The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I'm not demanding gentle parenting, I don't buy that dichotomy. I do concur that children need to be disciplined and that standards must be set. Along with that must come warmth and dignity, which my parents have not treated me with. I've never demanded handouts. Any Christmas gifts they gave me since at least the age of 13 were what they personally deemed fit to provision for me, and never anything I begged for. I'd be fine buying clothes from Ross. I'd be content to go on vacation to Daytona Beach or even not go on vacation at all if it meant they'd quit using it as leverage. I don't care if I have the latest iPhone or a 10-year-old Google Pixel. I want them not to act morose and curt and treat me like scum because I dared to ask a simple question. Sure, I get the sentiment that parents are a position of authority and that their instructions alone should be enough, but ultimately it leads children to be every bit as uncommunicative at school or in their work life and impedes their ability to think critically and question authority. Proponents of gentle parenting don't want to set boundaries; I want them to be set with clear explanations. Proponents of gentle parenting don't want consequences; I want consequences that are logical and not arbitrary, that don't involve cursing in my face like a sailor, screaming at the top of their lungs, threatening violence, and banging doors. I want obedience to be taught through deliberation and conviction rather than through fear and control.
Well, not in my house. It can be said over the most trivial crap imaginable.
Haha, I wish. My grandparents still live in my parents' respective homelands. My maternal grandmother came to visit us twice when I was a pre-teen, but it's been difficult to coordinate anything since then. My paternal grandparents have been entirely absent. My mother loathes her in-laws, so I rarely got to meet with my uncle.
Forgiveness is a virtue. That does not mean I must quietly absorb everything like a pushover and never air my grievances out. Acknowledging the reality and seeking a way out (what I am doing as I am moving out for college), is entirely compatible with Christianity. The Biblical forgiveness means to not harbor ill will against those who have hurt you and to progress in life without dredging up this hurt, it does not say to justify their actions and give them pats on the back. Forgiveness requires distance, healing, and time.
See above. Again, I believed my parents could be persuaded into becoming more pleasant people if I just behaved a little better here and walked on eggshells a little more there, but they operate on a separate, irrational wavelength. Maybe I'm still grateful to a fault, where getting up and leaving would lead me to feel immense guilt.
I do every single morning, and every single night. Once again, you are not privy to what I've done in my everyday life.
Her cynicism is her trauma talking. I don't consider her or my father's love to be any more unconditional than that of the friends I've made. If you're thinking from an absolutist lens, then even a parent's love for their child can never be truly unconditional, only God's is. We are taught to love our neighbors as ourselves, and I will strive to uphold that. I will serve as a missionary for my church for two years to serve people I currently do not know exist and to introduce them to the Gospel and show them the love that our Heavenly Father has for all of his children.
I'm actually very familiar with your situation. My wife was raised by a mom with a similar slavic background, she did have the luck to have a very kind grandma, but it went awry upon her passing away in my wife's teens. She then had to work part-time after school, deal with her mom disappearing sometimes for days possibly due to jail, power getting cut in winter, things like that. I like to compare her childhood experience to the black experience, as the verbal and physical abuse are actually quite similar imo.
This is also something I struggle with as an expatriated parent as I do not have any family support either. Perhaps that means that I can't properly handle my kids' emotions due to some personal stress with work, or maybe I just don't have time for a given child's tantrum among some other more pressing concern.
I agree with this. Unfortunately the striver mentality which leads to social success and material provisions is in some way opposed to a holy, good-natured, empathetic approach to relationships. This becomes apparent with a cursory look at the basic physiognomy of the apparent leaders of the world, Musk, Zuckerberg, Alex Karp, Sam Altman... There's something weird about these people. On the other hand, the kind of people who see themselves as empathy experts, who can sometimes be found in colleges and other prestigious institutions, can also be nasty people (Ellen DeGeneres comes to mind).
In fields manned by volunteers and passionate people, grifters and apparatchiks rise to the top. Isn't that the story of the Soviet Union, with the bank robbers taking control over the idealists?
Of course, I'm writing from my own experience. There is a tension as a parent between asserting control, being a teacher, letting a child bloom and develop independence... We want them to eventually make their own choices and suffer the consequences of them proportionally, without getting any catastrophic failure mode.
I think it's possible too. It would take tremendous work, it would take things that you probably don't have right now, but such miracles are possible. I maintain my mother-in-law in a sort of quarantine, and at the present I have no idea how to reach out to her and help her heal whatever damage she's got going on. You are also called to be a fisher of men, down the line, and that is the kind of work that is needed.
Perhaps having challenged their authority early on would have helped, as it would have helped you create your own, separate life, without any leverage as you say. These kind of broken family dynamics sometimes end up with a child taking care of a belligerent parent suffering from dementia. Another aspect of that is some kind of emotional detachment, dealing with your parents becomes like dealing with a boss you tolerate for a paycheck.
Eventually you get to replace the guilt of betraying your parents' expectations with the guilt of not giving your children the ideal life.
Another aspect of your misfortune is that for every child in your situation that would benefit from 'raising awareness that getting shouted at daily for minor inconveniences is abnormal', the kind of people and organization that would be suitable for such messaging also want to roll in things like 'if you like playing with dinosaurs / dress up your action figures, we'll probably want you to cut your genitals down the line m'kay'. Also a lot of it is basically considered racist (it may be).
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