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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?
I'm probably more in your camp, but as an adult raised in the 70s and 80s I honestly find the idea of tracking apps like Life360 a bit unnerving (just in reference to the specific reddit thread you mention but that I am not going to read because reddit is a bizarre echo chamber of people whose opinions I do not value). There's parenting, then there's micromanaging. I do not have daughters, and despite probably what I am meant to believe is enlightened parenting, I will raise my sons differently than I would raise a daughter. There are definitely lines I would set as Do Not Cross, but then ultimatums are dangerous.
I am fortunate in that my sons both appear very Kind-hearted and not terribly reckless, but that may change. Part of parenting teens is how you've parented the children prior to that. But as many parents can attest, peer groups are more influential than mom and dad most of the time.
This is disjointed but this train platform is cold and I have to put my gloves back on.
You also run into some moral hazard where "slow down and deny that adult development" is in the parent's best interest, but not the child's.
Parents are by their nature far too close to the problem, and much like bankruptcy, the balance [of power] drops gradually, then suddenly. And all of that happens coincident with their new ability to be a physical threat to you, either directly if a man, or by proxy if a woman.
All the teenagers I've had the pleasure of interacting with actually become more mature, not less, when they're out of watchful eyes. Granted, there's a lot of selection bias going on there- I don't generally hang out with stupid people, I didn't grow up exposed to a lot of stupid people, and the parents I hang out with have kids that are inherently as stable and well-rounded as they are (to the point that certain traits and thought patterns translate word for word- so if you magically turned insane the minute you hit 13 you're probably fucked as a parent). I also 'pass', for lack of a better word; it's quite easy to hide the fact I'm technically old enough to be their father(s) unless I say it directly (being Extremely Online helps with this; the dead giveaway I'm quite a bit older is because of a specific expression I don't/won't use, but nobody seems to pay attention to that), so I feel I have good reason to believe that bump in maturity is genuine.
There's a certain kind of parenting failure mode where the memes of "terrible teenagers" tend to take root a bit too much, and parents who have sensible kids do nothing to break them out of it. "You're just a stupid nigger, too much melanin makes your brain go crazy, why the fuck would you expect to be treated like an actual human being?" was stupid then, and the exact equivalent we visit on the young is stupid now. The parents generally didn't grow up with that meme, which is why they have the kind of self-actualization they do, but they don't realize it won't ever develop in their kids unless they take steps to make sure it occurs. (The slow-burn equivalent of "buy your son a hooker on his 14th"; you need to impress the concept that wanting things is good, natural, and should be pursued as a matter of personal development.)
Once upon a time my parents told me the hazards of being too close to a problem in matters of love and relationships... naturally, they did that with zero self-awareness whatsoever in terms of parenting style. It's something that happens to everyone; and in turn, the village used to raise young adults and from much younger, but now the village absolutely hates them (probably something about their labor being economically non-viable in modern society, segregation breeds contempt after all).
But that is then believed and internalized by parents who will remain more influential than peer groups throughout the teenage years due to the genetic makeup of their children, and that will kill their children more surely than any stupid stunt their peer groups get up to.
It seems like there’s a developmental window for learning to be basically functional as an adult in the society you live in, and that society tends to directly incentivize parents to put that off by eg high insurance costs for teen drivers. This is an intractable problem.
It's not so much 'learning to be basically functional' as it is 'wanting a life at all'. The first one is pretty easy- you either know it by 14 or you never will (though again, if you're prevented from doing it by KidTracker-type abuses of technology, that becomes a harder sell)- the second one... well, that's a lot more difficult especially if you position
worshipping deathnot wanting a life as a virtuous act.No, it isn't. Do what the UK does, pass a law preventing age discrimination in insurance. Easy. It is vital that teenagers don't have their want to learn to drive killed, and doing this subsidizes the risk of that over their entire life rather than forcing it as a single up-front cost.
And, y'know, the whole 'criminalizing children walking down the street unsupervised' thing, and society's corresponding worship of Safety, isn't exactly helping.
Of course, the easiest way to solve this problem is to simply conquer half of Europe (including her colonies in the South Pacific), but 1945 was kind of a fluke.
Took me until my 20s.
yeah also took me until 20s to become basically functional as an adult. I mean maybe not depending on how you describe it but I was doing a lot of drugs
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