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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?
Eh, I think a teenage daughter becoming a party girl, a slut, or even a fornicator is bad, but I think figuring out how to ban it is a very difficult problem. I think the optimal strategy is to control the peer group years ahead of time by selecting locations and activities -- but that itself is very difficult, because there are few communities that are aligned on these kind of values any more.
It's wild to me that according to the hive-mind, the only thing you should teach your child about sex is 1) the importance of proper consent and 2) birth control. There is never anything on /r/parenting about teaching your the importance of discerning proper character of the person to have sex with; nor anything about teaching your child how long to wait or under what circumstances to have sex (waiting for love, waiting for marriage, etc.). The idea that "consent" is the all-important thing, and marriage or even "love" doesn't matter at all seems like a complete shift from the Zeitgeist 30 years ago. I mean, 30 years ago was a pretty loose time, but at least there was a debate about the proper time to have sex, now it is just assumed that parents should not give any guidance about it.
Going nowhere without a chaperone was the traditional solution.
Yeah, this. It's how Muslims solve the problem. It's how Christians solved the problem until very recently.
I was watching ¿Qué Pasa, USA?, a bilingual sitcom from the 70s, and one of the big conflicts between the Cuban immigrants and their American daughter is the need to have a chaperone on her dates, as in episode 7, "The Super Chaperone". That's because America had already gone through the sexual revolution, but Cuba hadn't.
There is only one thing a woman wants to be alone with her date for. Chaperones are how we kept girls from becoming sluts.
I don't know as much about latin America, but in Spain the chaperone thing is often solved for with a double date, where one of the couples are older and generally married, and the other couple are youths. The older couple are often family, but usually not the parents. You want them to be a couple that the younger people will respect to some degree. An older married cousin and their spouse in their 20s is usually pretty good, or the older child of a god-parent and their spouse etc. An aunt/uncle who is quite a bit younger than the parent is good too, and more common in a Catholic country. I'm not sure how much this is still done now; my mother is Spanish and used to talk about doing this in the 60s/70s.
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BDSM is a fetish and participation in it motivated presumably by lust. DV, while superficially similar in that both involve violence (simulated vs. real) seems to come from a completely different place than BDSM. Anger, low impulse control, and both intensified by alcoholism in most cases. Presumably no one wants to be the target of DV, but it would not surprise me if the BDSM community contained more subs than doms.
Edit: I've caused quite a ruckus with misplacing my comment it seems. That's what you get for posting on mobile. But I'm still on my phone and at work so I will move this later when I find the time
I just had this comment in the "The Motte needs your help" report queue. Obviously it's in the wrong spot, but also I can't flag it as "this needs a moderator to move it maybe" because the report queue doesn't show context, and on its own this is a perfectly normal comment. Bit of a weakness, idk.
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I think maybe you meant to reply to a different comment?
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