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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My memory of childhood was of finding being controlled unbearable and always wanting to be left alone and to be independent and my own person and being quite difficult because of it.
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And this wasn't because my parents were authoritarian. On the contrary, they indulged this much more than most parents would because my dad was exactly the same - deeply introverted, private, independent-minded. He got it.
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And this strongly suggests that these traits of mine are genetic rather than socially imposed because it wasn't my introverted dad who brought me up but my extrovert mum. She mostly left me alone tho so I was very lucky really.
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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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