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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?
With regard to Tate you didn’t address the most crucial factor in all of this: liberal feminists like the Reddit commenters you mentioned that are out for blood are both unwilling to and ideologically incapable of giving actionable, effective dating and sex advice to heterosexual men altogether, and thus act as competition and an alternative to the likes of Tate. (In fact, they cannot give useful advice to women either, but that’s a different issue.) The anger and hostility you see is largely the consequence of this absence. How else would they react? Whatever Tate promotes is merely a dumbed-down, cruder version of Manosphere doctrines that were expressed (mostly) online in detail 10-15 years ago, and the only reason he gained any following is that most of this content was suppressed through the usual liberal feminist tactics of cancelling, doxing, panic-mongering, threats etc., which themselves were tacit admission of the shortcoming I mentioned earlier.
On a related note I should mention that this narrative about clueless teenage boys getting radicalized online by right-wing garbage human agents of Russian subversion is also a rather popular theme on Hungarian subreddits, which are unsurprisingly leftist circlejerks but somehow manage to be even worse than similar Western circlejerks due to them radicalizing themselves through their own sense of grievance at being self-perceived ideological underdogs. We’re talking about people who absolutely despise normies (because they perceive them as right-wing) and social hierarches and prejudices (because they perceive those as right-wing and authoritarian); but whenever this subject in particular comes up they instantly turn into authoritarian normies with the usual prejudices.
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