My parents, deeply Christian but still good California liberals, experienced the cultural change in the middle of their child raising. My sister was spanked and I was not. I suspect they still feel guilty. But the ground shifted right under them.
I would be hesitant to tell anyone I spanked a child because...maybe it's *technically* not illegal, but you don't have to do anything illegal to have your kids taken away. Better not to admit to any non-standard parenting practices
Probably the worst thing about PMC parenting is the anxiety. Just be confident! I happen to think that gentle parenting is silly, sleep training is good and essential, and corporal punishment is both cruel and ineffective, but most importantly, I’m confident in those beliefs. I’m totally willing to change my mind (all the toilet training tips seemed useless, eventually we resorted to dramatic failures in public as a quasi-shaming technique and convinced daycare we were willing to do a lot of laundry and it turned out ok), but I think humans from about ages 3-23 are just especially attuned to the confidence that a person in authority gives off and usually respond positively to it. Adults feel much more ambivalent about confidence, because it’s so often associated with people who don’t know anything/are tyrants.
I once thought foregoing corporal punishment would lead to parents raising narcissists.
Today, the two finiest young people I know were both raised without it. It may be important to note that both grew up with _both_ parents, and both sets of parents were kind, but firm, in their discipline.
I think most parents *do* (very occasionally) use mild corporal punishment... but most parents outright deny it - for their safety (society's judgement, and potential child services inquiries) So we have a society telling us what to do / what is the *proper* way to behave, and we go against that, but only privately. Ultimately, we trust our parenting instinct enough to act, but not enough to publicly defend.
This comes into play when I share a parenting story and I preface it with "all the books tell you differently, but i know my child and so I... ...)
I like this a lot. But it's the skeleton of a story-of-ideas. If you start with a highly idea-driven schematic narrative, like this, can you turn it into a story that feels motivated by human characters, bearing the ideas with them? Or to do that, do you have to start with the characters and their dilemmas, and only discover the abstract issues at stake as you write?
My parents, deeply Christian but still good California liberals, experienced the cultural change in the middle of their child raising. My sister was spanked and I was not. I suspect they still feel guilty. But the ground shifted right under them.
I know right! You're not the first person who's described this sort of change to me wrt corporal punishment. I think it's quite common.
I would be hesitant to tell anyone I spanked a child because...maybe it's *technically* not illegal, but you don't have to do anything illegal to have your kids taken away. Better not to admit to any non-standard parenting practices
I'm only sure of one thing when it comes to parenting: nobody knows what they're doing.
Probably the worst thing about PMC parenting is the anxiety. Just be confident! I happen to think that gentle parenting is silly, sleep training is good and essential, and corporal punishment is both cruel and ineffective, but most importantly, I’m confident in those beliefs. I’m totally willing to change my mind (all the toilet training tips seemed useless, eventually we resorted to dramatic failures in public as a quasi-shaming technique and convinced daycare we were willing to do a lot of laundry and it turned out ok), but I think humans from about ages 3-23 are just especially attuned to the confidence that a person in authority gives off and usually respond positively to it. Adults feel much more ambivalent about confidence, because it’s so often associated with people who don’t know anything/are tyrants.
Yes but how can you be confident about something you've never done before?
I once thought foregoing corporal punishment would lead to parents raising narcissists.
Today, the two finiest young people I know were both raised without it. It may be important to note that both grew up with _both_ parents, and both sets of parents were kind, but firm, in their discipline.
And yet after corporal punishment became unfashionable, a generation of narcissists did appear.
quite intriguing
I think most parents *do* (very occasionally) use mild corporal punishment... but most parents outright deny it - for their safety (society's judgement, and potential child services inquiries) So we have a society telling us what to do / what is the *proper* way to behave, and we go against that, but only privately. Ultimately, we trust our parenting instinct enough to act, but not enough to publicly defend.
This comes into play when I share a parenting story and I preface it with "all the books tell you differently, but i know my child and so I... ...)
I like this a lot. But it's the skeleton of a story-of-ideas. If you start with a highly idea-driven schematic narrative, like this, can you turn it into a story that feels motivated by human characters, bearing the ideas with them? Or to do that, do you have to start with the characters and their dilemmas, and only discover the abstract issues at stake as you write?
But if I had done what you say, you likely wouldn't even have read the story!
Maybe not on substack. In another context, yes, now that I know your work. For you, is this fable a final product?
This is it! It's done. There's no home for it other than here.
Are the ants and the grasshopper from the Aesop fable realistic human characters? I think so.