Some parents want their kids to be happy and reasonably law-abiding. Others have loftier goals. The latter parents want kids who will unfailing continue to forswear things they were forbidden as children and teens. Things like cigarettes, alcohol, pot, and certain kinds of books, TV shows, movies and people. Certain ideas.
If you want your kid to always think something is bad, and never, ever think about trying it, you just have to be abusive enough whenever the kid shows any "warning signs" and the kid will eventually come to connect the trauma with the activity: "I said I didn't see why I couldn't watch The Simpsons, and I got physically/verbally abused again. The Simpsons must be bad. Just my wanting to watch it always results in a sore ego/ass!"
This is pretty much guaranteed to work. (For 12-15 year anyway, and who cares about what happens after that, right?)
If, on the other hand, you raise your kids to think that they are wonderful, special little snowflakes, whose every thought and deed is ground-breaking, when tempted toward pot, stealing, backstabbing, lying and the like, they will be much more likely to think "How can stealing this particular thing, in this particular circumstance be bad? It's me who wants to do it, so it must be right! The usual rules do not, of course, apply to me."
Some parents are still doing the old-school breaking/eroding their kids until they don't know how to think at all. Some are raising kids who are right about absolutely everything, absolutely everything is about their needs and emotional state, and who don't need to follow any structure that doesn't seem explicable, pleasing and sensible to them, simply because they are themselves.
I consistently get to supervise and teach mixed groups of the two. You should see how they interact with one another.
No comments:
Post a Comment