alt Hacker NewsI'm from a family that believed strongly in what some might call "useful child abuse", but that doesn't imply any actual abuse as it would have been defined even 20 years ago, and it isn't without love. Every one of my brothers will admit that our parents loved us deeply, but that our upbringing was extremely stringent and intellectually rigorous, with seemingly unjust punishments for poor grades or for words spoken disrespectfully. Many immigrant children or people from cultures that prioritize education will understand this. But never was it abusive in a physical sense (if you have to get physical, you've failed. You're missing the point of educating the child and doing damage to future generations instead).
I still believe in this, because it produces self-reliant, ultra-high-performing people, and if your goal is e.g. to have your lineage survive and thrive, then that's what you would want. So we're all lawyers, doctors and engineers, and we talk to our children like they're adults and have high expectations of them and are gravely, mortally disappointed if they let us down somehow.
Really, the only thing I'd like from low-pressure and low-performing people with too much time on their hands is for them to leave people like us alone, and go back to maxing out their credit cards, taking drugs, watching reality shows and crashing their cars, without thinking they're capable of judging people they'll never understand. But hey, that's the world we live in, and it's all sour grapes from them, so the main thing is to make sure they never get an upper hand no matter how many ill-behaved children they have.
That's the perspective from this side of that.
I expect to be downvoted for this, but before you click that arrow, remember the good news is that our kids will be smart and self-reliant and yours will be helplessly reduced to voting on social platforms, if they can even read ;)
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It kind of depends on your definition on high-performing people. The definition you seem to be operating by might work for the sort of the lone, cantankerous academic genius, someone who’s work is largely dependent on their ability to focus, study, and have certain output. I imagine a lot of people on HN have this definition of success.
But if your definition of success is remotely related to any form of leadership, then your suggestions are extremely flawed. To be a good leader, you need to manage people, have empathy, sympathy, tact, charisma, and so on.
Adding to that - many things in the real world end up being a mix of both, which means you need both to get to the top. Tom Brady or Michael Jordan don’t become the best in the world by being assholes to their teammates. Significant political / activist figures don’t start movements by belittling people. And so on.
Which means that the attitude you’re displaying here really kind of locks you into the upper middle class overachiever definition of success as a doctor, lawyer, etc. and not into the class of the truly successful.
I don't think it's going to make a difference over a generation or two. If it did we'd have a society of high achievers and no achievers. Rags to riches and back in X generations. The people doing drugs and falling out with society may themselves be high achievers too Drugs drugs casts a wide net. You'll get older and unwanted and stupid like the rest of us. Then you'll wake up. Hopefully when you do you're not on your own.
That's a lot of inefficiency being displayed by such a high-pressure, high-performance, individual. You could've just written "my childhood fucking sucked and I obviously developed some issues, but I justify it as it being good, since I have achieved some level of success, as defined by the circles I dwell in". Also, wasting time commenting on a social platform? Disappointing.
Edit: clicked the profile, it's just a troll, lol. Joke's on me.
I don’t know if it’s the fault of your parents’ parenting style, but there’s a kind of shortsighted meanness in this comment that has been the source of vast amounts of human suffering throughout history.
So where did it all go wrong, to end up with you posting comments like this?
I grew up in an environment where I had high expectations placed on me with a father who was mortally disappointed when I failed to meet them, but the reality was that, even when I gave my all, I still couldn't be what my father expected me to be because I had undiagnosed ADHD which has obvious implications for educational performance which was complicated by the fact I had undiagnosed (until a teacher picked up on it when I was 15 and referred me) dyspraxia and was physically incapable of writing fast enough to finish exam papers in time. I was permanently stressed from roughly the age of 7 until I left home at 20 and it did enough damage that I had to be referred from the ordinary mental health service to a specialist at the beginning of the year. Your tone is very similar to that of my father, and I'm sure for many kids this parenting style is productive, but if you think this kind of treatment isn't equally capable of producing generational trauma as physical violence, you're lying to yourself. I hope for their sake that your children never find themselves in a position where they can't meet your expectations.
Once you've made it this far, the new spectrum everyone is measured on is their magnanimity.
It's okay that you didn't turn out to be that magnanimous, but don't lie to yourself and pretend that you tried as hard as you could
You had more in your humanity tank than you knew you had
> I expect to be downvoted for this, but before you click that arrow, remember the good news is that our kids will be smart and self-reliant and yours will be helplessly reduced to voting on social platforms, if they can even read ;)
you sound like a cunt, seriously, and have no idea what this attempt at stepping back tells about you. That makes you transparent, really any shrink would be like "ah yes, of course, that was to be expected". It's the only reason I'm replying back (no downvotes though, those are for spam). We get it you absorbed sadism from your parents. Why don't you tell us about the other side as well, all these moments of astheny when you're not flamboyant but ashy?
You expect to be upvoted for an obvious troll post?
It's Poe's Law in action. We can't tell if you're unhinged enough to post that or you're imitating people who would post that to make fun of them.
>So we're all lawyers, doctors and engineers,
I'd assume from the rest of your post that you'd all become olympians, astronauts, high ranked politicians, or founders of mega-corps. These are all fairly run-of-the-mill careers your family entered into, and plenty of people (I'd guess close to 100%) enter these roles without the type of abuse you suffered.
Hopefully the mortal disappointment you project onto your kids is a little lighter than that your parents projected onto you.
> if they can even read ;)
No need, they have videos.
> have high expectations of them and are gravely, mortally disappointed if they let us down
That sounds like a recipe for long-term psychological complexes. I know plenty of high-achievers that don't constantly feel like they have to prove themselves. And I wish I didn't have to work so hard to challenge that feeling in myself.
Empirically, the causality you state there is simply wrong, and clearly so. The psychological abuse you have suffered usually at least leads to anxious attachment, i.e. the inability to form healthy bonds with other people, as well as higher probability of social anxiety, depression and suicidality. You've just fallen victim to survivorship bias here - if you were one of the kids that got broken more severly by their parents, you wouldn't post here.
You don't have to abuse children for them to grow up into functioning and healthy adults. That simply is ideology not rooted in any kind of data.
There is a parenting style called authoritative (not authoritarian! Authoritarian is what you had to suffer through) that is characterized by both clear and unwavering secure attachment (i.e. the kid always knows it is loved and protected, even if it got a bad grade in school or did something stupid) and clear, well-communicated and understandable rules and high, but achievable performance targets.
signed, an educational science phd who never was punished for a bad grade in his entire time in school even once, yet developed the discipline of doing a part time phd while already working and being a parent anyway.