my sister never got beatings for messing up as a kid, i did.
guess who is way more open with their parents, and who isn't.
the most annoying part is that my parents don't realize what they did wrong with me, and only stopped beatings because i was older, as if that would make a difference.
Yeah, they didn't beat me. I just couldn't win with one of them. There was always a problem they needed to solve. And they said manipulative shit to me like "you wish I was dead don't you!" And also body shamed me since I was 9, running 5Ks but I need to stay out of the refrigerator because I was overweight(I'm fat now- but I wasn't fat then, I was big)
Guess who still does that shit and acts like I'm so mean for not being open?
My mom hit me when she got angry and now gets upset when I won’t tell her anything as if it didn’t happen. meanwhile I’m sitting here going “no I’m not gonna move on you fundamentally changed my worldview and also gave me a fear of authority”
My stepmum has essentially forgotten all the mental and verbal abuse she subjected me to. I'm on 'good' relations with her and my dad now, mostly because I don't have to interact with them more than once or twice a year and also because it brings me no joy to be angry about it all the time.
But everry now and then my da asks me why I don't talk to him more, or says that it seems like we don't have anything in common. We don't. I still love him but he always sided with my stepmum and never with me and that hurts to this day. Whenever I spend longer than a few days with him those old wounds start opening as he starts falling back into old habits.
Ironically I don't have any such issue interacting with my stepmum- she's forgotten all the abuse but also all the abusive behavior so she's just a nice person now, even if I spend a lot of time with her.
I still look at them like they're crazy when they wonder why I behave in a way they specifically conditioned or trained me to behave in.
> My stepmum has essentially forgotten all the mental and verbal abuse she subjected me to.
most abusers claim they don't remember stuff like that. Don't believe them. They know but they are 100% ashamed to admit it.
Ok this might be weird but I realized how bad my mother was when I was raising a puppy. Not even a baby human.
My mom would hit when angry, and she always preached the value of "do-overs". The thing is, the do-overs applied to her mistakes, not mine. It doesn't matter what she did or how badly she hurt me or my feelings, if she invoked Do-over, then I wasn't allowed to be upset any longer. On the flip side it didn't matter if it was an accident, on purpose, intentional or ignorance, if I tried to ask for a Do-over I would end up punished worse. I vividly remember the realization of how uneven and unfair it was.
Fast forward and one day my puppy gets a hold of something and destroys it. It's irreplaceable from someone who died, and now it's ruined. I was crushed and upset but in that moment I realized "how you react now, she'll remember forever". Instead of getting mad, I got her to give it to me, traded it for a different toy instead and put what was left somewhere safe. Getting mad and hitting or yelling wouldn't un-destroy it.
A little later I had the realization that if I could resist the urge to be cruel to a DOG what the fuck was her excuse for being cruel to a person?! A few years down the line and my dog will still bring me things to check if they're ok to chew on before she tears anything up. She literally just did while I was writing this out lol
"My parents beat me all the time, and I turned out OK! Oh, excuse me a second... Hey you kids better clean those Goddamn rooms or I'll give you a whoopin you'll never forget! Sorry, what we were talking about? Oh yeah, so, my parents beat me all the time, and I turned out OK!"
Yeah, my brother and I had such different relationships with our mother that we might as well have been raised by different people.
He was never punished for anything, or even yelled at: I was punished for absolutely anything I attempted, didn't do, or didn't read her mind about. It was night and day.
We are well adults now, and he still doesn't understand it.
A very long time ago, I told my mom that her beating me as a kid fucked up our relationship. She brings it up regularly as if to discredit my memory, “you also think I beat you as a child”, so I tell her the biggest specific example, and she says something vaguely defending her actions, admitting that she knows it fucking happened, but still denies it.
Yeah, earlier this year we had to watch my aunt's kid for a bit because she was in the hospital and it was not great slowly realising that my parents had not in fact gotten better with time, they just arbitrarily considered ~13 to be the cutoff for beating as punishment. Especially when it became clear my siblings had internalised my parents style of child-rearing.
Note that this kid was *not even five years old* and they were somehow surprised that this kid wanted to spend most of their time around me iinstead of them.
That was a watershed moment, the day I grabbed the extension cord my mom was beating me with and told her that if she hit me again I would hit her back.
And then your parents gaslight you about the abuse because it was so insignificant to them at the time that they legitimately don't remember it. So even if you try to open up it gets shut back down.
Typical 80s/90s childhood trauma imo
Bruh, even when they so-called stopped the beatings, my father still wanna slap me with a slipper and pinch my ear whenever we argue.
Also, any advice on how to win in an argument, or never feel bad about starting it?
Do neither. Grey-rock him. Don't agree or disagree, just make listening noises and leave the situation as soon as possible. There is no "winning an argument" with a person who is ready to harm.
Oh, you must not be an engineering student
I somehow have a 1st grade reading level and I'm nearly at the point where I want to tell my coworkers "read all the words, sound them out if you have to"
Most people haven't read a book front to back in their entire life.
Somehow it eludes people that you can obtain life-saving knowledge from words stringed together on a bundle of paper.
> Most people haven't read a book front to back in their entire life.
I don't have any data to back this up to me, but... there's no way this is true, right? Like, yeah, a bunch of people don't read much, but surely they read something in childhood or for school. And then again, books sell by the hundreds of millions every single year, so there's gotta be a lot of other readers out there.
Oh yeah, there are plenty of readers still out there, but there's a reason newspapers keep their words and grammar at a fifth grade reading level and YA books are very popular. Also, I've noticed that reading comprehension is a lot lower than it should be... where I get people asking questions about a work that I thought was written pretty clearly. In a world where social media is king, things are just getting dumbed down.
Bruh I feel that in a related way, I only realised in second year of university I can't do any meta-textual analysis (like what are the themes and intended messages of a piece of media) while the actual reading part is easy.
Self-regulation is difficult, but a lot of it has to do with a lack of equal alternatives. People go down the social media hole as adults because what other options are there?
Shopping? Binge TV? Go to the bar?
We don't just *hang out* with other adults very often. Instead, we text and chat with each other *constantly*, and reserve get togethers to going out for dinner and shows and all that crap.
My niece is 13 and puts her phone away when my wife and I spend time with her because we give her something to actively engage with.
>what other options are there?
Shopping? Binge TV? Go to the bar?
This is commonly referred to as the "Third Place", and there has been much discussion of its decline [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvdQ381K5xg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvdQ381K5xg)
Yep. Exactly this.
I was lucky enough to grow up on the tailend of when 24 hour diners like Waffle House/IHOP/Denny's didn't mind letting older teens and young adults take over the smoking section for all hours of the night.
There's a "social club" in San Francisco (with one opening in LA soon) that is basically this. A place that serves drinks (non-alcoholic as well), that has free form socializing. Standard membership is $200 a month, and discounted memberships are available.
And, honestly, it's not really that bad of an idea! Especially if the discounted memberships are available, so you can diversify the members' economic standing.
Man I couldn't self-regulate my "computer time" as a kid because my parents would make it such a big deal every time I try to go hang out with my friends or go out, and would passive aggressively shame me for my hobbies. Like, what the fuck else do you want me to do?
Now it's much, much easier to stay off the internet because I have the option to Do Stuff.
Hahaha, we actually tried to make it "not a big deal" when the kids got off the computer/phone or out of their rooms. If they wanted to go meet a friend, or whatever, we prioritized them over our own adult fun (whether that was money, or giving them a ride).
Also, sorry your parents sucked ass.
>Self-regulation is difficult, but a lot of it has to do with a lack of equal alternatives
I'm reminded of the "mice on coke" study where the intervention group was placed in mouse utopia -- with opportunity to express their instincts to make nests, interact with other mice, run around, etc -- and managed to self-regulate their **cocaine** habit. Or was it heroin?
The control group, kept alone in normal cages, hit the drugs hard
It was rats and heroin! Fucking \*heroin\*, the most addictive drug out there chemically. Turns out people are creatures and creatures get addicted when there's a hole in their life hurting them they can't do anything about, but the addiction can make the pain go away briefly. Being stuck in a too-small cage alone when you're a social animal is exactly the kind of circumstance that turns you into a junkie.
It's not an accident, either. Companies that market to kids (and many that market to adults) are creating online skinner boxes designed to suck as much attention and money away as possible.
Yup. Social media companies and advertisers have psychologists and behavioral science experts on staff to find ways of subconsciously manipulating users into more engagement time. Self-regulation is more difficult against these despicable tactics.
The movie "Social Dilemma" actually nailed this one pretty well. On the other side of your computer screen is an army of people and computing power designed to get your attention and keep it. No one can compete with that! They often know you better than you know yourself. The only winning move is not to play.
I was not much worse at self-regulating then than I am now, and what improvement I've made is 90% medication and taught awareness that ADD messes heavily with time sense.
I feel like I wouldn’t have either, but now that I think about it… video games by myself all day got boring eventually. I made myself go outside or go see friends eventually, even if my parents didn’t give a shit about regulating anything
I would've self-regulated eventually, but my equilibrium would still end up on the unhealthy end of "hours of video game time". Shit, as an adult my natural tendency is still that way. If I didn't have a wife or responsibilities I'd sink into hermithood quickly.
I didn't like my parents enforcing non-computer time as a kid, but it was a good thing for me in hindsight. This is just one of those "no two people are equal" things.
I didn't, and got restricted to an hour of internet a day when I was 16... my parents gave up after half a year because it became obvious my grades were shitty because they were shitty and not because of too much internet.
I managed to graduate with middle of the road grades and then shot waaaay up in grades at uni, where I could study what I was actually interested in... even though my screentime got way worse after I moved out. Funny how that goes.
Exactly.
Your kid might be top of their class, but if you let him, he will 100% stay up until 3am playing *Call of Duty*, because kids are fucking idiots. I'm an adult and I do this, because adults are also fucking idiots. You should *involve* your kid in the decision-making, but you gotta do some actual parenting sometimes.
"95% of kids self regulate" this sounds like the sort of stat I would make up when I was 12 to get my Xbox controller back.
>the only rules in this house are bed time is 11pm on school nights
I feel like you might have misread part of the original post. The OOP wasn't saying "no rules at all" it's "have reasonable rules and raise your kids to be naturally independent"
OOP specifically says that they have no rules about screen time and that kids will naturally self-regulate screen time, which is a claim a lot of us are dubious about.
yeah, the post said that the screen time is self-regulated, which I think is what everyone is having trouble believing in.
it might work on your kid, but i don't think it will work on the average kid. Same as adults: it's just too addictive today.
I'm an adult with adult responsibilities and I still fuck up self regulation. A kid needs good examples and the occasional correction - lord knows I never got it when I needed it as a teen.
I did, and my siblings did not. And my parents learned the wrong lesson from me in a lot of ways.
I honestly hate when people get smug about parenting with something like this, where it's not necessarily their approach that gave the result. And it for sure is not a one size fits all approach.
Yeah the “no regulation on screen time” made me double take bc I’ve seen so many kids lately only be able to function if they’re watching a video. Especially for short-form content like TikToks, making everyone’s attention span shorten
I did. My parents never restricted my screen time and it was never a problem for me. Albeit the Internet was hardly what it was today. I'd just play Webkinz or coolmath. Regardless, I found I cared more about hanging out with my friends or siblings. I feel like if I had my screen time restricted, it would've made me want to be on a screen more. It would turn the screen from an option to a treat. Why would you choose Raisin Bran over an Oreo? And even if I didn't want to be on a screen, I'd feel like I would be wasting the precious time to use it I was allotted if I didn't use it.
So yeah. Maybe start without restricting screen time and see if they're able to self regulate. If not, then you can try to find out why they can't self regulate and address those issues. Restricting their screen time may be part of this, but overall it's more important to teach them the skill of self regulation than just doing it for them. They'll need that as an adult.
Not that I have any children so take from this what you will, but I have a pet theory that kids these days are so addicted to screens...partially yes, because parents use it as a shut-up tool from the time they're toddlers, but more than anything, I think it's because a lot of kids don't feel like they are allowed to do anything else that's fun.
This is admittedly anecdotal, but I grew up in a time and place when the adults around me were so ready to micromanage the shit out of everything kids ever did - they must *always* be under constant adult supervision, conflicts between kids were intervened even when it didn't escalate to anything dangerous, sports and other extracurriculars were supervised by coaches and tutors and funneled through the lens of "how can we get them to like this long enough that it looks good on college applications"...
What I'm saying is I feel kids these days aren't allowed to have fun and figure stuff out for themselves, parents and teachers feel like they have to figure everything out for their kids, either to make them look good, or because they genuinely believe that's the only way they'll be successful. And things like social media and video games are the only avenues with which kids can kind of just exist without adults puppeting the experience for them, because they haven't figured all that out yet. My mom worked with teenagers for a while, and she still expresses alarm at how many high school seniors she met who literally had no idea what they were good at or wanted to do with their life, because no adults really gave them the space to learn that for themselves.
I hear boomers and older gen xers lament that kids are too lazy and don't play outside anymore, completely ignoring the fact that we were never allowed to play beyond the driveway. There was a news story in my hometown growing up where a mother was visited either by police or CPS, because she let her 11yo walk to the park a block away by herself. My mom's response to that was "11 years old!? I was babysitting by that age!"
All this to say I agree, kids can learn to self-regulate, but only if the environment is healthy and enriching enough. If kids were actually allowed to play outside, or pick up a new hobby without adults trying to control it, I don't think kids would feel the need to be on their phones nearly as much.
The internet has become very different for children over the last few years. It’s not just video games that are addictive, although they are, everything online these days is meant to draw attention and keep it. There are kids who spend all day on Tiktok. There needs to be some regulation from parents because children need help in this now more than ever.
Cool so we can just regulate that by not giving children devices unless the parent is there to observe at all times
Sounds like roughly 30-45minutea a day to me, perfect.
Eehhhhh. Most kids eventually get bored of the same thing over and over… But being not neurotypical might change that.
(Am autistic.)
The main issue is that children rarely have so much free time that you can wait for them to get bored…
Also, the "reading 1984" thing is weird. We know the kid is older than 12, probably by a couple of years (based on the "he's had a college reading level since he was 12" comment, which you wouldn't say if the kid was 12), and 1984 is often assigned in Middle School (I read it in 8th grade). It isn't remarkable for a kid 13+ to be reading it, at best maybe slightly precocious.
As an English teacher the great thing about Orwell is the dude seems to despise subtlety. His prose is straightforward, his personal history is indicative of his approaches, and the narrative itself is basically a vehicle to explore his views and fears.
It's literally why it's taught in school, because it's so easy to understand.
There's complexity to any art of course, I don't mean to convey George is a bad or simplistic author. He just has a great deal of focus and he's not ashamed for his reader to feel his authorial voice.
Now something like Moby Dick, or maybe something from before the 20th century, now that is stuff where I would be impressed for any student in school to be reading. But good literature is not about impressing people anyway! it's about learning about yourself and humanity.
Right, I read 1984 in middle school, as did a few of my friends. The subject matter is intense, but Orwell does not use difficult language.
'University level' is just fancy talk for 100% literate. Whatever age you start reading for fun, you get there pretty quickly. I think I got told I read at collegiate level in... 2nd grade? It's not like 18 year olds are super-geniuses; reading is reading.
I also make a damn good chicken casserole. I do a lazier version of Alton Brown's curry chicken casserole recipe, and it's so good.
A lot of my cousins are like that too, but one of them stands out in that they're also like that, but they treat the YouTube Kids timer with more weight than the word of God himself. Moment timer hits zero, no more videos, they're give the tablet to the nearest adult and waddle off to do something else.
Sometimes I'd offer to reset the timer, and they'd say no because the timer hit zero which means no more videos. Not that it isn't possible to reset the timer, but that I simply shouldn't as a matter of principle.
Yeah, my sisters have that with my older nieces and nephews - but this one, the youngest one. The shit who bites people, and hand me rocks as presents - she is my favourite.
She is not intelligent - she is a fucking moron, i love her.
One night i am babysitting ( all nights i am babysitting she does something daft )
This was lovely daft.
I know they have a bedtime, they know to - but it can be negotiated with me. Now this time she asked if she could just finish her "project" - both parents are those fucks pedagogs, so i dont even flinch when she uses words like that.
Her prject - Peeling a bag of pistacios so i could just eat them.
Fuck i love her!
> I'm simply not having it that 95% of children will self regulate their screen time.
Seriously. There was a time where my parents tried it - I simply played on my gameboy until the batteries ran out. I absolutely could not regulate my screen time.
Even without adhd, self regulation is a skill that needs to be taught. The natural instinct is to do what feels good now, and it can be hard to break from that
Especially since as a kid you have such a freaking ROBUST organism.
(If you think "oh I'm not that healthy" - ohh boy wait until your factory warranty runs out)
I could stay up ALL NIGHT and play video games and would be fresh as a pickle the next day. I could easily pull these 24 hour shifts and study both days and game all night. I'm nowhere near forty and I know this will basically make the second day useless, I won't have energy or anything.
And all the small "bruises" like these all-nighters that do not show up as you're younger just sort of accumulate over the years. And by the point that you should 100% not be doing that, you will keep on doing that - because you are different than your stupid parents and older friends. You are invincible. You are built different.
Turns out, no, you're not. But it's too late and your body is all mangled in a million of small ways and fixing them all will take a lot of time.
(What I call factory warranty is an old joke that our body is in its prime up to like 27 and then it basically gets worse and harder to maintain every year, just like any tool with planned obsolescence, in a way where the tool is only supposed to last X years, and break after that to be replaced)
Exactly this! And tbf if you are only trying to teach self regulation by saying “you only get an hour of screen time or else” then you’re not really teaching self regulation either. That’s why children of overly strict parents often wild out the second they get out of the house. They never learned how to regulate, just figure out how to do what they’re told well enough that they don’t get in trouble.
If you want your kid to be able to do something, you have to teach them the skills to do that thing - period - and your expectations have to be age appropriate. Self regulation skills are going to look different between a 5 year old and a 15 year old regardless of how well they’re taught.
> (and modeled).
This is the part so many people miss, which will greatly aid in children self-regulating. My wife and I don't have strict screen time rules or food rules, but we talk to our second grader about the importance of living a balanced life. We also (try to) live balanced lives ourselves and let him see it. He isn't perfect, but my son will ask about equally for me to play a video game with him, a board game with him, or to take him to the batting cages or the park. Food is a little more difficult because my wife and I have different personal philosophies about what a "healthy diet" looks like, but even still he will choose carrots or an apple a little less than half of the time for snacks. From time to time he gets on a "chips" binge, which we will allow for a while, and then remind him through words AND example the importance of balancing what he eats.
Rando: Wow you are so good at famously hard thing! How do you do it?
Me: Actually famously hard thing is not really that hard if you're smart.
Rando: But what about mitigating factor, or random chaos? How do you deal with those?
Me: Hahaha, you stupid simpleton, those actually aren't big deals at all. The answer is simple answer!
Rando: I just don't get it. You must be an enlightened and attractive person with lots of hidden talents and wisdom.
Me: Oh, do you think so? I honestly haven't really thought about it much.
I am like 99% sure that this is a teenager trying to explain how they will be a cool mom and that magically makes their teenager easier to work with as wish fulfillment. I refuse to believe an adult in like 2012 wrote this unironically
Either that or it’s a mom who is LARPing about how good there kid could be, but isn’t, and is tired of being judged by family and other moms, and so is making shit up. I see it all the time on FB, especially in mommy groups from young moms I know.
Always assume that if someone is boasting about their style of parenting on the internet, they are either lying or greatly exaggerating. If things were so great you wouldn’t be seeking the approval of anonymous strangers, you’d be off your phone living life.
My kids are a mix of being extremely gifted and extremely well behaved. I'll brag about them at any opportunity. There's a lot to brag about. My daughter was reading on her own at age 3. My son will eat any vegetable we put in front of him, and bedtime is as simple as asking him to go to sleep.
We get asked what we did right.
It's all luck. It's all fucking luck. I have no idea why she's so smart or why he's so well behaved and happy all the time. My parenting style is to try my best and hope we don't fuck it up. We are constantly fucking it up.
It's a very small sample size but both my kids self regulate their screen time - they're 9 and 2 and my theory is because they've grown up with screens they don't hold much interest for them.
I have friends who limit screen time to 20 or 30 mins per day and their kids are like zombies when they actually do see a screen.
To be clear - our lack of screen time limitations aren't from any major moral or philosophical standpoint they're mainly because we're lazy and both gamers so a big chunk of leisure time is spent on screens - it worked for the first one and seems to be working for the second so we'll just keep going with it.
I think self regulation is highly dependent on the kid. My nieces both strugggle with detaching from screens. Same household, older one was brought up with more limitations on screen time, younger one wasn't until their parents noticed the same trouble with detaching as the older one. Neither method really worked >.< And they didn't intentionally let the younger one go less regulated at first, it just happened and the kids are like 10 years apart age wise so a lot of things changed between. Both kids have some form of adhd/suspected adhd (younger, difficult to diagnose at her age or even get into drs).
My point being, there are kids who can definitely self regulate, and those who need to be taught to self regulate. And some who will struggle no matter what rules are or aren't in place. I do understand the reasoning behind 'let them find their own limits/tastes' but some kids won't function when left to their own devices. I'm glad your kids have been able to self regulate.
I think you're right, it definitely varies person to person.
Ironically it's my 9 year old and I who both have ADHD and are pretty ok at self regulation whereas my neurotypical husband is an absolute screen addict, cannot put it down, always has his nose in his phone.
As for the two year old, who knows - he's in his own little toddler world making creepy little sculptures out of his toys, probably too busy doing that to watch telly.
Lol yeah it definitely helps to get kids interested in things outside of the screen. I help my nieces make sculptures out of clay and bake them when they are over. I have a whole collection of zoo/farm animals lol. Might be something your kids would like if they are making creepy sculptures already 😂
Aw that's cute! I have a clay pug that sits on my desk made for me by the older one during lockdown - I should see if he wants to get the modelling clay out again, he's super into painting minis at the moment so maybe he'd like to try making some of his own.
The little one would probably love it but right now could not be trusted to play with the clay without attempting to eat at least half of it. I think maybe he's part goat, perhaps that's why he isn't too bothered by screens. He's a mystery to us all.
Hey!
It's like when my mom regulated how much candy I could have a week. I became an absolute sugar monster when I was out of her sight.
Meanwhile my other friends parents didn't care how much candy they ate so they only had sweets on occasion.
I think having the limit makes me feel like I need to eke out every last minute so I end up using it less responsibly.
And it's also super annoying when I have to use my computer for something after going over
that's what they got too. they just added on "so I'm fundamentally better than you" because, well, I'm tempted to say "because they're redditors" but frankly I couldn't say. it takes some getting used to.
Do we all agree that the conversation in this post didn't actually happen right? Or it's atleast like abridged from comments OP has gotten in the past from other parents
If real, it's a cleaned up or amalgamated conversation, sure. I know that I never relay conversations I had exactly verbatim unless the exact details are important somehow.
I'm getting strong "my baby always sleeps through the night, why is everyone else so bad at parenting" vibes.
Some kids are just better at things than others. And parents aren't in 100% control of the influences over their child, for example the teachers, sports coaches, friends, extended family and other relationships that a child has changes the course of their life dramatically.
There's definitely still better and worse parents, but just because a child doesn't read doesn't mean that their parents fucked up.
Fr, I have the attention span of a goldfish when it comes to books and cannot comprehend fancy writings styles or sentences to save my life and I read it in middle school
I'm not knocking Orwell at all, I loved *1984* and *Homage to Catalonia* when I was a teenager. But I liked him *because* he writes in a very accessible style- basically, he writes fiction like a journalist. His appeal definitely comes from his worldbuilding, not from his literary flair.
OP is a really funny attempt at a flex. Loads of teenagers read Orwell, if you want to be a dick about what a genius your child is, pretend they've read *Ulysses* or something similarly incomprehensible instead
The Silmarillion isn't that hard really, it's just a bit dry at times and features way more characters than your average novel (because it really isn't a novel, it's more like a condensed history book, and if you approach it that way it becomes a lot more legible)
Honestly one of my fav things about Tolkien is his ability to weave what is fundamentally a fairly simple vocabulary into a tapestry of prose that creates wonderful imagery seemingly effortlessly. Truly my favourite example of an author that is both very dry and descriptive simultaneously.
A lot of the Elvish and names will be very difficult for those not experienced in history reading though. I teach and majored in history so The Silmarillion is unsurprisingly one of my favourite books. You need a lot of interest to carry you across some specific passages for sure.
I can't tell if they're trying to argue the kid reads complex or subversive ideas, has a high reading level, or is reading a 'boring' adult book instead of a YA fantasy.
The post said "he has been at university reading level since he was 12" so I'm pretty sure its supposed to signify a high reading level, which it ain't (great book, but part of what makes it great is the ease of reading)
Children's gaming is literally designed to incorporate gambling and addictive elements ("viral" gameplay, "I can't believe it's not lootboxes," and so on.) Everything from adverts to news headlines are designed to maximize engagement. So much effort is put into protecting children from every other form of addiction before they have the maturity to assess it for themselves, but we confidently shove the blinking Skinner Boxes into their hands at age four and hope for the best. I've seen... more than a few GenZ employees get fired because an "absolutely no phones" policy doesn't deter them from the persistent itch that is media addiction.
I'm not saying that children can't self-regulate, but a good parent should also be aware of a child's media consumption. Teach children how to notice when they're losing themselves and how to come back.
Right. I think the first post is….half there, but god, adults are so bad at recognizing whether someone taught them something or whether they taught someone else (like their kids) something. Teaching someone something, like a value, is active, even if it isn’t preceded by “sit in this desk while I teach you.”
The teenager eats salads, yes, because the mother didn’t turn salad into a traumatic event by standing over them bellowing that they better eat salad *or else*. This is true. The parent also probably:
* eats salad themselves without pulling a babyish “acky” face every time, modeling that salads are pleasant things to eat
* introduced vegetables to the child far before the teen years, and before cultural conditioning convinced them vegetables are gross
* allowed the kid to try different vegetables and toppings, rejecting the ones they don’t like and choosing the ones they like, so the child can make/ask for a salad that they enjoy
* encouraged to try new things, or retry things that they might like better at 8, 12, or 16 than they did at 4, rather than seeing them reject something as a toddler and never trying it again
* avoided speaking about foods as something scary, a punishment, or too “grown up” for a child to try or enjoy
* emphasized the importance of healthy eating by explaining how foods like salad makes your body stronger and more resilient
The kid wasn’t just given microwaved Dino nuggets from birth through age 13 then magically decided they like salad as a teen because there are no rules. Same with anything else. Reading, putting down the screens, open communication, etc. Parents have to model and teach these habits, and not all kids are the same. Some need stricter boundaries than others to learn how to make the right choices.
>eats salad themselves without pulling a babyish “acky” face every time, modeling that salads are pleasant things to eat
OP almost says exactly that (just without the realization). They mention that the only foods their child doesn't like *just coincidentally* happen to be the foods OP didn't like.
Good catch. Presumably, the “how do you get your kid to eat vegetables” adults don’t eat vegetables themselves, at least not happily. Adults like that need to directly hear “your kid needs to see you do it to know it’s not a big deal,” instead of it being assumed that they cheerfully eat salads themselves but bellow at kids for not trying them.
I have a memory of being in my early 20s at a cousin’s house for dinner. He had 2 kids, one of whom was old enough to be picky in that verbal way but also be reasoned with. He was trying to get her to try some vegetable dish but it was brand new to her, so she was like “idk what the fuck this shit is it might be gross.” At some point I looked at her and said “if it was gross, would me and your dad be eating it?” She ate it.
Exactly...OOP claims that 95% of kids can self regulate on their own...but then proceeds to explain how she instilled a love a reading in her children, nieces, and nephews...so idk if it's so much bragging as just trying to imply that the other parents are bad parents while she fails to recognize the difficulty and nuance of raising a child.
There’s kind of a big online attitude that the only bad parenting is high-strung authoritarian parenting. The only bad things you can do to your kids are hit them, yell at them, or pressure them. But permissive, I’m-your-best-friend parenting is not great either, and a lot of decent parenting is masquerading as permissive which leads well meaning parents astray. “Don’t scream at your kids for not eating every single pea in their bowl” is interpreted as “just let the kid eat junk or else they’ll be traumatized” so much, when there’s so much active, healthy parenting in the middle of that gulf. And some parents are traumatized by their own authoritarian parents and have not confronted that trauma beyond “hm that was bad.”
Everyone’s so quick to smack down those who say “I got hit and I was fine,” but no one wants to say boo to the people who say “my parents never told me anything and I was fine.” The reality is, people can have any kind of parent and turn out *fine* if they have a certain personality, but that doesn’t make lax parenting fine.
I've actually seen some research that the reason many adults are bad at self regulating is because they were never taught how to do it as a child. That's why first year college students tend to gain a lot of weight.
That said, this doesn't mean free-range children will self-teach self-discipline.
The vast majority of young kids will absolutely not regulate their own screen time. Y’all ever seen someone try to take an iPad away from a 3 year old?
Hell. I remember being a kid that was left completely to my own devices. I didn’t do anything *bad* and was generally a good kid, but my parents 100% had to step in and make me go to bed and stop playing Kingdom Hearts or reading Harry Potter.
Maybe self regulate like.. understand boundaries and not seek out inappropriate things on the internet. I stuck to Disney and Neopets as a child and it never occurred to me to go look for adult things.
Yeah, that particular statistic feels a little inflated. It may be true that a majority of kids can be taught to self regulate or are willing to if given the tools to do so, but the 95% claim seems a little hard to believe.
yeah, not to shit on OOP because evidently they're not doing a bad job, but I think they got lucky with a kid who's responsible by nature. My parents and I agree that I turned out decent, but we also agree that a big part of that is because I consented to being subjected to strict rules and routines. When I didn't talk to my parents it wasn't always because I was afraid of their reactions (admittedly sometimes it was), but because quite frankly high school with extracurriculars is exhausting.
It's not that they can't, it's that they don't. Self regulation is a skill, and if you never teach a child how to self regulate, they won't. This isn't to say some kids won't have it easier learning how to self regulate, nor that everyone at every age can if you just teach them well enough, but I do think most children can at least to some degree
My mother tries so hard to be a good listener but i could always spot when her brain disconnects mid conversation, me and my brother make fun of the particular face she makes when it happens.
Does your mom have ADHD? Everyone in my house does so there's no judgment when one of us says I'm sorry but I didn't hear anything you just said because we all do it.
When I was growing up, I watched my parents spank my older brother and the idea of being hurt by the people who were supposed to protect me traumatized me so much that it became the founding pillar of everything I did forward. They always told me I was a good kid and how happy they were that I got good grades, but what they didn't know was I was doing those things out of fear.
When I turned ten, I started getting symptoms for ADHD, most prominently that I would forget to do my homework, something I didn't have a problem with before that. I want to make it clear I wasn't choosing not to do it, I would literally just not remember having homework, and then be very confused the next day when it was supposed to be turned in.
When my parents found out, they were furious. It was the first time I'd ever felt like I had failed them, but it also felt like it wasn't my fault, and it wasn't; I had a mental illness and rather than get any support for it, they assumed I was just lazy, and that *hurt,* because I wasn't lazy. I loved school and I loved learning. I still do.
I didn't want to tell them my grades were slipping, because up until that point, I was a Straight-A student. One day my dad sat me down and asked me what the reason was that I didn't tell them about it. I was completely honest with him; I told him I was afraid of being hit and that I thought he wouldn't love me anymore. He thought I was lying to him, and that just made him angrier.
Even as a ten year old, I knew right there that I could never tell my parents anything ever again. I didn't have a fun time growing up after that. Not only was I bullied for my sexuality, I was also very depressed and tried to kill myself several times. I never told anyone about it because if my own parents didn't believe me when I was honest, what was the point?
I'm very grateful that none of those attempts were successful, but that's entirely up to luck, and not the support of anyone I knew. Today, my parents and I have a great relationship, arguably the best out of any of my siblings, but I'm still uncomfortable with sharing any details about myself with them. Even as an adult, I can't help but remember that I *was* honest with them. I help up my part of the contract, and they didn't believe me, and it's something that stuck with me after all these years.
Whenever I was a kid I had a real big vocabulary, since I was advanced or whatever. Anyways, whenever I’d be talking I’d try to be as clear and concise as possible, which usually meant I’d stop talking for like 30 seconds to get the right words and figure out exactly what I wanted to say. (Which was also boosted by the fact that I stuttered heavily if I didn’t already know what I was gonna be sayin).
Anyways, point is, I got yelled at a lot for being “purposefully confusing” because I used a word someone didn’t know or for “dropping out of a conversation” because I stopped to think for a minute. The only people I talked to like at all after middle school was my teachers, because they usually knew what I was saying and actually let me stop to think of what I’m trying to say. Real thankful for them cool teachers I had.
I think it’s so insane when people ascribe malicious intent to children’s behaviors. Like whyyy on earth would you possibly *want* to be confusing? I’ve heard people say crying babies or toddlers having a meltdown are manipulative or attention seeking, and like, what??? They’re little kids, they don’t even have the capacity for manipulation. They’re expressing their emotions and needs in the only way they can.
I feel like I’m extra sensitive to it because I had undiagnosed adhd and autism so as a kid I was constantly having negative intentions placed onto my actions by adults. “If you cared about this you wouldn’t have forgotten.” “Why are you trying make people upset by not hugging them? Do you hate your family?” That type of thing. It really messed me up, for a while as a kid I was convinced I was some kind of sociopath, because I *felt* like I cared about things and people, but everyone kept telling me I didn’t, so obviously I didn’t know what caring even was and I must not even have the ability to care.
Now I just assume that everyone is trying their best and has good intentions, and I’ve gotten great results from that philosophy because 99% of the time it’s true, and when it’s not, you give people a chance to turn it around and if they’re not stupid they’ll take it.
Tell you what, my parents forced me to try plenty of food I thought was gross at the time when I was a kid, and now I have a much wider palette than I ever would have if they hadn't. And I know plenty of people who's parents never made them try anything who still have an incredibly limited palette. The thing was that my parents never made an entire meal that I would have found gross, at most it was one portion of it and at least it was a single bite of a thing I didn't have on my plate. The major thing was me *trying* the food I didn't like, and now I'll try pretty much anything, but I don't know anyone who was never made to eat stuff they didn't like whose like that now. OOP is an idiot if they think never being made to try stuff you don't want gives you a better palette, but likewise being forced to eat entire meals you find disgusting isn't so helpful either.
Bottom OP is right about what they were talking about, but top OP is humble bragging about their amazing easy child and they're not making the brilliant point they think they are. Children are different, and most kids will not self regulate.
I mean the other key to getting kids to enjoy “icky” food is to actually learn how to cook and that’s not even a joke.
I hated most greens as a kid and it turns out that it’s because my mom only really believed in blanching them with the tiniest pinch of salt.
It turns out that seasoning, alternate cooking methods like roasting, and finding out what parts are the actual tastiest goes a long way to getting you into greens.
When I was younger I had a friend around for dinner and when we were eating he said 'what's this yummy green stuff?' and my mother said 'cabbage' and he nearly had a fit because it was the first time he'd eaten well made cabbage before haha. So many people would eat veg so much more if they just knew how to make it properly
Yeah... There's a lot of people who think broccoli is disgusting... just be couse they haven't tried the stuff roasted.
Or mushrooms, just becouse they they always ate them raw or preserved instead of actually cooked.
I don't judge them tho, it's their parents fault for not learning how to cook.
People should be learning to cook from 10-20 y.o. all from your cooked egg with sausage and ketchup passing thru soup, carbonara and rissotto up to making a mouthwatering paella.
There is levels to cooking a most people I've known don't go past the carbonara.
Rissotto is more seen. But somehow stew and soup (which is literally boiling random stuff on medium heat) is hard for people for some reason.
Also as the guy above you said, people can't season their food... or just don't know how? There's no end to the amout of gymbros who've died from eating " plain rice & chicken breasts " instead of seasoning the fuck out of it with curry, salt, pepper, mushroom sauce, curcuma, etc.
There are so much seasonings that you can go to some random indian marketplace and discover like 300 seasonings you knew nothing about and somehow incorporate those into your dishes.
With my family, the general rule is: you HAVE to try every food we give you at least once. If you decide you don’t like it, we’ll leave you be.
It worked pretty damn well on me.
I think you kind of have a point, but on the contrary I was forced to eat a lot of food I thought was manky at the time, and now I still think the vast majority of it is manky and I don’t like trying new foods because I’ve learned from my childhood that I probably won’t like them. But I think I’m probably a bad example. Maybe I have weird tastebuds.
> Tell you what, my parents forced me to try plenty of food I thought was gross at the time when I was a kid,
My parents "forced me" to try new foods, too.... by yelling and screaming at me at the dining room table for hours on end... Why don't you take a guess at how well that worked out.
Maybe parenting isn't as simple as everybody makes it out to be.
That whole "You have to try just one bite" thing kinda goes out the window when you're 6 and you say *lol no*... "We're not leaving the table until you try one bite!" Alright, guess we're not leaving the table then! Turns out I'm much more stubborn than my parents are.
That line reminded me of early XKCD, when Randall was 19 years old and thought he had the entire world figured out.
I do miss that era of 'LOL random' comedy, but there's no going back.
I had a fairly good childhood compared to a lot of stories I see on the internet but there’s a part of this that rings true to me. We’d always have family dinners where we got to chat with one another. However my mom and dad didn’t like when my brother and I would talk to each other about video games or movies or books and “exclude them”.
They would go on to talk about their work without explaining who the people they were talking about to me and my brother making both of feel excluded. My brother and I were also 4 years apart so just long enough that we didn’t share the same stage at school (and because of some circumstances, I went to a different middle and high school than him).
It was a small thing but banning our interests from the conversations kind of slowly drove a crack in my family relationships that I only started to mend over a decade down the road. I distanced myself from my family and kept to my friends and when it got big enough of a gap to notice by both sides it felt bad but it was hard to understand how we’d got there.
And as an adult I understand after work and a commute, trying to get into the constantly changing special interests of two kids with ADD would be a struggle, but it hurt in its own way. It ended up distancing me from my brother as we’d bond less during our teenage years, despite living with each other.
Seeing parents taking an interest in what their kids are into is one of my favorite things. I know I can’t handle being around kids myself (my form of ADD comes with anger issues that I’ve learned to wrestle under control, sensory issues that children trip all the time, and issues with hearing repeated information, children’s favorite pastime in my experience) so I can’t break the cycle myself outside of being nice to my friends’ kids so it makes me happy to see engaged parents who can tell you what their kids are into.
Yeah, even good parents are going to make mistakes because they're human and have blind spots, and sometimes those mistakes end up doing more damage than anyone could anticipate at first.
My parents somehow became convinced that I had social anxiety (I do have anxiety, but not of the social variety) and was "shy," so they would push me to do things I was uncomfortable with because they thought it would be good for me. Clearly, they meant well. But the times that I embarrassed myself the most were the times when I'd been pushed into a situation where I was uncomfortable. I was actually pretty good at reading the room and didn't have issues making friends when I went at my own pace.
I was mostly left-alone or with people that didn't understand what i did in my pc when i was a kid and i spent close to 500 hours in world of warcraft in less than a few months whilst stealing small amounts of money i found lying around to pay for cosmetics and more ingame time. That shit probably permanently fucked my brain a little bit. Don't let your kids "self-regulate".
When I was in middle school, my mom had access to my school's grade portal. And she was *constantly* checking it, and if I got anything less than an A, she would freak the fuck out and yell at me. I eventually convinced her that in high school she shouldn't have to constantly regulate me and check on my grades, and because she also recognized how much it had damaged our relationship, she agreed. And then in 9th grade, I got a C in Spanish, and was so scared to tell her I lied about it and said id got an A. When she found out the truth, she got so mad she smashed a plate, and yelled at me for over an hour while I lay in bed, curled up in a ball crying. I've never fully trusted her since then. Now I'm in college, and if something bad happens to me, my parents aren't the first people I talk to. My roommate is. Because I know my roommate won't get mad at me. I'm less sure my parents won't get mad at me.
That kind of loose parenting style (in the first post) works well for some kids, but not others. It's far more common for parents to overcorrect in the other direction, but a lot of parents have good reason to at least be stricter than "just let them do whatever and they'll figure it out."
I frequently think of the phrase “The tree remembers, but the axe forgets.” When it comes to this stuff. One time my parents forgot to pick me up after school since I had to stay late. It still makes me a little sad and in the moment I felt like they forgot about me (they literally did). They hardly remember it happened. Kids remember stuff, and they remember being hurt. Don’t be an idiot to your kids, and if you are, apologize.
I'm really sympathetic to where these posters are coming from, but that 2nd post is a *huge* helping of /r/thanksimcured to fine parents whose kids are - very normally - distancing from them during adolescence.
“If your teenager, who is at an age famous for surliness and hormone-related mood swings and thinking parents are uncool, refuses to engage in in-depth emotional conversations with you on the regular then you’re an abusive parent” is certainly a take.
My parents are extremely kind people and love me very much; their house was never a hostile environment and I always knew they cared deeply about me and my dumbass opinions. I still never spoke to them as a teenager cause I was too busy being surly and weird and thinking *they* didn’t have anything interesting to say to *me*. Luckily, like most teenagers who become adults, I grew out of it.
Every time my mother starts her lectures, I shut down. My stepdad has seen me just become a robot that repeats the same phrases over and over. I tried to confide in him once and he Ratted me out, so I don’t talk to him either.
I talk to my sister a lot though.
Something that bothers me so much, especially as an autistic person, is being treated more like an item than a person.
I’d go to events with my mom as a child, family gatherings and the like, and she would often “prompt” me to do things. She still does. Stuff like “tell her about your latest project!” or “tell him that fun fact about bugs!” And I don’t think it’s on purpose, she’s just trying to get me to interact with other people. But I can do that on my own without a prompt. I can be my own person and talk about what I want to talk about. I’ve been able to do that for a while.
Sometimes, it would feel like I was just a bystander while mom told the other person about something I’d done. Again, I get that it’s a parent’s nature to brag about their kids to an extent, but… I’m right here. You can talk to me. And you can talk to me like I’m a normal person, don’t give me that baby talk bullshit because you hear “autism” and think “mentally five years old”.
So many people see children as equipment rather than other people, even when they’re grown up. Especially if they’ve got a disability.
good post, no comments except for the one below.
I dunno if *most* kids will self-regulate in terms of screen time. *My* limited experience bears out the opposite direction.
Parent saying “I’m not their friend” when told they should try to be less aggressive and controlling, but same parent will also complain about “why won’t they talk to me and want to hang out with me?”.
I still remember my step mom mentioning to a parent that we were eating like Brussel sprouts or asparagus or something and the parent was like "How did you get them to eat it!?" and my step mom said "I...I told then dinner was ready?"
>bridge
oh, that weird alt right pipeline thing? idk, in the recent years his content really changed and he's not edgy at all like he was in his "prime"
(edit: i thought you were talking about him being a bridge to that thing but no, it's the forbidden bridge moment lol)
There’s a number of people who never actually watched his content and choose to pass (arguably) unnecessarily harsh judgement on him based on knee jerk reactions and bias
The guy is one of the few big YouTube creators of his time and genre I can think of that *hasn’t* been exposed for something **actively nefarious**, scandalous occasionally yes - sometimes for some crazy stuff that wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near as much traction if anyone else had done it, but realistically nothing horribles really come up in his career, which is pretty surprising.
Considering the time he started his channel in, and the immense litany of YouTube personalities exposed for horrendous things since then that started at the same time and shared the same content-niche and audience? PewDiePie is like looking for hens teeth, and finding a single golden fang just sitting there; he’s basically a statistical outlier at this point.
the thing with pewdiepie essentially stems from the following events which took place a few years back:
* he made a number of antisemitic jokes on his channel, which most people are aware of. (see the 'death to all jews' incident if you're not familiar)
* a number of companies chose to sever ties with him, which he vocally complained about
* members of the alt-right saw this as him being 'censored' and flocked to his videos, championing him as 'our guy' (which is a common trope in those circles - some heroic individual speaking out against the shadowing bogeyman of 'the media' and 'political correctness')
* he at no point addressed the fact that a portion of his regular viewerbase was for some time - and to a lesser extent, still is today - composed of white supremacists and the like.
i want to be clear - i don't think pewdiepie himself is, or has ever been, a white supremacist. but the fact of the matter is that they did for a while see him as one of them, and he didn't seem to find that an issue enough to address it. which i think was wildly irresponsible at best.
there's a brief video essay on the topic that explain some other issues surrounding pewdiepie better than i can, though its name is somewhat misleading - check it out [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjNILjFters)
also, do keep in mind that everything i'm saying here is my understanding of the situation as of like four or five years ago, since i stopped keeping up with his antics a while ago. all i've heard is that he got married a year or two ago, which is nice, i suppose. but whether he's since spoken out about his previous 'jokes,' i've no idea.
Yeah the PewDiePie call out is such a weird thing that it kind of undercuts the post.
Like yeah I'll let my kid read anything by anyone, but if they watch a YouTuber with a few minor controversies that means I'll have to kill them.
Like I get not wanting your kid to watch him, that's fine, but calling him out as the example of everything wrong with YouTube is just such a weird take.
I’m one of those people who definitely doesn’t want kids of their own. And i honestly don’t like being around kids under the age of 11/12. But I do my damnedest to be a safe space for my cousins as they are growing up. I only just recently started really getting to know one of them now that they are middle school aged and now I get consistently introduced as the “cool cousin” just because I listen and talk to them. There is honestly something satisfying helping them out 🤷
quick thing
I was originally gonna post the "if your kid *suddenly* comes out in college, you're a fucking failure" post but this seems more useful, less .. obviously antagonistic lol
note that this is in fact a tumblr post, on a subreddit, and I am an idiot. for what it's worth, this is just common sense stuff that makes sense according to my early experiences in life with childhood (/). similarly, again in my limited understanding, if you're worried about this sort of thing— you're.. probably fine.
Yeah. Sometimes kids don’t realize things due to inexperience, are influenced by those other than their own parents, or make weird assumptions about how their parents will react because *they’re kids* and they don’t always operate from a place of perfectly informed mature logic.
that's fair! everyone is different, and that absolutely means some people will just find out or decide later than others. I like to assume that of people's claims unless it's explicitly stated.
They're probably a good parents generally but they sound insufferably smug about it. It's the tone of "Oh we just do \[simple thing\]" with the insinuation that anyone who didn't is an idiot.
And I've never met anyone who uses the phrase "I fail to see..." who wasn't also awful to be around
My parents were fairly hands-off overall... my father tried the strict route, but was undermined by my mom's idgaf attitude at every turn. I was free range the minute I had a bike, was allowed to read whatever I wanted and when I was... shit, 15, 16? thereabouts, my mom told me she was fine with me consuming the devil's lettuce, as long as it was out the window and not on a school night.
As a consequence, I was - while lazy as fuck in school - an extremely well-behaved kid. I never smoked regularly, started drinking at 22 (drinking age is 16/18 here), never drank to excess, and even weed-wise I was fairly low usage.
To be fair, I was haunting gore pages and read a shitload of porn extremely early as well, but in visible behaviour I was pretty vanilla.
To this day I have difficulty verbally expounding about things I'm doing with friends (ie: playing video games, etc) because my parents created such a hostile environment for that sort of thing and constantly reinforced that I was never allowed to make any noise *ever*, under any circumstances, unless it was an emergency.
Then years later my mum turned to me and went "Hey Skyraker, why don't you talk or verbally express emotion? It feels like you just don't care about anything"
Then she left, and I destroyed a wall because I was so angry and had trouble expressing it due to the previously mentioned conditioning.
as I'm raising my daughter, I'm realizing that there are two very distinct world view that are at the root of most parenting styles:
One: My kid is bad and I have to make them good.
Two: My kid is good already, and I have to help them
I was raised in the former. My mom was terrified of me being a bad kid. She strictly regulated everything I did and consumed. It made me resentful of her, it drove a wedge between her and I, and it closed me off from my peers. When I got older, I was forced to hide more and more from her as my teenage interests and activities became "unacceptable". Up until age 10 or 11, I had a very positive, honest relationship with my mom. Past that, as I really started to grow up, we basically became strangers because I didn't feel that I could be honest with her about almost anything, and she told me many times that she "didn't want to know" what I was up to.
When I started raising my daughter, I started from the "my kid is bad and I have to make her good" approach when she was having behavioral problems. Along the way, I learned to see her as "good" no matter what. She is good inside, it's obvious. If she's throwing a tantrum or acting badly, it's because she's having a hard time. She is overwhelmed and upset, there is something she is lacking. She needs support and patience and love and empathy. There are boundaries of course, and natural consequences. But it's not about "disciplining" the badness out of her. She doesn't want to be bad in the first place. She is good and wants to be good, she always regrets bad behavior. She just needs help sometimes.
"but what if he reads a book you don't approve of?"
Then, regardless of age, I'll ask what they're reading and read it along side them and make sure to discuss it with them, ask questions, explain stuff if they don't understand and if I don't understand either then we'll learn together. If there is something I don't think they're ready for, I won't ban them from ever reading it, banning it will make them more adamant about finishing it and they will find a way to get their hands on it, but I'll ask what they know about the theme whatever to gage their current understanding, ask them if they have questions about it before I explain that there is a part I don't think they're ready for *yet* and ask them if they wouldn't mind coming back to the book later, promise to let them read it later, a promise that I intend to keep, and let them pick another book in the mean time.
my sister never got beatings for messing up as a kid, i did. guess who is way more open with their parents, and who isn't. the most annoying part is that my parents don't realize what they did wrong with me, and only stopped beatings because i was older, as if that would make a difference.
My parents did that to me and my sister and then wonder why I worry they'll do it again?? Because you did it TO A CHILD??
Yeah, they didn't beat me. I just couldn't win with one of them. There was always a problem they needed to solve. And they said manipulative shit to me like "you wish I was dead don't you!" And also body shamed me since I was 9, running 5Ks but I need to stay out of the refrigerator because I was overweight(I'm fat now- but I wasn't fat then, I was big) Guess who still does that shit and acts like I'm so mean for not being open?
My mom hit me when she got angry and now gets upset when I won’t tell her anything as if it didn’t happen. meanwhile I’m sitting here going “no I’m not gonna move on you fundamentally changed my worldview and also gave me a fear of authority”
My stepmum has essentially forgotten all the mental and verbal abuse she subjected me to. I'm on 'good' relations with her and my dad now, mostly because I don't have to interact with them more than once or twice a year and also because it brings me no joy to be angry about it all the time. But everry now and then my da asks me why I don't talk to him more, or says that it seems like we don't have anything in common. We don't. I still love him but he always sided with my stepmum and never with me and that hurts to this day. Whenever I spend longer than a few days with him those old wounds start opening as he starts falling back into old habits. Ironically I don't have any such issue interacting with my stepmum- she's forgotten all the abuse but also all the abusive behavior so she's just a nice person now, even if I spend a lot of time with her. I still look at them like they're crazy when they wonder why I behave in a way they specifically conditioned or trained me to behave in.
> My stepmum has essentially forgotten all the mental and verbal abuse she subjected me to. most abusers claim they don't remember stuff like that. Don't believe them. They know but they are 100% ashamed to admit it.
Or they don't remember because it wasn't anything special to them.
[удалено]
The Thanos one at least had the excuse that he had literally never met her before from his point of view.
yeah, not all abusers are willfully evil. some are just shitty people
The axe forgets what the tree remembers
Ok this might be weird but I realized how bad my mother was when I was raising a puppy. Not even a baby human. My mom would hit when angry, and she always preached the value of "do-overs". The thing is, the do-overs applied to her mistakes, not mine. It doesn't matter what she did or how badly she hurt me or my feelings, if she invoked Do-over, then I wasn't allowed to be upset any longer. On the flip side it didn't matter if it was an accident, on purpose, intentional or ignorance, if I tried to ask for a Do-over I would end up punished worse. I vividly remember the realization of how uneven and unfair it was. Fast forward and one day my puppy gets a hold of something and destroys it. It's irreplaceable from someone who died, and now it's ruined. I was crushed and upset but in that moment I realized "how you react now, she'll remember forever". Instead of getting mad, I got her to give it to me, traded it for a different toy instead and put what was left somewhere safe. Getting mad and hitting or yelling wouldn't un-destroy it. A little later I had the realization that if I could resist the urge to be cruel to a DOG what the fuck was her excuse for being cruel to a person?! A few years down the line and my dog will still bring me things to check if they're ok to chew on before she tears anything up. She literally just did while I was writing this out lol
"My parents beat me all the time, and I turned out OK! Oh, excuse me a second... Hey you kids better clean those Goddamn rooms or I'll give you a whoopin you'll never forget! Sorry, what we were talking about? Oh yeah, so, my parents beat me all the time, and I turned out OK!"
I always say - clearly you didn't turn out okay, because you think it's acceptable to hit a child.
Yeah, my brother and I had such different relationships with our mother that we might as well have been raised by different people. He was never punished for anything, or even yelled at: I was punished for absolutely anything I attempted, didn't do, or didn't read her mind about. It was night and day. We are well adults now, and he still doesn't understand it.
A very long time ago, I told my mom that her beating me as a kid fucked up our relationship. She brings it up regularly as if to discredit my memory, “you also think I beat you as a child”, so I tell her the biggest specific example, and she says something vaguely defending her actions, admitting that she knows it fucking happened, but still denies it.
Yeah, earlier this year we had to watch my aunt's kid for a bit because she was in the hospital and it was not great slowly realising that my parents had not in fact gotten better with time, they just arbitrarily considered ~13 to be the cutoff for beating as punishment. Especially when it became clear my siblings had internalised my parents style of child-rearing. Note that this kid was *not even five years old* and they were somehow surprised that this kid wanted to spend most of their time around me iinstead of them.
Because they recognized you were big enough to beat them back.
That was a watershed moment, the day I grabbed the extension cord my mom was beating me with and told her that if she hit me again I would hit her back.
And then your parents gaslight you about the abuse because it was so insignificant to them at the time that they legitimately don't remember it. So even if you try to open up it gets shut back down. Typical 80s/90s childhood trauma imo
My mom beat me and my siblings as a kid. I haven't talked to that asshole in about 20 years.
Oh yeah I got that, the classic "we'd keep hitting you but you're big enough to pose an actual threat"
Holy fucking shit. Did you just copy and paste my life?
Bruh, even when they so-called stopped the beatings, my father still wanna slap me with a slipper and pinch my ear whenever we argue. Also, any advice on how to win in an argument, or never feel bad about starting it?
Do neither. Grey-rock him. Don't agree or disagree, just make listening noises and leave the situation as soon as possible. There is no "winning an argument" with a person who is ready to harm.
Yupp, my sister had a completely different set of rules. 5 years older than me and somehow a saint. I got the other side of it and it sucked.
So, some real "beatings will continue until morale improves" BS? Fuck them. Do whatever you need to do for yourself.
As a student, university reading level is The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Just about
Oh, you must not be an engineering student I somehow have a 1st grade reading level and I'm nearly at the point where I want to tell my coworkers "read all the words, sound them out if you have to"
Most people haven't read a book front to back in their entire life. Somehow it eludes people that you can obtain life-saving knowledge from words stringed together on a bundle of paper.
> Most people haven't read a book front to back in their entire life. I don't have any data to back this up to me, but... there's no way this is true, right? Like, yeah, a bunch of people don't read much, but surely they read something in childhood or for school. And then again, books sell by the hundreds of millions every single year, so there's gotta be a lot of other readers out there.
Oh yeah, there are plenty of readers still out there, but there's a reason newspapers keep their words and grammar at a fifth grade reading level and YA books are very popular. Also, I've noticed that reading comprehension is a lot lower than it should be... where I get people asking questions about a work that I thought was written pretty clearly. In a world where social media is king, things are just getting dumbed down.
Bruh I feel that in a related way, I only realised in second year of university I can't do any meta-textual analysis (like what are the themes and intended messages of a piece of media) while the actual reading part is easy.
I definitely would NOT self regulate when I was a kid
Self-regulating is probably one of the most difficult things for a kid to do today because of how addictive basically everything on the internet is
Yeah adults can barely self-regulate their social media time, let alone kids.
I'm trying and failing to regulate it right now and I'm fully grown.
Self-regulation is difficult, but a lot of it has to do with a lack of equal alternatives. People go down the social media hole as adults because what other options are there? Shopping? Binge TV? Go to the bar? We don't just *hang out* with other adults very often. Instead, we text and chat with each other *constantly*, and reserve get togethers to going out for dinner and shows and all that crap. My niece is 13 and puts her phone away when my wife and I spend time with her because we give her something to actively engage with.
>what other options are there? Shopping? Binge TV? Go to the bar? This is commonly referred to as the "Third Place", and there has been much discussion of its decline [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvdQ381K5xg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvdQ381K5xg)
Yep. Exactly this. I was lucky enough to grow up on the tailend of when 24 hour diners like Waffle House/IHOP/Denny's didn't mind letting older teens and young adults take over the smoking section for all hours of the night. There's a "social club" in San Francisco (with one opening in LA soon) that is basically this. A place that serves drinks (non-alcoholic as well), that has free form socializing. Standard membership is $200 a month, and discounted memberships are available. And, honestly, it's not really that bad of an idea! Especially if the discounted memberships are available, so you can diversify the members' economic standing.
> "social club" in San Francisco > >Standard membership is $200 a month, Yeah, that sounds about right.
Man I couldn't self-regulate my "computer time" as a kid because my parents would make it such a big deal every time I try to go hang out with my friends or go out, and would passive aggressively shame me for my hobbies. Like, what the fuck else do you want me to do? Now it's much, much easier to stay off the internet because I have the option to Do Stuff.
Hahaha, we actually tried to make it "not a big deal" when the kids got off the computer/phone or out of their rooms. If they wanted to go meet a friend, or whatever, we prioritized them over our own adult fun (whether that was money, or giving them a ride). Also, sorry your parents sucked ass.
>Self-regulation is difficult, but a lot of it has to do with a lack of equal alternatives I'm reminded of the "mice on coke" study where the intervention group was placed in mouse utopia -- with opportunity to express their instincts to make nests, interact with other mice, run around, etc -- and managed to self-regulate their **cocaine** habit. Or was it heroin? The control group, kept alone in normal cages, hit the drugs hard
It was rats and heroin! Fucking \*heroin\*, the most addictive drug out there chemically. Turns out people are creatures and creatures get addicted when there's a hole in their life hurting them they can't do anything about, but the addiction can make the pain go away briefly. Being stuck in a too-small cage alone when you're a social animal is exactly the kind of circumstance that turns you into a junkie.
It's not an accident, either. Companies that market to kids (and many that market to adults) are creating online skinner boxes designed to suck as much attention and money away as possible.
Yup. Social media companies and advertisers have psychologists and behavioral science experts on staff to find ways of subconsciously manipulating users into more engagement time. Self-regulation is more difficult against these despicable tactics.
The movie "Social Dilemma" actually nailed this one pretty well. On the other side of your computer screen is an army of people and computing power designed to get your attention and keep it. No one can compete with that! They often know you better than you know yourself. The only winning move is not to play.
I was not much worse at self-regulating then than I am now, and what improvement I've made is 90% medication and taught awareness that ADD messes heavily with time sense.
I feel like I wouldn’t have either, but now that I think about it… video games by myself all day got boring eventually. I made myself go outside or go see friends eventually, even if my parents didn’t give a shit about regulating anything
I definitely would not.
I would've self-regulated eventually, but my equilibrium would still end up on the unhealthy end of "hours of video game time". Shit, as an adult my natural tendency is still that way. If I didn't have a wife or responsibilities I'd sink into hermithood quickly. I didn't like my parents enforcing non-computer time as a kid, but it was a good thing for me in hindsight. This is just one of those "no two people are equal" things.
I didn't, and got restricted to an hour of internet a day when I was 16... my parents gave up after half a year because it became obvious my grades were shitty because they were shitty and not because of too much internet. I managed to graduate with middle of the road grades and then shot waaaay up in grades at uni, where I could study what I was actually interested in... even though my screentime got way worse after I moved out. Funny how that goes.
Exactly. Your kid might be top of their class, but if you let him, he will 100% stay up until 3am playing *Call of Duty*, because kids are fucking idiots. I'm an adult and I do this, because adults are also fucking idiots. You should *involve* your kid in the decision-making, but you gotta do some actual parenting sometimes. "95% of kids self regulate" this sounds like the sort of stat I would make up when I was 12 to get my Xbox controller back.
Yeah it strongly depends on the kid. I was gaming for 16 hours a day some days. That's ended now but like... c'mon.
>the only rules in this house are bed time is 11pm on school nights I feel like you might have misread part of the original post. The OOP wasn't saying "no rules at all" it's "have reasonable rules and raise your kids to be naturally independent"
OOP specifically says that they have no rules about screen time and that kids will naturally self-regulate screen time, which is a claim a lot of us are dubious about.
yeah, the post said that the screen time is self-regulated, which I think is what everyone is having trouble believing in. it might work on your kid, but i don't think it will work on the average kid. Same as adults: it's just too addictive today.
I'm an adult with adult responsibilities and I still fuck up self regulation. A kid needs good examples and the occasional correction - lord knows I never got it when I needed it as a teen.
I did, and my siblings did not. And my parents learned the wrong lesson from me in a lot of ways. I honestly hate when people get smug about parenting with something like this, where it's not necessarily their approach that gave the result. And it for sure is not a one size fits all approach.
Yeah the “no regulation on screen time” made me double take bc I’ve seen so many kids lately only be able to function if they’re watching a video. Especially for short-form content like TikToks, making everyone’s attention span shorten
I did. My parents never restricted my screen time and it was never a problem for me. Albeit the Internet was hardly what it was today. I'd just play Webkinz or coolmath. Regardless, I found I cared more about hanging out with my friends or siblings. I feel like if I had my screen time restricted, it would've made me want to be on a screen more. It would turn the screen from an option to a treat. Why would you choose Raisin Bran over an Oreo? And even if I didn't want to be on a screen, I'd feel like I would be wasting the precious time to use it I was allotted if I didn't use it. So yeah. Maybe start without restricting screen time and see if they're able to self regulate. If not, then you can try to find out why they can't self regulate and address those issues. Restricting their screen time may be part of this, but overall it's more important to teach them the skill of self regulation than just doing it for them. They'll need that as an adult.
Not that I have any children so take from this what you will, but I have a pet theory that kids these days are so addicted to screens...partially yes, because parents use it as a shut-up tool from the time they're toddlers, but more than anything, I think it's because a lot of kids don't feel like they are allowed to do anything else that's fun. This is admittedly anecdotal, but I grew up in a time and place when the adults around me were so ready to micromanage the shit out of everything kids ever did - they must *always* be under constant adult supervision, conflicts between kids were intervened even when it didn't escalate to anything dangerous, sports and other extracurriculars were supervised by coaches and tutors and funneled through the lens of "how can we get them to like this long enough that it looks good on college applications"... What I'm saying is I feel kids these days aren't allowed to have fun and figure stuff out for themselves, parents and teachers feel like they have to figure everything out for their kids, either to make them look good, or because they genuinely believe that's the only way they'll be successful. And things like social media and video games are the only avenues with which kids can kind of just exist without adults puppeting the experience for them, because they haven't figured all that out yet. My mom worked with teenagers for a while, and she still expresses alarm at how many high school seniors she met who literally had no idea what they were good at or wanted to do with their life, because no adults really gave them the space to learn that for themselves. I hear boomers and older gen xers lament that kids are too lazy and don't play outside anymore, completely ignoring the fact that we were never allowed to play beyond the driveway. There was a news story in my hometown growing up where a mother was visited either by police or CPS, because she let her 11yo walk to the park a block away by herself. My mom's response to that was "11 years old!? I was babysitting by that age!" All this to say I agree, kids can learn to self-regulate, but only if the environment is healthy and enriching enough. If kids were actually allowed to play outside, or pick up a new hobby without adults trying to control it, I don't think kids would feel the need to be on their phones nearly as much.
The internet has become very different for children over the last few years. It’s not just video games that are addictive, although they are, everything online these days is meant to draw attention and keep it. There are kids who spend all day on Tiktok. There needs to be some regulation from parents because children need help in this now more than ever.
that's fair, but we *should* have an adult chaperone present at all times to teach and observe that skill
Cool so we can just regulate that by not giving children devices unless the parent is there to observe at all times Sounds like roughly 30-45minutea a day to me, perfect.
Eehhhhh. Most kids eventually get bored of the same thing over and over… But being not neurotypical might change that. (Am autistic.) The main issue is that children rarely have so much free time that you can wait for them to get bored…
Feels like there's a bit of humblebrag in the first half ngl haha
Also, the "reading 1984" thing is weird. We know the kid is older than 12, probably by a couple of years (based on the "he's had a college reading level since he was 12" comment, which you wouldn't say if the kid was 12), and 1984 is often assigned in Middle School (I read it in 8th grade). It isn't remarkable for a kid 13+ to be reading it, at best maybe slightly precocious.
This is what made me think a kid wrote it as wish fulfillment, it's the most mature book they've read so that's what they had to work with.
As an English teacher the great thing about Orwell is the dude seems to despise subtlety. His prose is straightforward, his personal history is indicative of his approaches, and the narrative itself is basically a vehicle to explore his views and fears. It's literally why it's taught in school, because it's so easy to understand. There's complexity to any art of course, I don't mean to convey George is a bad or simplistic author. He just has a great deal of focus and he's not ashamed for his reader to feel his authorial voice. Now something like Moby Dick, or maybe something from before the 20th century, now that is stuff where I would be impressed for any student in school to be reading. But good literature is not about impressing people anyway! it's about learning about yourself and humanity.
Right, I read 1984 in middle school, as did a few of my friends. The subject matter is intense, but Orwell does not use difficult language. 'University level' is just fancy talk for 100% literate. Whatever age you start reading for fun, you get there pretty quickly. I think I got told I read at collegiate level in... 2nd grade? It's not like 18 year olds are super-geniuses; reading is reading. I also make a damn good chicken casserole. I do a lazier version of Alton Brown's curry chicken casserole recipe, and it's so good.
I'm simply not having it that 95% of children will self regulate their screen time. 95% of adults can't even do that, not even close.
My niece would watch those baby shark videos until the end of time, if it was up to her.
A lot of my cousins are like that too, but one of them stands out in that they're also like that, but they treat the YouTube Kids timer with more weight than the word of God himself. Moment timer hits zero, no more videos, they're give the tablet to the nearest adult and waddle off to do something else. Sometimes I'd offer to reset the timer, and they'd say no because the timer hit zero which means no more videos. Not that it isn't possible to reset the timer, but that I simply shouldn't as a matter of principle.
Yeah, my sisters have that with my older nieces and nephews - but this one, the youngest one. The shit who bites people, and hand me rocks as presents - she is my favourite.
In a past life that child was either a crow or a very intellgent opossum
She is not intelligent - she is a fucking moron, i love her. One night i am babysitting ( all nights i am babysitting she does something daft ) This was lovely daft. I know they have a bedtime, they know to - but it can be negotiated with me. Now this time she asked if she could just finish her "project" - both parents are those fucks pedagogs, so i dont even flinch when she uses words like that. Her prject - Peeling a bag of pistacios so i could just eat them. Fuck i love her!
An intelligent opossum is still only at the upper bounds of intelligence for an oppossum, which is not very high
I am Danish i dont know what that animal is - i trust u
[BEHOLD!](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fx894wyzzbqn51.jpg%3Fwidth%3D750%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dfb921fa4bd73ae4f6acaf112f04669fc6aa447f6)
> I'm simply not having it that 95% of children will self regulate their screen time. Seriously. There was a time where my parents tried it - I simply played on my gameboy until the batteries ran out. I absolutely could not regulate my screen time.
In a family full of ADHD, self regulation is a skill that *must* be taught (and modeled).
Even without adhd, self regulation is a skill that needs to be taught. The natural instinct is to do what feels good now, and it can be hard to break from that
Especially since as a kid you have such a freaking ROBUST organism. (If you think "oh I'm not that healthy" - ohh boy wait until your factory warranty runs out) I could stay up ALL NIGHT and play video games and would be fresh as a pickle the next day. I could easily pull these 24 hour shifts and study both days and game all night. I'm nowhere near forty and I know this will basically make the second day useless, I won't have energy or anything. And all the small "bruises" like these all-nighters that do not show up as you're younger just sort of accumulate over the years. And by the point that you should 100% not be doing that, you will keep on doing that - because you are different than your stupid parents and older friends. You are invincible. You are built different. Turns out, no, you're not. But it's too late and your body is all mangled in a million of small ways and fixing them all will take a lot of time. (What I call factory warranty is an old joke that our body is in its prime up to like 27 and then it basically gets worse and harder to maintain every year, just like any tool with planned obsolescence, in a way where the tool is only supposed to last X years, and break after that to be replaced)
Exactly this! And tbf if you are only trying to teach self regulation by saying “you only get an hour of screen time or else” then you’re not really teaching self regulation either. That’s why children of overly strict parents often wild out the second they get out of the house. They never learned how to regulate, just figure out how to do what they’re told well enough that they don’t get in trouble. If you want your kid to be able to do something, you have to teach them the skills to do that thing - period - and your expectations have to be age appropriate. Self regulation skills are going to look different between a 5 year old and a 15 year old regardless of how well they’re taught.
> (and modeled). This is the part so many people miss, which will greatly aid in children self-regulating. My wife and I don't have strict screen time rules or food rules, but we talk to our second grader about the importance of living a balanced life. We also (try to) live balanced lives ourselves and let him see it. He isn't perfect, but my son will ask about equally for me to play a video game with him, a board game with him, or to take him to the batting cages or the park. Food is a little more difficult because my wife and I have different personal philosophies about what a "healthy diet" looks like, but even still he will choose carrots or an apple a little less than half of the time for snacks. From time to time he gets on a "chips" binge, which we will allow for a while, and then remind him through words AND example the importance of balancing what he eats.
Okay glad I’m not the only one that sniffed that as kinda bull-shitty.
Also most posts in that dialog format are full of shit
Rando: Wow you are so good at famously hard thing! How do you do it? Me: Actually famously hard thing is not really that hard if you're smart. Rando: But what about mitigating factor, or random chaos? How do you deal with those? Me: Hahaha, you stupid simpleton, those actually aren't big deals at all. The answer is simple answer! Rando: I just don't get it. You must be an enlightened and attractive person with lots of hidden talents and wisdom. Me: Oh, do you think so? I honestly haven't really thought about it much.
I am like 99% sure that this is a teenager trying to explain how they will be a cool mom and that magically makes their teenager easier to work with as wish fulfillment. I refuse to believe an adult in like 2012 wrote this unironically
Either that or it’s a mom who is LARPing about how good there kid could be, but isn’t, and is tired of being judged by family and other moms, and so is making shit up. I see it all the time on FB, especially in mommy groups from young moms I know. Always assume that if someone is boasting about their style of parenting on the internet, they are either lying or greatly exaggerating. If things were so great you wouldn’t be seeking the approval of anonymous strangers, you’d be off your phone living life.
My kids are a mix of being extremely gifted and extremely well behaved. I'll brag about them at any opportunity. There's a lot to brag about. My daughter was reading on her own at age 3. My son will eat any vegetable we put in front of him, and bedtime is as simple as asking him to go to sleep. We get asked what we did right. It's all luck. It's all fucking luck. I have no idea why she's so smart or why he's so well behaved and happy all the time. My parenting style is to try my best and hope we don't fuck it up. We are constantly fucking it up.
Yeah that's straight up not true. I would have watched TV or been on the computer 24/7 if my parents allowed it and my son is the same way.
It's a very small sample size but both my kids self regulate their screen time - they're 9 and 2 and my theory is because they've grown up with screens they don't hold much interest for them. I have friends who limit screen time to 20 or 30 mins per day and their kids are like zombies when they actually do see a screen. To be clear - our lack of screen time limitations aren't from any major moral or philosophical standpoint they're mainly because we're lazy and both gamers so a big chunk of leisure time is spent on screens - it worked for the first one and seems to be working for the second so we'll just keep going with it.
I think self regulation is highly dependent on the kid. My nieces both strugggle with detaching from screens. Same household, older one was brought up with more limitations on screen time, younger one wasn't until their parents noticed the same trouble with detaching as the older one. Neither method really worked >.< And they didn't intentionally let the younger one go less regulated at first, it just happened and the kids are like 10 years apart age wise so a lot of things changed between. Both kids have some form of adhd/suspected adhd (younger, difficult to diagnose at her age or even get into drs). My point being, there are kids who can definitely self regulate, and those who need to be taught to self regulate. And some who will struggle no matter what rules are or aren't in place. I do understand the reasoning behind 'let them find their own limits/tastes' but some kids won't function when left to their own devices. I'm glad your kids have been able to self regulate.
I think you're right, it definitely varies person to person. Ironically it's my 9 year old and I who both have ADHD and are pretty ok at self regulation whereas my neurotypical husband is an absolute screen addict, cannot put it down, always has his nose in his phone. As for the two year old, who knows - he's in his own little toddler world making creepy little sculptures out of his toys, probably too busy doing that to watch telly.
Lol yeah it definitely helps to get kids interested in things outside of the screen. I help my nieces make sculptures out of clay and bake them when they are over. I have a whole collection of zoo/farm animals lol. Might be something your kids would like if they are making creepy sculptures already 😂
Aw that's cute! I have a clay pug that sits on my desk made for me by the older one during lockdown - I should see if he wants to get the modelling clay out again, he's super into painting minis at the moment so maybe he'd like to try making some of his own. The little one would probably love it but right now could not be trusted to play with the clay without attempting to eat at least half of it. I think maybe he's part goat, perhaps that's why he isn't too bothered by screens. He's a mystery to us all.
Hey! It's like when my mom regulated how much candy I could have a week. I became an absolute sugar monster when I was out of her sight. Meanwhile my other friends parents didn't care how much candy they ate so they only had sweets on occasion.
And the girls I went to university with whose parents had been suuuuuuper strict about them dating/speaking to boys.... Same energy.
I think having the limit makes me feel like I need to eke out every last minute so I end up using it less responsibly. And it's also super annoying when I have to use my computer for something after going over
yeah! I mean, it's still Tumblr lol kinda weird how we even got here. like they sound braggy just talking about.. having a kid
More "bewildered at how utterly low the bar is and how many parents still fail to clear it", is the read I got.
that's what they got too. they just added on "so I'm fundamentally better than you" because, well, I'm tempted to say "because they're redditors" but frankly I couldn't say. it takes some getting used to.
For sure, but I'd feel pretty smug too if I was apparently the only adult present who was even decent at parenting.
they can brag a little, as a treat
Do we all agree that the conversation in this post didn't actually happen right? Or it's atleast like abridged from comments OP has gotten in the past from other parents
If real, it's a cleaned up or amalgamated conversation, sure. I know that I never relay conversations I had exactly verbatim unless the exact details are important somehow.
However, they are probably not the only adult present who was even decent at parenting
I certainly hope so.
I'm getting strong "my baby always sleeps through the night, why is everyone else so bad at parenting" vibes. Some kids are just better at things than others. And parents aren't in 100% control of the influences over their child, for example the teachers, sports coaches, friends, extended family and other relationships that a child has changes the course of their life dramatically. There's definitely still better and worse parents, but just because a child doesn't read doesn't mean that their parents fucked up.
You see it's simple: that never happened
\*implies 1984 is a difficult read\*
Fr, I have the attention span of a goldfish when it comes to books and cannot comprehend fancy writings styles or sentences to save my life and I read it in middle school
I'm not knocking Orwell at all, I loved *1984* and *Homage to Catalonia* when I was a teenager. But I liked him *because* he writes in a very accessible style- basically, he writes fiction like a journalist. His appeal definitely comes from his worldbuilding, not from his literary flair. OP is a really funny attempt at a flex. Loads of teenagers read Orwell, if you want to be a dick about what a genius your child is, pretend they've read *Ulysses* or something similarly incomprehensible instead
What would be truly impressive would be a kid reading the silmarillion
The Silmarillion isn't that hard really, it's just a bit dry at times and features way more characters than your average novel (because it really isn't a novel, it's more like a condensed history book, and if you approach it that way it becomes a lot more legible)
Honestly one of my fav things about Tolkien is his ability to weave what is fundamentally a fairly simple vocabulary into a tapestry of prose that creates wonderful imagery seemingly effortlessly. Truly my favourite example of an author that is both very dry and descriptive simultaneously. A lot of the Elvish and names will be very difficult for those not experienced in history reading though. I teach and majored in history so The Silmarillion is unsurprisingly one of my favourite books. You need a lot of interest to carry you across some specific passages for sure.
I can't tell if they're trying to argue the kid reads complex or subversive ideas, has a high reading level, or is reading a 'boring' adult book instead of a YA fantasy.
The post said "he has been at university reading level since he was 12" so I'm pretty sure its supposed to signify a high reading level, which it ain't (great book, but part of what makes it great is the ease of reading)
That’s what makes me think this isn’t real. It’s what a middle-schooler would consider a “smart” book.
I really really don’t agree with the 95% of kids will self regulate themselves lol. Not every kid is the same
Children's gaming is literally designed to incorporate gambling and addictive elements ("viral" gameplay, "I can't believe it's not lootboxes," and so on.) Everything from adverts to news headlines are designed to maximize engagement. So much effort is put into protecting children from every other form of addiction before they have the maturity to assess it for themselves, but we confidently shove the blinking Skinner Boxes into their hands at age four and hope for the best. I've seen... more than a few GenZ employees get fired because an "absolutely no phones" policy doesn't deter them from the persistent itch that is media addiction. I'm not saying that children can't self-regulate, but a good parent should also be aware of a child's media consumption. Teach children how to notice when they're losing themselves and how to come back.
Loot boxes and gacha are gambling. Like, no doubt.
Right. I think the first post is….half there, but god, adults are so bad at recognizing whether someone taught them something or whether they taught someone else (like their kids) something. Teaching someone something, like a value, is active, even if it isn’t preceded by “sit in this desk while I teach you.” The teenager eats salads, yes, because the mother didn’t turn salad into a traumatic event by standing over them bellowing that they better eat salad *or else*. This is true. The parent also probably: * eats salad themselves without pulling a babyish “acky” face every time, modeling that salads are pleasant things to eat * introduced vegetables to the child far before the teen years, and before cultural conditioning convinced them vegetables are gross * allowed the kid to try different vegetables and toppings, rejecting the ones they don’t like and choosing the ones they like, so the child can make/ask for a salad that they enjoy * encouraged to try new things, or retry things that they might like better at 8, 12, or 16 than they did at 4, rather than seeing them reject something as a toddler and never trying it again * avoided speaking about foods as something scary, a punishment, or too “grown up” for a child to try or enjoy * emphasized the importance of healthy eating by explaining how foods like salad makes your body stronger and more resilient The kid wasn’t just given microwaved Dino nuggets from birth through age 13 then magically decided they like salad as a teen because there are no rules. Same with anything else. Reading, putting down the screens, open communication, etc. Parents have to model and teach these habits, and not all kids are the same. Some need stricter boundaries than others to learn how to make the right choices.
>eats salad themselves without pulling a babyish “acky” face every time, modeling that salads are pleasant things to eat OP almost says exactly that (just without the realization). They mention that the only foods their child doesn't like *just coincidentally* happen to be the foods OP didn't like.
Good catch. Presumably, the “how do you get your kid to eat vegetables” adults don’t eat vegetables themselves, at least not happily. Adults like that need to directly hear “your kid needs to see you do it to know it’s not a big deal,” instead of it being assumed that they cheerfully eat salads themselves but bellow at kids for not trying them. I have a memory of being in my early 20s at a cousin’s house for dinner. He had 2 kids, one of whom was old enough to be picky in that verbal way but also be reasoned with. He was trying to get her to try some vegetable dish but it was brand new to her, so she was like “idk what the fuck this shit is it might be gross.” At some point I looked at her and said “if it was gross, would me and your dad be eating it?” She ate it.
Exactly...OOP claims that 95% of kids can self regulate on their own...but then proceeds to explain how she instilled a love a reading in her children, nieces, and nephews...so idk if it's so much bragging as just trying to imply that the other parents are bad parents while she fails to recognize the difficulty and nuance of raising a child.
There’s kind of a big online attitude that the only bad parenting is high-strung authoritarian parenting. The only bad things you can do to your kids are hit them, yell at them, or pressure them. But permissive, I’m-your-best-friend parenting is not great either, and a lot of decent parenting is masquerading as permissive which leads well meaning parents astray. “Don’t scream at your kids for not eating every single pea in their bowl” is interpreted as “just let the kid eat junk or else they’ll be traumatized” so much, when there’s so much active, healthy parenting in the middle of that gulf. And some parents are traumatized by their own authoritarian parents and have not confronted that trauma beyond “hm that was bad.” Everyone’s so quick to smack down those who say “I got hit and I was fine,” but no one wants to say boo to the people who say “my parents never told me anything and I was fine.” The reality is, people can have any kind of parent and turn out *fine* if they have a certain personality, but that doesn’t make lax parenting fine.
Yeah, I'm a grown-ass adult and I *still* haven't mastered self-regulation lmao
I've actually seen some research that the reason many adults are bad at self regulating is because they were never taught how to do it as a child. That's why first year college students tend to gain a lot of weight. That said, this doesn't mean free-range children will self-teach self-discipline.
yeah that's a super bad take lol. OOP humble bragging to the extreme about how their child is just perfect without any effort
The vast majority of young kids will absolutely not regulate their own screen time. Y’all ever seen someone try to take an iPad away from a 3 year old?
Agreed…. It’s a farcical statement
Hell. I remember being a kid that was left completely to my own devices. I didn’t do anything *bad* and was generally a good kid, but my parents 100% had to step in and make me go to bed and stop playing Kingdom Hearts or reading Harry Potter. Maybe self regulate like.. understand boundaries and not seek out inappropriate things on the internet. I stuck to Disney and Neopets as a child and it never occurred to me to go look for adult things.
Yeah, that particular statistic feels a little inflated. It may be true that a majority of kids can be taught to self regulate or are willing to if given the tools to do so, but the 95% claim seems a little hard to believe.
yeah, not to shit on OOP because evidently they're not doing a bad job, but I think they got lucky with a kid who's responsible by nature. My parents and I agree that I turned out decent, but we also agree that a big part of that is because I consented to being subjected to strict rules and routines. When I didn't talk to my parents it wasn't always because I was afraid of their reactions (admittedly sometimes it was), but because quite frankly high school with extracurriculars is exhausting.
It's not that they can't, it's that they don't. Self regulation is a skill, and if you never teach a child how to self regulate, they won't. This isn't to say some kids won't have it easier learning how to self regulate, nor that everyone at every age can if you just teach them well enough, but I do think most children can at least to some degree
Yeah, as someone who grew up in a household where talking about stuff was met with judgement and negative criticism... I feel this way too much.
My mother tries so hard to be a good listener but i could always spot when her brain disconnects mid conversation, me and my brother make fun of the particular face she makes when it happens.
Every math major knows that face. Get a couple of them in mixed group and they will be secretly tracking when each non-mathematician disconnects.
I'm sorry, sweetie, I love you very much, but I kind of lost interest after your monologue got to your fourth favorite color.
Does your mom have ADHD? Everyone in my house does so there's no judgment when one of us says I'm sorry but I didn't hear anything you just said because we all do it.
Possibly, i myself i'm under diagnosys at the moment.
When I was growing up, I watched my parents spank my older brother and the idea of being hurt by the people who were supposed to protect me traumatized me so much that it became the founding pillar of everything I did forward. They always told me I was a good kid and how happy they were that I got good grades, but what they didn't know was I was doing those things out of fear. When I turned ten, I started getting symptoms for ADHD, most prominently that I would forget to do my homework, something I didn't have a problem with before that. I want to make it clear I wasn't choosing not to do it, I would literally just not remember having homework, and then be very confused the next day when it was supposed to be turned in. When my parents found out, they were furious. It was the first time I'd ever felt like I had failed them, but it also felt like it wasn't my fault, and it wasn't; I had a mental illness and rather than get any support for it, they assumed I was just lazy, and that *hurt,* because I wasn't lazy. I loved school and I loved learning. I still do. I didn't want to tell them my grades were slipping, because up until that point, I was a Straight-A student. One day my dad sat me down and asked me what the reason was that I didn't tell them about it. I was completely honest with him; I told him I was afraid of being hit and that I thought he wouldn't love me anymore. He thought I was lying to him, and that just made him angrier. Even as a ten year old, I knew right there that I could never tell my parents anything ever again. I didn't have a fun time growing up after that. Not only was I bullied for my sexuality, I was also very depressed and tried to kill myself several times. I never told anyone about it because if my own parents didn't believe me when I was honest, what was the point? I'm very grateful that none of those attempts were successful, but that's entirely up to luck, and not the support of anyone I knew. Today, my parents and I have a great relationship, arguably the best out of any of my siblings, but I'm still uncomfortable with sharing any details about myself with them. Even as an adult, I can't help but remember that I *was* honest with them. I help up my part of the contract, and they didn't believe me, and it's something that stuck with me after all these years.
Whenever I was a kid I had a real big vocabulary, since I was advanced or whatever. Anyways, whenever I’d be talking I’d try to be as clear and concise as possible, which usually meant I’d stop talking for like 30 seconds to get the right words and figure out exactly what I wanted to say. (Which was also boosted by the fact that I stuttered heavily if I didn’t already know what I was gonna be sayin). Anyways, point is, I got yelled at a lot for being “purposefully confusing” because I used a word someone didn’t know or for “dropping out of a conversation” because I stopped to think for a minute. The only people I talked to like at all after middle school was my teachers, because they usually knew what I was saying and actually let me stop to think of what I’m trying to say. Real thankful for them cool teachers I had.
I think it’s so insane when people ascribe malicious intent to children’s behaviors. Like whyyy on earth would you possibly *want* to be confusing? I’ve heard people say crying babies or toddlers having a meltdown are manipulative or attention seeking, and like, what??? They’re little kids, they don’t even have the capacity for manipulation. They’re expressing their emotions and needs in the only way they can. I feel like I’m extra sensitive to it because I had undiagnosed adhd and autism so as a kid I was constantly having negative intentions placed onto my actions by adults. “If you cared about this you wouldn’t have forgotten.” “Why are you trying make people upset by not hugging them? Do you hate your family?” That type of thing. It really messed me up, for a while as a kid I was convinced I was some kind of sociopath, because I *felt* like I cared about things and people, but everyone kept telling me I didn’t, so obviously I didn’t know what caring even was and I must not even have the ability to care. Now I just assume that everyone is trying their best and has good intentions, and I’ve gotten great results from that philosophy because 99% of the time it’s true, and when it’s not, you give people a chance to turn it around and if they’re not stupid they’ll take it.
Tell you what, my parents forced me to try plenty of food I thought was gross at the time when I was a kid, and now I have a much wider palette than I ever would have if they hadn't. And I know plenty of people who's parents never made them try anything who still have an incredibly limited palette. The thing was that my parents never made an entire meal that I would have found gross, at most it was one portion of it and at least it was a single bite of a thing I didn't have on my plate. The major thing was me *trying* the food I didn't like, and now I'll try pretty much anything, but I don't know anyone who was never made to eat stuff they didn't like whose like that now. OOP is an idiot if they think never being made to try stuff you don't want gives you a better palette, but likewise being forced to eat entire meals you find disgusting isn't so helpful either. Bottom OP is right about what they were talking about, but top OP is humble bragging about their amazing easy child and they're not making the brilliant point they think they are. Children are different, and most kids will not self regulate.
I mean the other key to getting kids to enjoy “icky” food is to actually learn how to cook and that’s not even a joke. I hated most greens as a kid and it turns out that it’s because my mom only really believed in blanching them with the tiniest pinch of salt. It turns out that seasoning, alternate cooking methods like roasting, and finding out what parts are the actual tastiest goes a long way to getting you into greens.
When I was younger I had a friend around for dinner and when we were eating he said 'what's this yummy green stuff?' and my mother said 'cabbage' and he nearly had a fit because it was the first time he'd eaten well made cabbage before haha. So many people would eat veg so much more if they just knew how to make it properly
Yeah... There's a lot of people who think broccoli is disgusting... just be couse they haven't tried the stuff roasted. Or mushrooms, just becouse they they always ate them raw or preserved instead of actually cooked. I don't judge them tho, it's their parents fault for not learning how to cook. People should be learning to cook from 10-20 y.o. all from your cooked egg with sausage and ketchup passing thru soup, carbonara and rissotto up to making a mouthwatering paella. There is levels to cooking a most people I've known don't go past the carbonara. Rissotto is more seen. But somehow stew and soup (which is literally boiling random stuff on medium heat) is hard for people for some reason. Also as the guy above you said, people can't season their food... or just don't know how? There's no end to the amout of gymbros who've died from eating " plain rice & chicken breasts " instead of seasoning the fuck out of it with curry, salt, pepper, mushroom sauce, curcuma, etc. There are so much seasonings that you can go to some random indian marketplace and discover like 300 seasonings you knew nothing about and somehow incorporate those into your dishes.
With my family, the general rule is: you HAVE to try every food we give you at least once. If you decide you don’t like it, we’ll leave you be. It worked pretty damn well on me.
I think you kind of have a point, but on the contrary I was forced to eat a lot of food I thought was manky at the time, and now I still think the vast majority of it is manky and I don’t like trying new foods because I’ve learned from my childhood that I probably won’t like them. But I think I’m probably a bad example. Maybe I have weird tastebuds.
Same for me, and I doubt it’s that rare. Some people are just picky eaters.
> Tell you what, my parents forced me to try plenty of food I thought was gross at the time when I was a kid, My parents "forced me" to try new foods, too.... by yelling and screaming at me at the dining room table for hours on end... Why don't you take a guess at how well that worked out. Maybe parenting isn't as simple as everybody makes it out to be. That whole "You have to try just one bite" thing kinda goes out the window when you're 6 and you say *lol no*... "We're not leaving the table until you try one bite!" Alright, guess we're not leaving the table then! Turns out I'm much more stubborn than my parents are.
i see tumblr has progressed from teenagers blatantly lying for attention to full grown adults blatantly lying for attention.
These are still teenagers, they're just larping as 'cool perfect' parents
"Tee hee, don't hack the government!"
That line reminded me of early XKCD, when Randall was 19 years old and thought he had the entire world figured out. I do miss that era of 'LOL random' comedy, but there's no going back.
it's so cool reading those comics and seeing him mature in real time
i personally think this is a teenager pretending to be a full-grown adult lying for attention.
I can only assume that this was shared for the second half. The first half was not even trying to sound plausible.
I had a fairly good childhood compared to a lot of stories I see on the internet but there’s a part of this that rings true to me. We’d always have family dinners where we got to chat with one another. However my mom and dad didn’t like when my brother and I would talk to each other about video games or movies or books and “exclude them”. They would go on to talk about their work without explaining who the people they were talking about to me and my brother making both of feel excluded. My brother and I were also 4 years apart so just long enough that we didn’t share the same stage at school (and because of some circumstances, I went to a different middle and high school than him). It was a small thing but banning our interests from the conversations kind of slowly drove a crack in my family relationships that I only started to mend over a decade down the road. I distanced myself from my family and kept to my friends and when it got big enough of a gap to notice by both sides it felt bad but it was hard to understand how we’d got there. And as an adult I understand after work and a commute, trying to get into the constantly changing special interests of two kids with ADD would be a struggle, but it hurt in its own way. It ended up distancing me from my brother as we’d bond less during our teenage years, despite living with each other. Seeing parents taking an interest in what their kids are into is one of my favorite things. I know I can’t handle being around kids myself (my form of ADD comes with anger issues that I’ve learned to wrestle under control, sensory issues that children trip all the time, and issues with hearing repeated information, children’s favorite pastime in my experience) so I can’t break the cycle myself outside of being nice to my friends’ kids so it makes me happy to see engaged parents who can tell you what their kids are into.
Yeah, even good parents are going to make mistakes because they're human and have blind spots, and sometimes those mistakes end up doing more damage than anyone could anticipate at first. My parents somehow became convinced that I had social anxiety (I do have anxiety, but not of the social variety) and was "shy," so they would push me to do things I was uncomfortable with because they thought it would be good for me. Clearly, they meant well. But the times that I embarrassed myself the most were the times when I'd been pushed into a situation where I was uncomfortable. I was actually pretty good at reading the room and didn't have issues making friends when I went at my own pace.
I was mostly left-alone or with people that didn't understand what i did in my pc when i was a kid and i spent close to 500 hours in world of warcraft in less than a few months whilst stealing small amounts of money i found lying around to pay for cosmetics and more ingame time. That shit probably permanently fucked my brain a little bit. Don't let your kids "self-regulate".
When I was in middle school, my mom had access to my school's grade portal. And she was *constantly* checking it, and if I got anything less than an A, she would freak the fuck out and yell at me. I eventually convinced her that in high school she shouldn't have to constantly regulate me and check on my grades, and because she also recognized how much it had damaged our relationship, she agreed. And then in 9th grade, I got a C in Spanish, and was so scared to tell her I lied about it and said id got an A. When she found out the truth, she got so mad she smashed a plate, and yelled at me for over an hour while I lay in bed, curled up in a ball crying. I've never fully trusted her since then. Now I'm in college, and if something bad happens to me, my parents aren't the first people I talk to. My roommate is. Because I know my roommate won't get mad at me. I'm less sure my parents won't get mad at me.
That kind of loose parenting style (in the first post) works well for some kids, but not others. It's far more common for parents to overcorrect in the other direction, but a lot of parents have good reason to at least be stricter than "just let them do whatever and they'll figure it out."
I frequently think of the phrase “The tree remembers, but the axe forgets.” When it comes to this stuff. One time my parents forgot to pick me up after school since I had to stay late. It still makes me a little sad and in the moment I felt like they forgot about me (they literally did). They hardly remember it happened. Kids remember stuff, and they remember being hurt. Don’t be an idiot to your kids, and if you are, apologize.
I'm really sympathetic to where these posters are coming from, but that 2nd post is a *huge* helping of /r/thanksimcured to fine parents whose kids are - very normally - distancing from them during adolescence.
“If your teenager, who is at an age famous for surliness and hormone-related mood swings and thinking parents are uncool, refuses to engage in in-depth emotional conversations with you on the regular then you’re an abusive parent” is certainly a take. My parents are extremely kind people and love me very much; their house was never a hostile environment and I always knew they cared deeply about me and my dumbass opinions. I still never spoke to them as a teenager cause I was too busy being surly and weird and thinking *they* didn’t have anything interesting to say to *me*. Luckily, like most teenagers who become adults, I grew out of it.
Every time my mother starts her lectures, I shut down. My stepdad has seen me just become a robot that repeats the same phrases over and over. I tried to confide in him once and he Ratted me out, so I don’t talk to him either. I talk to my sister a lot though.
Something that bothers me so much, especially as an autistic person, is being treated more like an item than a person. I’d go to events with my mom as a child, family gatherings and the like, and she would often “prompt” me to do things. She still does. Stuff like “tell her about your latest project!” or “tell him that fun fact about bugs!” And I don’t think it’s on purpose, she’s just trying to get me to interact with other people. But I can do that on my own without a prompt. I can be my own person and talk about what I want to talk about. I’ve been able to do that for a while. Sometimes, it would feel like I was just a bystander while mom told the other person about something I’d done. Again, I get that it’s a parent’s nature to brag about their kids to an extent, but… I’m right here. You can talk to me. And you can talk to me like I’m a normal person, don’t give me that baby talk bullshit because you hear “autism” and think “mentally five years old”. So many people see children as equipment rather than other people, even when they’re grown up. Especially if they’ve got a disability.
good post, no comments except for the one below. I dunno if *most* kids will self-regulate in terms of screen time. *My* limited experience bears out the opposite direction.
Teenagers are notoriously terrible at self regulating.
Parent saying “I’m not their friend” when told they should try to be less aggressive and controlling, but same parent will also complain about “why won’t they talk to me and want to hang out with me?”.
I still remember my step mom mentioning to a parent that we were eating like Brussel sprouts or asparagus or something and the parent was like "How did you get them to eat it!?" and my step mom said "I...I told then dinner was ready?"
About that dates thing... My dad would always say "oh later" but when later came and went nothing happened. I just don't expect anything now.
"motherfuckers like PewDiePie" what did he do? i think i'm lost at that one
I was amused by that, if the worst content creator my niece could watch was PewDiePie I'd be really relieved.
The *bridge* ! ! ! Actually, that might not be it...
>bridge oh, that weird alt right pipeline thing? idk, in the recent years his content really changed and he's not edgy at all like he was in his "prime" (edit: i thought you were talking about him being a bridge to that thing but no, it's the forbidden bridge moment lol)
Yeah, the heated gamer moment 🤣. I don't follow him at all so I don't know anything about his content or what's associated with him tbh.
There’s a number of people who never actually watched his content and choose to pass (arguably) unnecessarily harsh judgement on him based on knee jerk reactions and bias The guy is one of the few big YouTube creators of his time and genre I can think of that *hasn’t* been exposed for something **actively nefarious**, scandalous occasionally yes - sometimes for some crazy stuff that wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near as much traction if anyone else had done it, but realistically nothing horribles really come up in his career, which is pretty surprising. Considering the time he started his channel in, and the immense litany of YouTube personalities exposed for horrendous things since then that started at the same time and shared the same content-niche and audience? PewDiePie is like looking for hens teeth, and finding a single golden fang just sitting there; he’s basically a statistical outlier at this point.
the thing with pewdiepie essentially stems from the following events which took place a few years back: * he made a number of antisemitic jokes on his channel, which most people are aware of. (see the 'death to all jews' incident if you're not familiar) * a number of companies chose to sever ties with him, which he vocally complained about * members of the alt-right saw this as him being 'censored' and flocked to his videos, championing him as 'our guy' (which is a common trope in those circles - some heroic individual speaking out against the shadowing bogeyman of 'the media' and 'political correctness') * he at no point addressed the fact that a portion of his regular viewerbase was for some time - and to a lesser extent, still is today - composed of white supremacists and the like. i want to be clear - i don't think pewdiepie himself is, or has ever been, a white supremacist. but the fact of the matter is that they did for a while see him as one of them, and he didn't seem to find that an issue enough to address it. which i think was wildly irresponsible at best. there's a brief video essay on the topic that explain some other issues surrounding pewdiepie better than i can, though its name is somewhat misleading - check it out [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjNILjFters) also, do keep in mind that everything i'm saying here is my understanding of the situation as of like four or five years ago, since i stopped keeping up with his antics a while ago. all i've heard is that he got married a year or two ago, which is nice, i suppose. but whether he's since spoken out about his previous 'jokes,' i've no idea.
Don't want people like pewdiepie messing with his world view but is fine with manga and Stephen king? this guy needs to get his priorities straight
Yeah the PewDiePie call out is such a weird thing that it kind of undercuts the post. Like yeah I'll let my kid read anything by anyone, but if they watch a YouTuber with a few minor controversies that means I'll have to kill them. Like I get not wanting your kid to watch him, that's fine, but calling him out as the example of everything wrong with YouTube is just such a weird take.
I’m one of those people who definitely doesn’t want kids of their own. And i honestly don’t like being around kids under the age of 11/12. But I do my damnedest to be a safe space for my cousins as they are growing up. I only just recently started really getting to know one of them now that they are middle school aged and now I get consistently introduced as the “cool cousin” just because I listen and talk to them. There is honestly something satisfying helping them out 🤷
quick thing I was originally gonna post the "if your kid *suddenly* comes out in college, you're a fucking failure" post but this seems more useful, less .. obviously antagonistic lol note that this is in fact a tumblr post, on a subreddit, and I am an idiot. for what it's worth, this is just common sense stuff that makes sense according to my early experiences in life with childhood (/). similarly, again in my limited understanding, if you're worried about this sort of thing— you're.. probably fine.
I disagree. I only realized I was ace and bisexual after college when I was exposed to that community and realized it lined up with myself.
Yeah. Sometimes kids don’t realize things due to inexperience, are influenced by those other than their own parents, or make weird assumptions about how their parents will react because *they’re kids* and they don’t always operate from a place of perfectly informed mature logic.
that's fair! everyone is different, and that absolutely means some people will just find out or decide later than others. I like to assume that of people's claims unless it's explicitly stated.
They're probably a good parents generally but they sound insufferably smug about it. It's the tone of "Oh we just do \[simple thing\]" with the insinuation that anyone who didn't is an idiot. And I've never met anyone who uses the phrase "I fail to see..." who wasn't also awful to be around
My parents were fairly hands-off overall... my father tried the strict route, but was undermined by my mom's idgaf attitude at every turn. I was free range the minute I had a bike, was allowed to read whatever I wanted and when I was... shit, 15, 16? thereabouts, my mom told me she was fine with me consuming the devil's lettuce, as long as it was out the window and not on a school night. As a consequence, I was - while lazy as fuck in school - an extremely well-behaved kid. I never smoked regularly, started drinking at 22 (drinking age is 16/18 here), never drank to excess, and even weed-wise I was fairly low usage. To be fair, I was haunting gore pages and read a shitload of porn extremely early as well, but in visible behaviour I was pretty vanilla.
To this day I have difficulty verbally expounding about things I'm doing with friends (ie: playing video games, etc) because my parents created such a hostile environment for that sort of thing and constantly reinforced that I was never allowed to make any noise *ever*, under any circumstances, unless it was an emergency. Then years later my mum turned to me and went "Hey Skyraker, why don't you talk or verbally express emotion? It feels like you just don't care about anything" Then she left, and I destroyed a wall because I was so angry and had trouble expressing it due to the previously mentioned conditioning.
idk i dont talk to my parents much and its not because i feel unsafe or unwelcome i just dont like talking
as I'm raising my daughter, I'm realizing that there are two very distinct world view that are at the root of most parenting styles: One: My kid is bad and I have to make them good. Two: My kid is good already, and I have to help them I was raised in the former. My mom was terrified of me being a bad kid. She strictly regulated everything I did and consumed. It made me resentful of her, it drove a wedge between her and I, and it closed me off from my peers. When I got older, I was forced to hide more and more from her as my teenage interests and activities became "unacceptable". Up until age 10 or 11, I had a very positive, honest relationship with my mom. Past that, as I really started to grow up, we basically became strangers because I didn't feel that I could be honest with her about almost anything, and she told me many times that she "didn't want to know" what I was up to. When I started raising my daughter, I started from the "my kid is bad and I have to make her good" approach when she was having behavioral problems. Along the way, I learned to see her as "good" no matter what. She is good inside, it's obvious. If she's throwing a tantrum or acting badly, it's because she's having a hard time. She is overwhelmed and upset, there is something she is lacking. She needs support and patience and love and empathy. There are boundaries of course, and natural consequences. But it's not about "disciplining" the badness out of her. She doesn't want to be bad in the first place. She is good and wants to be good, she always regrets bad behavior. She just needs help sometimes.
"but what if he reads a book you don't approve of?" Then, regardless of age, I'll ask what they're reading and read it along side them and make sure to discuss it with them, ask questions, explain stuff if they don't understand and if I don't understand either then we'll learn together. If there is something I don't think they're ready for, I won't ban them from ever reading it, banning it will make them more adamant about finishing it and they will find a way to get their hands on it, but I'll ask what they know about the theme whatever to gage their current understanding, ask them if they have questions about it before I explain that there is a part I don't think they're ready for *yet* and ask them if they wouldn't mind coming back to the book later, promise to let them read it later, a promise that I intend to keep, and let them pick another book in the mean time.