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Feb. 6th, 2012 12:14 pm
On parenting
Seeing a friend's link to this piece about French parenting got me to thinking about the rampant parentfail I see all the time.
Reposting what I commented, plus some other thoughts:
I don't have a lot of room to talk, yet, but I find many parents have one or two fatal flaws (or both): 1. They want to be their child's best friend, rather than their child's teacher. 2. They take emotional comfort from their child, rather than from the other adults in their lives.
( A parent is a child's first teacher )
On the flip side of this, of course, is parents who think their job boils down to keeping their kid in line. They don't establish themselves as authorities by virtue of being a grown-up who knows better, but as a means of pulling rank and maintaining control. At the end of the piece above, the author relates how she taught her son not to do something he ought not: not by physically harming him or raging over him so much that he was terrified, but merely by being firm, and setting a clear, consistent boundary.
( Psychology 101: Fear is a shitty motivator )
The bottom line is that it's all about teaching: people with established knowledge and skill conveying that information to others with a sense of respect for their ability to learn. If you look at children, or patients, or the poor as clueless idiots who either need constant minding or the fear of god in order to make them behave, you're robbing them of their humanity, and you're not actually going to get anywhere with them.
As the proverbial wisdom goes (teaching a man to fish and all that): give him the fish, he'll never learn how to feed himself. Threaten him with starvation if he doesn't figure it out on his own? He'll just die. The happy, most-effective medium is taking responsibility for being a guide--not a crutch, not a boss--for those who have less information than you do, and showing him how to fish.
And frankly, if you can't be arsed to do that? If you think you should micromanage your kid or only teach her how to obey you? You really shouldn't be a parent.
Reposting what I commented, plus some other thoughts:
I don't have a lot of room to talk, yet, but I find many parents have one or two fatal flaws (or both): 1. They want to be their child's best friend, rather than their child's teacher. 2. They take emotional comfort from their child, rather than from the other adults in their lives.
( A parent is a child's first teacher )
On the flip side of this, of course, is parents who think their job boils down to keeping their kid in line. They don't establish themselves as authorities by virtue of being a grown-up who knows better, but as a means of pulling rank and maintaining control. At the end of the piece above, the author relates how she taught her son not to do something he ought not: not by physically harming him or raging over him so much that he was terrified, but merely by being firm, and setting a clear, consistent boundary.
( Psychology 101: Fear is a shitty motivator )
The bottom line is that it's all about teaching: people with established knowledge and skill conveying that information to others with a sense of respect for their ability to learn. If you look at children, or patients, or the poor as clueless idiots who either need constant minding or the fear of god in order to make them behave, you're robbing them of their humanity, and you're not actually going to get anywhere with them.
As the proverbial wisdom goes (teaching a man to fish and all that): give him the fish, he'll never learn how to feed himself. Threaten him with starvation if he doesn't figure it out on his own? He'll just die. The happy, most-effective medium is taking responsibility for being a guide--not a crutch, not a boss--for those who have less information than you do, and showing him how to fish.
And frankly, if you can't be arsed to do that? If you think you should micromanage your kid or only teach her how to obey you? You really shouldn't be a parent.
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