Elon Musk (father of 11) admires them. Thousands follow their ideology. Malcolm and Simone Collins are on a mission to persuade everyone to have multiple children. But are they really model parents?
The highlight for me is coming up with some weird pseudoscience justification for why it’s okay to hit your kids.
I contacted the reporter via her website, to ask what motivated the story when the Guardian just wrote about them last year, and if the couple’s PR rep (who I assume exists) had instigated it.
I don’t really expect to hear back but it sure would be interesting to know.
It’s worth noting in the Grauniad’s defence that the piece which mentioned them (among others) last year wasn’t a commissioned interview article, it was a column by Arwa Mahdawi. Columnists usually have a regular gig to write opinion pieces on some topic relevant to their interests and then submit them for publication – in other words, they don’t have an editor telling them to go and cover something, they write about what they feel like writing about even if it turns out to be at odds with the paper’s editorial policy (e.g. Simon Jenkins, who is a Guardian columnist despite regularly expressing some highly un-Guardian-reader views). As Mahdawi is a columnist who regularly focuses on feminist issues and the United States this would be entirely within her field of interest.
Still doesn’t mean these people deserve yet more coverage, though. I hope their kids get out of this toxic family having suffered as little harm as possible from a mother who apparently thinks that the only solution to “cheap, good-quality snowsuits bought from Russia” not fitting when you’re pregnant is dressing like a tradwife and a father who really doesn’t seem to like them and who does an abuse in front of a journalist which he thinks he can just explain away with pseudoscientific bullshit as “hey, that looked like abuse but it wasn’t, it was SCIENCE”.
@dgerard
I contacted the reporter via her website, to ask what motivated the story when the Guardian just wrote about them last year, and if the couple’s PR rep (who I assume exists) had instigated it.
I don’t really expect to hear back but it sure would be interesting to know.
It’s worth noting in the Grauniad’s defence that the piece which mentioned them (among others) last year wasn’t a commissioned interview article, it was a column by Arwa Mahdawi. Columnists usually have a regular gig to write opinion pieces on some topic relevant to their interests and then submit them for publication – in other words, they don’t have an editor telling them to go and cover something, they write about what they feel like writing about even if it turns out to be at odds with the paper’s editorial policy (e.g. Simon Jenkins, who is a Guardian columnist despite regularly expressing some highly un-Guardian-reader views). As Mahdawi is a columnist who regularly focuses on feminist issues and the United States this would be entirely within her field of interest.
Still doesn’t mean these people deserve yet more coverage, though. I hope their kids get out of this toxic family having suffered as little harm as possible from a mother who apparently thinks that the only solution to “cheap, good-quality snowsuits bought from Russia” not fitting when you’re pregnant is dressing like a tradwife and a father who really doesn’t seem to like them and who does an abuse in front of a journalist which he thinks he can just explain away with pseudoscientific bullshit as “hey, that looked like abuse but it wasn’t, it was SCIENCE”.
I really really don’t get how wearing a corset* while you’re pregnant is somehow the most rational option
*Don’t come @ me corset fans, I’m sure they are very comfortable, but while you’re pregnant? Eight months pregnant?
i pinged her on twitter too