I feel very strongly about parenting, not because I think that it makes a huge difference to how the child will turn out but because I think it makes a huge difference to how children experience childhood.
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But I think even kids who are not particularly individualistic and independent-minded have a hard time dealing with having their lives controlled because...well, why wouldn't you?
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The problem is that this can't be helped to a certain extent because kids don't have the judgement to make all their own decisions and do need guidance and boundaries.
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So, I think parents have a difficult balancing act because, on the one hand, they need to keep their kids safe, healthy, educated, well-behaved and adequately supervised and on the other, they need to try to give them as much independence, privacy & autonomy as possible.
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I get most furious at parents who seem to take some kind of pleasure in a controlling role and think 'my house, my rules' is some kind of ethical justification for those rules. Those who take pride in being disciplinarians and having a gazillion largely arbitrary rules.
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Those who think its generally good for kids to be forced to defer to authority just because it's authority and it doesn't matter much whether the authority is respect-worthy or not. (Still think I'm gonna realise I'm conservative, conservatives?)
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I remember writing in my teenage angst diary 'They have the legal right to make the rules but they seem to expect me to still like them if they do. I have control over that.' :-/
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If I was a kid now, I'd probably be informing them that I was withdrawing my emotional labour in protest at my oppression. God, its a good thing I was a kid in the 80s when people mostly ignored me.
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End of conversation
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