"most data shows parenting barely matters
inb4 "yeah but my parenting SUPER DUPER matters"
kids just grow up to be blends of their parents, with a few mutations and remixes here and there."
https://twitter.com/_drawthentic_/status/1864461155865121256/
Most parents are incompetent. Further they're not raising their kids, TV and school is raising their kids.
If you're competent you can do several things.
1) Prevent psychological maiming.
2) Develop virtuous habits (ref: aristotle), so the adult doesn't have to fight their vices
3) train the child to use their rational faculties instead of acting via emoting
4) convey skills, so the use of rational strategy results in success
You can't [civilize] them or [[instill values]]. Those are impossible even if you're the best parent possible. You can't change the OCEAN values much but if the child is a thinker instead of a knee-jerker it doesn't much matter.
Naturally, in Democratic, Tyrannous, or Lead Man times, well over 99% of parents are incompetent. Skilled, trained parents are rare even during optimum golden ages.
It doesn't matter how good of a parent you are, if your kids spend 8 hours at school or doing homework, then 8 hours watching TV or tiktok memes.
"I'm [[instilling values]]!!!1!" "...are you homeschooling?" (Or rather, unschooling.) No they aren't. At most 7% of the population doesn't send their kids off to be tortured by pedophiles at the concentration camps. See also: covid vaccination rates. "Weird why is my traumatic parenting (six weekends a year) not overriding the concentration camp's traumatic parenting." Who could have predicted this.
(Not someone who doesn't engage in rational predictions, for example.)
When they say kids are [resilient] what they mean is the trauma doesn't show up right away. They keep acting based on semi-instinctive programming for a while, making it nontrivial to connect a psychological scar and the damage that causes it. E.g. spanking is traumatic parenting, it results in an adult with low impulse control and interrupts the development of [faith], they can't keep their word. The child already had low impulse control - it's not like the kid didn't know you're a psychopathic, violent, deviant traitor, yet they broke the rules anyway, because undeveloped brain. Even if the damage was instant you wouldn't notice the difference. Their habit of being [[happy]] when they're not breaking the rules won't change right away. Only after their lives are ruined in accordance with their artificial ADHD and failed attempts to copy parent-child violence when up against peers.
Parents are able to wield insane levels of psychological pressure. You can use this to get the kids into good habits, as a form of skill (not personality) training. What if my parents had trained me in the one-plate system before adulthood, so it became a crib virtue? The one-plate system is: do dishes before you eat, and never get out a clean plate if there's already a used plate you can clean. Like the rest of us dirty vice-raised children of Democracy, I naturally don't do dishes, and let them pile up in the sink - unless I use one-plate discipline, which, as it turns out, is way easier than trying to do dishes after eating.
I suppose, more importantly, interrupt the development of vices. If your kid starts developing a bad habit, stop them. By process of elimination, they will develop good habits. Normally it's easy to interrupt a bad habit by pointing out the negative consequences. The child can't easily connect the to, and that's what parents are for.
Of course this presupposes the parent can tell the difference between good and bad habits, a skill I've never seen demonstrated. A Lead Age parent is also a child and has no idea which habits have harmful consequences. Every time someone tried to give me a good habit, it was bad. Actively damaging. Incompetent amateurs. E.g. never do your homework, it's a bad habit. Doing dishes after eating so that strangers don't use mean words is a bad habit.
By default the so-called adult makes decisions based entirely on what decision gives them the good feels in the moment. They don't think about the results at all, let alone how the results will feel in the future. Usually even the feels are restricted. They only emotionally care about what journalists would write about the action, if it showed up in the news. "Will some representative stranger approve of my intent? Or will I be shamed?"
First: don't do it in public, so nobody can shame you, because they don't notice you're doing it. Secure your shit.
The ability to make decisions that feel weird, for strategic gain, is a superpower. Aristotle was wrong about man being the rational animal. Becoming rational means you transcend humanity.
It's just a skill, though. Like lifting weights. You try it, it doesn't work at first. You keep trying, doing various exercises, then it works more, then it works all the time. Just training.
In particular, it's important that the child recognizes when they want something because it's ingroup and not because it's logical. Ingroup signalling is uniformly harmful parasitism, benefitting some politician at the cost of the group members.
The wise parent provides this training for their children. You can check very easily. Can you sit in a chair upside-down? Can you just do weird things merely to demonstrate your ability to make arbitrary decisions?
Once arbitrary decision-making is unlocked, it's merely a matter of making the correct arbitrary decision. Which is again a skill. There's some heuristics, you just tell the kid the heuristics. Don't spend more effort on improving the decision than you gain from making the optimal decision, for example. If you can't tell, then go find out. If you can't cheaply find out, then it's not important. If you get analysis paralysis, clear your mind, then look again, and choose based on whatever pro or con comes to attention first. E.g. if you can't choose between two cars, and you notice wing mirrors first, choose based on the best wing mirrors. Almost always, the cheapest, most profitable way to choose between two alternatives is to try both of them, unless choosing wrong can cause permanent harm. Just try eating meat. Just try eating, I dunno, peaty or whatever. It won't kill you, it will learn you.
The hardest part is documenting all the unlabelled intuitions, because nobody has words for all the thousand flavours of intuition - or even for one flavour, for that matter, so everyone gets to reinvent the wheel. In particular it's a good idea to learn the intuitions that predict permanent harm.
In theory, adults know things. They can say, "I want [x]," then go perform actions that are likely to lead to [x]. They can also deal with the risks and costs of not obtaining [x].
Then, when your child wants [x], you can teach them how to easily obtain it, letting them skip all the trial and error.
Have skills. Teach your son those skills. Then they get what they want.
P.S. Narcissism. Narcissists choose based solely on the social identity of the kind of person who acts that way. Everything they do is a virtue signal, and whether it [works] at its superficial goal is irrelevant. In particular, a scholar narcissist can't ever look stupid, no matter how smart the action is. Since dunning-kruger is real, that's a big problem. Would rather look rich than have a lot of money. Would rather look tough than win fights. Narcissism.
If they do something to look tough and it doesn't make them look tough, they instantly become suicidal. Can't handle failure. Even if it genuinely causes them to be tough.
Of course, the primary reason parents are bad parents is because they want to be bad parents. Supply meeting demand. They claim so loudly that they want the best for their kids precisely to hide the fact they want the worst. "How can I get my son to respect me?" Is in fact, "How can I get my son to respect me despite being an active hindrance to their health and welfare?" Certainly, that is a tricky question. "How do I abuse and torment my children and have them support me in my old age and call and visit anyway?" Rockets are easy compared to this, but scientists are working hard on the question.
Parents already know how to have happy and respectful kids the easy way. They're not interested, they want to have it without earning it. They want to be so high status their kids have to treat them well even if they do everything wrong, and would rather die than give up on that dream.
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