in the first place. Kylo used to love Han, but Snoke tore them apart and caused Han to go smuggling.

There is such a thing as mourning a relationship you might have had, a person you could have known but never got to. Children of abusive or absent parents can attest to this very well. Not every person who had a bad or neglectful parent feels this grief for what might have been, of course. They might, indeed, feel nothing or even relief at the death of that parent. Leia, for instance, doesn’t seem to have felt much af a connection to Vader or particular grief at his death for very understandable reasons–she grew up with parents she knew and loved, for one thing–and I am very glad that her response is presented to be as valid as Luke’s.

That said, the fact that some children of inadequate or hurtful parents feel no grief at their parents’ passing does not invalidate the pain that other such children feel at the same event. I’m frankly angry that you feel the need to devalue Luke’s very real grief at losing a father he had dreamed of since childhood. And for what? To woobify the mass-murdering patricidal Vader fanboy?

So here’s an exceedingly modest proposal for you, anon: There is no need to shit on Luke’s loss to empathize with Kylo Ren’s.

Here’s modest proposal number 2: If you don’t want to lose your father, NOT SHOVING A DEADLY WEAPON INTO HIS GUTS IS A FUCKING GOOD START.

to-intuit:

Teach boys how to be soft
To hug with their whole hearts
Hug your boys
Love them
Tell them you love them
Teach them the greatest battles are won by the heart not the fist
Teach them intimacy is more than birds and bees
Teach them young so they won’t have to unlearn later like Daddy does
Hug your boys