The little assistants of the library

图书馆的小服务员

Tushuguande xiao fuwuyuan

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8246456

Ah yeah more money than I will make in a lifetime, ez to start a family nowadays!

Key findings

• The 18-year cost of raising a child grew to $303,418 after tax exemptions and credits, according to a LendingTree analysis, even though the cost of the first five years dipped slightly. That's an average of $16,857 annually over 18 years, up 1.9% from a year ago. However, annual costs in the first five years decreased slightly from $29,419 to $29,325 (or 0.3%), driven primarily by a dip in day care costs.
• Hawaii is the most expensive state to raise a small child, with annual costs for the first five years reaching $40,342. Maryland and Massachusetts follow at $36,419 and $34,247. Conversely, annual costs are lowest in Mississippi ($17,148), Alabama ($18,019) and South Dakota ($18,622). All three states have infant day care costs below $10,000 annually, helping them rank among the cheapest states to raise a small child.
• Fourteen states saw the annual cost of raising a small child rise at least 10.0%, including four with growth of 20.0% or more. Annual costs rose in 39 states and the District of Columbia. Nebraska (27.4%), Montana (24.5%), Maine (24.4%) and Wisconsin (23.3%) all saw significant year-over-year growth in the annual cost of raising a small kid.  - Families in six states are projected to spend more than $300,000 raising a child over 18 years, with Hawaii leading at $412,661, followed by Alaska ($365,047) and Maryland ($326,360). By contrast, projected costs are lowest in New Hampshire ($201,963), the District of Columbia ($202,115) and South Carolina ($204,213). Kansas and Alaska saw the largest increases in projected 18-year child-rearing costs, each rising 23.5% from last year's report.
• Families spend an average of 21.9% of their income on the basic annual expenses to raise a small child, down from 22.6% in our 2025 analysis. The percentage is lowest in the District of Columbia (13.9%) and highest in Hawaii (27.4%).

A page from [A Book] for Children About Lenin (Детям о Ленине, Detiam o Lenine)

Andrei Lysenko. Lenin, Krupskaya and children

This looks like a really interesting read. I stumbled on this book because my wife is reading about the Author's developmental theory for her student development masters. His theory of child development has a real striking resemblance to Dialectical Materialism at a cursory glance. The author after writing this book went on to help establish Head Start. Which is just another example of social programs in the west being created as a direct result of experience with the Soviet system.

This book compares the childhood development of kids from both the USSR and the US in the 1960s. Anna's Archive has a few PDFs of the book in various editions.

Adding it to my growing reading list.

MIKHAIL SAMKOV. CHILDREN SINGING, 1971-72

Spiro Kristo - The Children (1968)

"The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution."

—Huey P. Newton

So I informed you people of my recent conundrum. My solution ended up being that I had a discussion with the child about the fact that there are adults who want to hurt children who lurk the internet, and what kind of information she should be wary of handing out on the internet (Incidentally the person the child handed out their number to was another child, the kid had vetted this on their own before handing out their actual phone number, which is pretty cool. Also both kid's moms have now spoken so that's double cool). I then promised the child that I would never tell anyone anything that they tell me in confidence. Which I mean I guess I already did kinda, but it feels different because I am sharing it anonymously. I then said I would tell their mom that it was time to talk to them about what they were allowed to do on the internet so nobody would get in trouble in the future.
Well someone got in trouble, and that someone is me. Because the girl told her parents what she did during that conversation, and they panicked and told the institution, and everyone agreed that I had been negligent because I had only told them to have a conversation about internet safety and not told them specifically what happened. Even though they found out literally two days after I did.

Now the worst didn't happen. The kid still has her phone. But it's now basically 90% spyware and parental control which is gonna do a fat load of good since nobody bothers to check it and the parents immediately wanted my help in getting around parental controls to use a third party chat feature anyway. While still being mad at me for not telling them. But also she's not allowed to install google messages because they don't know if they can monitor that?!? The whole thing is a mess, but at least no one got hurt.

Pyongyang, August 12 (KCNA) — Many working people and schoolchildren have a pleasant time at the Munsu Water Park in the capital city of Pyongyang.

They are giving out their phone number to people they met on roblox. The child is institutionalised, their parent cannot control their behavior meaningfully and the adults at the institution are pretty negligent and she doesn't trust them.
I have messaged like my whole family and some friends for advice but nobody is getting back to me.

So I have two kids, 11 and 14, and I think they’re actually older than any of the other kids that other users on this website might have. Like a good communist, I made sure to brainwash my children when they were young, and I even homeschooled them for the first three years of the pandemic. Eventually they asked to go back to school and I couldn’t really stop them. They’ve actually had a great time there, they’re doing really well and they seem very popular, but especially my older kid has been having such a good time that he started doubting that America was bad, and has just kind of been drifting into liberalism, although I could still get him to say cool things like free Palestine, which liberals won’t usually say. He also developed a serious interest in sports, sadly just watching rather than playing, and I don’t know where that comes from because neither of his parents are really interested in watching sports, but seemingly it’s what everyone at his school loves. He was also repeating a lot of the usual liberal nonsense to me about China and the Soviet Union.

Anyway, over the last couple of weeks he’s become pretty obsessed with Epstein, and has been sending me lots of TikTok videos about the usual Epstein-related things, and yesterday he just suddenly told me that ”maybe the commies are the good guys because at least they aren’t eating children.” He stopped arguing with me about China and the Soviet Union, and seems slightly more interested in getting a more left perspective on these and other similar subjects. I don’t know how long this will last, but it’s just a minor hopeful sign. I know that most liberals and conservatives are just kind of doing their best to focus only on how Epstein implicates their enemies, rather than the system itself, but some people at least might be shaken out of the capitalist ideological paradigm.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/25719

Two weeks into January, the director of a St. Paul child care center called a family to ask why their daughter had been absent on-and-off since late last year.

“We reached out to just see, ‘Hey, what’s going on? Is your child sick?’” said Angela Clair, whose child care center serves more than 70 children.

The girl’s mother answered the phone.

“ICE is in our neighborhood every single day, and I don’t want to leave the neighborhood to take her to school, because I’m afraid that myself or my husband will be taken,” Clair recalls the mother saying.

Clair called back a week later to check on them, but the family still didn’t feel safe bringing their child to school. The family relies on the Child Care Assistance Program, a federally-funded, state-managed program that subsidizes child care for low-income families. The family would no longer receive the subsidy if the child missed 10 days in a row or more than 25 days of school in a calendar year.

With the girl’s absences creeping towards 25, Clair had to un-enroll her.

“It’s just unfortunate because mom does not want her to not be in school,” Clair said. “But also knows it’s just not safe right now.”

Minnesota is entering the third month of “Operation Metro Surge,” in which thousands of immigration agents are sweeping the state, arresting immigrants — including many who are in the U.S. legally. Agents have shot three people, killing two U.S. citizens, and sparked widespread protests and efforts to track and observe agents’ actions.

Parents and children have been detained on their way to school, prompting several metro-area schools and districts to offer online learning options to vulnerable families. Volunteers — mostly parents — are taking shifts during dropoff and pickup to keep eyes out for ICE.

The absences are impacting early childhood education, too — and have big-picture implications for child care providers, who are often running on low margins already.

Source

From Truthout via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/23096

Before Thanksgiving 2025, the Department of Homeland Security set its sights on North Carolina. Since launching Operation Charlotte’s Web, a multiagency campaign of terror and abduction directed against the state’s non-white immigrant population, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) have made more than 400 arrests while local businesses have shuttered and student absences have skyrocketed.1

But workers and students in the bull city did not take this invasion lying down. In this interview, Shan, a Durham-based public school teacher, shares about the initially “chaotic” response to raids—and the organized response before, during, and after them. Widespread pressure and fast-acting responses coordinated by the local teacher’s union, community groups, parents, and students won important protections and paved the way for continued resistance to state terror in their schools.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

by Juan Verala Luz

Juan Verala Luz (JVL): When you first learned ICE was planning to invade North Carolina, how did you and other educators prepare?

Shan (S): Local nonprofits and other community groups have long prepped for that sort of thing.2 As far as I know, in recent years, there’s never been Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) coming along with ICE. Given what was already happening in Charlotte, it was pretty scary how close it was and the sheer number of people snatched in such a short amount of time.

I definitely don’t think school staff were really prepared at all. It wasn’t a thing where I felt like I knew what exactly to do. A lot of people were asking questions about it as things were happening. We blame the school district administration for that disorganization.

With schools, the nice thing is that we already kind of have a natural network, because parents, students, workers are all kind of connected. So it was almost easy in a sense to mobilize around it. We didn’t have to really convince each other. We all came together very organically.

JVL: How did you “organically” come together? Were you explicitly coordinating responses together, or recognizing from a distance each other’s role in confronting this operation?

S: During Operation Charlotte’s Web, our worker organization was really focused on pushing immigrant protection policies at our upcoming second meet-and-confer session.3 We were trying to argue for a robust ICE policy that provides all the resources possible, such as Red Cards, “Know Your Rights” information, and comprehensive training for staff as part of our platform, so our capacity was highly limited.4

Because we were so out of capacity, community groups really stepped up. At the high school levels, the students self-organized and did a walkout in at least two of the schools, if not more.5 A lot of parent organizations and outside nonprofits cohered together and reached out to us. We were able to provide a lot of contacts at different schools because we already had Durham Association of Educators leaders and that connected network.

I became one of the captains of a school so that I could coordinate with parents. I remember being in meetings with hundreds of people to plan our response. We told people to come to a spot to make sure we watch for any suspicious vehicles coming through the schools. We also held signs to show we really support students and all that, like, you’re welcomed here. Because it was right around the time of Thanksgiving break, parents wanted to make sure that for families that were afraid to go out to get food for whatever reason, they had food delivered to their houses, so they organized a food drive.

It was kind of like having a morale boost in those scary times from parents.

JVL: You mentioned your union was focused on the meet-and-confer immigrant protection policy. Walk me through how the team brought it to the school district.

S: Immigrant protections were definitely something that was on the top of our minds after Trump got re-elected. Durham has actually protected a student from deportation with a policy at the time that got adopted, so it was already drafted.6 We’re trying to push the district to readopt that policy.7

A lot of staff members and workers in my school who don’t read up on stuff like that would be really confused about how to help students. They’re, like, “Well, what if ICE agents show up? What should I do?” We also wanted to make sure that other staff members are protected too, because we have staff members who are international teachers and workers. If the district would train and have a more systematic approach so that we’re all in it together, we could respond a lot faster and more effectively. Most of the stuff administrators put out these days are just vague platitudes, like “Oh, we care and believe in protecting families. We believe that all children deserve education.” I’m like, “Okay, that’s nice, but what can we do concretely?”

In the first session, when we started the conversation, the district was very reluctant to re-adopt the policy and was very defensive generally. They said “I don’t really want to get targeted by ICE.” We’re like, “Well, ICE is gonna come anyway, doesn’t really matter if you say it publicly here or not.”

Once ICE was in town, it was one of those things where the point was proven. Because things were so really red hot, the administration really couldn’t wiggle out of that. We have open meetings between our team, their team, and we as members of the public are all sitting there, all 200 some of us. A lot of the district meet-and-confer team members are very angry that we’re even there to begin with; they have to really show their faces. If they said anything that was against the immigrant protection policy, I think it would have been game over, publicity-wise.

JVL: Have you won anything since ICE came to Durham?

S:  Because of all the organic community organizing, the union pushing, and now with ICE coming, the timing ended up being good for us in terms of winning more specific things, more commitments from the district. They agreed to provide Red Cards in all the schools. They agreed to work on the immigrant protection policy and the training.

The victory isn’t just the things that were provided in the moment, but also the fact that we now have this network and structure set up. We know this was a kind of last-minute scramble, and we’re trying to refine it, but in case this happens in the future, we already have the structure to respond to it and that will be sustained. We never know when they’re going to come and ICE is always here, but I feel a lot more prepared both mentally and materially.

JVL: What lessons are you taking with you to prepare for ICE’s return?

S: Community organization really works: having people mobilize and be visible to take that strong stand that we’re not tolerating ICE matters. I can’t say for sure but I know that when they came to the Triangle area and we had all these protests and more visibility, they didn’t stay for long. Making sure that we have lots of people there protecting each other, I think that was really important.

Because we were already having that conversation about immigrant defense, I think that helped all of us jump in and take action. Leveraging all those networks and on-the-ground mass organizations is very helpful. Think about what kind of people and organizations you have rather than going through the legal route. I think it will be good for any kind of organization to think about setting up that type of structure so that ICE can’t hit anywhere and everywhere.

If you enjoyed this article, we also recommend our guide for Organizing to Keep ICE Out of Your Workplace.

Notes

1. For a substantive look at Operation Charlotte’s Web’s development and impacts, see https://www.wbtv.com/2025/12/03/425-arrested-operation-charlottes-web-federal-officials-say/. ↩︎
2. One noteworthy example is Siembra NC. Even before Trump’s 2024 electoral victory, the organization had been hosting packed “Know Your Rights” training and readying rapid response networks. Learn more about their work in this interview with co-founder Nikki Marín Baena: https://truthout.org/audio/fight-fear-build-power-community-defense-works/. ↩︎
3. North Carolina’s right-to-work legislation forbids public-sector collective bargaining. Meet-and-confer, wherein district administrators and workers’ associations negotiate over non-binding priorities they recommend that the board of education adopts, is “as close as you can get to” it, explained Shan. ↩︎
4. Typically printed on bright red cardstock, Red Cards are wallet-sized reminders about constitutional rights and an enumerated list of steps for exercising them during encounters with federal law enforcement. The Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) makes printable PDFs available in over 50 languages; see https://www.ilrc.org/redcards.  ↩︎
5. An account of the walkouts can be read at https://dukechronicle.com/article/duke-university-durham-demonstration-protest-ice-border-patrol-immigration-high-school-durham-public-schools-north-carolina-charlotte-walkout-20251122. ↩︎
6. To learn more about this powerful example from 2016, see https://inthesetimes.com/article/wildin-acosta-ice-teacher-union-north-carolina-right-to-work-deportation. ↩︎
7. Details of the revised 2017 policy can be found at https://www.campussafetymagazine.com/news/durham-strengthens-policy-protecting-immigrant-students/35797/. ↩︎

The post How Teachers, Students, and Parents are Organizing to Keep ICE Out of Durham Schools appeared first on Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation.

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TO MY SON AS I CONTEMPLATE MY DEATH

Upon my departure grieve not too fiercely, for casting across that spaceless light like Saturn's orbit dimmed by distance, waiting to touch you, I shall be transformed— only that.

After a life answering its call,

fretting over shadows on the cave wall

for vain promises not really desired,

yet with sense enough to pit a middling talent

against majestic goals, a small walk-on part for a better world.

Now to find beyond the dark passage

a world of luminous wonder and joyful comprehension of things you and I pondered when you were scarcely ten years old, surmising that the personality cannot capture the soul,

but the joyful soul remembers the personality.

I'll not hesitate to re-enter

but shall move in another time,

urging your guardians to perfect diligence,

cheering you on from across a mute universe.

Yet grieve a little,

for who knows what deposit of love can survive that distance?

When even the prodigy of your metaphysics and the protective ferocity of a father's heart cannot produce certitude,

when one's composition is immolated by time,

never to recompose, never again these hands, these eyes, a dreadful certitude that creates the pain of doubt.

So I ask you, in your later years,

in a quiet moment,

to keep the memory of our company and our struggle,

and the loyal unfinished love,

each for the other.

Ciao bambino

In the fading cosmic light

two little boys embrace good night.

— Michael Parenti, the last entry in Dirty Truths.