History: Please Stop Raising Children

Source of version: 2 (current)

! Please Stop Raising Children

The basic topic here is
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_parent|helicopter parenting], 
the tendency of some parents to attempt to remove all obstacles, all
forms of pain and failure of any kind, from the lives of their
children, thus condemning their children to being almost totally
incapable of living their own lives.

It is my totally anecdotal and unprofessional opinion that such
sickening behaviour has become much more prevalent over my lifetime
(I was born in 1975).  Having said that, I remember being quite
shocked to see a scene in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Series|7
Up], which was filmed in 1963 or so, where the children were sent to
an "adventure park" to play.  As far as I could tell, an "adventure
park" was an industrial sand pit with a bunch of boards with nails
sticking out and some rusty hand tools.  So apparently this trend
predates my birth, because you couldn't have gotten away with that
(though this may also be regional, as I'm in North America and the
Up series is in the UK).

I'm really bothered by this trend, and what it's doing to people's
lives in the long term.  I've had to put a lot of effort into trying
to help younger friends who are paralyzed by ''any'' degree of
responsibility over ''anything'', including, like, having to get
dinner done on time.  It's completely crippling.

The title of this page is a reference to a saying that RA (one of my
girlfriends) has: "You're not raising ''children'', you're raising
''future adults''", which I think is the pithiest summary of the
problem I've ever heard.

!! A Brief Theory As To Recent Prevalence

As a side comment, I think the reason this is becoming more and more
common is that people in the relevant social classes (middle class
and wealthier) are having children later and fewer of them, by and
large.  Certainly it seems like anecdotally that the worst
helicopter parents have one child (or at least far fewer children
than they wanted to have), or that each child is far apart from the
others.

My theory is that this behaviour comes from abject terror of losing
something both precious ''and'' irreplaceable.  You can criticize me
all you like for acting like any child is replaceable in any way
(and of course they aren't), but it is simply true that if you're 20
and your only kid gets hit by a bus, this leaves you in a ''very''
different position than if the same thing happens and you're 50.

I came to this conclusion when I realized just how terrified I am
for the safety of my unborn child (-ren; turns out there are two,
but I didn't know that at the time) for precisely this reason: if we
screw this up, we're too old to try again.

!! The Teenage Years: A Time For Mistakes

I am particularly horrified by the way teenagers are treated in our
culture around this issue.  There seems to be this belief that
because teenagers tend to have crappy risk management, they
therefore should be hugely protected from all possible risk.

The other option is pretty simple: if you want them to get better at
managing risks, let them take risks ''and lose''.  They will quickly
learn "Wow, when I do stupid things, it hurts".

What weirds me out is this idea that if a person never hurts or
loses, they will somehow magically learn how to avoid risk and make
sensible decisions to get the results they want.

I just find myself really wondering if these people remember
''anything'' about their life before 25.  Do they seriously think
they just magically woke up one day with the "responsible adult"
button switched?

It's just mind-blowing.

I'm also pretty deeply offended by the effort people put into
stopping their teenagers from having any kind of romance or
intimate/sexual contact at all ever.  Anyone who had any kind of
teenage romance knows that there is nothing like it; that you will
never again feel that sort of raw force of passion and emotion and
desire.

What kind of evil do you have to be to wish your child to ''never''
experience that?

Sure, such relationships end in horrible pain basically every time,
but that's part of life too: there is beauty and joy, pain and
sorrow.

To keep a human from experiencing joy to its fullest just because
some pain might result really seems evil to me, especially since
we're talking about ''emotional'' pain in this context.  How can you
do that to someone?

!! Guidance Through Friendship

By this time, some readers are screaming about how I've ignored all
the very real dangers that face children, and how dare I suggest
that they let their teenagers do dangerous things like drive around
drunk or have unprotected sex?, and RANT RANT RANT.

Now, hold on just a second.

I wrote this because I want to ''help''.  Because I want to help
people achieve their fullest potential in life.  Not die at 17; that
doesn't help.

If you think that I've honestly suggested that letting a teenager
(or anyone else!) get in a car with a bottle of whiskey is OK,
you've got a real
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/hw/scope_insensitivity/|scope insensitivity]
issue, because apparently when I said "you should let your child
make some mistakes so they can learn how to deal with risk and
loss", you heard "all possible mistakes are good", which is hardly
the same thing at all.

I think that the best way to teach a child about fire is to explain,
once, that that red thing over there is going to hurt if they touch
it, and then back off and let them touch it (which most will sooner
or later).  But the implicit "I'm neither crazy nor stupid nor evil"
idea there is that we're talking about a candle or a campfire or
something.  Would I let a small child stick a hand into the outer
bits of a campfire?  Certainly.  Would I let them stick their hand
into a blowtorch?  ''NO''.  Don't be stupid!  Would I let them walk
into a campfire in such a way that they might fall in?  Of course
not.

Your job as a parent, especially of a teenager, is to help explain
to your child the difference between mistakes they will learn from,
and mistakes that they ''won't'' learn from because
''they'll be dead''.  It's a rather important distinction.

This means your child, beyond a certain age anyway, has to ''trust''
you.  Because if they don't trust you, and you say "OK, don't get in
a car with a bottle of whiskey, because you will very likely die,
and that's bad", they'll just ignore you.

It's very very important that you be able to convey to your children
that no no, this issue here is ''really'' important, and they
shouldn't test it.

This means you need to have given them reason to trust you.  By,
say, not routinely lying to them.  Telling them that everything
fun is horribly awful and will cause them horrible trauma, for
example, will cause them to stop trusting you, because they'll try
things out and discover that you lied to them.

In other words, you need to not cry wolf all the time, as I see so
many parents doing.

This is particularly palpable with "drug" "education".  Here's a
tip: if you tell kids that marijuana is hugely, deeply awful and
will destroy them forever, they will almost immediately discover, by
talking to friends if nothing else, that this is basically a lie.
This means that when you tell them that, say, ''heroin'' is hugely,
deeply awful and will destroy them forever,
''they won't believe you about that either''.

Yep, I'm saying that the reason so many kids try out hard drugs is
that people consistently lied to them about things like alcohol and
cigarettes and marijuana.  Easily verifiable lies, so they just
assumed all the rest was lies too.  In fearful attempt to protect,
such behaviour causes what it fears most.

As a side comment, and partly so that people don't get the
impression that I'm all like "DRUGS ARE AWESOME!" or something,
here's how I scared my nephews about hard drugs when the topic came
up.  First of all, stop saying "drugs" like all drugs (including the
ones in your medicine cabinet) are of the same category, and start
talking about particular chemicals (don't know enough? that's part
of the test).  My basic technique is to explain that if you try meth
or coke or heroin, in particular but there are others, the odds are
that you will immediately and irrevocably die.  Not physically;
you'll still be walking around and talking to people.  But the
person that I value in you will be gone forever, replaced by someone
who shares all your memories but has only one motivation: to get
more meth or coke or heroin.  I do not want you to be a heroin
zombie, and I don't think you do either, so don't try it, because
the odds of that happening are ''way'' too high to be ignored.

I've found that if I explain that in sufficient detail of what I
mean by "heroin zombie" and how totally dead they will truly be as a
person, this scares them sufficiently for my purposes.

Moving on, back to talking to kids about risks in general.

You need to start being honest about risks, and how deep they go, so
that when you say "heroin is very likely to destroy your life",
they'll believe you because they'll remember that when you said
"well, alcohol leads to pretty stupid behaviour, but as long as
you're careful with how much you have and who you have it around,
and don't drive on it of course it's not really too dangerous", you
were telling the truth and they were easily able to verify that.

In other words, talk to them like a friend about the less-awful
risks, albeit a much much wiser friend than most they have, and when
it comes to the actually awful risks, they'll have reason to listen.

This means they'll confine their mistakes to ones they can actually
survive, and you'll have achieved your goal of helping them be safe,
because you'll have allowed them to learn and grow and become an
''adult'' in their own right, which is what you signed on for when
you had them, like it or not.

And won't you be much prouder of the child that makes their own path
with skill and determination, than of the child that's calling you
at 40 asking for advice on what color to paint the house because
they've never made a decision without you in their life?

Of course you would.
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History: Please Stop Raising Children

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