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I’m pretty sure you can raise children in orphanages and they turn out fine (They may whine, more on that later).
You just assume that parenting matters. Why? I don’t think anything my parent did made me taller or smarter (aside from feeding me and not hitting me with a rock), so why would it have made me more well-adjusted (or whatever parenting is supposed to achieve) ?
I think the main reason for the
is just everyone obsessing about parenting. The idea that, if you fail to provide the exact balance of ”loving, but strict“(plus ridiculous amounts of money, time and attention), you should not have kids.
Adult children are always whining that their parents either were or were not strict enough. They, as well as parenting experts should be ignored, and apathy should again become the cornerstone of parenting. Before contraception, kids used to just show up, and life just went on as usual, with just slightly more crying and laughter.
Now that a woman has to make a conscious decision, it opens the door to all this anxiety and neuroticism and talk and judgment about what should be an easy, natural and popular path. What’s needed is less your strict authoritarian father than a deeply apathetic one, who just goes “I don’t care”, “It doesn’t matter”, “Have another kid if you’re worried about this one”, “Of course it’s not your fault our son’s a junky”.
Because if you spend any time around children at all it is immediately apperant which ones have more engaged parents/caregivers.
The idea that it doesn't matter is another one of those ideas so manifestly absurd that you need to be an academic to take it seriously.
How do you separate it from a genetic influence?
Most academics think parenting is very important, they’re into the rousseauian blank slate, nurture not nature. Is this your opinion as well, groups that fail are just badly parented?
Genetics provide a high water mark that a human can aspire to, but there are obvious ways a bad parent could cut that short. Concussing the kid, starving the kid, locking up the kid so they never learn language before that critical period is passed.
There is a large body of work suggesting that not setting rules and limits for kids is one of these blunders that prevents a kid from reaching their full potential.
I did note that feeding and not-hitting-kid’s-head-with-rock was a non-optional part of parenting.
After that, I don’t trust this body of work about parenting styles. It sounds like another spurious explanation for group differences, of the kind that produces new and revolutionary interventions in schooling every few years.
Think of it less as a parenting style, and more as a complete neglect of acculturating a child into society. If a kid never learns a word is spoken before sometime between 6 and 12, they will never understand language syntax. Never ever, no matter how smart their parents were or how dedicated their speech therapist is.
If a kid never has a single rule enforced by a grown up and is shielded from the consequences of their actions, are they capable of learning executive function and how to behave in a society which has authority over them? I'm really surprised if you think it doesn't matter, when it is clear from several fields that there are "critical periods" of brain development, and if certain stimuli are not provided during those periods that the window to learn certain skills closes.
Is this language example an analogy? I’m not proposing to lock children outside in a stall for the first 12 years of their lives and never letting them hear a human word. And if it is an analogy, I don’t think a permissible parenting style is comparable to being raised by wolves.
People used to beat their kids. My father was occasionally severely beaten with a hose. Not because my grandfather drank – he didn’t – but because that’s what the parental-educational fashion was at that time. He would know, my grandfather was a schoolmaster. Teachers back then thought they could beat the stupid and evil out of children – and they had a duty to. At some point before he retired, he got a directive from the education ministry that teachers weren’t to do that anymore. He told me he had to let go of a few of the old-timers, who could not stop beating children – they had always done it this way, this was what education was to them, teaching children how to behave in a society that has authority over them.
So after the beatings era, the experts came up with a new theory, where strictness was excoriated, damaging the child’s ‘true potential’ etc. In my opinion they were not any more correct than their predecessors (because parenting and schooling don’t really matter), but at least the unnecessary beatings stopped, and that’s a small win, because it’s unpleasant for both parties, and you could break something.
And now the experts have turned the wheel again and apparently children need strict rules or something. I am skeptical.
The language example is something that has happened several times in highly abusive situations, and has been studied in detail, for example, see Genie. Not enforcing any rules at all may be a similar form of neglect, lesser in severity, but still with consequences.
Yes, people used to beat their kids. As far as I can tell, that is ok, as long as the parent shows love at other times.
The experts have not turned the wheel, the experts have always said "Strictness and love," it's just interpreted through the popular self-help books differently through the generations.
Again, I consider the feral child analogy ludicrous, not carrying any weight.
Do you have studies to back that up?
So beating is optional? That is a bizarre position to take. It’s either necessary, as people used to believe, or it should be avoided, for obvious reasons.
I gave you an example of expert guidance, and it wasn’t popular interpretations of consistent ideas in a self-help book. They used to tell teachers that part of their job was beating children, and later told them to cut it out.
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