There's going to be a cultural war between the members of the millennial generation --between those who are rational and skeptical, and those who are influenced by the visceral and sensational. This is to say, it will be waged between those who accept reality and the unshakable flaws and powers of human nature, and those who want to save the world with uncompromising ideology. And how can someone like myself know this outcome with such certainty? It is probably because there is nothing new about it.
There will always be those who want to save the world and those who want to help the world. Those who have endeavored to save the world have failed, and those who have worked to help it, have succeeded only so long as they are permitted to do so by those who are trying to save it. Helping is a selfless act to assist another when it is needed and asked for, whereas saving is a selfish act meant to make one appear like a savior when the assistance is neither required or asked for. Those who help try to accept the failures of human nature and persevere in spite of them. Those who play savior try to eliminate the failings of human nature so that they may supersede it with an ideal. There is nothing new about cult behavior though. We must be weary of it, but not fearful of it or destructive towards it. Ideology seeks out enemies to destroy, and creates new ones by doing so. Rationality speaks truth to power, and finds friends with all those who seek justice without destruction.
The same is true for how we respond to our children. There are those who want to help children and those who want to save the children. Those who help children are able to see their fallible human nature, and find ways to work around it with them. Those who want to save children either want to pretend that children are infallible (Indigo children), or try to eliminate the fallible qualities of a child's human nature completely so that they may match with the cultural standards of children as infallible. The mechanism by which the adult saves children appears to be by subverting their humanity, whereby the mechanism the adult helps children is through recognizing and empowering it (by overcoming faults). What is true for how we raise children, is true for society.
Human nature has a variety of expression, but it is a finite expression that is then malleable by culture and economics. Anyone who attempts to posit that it is entirely a creation of culture and circumstance (the Marxists), or posits that it is entirely innate, is preceding from false assumptions. Anyone who thinks they can invent some ideology to "wake the world up" from its sleepwalk into doomsday by convincing the people that their governments and corporations have created human nature in its entirety, is selling a contradiction. On the one hand, they say human nature is being exploited in order to propagate an ideology, and on the other, that human nature is a mere creation and doesn't exist naturally. How can human beings be as we picture children--mindless drones one minute when in the hands of the group the onlooker despises, and the next, intentional beings once fallen under the spell of that onlooker? The onlooker exploits their human nature by telling them their nature is a creation.
There has become such a thing as an anti-ideology ideology. It proposes that people are becoming sedated by the ideologies they absorb on a daily basis in their information-rich contexts--leaving out of course that the "ideology of ideological sedation" is itself part of that information bombardment. So we have people panicked over how children will grow up with impairments due to exposure to certain ideologies, not realizing that restricting them from ideology is itself an ideology that they are inadvertently exposing their children to. This is not to say that we ought to be anxious that anti-ideologies are still ideologies, falling prey to an endless loop of paranoia about the effects of anti-ideology ideologies--if that is confusing, good, because it's irrational. Instead, what is meant by this is simply that we ought to accept that reality, accept that things we may not like exist and will always exist, and then do our best to recognize them and step around them when we see them.
Children are human beings, they are not lifelong slaves to the ideology they heard when they were three years old. They can break out of the system if we work with them to teach them about the system. They can not break free if we shut them off to that critical information or neglect to teach it in fear that they will "fall prey to it." There is no reason to concern ourselves so much with what is going into them, because when we do that we fail to attend to what is coming out. When we focus our attention on covering their ears so that information we don't like can't seep in, we forget to listen to what is coming out of their mouths. When we spend our time blocking their eyes so that they can't see something, we blind ourselves to what is coming out in their physical movements. For every inch we think we gain on their ability to understand the world, we give up our understanding of them.
Now this should not be a worrisome trend, seeing as what will happen will happen--intervention only stops what we imagine from happening, it doesn't stop what we can't imagine. In all likelihood, what we can't imagine is what is probably going to happen. We have no control over outcomes, just the social devices we choose to get there. Discussion and education is what informs a human being's choices, and a child's outcomes, not mere exposure to certain ideas. What is true for children is true for society.
Showing posts with label Child Raising. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Child Raising. Show all posts
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Affectionate Men
This is a culture that honors work over family, so it is no surprise that the struggle to gain women equal standing with men in the workplace and therefore in society in general, has been generally promoted. It is also no surprise that the struggle to gain men equal standing with woman over the family, the children, has never taken root. This work based culture seems to want nothing to do with raising its own children. The majority of men are pushed away from the care of children, and just as many seem more preoccupied with the workforce, with careers. With the arrival of feminism, it was finally declared that women sought the same. For both, having and raising children has become just a side project on a path toward personal fulfillment within the work place--something you have to do just to stay in keeping with social expectations.
These expectations have done nothing to raise us out of the sexist, 1940's culture that permeates family law in the United States. It has even been conveniently overlooked by the feminist movement itself--once again, because it doesn't concern the workplace. Family law arises from the belief that men are breadwinners and women are housewives and child caretakers. This is how a man and woman can divorce, and along with fifty percent of the marriage effects, the woman is typically granted the children, child support, and alimony. Many fathers who have weathered divorce have been brought into extreme poverty and even bankrupcy and homelessness as they've watched the mothers of their children reap the rewards of 1940's sexism in a modern equal opportunity culture. This is especially true if the man was not indeed the true breadwinner.
Regardless, all this stems from a pervasive and destructive cultural belief that men can not and should not be affectionate with children, and certainly are not equipped to be sole caretakers of them. As the old adage goes, we're fast becoming a culture that fears it may never cross a bridge designed by a woman, but couldn't care less if its children are raised by a man. Stereotypes, comedic tropes, and sexist cliches reinforce prejudice and embolden standards. Men who express any affection in public toward children, even fathers toward their own children, are often mistaken to be pedophiles, to be deviants. They are often ridiculed openly and harassed rather than celebrated.
The problem is not feminists, who have conveniently overlooked matters of family law and long ago demeaned and diminished the importance of raising children. The problem is not with men, who have been belittled from birth against showing affection toward anyone, and certainly not toward children, until they accepted this without complaint. The problem is with the underlying culture that does not allow men to complain about their diminished importance within the family, within childcare, as the feminists did about their status in the general workforce. Society looks up to work, it looks down on child raising. If a group of men come out and declare that they want to be taken seriously as child caretakers, it becomes a comedic trope at best rather than a genuine statement of desire. Why should a group of men who are not being discriminated against in the glorious and glamorous workforce want to do something as demeaning in the eyes of the culture as raise and nurture children? Society can not grapple with this concept.
Most men aren't like me. Most men don't place a high value on parenting either, as culture has dictated, so it's only the disaffected men (those who have been spit through family court) that complain. Many men will be reluctant to demand equal rights under family law because doing so makes them appear effeminate. What was a strength among the women's movement--the calculating, un-feeling, career-minded, self-fulfilled, self-dependent ideal woman of the future--becomes the unraveling of the men's movement--the nurturing, loving, reliable, educational, invested, selfless ideal male child caretaker of the future. It's seen as a sign of weakness to devote oneself to the ones society generally demeans anyways. The women's movement goes with the flow of western civilization (self-fulfillment, making money, children as a means to an ends...etc.) while the men's movement resists it (self-fulfillment in the fulfillment of a child's needs, children as a ends in and of themselves). There's no money in staying home and taking care of the kids, so western culture has no use for this new breed of man, and roots for his demise.
Feminists may have overlooked the affectionate man, male chauvinism may have tried to keep them down, culture may be trying to do away with them like shedding a malignancy, but the one group that needs the affection of a man is the only group we care about--the children, the boys and girls. In the end, raising them up is its own vindication where all else has failed them. If society wants nothing to do with the demeaning aspects of raising a child, then it's high time someone steps up to do the most important job of them all. Automation will erode the glorious western workforce, but children are always going to need affection.
These expectations have done nothing to raise us out of the sexist, 1940's culture that permeates family law in the United States. It has even been conveniently overlooked by the feminist movement itself--once again, because it doesn't concern the workplace. Family law arises from the belief that men are breadwinners and women are housewives and child caretakers. This is how a man and woman can divorce, and along with fifty percent of the marriage effects, the woman is typically granted the children, child support, and alimony. Many fathers who have weathered divorce have been brought into extreme poverty and even bankrupcy and homelessness as they've watched the mothers of their children reap the rewards of 1940's sexism in a modern equal opportunity culture. This is especially true if the man was not indeed the true breadwinner.
Regardless, all this stems from a pervasive and destructive cultural belief that men can not and should not be affectionate with children, and certainly are not equipped to be sole caretakers of them. As the old adage goes, we're fast becoming a culture that fears it may never cross a bridge designed by a woman, but couldn't care less if its children are raised by a man. Stereotypes, comedic tropes, and sexist cliches reinforce prejudice and embolden standards. Men who express any affection in public toward children, even fathers toward their own children, are often mistaken to be pedophiles, to be deviants. They are often ridiculed openly and harassed rather than celebrated.
The problem is not feminists, who have conveniently overlooked matters of family law and long ago demeaned and diminished the importance of raising children. The problem is not with men, who have been belittled from birth against showing affection toward anyone, and certainly not toward children, until they accepted this without complaint. The problem is with the underlying culture that does not allow men to complain about their diminished importance within the family, within childcare, as the feminists did about their status in the general workforce. Society looks up to work, it looks down on child raising. If a group of men come out and declare that they want to be taken seriously as child caretakers, it becomes a comedic trope at best rather than a genuine statement of desire. Why should a group of men who are not being discriminated against in the glorious and glamorous workforce want to do something as demeaning in the eyes of the culture as raise and nurture children? Society can not grapple with this concept.
Most men aren't like me. Most men don't place a high value on parenting either, as culture has dictated, so it's only the disaffected men (those who have been spit through family court) that complain. Many men will be reluctant to demand equal rights under family law because doing so makes them appear effeminate. What was a strength among the women's movement--the calculating, un-feeling, career-minded, self-fulfilled, self-dependent ideal woman of the future--becomes the unraveling of the men's movement--the nurturing, loving, reliable, educational, invested, selfless ideal male child caretaker of the future. It's seen as a sign of weakness to devote oneself to the ones society generally demeans anyways. The women's movement goes with the flow of western civilization (self-fulfillment, making money, children as a means to an ends...etc.) while the men's movement resists it (self-fulfillment in the fulfillment of a child's needs, children as a ends in and of themselves). There's no money in staying home and taking care of the kids, so western culture has no use for this new breed of man, and roots for his demise.
Feminists may have overlooked the affectionate man, male chauvinism may have tried to keep them down, culture may be trying to do away with them like shedding a malignancy, but the one group that needs the affection of a man is the only group we care about--the children, the boys and girls. In the end, raising them up is its own vindication where all else has failed them. If society wants nothing to do with the demeaning aspects of raising a child, then it's high time someone steps up to do the most important job of them all. Automation will erode the glorious western workforce, but children are always going to need affection.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Parent State
This is going to be the beginning of a multi-part post regarding the disintegration of the power of parents in society, what I term "passive" dealings with children, and how they do more harm than good.
There are two societies we are forced to consider. The one that governs its interactions with children passively and the one that governs its interactions with children actively. The passive society governs with a divestment of personal responsibility but not the point of inflicting physical neglect. The basic needs of the child are met but not by the primary caregiver, rather, the community of experts and society at large step in to fill that role. This practice of Parens Patriae was preached, infamously, by sociologist Arthur W. Calhoun in A Social History of the American Family--a critical corpus that students have been drawing lessons from for the last century:
Children can not feel responsible to a ghost, a non-physical entity--an idea or conception--whether they be a network of professionals, experts, or state employees working in unison for their support, any more than an idea can be responsible for a child, which IS an entity, a dynamic being. No child under the custody of a state, or sitting in a doctor's office, relates themselves as socialized and attached to this abstract notion of the "State," as such a thing is a non-entity, a conception. It is made up of networked social structures and organizations that have no contact with the child directly but can assume the very direct task of parenthood.
This is the essence of the passive society. A child under the custody of the state, for instance, or in the supervision of an expert, relates themselves socially to their immediate caregivers--who only serve as a representative face for the abstract notion of the state, the corporation, or the daycare, and it is these individuals--the direct caregivers---that the child is natively wired to model, to learn and socialize themselves. This is that natural instinct of childhood, and yet these caregivers don't assume this direct role. They do not participate or feel obligated to take a participatory role in modeling behavior, because that responsibility belongs to the invisible organization or the state.
Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that since the direct caregivers, for which children are wired to respond to, can not have personal responsibility on an individual level for the children they are assigned to, that neither should the child feel responsible for him or herself and for society to which they are assigned. This is what makes the passive society passive, and ultimately ineffective in nurturing positive development in children. Thus the individual children it raises can not be effective in nurturing the positive development of a responsible society in return.
Obviously our society is not a completely passive one, as Engels and Marx may have desired, and the demonstration of this extreme was only intended to provoke the reader's imagination as to why we shouldn't be allowing passivity to overtake action when it comes to raising children. It is true though, that our society has many passive institutions within it--the Medical Industrial Complex, for example, whereby parental regard and discretion is disengaged by the push to diagnose and intervene in the behavior of children only so far as the transgressions can be medicated, not reinforced. Parents surrender their right to parent by dropping their children a pill.
Other passive institutions are the existence of youth curfews, where society relegates the behavior of children to bedroom confinement for their own protection or the supposed good of society. The existence of child leashes, satellite locating devices, and any device that promises to regulate children's behavior by relieving the parent of their often difficult parental duties are all passive practices that are in common use. A child who dangles on the end of a leash is being forcefully controlled, and the parent has no part in enforcing the control other than the light action of holding the strap. In this, behaviors are not being reinforced by the parent, rather, they are being reinforced by the parent surrogate--the harness! And as such, the parent takes a passive role in the raising of their child.
There are two societies we are forced to consider. The one that governs its interactions with children passively and the one that governs its interactions with children actively. The passive society governs with a divestment of personal responsibility but not the point of inflicting physical neglect. The basic needs of the child are met but not by the primary caregiver, rather, the community of experts and society at large step in to fill that role. This practice of Parens Patriae was preached, infamously, by sociologist Arthur W. Calhoun in A Social History of the American Family--a critical corpus that students have been drawing lessons from for the last century:
"The new view is that the higher and more obligatory relation is to society rather than to the family; the family goes back to the age of savagery while the state belongs to the age of civilization. The modern individual is a world citizen, served by the world, and home interests can no longer be supreme."The society he praised is also that advanced by Engels and Marx in the Communist Manifesto, where the family is abolished and the state assumes its essential functions. It is one that could be considered passive because of its shared divested interest, in that it remains a collectively active in caring for children, but on an individual level--the level for which a child is going to be aware and relating with--is a more passive and uninvolved authority. In this way, individuals for which the child is in developmental proximity with can neglect them but still maintain that the child's care is satisfactory provided for on a social level. The society assumes responsibility for the parenting, for which the child can't relate or feel obligated or responsible to, and the parents and other individuals for which the child can naturally relate to divest their personal responsibility to some other invisible entity or device.
Children can not feel responsible to a ghost, a non-physical entity--an idea or conception--whether they be a network of professionals, experts, or state employees working in unison for their support, any more than an idea can be responsible for a child, which IS an entity, a dynamic being. No child under the custody of a state, or sitting in a doctor's office, relates themselves as socialized and attached to this abstract notion of the "State," as such a thing is a non-entity, a conception. It is made up of networked social structures and organizations that have no contact with the child directly but can assume the very direct task of parenthood.
This is the essence of the passive society. A child under the custody of the state, for instance, or in the supervision of an expert, relates themselves socially to their immediate caregivers--who only serve as a representative face for the abstract notion of the state, the corporation, or the daycare, and it is these individuals--the direct caregivers---that the child is natively wired to model, to learn and socialize themselves. This is that natural instinct of childhood, and yet these caregivers don't assume this direct role. They do not participate or feel obligated to take a participatory role in modeling behavior, because that responsibility belongs to the invisible organization or the state.
Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that since the direct caregivers, for which children are wired to respond to, can not have personal responsibility on an individual level for the children they are assigned to, that neither should the child feel responsible for him or herself and for society to which they are assigned. This is what makes the passive society passive, and ultimately ineffective in nurturing positive development in children. Thus the individual children it raises can not be effective in nurturing the positive development of a responsible society in return.
Obviously our society is not a completely passive one, as Engels and Marx may have desired, and the demonstration of this extreme was only intended to provoke the reader's imagination as to why we shouldn't be allowing passivity to overtake action when it comes to raising children. It is true though, that our society has many passive institutions within it--the Medical Industrial Complex, for example, whereby parental regard and discretion is disengaged by the push to diagnose and intervene in the behavior of children only so far as the transgressions can be medicated, not reinforced. Parents surrender their right to parent by dropping their children a pill.
Other passive institutions are the existence of youth curfews, where society relegates the behavior of children to bedroom confinement for their own protection or the supposed good of society. The existence of child leashes, satellite locating devices, and any device that promises to regulate children's behavior by relieving the parent of their often difficult parental duties are all passive practices that are in common use. A child who dangles on the end of a leash is being forcefully controlled, and the parent has no part in enforcing the control other than the light action of holding the strap. In this, behaviors are not being reinforced by the parent, rather, they are being reinforced by the parent surrogate--the harness! And as such, the parent takes a passive role in the raising of their child.
Monday, April 5, 2010
A Portrait of Four Generations
The Boomers were a whiny generation from the get-go. They had major issues with authority to their ultimate slow degeneration. Born out of nuclear conformity and hysteria, they marched upon the earth as a bunch of kicks-seeking go-getters, preached universal love and tree-hugging only to crash and burn in a cocaine blitz and set themselves to work confining, restricting, and finding new ways to control the younger generations to the drum beat of "The War on Drugs", "Zero Tolerance", and "Reviving Ophelia."
As a result, their children grew up in a world full of their parents flexing their demons, never knowing a world where holding a squirt gun in a crowd wouldn't find them in the back of a police car, or where they could walk to school unsupervised without having Child Protective Services stop by for a visit, where they could play football or dodgeball in school, or simply be a "boy". If the Millenials have any failing point, we at least know the culprit.
In the meantime, the intervening generation, the X'ers, blazed a trail of self-absorption that now finds them in the throes of mainstream power, working to sedate the younger generations with their technological gadgetry. Their children are growing up never knowing a world where cellphones don't exist, where the internet doesn't exist, where satisfaction doesn't come instantly fulfilled, where dependence on technology wasn't considered progress.
There's a reason the X'ers have been called, for a long time, the Me Generation, because if it wasn't for being able to hop on the latest techno-trend to satisfy themselves before all else, they'd have to take a long hard look at themselves without the technological extensions of their personality and see just how little control they have, having surrendered themselves to their desires. So there's no question that they've set loose their demons on their own progeny, the kids, the Z's.
What is the fate? The Millenials will embrace new thinking about the social structure of society, such as the ill-conceived Venus Project (which so many of them already do), green technologies, gay rights, and other social causes, but they will ultimately fall short because they were bred without a spine to implement their dreams, and will slip slide into obscurity and confusion and wrest scorn from their progeny. They will be lots of talk and little resolve.
For the kids, the Z's, all one can foresee is absolute and total rebellion. Having grown up totally pacified by the internet and instant gratification of desire, they will begin to yearn for something "more," in fact, they may be termed the "More Generation," trying to break free from their parent's "me-centered" egotistical philosophies, they will perhaps embark on more spiritual-fed paths of communal rebellion (subversion of their parents' internet). Such is a prediction.
As a result, their children grew up in a world full of their parents flexing their demons, never knowing a world where holding a squirt gun in a crowd wouldn't find them in the back of a police car, or where they could walk to school unsupervised without having Child Protective Services stop by for a visit, where they could play football or dodgeball in school, or simply be a "boy". If the Millenials have any failing point, we at least know the culprit.
In the meantime, the intervening generation, the X'ers, blazed a trail of self-absorption that now finds them in the throes of mainstream power, working to sedate the younger generations with their technological gadgetry. Their children are growing up never knowing a world where cellphones don't exist, where the internet doesn't exist, where satisfaction doesn't come instantly fulfilled, where dependence on technology wasn't considered progress.
There's a reason the X'ers have been called, for a long time, the Me Generation, because if it wasn't for being able to hop on the latest techno-trend to satisfy themselves before all else, they'd have to take a long hard look at themselves without the technological extensions of their personality and see just how little control they have, having surrendered themselves to their desires. So there's no question that they've set loose their demons on their own progeny, the kids, the Z's.
What is the fate? The Millenials will embrace new thinking about the social structure of society, such as the ill-conceived Venus Project (which so many of them already do), green technologies, gay rights, and other social causes, but they will ultimately fall short because they were bred without a spine to implement their dreams, and will slip slide into obscurity and confusion and wrest scorn from their progeny. They will be lots of talk and little resolve.
For the kids, the Z's, all one can foresee is absolute and total rebellion. Having grown up totally pacified by the internet and instant gratification of desire, they will begin to yearn for something "more," in fact, they may be termed the "More Generation," trying to break free from their parent's "me-centered" egotistical philosophies, they will perhaps embark on more spiritual-fed paths of communal rebellion (subversion of their parents' internet). Such is a prediction.
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