A few people have told me in just the last few days how they hated their kids in their teens. This seems sad to me. It’s hard to say what the future holds, but for now I have a very good relationship with them, and thought I might put a few thoughts out there.
Your kids need to know they will be responsible for themselves some day. That you will be gone, and that their sense of freedom and control of their lives will depend on their ability to work. I have been telling mine this since a very early age.
I have been telling them they will fail, and likely fail often, and that this is the way life works. It’s perfectly acceptable, as long as you keep showing up.
I tell them that pain and sadness are a natural part of life, and that they should not be rejected; nor should they be encouraged. Self pity is the worst and heaviest weight that could ever hang on their neck, and to avoid it at all costs.
I tell them it’s OK to break the rules, if they know why the rules exist. If you see a buttom which says “don’t push this”, then don’t push it. If you know that that button used to control something, but doesn’t now, then you know what will happen, and that rule is outdated and no longer useful.
In my view, this helps to teach the idea of consequences. I will periodically ask them why, say, it’s against the rules to run a red light, or to speed. Why is it against the rules to be tardy, or to be talking in class while the teacher is trying to teach? Why can’t you run at swimming pools? We discuss and evaluate different rules. As one example, I have told them I see no problem running red lights late at night, if there is no one around. This is not a safety hazard, and in my view it is not a moral issue. The law and morality are two different things. Segregation was the law. You have to be able to think about these things in higher ways.
My hope is that the explicit permission to break stupid rules will help curb rebelliousness. My oldest actually asked my permission to break a small rule–that prohibiting the chewing of gum in school–to earn detention, since it has never happened before. I said it was fine, but it hasn’t happened yet.
More generally, this line of thought ties into another post I wanted to make. I am still reading–it comes into and out of my hands regularly between other books–Peter Bauer’s excellent “Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion”, and in one of the essays he discusses population growth in the Third World (it dates from the 70’s-80’s timeframe).
One point he makes is that in most developing nations, children take care of the parents, so there is ample reason to have a lot of them. There is also ample reason for the parents to make sure the children are raised to be economically independent and successful. Love and nurture is not so important as making them tough and agile.
Let’s be blunt and admit that by and large we raise soft, self indulgent children in our culture. We train them to be DEPENDENT.
I was thinking about this. In large measure, we, too have a system in which the children take care of the old, but they do it through the medium of so-called Social Security and Medicare. Our generation is bearing the burden of the bills of the previous two generations. That’s how the system works. For perhaps two years they tried to save the money, then poof the veil was torn, and the money taken.
But the key difference is that the kids don’t care for the parents: the government does. We pack our old into government-subsidized rest and nursing homes, pay their medical bills, and in almost all cases get them out of our homes. If they have provided for themselves, they get their own homes. If they haven’t, the children and grandchildren pay taxes to the government, who then doles them back out to the parents.
The question I ask myself is: what is the psychological effect of this system on the institution of parenting? Clearly, we have had some astonishingly dumb psychological ideas float through our world, like the primacy of compassion over justice and moral clarity. These have had their predictable effect.
But over and above that, the parents know the children HAVE to take care of them,and will take care of them. This is compelled by the force of law, and will continue until national bankruptcy or massive, necessarily unpleasant (except for my proposal, whose pain should be short) reform.
Do the parents, then, have to care about the success of the children? One sees many, many cases of kids coming back home to stay. If you look at, say, the Chinese, they are stern because their children will one day, in effect, be their parents, and they want them to be equal to the task. They are making an investment that will pay dividends down the road.
We have no such system. There is no system of accountability. I look around me, and it seems to me that where we should have walls, and lines and roofs and bunkers, and a skyline of an intact city, what we have are shimmering heatwaves, ephemeral, solid looking, but impossible to touch. Nothing is real; everything is illusion.
This situation is maddening, and that is why our kids are poking holes in themselves all over their bodies and listening to music that talks about suicide and violence.
Life is logistics. There are emotional and mental logistical tasks, in addition obviously to physical logistics. We are managing these things with stunning stupidity, short-sightedness, and complete failure of courage, in all too many cases.