Your Saturday morning "authenticity" update.

1. "A Little League coach went viral for his dad joke on the mound. It taught a bigger lesson" (NYT) quotes Jake Riordan, a Little League coach in Kentucky: "I don’t really take anything in life too seriously. It’s like, it’s Little League baseball. But I think consistency when you’re a coach is pretty important. So I’m consistently loose and goofy, and they play that way. I think that one of the best things we can do as a coach or leader is just to be authentic — to be yourself. I think, believe it or not, kids or players of any age can see through the bull crap."

2. "Jeff Probst Reflects on ‘Survivor’s’ Resurgence After 2025 Emmy Nominations" (Entertainment Now): "While Probst has been open about his friendly rivalry with the other competition series hosts in the past, he argues that [Alan] Cumming and RuPaul 'take on a more performative role' for their respective shows. 'It’s not their true selves,' said Probst, referring to Cumming’s 'dandy Scottish laird' persona on 'The Traitors' and RuPaul’s extravagant drag transformation on 'Drag Race.' Alternatively, Probst said that the man viewers see on each and every episode of 'Survivor' is his authentic self. 'That’s me,' he said. 'The vulnerability is that I’m exposed and vulnerable in the same way that the players are because I don’t do do-overs.... '"

3. "Ding Yuxi’s Tear‑Filled Gaze Goes Viral, Highlighting Authenticity and Shifting Masculinity in Chinese Reality TV" (Trending on Weibo): "Actor Ding Yuxi – known to his growing legion of fans for his curly hair, gentle demeanor and the boy‑ish charm that has anchored his rise in dramas such as “十年一品温如言” – was caught on screen with what Chinese netizens have affectionately called “酒汪汪的大眼睛”, literally 'wine‑soaked big eyes'... a playful twist on the more common “水汪汪的大眼睛” (big watery eyes).... Fans celebrated the moment as a rare sign of authenticity in an industry often accused of presenting polished, pre‑packaged personas.... viewers reposted the clip with captions praising his 'authentic vulnerability,' while others dissected the scene, wondering whether the tear was spontaneous...."

4. TO COME! I SAID I'D DO 4. DO YOU DOUBT MY SINCERITY? 

If people are poor, give them money.

I've heard that said as if it's obtuse to concoct more complicated policies. But now I'm seeing:

[A] rigorous experiment, in a more direct test, found that years of monthly payments did nothing to boost children’s well-being.... After four years of payments, children whose parents received $333 a month from the experiment fared no better than similar children without that help, the study found. They were no more likely to develop language skills, avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays, demonstrate executive function or exhibit brain activity associated with cognitive development....

It has long been clear that children from affluent families exhibit stronger cognitive development and fewer behavioral problems, on average, than their low-income counterparts. The question is whether their advantage comes from money itself or from related forces like parental health and education, neighborhood influences or the likelihood of having two parents in the home....

From "Study May Undercut Idea That Cash Payments to Poor Families Help Child Development/Rigorous new research appears to show that monthly checks intended to help disadvantaged children did little for their well-being, adding a new element to a dispute over expanded government aid" (NYT)(gift link).

"In South Korea, many parents bed share because they want to savor a close relationship with young children 'who one day won’t need them anymore'..."

"... said Inae Kim, an office manager in Seoul. She sleeps in two adjacent king-size beds with her husband and their two girls, ages 5 and 7.... In some East Asian societies, choosing not to bed share can be seen as 'harsh parenting'.... Ms. Kim... sleeps better without her kids in the bed, she said. But her husband insists on family bed sharing because he sees it as essential for a close relationship with his daughters. Some of Ms. Kim’s friends have children who stayed in the family bed until age 12, even at the expense of their parents’ sleep quality and sex lives. That would be too much for her, she said. So she and her husband have decided that their girls will move into what is now their playroom in about two years. Whether that will happen on schedule is an open question. The plan is to install bunk beds, Ms. Kim said with a laugh, but neither girl wants to sleep on top...."

From "Sharing a Bed With Your Kid? It’s Totally Normal in Asia. Bed sharing tends to be unpopular and contentious in the United States. But in many Asian countries, the question is often not whether to do it, but when to stop" (NYT).

Meanwhile: "Many Western parents put infants to sleep in cribs or beds in a separate room — often using a practice known as 'sleep training,' in which infants are taught to sleep independently. Modern ideas about separating mothers and babies at night have their roots in campaigns by 'Victorian-era influencers' in Britain and the United States...."

Feminism doesn't come up in this article, presumably because it is romanticizing the "other" and questioning the "West." Are we not supposed to notice that Inae Kim is unhappy with the burden and disorder of bed sharing and the loss of sleep and sexual connection to her husband, who insists that closeness to the daughters must predominate?

"From Edison films catalog: Four young ladies, in their nightgowns, are having a romp. One of the pillows gets torn, and the feathers fly all over the room...1897."

Found in the Library of Congress collection at YouTube when I was looking for some film of Annie Oakley, to use in the previous post. I did find an Annie Oakley clip — from 1894 — but I just didn't think it was interesting enough. But here.

Maybe you think that's more interesting than 4 young ladies, in their nightgowns, having a romp in 1897." To me, it's more interesting that, in the first decade of movie-making, the idea of girls pillow-fighting came up. Filming a famous performer is obviously something you'd want to do. 

"Kids: They’re pint-size spies. They’re little data processors, soaking things up and spitting them back, until one day they’ve grokked enough to knock you into the gutter."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "The Future Looks Dark, but Familiar, in Gary Shteyngart’s New Book/'Vera, or Faith' follows a 10-year-old girl navigating family drama and a dystopian America" (NYT).

1. Garner, the name, is not a "garner (the word!)" spotting, within the logic of the Althouse blog.

2. "One day they’ve grokked enough" might be one of the last appearances of "grok," the verb, in this Musk-permeated word.

3. I just finished reading "Vera, or Faith" last night. That's why I'm reading a review of it this morning. The quote I pulled from the review was chosen because of that "grokked."

4. About that dystopia — to quote the book — "[T]he states are having their constitutional conventions. And these conventions will decide whether to give an 'enhanced vote'... counting for five-thirds of a regular vote to so-called 'exceptional Americans,' those who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains."

5. Lots of novels use that child as pint-size spy idea, don't they? I think of "What Maisie Knew" and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." You can think of more. Or ask Grok. But whether the character is a child or not, many novels make their plot out a character gradually putting clues together and figuring something out. The thing to be figured out may not be an interesting story at all — who killed X, who is X's father/mother, why did X leave town all these many years ago. The story is the unlocking of the mystery. But to make the central character a child is to blend this mystery-solving with the mystery-solving that is every child's life: What do words mean? What are adults doing? Where do I fit into all this?

6. "Vera, or Faith" (commission earned).

"And you could have my two daughters on this call who know that when I die, my ashes are to be spread at Camp Mystic."

"It runs that deep for people who went to that camp. It was a very, very safe space. You know, it just was a, a clean slate. No one knew what you were like at school every day. No one knew that I was the geeky kid. I just was a can't-miss-it girl. I didn't even have a present father. I didn't know what anybody else's father did or how much money or the size of the house they lived in. It was a space where people could come and it was a level playing field.... So I did not have an idyllic childhood. I had a privileged childhood. But, you know, just because you're privileged doesn't mean that things are always going well at home. And I think a lot of kids were grappling with themselves and they came to Mystic and it was just a place to be a child.... I had an older brother and he was great. But I looked up to girls. I don't think I understood that at the time. It was also a place where you could just be silly. And I don't know that I would've been silly in front of boys at that age...."

Said Erin Paisan, describing her years as a camper in the 1970s, in "A Love Letter to Camp Mystic," today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast.

And over at The Washington Post, there's "'The camp of our dreams’: LBJ’s daughter remembers her years at Camp Mystic/Lynda Bird Johnson Robb recalls how the Texas camp shaped her childhood" (free-access link): "The camp, which opened in 1926, had a legendary reputation among Texans of privilege. Parents were known to put their daughters on the waiting list at birth.... Girls in their cabins could look up and see the names of their mothers and aunts and grandmothers carved into the rafters.... The bonds formed there could help assure that a girl would get into the right sorority at the University of Texas, marry well and find entry in elite circles."

"'Stop talking over your brother,' they’d chide. 'I asked him a question.' And I would quieten down, shamed."

"My brother would say nothing, but entreat me with frightened eyes to step in. As a small child, I felt my brother spoke without language. I heard his voice in my head, and I believed I was his translator. To me, this felt natural. It’s easy to scoff – the delusions of childhood – but as toddlers we read everything around us.... Maybe, my brother’s non verbal cues felt like language to me. So much of what is communicated between people involves attunement, a subtle reading of one another’s emotional states, micro-expressions and non verbal cues. Perhaps I just hadn’t learned to distinguish...."

Writes Jessie Cole, in "I spoke for my brother when he was too afraid to answer — now, he speaks in melodies, and I have learned to listen" (Guardian).

Jessie Cole is a writer. Her brother, Jacob Cole, is a guitarist. I'm listening on Spotify, here. 

"The mayor of a city in southwest Russia encouraged men to 'sneak up on their women so that 10,000 children will be born in exactly nine months.'"

"Some regions are giving lump-sum bonuses to women who become mothers while they’re still in school, and a Russian version of MTV’s '16 and Pregnant,' which originally discouraged teen pregnancy, has been rebranded as 'Mom at 16,' in order to promote it. One politician encouraged women to wear miniskirts to increase births, while an official in the country’s Education Ministry advocated 'school discos' to foster 'romance for children.' A regional health minister has told Russians to have sex during work breaks. Now, a hodgepodge of religious conservatives and techno-futurists are leading the United States into the fray...."

From "A Bold Idea to Raise the Birthrate: Make Parenting Less Torturous" (NYT).

The article is by Anna Louie Sussman who says she's keeping "a running list of harebrained schemes various governments and officials have proposed to raise the birthrate in their aging countries."

"It’s possible that within the MAGA bubble, some aspiring tradwives might genuinely be motivated by the prospect of a medal, or perhaps a memecoin, from Mr. Trump (though whether they’ll get all the way to baby No. 6 by the time his term ends is an open question).... The ideas currently being floated... prompt mockery and horror, at least among my cohort of reproductive-age women. 'This is nuts,' said one friend.... 'God help us,' wrote another."

The incentives will just have to get better, but they probably won't until the decline becomes more obvious, and then, they still won't, because it will be too late, and who will want to pay for all that free childcare and so forth when it's easy to see there's no hope? But aren't those Russians crazy?

"[H]e was returning home from school when he realized that a car was following him. He recalled that a well-dressed man... emerged from the vehicle..."

"... and asked him for his name. Having been instructed by his mother not to speak to strangers, Mr. Staiola did not respond. Mr. Staiola said [the man, Vittorio De Sica,] then followed him home, where his parents immediately recognized the film eminence but refused to allow their son to appear in his movie. Later, Mr. Staiola recounted, an uncle took him back to audition before De Sica. Still determined to cast Mr. Staiola as Bruno, De Sica returned to his parents, Mr. Staiola said, and offered the extravagant sum of 300,000 lire for two months’ work. At that point, Mr. Staiola said, his father turned to him with a smile and declared: 'If you don’t go to work tomorrow, I’ll kill you.'"

From "Enzo Staiola, child actor at heart of ‘Bicycle Thieves,’ dies at 85/He was 8 years old, with no acting experience, when director Vittorio De Sica cast him in the 1948 film that epitomized Italian neorealism" (WaPo)(free-access link).

ADDED: My son John wrote about "The Bicycle Thieves," with an update about Staiola's death, at his "101 Years of Movies" blog, here. It was his second favorite movie of the year 1948. (First was "Unfaithfully Yours," a movie I quoted a few years ago, here.)

"Today, parents still have obligations to their children. But it seems the children’s duties have become optional."

"'With parents and adult children today, the adult child feels like, "If you failed me in your responsibility as a parent" — in ways, of course, that are increasingly hard to define— "then I owe you nothing as an adult child,"' says [psychologist Joshua] Coleman. Which means that it now often seems like having a child entails an enormous amount of financial, emotional and spiritual investment, with a hovering possibility that your children will cut contact with you after they reach young adulthood and the increasing likelihood that they will hold you responsible — not only for their suffering and struggles but even for your decision to bring them into the misery-inducing world in the first place.

Writes Michal Leibowitz, in "Why Millennials Dread Having Babies" (NYT).

"Screen time together is better than individual device time, experts say. Start playing multiplayer video games like Mario Kart on the same screen...."

"Pick a movie or TV show to watch together as a family, without checking a your phone. 'TV is underrated in the age of short form video, if you’re worried about their attention span,' says Devorah Heitner, author of 'Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World.' 'It’s an opportunity to connect, and it’s also an opportunity to have a shared vocabulary.'"

From "The White House is worried about kids’ screen time. Here are five things parents can do. A new MAHA-led report on childhood health has harsh words about screen time, but the reality is more nuanced" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Did you ever think it would come to this, that the situation with children would get so bad that watching more TV would come to be regarded as therapeutic?!

That's a free access link, so you can see multiple other issues, such as the painful dissonance for parents who want to get their kids off the devices but hate to be on the same page with Trump and Bobby.

"A large number of animals were also removed from the home, including four Great Danes, three other dogs, a lizard, snakes, several birds, two hamsters and 29 chinchillas..."

"... according to Chief Harkins. Ms. Spencer’s social media is filled with love notes to Mr. Mosely, interspersed with images of her in sundresses posing with Great Danes at dog competitions."

From "Couple Imprisoned Girl for 7 Years and Kept Her in Dog Cage, Police Say/Investigators, who did not identify the teenager, now 18, said they believed she had been sexually abused by her stepfather" (NYT).

I know cruelty toward non-human animals correlates with cruelty toward human beings, but I wonder if an effusive, over-the-top love for non-human animals correlates with cruelty toward human beings. Are there not people who see dogs (or cats) as purer and better than humans and more deserving of loving care? Of course, one's dog will give unconditional love and never utter a word of criticism. Compare a teenager to a dog and — if you are incredibly stupid or deranged — you may descend into a Great-Dane-and-chinchilla-infested hell of the sort devised by Ms. Spencer and Mr. Mosely.

"In a 1987 episode of the HBO satire series 'Not Necessarily the News,' he played an enraged, violent version of himself obsessed with revenge..."

"... on Hollywood executives who had ignored him, all while wearing Dennis the Menace’s signature overalls and striped shirt."

From "Jay North, Child Star of ‘Dennis the Menace,’ Dies at 73/He was best known for playing the towheaded Dennis Mitchell on a sitcom that ran on CBS from 1959 to 1963" (NYT).

"If you cannot get married and start a family within three quarters, the company will terminate your labor contract...."

"Not responding to the call of the country, not marrying and having children, is disloyal."

Said the memo to unmarried employees of Shandong Shuntian Chemical Group, quoted in "Chinese Company to Single Workers: Get Married or Get Out/As China’s government worries about the falling birthrate, some private employers have ordered workers to do their part, or else" (NYT). 

The notice from the chemical company, which began circulating online last month, was directed at unmarried employees between the ages of 28 and 58, including divorced workers. As online ridicule grew, the company quickly backtracked. Reached by phone, a woman at its headquarters said the notice had been retracted, and that the local government had ordered the company to undergo “rectification.”...

Years ago, when the Chinese authorities wanted to limit births, they resorted to coercive measures like forced abortions and sterilizations. (The city where the chemical company is based, Linyi, was particularly notorious for such tactics.) Now that Beijing is trying to do the opposite, it is taking a softer approach, perhaps to avoid setting off large-scale resistance.

"Toys are a scam."

It's a great headline: "Toys are a scam. Kids keep asking for them. We keep buying them. And no one is playing with them" (WaPo).

But to say "toys are a scam" is to blame the manufacturers and sellers of toys. They're out to trick parents into buying things that are not needed and might be actively bad. But this puts the blame/"blame" with the parents:

Suzanne Gaskins, a cultural developmental psychologist, says it’s only in the past 50 years that we’ve started accumulating piles of toys. As she compared families in America with those in other societies, a couple of observations stood out. One is that our kids are less engaged in the adult world — regularly helping prepare food, say, or care for a household — and more focused on the kid-centric universe we’ve constructed to “maximize their development.” 

“The first goal for American parents is to let their kids be happy,” Gaskins says. “And not just happy in a contented sense, but happy in an active, almost hysterically happy sense.” 

For Mayan parents, by contrast, the “primary goal is that the kid is even-keeled — not particularly happy, not particularly sad.” 

Hysterically happy — that's something that can only persist for a moment, perhaps on Christmas morning. But one must revert to feeling normal. The keel will even. Imagine if your kids stayed Christmas-happy for months — gaga over new toys for days on end. You wouldn't think, great, they are maximizing their development.

"My kids don't want to go to the movies. They think the screen's too big. It freaks them out."

"The biggest screen that they want watch is the screen that we have at home or their phone. I took them to see a movie. They were like freaked out. It's too big, the screen."

"I’ve gotten so lazy with my youngest one, because there’s so many, that at night I put him in his clothes for the next day..."

"So, he has dinner, he takes his bath, but then I’ll be like, 'Hey, dude. It will save an extra five minutes if we get dressed now and then you can sleep later,' and I can sleep later, wink wink."

Said the celebrity Tori Spelling, quoted in "Tori Spelling Gets Backlash for Dressing Her Son for School the Night Before—But Should She?"

That's in Parents, last September, and I'm seeing it because it's linked in a new article in New York Magazine, "On the Internet, Everyone’s a Bad Mom."

"Children as young as 12 are being arrested on suspicion of extremism offences, Britain’s most senior counterterrorism police officer has said."

"Matt Jukes, assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan Police, said there was a 'conveyor belt leading children towards extremism' being driven by tech companies 'making vast amounts of money' from them.... [G]overnment figures revealed that the largest group of people referred to the government’s counterextremism programme Prevent were children aged 11 to 15, who made up 2,729 referrals — 40 per cent...."

The London Times reports.

"You mentioned fertility and regret, and I'd like to take both of those concerns head-on."

Said the Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, arguing against state law that restricts access to puberty blockers and hormones as a treatment for gender dysphoria. Full transcript here. Audio here.

I do want to acknowledge that there is evidence to suggest that gender-affirming care with respect to hormones can have some impacts on fertility. Critically, puberty blockers are -- are -- have no effect in and of themselves on fertility, so I don't think that concern can justify the ban on puberty blockers, which is just pressing pause on someone's endogenous puberty to give them more time to understand their identity. With respect to hormone use, there are some effects on fertility, but the court found that many individuals who are transgender remain fertile after taking these medications. They can conceive biological children. 

"Australia has imposed a sweeping ban on social media for children under 16.... But many details were still unclear..."

"... such as how it will be enforced and what platforms will be covered....  The law... uts the onus on social media platforms to take 'reasonable steps' to prevent anyone under 16 from having an account. Corporations could be fined... for 'systemic' failures to implement age requirements. Neither underage users nor their parents will face punishment for violations. And whether children find ways to get past the restrictions is beside the point, [Prime Minister Anthony Albanese] said. 'We know some kids will find workarounds, but we’re sending a message to social media companies to clean up their act,' he said...."

From "Australia Has Barred Everyone Under 16 From Social Media. Will It Work? The law sets a minimum age for users of platforms like TikTok, Instagram and X. How the restriction will be enforced online remains an open question" (NYT).