sure, some of what kids want will directly harm them and we should prevent it, like not letting them run into streets, but a lot of them is harm we've *made up* to justify our attempts mold their brains into what we think they should be.
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i vividly remember as a kid thinking that adults didn't seem to treat me like a person, like my experience and feelings didn't actually matter. i was terrified about growing up, cause i knew they all used to be kids once, but *they* forgot, so that meant i was going to forget too
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i remember being really young and trying to scream to my future self I AM REAL AND THIS MATTERS. I carefully preserved that memory as i aged, repeating it dutifully, reviewing the message with the respectful importance I'd initially imbued it with, as i passed it to my adult self
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for most of us, childhood is just adults smashing down your autonomy in so many unnecessary ways. i've always felt parenting reveals the core of someone, is when you get to see what people are like when they are granted absolute power over another human being
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(this is one reason why i feel uninterested in reconnecting with my dad; he might be acting nicer now, but i got to see who he was when he had power over me. it's made it starkly clear that any respect he affords me now is *only* because he can't control me)
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Yep. And what children view as a parent "being mean" is often a parent experiencing extreme frustration and feeling like a failure for being unable to "properly guide" their child
Terrified that their children will grow up to be social rejects/in jail/dead/etc
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maybe this is the case for some people, but not the case for me here. my dad is a narcissist who systematically psychologically tortured me and the rest of my family. was kind of person to mock cry loudly back into your own face whenever you started crying
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had the explicitly stated goal of psychologically breaking me, he would often say 'i will break you', and did deliberate stuff like forcing u not to hesitate even for a second when approaching for a beating or else u get more beatings, u know casual stuff like that
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idk bruh every time i casually reference my bad relationsihp with my dad i feel like ppl are like 'oh parenting is hard ppl screw up u gotta forgive him' and im like ok do i need to outline the level of bad we're talking about here, every time
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also yknow all this in the context where he worked from home 24/7, and i was homeschooled my whole childhood/always at home, access to the outside world was limited, had filter on our television, there was literally no escape or conception that this treatment wasn't normal
but srry maybe that one time he went to jail for domestic abuse was really just him feeling "frustrated" he was unable to "properly guide" us
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