3 thoughts on “Dumbing Them Down”

  1. OK, let me say at the outset, my Mrs doesn’t read blogs. So if I get run over by a truck later, it WAS an accident!

    My wife is one of the smartest people I know. She’s a great computer type, her instructors begged her to go into software in school as she had a ‘knack’. But she’s equally good at hardware and likes it better. It takers her just a few days working with new OS or software to know it.

    But she’s a pretty damned good auto mechanic, plumber and sheetrock assistant when I’ve needed one. She makes great biscuits, even though she doesn’t care to cook. She is great at math and has some aptitude for some math I don’t play at understanding.

    Having said all that (here’s where the opening disclaimer comes in), when she had our younger son and stayed home for his first year, I swear I was worried she’d had a stroke or something! After 5 or 6 months she couldn’t pour ‘p’ out of a boot with directions on the heel! It was scary to me. She was off, all told, about 16 months and she was fine after a few weeks working. Here’s MY arm chair idea.

    Here was a person who was used to thinking, working, talking to 10 or 12 adults an hour, responsible for writing, reading and accounting for her workload. She drove to and from work, shopped, etc like all who work outside the home. She also cleaned house, did clothes etc, like all of us who work.

    Put her in the house, with limited adult contact, talking to someone who doesn’t talk back, and who NOW just does the manual labor stuff, pretty soon her brain is not exercised!

    This is why men used to think women were dumb, IMHO.

  2. Having children isn’t economically rational.. especially in the modern western world where we don’t tend farms and child labor laws lengthen the duration of the drain of children on the family unit.

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