#PARENTING

[canadiankazz]

I'm reminded of a parenting reality show I saw several years ago, and one of the families was a "strict" family that usually used spanking as a punishment. (They weren't the only family that spanked, but they did it the most often and used a wooden spoon as opposed to just a hand.) The families were given a challenge to send the kids to a shop with $20 to only buy a litre of milk and to bring back the change. The kids were also tempted to buy chocolate and ice cream. The kids in the spanking family were the only ones who lied to their parents' faces about getting chocolate and ice cream, despite knowing they were on camera. I know it's too small a sample size to prove anything, but it was certainly an interesting result.

Generational toxic masculinity.

[lurks-no-more]

This is like when bad parenting flips over to good parenting!

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[animentality]

[thehmn]

A lot of people around me are having kids and every day it becomes more apparent that hitting your children to punish them is insane because literally everything can be a horrible punishment in their eyes if you frame it as such.

Like, one family makes their toddler sit on the stairs for three minutes when he hits his brother or whatever. The stairs are well lit and he can see his family the whole time, he’s just not allowed to get up and leave the stairs or the timer starts over. He fucking hates it just because it’s framed as a punishment.

Another family use a baseball cap. It’s just a plain blue cap with nothing on it. When their toddler needs discipline he gets a timeout on a chair and has to put the cap on. When they’re out and about he just has to wear the cap but it gets the same reaction. Nobody around them can tell he’s being punished because it’s in no way an embarrassing cap, but HE knows and just the threat of having to wear it is enough.

And there isn’t the same contempt afterwards I’ve seen with kids whose parents hit them. One time the kid swung a stick at my dog, his mother immediately made him sit on the stairs, he screamed but stayed put, then he came over to my dog and gently said “Sorry Ellie” and went back to playing like nothing happened, but this time without swinging sticks at the nearby animals.

[bicokun]

I think it also just comes down to the fact that stories thrive on conflict. It’s for the same reason that if a couple gets together at the end of a story means that if a sequel comes along they’ve broken up or are at least on the rocks. Having a story about the next generation where there’s not a conflict between them and the older generation would probably strike a lot of writers as a missed opportunity. And it is interesting to have the prior protagonist have some kind of failing in raising their child. Even if the prior protag isn’t alive at the time, it can also be interesting for there to be unresolved angst that the new protag needs to work through, possibly with siblings. That said, it also comes from fandoms tending to take what are sometimes pretty minor character flaws and magnifying them to become all-encompassing.

Like, you look at Aang playing a little more favorites with Tenzin which caused Kya and Bumi to become resentful and people start saying he was a neglectful and distant parent. Except the text never says or even implies that. Dude just paid a bit more attention to his airbender son to make sure he was trained sufficiently to carry the entirety of airbending culture to the next generation, which he had on his own shoulders as well.

I won’t defend Naruto, though. To be fair he also kind of sucked as a child.

Generational spin-off media is like “okay, what would be the most in-character way for the previous show’s protagonist to comprehensively fail as a parent?”

[anexperimentallife]

I love this.

[cpericardium]

seems reasonable

[carnagechicken]

I don't remember how old I was, perhaps 6, I stole two little horse figure keychains from a store. I didn't want to have to hide them forever, I wanted to be able to play with them, so I pulled the chain and hoop out, waited a couple weeks, then mixed them into our toy animals bin because I knew that everyone would assume they'd just been there all along. It worked. and to this day nobody knows they were stolen.

I absolutely think adults, especially parents, ascribe manipulative intent to children when they shouldn't and it's absolutely a problem but it's always kind of funny to me when people go online and proclaim that children are incapable of manipulation. When I was three I asked my mom to get my older sibling their favorite candy bar at the grocery story because I knew she'd get me mine too as a reward for being thoughtful and that was way more likely to succeed than if I just asked for a candy bar for me. And it worked. Children scheme at a developmentally appropriate level the trick is not assuming children scheme at an adult level.

[happyherringbonkpickle]

[wordswithloveee]

[hidden-snow]

Adding on as another parent and previous victim of this; parents, you are not protecting your child if you do this. You’re turning them into sneaky, mistrusting individuals.

Parents should not be reading your journals

Parents should not be searching through your trash 

Parents should not be snooping on your private social media messages 

Parents should not be taking your bedroom door off 

Parents should not be invading your privacy 

[typhlonectes]

[drmajalis]

Too good to stay on twitter

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]