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Notes -
Stealing a comment in a subthread from @Samizdata that I liked a lot:
I posted this in the Weekly Culture War Roundup, but I think I got filtered out as a new user. I’ve deleted and reposted, so apologies if you’re seeing this twice!
There’s a recurring juxtaposition of views on /r/parenting that I find interesting. For context, the parenting subreddit, like most of Reddit’s forums, skews left-wing. There are periodic posts where parents try to determine what to do after their child engages in some kind of undesirable behavior. The typical suspects are drugs and alcohol, with most of the posts looking similar to this one.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/1fc70nm/appropriate_stance_on_alcoholdrugs/
This parent is worried about their 17-year-old daughter, who admitted to turning off her Life360 before going to a house party and having several drinks. Most commenters recommend clemency, with the top comment saying:
There’s a significant attitude of “Teens are going to engage in risky behaviors no matter what, your punishments and restrictions will have zero deterrent effect, and the best course of action is some kind of harm reduction.”
In contrast, there are periodic posts with parents hand-wringing about their son “being radicalized” by YouTube. This is a fairly typical example:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/1dqk7fs/son_caught_the_andrew_tate_bug/
Some of comments just suggest alternative influencers to watch, but many are out for blood, one saying:
If it’s not clear, I think both of these approaches are wrong-headed. Andrew Tate, while execrable, is reasonably widespread and popular among teenage boys. I don’t think treating him as an irresistible gateway drug to the alt-right is useful or true; most of the teens that watch him manage to do so without falling down some rabbit hole of extremism.
In contrast, I think even moderate drinking or drug use is fairly risky for developing brains, and I think the laissez-faire attitude towards it is dangerous.
When I search my own heart, I come to the exact opposite conclusion of the /r/parenting hivemind, both in practical and moral terms. Even if I banned my kids from watching or listening to a particular influencer, and set up bulletproof content blockers on every device in our house, it seems pretty futile; they’re around other teens with smartphones 30-40 hours a week while they’re at school. Surely there will be plenty of opportunities to watch whatever they want on a friend’s phone?
In contrast, I honestly think reasonable restrictions on a teen, like curfews, are more likely to curtail behaviors like drinking and drug use. I know that some teens can get around these restrictions, but these are the kind of obstacles that legitimately stymied me when I was a semi-wayward teen. Maybe I wasn’t a sufficiently motivated delinquent, I don’t know.
But the bottom line is: Isn’t it kind of convenient that my moral inclinations and my opinions of the practical difficulties of implementing a ban line up so well for different activities?
It’s easy to practice gentle, permissive parenting with a nonchalant “Teens will only rebel harder against strict rules” attitude when your child isn’t actually doing something you have strong feelings against.
So, my question for the forum would be: how do you balance letting your child(ren) make their own mistakes and take the consequences in a controlled environment, even when you disagree with their choices? When do you step in?
Teen drinking is universal outside the US, near-universal in the US, and lindy. "Moderate drinking at 17 damages developing brains" is only relevant if you think everyone was brain-damaged in a relevant way back in the day. Unless you are trying to raise your kids teetotal for religious reasons, you are raising them in a culture where drinking is ubiquitous, and the distinction between "drinking sensibly" and "drinking too much" is far more important to teach than the one between drinking below and above an arbitrary cutoff age. The punishable misbehaviour in that anecdote was travelling to a secondary location without informing the parents, which is a basic safety issue, particularly for girls.
This is the classic religious indoctrination problem, and it would be helpful if the Reddit mums grokked this. If you want your children not to adopt the lowest-common-denominator version of the locally prevailing culture, you either need to present them with a better (by their light, not yours) alternative, or control their information diet by heavy censorship. (This can be done - fundies in the US seem to do it successfully until the kid is 18 and goes off to university or gets a job at a non-fundie-owned business). And unfortunately it is hard to present civilised behaviour as a better alternative to what Tate is selling until he is finally convicted and jailed.
My sons are too young for this to be an issue yet, but I am reasonably clear that the product I am selling is a working marriage (and children), that In This House We Belive that Andrew Tate is a gypsy's prison bitch, and that part of men raising men is letting them know the well-known true facts about women that the RedPill crowd present as a new and subversive discovery. The reason why people like Tate have an audience is that both mainstream red-tribe Christianity and mainstream blue-tribe feminism are lying about what women want. The rest of the culture need to find a non-toxic way of sharing the truth if they don't want to be outcompeted. I used Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynmann when I was a kid.
I haven't seen "grok" in at least forty years!
Should be less than forty. I’m not that old.
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