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Notes -
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?
Well, that depends. Do I lack the time, the energy, the intelligence, or the personality to bother to connect with my kids (even for rational reasons)? Did I forget how I was like at that age, or am I forgetting on purpose? If I do, I'm just going to do the parental equivalent of copy-pasting code from StackOverflow or GPT-4 and hope for the best. This is a programming exercise, after all, humans are just meat-based neural networks.
It also matters who's giving the advice. So
is obviously a progressive woman (less often, a man) who hates her sons (or hates her sons because they do not sufficiently hate themselves, for the perceived sake of someone else's daughters) because her peer group told her to.
This is also the kind of woman who, by genetics, is not only more likely to have teenagers that rebel against her (and have peer group influence dominate her sons just as her peer group clearly does to her right now), but to take that extremely personally.
This advice should, obviously, be ignored by those parents who are not progressive, are not women, and who are not susceptible to peer pressure to anywhere near that same degree. (The fact that "opinion discarded" isn't obvious to some parents is a personality/risk management thing.) All of which are why you have no problem thinking this is wrong, and not trying to stamp out the possibility By Any Means Necessary.
I think the laissez-faire attitude towards propagating stupid memes like "developing brains" is more dangerous than moderate drinking or drug use if you're not a parent given to those things in the first place.
Of course, the problem with moderate drinking or drug use is an obvious one- you're their boss, and it's very awkward to go far into more vulnerable states of consciousness with someone in a position of power! That's why it has to be done with peers, and depending on where that occurs, that's the dangerous part (especially if they have a reason to go full Rumspringa on you). Bars would actually be one of the safer options for this, but that's the one place they're banned from due to that infinite parental/societal wisdom.
Parents are generally just as stupid and selfish as their children; conversely, children are generally as wise and self-controlled as their parents.
News at 11.
I drank with my dad and his friends when I was a teenager. I don’t quite understand why that can’t be normal(I understand very well that it isn’t, I just don’t why it can’t be).
And as an aside, I was under the impression that even moderate pot use was pretty bad for teenage brains, but for alcohol to be worse for a teenager than an adult would require fairly large quantities thereof.
Because most parents rule their children through fear, especially during the teenage years.
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