Immature Parents

Pre-College Issues High School Life
41

<p>I was raised “undisciplined.” I think I turned out quite alright. </p>

<p>We shouldn’t ignore that some kids need more (or different) parenting than others. My parents only rarely ordered me to do things, so I respected their wishes. Some would respond differently to this, and with a roll of the dice I might have been a kid who would have taken advantage of leniency. My parents would’ve responded in kind, and helped me more along the way. </p>

<p>The problems come from parents who are lax with a child who can’t (or doesn’t) handle it, or from parents who are strict with a child who doesn’t need stringency. But, given a choice between some mistakes along those lines, and having the government raise children so they can be just as well-adjusted and safe as the average D.C. citizen… I’ll take my chances.</p>

42

<p>^^Across species, mammalian ethics generally develop along the same lines: a desire for “fairness,” a desire to protect family and friends, etc. These conferred great survival chances on those who developed them. Others developed in response a form of parasitism, taking advantage of others’ commitment to ethics. Hence: some people have a more strongly developed, innate sense of “mammal ethics.” Some people-- notably, sociopaths and politicians-- have no sense of ethics at all. </p>

<p>Also: don’t assume we all didn’t start with strong moral instincts because you can’t remember having them. I owe many, many things to my parents and to my family, and I’ll never be able to repay their debt (not that they expect it from me), but my essential self is the same as it was in my first memories.</p>

43

<p>It would be reasonable to assert, however, that many or even a majority of children (or people) do not listen to their moral instincts (i.e., they have weak moral instincts). I remember being in preschool when I was four. A large group of children were torturing a bird with a broken wing, poking it with sticks and being generally awful. This made it hard for me to believe that they were born good, and that and many other observations of people (kids in my boyscout group liked pointlessly killing ants when they were supposed to be doing other things; kids choose to fight and assault the weak, and though I was tall and strong enough to deter even small groups from attacking me, they’d have loved to: I was a loner; kids were rude to teachers and to each other; kids lied readily and without embarrassment, even when their utter stupidity allowed the truth to surface) led me to a long period of time where my default response to new people was mistrust. I grew out of it, after a while-- perhaps because others started growing out of their childhood faults-- but I can still acknowledge that many needed or need to be instructed in what we might call the finer points of morality and decency. This does not, however, mean that kids are sociopaths, that all kids need such training, or that parents must first attack their children with regimen after regimen and cruelty after cruelty in the name of raising a “good kid.”</p>

44

<p>jimbosteve I always appreciate your posts a lot :p. so much reason and fluency lolz.</p>

<p>it’s certainly true that humans and some animals have a diverse range of temperaments and behavioral instincts, and that we can make these nice probability distributions with severity of a trait on one axis and frequency on another. and that all of this variance can be roughly understood as emerging when you get animals living in complex social groups, or something like that. </p>

<p>the formulaic parenting advice offered by society for a long time (I think things have broadened more and more in the recent past) probably did a good job of mitigating child abuse and overall damages when you have unfit parents or destructive kids as judged by society (and often those to would probably go together).</p>

<p>It’s possible that what society thinks of as poor parent/child relationships and engagement aren’t actually worse from the emotional perspective of the participants than what society things of as being better (where there are, say, more enforced rules); it’s just that the former perhaps tends to disrupt society more overall, so it is discouraged. </p>

<p>Of course you also have the people (perhaps jimbosteve’s parents are one example) that don’t worry about any of that, and rightly so, and people are well aware of this, that not everyone benefits from conventional parenting advice, and they do just fine with limited rules, special diets and rituals, or whatever else works for them.</p>

<p>==</p>

<p>the one general thing i tend to think about parenting, which has been said before in this thread i think, is that extended family involvement, more communal upbringings, probably tend to work out better for those involved, than the small immediate family, more isolated, apartment dwelling upbringings. and of course the main reasons for that speculation is evolutionary insight - asking roughly how did humans evolve to grow up. </p>

<p>and this kind of thinking has expectantly has a variety of successes in term of predicting treatments to autoimmune problems and diseases correlated strongly with affluence.</p>