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  "path": "/post/810691814377095168",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-10T09:46:01.000Z",
  "site": "https://tumblr.sztupy.hu",
  "tags": [
    "daisukitoo",
    "ismenes"
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  "textContent": "daisukitoo:\n\n> ismenes:\n>\n>> When my son was about to turn two, strangers would offer condolences. There’s a collective cultural dread of toddlers, who get described more like animals than people. Kids in their “terrible twos,” I was warned, are illogical, unregulated, and feral. “Good luck,” people would say. “He’ll grow out of it.”\n>>\n>> I’m lucky: My son is a very easygoing kid. But I remember the first tantrum he threw for me. He was standing by our front door and asked to go outside. So I opened the door and grabbed his shoes. But as soon as he stepped onto the porch, he pointed back into the house.\n>>\n>> “Inside,” he said.\n>>\n>> “Okay,” I said. I picked him up and brought him inside.\n>>\n>> But as soon as I shut the front door, he pointed outside.\n>>\n>> “Outside!” he said.\n>>\n>> You know where this is going. We went back and forth, inside and outside, again and again. He got more frustrated. And I got more frustrated. Eventually he wound up straddling the threshold of our house, sobbing. When I tried to comfort him, he screamed at me. “You go wherever you want!” I said. He just got madder. I felt trapped, convinced he’d concocted the whole episode as a pretext to unleash his rage at me. It was ridiculous. I consoled myself with the thought that he was just being a toddler.\n>>\n>> But later I kept thinking about him wailing at our front door, one foot inside, one foot outside. His misery wasn’t unreasonable, or trivial, or silly. My son was experiencing the agony of wanting two things that were impossible to have at the same time. What a fundamentally human sorrow! My son wasn’t being a toddler; he was being a person. Adults may not walk around howling, but that same pain rages within us. In that moment, as a father, I was powerless to solve my son’s problem. I told him he could go wherever he wanted, but of course I was wrong. To be where he wanted was impossible.\n>>\n>>> _Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children_ by Mac Barnett\n>\n> Childhood neurological development is existing in a state of Lovecraftian existential terror and horror. You are constantly becoming dimly aware of things about yourself and the world, but you are aware of them before you have the neurological capacity to understand them fully, and even if you could you lack the linguistic capacity to express them, and even if you could you lack the power to affect them. You are subject to immense forces beyond your control, and you are just becoming aware of how immense and how uncontrolled.\n>\n> In this story this child is discovering things like:\n>\n>   * Impossible states of affairs exist\n>   * Some desires cannot be achieved\n>   * Your parents can summon light and food and Elsa the Snow Queen but cannot or will not create a simple state of affairs like “both inside and outside”\n>   * The feeling of frustration exists\n>   * Some states of affairs are impossible and others are not and there is little way of predicting in advance which options are mutually exclusive\n>   * The impossibility of some states of affairs can change and be dependent on factors you can neither foresee nor fully understand\n>   * Their own capacity to understand and express these things\n>   * The incompleteness of that capacity\n>   * That capacity is changing in ways they can neither foresee nor control\n>   * Sometimes that development will help them achieve what they want and sometimes it will just show them that their desires must remain frustrated\n>   * Life can be confusing and incomprehensible\n>   * You can hardly tell which things are incomprehensible or just not yet comprehensible\n>\n",
  "title": "When my son was about to turn two, strangers would offer condolences. There’s a collective cultural…"
}