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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   31384 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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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:

“Honestly, I think you are going to have to let go a little bit or she might go crazy after she gets out yalls house. All of her behavior was appropriate for a 17 year old. I was doing these things at 17. Almost all of my high school and the high school down the road were doing these things. And worse…. The way you go forwards is going to determine whether you are in her adult life.”

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 I caught my kid looking at extremist material it would be a two prong 'congrats you just lost ALL media privileges' and a 'instant therapy or else'.”

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'd take fear mongering around Tate a lot more seriously if they didn't condemn in the same breath Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Trump, and virtually every man who displays any masculinity what so ever. The only form of masculinity that the average redditor on /r/parenting is probably comfortable with is one totally subservient to Wonderful Women. A demoralized abuse victim in waiting.

As for the drinking and drugs, well, drinking is what it is. Young men risk profound bodily injury when they get too drunk, young women risk making very poor decisions (at best) about young men. Maybe you just need to see a friend make a life changing mistake due to alcohol to earn a healthy respect for it. And with fentanyl poisoning everything, drugs are a whole different ballgame than when we were kids.

That said, we've all got our red lines. I'm profoundly sensitive to demoralization and trans propaganda in children's programming. We basically have a rule in our house that our daughter doesn't read or watch anything newer than 2000, with older generally being better. She's still little, I don't know how well this will hold up. She's starting to ask if we can get Paw Patrol like all the other kids at school. We've heard through the grapevine from other parents with concerns like ours that "the first few seasons" are fine. But we aren't interested in playing whack-a-mole with a franchise our daughter grows to love trying to sneak bullshit past us. We know this isn't sustainable forever, but god damn. The media put out there for children just keeps getting worse and worse.

Sometimes I think back to my own childhood watching G.I. Joe and Transformers, wondering if there were sneaky bit of propaganda snuck into them. I do remember some pretty on the nose storylines from G.I. Joe about the drug war, the government defunding G.I. Joe because some senators were working for Cobra, run of the mill American Exceptionalism, etc. That said, I'm not exactly against a cartoon talking up our national values... or at least our national values circa the 80's and 90's. I guess now that our "national values" are that children should choose their own gender, and if you disagree the government should take them from you and facilitate them sterilizing and mutilating themselves I feel significantly differently about it. But then again, that takes for granted the illusion of consensus control of the institutions granted trans activist. All the same...

I donno. Once upon a time in highschool I met a girl who's family didn't have a TV. I almost couldn't wrap my mind around it, but she was the smartest most original girl I ever met back in school. So presumably it's not impossible.

I'm profoundly sensitive to demoralization and trans propaganda in children's programming. We basically have a rule in our house that our daughter doesn't read or watch anything newer than 2000, with older generally being better. She's still little, I don't know how well this will hold up. She's starting to ask if we can get Paw Patrol like all the other kids at school. We've heard through the grapevine from other parents with concerns like ours that "the first few seasons" are fine. But we aren't interested in playing whack-a-mole with a franchise our daughter grows to love trying to sneak bullshit past us. We know this isn't sustainable forever, but god damn. The media put out there for children just keeps getting worse and worse.

A quick online search reveals that the Paw Patrol spinoff Rubble & Crew features a nonbinary character, River, in its first season. So, good call.

But I think your first mistake was sending your daughter to school. It's not going to stop at TV shows. Everything that your family does differently from the mainstream is going to be something that she learns is not normal from her peers, and become a point of contention. If you think it's bad now, wait until she hits 15 and she is yelling that she hates you and that you are ruining her life because you won't let her go out to a date or party unchaperoned like her friends. You cannot send your children to Caesar for their education and then be surprised when they come back as Romans.

From "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by AntiDem:

First, as the leftists used to say, “Kill Your Television”. I am not one who generally thinks that machines are inherently evil. Television is an exception. It is no more and no less than a hypnotic mind control device. Don’t believe me? Sit a hyperactive toddler in front of a television and watch what happens. They freeze, turn away from everything they were doing, and stare at the screen. Gavin McInnes once noted that the “on” switch of his television was an “off” switch for his kids, and so it is. Do you think this device does not place ideas in the minds of those who fall into a trance in its presence? And what ideas do you think the Hollywood/New York axis wishes to place there? I recall reading one account of a father who, tired of his two under-10 daughters’ bratty attitudes, limited their television viewing to a DVD box set of Little House on The Prairie. The change in his daughters’ behavior was dramatic – within a couple of weeks, they were referring to him and his wife as “Ma” and “Pa”, and offering to help with chores. The lesson is obvious: people (and especially children) learn their social norms from television, far more even than from the people around them.

Ideally, one would cut oneself off from it totally. Many find this rather difficult (I must admit, myself included at times). Some keep a television set, but make sure it is disconnected from broadcast channels and use it only as a monitor for a carefully-selected library of DVDs. Others (myself included) don’t own a set, but download a few select programs from torrent sites and watch on laptops or tablets. My total viewership of television programs tops out at perhaps 3-4 hours per week during particularly good seasons. Any traditionalist should strive to do the same. In fact, traditionalists should reject – should “drop out” of – all popular culture (especially that produced after, say, 1966) to the greatest degree possible, and make sure their children are exposed to it as little as possible. Music, video games, even the web – either drop out of it completely, or, at very least, carefully limit the time and scope of it in your life and the lives of your children.

While we’re on the subject of children: DO NOT send your children to a public school. “Drop out” here too; by which I do not mean that your children should go uneducated, but that you should – you must – homeschool. To do otherwise is pure child abuse. Perhaps fifty years ago, this was not the case, but these times are not those times. The failures of the public schools need not be repeated here, but they are undeniable, and any reasonably smart ten-year-old whose attention span hasn’t been destroyed by television can learn more by being left alone all day with a stack of books than they can in any public school classroom anyway. As for the universities, there are not quite any suitable replacements for them yet, but some lurk just over the horizon and will appear before long.

To say that one should “drop out” of – not bother listening to and not ever trusting – the mainstream news media goes without saying.

I have kids, plural, and it sounds more or less correct to me. I would be interested in hearing what "costs" you believe homeschooling imposes on the kids involved. My wife and I have zero interest in our kids attending public school, ever.

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