> Your parents' individual personalities and ability to raise you does matter, but broader historical context matters very little
Broader historical context plays part in what defines your parents' personalities and ability to raise children in the first place. You're trying so very hard to abstract it away in order to solve this problem but many of us know this won't work.
> Sounds like an oblique way to say the upbringing is the problem.
They're saying it doesn't differ between families, which means parental upbringing is not the issue, it's some issue which affects society in a broad swathe.
> - Did you think about what makes a good kid and work backwards?
Others have made some great points, so I'll just address this one.
I would not necessarily recommend doing this, unless you're able to have a high degree of confidence in the causality of your parents' approach/behaviours/ to raising you. Otherwise it leads a lot to the "my parents beat me and I turned out fine"-type thinking which is -- IMHO -- flawed and illogical.
I'd like to think I turned out mostly fine, but my current life circumstances are so wildly different from my childhood that it's basically impossible to isolate confounding factors, and therefore use that as any sort of sound basis on which to raise my kid.
Edit: I just realised I answered the question "Did you think about what makes [YOU] a good kid and work backwards?" instead of what you actually asked. My apologies for misreading, but I'll leave my soapbox up!
> What are the chances that happen because I was so smart or because I had a mother who was not only a high school math teacher but also spent years volunteering to teach SAT prep classes?
It sounds like you are saying that good parenting shouldn't have any effect of kids success in life.
Look, we know that poor parenting results in kids with poor outlooks, but penalising good parenting by taking away the effect of good parenting is probably not a good way to go about helping those kids with poor parenting.
> Are you sure you are cultivating his attention span, or were you both just born like that, and he is getting older and more mature?
Ah, nature vs. nurture-- perhaps not the most novel take.
> The hours you spend with your children (5 hours a day would be really difficult with 3 kids) during a couple of years in their childhood is not that important to their adult personality. It’s a combination of traits from birth, which class mates they get, the teachers, if they get sick, infections, siblings, grand parents, media, culture...
It sure looks like activities during age 0-5 have a huge impact on overall trajectory. Yes, the genetic starting point matters, as does everything else afterwards.
> not to cultivate this or that personality trait.
IMO this is the biggest problem. I think being excessively intentional has significant potential downsides.
> For a kid, their parents are often unaware or unsympathetic to their struggles
So you're just going to generalize on all parents like that? Believe it or not, there are actually some parents out there who are interested in their child's well-being and involved in their life.
> I’m not going to defend it
It seems to me like you're grasping at straws to do precisely that.
>If I were raised by my parent-clone I would have matured faster and been more skilled at playing baby-roulette with a natural child.
This is leaning heavily on the assumption that your personality is primarily a product of your genetics, and not of your life experiences. Outside of relating on physiology, what makes you think you would understand their reactions to unique life experiences at such a young age?
Speaking as someone who had a dramatic personality shift from early trauma, I don't think that what you hypothesize is true.
> What experiences does the child have that makes their opinion valid in parenting issues?
Well, their own. Those experiences likely give them better insight into their own preferences than an outsider, even at a young age.
Ignoring those preferences suppresses their individuality. It also reduces the chances of them finding something they're uniquely good at, restricts development to the parent's biases, and kneecaps entire suites of decision-making skills and development.
>Modern parenting literature seems largely to be about manipulating your child into being who and what you want them to be.
That is not modern parenting, that's just parenting. Aside from some fringe philosophies (Summerhill for example) I have yet to come across any seriously taken historical example of parenting advice that is not focused on shaping children into something the parent desires, even if that is a very loose mold.
Even your own example does this by assigning a direction to your actions based on how it will impact the child.
Does that really matter? Starting to get a bit fed up with this concept that parents are somehow blessed with esoteric wisdom that people without children can't possibly grasp.
It's a fairly simple concept and surely even a childless person can understand where and why this went wrong. It's not as hard to imagine life with children as parents seem to believe.
> highly educated parents I could have amazing conversations with, who would encourage me to achieve and grow even more.
I realize you may not be implying this, but I just wanted to point out that highly-educated parents don't always have amazing conversations with their children, or encourage them to achieve and grow even more, or even accept or approve of the accomplishments their children have achieved.
>> "There is no gender equality when it comes to what a child needs. A child needs the smile of a mother as much as they need the smile of a father. And one can not replace the other."
I kind of get what you mean but I don't think you've expressed it properly. I think the real important thing is that having multiple parental figures is a good thing. In some families the mother can provide better emotional support and the father brings things to the relationship the mother doesn't. If the parents are homosexual they can still both bring different things to the parent/child relationship which complement each other. Children of single parents often have Aunts/Uncles that care for them and are as much a part of their life as a parent.
Basically having multiple parental figures who's natural roles complement each other is best.
NB: I'm not a parent so I could be completely wrong.
> if you don't have kids- don't weigh in on these issues
I agree, but would also add that even if you do have kids, they probably have personalities and circumstances unlike everyone else's kids. And that in all likelihood your sample size is too hilariously small to be able to produce useful broad generalizations from your experience.
> Throughout most of history, parenting was largely focused on equipping one's children to survive. The idea that one could impart specific qualities onto one's children is very new - until recently one instead struggled to impart religious rules onto them, with sufficient impact that they would continue to be followed.
That's a big pile of self-contradiction. Both survival skills and religious rules are specific qualities.
> However I’m not in anyway implying that a child’s behaviour is 100% down to nurture. Clearly there is going to be a biological element as well.
I think we're basically agreed here: yes, other influences exist, but there's a huge biological element. Even if you remove TV, other family, etc it wouldn't surprise me if there's similar results.
>I think it is common for a child of his age to follow his parents' instructions.
True, but the parent should be making these decisions as a advocate for the child, and not looking at the child as a resource for their own benefit.
I get that this is not how it's always been done, but if you are lucky enough to live in a time and place where we don't need the labor of our direct children to survive (New Jersey 2021 counts IMO), then you have a duty to act (as best you can) as the child would if they had a fully developed sense of reason and self expression.
Personally, I would be thrilled if my father had supported
my development into a grand master.
> start giving your kids amazing skills that you think will give them a fulfilling and good life from day one. Well yea, of course.
You'd think "well yea, of course" but man do I feel parents rarely do that. The majority, and I really do think the majority, seem to be content just doing nothing with the most valuable years of the childs life.
Perhaps I take that too seriously, but I don't think so. I feel that is one of our largest failings as a society. That and failing to encourage learning, lessons from past mistakes, self growth, etc etc.
> When you get to scale that large, you are talking about society and culture, not individual choices.
A society and culture that pampers their children instead of making them learn their place in the world? I wasn't speaking about him in particular, but rather the parenting culture that created this reclusive and apathetic behavior.
Broader historical context plays part in what defines your parents' personalities and ability to raise children in the first place. You're trying so very hard to abstract it away in order to solve this problem but many of us know this won't work.
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