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thinkerspace · 9 months

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The Problem with Daycares: Inconsistency in Authority and Attachment

For the last five years, all of my work hours (and most of my volunteer hours) have been spent in childcare or pediatrics. I took care of kids ranging from six weeks to twelve years old, and I did it in several settings — summer camps, daycares, clinics, and private homes. The time that I spent in childcare capitalized on my interest in child development, so along the way, I read a lot about developmental psychology and related subjects. I’m not a parent myself, but I’ve spent enough time in childcare to have one major gripe with the daycare setting in particular.

It’s been the extremely rare time that I’ve brought up problems with the daycare setting without anyone become defensive in response. It seems many parents with young children in daycare find it a personal offense for a daycare worker to imply that their decision is more likely harming their children than not. On the one hand, I can understand the reaction — some families need both parents to work, or some single parents can’t take care of their young children and work at the same time. On the other hand, it’s reasonable to evaluate a situation and say it can be — or even is — quite detrimental without passing judgment on people who have no other choice. I don’t think it’s a good thing that parents put their kids in daycare, but then again, it also wouldn’t be good if the whole family starved because not enough money was made. In some cases, putting a child in daycare is the best of several bad options. But that doesn’t make putting them in daycare a good option, and I would do everyone an injustice to pretend that it was.

I’d rather discuss what I see daycare doing to kids on the assumption that parents could keep their children at home if they decided to. Not everyone can, and I know that — but adding caveats for that every other paragraph will interrupt the topic more than necessary. If I am to write about the detriments of the daycare system, I’d rather talk about it like it could be minimized, not like every child in daycare belongs to a struggling family with no other option. So, in this article, I may talk like every parent could pull their kid out of daycare and keep them at home if they wanted. I know that doesn’t apply to everyone, but as you’ll see, I certainly wish it did.

Not every daycare has a setting comparable to my experiences, so if your child is in daycare and you don’t see any of these problems applying to it, that’s fantastic — send me the name of the daycare in the Contact form or in the comments below, because I’d genuinely be curious to see.

There are a lot of small problems I have with daycares — for example, everything, always, without exception, must be completely and perfectly safe. Or the menu options are often designed to be aesthetically nutritious to parents, rather than nutritious options kids actually eat. Or the age-segregated system mirrors that of the typical school system, so kids spend almost the entirety of their social hours in the first 21 years of their life with same-age peers — and get little practice accommodating children of other ages. Or the early teacher-child dynamic dichotomizes adults into either playmates or bosses, but not mentors or guiders. Or this, or that, or a lot of things. But my biggest problem with daycares is that they are inconsistent.

How is it inconsistent?

To flesh this out, imagine that you’re a one-year-old child going to daycare for the first time. Up to this point in your life, you’ve probably had two caregivers — your parents — with perhaps a few grandparents, family friends, or relatives dropping in now and then. Most of the time, though, you were with your parents, and you knew who they were and you knew you could trust them.

When you go into a daycare setting, that is the first thing to change. On your first day, you get put in a room with seven other toddlers — at best. At worst, you get put in a room with thirty-one other toddlers, with the room divided into four small sections to make four “rooms”. Your parents tell you they’ll be back for you that evening, but you have no idea what that means. Now you’re in a room with a bunch of other crying babies, your parents are gone, and there are two complete strangers in here to take care of you.

So that’s facet number one of the inconsistency: Who’s taking care of you now — the people at school or your parents? For a one-year-old child, they hardly understand who they’re supposed to attach themselves to now. They may try to reattach to a daycare worker, but that would look bad on the worker, so they can’t let that happen — and the child is left confused about who to trust, attached to the worker anyway, or endlessly sobbing for the people they are attached to (their parents) to come back. I haven’t seen a fourth category in any daycare child younger than three.

Now that you’re in this classroom, you discover something new: most daycares (not all) move kids from classroom to classroom during the day to keep legally required teacher-child ratios. A child might spend 8a-12p in class 1, 12p-3p in class 2, 3p-4:30p in class 3, and then 4:30p-5:15p in class 1 again. By the time the parent comes to pick up their kid, the child has changed classrooms (and teachers) four times. For a one-year-old, that’s four full setting changes and four rotations of people they’re supposed to trust to feed, clean, teach, and play with them. A one-year-old doesn’t understand the daycare policy, though, so they learn very quickly that whatever adult they happen to be with is in charge — and they rarely learn to discriminate between strangers they shouldn’t trust and adults that they can.

There’s facet number two: which of these strangers is in charge when? You move from classroom to classroom, trying to keep up, but who you’re with can change during the day, and some of the teachers are nicer to you than others. How are you supposed to know the difference between adults in charge of you and adults who happen to be nearby?

Then you come to your classroom one day — the one you spend the morning in, at least — and the person you normally see isn’t there. Your parents ask the new person what happened to your old teacher. “Oh, she quit,” they reply, and your parents nod uneasily. Then, off you go to the new class. You’ll see your parents tonight, maybe to eat dinner together before you go to bed.

There’s facet number three: daycare teacher turnover is extremely quick. One classroom might change teachers four times or more in one school year — and that’s not counting the times the child changes classrooms for keeping ratio. Depending on classroom change rate, a child could have eight or more different teachers throughout the year — for a one-year-old, that’s distressing and confusing. You don’t have time to healthily trust one person before you get scooted along to the next, so you learn to either trust no one, trust no one but your parents, or trust everyone. None of those set children up for much success regarding emotional boundaries in the future.

Going deeper into the setting is just more disturbing. Most daycare settings, for example, have very, very, very strict policies about the kinds of discipline that can and can’t be enforced (mostly to prevent over-discipline and lawsuits). In the daycare that I worked at, I was not allowed to tell a child “no”, take away any privilege (outside time / toy from home / etc), have them sit in time-out, or ask them to apologize to someone else they hurt. The only — only — thing I was allowed to do was redirect the child to something more exciting. That is a tremendous problem. If, as an adult, I hit someone over the head with a wooden building block, no sane person would smile at me and say, “now, Emma, this is a great block for building a tower with! Let’s go build a tower together!” Why not? Because that’s reinforcing my harmful behavior. It’s teaching me that as long as I’m bad enough, I’ll get to do fun things. No one is teaching me that there are negative consequences I have to pay for if I do something bad. In fact, it is teaching me the exact opposite: only the people that I do bad things to have to pay for the bad things I do. I don’t have to pay for those consequences, because now I’m going to go build a tower. You can deal with the headache I just gave you by yourself. To state the obvious, this is a disturbing prototype of disordered antisocial personality behavior.

Even if I was allowed to tell a child no, take away their toy from home, or make them sit in the corner for five minutes, that would not be the same as a parent disciplining a child. This is for a few reasons. One, there’s no guarantee a daycare worker isn’t disciplining your child out of anger rather than sincere care. If a child is disruptive and hurts other children deliberately, it can be more than challenging to respond gently, and if time-out was an option, the daycare teacher could use it as punishment, not discipline. Discipline helps you learn; punishment just makes you pay for the damage you did to someone else. Two, there is still the inconsistency in authority described above. What if the daycare teacher has different moral standards than the parent? What if the daycare teacher refuses to discipline something the parent would? And what does it teach the child about who to listen to if a temporary, high-turnover daycare teacher can administer discipline the same way a parent can?

Hence facet number four: inconsistent discipline. It takes one child who hasn’t been taught and disciplined at home to teach every other child in the classroom to act out — and if these kids have been raised primarily in the daycare setting since three months old, very little discipline at home has been happening. Most parents aren’t around during the day to even notice the behaviors, so how could they discipline them? Consequently, by age four, most kids have spent the last three and a half years in settings where they could do whatever they wanted (and if the teacher didn’t like what they did, they got to do something more fun). The parents may find a child’s unrestrained behavior unacceptable and discipline them at home, but the child will spend most of their waking hours at the daycare — and that’s no match for the one or two hours a parent gets in the morning or evening each day. Further, the child isn’t taught self-restraint or consideration for others — only simple hedonism.

Not every teacher or daycare setting fails to teach a child any self-regulation whatsoever. Some teachers in some settings still do a good job despite the limits of the daycare discipline system. However, there are still two problems with this. First, this is no match for the regular, consistent discipline of a parent. If a parent is the primary administrator of discipline, they have consistent standard they communicate to the child, and they typically discipline the child in a consistent manner. The child then conceptualizes a more precise understanding of what is “right” and “wrong” according to their parent, rather than having to change that standard for every teacher.

Secondly, “discipline” within the limitations of the daycare system does not delve into the root of the problem, but merely addresses the child’s external behaviors. As a consequence, the child isn’t taught a reason for the discipline in terms of robust morality. More often, the reason for any discipline a teacher could manage within the system is reasoned by “you can’t do that” or “we don’t do that in class”, which hardly gives the child a moral framework with which to understand reality. Discipline like this can help manage a classroom and even a child’s external behaviors, but it doesn’t guide their growth the same way a parent could, because a parent has the authority to explain the moral framework to their child (and daycare teachers are reticent to do so for fear of lawsuits). Consequently, even the discipline manageable in a daycare setting is more adjacent to cutting off the heads of weeds than actually tearing out their roots.

So we’ve established a few ways that daycares are inconsistent — primarily in terms of attachment, authority, and discipline. But what does this mean for the kids?

Is inconsistent a bad thing?

Whether inconsistency is a bad thing is actually a fair question. On the one hand, much of real life is inconsistent — management, primary school teachers, social circles, and so on change constantly. From a distant vantage point, it seems like introducing a child to change in caregivers and standards early would prepare them for the constantly changing world they’re destined to grow up in.

However, I don’t think it’s self-evident that a high level of variability in early childhood equals success in the highly variable adult world. The reason for this is rooted in attachment theory, which is a psychological concept discussing how infants respond to stress and reassurance in their environment. I’ve cited the 6-page entry on the topic from the Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine below should you like to view it, but to summarize, the theory puts forward that when babies experience need or difficulty — hunger, thirst, soiled clothing, physical pain, cold, need for attention, or so on — their natural response is to communicate this need by crying. As the baby cries, though, he or she takes note of whether someone comes to respond to their needs when they call for help. If someone comes, attends to their cries, takes note of their needs, addresses them, and soothes the baby again, the baby will learn that expressing their needs will have an effect on their environment. Moreover, the baby will learn that there are at least some individuals in the world who are not hostile and who will, in fact, care for them.

Attachment theory reference work entry

However, if no one comes, or if people come irregularly, or if different people come each time, the baby is going to develop a confused understanding of how the world views them and their needs. Maybe the world doesn’t care, maybe other people aren’t dependable, maybe the external environment is hostile to their needs. Whatever the framework that they subconsciously develop, the baby learns that the world is against them, and so are its inhabitants. When humans are young, they seek a specific figure to create an attachment bond with. When this is consistently changed or ripped away, as in the case of daycare settings, the inconsistency is scarring to the process of proper attachment.

This does not only apply to infants and one-year-olds. This also applies to two, three, and four year olds. At that age, the attachment imbalance comes as a result of how long the child spends away from the person they’re supposed to have a primary attachment to. They spend so many hours away from their primary caregivers that they swing between attachment to them and attachment to their daycare teachers. A child aged two to four in a classroom with twenty other kids is rarely going to have their needs met promptly — it’s hard for a daycare teacher to keep up. Consequently, the child is still learning that the world is inattentive to their needs — a sorry substitute for healthy attachment.

Because of the impact that the attachment variability and authority imbalances have on children and their perception of the world, I think it’s fair to say that inconsistency is a bad thing for young children, especially on matters of attachment and morality. Here are two other research articles that discuss longitudinal and biological consequences of growing up in daycare, if you would like to read them:

Longitudinal data (crime, negative emotion, hyperactivity, aggression, etc.).

Biological and socioeconomic data (cortisol, crime, child and parent stress, etc.).

Are there better alternatives that avoid such inconsistency?

There are some benefits to the things daycare tries to accomplish — downtime for parents, socializing time for kids, and practice for other individuals in taking care of children. I don’t propose that children only ever stay at home with their parents and never spend time with another adult. However (again, assuming this is feasible), I think that attachment theory as well as general research supports that children should remain primarily with their parents throughout the day, and other caregivers used as an occasional supplement.

One of the upsides to the idea behind daycare is that children get time to interact with other children. On the one hand, this is certainly a good idea — children learning to play with each other form a more adept understanding of social rules and how to interact with others. On the other hand, this kind of beneficial socialization is not limited to the daycare setting — and the daycare setting often struggles to properly accomplish this anyway. Structured playdates (for very young children) and classroom-style activities (for older children) are a reasonable way to help a child socialize. Personally, I am somewhat of a proponent of more unstructured playdate time for older children because of my Montessori bent (for a later post), but settings analogous to daycares — as long as they actually accomplish what they say they do — can be a firmly positive supplement to a child’s development.

Consequently, I think that while the daycare setting reaches for some positive aspects, not only does it often fail to reach them, it also often causes serious byproducts that harm more children than they help. Because of the vulnerability characterizing early childhood, the inconsistency in caregivers, authority, and standards is a major pitfall that comes as a consequence of attempting to compartmentalize full-on parenting into an industrialized system. If you have any thoughts on the subject, research I overlooked, or otherwise, I’d be curious to hear.

#childcare #social issues #child development #daycare #preschool #education #pediatrics #elementary education #psychology #attachment theory #attachment issues #attachment

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inkskinned · 1 year

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there are a lot of posts out there that are positive and healthy coping mechanisms for handling the holidays. this is not one of them :)

i think there's like. going to be times in your life you will be stuck in a social situation that you cannot escape from gracefully. i do not know why the internet doesn't believe these times exist. it's not always just that your physical safety is at risk - sometimes it's legit like "i just don't currently have the energy or time to put in the effort of responding to this." sometimes it's a coworker you hate so much. sometimes it's just like, fine, you know? like you know you can handle your aunt when she's cheerily horrible, but if you actually set a boundary around her, it's going to be weeks of fallout with your father.

i don't know why people think the answer is always just "cut them out!" or "don't let them get away with that!" because ... the real world is tricky and complicated. i think kind of a lot of us have an internal "radiation poisoning" meter for certain people. like - i'm talking about the ones who are absolutely giving you gradual ick damage. like, you can handle them, but you'll be exhausted.

and yes. you absolutely should listen to your therapist and the good posts about handling others and set good boundaries and take care of yourself. prioritize peace.

HOWEVER :) ...... since im often in a situation with a Gradual Sense of Ick person i cannot just "cut out" of my life (without losing someone else precious to me) - i have sort of developed the most. maladaptive form of mischief possible. because like, if i'm going to have to listen to this shit again, i like to have a little bit of private fun with it.

now! again, i am physically safe, just mentally drained by this man. you should only do this with people you are not in danger with. which leads me to my suggestions for when your Unfortunate Acquaintance shows up and says oh everyone pay attention to me.

my favorite word is "maybe!" said as brightly and happily as possible. whenever the Horrible Person starts in on a topic you do not want to go further with, particularly if they make a claim that you know to be inaccurate, do not respond to it. you and i have both tried to actually argue with this person, and it hasn't gone well, because this person just wants the drama of an argument. however, "maybe!" gives them literally nothing to go on. it is incredibly disarming. they are used to people having some response. they know they can't prove what they're saying, and maybe! treats them like the child they are. it dismisses them in the politest way possible.

i like to say maybe! and then, in their stunned silence, immediately change the subject. this is because i have adhd and i will have something unrelated to talk about, but if you can't think of topics fast enough, i recommend just pointing to something and saying, "isn't that lovely?" because fuck you let's bring in some positivity.

by the way. that second trick - of pointing to something and stating an opinion about it? - that just works on its own, like, 70% of the time. i picked it up from teaching preschoolers. it's an intentional "redirect". it stops children crying and it also stops grown adults from finishing their explanation on why women belong in kitchens. dual wielding!

keep it silly for yourself. i absolutely do not care if people think i'm fucking stupid (it's more fun if they do) and as a result i will purposefully misunderstand things just to see how long it takes them to realize i've completely removed them from the subject at hand. when they say "women aren't funny" i get to be like. "which women." "all women." "all women in america?" "no in the world." "like the mole people? the people in the world?" "what? no. like, alive." "oh are we not counting the mole people?" "what the fuck are you talking about." "you don't believe in the mole people?"

similarly, i play a personal game called "one up me." my Evil Acquaintance literally knows this game exists (my family & friends caught onto it and now also play it) and it always fucking gets him. i don't know why. you have to be willing to be a little free-spirited on this one, though. the trick is that when they make one of those horrible little bigoted or annoying comments they are always making, you need to go one unit weirder. not more intense, mind you - just more weird. "you don't look good in that dress." "yeah, actually, my other dress was covered in squid ink due to a mishap at the soup store." "you shouldn't wear such revealing clothes." "wait, what? oh shit. sorry, your son tears off strips when no one is looking and eats them. i swear it was longer before we left the building."

the point of "one up me" is to completely upend this person's narrative. we both know this person likes setting up situations where you cannot "win" and then they really like telling other people how badly you handled it. in a usual situation, if you respond "please don't say something that rude", you're a bitch. but if you let it happen, you're letting yourself be debased. they are not usually expecting door number three: unflappably odd. because what are they going to say when they're telling everyone how badly you behaved? "she said my son eats her dresses" ".... okay?"

if you can, form an allyship with someone whomst you can tagteam with. where they can pick up on your weird "soup store" story and run with it.

the following phrase is amazing and can be deployed for any situation: "oh, be nice :) it's the holidays!" i do not know why this works as often as it does. i'll say it for the most random shit. i think this is bc most of the time these people know they're being impolite, they just like to fight.

godbless. when in doubt, remember that you could always start stealing their pens.

the whole point of this is - if you can't escape. maybe see how long you can just be. like. a horrible little menace.

#this is objectively bad advice #don't listen to it protect yourself and do real work on yourself find one of the good posts i've made about this #but also. u know. if u want to have fun while u do the work of setting boundaries #.... it IS fun #i will say that my fear of him went SO down after i just started. fucking with him.#bc i used to get SO fucking upset #i'd spend WEEKS arguing with him. tearing my hair out. sick with anxiety and dread and anger about all of it #and now i just LITERALLY do not engage #instead i'm like '' haha :) mole people" and get the HELL out of any tense conversation #i kind of think some of these people are literally addicted to drama as a form of connection #they like the rush they get from arguing #but those arguments are incredibly damaging for me #so like..... i am in the process of literally rehabilitating this person to figure out how to find connection thru #NORMAL CONVERSATION #he doesn't get it yet #i also do talk to them like they're preschool kids lmafo . ''are you using a safe and kind voice right now?''#'' do you need a snackie? you sound a little upset. let's have some hummus and come back to playtime when we feel ready''

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themontessoriacademyofarlington · 2 years

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Infant - Peer Interactions

In the mixed age environment of the Nido, we see the benefits daily. They enjoy observing each other and learning the differences from themselves and infants of different ages. Each child is learning through experience how to control their movements and how they affect others. We “sports cast,” objectively putting into words what we see, such as “this child smiles when you use your gentle hands,” so students can pick up on social cues. As this child has gotten older, he has begun to show interest in the younger children and enjoys making them smile or giving them a rattle to hold.

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oldfangirl81 · 4 months

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Kid fic plot idea

Danny discovered after anti-Ecto Acts were repealed there was a spike of liminals being discovered. Many had been considered just meta until everything around the GIW came out. This meant there were occasionally liminals put into foster care in the mortal world.

After finishing his degree Danny took the throne as King of the Infinite Realm. These liminal kids fell under his jurisdiction. Most of the time Danny just found homes for them with the help of his social worker advisors Jazz & Elle.

Except for a pair of siblings discovered in a lab. They were designer clones of an alien species and a liminal. Luckily they were rescued at only six weeks old. Danny was their only parent.

The kids developed a few peculiar tastes as they grew up. Eventually Danny had to carry around plain rice cakes with him everywhere because it was close enough to Styrofoam to make them happy, but an actual edible item that wouldn't get CPS called on his civilian identity again. Even in Gotham people get worried about kids eating toxic substances. Maybe especially Gotham because who knows what will create the next rogue.

Oracle keeps a folder of the ridiculous incidents of Danny & kids vs Rogues.

They escaped the baby-sitter one day. Icicle Jr turned himself in, begging to get away from the hyper toddlers. They kept calling him "kinda daddy" because ice reminded them of Danny's core.

They escaped the new baby-sitter. Killer Croc slept for hours after he stumbled across them lost in the sewers, exhausted by the kiddos wanting to wrestle for hours before they'd agreed to go home. Killer Croc eventually flagged down Signal to return them.

The first day of preschool went well. The second day did not. The two ran from the school and made it all the way to Central City. Flash and Captain Cold didn't know how to react to a pair of preschoolers demanding to play tag too in the middle of a robbery.

It only surprised a few folks that the best nanny ended up being Harley. The kiddos spotted the hyenas one day and wanted to pet the doggy.

#fic prompt #ghost king danny #dp x dc #i was an odd kid who loved plain rice cakes #i still do #that sparked this #yes i also just read some xmen comics

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captainremmington-13 · 2 months

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𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖉𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍𝖙𝖊𝖗 𝖔𝖋 𝖉𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍 - 𝖔𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖎𝖓 𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖗𝖞

show!Luke Castellan x daughter of thanatos!reader

DISCLAIMER: I don’t own the image above or any of Rick Riordan’s characters/world-building.

⚠️Warnings⚠️: attempted murder, swearing, parental neglect, overall sad vibes

A/N : this post is to set up context for the rest of the series (i have to set up the lore so everything makes sense lmao). this is my first time writing for luke, i promise i’ll get better at it with time :))

you essentially grew up at camp, having arrived at the young age of five

monsters began creeping their way into your life ever since you learned to speak. death seemed to be drawn to you.

first was the dracanea disguised as a nanny that tried to eat you while your mother was out of the house (she was a florist that prepared bouquets for funerals). you only survived because the dracanea was interrupted by your mortal older brother. when he saw you on the ground with the nanny about to wrap her hands around your tiny throat, he screamed so loud that the dracanea fled immediately. he then called the cops on her, but she’d long since disappeared. you were only three at the time.

the final straw was when an Aeternae attacked you on the preschool playground. it lept out from the large bushes near the fence and nearly ripped your face off. you would have died if your teacher, a satyr in disguise, hadn’t scared it off.

your preschool teacher, Mr. Maciolli, escorted your to camp the next day. he had a long talk with your mother, who didn’t put up much of a fight to keep you at home. you attracted trouble that she had no time to deal with.

with that, you were uprooted from your normal life and transported into the world of the Olympian gods.

you were the youngest camper by far. the older campers took you under their wing, helping you adjust to camp life as best as they could. they gave you a wooden sword and taught you the basics of combat. they made sure to keep you away from anyone who could cause you harm. and most importantly, the many unclaimed demigods that you met while staying in Cabin 11 taught you that the gods didn’t give a flying fuck about their kids.

though it was difficult at first, you were happy. sure, you missed your mom sometimes, but you reminded yourself that she hadn’t been interested in keeping you around anyways.

your first five years at camp were relatively peaceful. you developed your personality and learned your likes and dislikes, just like any “normal” kid.

however, there were occasional incidents that were absolutely unexplainable.

the worst one of all was this: a son of ares kept throwing pebbles at you while you were supposed to be picking strawberries. no matter what you said, he wouldn’t quit. after a particularly large pebble hit you in the back of the head, you turned around and screamed “stop it!”

the kid immediately collapsed, his skin turning pale. the other campers rushed him to the infirmary, and the apollo kids immediately got to work.

they concluded that his heart had stopped. he had been dead to the world for almost a whole minute. if not for the nectar that had been poured down his throat, he probably wouldn’t have made it.

campers did their best not to anger you after that. nobody could explain what had happened, but clearly, you had caused the son of ares to have a close brush with death.

you were claimed by Thanatos, the god of death, at the age of ten.

your social life turned on its head after that.

basically everyone except for Chiron and Mr. D avoided you like you were the walking Black Plague (which you kinda were)

after getting claimed, your powers increased. you could touch a small plant and kill it instantly if you wished to. wherever you sat, the grass would wither around you. you could even kill small animals with a simple touch (only if you wished it to die).

nobody wanted to risk crossing you and getting killed. so nobody tried to get close to you. they would say the occasional “hello”, but that was it.

you grew to resent not only your father, but all of the gods. they had everything, it seemed, while you had nothing. they didn’t even have the heart to check in on their own children.

you learned to thrive without any companions. you spent your days sparring against invisible enemies, building muscle, and developing stamina. you rarely conversed with the other members of Cabin 11, staying in your bunk in the far corner of the cramped space. during your down time, you killed flowers, dried and pressed them, and used them to make collages.

things were relatively stagnant for awhile.

until you turned fourteen.

at age fourteen, luke castellan arrived at camp, and changed your life forever.

Thank you for reading! Pls let me know what you think in the comments!!! I plan on making this a series, but I’m not sure how I’m going to format it yet. Stay tuned for the first official installment!

Let me know in the comments if you want to be added to the taglist!

#luke castellan x reader #luke castellan #percy jackson #percy series #rick riordan #pjo series #pjo tv show #charlie bushnell #demigods #percy jackon and the olympians #the lightning thief #thanatos #luke castellan imagine #luke castellan x you #luke castellan series

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baby--charchar · 2 months

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Social-Emotional Checklist for Age Regressors

This checklist can help you figure out a specific age that you, an OC, or your little one regress to, based on how they communicate, express emotions, interact with their caregivers, and socialize with other littles.

To complete it, highlight or check off any of the descriptions that apply to you or your little one. If you highlight ALL or the vast majority of the traits in one category, then your little is OLDER than that and is past that phase. If you highlight about HALF of the descriptions, then that is exactly where your little one is at when regressed. If nothing in that category applies to your little one, they are younger than that given age. Some littles may have a mix of multiple developmental ages, especially if they're neurodivergent, and that's okay!

I'm gonna do this for my age-regressing OC Rhea, and feel free to copy/paste this wherever you'd like, or just use it for your own reference! [original source]

You'll see that for Rhea, I could check off almost everything in the infant category. She has her favorite caregiver, she's anxious around strangers, and she's aware of other people's emotions and tries to respond!

Once I got to the toddler category however, things got a little more shaky. She throws tantrums and has some complexity to her emotions, however she's not playing with peers at all and doesn't care for pretend play. Once I reached the gradeschool level, nothing really applied to her so I stopped there.

This tells me that Rhea is about 2 years old, although this can shift a bit because age regression has its own natural ebbs and flows. Try it out with yourself or your little one, and see if it helps you understand them or help them out a little bit better!

Infants and babies

By 2 months

• Cry to get needs met ✅️

• Occasionally self-soothe by sucking on hands and fingers ✅️

• Start to smile and look directly at you ✅️

By 4 months

• Cry in different ways to show hunger, pain, or being tired ✅️

• Smile in response to caregiver’s smile ✅️

• Play with toys by shaking them✅️

By 6 months

• Are more aware of which people are familiar and which are strangers ✅️

• Can respond to other people’s emotions by crying, smiling, or laughing✅️

• Enjoy looking at themselves in the mirror❌️

By 9 months

• Start to show stranger anxiety✅️

• May cry when familiar faces aren’t around✅️

• Start to prefer some toys over others✅️

By 12 months

• Play favorites with familiar people✅️

• Are more interactive (like handing over a toy or a book, or making a specific noise to get a caregiver’s attention)✅️

• Enjoy simple interactive games, like patty-cake and peekaboo❌️

Toddlers and preschoolers

Ages 18 months–2 years

• Have more temper tantrums and become more defiant as they try to communicate and be independent✅️

• Start simple pretend play, like imitating what adults or other kids are doing❌️

• Become interested in having other kids around, but are more likely to play alongside them (parallel play) than with them (cooperative play)❌️

Ages 3–4 years

• Start to show and verbalize a wider range of emotion ✅️

• Are interested in pretend play, but may confuse real and “make believe”❌️

• Are spontaneously kind and caring❌️

• Start playing with other kids and separate from caregivers more easily❌️

• May still have tantrums because of changes in routine or not getting what they want✅️

Grade-schoolers

Ages 5–6 years

• Enjoy playing with other kids and are more conversational and independent

• Test boundaries but are still eager to please and help out

• Begin to understand what it means to feel embarrassed

Ages 7–8 years

• Are more aware of others’ perceptions

• May complain about friendships and other kids’ reactions

• Want to behave well, but aren’t as attentive to directions

• Try to express feelings with words, but may resort to aggression when upset

Ages 9–10 years

• Share secrets and jokes with friends

• May start to develop own identity by withdrawing from family activities and conversations

• Are affectionate, silly, and curious, but can also be selfish, rude, and argumentative

Middle-schoolers and high-schoolers

Ages 11–15 years

• Start thinking more logically

• Are introspective and moody and need privacy

• Value friends’ and others’ opinions more and more

• May test out new ideas, clothing styles, and mannerisms while figuring out where/how to fit in

Ages 16–18 years

• Strive to be independent and may start emotionally distancing from caregivers

• Start trying to discover strengths and weaknesses, at times seeming self-centered, impulsive, or moody

• Show pride in successes

• Spend a lot of time with friends and may be interested in dating

#sfw age regression #sfw agere #sfw babyspace #teen regressor #teen regression #sfw middlespace #sfw middle regression #middlespace #sfw regression #hazbin hotel age regression #hazbin hotel agere #rhea

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french-preschool-brooklyn · 4 days

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Discover the numerous benefits of French preschool education at Explorer Studio. Learn how language acquisition, cognitive development, and cultural immersion set a strong foundation for your child's future success.

#French Preschool Education #Language Acquisition #Cognitive Development #Early Childhood Education #French Preschool Brooklyn #Bilingual Preschool #Social and Emotional Development #Preschool Curriculum

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 8 months

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By: Louise Perry

Published: Jun 8, 2023

When we get home from the supermarket, our two-year-old likes to assist with taking the groceries out from underneath his stroller and carrying them to the kitchen. He will pick up a carton of milk and heave it towards the fridge like an atlas stone. “Well done darling” I say to him in a pitch slightly higher than usual, “you’re being so helpful.”

Of course he isn’t actually being helpful. In fact, he’s slowing down the process of unpacking and risking an enormous milk spillage all over the kitchen floor. But my goal is encouragement and kindness – he’s only two, bless him, and that carton is awfully big and heavy.

My husband regards these exercises with more of a gentle briskness. “Thanks mate” he’ll say in his usual tone of voice, excising my white lie. In this, I’ve learnt, my husband is typical of other men. In a 2015 study led by Mark VanDam, a professor in the Speech and Hearing Sciences department at Washington State University Spokane, researchers outfitted preschoolers and their parents with recording devices to monitor social interactions over the course of a normal day. The mothers, they found:

… used higher pitch and varied their pitch more when interacting with their child than with adults. The fathers, on the other hand, did not show the same pattern, and instead talked to their children using intonation patterns more like when they talked to other adults.

As an instinctive speaker of so-called ‘motherese’ – that is, baby talk – I find that when our son mispronounces a word (‘tawtah’ for ‘water’ or ‘mulack’ for ‘milk’) I will automatically echo it back to him, while my husband will automatically respond with the correct pronunciation. These differences persist despite the fact that we share childcare almost exactly equally within our family.

It turns out we’re not alone in this sex difference, and that it may well have some adaptive purpose. "We think that maybe fathers are doing things that are conducive to their children's learning but in a different way,” writes VanDam, “the parents are complementary to their children's language learning.” Mothers speak down to children, while fathers speak to them like equals – in combination, these two kinds of stimuli promote the development of adult language.

The adoption of motherese is an instinct that, in its correct context, is both comforting and developmentally useful. But it can also, in some circumstances, be dysfunctional. And, as I have become more and more fluent in it, I have started to notice that motherese is no longer confined to the nursery or the classroom, but is now to be found also in public life. Not in its full expression – “have you got a boo-boo, honey?” – but in a more subtle form.

I heard a lot of motherese, for instance, in the responses to philosopher Kathleen Stock’s appearance this week at the Oxford Union – a political event considered significant enough to attract commentary from the Prime Minister and rolling updates on the homepages of several national newspapers.

Students at risk of being traumatised by Stock’s mild-mannered, centre-left brand of politics were ushered towards ‘welfare rooms’ offering ear plugs, bottles of water, and snacks. “The Union has made the choice to amplify a voice that actively harms trans students, trans people and the trans community at large” wrote one student politician, “we’re tired of [the Union’s] refusal to listen to the communities they hurt” insisted another. It was as if Stock was a rampaging bully on the playground, knocking other children to the ground, and her critics were leaping to the defence of the persecuted toddlers.

Witnessing the backlash against her, you’d never guess that Stock’s only sin is to offer a careful academic critique of the doctrine of gender identity – that is, the claim that one can become a member of the opposite sex (or some other identity category in between) merely by force of will. As she reiterated in her Oxford Union speech, to reject this doctrine is not to deny the humanity of trans people, but rather to balance their interests against those of other people, particularly women.

But I am by no means the first to notice an unexpected feature of the crowds that formed outside the Oxford Union this week, and indeed all of the crowds that congregate in support of trans activism (now a regular occurrence, and not just in the Anglosphere). While the occasional acts of outright aggression are overwhelmingly committed by men, the crowds in general are mostly composed of young women.

Polling reveals this to be a wider pattern. In the UK, women – and particularly young women – are far more supportive of trans activism than are their male counterparts. The same gap can be seen in US polling. The public figures who have received the most flak for their criticisms of trans activism are disproportionately women – I’m thinking not only of Kathleen Stock, but also of JK Rowling – and yet so, too, are the movement’s most devoted allies. This is, in the main, an intra-female conflict.

But if trans activism poses a threat to women’s interests – as Stock and Rowling insist that it does – then why have so many women come out in support of it? I want to propose two explanations for this seeming paradox.

Firstly, in socioeconomic terms, the women who have the most to lose from the disintegration of female-only spaces – prisoners and domestic abuse victims, for instance – are not actually the same women who are draping themselves in blue and pink flags outside the Oxford Union. This is a textbook example of what Rob Henderson has termed a ‘luxury belief’ – an idea that confers status on the rich, while causing harm to the poor.

But then I am begging the question, because why on earth would trans activism confer status on the rich, or indeed anyone? This is where we come to the second factor: the extraordinarily well-documented differences in personality that have been observed between male and female populations cross-culturally.

Note that there is a crucial distinction to be drawn between average and absolute differences. It is not true that all men or all women exhibit only masculine or feminine personality traits, in the same way that not all women are short and not all men are tall – rather, average differences between the sexes are obvious only at the population level.

One trait on which men and women differ substantially is agreeableness. To put it bluntly, women are usually nicer than men – that is, they are “more nurturing, tenderminded, and altruistic more often and to a greater extent than men,” as psychologist Professor Yanna Weisberg puts it.

This nurturing instinct often finds its way into polling on political questions. For instance, a typical study from 2017 asked 3,014 college students the following question: “If you had to choose, which do you think is more important, a diverse and inclusive society or protecting free speech rights.” 61% of male students chose to prioritise free speech, compared with only 35% of female students – exactly what you would expect from two populations that differ in this most crucial of traits.

Don’t think that I’m bashing agreeableness per se – it’s one of those personality traits that really does offer advantages and disadvantages all along the spectrum. Disagreeable people are often rude, but they can also be refreshingly honest; agreeable people are often pleasant, but they are easily taken advantage of. Think of agreeableness as motherese: soothing and lovely in the right circumstances, cloying and foolish in the wrong ones.

The problems arise when an agreeable style of politics gloms onto a group that seems to offer plentiful opportunities for babying. Right now, it is trans people who have found themselves in the hot seat (or the high chair). For just one example of this babying tendency in action, observe the progressive response when then-66 year old Caitlyn Jenner came out as trans (a response parodied exquisitely in a South Park episode titled ‘Stunning and Brave’). When Glamour honoured Jenner as the magazine’s 2015’ Woman of the Year' – despite the fact that Jenner had not yet lived as a woman for a full year – I couldn’t help but hear the high pitched notes of motherese (“you look so pretty sweetie”, “well done that was very brave.”)

Observe, too, the trans celebrity Dylan Mulvaney’s recent appearance on Drew Barrymore’s talkshow, which culminated with Barrymore kneeling on the ground, looking Mulvaney straight in the eye, and offering a heartfelt pep talk on self-love. Some gender critical feminists looked at this scene and saw a woman prostrating herself before a man. What I saw was a mother kneeling down to reassure a young child – for some bizarre reason, Barrymore was speaking motherese to a grown adult on national TV.

At the risk of stating the obvious, trans people are not babies. Nor are they pets. They do not need earplugs and snacks to withstand an academic discussion, and they do not need to be spoken to like toddlers. Real two-year-olds may benefit from the gentleness of motherese. The rest of us need to grow up.

https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/The-Politics-of-the-Culture-Wars-in-Contemporary-Britain.pdf#page=57

Women are more likely than men to say a trans women should be able to enter a women’s refuge, favouring this by a 36-32 margin while men oppose it 40 to 30. In fact, across all 6 questions pertaining to the trans issue (Stock, Rowling, refuges, gender identity, pronouns, teaching biological sex), women are significantly more supportive of the trans rights position even when ideology is taken into account. Women even exceed LGBT identifiers in their support for the pro-trans position on many questions.

Why? Is this not against the female interest? The likely answer is that women are more likely to be cultural leftists than men across most of the 25 attitudinal items in the survey. The inclination to empathise and care for groups perceived as vulnerable best accounts for the pattern. The result of the empathy dynamic is that the gender-critical feminist position, while intellectually prominent, is still a contested view among women. Indeed, the largest source of opposition to greater trans access to women’s spaces comes from cultural conservatives.

This isn't a war between men and women, as some would like to assert.

It's really a war between different denominations of feminism. Like Catholicism vs Protestantism. Or Sunni vs Shi'a Islam.

One thing that's hilarious and worth pointing out: gender-critical feminists will sometimes say things along the lines of, well that agreeableness was socialized into women by "the patriarchy" to make them compliant. Which means they're denying the same evolved sex-based differences that they started off defending. Like claiming to be a Catholic while denying transubstantiation.

Either sex-differences are real, and can explain different participation rates in physics and kindergarten teaching, different career priorities and trajectories (and thus, the mythical "pay gap") and different work patterns as readily as they explain differences in swimming, cycling and weight-lifting performance, making "the patriarchy" as unnecessary as a god is to the existence of the universe... or they're not, and the gender-critical argument goes up in smoke in the flames of social constructivism. God can't be both good and unknowable.

#Louise Perry #stunning and brave #gender activism #gender ideology #queer theory #genderwang #motherese #infantilization #mothering #western feminism #sex based differences #sex differences #religion is a mental illness

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chronicbitchsyndrome · 1 year

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i feel like before you complain about how "former gifted kids are always acting like they're oppressed because everyone doesn't treat them like they're special anymore," i think you should probably try to understand the common timeline that a kid getting funneled into the gifted program follows.

usually, a child starts getting funneled into gifted tracks around preschool-to-kindergarten. typically, what will happen is a kid will show socially unusual interest in and affinity for a basic life skill that also happens to be taught in school--usually either verbality, reading/writing, understanding and manipulating shapes, or basic numerical concepts, or some combination of the above. they might start talking fairly early, for example, or start reading complete sentences earlier than their peers, or show a lot of unusual interest in basic arithmetic. they might get IQ tested, they might not; this is pretty irrelevant because IQ both has almost no correlation with any measure of "intelligence" other than the IQ test itself, and is an extremely poor predictor of academic success.

based on this, the parents are encouraged to push this child into academic settings earlier and at a faster pace than their peers. once in grade school, they'll be funneled into the gifted track. often, they'll have to "test in" to the gifted track, but they tend to weight what the kid is showing an affinity for the most when "testing in." what the gifted track looks like is different for every school, but generally the common factors are more work, assigned at a faster pace, and dealing with concepts that their "typical" peers are not taught until a year or more later.

this is where the most common timeline becomes important, and diverges from what i think a lot of people's perceptions of gifted kids are. the kid fails. the kid does not have some kind of magical universal affinity for every aspect of academia. in fact, the kid has, in the context of their neurotypical peers setting the standard by which they have to live up to, significant deficits in areas other than the one they showed interest in at a young age. for example, maybe they started reading incredibly early, but once they get to grade school, they start failing every math test. they write numbers backwards and copy them from the board in the wrong order. they get basic arithmetic wrong.

here's the thing: the gifted kid program accidentally self-selects for developmentally disabled children with academic splinter skills. splinter skills are incredibly common in people with developmental disabilities; frequently, they don't get perceived as such because they're very often completely nonacademic (and may not be perceived as a "skill" at all, particularly in the context of more profound developmental disabilities--someone learning to use AAC very quickly, for example, is still perceived as a deficit no matter how quickly they do it, instead of a skill in developing communication methods with significantly less support and interaction than those who learn to communicate verbally). developmentally disabled people with academic splinter skills are significantly more common than abled people with an uncommon affinity for all areas of academia, or abled people with splinter skills.

once a kid starts failing, generally the timeline splits off into two possibilities, mostly dependent on how supportive their parents are, how well-funded their school is, and what psychiatric resources are available in their area of the country. option one is that they just keep failing, and get punished more and more violently over time for their perceived "stubbornness." they are perceived as obviously capable of doing the work the gifted program is assigning them, since they were tracked into the gifted program to begin with, and their grades in this other specific subject are stellar, so obviously they're just lazy and need to be whipped into shape via punishment.

the other option is that the kid's developmental disability is clocked by a teacher or counselor, or even their parents, and enough strings are pulled to get them evaluated by a school psychologist. then, they'll get dual-tracked into the gifted program and the special ed program, with classes divided along where their splinter skills and deficits lie. the special ed program is not actually a good place for disabled children and is incredibly traumatizing to be in.

either way, they come out of school with a significant amount of trauma. legitimate trauma. from being a disabled person in the public education system, which fucking sucks and is an awful experience i wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

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lollytea · 7 months

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(Part 4 of La La Land Machine exposition posts!! I know I've made way more than 4 but this is the part that's going in chronological order. Like I've talked about Hunter and hunlow in this au before but this is his formal introduction, like Willow got in part 1. I also got quite a lot more followers since I last rambled about this AU so linking the other parts if they wanna catch up. And if they want, they can look through the tag for all the additional info.

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

Anyway, I lied. We are only BEGINNING to talk about the hunlow slow burn. It's taken me long enough to set up Hunter and everything he's got going on. It sets up hunlow but they're not really close yet. But it won't even take that long to get the next post out because I am so excited to talk about them more)

Hunter Wittebane has lived his whole life wearing masks. He's been an actor before he developed object permanence. He was memorizing scripts by ear before he could fully read by himself.

Job after job, set after set, role after role. His environment is not only cutthroat competitive, but it's always in motion. Things never sit still. The biggest stability in his life was his Uncle Philip, whom Hunter loved intensely. Even if it felt like the only way he could express it was by bleeding.

But Hunter was only allowed to bleed in private. And if he wanted his Uncle to stroke his hair back and keep telling him he was special, he needed to prove it. He needed to be the second chance that he was born to be.

Hunter struggles to really understand who he is. Because he is seldom himself. If he's not playing a character, he's only known as the legacy of the Hollywood gem, Caleb Wittebane, Hunter's late father.

Hunter was quite sheltered as a child. Other than being out and about for business reasons, he didn't really get to experience much of the world. If he wasn't working, he was usually confined to his Uncle's house. Or hotel rooms. The only outings he goes on that are considered "personal" are to church.

He loves to read and he'll devour whatever book he gets his hands on. Unfortunately his options are limited to what his Uncle believes is appropriate. Philip views the world as a depraved and lecherous place, as are the people that inhabit it. If it weren't for this world and its poison, his brother would still be alive.

And then he wouldn't need to waste his time replicating his brother's likeness in some aimless weak willed child who can barely comprehend how important his performance is in all of this.

Philip refuses to allow outside forces to contaminate his nephew. If Caleb's soul is going to live on in the way it should have, they can't make a repeat of last time. Caleb's replacement has to remain on the right path, or his legacy goes up in flames.

The Bible is one of Hunter's top comfort reads. It's the only book that his Uncle seems pleased to know he's interested in. And he's pored over the pages so many times that the familiarity is soothing. It also puts the fear of God in him. As do Philip's frequent lessons. He's shaping up to be a very faithful little Christian.

Hunter also watches a lot of (Uncle approved) television. He's a tiny chatterbox but is pretty starved of socialization. If his Uncle isn't around, he's stuck with the family assistant Kiki, who usually ignores him. TV and books are mostly responsible for Hunter's expansive vocabulary.

As a shy but precocious little boy, his best friends are sweet, comforting preschool cartoon characters.

Even though Philip's life seemed to orbit around Hunter and he worked day and night for the sake of his nephew's success, a lot of the time he just....wasn't around. Sometimes Hunter went weeks without hearing from him and was left in the "care" of Kiki.

Hunter was always left wanting. On those lonely nights when Philip was away, he would beg Kiki to call him so Hunter could at least say goodnight. All for the sake of holding the phone tight against his ear and hearing his Uncle's soft spoken "Sleep well, Hunter," so his world felt a little less cold.

If Philip even answered.

But when Uncle was home, Hunter found himself with some very guilty feelings and ungrateful thoughts.

The details are not important. By that, I mean Hunter is quite uncomfortable recounting the things that used to happen in the Wittebane house when his Uncle was home.

He said them aloud once. At the age of sixteen, when his breathing was in sync with the girl he had fallen in love with and her fingers were tracing gentle paths down his bare back. He felt like he had melted into a world where he could say anything.

It didn't stop his voice from wavering nor his throat from threatening to close up. It was like he was having a full body rejection of the admission. These were secrets meant to remain locked up in his chest until his heart went still.

But he said them. And after that, they couldn't go back to being unsaid.

He didn't say them again for many years. It wasn't until he was a grown man. He wrote them down and he told the whole world.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

The point is that when Philip was away, Hunter got lonely and wanted his Uncle back. When Philip was home and focused all of his attention on his nephew, Hunter wanted nothing more than for him to be gone again. He knew that was an awful thing to want and the guilt ate him alive.

Did he not love his Uncle? Of course he did! He loved him more than anything.

That's why it hurt so much.

Sometimes, his Uncle was a comfort to Hunter's anxious heart. He held him in his arms and hushed him when Hunter had nightmares. He was safety.

And other times, he was the reason for those nightmares and Hunter didn't feel like he could be safe until that man was out of the house again.

Maybe, no matter what happened, he'd never be truly happy with any situation he was put in. Maybe the state of "being happy" just wasn't real, but a thing TV made up. There was just something inherently empty and scary about being alive.

At least that's the conclusion the small boy came to. This remained his mindset as he navigated the big loud upsetting world around him, which only got bigger and louder and more upsetting as Hunter got older and his career grew.

The most glaring problem Philip encountered grooming Hunter in Caleb's image was that there's a drastic difference between a man who achieved the most undiluted burst of stardom in his twenties and a toddler. Hunter can not immediately slide into the dignified shadow his father left behind, because he's too young for the kind of dramatic roles that Caleb had dazzled the world with.

There was nothing available to little Hunter that Philip felt lived up to the standards of Caleb in his prime. Which was understandable but disappointing. So, with a heavy exhale, which made Hunter worry the hem of this shirt ("Am I doing something wrong, Uncle?") Philip relented. Hunter would need a lengthy portfolio by the time he was older, so it was now time to start building this budding actor from the ground up.

Commercials, TV appearances, small film roles. Though it pained him to do so, Philip abandoned all the initial integrity he attached to his brother's legacy, and focused primarily on simply getting Hunter's face on a screen, any screen, whatever it took to get him entrenched in the industry.

Hunter was a lot more sensitive than other children. When he was very little, he had a bad tendency to get distressed over things like bright lights and unfamiliar places and weird textures. This led to a lot of on-set tantrums and he was deemed a difficult and entitled brat.

His "brattiness" never quite went away as he aged. But Philip did manage to curb those tendencies to be far less frequent. It involved brief private conversations in the nearest dressing room. When Hunter emerged, he was quieter and a lot more willing to co-operate with what the adults needed from him.

Hunter learned that misbehaving had consequences. He learned to swallow whatever obscure distress he was feeling and just do his job.

This didn't make his tantrums stop. They just shifted from regular occurances to big nasty explosions that build up over a period of weeks to months.

He eventually gave up trying to suppress them. It doesn't work. So, he just allows his emotions to burst out of him in the most humiliating public display a human being can put on, and then takes his punishment.

Uncle keeps telling him that people are going to think there's something wrong with him if he keeps doing this.

Hunter begs him to believe that there's not. There's not something wrong with him.

While it was happening, Philip would consider the 90s as a rocky beginning to his nephew's career. He didn't care much for any of the films or television series' Hunter appeared in, likely because he didn't care much for any production that included small children. So he was uninterested by default in any of the roles Hunter managed to book.

Regardless, this didn't make Philip any less demanding. Even if it was all tripe, and by God, he was very vocal about it all being tripe, he was still strict about Hunter's work ethic. The boy was expected to pour everything into his performance, and through there were very irritating child labor laws, Philip turned a blind eye to directors pushing the limits every now and again.

After long work days, Hunter would listen to his Uncle tear his current acting job to shreds. The stupid demeaning script that Caleb would be appalled at, but Hunter had no choice but to take, because he simply doesn't have the privilege to be picky.

Hunter felt a deep humiliation by his own career before he was even ten years of age. There was nothing that Philip held to Caleb standard, which left Hunter a paranoid wreck most of the time, fearing that he was always doing something wrong but never knowing how to fix it.

When he thinks back on being a little kid, he has a lot of memories of tearfully begging his Uncle to stop thinking of him a certain way or looking at him the way he does. He remembers his throat hurting. Things must have gotten loud.

An older Hunter would wince as he makes that connection. He remembers his throat hurting but not the consequences of raising his voice.

Every so often, a more prestigious opportunity presented itself to him (like the role of the protagonist's son in a film adaption of an American classic), and Hunter got so overwhelmed by the pressure of finally having something that could possibly hold a candle to Caleb Wittebane that he completely flubbed the audition and failed to book the role.

He knows that were dire consequences for not getting it. Although, once again, he doesn't remember the details of the punishment. But he remembers how tightly Uncle gripped his wrist as they walked out of the building. He remembers sitting perfectly still in the car, scared to make a sound by wriggling in his seat. Scared to breathe.

That was the 90s. That was Hunter's experience as a young child actor.

By the year 2000, he was ten and that's when Philip quietly realized something.

Hunter currently resembled Caleb Wittebane in miniature. He had his strong nose, his ashy hair, his dark eyes. Philip had always anticipated that there may be a bit of her in his nephew's appearance, but there wasn't a trace. It was beyond ideal.

This is when things should have gotten easier. This is when dignified job opportunities should have begun rolling in. This is when the world should have taken notice that Caleb Wittebane was not dead.

But this was not the case.

What Philip did not anticipate was that the industry had changed significantly since the 80s. It was the year 2000 and a young Caleb Wittebane was not what the industry wanted the future of film to look like.

He realized this in his study late one night as he obsessed over old video tapes. And once the truth had sunk in, he called Hunter into the room.

Hunter remembers wearing red pajamas patterned with beagle puppies. He has a memory of liking those pajamas a lot but can't recall the disappointment of growing out of them and throwing them away. It makes him suspect that at some point he just stopped wearing them.

On that night, a part of Philip gave up completely. He decided that this attempt of reviving his late brother's career was a failure before it had even started.

However, Philip was a deeply complex man. A remarkably stubborn man. So even when a part of him died, another part flared with life. It was the part of him that wanted to dig his heels in and say he wasn't done yet. Maybe they didn't want Caleb now, but this world was fickle. Who knows what they'd want in five years? In ten?

Hunter would continue making a name for himself, Philip would make sure of that.

Hunter would be something special if it damn near kills him.

And if he fails, Philip would kill the boy himself.

So, Hunter continues working diligently, attempting to find his footing in the rapidly changing environment. The early 2000s seem to be working overtime to distance itself from the 90s and it certainly takes some getting used to.

When Hunter is around eleven, he is told for the first time that he is not very nice to look at. According to various make up artists and hair stylists who he is left in the custody of when Kiki is god knows where, it's very easy to be cute as a small child. Baby fat n' all. But at a certain age, you start outgrowing it and that's when it becomes apparent whether you're going to be a handsome young man or not.

They gently break the news that there are not a lot of promising signs for Hunter. As one of the women, maybe in her late twenties, cups his face in her hands and tilts it towards the light (he really hates when strangers touch him), she sucks through her teeth and winces, as though she's trying to dig something out with her eyes but is coming up short. Nothing about his features reads as a future leading man. He can still have a steady acting career of course. But it's important he not get his hopes up too high. He's doesn't look like the typical Hollywood star.

Hunter argues with her. He riles himself up until his face flushes with rage. He looks just like his father, who was one of the most famous leading men of all time.

"Who's your Dad?" The woman asks.

Hunter frowns. He's never said the word "Dad" in his life. But the full name is familiar on his tongue when he answers the question.

"Oh, yeah," She says vaguely. "I think my parents used to watch his movies. I guess he was what they considered handsome in the 80s but..."

He doesn't like the way she trails off. He doesn't like all the new information being presented to him. He doesn't like her saying Caleb Wittebane wasn't handsome. In the world Hunter lives in, the man is picture perfect in every discernable way. He's never heard a bad word spoken of his father before, not even of the shallow variety. Uncle only lets him speak to people with nice things to say about Caleb. It's so jarring that it makes him feel nauseous. This isn't the way things are supposed to be.

And what's even worse, does looking like Caleb Wittebane not even matter?

Does this legacy he's supposed to carry on not matter?

That's always been one of his biggest fears, but he can not think about it for too long or the meltdown gets bad. But this new realization about his apparently mediocre looks catch him so off guard that he can't help it this time.

Hunter proceeds to hyperventilate in a supply closet for the next twenty minutes. He had never thought about what he looked like before. He had never really cared. He didn't know his appearance could hinder his career. He didn't know everything could fall apart just by having the face he does.

This is when a deep seated insecurity centered around his body image began spiraling out of control. It was also around the time that Hunter's dietary restrictions were being implemented, as were the intensity of his ballet lessons. This certainly did not help his already deteriorating self confidence.

From that point, Hunter is far more conscious of his own ambitions as an actor. He believes he is more than just a little boy who performs because it's what his Uncle tells him to do. He's a young man who wants to become a success like his father before him. He wants recognition. He wants acclaim. He wants...he wants....he wants something that he does not currently have.

As an adult, Hunter can only drag his fingers through his hair and sigh sympathetically at the thought of his young self believing that his determination to be a successful was ever for himself. It was for Uncle. It was for Caleb Wittebane. It was for everybody but himself. He was just a stupid kid who thought he wanted this because he knew nothing else.

The 2000s are a time when Hunter simultaneously starts slipping out of his iron confines, while getting reeled back tighter than ever. As he grows older, his curiosity becomes more and more insatiable and current pop culture is not as easy to shield him from. Especially when it's such a huge part of his life as an actor.

By the age of twelve, he's such a boring obedient self sufficient little robot that Kiki doesn't even bother monitoring him as severely as she once had. What's he gonna do, really?

And though Hunter is adamant that he never breaks his Uncle's rules, he finds himself shattering them to smithereens on a regular basis.

"I like authority. And rules," He says, ignoring the fact that there are piles of teen magazines tucked away under his mattress. Ignoring the hour of TV he sneaked in that Philip would have shattered the television screen over.

And no matter how many times Hunter wrinkles his nose in disapproval at how rowdy and frivolous today's youth are, he's still reading those trashy articles, desperate to find some connection. His small bubble of worldliness is beginning to grow.

It is slowly occuring to Hunter that he is much different than other kids. But that's a good thing....right? He's on a cleaner path than they are. None of them are being led by Philip Wittebane.

This is a good thing, he tells himself. This is a good thing, this is a good thing, this is a good thing--

However, Philip does crack down on an aspect of Hunter's autonomy that has been mostly ignored until now.

Though he tries not to think about it, as it gives him the most splitting headache, Philip must internally acknowledge those rumors from an age ago. The word of mouth telephone that crackled with the events of that one ridiculous party. Caleb Wittebane, age 17(!!!!) with his tongue down some filthy girl's throat.

The news hadn't been as scandalous as Philip viewed it as, and the world forgot about it remarkably fast. But he never forgot. And he never would. It was a pesky stain on the otherwise clean image that Philip was trying to preserve.

It hadn't been Caleb. It wasn't like him at all to behave in such an indecent way. It was her influence. It always was. Sometimes his blood boiled when he remembered how deeply interwoven she had become in his brother's life. How the child wouldn't even exist without her. It was vile. Eternally contaminating a narrative she had no business being a part of.

Obviously, he never told Hunter about all this. About the party. About the tongue. About the girl. He never mentioned the girl. She was a footnote at best.

Anyway, Hunter was almost thirteen. He was tumbling into adolescence. And no matter how singleminded and sensible he tried to act, there would be challenges to this physical and mental development. And Philip knew from personal experience that there was nothing more damaging to a clean Christian boy than fizzling teenage hormones.

There would not be a repeat of last time.

On Hunter's thirteenth birthday, his Uncle gifted him a chastity ring, like many of the other young people that attended their church.

Hunter was so floored by the gift he forgot how to speak. And when his Uncle put his hand on his shoulder and murmured "I know you won't let me down," Hunter had nodded solemnly, suddenly feeling so much older than he had been a moment before.

He now had a responsibility to refrain from things he hardly understood.

Philip felt this would be an effective precaution. It made Hunter feel important and Hunter loved to feel important.

All that concerned Philip was that the boy stick to his morals.

Keeping his stupid tongue in his stupid mouth was only the tip of the iceberg of what the rules of the chastity ring entailed, but Philip stressed the importance of it nonetheless.

And if the boy failed to do this one simple thing, Philip was going to gouge his eyes out.

A few months later, Hunter was hired to appear in an advertisement produced by his family's church. He, and several other actors in his age range, promoted the rings they wore to the children watching at home.

Hunter was very proud to be a part of it. He rarely got to do anything educational.

When Hunter was fourteen, he surprisingly booked a role as Sir William in some medieval fantasy film for swoony teen girls.

He rolled his eyes over it, but this was the point when Philip made it apparent to Hunter that swoony teen girls was a huge chunk of the target demographic of any actor his age so he best begin pandering. He was no Edric Blight (Hunter fucking hated Edric Blight) but he'd probably appeal to some.

The means of obtaining the role was not Hunter's talent alone, but it was because of a perfectionist director who wanted raw, emotionally gripping action scenes, and was disappointed that all the hazardous exploits in the script would require stunt doubles. No parent in their right mind would allow their child to be put in such dangerous conditions.

Enter Philip Wittebane and his nephew Hunter.

The film's shooting schedule had a rough history. And after a few months, production had to stop altogether when an on-set accident resulted in Hunter being sent to the hospital.

He remembers the hospital, specifically the very uncomfortable bed. He remembers rarely sleeping through the night unless he was drugged, as he kept waking up with panic attacks about all the money he was causing the studio to lose by not healing faster.

By the time the film released, Hunter was fifteen and already moving forward with his next project.

The Golden Guard was a TV adaption of a well loved comic book series that was currently in the development stages. Hunter has never read the comic (he's never read most comics, other than newspaper funny pages) but he's been informed that he is the spitting image of the titular character.

Initially he was skeptical. Who wants a famous superhero on their screen who looks like him? Certainly not current networks who have a very limited view of what leading men should look like, regardless of the comic it's being adapted from.

Apparently, a lot of negotiations have been taking place with the Golden Guard's creator, in order to obtain rights to the series. After months of arguing, they wore him down, as they always manage to wear creators down, and he agreed to hand over his baby.

The one condition that he managed to secure was that the boy cast for the screen resembled the boy on the page.

Hunter was fully aware that if it weren't for that old man's stubbornness, there was no way he would have been eligible for the role. He remembered seeing him appear once during a screen test and had wanted to thank him. The speech that fell out of him was flustered and clumsy, but it made the man smile.

"There are going to massacre the Golden Guard," He said with a bitter smile. "But I think you'll do well."

He never saw him again after that. And though Hunter did not have the frame of reference to have an opinion, the girl he would inevitably fall in love with happened to be a huge comic book nerd, being especially infatuated with the Golden Guard. And her opinions were strong.

"He was right, y'know," She would inform Hunter. "Your show is a steaming pile of shit." She would then kiss the tip of his nose. "But you're the best part of it."

Speaking of girls,

Hunter met Emira Blight a year prior when she and her twin brother also showed up for the chastity ring promotional ad. The two of them would have gotten fired for vandalizing the set and pranking the director if they weren't the most well known stars associated with the project.

Someone had tried to contact their mother to come get her children under control but she had failed to pick up the phone.

"Our precious little Mittens has an audition today," Emira explained, hands placed angelically behind her back.

"Until further notice, Mom has forgotten she has two other kids," Added Edric.

Emira smiled. "Like the next time she notices her stretch marks <33"

The two of them burst into giggles. They were left to be "disciplined" by members of the crew, who hadn't the faintest idea how to handle either of them.

Hunter had tried to avoid them while on set. He never had any personal encounters with them but he was well aware of their existence. They had been starring in twin centric comedies for the last decade or so, and were beloved talk show guests for being chatty, mischievous and overall "adorable."

Hunter found them obnoxious.

Edric more so than Emira. Especially lately, as the two were finally branching out into their own separate careers, rather than remaining a double act. Meaning Edric could be found sniffing around in the same auditions rooms as Hunter, going for the same roles.

Edric had a perfectly structured face, devoid of blemishes. He had the most photoshopped nose Hunter had ever seen, except he looked like that in real life apparently. He looked perfect and he was already a star to begin with. The roles were his the moment he stepped into the room.

But this wasn't about Edric. Edric was off somewhere else, performing the leading role in some teen musical movie that was going to become a worldwide phenomenon the moment it hit television screens.

This was about Emira, who had just been cast as Ruby Green, the Golden Guard's love interest.

Emira Blight was one of the most beautiful teenage girls in the entire world. Hunter knew this because he read it in a magazine once. More specifically, she placed 4th on the list, but that was still a pretty impressive accomplishment.

Hunter always had a difficult time deciphering the exact definition of beautiful. It was apparently a far different thing than what you would initially imagine.

From what he had gathered, it had nothing to do with being particularly interesting to look at, but having a nice and tidy face with all its features being a specific size and shape. He couldn't understand how one girl on that list could be in 8th place, while another could be in 3rd, as they all looked so startlingly similar.

That was what beautiful meant, he supposed.

There were definitely people that Hunter saw as beautiful in their own peculiar way. In the way that wasn't correct. Sometimes he saw them in movies from the 80s-90s. Sometimes he saw them in audition rooms, but they rarely booked the role.

Sometimes he even saw them on the street as the car drove past, people who made him sit up and want to look at them a little longer--

Girls. Girls on the street. Just girls. Only girls. It was only girls that he looked at on the street. It was only girls that he looked at ever.

Emira Blight had Edric's perfectly structured face, which made her beautiful in a celebrity kind of way, but also made Hunter want to look at her less. She had Rapunzel hair and a rail thin frame and, much to Hunter's dismay, she was taller than him.

The wardrobe department were given notes to add an extra few inches to the Golden Guard's boots.

"Little Prince indeed," The head stylist had murmured under his breath, just loud enough for Hunter to hear. An furious flush set his face aflame.

There were no screen test to determine Hunter and Emira's chemistry before the latter was cast, which resulted in hours of reshoots where they were chastised for the lack of romantic tension that they were putting into their performance.

To be perfectly honest, Hunter disliked Emira quite a bit and she disliked him too.

She carried her troublemaking tendencies from the promotional ad to the Golden Guard set, frequently wreaking havoc on the cast and crew.

Hunter had blown a gasket and berated her for it several times, but all she had done was smile her insufferable smile, roll her eyes and sing songingly tease him for being so uptight.

She made him mad. So uncomfortably mad. If he pulled the kind of stunts she pulled, without caring about the consequences, he would probably be dead by now.

Emira rarely got angry. Everything she did had this air of impish joy, but based on the way she spoke to Hunter, her opinion of him wasn't exactly glowing.

She called him arrogant, bossy, egotistical, to which he practically exploded in response. And then she made fun of how red in the face he got.

The only time Hunter ever saw Emira as anything less than her usual bombastic self was early in the morning, during hair and makeup.

"Are you washing your face, honey?"

"Yes," Answered Emira, looking smaller than ever in the makeup chair.

"Drinking plenty of water? Eating healthy? Staying away from junk food? Getting plenty of exercise?"

"Yes, yes, yes and yes," Emira's voice was quiet and automatic.

After a pause, she continued "It's not my fault."

The makeup artist hummed, unconvinced, which made Emira grip the seat so hard her fingers shook.

But the woman didn't push the matter any more and got to work on painting Emira's face into the porcelain masterpiece that made its way on to magazines.

Hunter watched in fascination as a few minutes of work with sponges and brushes wiped her skin clear of acne. And then she was what everyone around here would call beautiful once again.

When Emira noticed him looking, she said, in her usual playfully indifferent voice "I think Hunter's eyebags are getting worse."

"We know," The woman replied, exasperated.

The comment wasn't much, but it successfully corralled Hunter into his default mood. Not being enough. Any thoughts about Emira flew out the window, and he was back to fretting about his own inadequacy.

"And he's more sickly looking than usual," Emira decided to add.

"Well, maybe if he laid off the coffee. It's got him looking like a half-dead ghoul. No wonder it takes so long to make him look presentable."

It was a bad time for Hunter to be taking a sip of his takeaway cup. He frowned. "I've been awake since 4:30am."

"You should go to bed earlier then,"

"But I--"

"And kids shouldn't be drinking coffee at all."

"I'm not a kid!"

"Hush up. We've got work to do on this face and the last thing I need is to listen to you bitching again,"

Hunter glowered at her.

"You're gonna have wrinkles before you're 18 if you keep pouting like that."

He was so preoccupied with not throwing a temper tantrum that he didn't notice Emira leave the room.

The worst thing she ever did was while they were filming episode 3 and she had decided that Hunter's uptight behaviour deserved a humbling punishment. He didn't know how but she had somehow managed to break into his trailer and scavenged the place for something embarrassing.

This resulted in his stuffed frog Sprig being paraded around the set in Emira's arms as she declared the toy's owner to everyone who would listen in a high pitched trill. Everybody. She told everybody. Everybody knew about his toy. And now nobody was going to treat him seriously.

And when Hunter finally processed what was happening, all he had wanted to do was cry.

But he couldn't cry. Because fifteen year old boys don't cry. But he wanted to cry so badly that his usual screaming rage was nonexistent. He was just completely deflated.

He silently took the frog from Emira's possession and walked away. She had seemed confused, not understanding why he was not turning his funny red colour and yelling his head off.

She didn't bait him as much after that. She rarely spoke to him at all, outside of filming.

At one point she had randomly burst into his trailer, brandishing a magazine full of women in bikinis.

"For you!" She announced proudly. "A gift."

Hunter was a little slow on the uptake because a bikini magazine being within ten feet of his person was so incriminating that immediately thinking of the consequences nearly made him black out.

When he could speak again, he exploded "ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?? GET THIS OUT OF HERE!!"

"No, no, listen," Emira insisted. "I know your Uncle is like. Super Christian--"

"So am I!"

"And I know you're never gonna get your hands on this stuff by yourself. So, I'm helping,"

"Why do you even have this?" Hunter demanded, disgusted.

Emira took more than half a second to answer. "It's Ed's."

As if anything on earth could have made Hunter want to touch the thing less.

"Why..." He began, lost. "Why would you ever think I would want this?"

Emira cocked her head at him, puzzled. "You're a boy."

"Get out."

At the time, Hunter had presumed this to be another means of humiliating him, because he had quickly written Emira off as inexplicably cruel. But in hindsight, she had probably just been trying, in her own emotionally stunted way, to apologize to him. She had known next to nothing about boys and she knew even less about herself, other than she was a thing boys were meant to be obsessed with.

They were both just stupid kids who couldn't communicate properly to save their lives, because they had never learned how.

As a child, Emira ranged from a mild bully to an indifferent co-star, to an acquaintance of Hunter's. As an adult, she was the close friend in his Instagram comments section who kept hitting on his wife.

She still never figured out boys, but she figured out herself.

But again, getting ahead of ourselves.

Despite being the only two teenagers on set, Hunter and Emira did not spend much time together unless they were working. Once she settled down and stopped causing problems, Emira spent a lot of her time across the studio to visit her little sister, who was filming some preteen comedy show.

Hexside it was called. Some some vapid sugary husk of a television production that had magic and witches, yet not an ounce of dignity. Hunter had become quite a ruthless critic when it came to TV and film, mostly because he had spent his whole life in the company of a man with sky high standards.

It also helped him feel better about his own work as an actor. The glass half full method. Maybe the Golden Guard was not going to be the most brilliant show of all time, but at least he wasn't working on Hexside.

He had caught glimpses of Emira's sister a few times around the studio, mostly because her hair had been dyed a bright garish teal, so she was impossible to miss.

There were other cast members scattered about, you could usually tell from the explosion of layers and clashing patterns they were dressed in. Chunky belts, brightly coloured converse, weird pointy hats, jangly jewelry. They were a visual overload.

On one occasion, Hunter was waiting in line at the canteen. He was feeling lightheaded again, like if he didn't eat something in the next hour he would probably pass out while shooting. The last time that happened, it was really embarrassing.

He was a little zoned out, so he didn't pay them much attention at first. But then the poofy tutu-like skirt and zebra print leggings caught his eye, if only for him to wonder how in the Lord's name these young actors ever signed up for this ridiculous show.

It was a girl and a boy and their conversation entailed some familiar words and names that Hunter hadn't heard said in months.

Ah. The movie. The swoony teen girl movie. That had just released in theaters, hadn't it?

That's when the girl brazenly stated "I wanna sink my teeth into Sir William," successfully knocking Hunter straight out of the realm of sensibility.

What. In the name of all that is holy. Is that supposed to mean???

And also.....he's Sir William.

"You want to BITE ME??" Hunter finds himself blurting out, completely flummoxed. Was that a threat of violence? Did she not like his performance? Did she find his voice annoying like those other film critics? He used to get a lot of death threats for that when he was younger but...

It didn't really sound like a death threat. It was was just....absurd. How was he supposed to take this?

The girl whipped around, flashing Hunter with a very bright pair of green eyes. They were blown wide in panic, and she looked at him like he was the one about to bite her.

(He wasn't about to bite her.)

The girl wasn't tall, but she was big. Broad shoulders and a thick chubby build. Her face was rounder than he usually saw in young actresses, and her nose was wide and flat.

All he could really think as he was digesting these all details at once was....she was interesting to look at.

Hunter watched as a fluorescent shade of pink burned across her lightly freckled cheeks and the girl scurried away, flanked by the younger boy, calling after her.

For some reason, Hunter turned around to watch her leave until she was completely out of sight.

He was left more confused than ever.

What did he do that deserved biting? He never found out.

(Well, he found out eventually but....)

He continued to see that girl around the studio sometimes, as well as the young boy that accompanied her, and Emira's little sister.

The bigger girl usually tried to hide whenever she saw him, though Hexside's flamboyant wardrobe department made that nearly impossible. Hunter presumed she was embarrassed by what she said, though he really wasn't all that offended. He had heard way worse. The thing that drew his attention to her was actually the lengths she would go to to make herself invisible. He watched her dive under a table once.

Hunter usually just stared, not remembering until an hour later that embarrassed people don't like being stared at.

Eventually, Hunter and Emira started spending occasional school hours with the Hexside cast's tutor, which resulted in them all being lumped in a room together.

Her name was Willow Park, he learned. And with a little exposure therapy, she stopped blushing every time he was within ten feet of her. Though they still never really talked, she seemed to become a little more comfortable with his existence.

She didn't look at him much though. Or anybody for that matter. She seemed to be very guarded and closed off whenever they were in the school room. Hunter had also noticed that the tutor had to spend more time with her than anyone else.

But Willow Park was not currently where Hunter's head was at the moment. He had other things to deal with.

The recent Golden Guard script had been delivered to Hunter and did not really like what it had to say.

Apparently several episodes of the romantic tension that Hunter and Emira were famously bad at was finally coming to fruition in this big grand dramatic kiss scene.

Hunter did not think about kissing much because it made him feel very weird and squirmy, but he was always well aware that if he was ever kissing a girl anytime soon, it would probably be circumstances like this.

His opinion on romance in general is that he wasn't quite sure if it was something that could really happen in real life or if it was just a concept made up for TV.

First kisses were considered a milestone in the shows and magazines Hunter had secretly devoured. Something sacred and significant. It can't be with just anyone.

Admittedly, it had Hunter second guessing himself a little bit. Is his first kiss important? Or is that just a bunch of silly TV fluff with no grounds in reality?

It doesn't matter if it's Emira, does it? He's read books where first kisses are supposed to feel like you've been electrocuted. But in a good way. He can't imagine being electrocuted in a good way.

He gets his answer on the day of shooting when the kiss is ordered of him.

He should be grateful that they've been directed to keep it chaste. They both wear rings after all, and this is a family show.

Hunter squeezed his eyes shut, because eyes are always shut when people kiss in movies. And his mouth pricks Emira's mouth. And that's it. That's his first kiss over and done with.

And when he opens his eyes, a little underwhelmed and vaguely wondering why everything feels the exact same, Emira looks disappointed too.

That's when he realizes that the significance of first kisses is all lights and cameras. It's made up for TV. None of it is real.

But what he can't understand in the moment is why he feels a bit sad. There's no reason to feel sad.

But it's an annoyingly heavy emotion that sticks with him for the rest of the day.

They do a million shoots. Or what feels like a million. Hunter kisses Emira what feels like a million times. He had gone from having never kissed before to having kissed far too many times in one day.

And not a single kiss felt like anything but the usual emptiness that Hunter was used to.

During shooting breaks, he thought a little too much about how everything was just going to be like this. Forever. All of his experiences. Scripted. Made up. Not real.

Nothing was ever going to be real.

He didn't usually think about things like that. But now he was finding it hard to think about anything else.

Hunter couldn't sleep that night. You would think he'd sleep soundly when he had to get up before the crack of dawn, but he continued to struggle. Too much caffeine, too much brain bees that never shut up.

Tonight it was that one single thought of an entirely artificial lifetime.

Hunter was never going to be real.

After hours of restless tossing and turning, he left his bed and went downstairs, his footsteps expertly navigating across the creaky floorboards. He would watch something terrible on TV and he'd get so distracted by hating it that he'd forget his own problems.

After pushing a button, the first thing that appeared on Hunter's screen was a familiar girl's rounder than average face and bright green eyes.

Apparently, the Hexside Pilot had premiered recently. Hunter scoffed, making himself comfortable and deliberately tuning into whatever brain rotting stuff he was about to experience.

Unsurprisingly, he hated it. It was terrible. Cheap jokes. Flimsy plots. An obnoxious laugh track. He had never seen a worse show in his life.

Nothing is real, I'm not real, I'm not real, Nothing is real, I'm not real....

The costumes looked just as ridiculous on screen as they did in the studio.

Nothing is real....

The sets were cheap.

I'm not real....

Hunter abruptly paused mid laugh track, and stared at Willow Park's interesting face for an additional moment.

He knew absolutely nothing about this girl. Absolutely nothing.

The character she played was borderline illiterate, and Hunter genuinely could not say how much of her he was seeing was a script and how much was her.

But she was very lookable.

Are you real?

#tw child abuse #a lot of it!!!!!#tw for....belos in general #how do i even tag this. he's really creepy and it delves into a few uncomfortable subjects #some very weird policing of teenage bodies. it is meant to be weird i promise you #tw religious trauma #THATS IT!!! that is certainly a thing that is happening #La La Land Machine AU

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neonponders · 1 year

Text

Okay so I did a thing. @passivenovember made an excellent post on twitter about kindergarten teacher!Steve and I indulged.

• • • • •

The first day of school should have been the red flag. Day One of kindergarten was technically a half-day, because the little ones might find their first day of school to be overwhelming. It was a fifty-fifty chance that a student had done preschool before kindergarten, so the day was only from 8am to noon.

Steve had been doing this job for long enough that he had developed a good eye for which kids would be problematic. It was never indicated by the children, themselves.

It was the parents.

The first day of school was an unofficial parent-teacher conference, with Steve meeting every parent and introducing himself and his classroom to them. Plenty of parents were sweet as could be and profusely grateful, because they had been waiting four or five years for this day: the day they’d finally get to have more hours to themselves. Hours for self-care. Hours at their workplace to make better money. An overall passing of the baton to someone else to raise their kid.

As for the kids themselves, they were easy to read in regards to who’d been in daycare or not. They were either very social or immediately minded their own business. The kids who looked around like they were lost were where he devoted the most of his time on the first day.

Lila Hargrove was one of the latter. She walked in, holding her dad’s hand next to her head while the other fiddled close to her mouth. She didn’t suck her thumb, but she seemed to be thinking about it.

Steve stood up from where he crouched next to a table, getting the others settled and extended a hand. “Good morning! I’m Steve Harrington.”

The father was able to shake his hand since he carried his daughter’s purple backpack on one shoulder. “Billy Hargrove. This is my cupcake, Lila."

Hearing her name, her head jerked up, but Steve smoothly knelt on one knee for her level. “Hi, Lila. I’m Mr. Steve. What’s your favorite thing to do?”

He liked giving the kids options on the first day. Coloring? Reading? Blocks? Anything to help them establish a comfort level with the room.

Lila hesitated for a long moment, long enough for Steve to almost stand back up to address her father, but she murmured, “I don’t know.”

“That’s okay,” he reassured. There was nothing wrong with being shy or anxious. Usually mothers or both parents brought their kids in for the big day. A dad on his own…Hargrove was hardly the first, but they were always a bit special. “I made a present for everyone on their first day. Do you and your daddy want to open it together?”

She sure did, looking up at her father with the most hopeful expression, it made Steve’s heart pinch. Billy smiled down at her but prompted, “I see name plates.”

Steve guided them through the room with a brief glance at his other students to make sure they were behaving and occupied. He’d gathered them in one spot, but for lessons, they’d sit in their designated seating arrangement. Pulling out Lila’s chair for her, he explained, “I folded construction paper for everyone’s name plate. One of your first projects, Lila, will be decorating yours. After that, I’ll have them laminated so you can collect stickers on it throughout the year.”

Lila’s name stood on a table in the corner of the room. The nook was framed by cubic shelves and hooks mounted on the walls, which also had names over them: less glamorous marker written on masking tape. Colorful backpacks featuring action figures already hung from some of the hooks. Hargrove took his daughter’s backpack off and set it on her table. “Everything on the school supply list is in here.”

“Great!” Steve said as he took a box bound up with ribbon from one of the shelves. “I try to supply some of the stuff myself, but the school always gives out the same list. Do you want to do the honors?”

Again, Lila looked to her father. Disciplined, Steve wondered in the back of his mind, but the alert didn’t go off in his head. Far from it, he smiled as Hargrove knelt beside her chair and pinched one end of the ribbon bow.

“One? Two…” he counted, and the smile that his daughter blossomed with gave Steve a wave of relief; both in the comfort she had with her father as well as a knowledge of numbers. She took the other ribbon tail and they pulled on three. Lila whipped off the box lid to reveal a small stuffed lion, a Lego block the size of her hand, and a box of glitter crayons.

Hargrove pulled out the soft lion and poised it on the table that she’d be sharing with three other students. “Well, look at him. Does he have a name?”

Steve opened his mouth to prompt Lila to name him, but she piped, “Panthera leo! Like daddy!”

Steve’s mouth froze open around a, “Huh?”

Hargrove grinned as his daughter shoved her hand into his dark blond hair, and then ruffled the lion’s mane. Then he looked up at Steve. “The lion was a good choice. She loves animals right now. She only knows like six, but that includes their Latin name.”

“I…’ve never met a kid who knew Latin,” Steve recovered. “I have a confession, though. The lion and crayons are for you, Lila, but the block is for me. I like for all my kids to write their names on a block so I can build something with them at the end of the year.”

Hargrove’s eyes immediately swept up to the Lego sculptures on top of the arts and crafts cabinets. A small smile ghosted over his face, but he didn’t point them out to his daughter. “Lila can write most of her name but struggles a little with round letters.”

“That’s okay. We do a lot of practice with writing. The block is a promise: I’ll keep it safe for you, and you’ll be able to write your name and help me build something in the spring. How’s that sound?”

Whether or not parents understood the promise didn’t really matter. It was always worth it by the end of the year to remind the kids of their first presents, and seeing their excitement at such a long awaited activity.

Hargrove got it, though. “You play the long game.”

Steve looked up and smiled, only to face the full brunt of Billy Hargrove’s gaze. Attractive was an understatement. Water blue eyes pinned Steve in place, a chiseled jaw but full cheeks giving the man a stop-traffic appeal as well as an approachable softness. His short hair was long enough to imply that he was due for a haircut or in between styles; the broken and wonky curls had been haphazardly shoved to one side of his head. The man wore an ironed button-up, but his shoes gave him away: dirty black Converse with ombré pink and purple shoelaces.

Steve responded on autopilot. “Delayed gratification can be a doozy. Might as well make it fun.”

Hargrove didn’t really answer. He just sort of nodded and returned his attention to his daughter.

Lila Hargrove was a good girl. She loved animals, showed an early propensity for math, and carried the collective sweetness, observation, and behavior skills that teachers longed for.

Billy Hargrove was a red flag. He exhibited over-protective, analytical habits alongside a bizarre talent for filling every minute of Steve’s time when he wasn’t directly managing the kids or other parents coming and going.

Going, being the key word.

Hargrove stayed at the school all the way until noon. Then he donned the purple backpack and carried his daughter out, encouraging her tiny fists into the air for completing her first day.

“Donalds! M’Donalds!” she chanted.

Some time later, as Steve cleaned his classroom, vacuuming the reading time rugs, disinfecting each table, and tagging each Lego block with another masking tape label—so nobody had a crisis in May like, “But my block was Blue in August! Why’s it yellow now?”—a knock sounded on his doorframe.

Steve looked up, prompting Billy Hargrove to stroll in with a familiar paper bag. “Delivery for Mr. Steve. One Oreo McFlurry with a medium fry.”

Steve leaned back in his seat. He’d been standing for most of the morning, he couldn’t be bothered anymore. “Uh, thanks. You didn’t have to do that.”

“Are you lactose intolerant?”

“No?”

“Then it’s my pleasure,” he said with finality, giving the bag a shove to be a few inches closer to Steve. With the smell permeating the room, he couldn’t say no.

He asked while unpacking the bag, “Where’s Lila?”

“Her dance class. My P.A.’s got her while I get some work done. I just wanted to say thanks for catering today for the kids.”

Steve used the time to bite through four fries at once while he formulated an answer. This guy’s got a personal assistant?

“I’m happy to. Their first day in here is kind of the first day of the rest of their lives. It’s my job to help them feel safe and confident in here.”

A smile twitched on Hargrove’s face. “You’re playing nice, but I did notice the other parents leaving their kids in your hands.”

Steve allowed himself a harmless glare. “I can deal with a helicopter dad for a few hours. But after today, it won’t be up to me.”

The man held up a hand as if to gently move that aside. “I won’t need the principal escorting me out. I’m too busy to be here all day, anyhow. I just needed the full measure of the person who would be here with my girl.”

Steve looked up with the massive McFlurry spoon in his mouth. “Anph?”

Billy’s stoic bravado visibly dented as a laugh blurt out of him. “And you’re all right. But if my kid comes home crying, you might not be.”

Steve let exactly what he thought about being threatened ripple under his features as they steeled into what his best friend called, “Customer Service Harrington.”

And yet…he felt pinned in place again...because Billy’s eyes flashed, his expression opening as if he were intrigued—excited—by pissing Steve off. The spark settled as quickly as it manifested, making Steve wonder if he’d imagined it.

“The kids go home everyday with a progress folder. You’ll have my notes on the hottest kindergarten gossip.”

Billy laughed breathily, but it wasn’t as real as the rest of his emotive gestures. He lightly slapped the surface of the desk and dragged his hand away as he pivoted toward the door. “I’m looking forward to it, Harrington.”

#harringrove #teacher!steve #kindergarten teacher!steve #passivenovember #neonponders #😘#i hope it doesn't suck lol #ficlet

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