5 ms·

Let's add "affluent and white and fortuitously non alcohol addicted" to "1950-1970" and I think you nailed it.

jacobolus 7y ago
Not being alcohol addicted is not “fortuitous”. Fortuitous means purely by chance; accidentally; without any known cause.
- tlb 7y ago
  It also means "Resulting in good fortune; lucky" in which sense the word fits perfectly. https://www.wordnik.com/words/fortuitous https://www.wordnik.com/words/fortuitous
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    It is sometimes used like “lucky” because people who have no idea what it means get it confused with “fortunate” and use the two interchangeably. If you want to use it to mean “lucky” it should be in the sense of “a purely accidental thing that happened to be good”, not just any good thing that happened. If I travel to a foreign city on a whim and meet my future spouse there, that might be fortuitous. (It would also be fortuitous if I travel on a whim to a foreign city, get hit by a truck, and end up paraplegic.) If I train for years and finally manage to achieve my dream of running a marathon, that is not fortuitous. Your link offers the definition “Happening independently of human will or means of foresight; resulting from unavoidable physical causes.”
- treebog 7y ago
  To a large extent, alcoholism is by chance, accidental, and without any known cause.
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    In many (most?) cases, not becoming addicted to alcohol is a straightforward result of deliberate repeated choices not to consume much alcohol. There are also people who regularly binge drink and don’t become addicts per se... I guess you could call that both fortuitous and fortunate? Or we can go all out and deny any human agency or choice, in which case I guess everything becomes fortuitous. This makes the word not very useful though.
FillardMillmore 7y ago
What does being white have to do with predominant parenting practices? If you would like to point out differences in parenting practices by race/wealth/class and possible causes for said discrepancies, then please do so.
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  I mean, considering the era they quoted, I would say that black people might've had a bit more trouble raising kids than white people in the 1950s-1970s for reasons I hope would be incredibly obvious.
  - FillardMillmore 7y ago
    Compared to whites in that time period, sure. The raising of kids seems to me to be a multifaceted issue. One interesting example: most would agree that having two parents in a household is better for raising kids. In the early 20th century, despite racism and segregation, black divorce rates and birth outside of wedlock was much lower than it is for blacks today. Of course, those rates have gone up for all races over time but more drastically so for blacks. As a result, the children are often brought up with one parent (which most would agree, means the children are worse off in that respect compared to black children of say 100 years ago). Whether or not this trend is a good or bad thing is a completely different discussion than that of the causality.
    - fzeroracer 7y ago
      Yes, but the point is that the era we tend to romanticize the most with 'free range parenting' tended to be something exclusive to white and/or affluent parents. Black children didn't really have that luxury at the time considering the systemic racism they encountered every step of the way. As a poor white kid when I grew up my parents didn't have the luxury to let me do my own thing because they were often out fishing for a week+ at a time out in the bay area. So I was either waiting in the dock house playing video games for shorter fishing trips or out there on the boat with them for longer excursions.
Baeocystin 7y ago
I spent my childhood in southeast asia. No one was what would be considered anything other than various levels of poor compared to the US. All of us neighborhood kids ran around in semi-feral packs and played together, being home before night, and I enjoyed it very much. Yes, there was a lot of work to be done. But kids got to be kids, too, and suffered none of the overscheduled insanity I see around me nowadays. Slight aside- I honestly think that being able to contribute to the household from a young age was good for our mental health, too. Even if (as an example) hunting grasshoppers for a snack was silly fun together, we were proud to hand over our catch, and it felt good to be appreciated by the adults.

Not being alcohol addicted is not “fortuitous”. Fortuitous means purely by chance; accidentally; without any known cause.

tlb 7y ago
It also means "Resulting in good fortune; lucky" in which sense the word fits perfectly. https://www.wordnik.com/words/fortuitous https://www.wordnik.com/words/fortuitous
- jacobolus 7y ago
  It is sometimes used like “lucky” because people who have no idea what it means get it confused with “fortunate” and use the two interchangeably. If you want to use it to mean “lucky” it should be in the sense of “a purely accidental thing that happened to be good”, not just any good thing that happened. If I travel to a foreign city on a whim and meet my future spouse there, that might be fortuitous. (It would also be fortuitous if I travel on a whim to a foreign city, get hit by a truck, and end up paraplegic.) If I train for years and finally manage to achieve my dream of running a marathon, that is not fortuitous. Your link offers the definition “Happening independently of human will or means of foresight; resulting from unavoidable physical causes.”
treebog 7y ago
To a large extent, alcoholism is by chance, accidental, and without any known cause.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  In many (most?) cases, not becoming addicted to alcohol is a straightforward result of deliberate repeated choices not to consume much alcohol. There are also people who regularly binge drink and don’t become addicts per se... I guess you could call that both fortuitous and fortunate? Or we can go all out and deny any human agency or choice, in which case I guess everything becomes fortuitous. This makes the word not very useful though.

FillardMillmore 7y ago

What does being white have to do with predominant parenting practices? If you would like to point out differences in parenting practices by race/wealth/class and possible causes for said discrepancies, then please do so.

fzeroracer 7y ago
I mean, considering the era they quoted, I would say that black people might've had a bit more trouble raising kids than white people in the 1950s-1970s for reasons I hope would be incredibly obvious.
- FillardMillmore 7y ago
  Compared to whites in that time period, sure. The raising of kids seems to me to be a multifaceted issue. One interesting example: most would agree that having two parents in a household is better for raising kids. In the early 20th century, despite racism and segregation, black divorce rates and birth outside of wedlock was much lower than it is for blacks today. Of course, those rates have gone up for all races over time but more drastically so for blacks. As a result, the children are often brought up with one parent (which most would agree, means the children are worse off in that respect compared to black children of say 100 years ago). Whether or not this trend is a good or bad thing is a completely different discussion than that of the causality.
  - fzeroracer 7y ago
    Yes, but the point is that the era we tend to romanticize the most with 'free range parenting' tended to be something exclusive to white and/or affluent parents. Black children didn't really have that luxury at the time considering the systemic racism they encountered every step of the way. As a poor white kid when I grew up my parents didn't have the luxury to let me do my own thing because they were often out fishing for a week+ at a time out in the bay area. So I was either waiting in the dock house playing video games for shorter fishing trips or out there on the boat with them for longer excursions.

Baeocystin 7y ago

I spent my childhood in southeast asia. No one was what would be considered anything other than various levels of poor compared to the US. All of us neighborhood kids ran around in semi-feral packs and played together, being home before night, and I enjoyed it very much. Yes, there was a lot of work to be done. But kids got to be kids, too, and suffered none of the overscheduled insanity I see around me nowadays. Slight aside- I honestly think that being able to contribute to the household from a young age was good for our mental health, too. Even if (as an example) hunting grasshoppers for a snack was silly fun together, we were proud to hand over our catch, and it felt good to be appreciated by the adults.