Dolls childish? Weapons violent?

For years now I hear strange things like:
Young teens (13yo - 14yo's) shouldn't be playing with dolls, that is childish - why?
Boys shouldn't play with weapons, that makes them violent men - why?

I will go into my thoughts on this below a bit.

Dolls
In a tribal community young teenagers have babies to spend time with and to practise on to learn how to handle a baby. The mothers of these babies are also there, or the aunts, grandma's etc. So the girl learns under supervision how to do this. In some communities those young teenage girls end up being responsible for the majority of the care and entertainment of these babies.
They carry them a lot when the mother is busy with activities which make it difficult to wear the baby. These young teenage girls have quite a bit of responsiblity, also within their community with helping with all the other adult tasks. They start doing those before they are getting a partner and have babies, in general.
So in general by the age of 13 to 14 they are participating in the adult world.
In our world they are considered children until they are done with their studies, which could be 26, so pretty much double the age of maturity in a tribal community.
By nature, children expect to be entering the adult world from about 13 - 14 years of age.
This is one of the reasons why teenagers can be difficult, they are treated like babies, which they are not. They are supposed to be taking care of babies, house, cooking etc. Of course in our world that will have to find other outlets than in a tribal community.
With this in mind I don't think its childish for a 13yo to play with a doll like it is a real baby and I also think that its pretty educational for them when mothers explain to them how things would work with a real baby, iso telling them off for being "childish".
I really do think that girls of 13 - 14 should be slowly but carefully get more taken into the adult world. Its really important for them in their growth.

Weapons
Another hang-up in our western world. Boys aren't supposed to play with weapons it makes violent men out of them.
I think this is rubbish, just examine what happens in tribes that live more natural.
There boys have a bow and arrow that they use and learn how to use from a young age. Of course its made to size.
But the learning starts very young, they need to learn to hunt, they need to learn that to be able to help feed the tribe later on when they are older.
At about the age of 10 to 14 they go out with the men hunting, give and take a few years as this is different in every tribe.
At some point they start with small animals and the better they get the bigger the animals they can help hunt.
There is nothing wrong with that, they learn to use the weapons and learn how to provide food. This is still a natural instinct in our boys.
If only more people would recognize that and work with that life would be much easier on all.

I have a 13yo and I do see how much she loves messing with our 3mos old baby. The baby also enjoys it and it does give me quite a bit of space to do things without carrying her.

Respect

Today my 4yo told me that when she was in the paddling pool of neighbours one of the children there kept throwing water on her and she asked him several times to stop, but he didn't.
This is respectless to me and makes me wonder how he was raised when he cannot respect a 4yo's begs to stop, being 15 himself.
To me that is just not right. I am always making sure that my girls do respect other people's requests to not do something when appropriate.

There are also things that my kids are being told they are not allowed to do something, which they are allowed to do, i.e. go into the woods.
Its really strange and as far as I am concerned again respectless to tell my kids that I would not allow them that, when I do. It would be good to first run it by me, me thinks.

Helicopter parents

A few thoughts that occurred to me today are the following ones.
In the past my kids have always been able to do their things with other kids without parents messing with it. We didn't have problems with that at all. The kids in the area would fall out every now and then and be friends again later on. No big thing, those things happen with kids from very different backgrounds. If it would be that they had grown up together, like in a tribal community, things would be different.
Then we move to this neighbourhood. And then the mess started.
All parents in this neighbourhood are helicopter parents, as they are continuously meddling with things. They do not let kids sort it out on their own.
In the beginning I didn't realize that, after a while I got annoyed with it that my kids got told off by neighbours for things they hadn't even done. I knew they hadn't, as either we all had been gone, or they had been inside with me or something like that.
Then, as things didn't improve, but only went worse, I started meddling with things as well and there I am, trying very hard not to be a helicopter parent, but having to be one for the sanity of our family and the children, I need to protect them from the extremely intimidating way other parents are treating them, which even involved stuff like one of my kids having to help clean up the room of one of them right at the moment she came into the house to play and after the cleaning up, inclding the hamster cage (!!) the were kicked out. This type of stuff is totally unacceptable to me.
Moreover so as those children need to immediately come home and do not have the time to help clean the mess they made. So, as a consequence I had to interfere and make sure that neither of these things happened again.
I sooo hate not being able to just let kids have a relaxed life with other kids, but have to keep a constant eye on things as other people think they can treat them like shit.

This particularly goes for the excusing of one child with special needs, but not the other, its all so sick to me.

neigbours suck

A bit of history first:
2 months ago one of my girls comes in with very nasty bruise marks on her throat. She came in a few minutes are we had come back with our baby from the doctor who was quite ill with a nasty cold at that time.
So we ask what happened. H had done it, after H had been bullied by C earlier that evening and my daughter went up to her to ask if she was okay, after C had gone in.
2 other girls were there as well.
We take photos of it and call the police as this was too much, this was assault. I had actually been thinking about going going to the A&E with it to have her checked out, but we didn't. We also didn't go to the doc the next day as we should have, hindsight.

A standard thing with the mum of C, R, is that she excuses H for everything as H has special needs and cannot help herself - and its not even a relative to her, WTF my girl that was assaulted also has special needs, asperger and can therefore not always interpret peoples ways in socializing very well, which is held against her and always explained as lying. Which gets me extremely pissed.

Fast forward to last night one of my girls comes in telling me that she was told off by R&K to not go near H.
We talked a bit and she told me that R had talked and K was there. That the comment or R was that "they weren't allowed to play together" "you weren't allowed to be together" or something like that.
My girl was called to come over by C, the daughter or R and hadn't seen that H was there, else she would have stayed away as she doesn't want to risk trouble.
So when she heard that comment she left and told me about it, which I consider quite normal.
My partner got ticked off by this type of stuff happening again and again around here and went to the top of our garden and looked at them.
First he got a snarky grin by K - who has been actively ignoring me for a few months now after stating last year that she wanted to be friends.... - which got him actually more pissed.
Then R started talking to him, which in the end got him and me more and more pissed as R stated that our daughter is *always* lying.
We asked for an example and she comes with and example which is a total lie, she actually tried to get her daughter to say stuff to confirm her, but her daughter only looked down at the road, and didn't say anything, which made it even more clear to me what was going on. I feel very sorry for her daughter to have to put into those positions over and over again by her own mother. The daughter has at times even excused herself to me for the things her mother says and does. That is really scary, when a 10yo knows her mum is doing wrong stuff.
This 10yo has also at times told me that I am the only adult that you can actually talk with normal.
In the end the baby started crying so I went in, but my partner stayed with the conversation for a while and got totally insulted when he got the "parenting advice" that you shouldn't believe everything children say. Pardon.... my own middle child was there and got extremely insulted by it, as she is trying to tell me as much as possible about what is happening to make sure I know about everything before someone comes with stupid comments again.

A really stupid incident was at some point that this same mum R comes to our door with a whole big story and obviously didn't know jack shit about what had happened as I had been there and knew what had happened, but then she preferred staying with her own story, although she had been at work at the time it happened, what a way to deal with things.
At least one of the comments then was that her house is always tidy... like that has anything to do with it.... I could have stated that we always eat healthy - as we do, that didn't have anything to do with the kids argument either.

I am getting so sick and tired of this crap and have had a nice wish of moving, but for now we cannot afford that. So I will have to do quite a bit of work with the law of attraction to get a nice friendly neighbourhood fixed.

Breastfeeding musings

Today we were out. We went to the market and the shopping mall. First the market and then for lunch to the mall. When we were sitting there having lunch I noticed 2 women coming in with their babies.
The blond woman's baby was very young, I suspect only a few days old. The mother had trouble walking and looked like she had just given birth. Her partner was with her, but she was pushing the pram and holding the shopping bags. It looked strange to me.
The other woman's baby was about 3 months I think, looking at the behaviour of that baby in comparison to my own.
When I was observing them I was wondering how they would ever survive in another area of this world.
Both babies were in prams, no carrying.
Both babies were bottle fed.
The oldest baby's mum was continuously rattling with a bright coloured plastic toy in front of the baby's crying face. She was just continuing her conversation.
In view of my own views of child care, this was all very wrong.
I couldn't understand how a crying baby could just be ignored. I could also not understand that someone would not want to have a baby close to them, like on their lap or something like that.
Furthermore I totally fail to understand why only 1 in a 100 women in the UK follow the advice of health care professionals to breastfeed their baby.
BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6653679.stm

A baby expects at birth to be breastfed, the whole body of the baby is designed to digest human milk, not a substitute. For a baby its the norm to be breastfed, why do most people not see that.

A baby expects to be held a lot, not being put in some place, but expects to be with mum or dad, or big sister, aunt, uncle, who ever. Somebody that can protect the baby from harm. That is an expectation baby has at birth, its inside the baby, its disturbing for a baby to put somewhere alone, its traumatising.

A baby expects interaction with people, not plastic.

A baby expects to be nurtured at the breast, comforted at the breast, not at a plastic dummy.

A baby expects to be taken seriously, not ignored, because this and that writer, who didn't have kids when they wrote the book or has totally mentally disturbed kids, says that babies only need attention 1x every 3 hours and doesn't need anything when they are fed and cleaned.
I sure as hell need more attention than that, so why can a baby not get the same amount of attention.

Just like that I do not like to have to wee and poo in my underpants, that is just not right, babies also know when they need to eliminate. They expect help with that. Most people won't give them that help.

That's all for now with my frustrations of the day. No doubt more to come later.