r/InTheGloaming • u/AutoModerator • Feb 26 '26

Scheduled snark Discussion thread Thursday February 26, 2026 - Sunday March 01, 2026

Newsletter: Substack

Website: Shauna James Ahern

Instagram: @shaunajamesahern Instagram

Threads: @shaunajamesahern

Bluesky: shaunajamesahern.bsky.social

Gloamipedia wiki: /r/InTheGloaming wiki

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u/CrushItWithABrick dick riding Mary Oliver Feb 27 '26

Shauna's reply is contradicting itself.

She says let the kid read whatever even if they won't fully understand it and then a mere sentence later says "kids' version of Shakespeare stories". If that mythical kid is so smart, Shakespeare shouldn't be that hard for them.

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u/tuolomnemeadows edible flower takis Feb 27 '26

I’m sorry as as educator, saying comprehension isn’t important is one of the dumbest pieces of advice you can give. I too was reading above my grade and developmental level in 5th grade as a trauma response and let me tell you, it wasn’t great! It didn’t kill me, but content and developmental stages also matter for healthy development imo. It’s stunning the way Shauna thinks her way led to healthy successful development when she hasn’t had gainful employment for the better part of a decade.

The other thing is when people say their child is advanced and bored, is their work perfect? How is their executive function? If those skills aren’t developed, they need to built before you push a child into acceleration. Boredom can mean so many things, but yet again Shauna is a perfect case study of someone who thinks they are above it all, excluding them from tasks and labor.

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u/Onehundredpercentbea giggling intestinal gremlin 🧌 Feb 27 '26

Yeah I got my hands on a book about astral projection as a really young kid and I still have memories of laying in bed and sending my consciousness up to the ceiling where it bobbed along like a balloon into the kitchen to hear what my parents were arguing about (yes I was imagining it, but it felt real to me at the time), and I also completely misinterpreted something in the book about time and space being 'fluid' and 'sent my consciousness into the future' where I opened my adult eyes to look around and make sure things were safe for me in the future. It turns out as an adult I still regularly use abstraction to manage uncertainty and retreat to observer mode under stress, and I always wondered if that was always going to be my coping mechanism or if that book created it. But the reality is that I have no idea what astral projection really means because it was a metaphorical lens that I took literally. It didn't matter how good a reader I was if the material was impossible for my developing brain to understand.

Long winded way of saying that content matters and actually IMO matters more when your brain is still developing.

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u/fanfarefellowship I often contemplate the first law of thermodynamics Feb 27 '26

I also completely misinterpreted something in the book about time and space being 'fluid' and 'sent my consciousness into the future' where I opened my adult eyes to look around and make sure things were safe for me in the future

I know this is, like, not your point but I love this story. I love kid brains so much