Meredith Thornburgh
@MCMCD_
In pursuit of human flourishing. Historian of household economics / phd student @Princeton / thinking about dignity, love and work / Catholic / mother of 1 🕊
Something insane and wonderful has happened to me. I have no idea how to cleverly lead into this story but here is the headline: I came across a random account on this very website some two months ago, we are now engaged to be married, I have never been happier in my life
any recommendations in Charlotte, NC? toddler (2yo), husband and I will be there for about a day, breaking up a long drive. restaurants, bookstores, parks, churches, anything welcome
New, from me. Citing @IvanaDGreco @MCMCD_ and lots of @FamStudies. Socialists don't understand what mothers actually need. They didn't even bother to ask.
My family is reeling over this upsetting news. My daughter has been planning on joining the University of Tulsa Honors college this fall. We had hoped we had found the perfect place for her 🧵
Now for some personal news: today is my last day as Dean. I was stunned to be informed by our new provost there will no longer be a Dean of Honors, period. Nor an Assistant Dean. Rather, I was told there will be a “director” of honors--but that person will not be me. (12/21)
Hugely demoralising. Jen is a trailblazer for successful classical liberal learning initiatives, built a top quality program at a major secular university. But it doesn’t matter how successful such initiatives are, for reputation and enrollment. An ideological bureaucrat will…
The University of Tulsa self-destructed several years ago. Then @bradrcarson started rebuilding, bringing in great people like @jennfrey. Now it’s self-destructing again. Pathetic.
A dear friend’s daughter decided to enroll at @utulsa Honors College on the basis of the wonderful work @jennfrey and others have done there. What a cowardly betrayal to announce this suddenly in the middle of the summer.
Now for some personal news: today is my last day as Dean. I was stunned to be informed by our new provost there will no longer be a Dean of Honors, period. Nor an Assistant Dean. Rather, I was told there will be a “director” of honors--but that person will not be me. (12/21)
Chesterton in 1932, one of my all-time favorite excerpts: “Some social reformers try to evade this difficulty, I know, by some vague notions about the State or an abstraction called Education eliminating the parental function. But this, like many notions of solid scientific…
He wants parity btwn daycare worker pay and public schoolteacher pay––so daycare worker salaries would need to roughly double. Then we're talking 1 caregiver for every 3 children––that's the state-mandated ratio for babies. This is an incredibly expensive program!
An ideal childcare system: (A) takes into account the full range of “childcare,” including parents, extended family, friends, and neighbors; (B) considers and respects the wishes and needs of individual families, which will be *different* both from family to family and from…
as I’ve been watching this unfold from NJ, aside from the rent stuff and the grocery store stuff and the transit stuff, I was really struck by this paragraph of Mamdani’s website. let’s just take the top part sentence by sentence:
Total strawman I don't even consider myself libertarian, but since we linked up with an explicitly libertarian network it's been a continuous barrage of invitations to child-centric family activities What's absurd is suggesting that daycare is basically the same thing
every accusation is a confession, so “the state sees the family as a competitor for influence” is wild the Perfect Libertarian Family is a fully isolated and atomized pod no community, friends, faith or mutual support because all of those are competitors to the Supreme Mom
There’s a key point in here that I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never really thought about in exactly these terms, but any plan to subsidize childcare out of the home is a decision to promote a particular societal and familial arrangement over its alternative in which the mother stays…
Socialists are incurious about a) what structural barriers are actually in place that make it hard to raise children in NYC and b) what types of childcare arrangements/amounts of coverage mothers actually want. (One-third wants partial coverage for part-time employment.…
Socialists are incurious about a) what structural barriers are actually in place that make it hard to raise children in NYC and b) what types of childcare arrangements/amounts of coverage mothers actually want. (One-third wants partial coverage for part-time employment.…
and sentence 3, reproduced here: “the burden falls heaviest on mothers, who are giving up paying jobs to do unpaid childcare.” let’s do a close reading. “the burden falls heaviest on mothers”—this campaign/worldview does not grant mothers an active role in these decisions about…