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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?
I don't think there is any interesting debate to be had on results without debating methods. And here, the methods are rotten. There is no rational universe in which you should be tracking your high school senior's location at all times, every second of the day, enough to notice that she turned it off briefly. That's insane behavior. Death worship.
By contrast, you cite curfews as reasonable restrictions, but there's no indication this girl didn't have a curfew. She was supposed to be at another girl's house, by permission of her parents, and instead went to the party. No other method, even of verification, was cited in the OP, just the Life360 app being turned off.
It's insane to have your teenager living her entire life on what amounts to parole.
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hmmm I'd love to see thison the CWR. might steal and post today
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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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Well, that depends. Do I lack the time, the energy, the intelligence, or the personality to bother to connect with my kids (even for rational reasons)? Did I forget how I was like at that age, or am I forgetting on purpose? If I do, I'm just going to do the parental equivalent of copy-pasting code from StackOverflow or GPT-4 and hope for the best. This is a programming exercise, after all, humans are just meat-based neural networks.
It also matters who's giving the advice. So
is obviously a progressive woman (less often, a man) who hates her sons (or hates her sons because they do not sufficiently hate themselves, for the perceived sake of someone else's daughters) because her peer group told her to.
This is also the kind of woman who, by genetics, is not only more likely to have teenagers that rebel against her (and have peer group influence dominate her sons just as her peer group clearly does to her right now), but to take that extremely personally.
This advice should, obviously, be ignored by those parents who are not progressive, are not women, and who are not susceptible to peer pressure to anywhere near that same degree. (The fact that "opinion discarded" isn't obvious to some parents is a personality/risk management thing.) All of which are why you have no problem thinking this is wrong, and not trying to stamp out the possibility By Any Means Necessary.
I think the laissez-faire attitude towards propagating stupid memes like "developing brains" is more dangerous than moderate drinking or drug use if you're not a parent given to those things in the first place.
Of course, the problem with moderate drinking or drug use is an obvious one- you're their boss, and it's very awkward to go far into more vulnerable states of consciousness with someone in a position of power! That's why it has to be done with peers, and depending on where that occurs, that's the dangerous part (especially if they have a reason to go full Rumspringa on you). Bars would actually be one of the safer options for this, but that's the one place they're banned from due to that infinite parental/societal wisdom.
Parents are generally just as stupid and selfish as their children; conversely, children are generally as wise and self-controlled as their parents.
News at 11.
Another aspect is that she’s very much like a fish out of water in this situation. She grew up in an era when society was already transforming culturally to what it is now, but was still running on the fumes of the crumbling patriarchy, so traditional mating norms were in force. (As another commenter observed here a couple of months ago, it doesn’t occur to normal people to spend mental energy investigating things that work.) The idea that young men would resort to looking up Youtube tutorials and whatnot just to find girlfriends is inconceivable to her. She lacks any point of reference. It all seems a bit scary.
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Are you saying that progressive mothers shouldn't ignore that advice? I mean, they're going to get away from you eventually, and "has a formative experience of being abused by a crazy feminist" is TTBOMK a large risk factor for getting hardcore into the manosphere.
Do note what "or else" likely signifies here; you're probably talking about child neglect and/or law enforcement involvement under dubious pretences, because there aren't many other levers left to pull for a mother who's already confiscated all modern entertainment and who's too scared of retaliation to try beatings. Certainly, starvation/threats of eviction/threats of LE involvement were Mum's go-to levers to pull when I was a teen.
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I drank with my dad and his friends when I was a teenager. I don’t quite understand why that can’t be normal(I understand very well that it isn’t, I just don’t why it can’t be).
And as an aside, I was under the impression that even moderate pot use was pretty bad for teenage brains, but for alcohol to be worse for a teenager than an adult would require fairly large quantities thereof.
Because most parents rule their children through fear, especially during the teenage years.
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I mean, I think the obvious answer is 'they don't think teen drinking or sex or substance experimentation etc are big deals, but think extremist content(whatever that is) is a very bad thing and one of the #1 challenges in society'.
Sure, I don’t disagree that they consider watching Ben Shapiro or whoever worse than smoking marijuana as a teenager. My confusion stems from the fact that no one ever seems to say:
“Yes, watching these videos is terrible and will have deleterious long-term consequences for your child. However, it is completely outside your capacity to stop them from doing so, and you must make your peace with it.”
Everything seems to fall into one of two categories for these people: either bad, and easily stopped via punishments, or neutral-and-you-couldn’t-stop-them-anyway. That’s what makes me second-guess myself, since I feel the same way about dumb teenage mistakes, I just have the polarities reversed on which activities are which. Since their opinions seem obviously wrong-headed to me, who’s to say that mine aren’t as well?
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I'm probably more in your camp, but as an adult raised in the 70s and 80s I honestly find the idea of tracking apps like Life360 a bit unnerving (just in reference to the specific reddit thread you mention but that I am not going to read because reddit is a bizarre echo chamber of people whose opinions I do not value). There's parenting, then there's micromanaging. I do not have daughters, and despite probably what I am meant to believe is enlightened parenting, I will raise my sons differently than I would raise a daughter. There are definitely lines I would set as Do Not Cross, but then ultimatums are dangerous.
I am fortunate in that my sons both appear very Kind-hearted and not terribly reckless, but that may change. Part of parenting teens is how you've parented the children prior to that. But as many parents can attest, peer groups are more influential than mom and dad most of the time.
This is disjointed but this train platform is cold and I have to put my gloves back on.
You also run into some moral hazard where "slow down and deny that adult development" is in the parent's best interest, but not the child's.
Parents are by their nature far too close to the problem, and much like bankruptcy, the balance [of power] drops gradually, then suddenly. And all of that happens coincident with their new ability to be a physical threat to you, either directly if a man, or by proxy if a woman.
All the teenagers I've had the pleasure of interacting with actually become more mature, not less, when they're out of watchful eyes. Granted, there's a lot of selection bias going on there- I don't generally hang out with stupid people, I didn't grow up exposed to a lot of stupid people, and the parents I hang out with have kids that are inherently as stable and well-rounded as they are (to the point that certain traits and thought patterns translate word for word- so if you magically turned insane the minute you hit 13 you're probably fucked as a parent). I also 'pass', for lack of a better word; it's quite easy to hide the fact I'm technically old enough to be their father(s) unless I say it directly (being Extremely Online helps with this; the dead giveaway I'm quite a bit older is because of a specific expression I don't/won't use, but nobody seems to pay attention to that), so I feel I have good reason to believe that bump in maturity is genuine.
There's a certain kind of parenting failure mode where the memes of "terrible teenagers" tend to take root a bit too much, and parents who have sensible kids do nothing to break them out of it. "You're just a stupid nigger, too much melanin makes your brain go crazy, why the fuck would you expect to be treated like an actual human being?" was stupid then, and the exact equivalent we visit on the young is stupid now. The parents generally didn't grow up with that meme, which is why they have the kind of self-actualization they do, but they don't realize it won't ever develop in their kids unless they take steps to make sure it occurs. (The slow-burn equivalent of "buy your son a hooker on his 14th"; you need to impress the concept that wanting things is good, natural, and should be pursued as a matter of personal development.)
Once upon a time my parents told me the hazards of being too close to a problem in matters of love and relationships... naturally, they did that with zero self-awareness whatsoever in terms of parenting style. It's something that happens to everyone; and in turn, the village used to raise young adults and from much younger, but now the village absolutely hates them (probably something about their labor being economically non-viable in modern society, segregation breeds contempt after all).
But that is then believed and internalized by parents who will remain more influential than peer groups throughout the teenage years due to the genetic makeup of their children, and that will kill their children more surely than any stupid stunt their peer groups get up to.
It seems like there’s a developmental window for learning to be basically functional as an adult in the society you live in, and that society tends to directly incentivize parents to put that off by eg high insurance costs for teen drivers. This is an intractable problem.
It's not so much 'learning to be basically functional' as it is 'wanting a life at all'. The first one is pretty easy- you either know it by 14 or you never will (though again, if you're prevented from doing it by KidTracker-type abuses of technology, that becomes a harder sell)- the second one... well, that's a lot more difficult especially if you position
worshipping deathnot wanting a life as a virtuous act.No, it isn't. Do what the UK does, pass a law preventing age discrimination in insurance. Easy. It is vital that teenagers don't have their want to learn to drive killed, and doing this subsidizes the risk of that over their entire life rather than forcing it as a single up-front cost.
And, y'know, the whole 'criminalizing children walking down the street unsupervised' thing, and society's corresponding worship of Safety, isn't exactly helping.
Of course, the easiest way to solve this problem is to simply conquer half of Europe (including her colonies in the South Pacific), but 1945 was kind of a fluke.
Took me until my 20s.
yeah also took me until 20s to become basically functional as an adult. I mean maybe not depending on how you describe it but I was doing a lot of drugs
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