The NYTimes recently had an opinion piece in which the author claims that one of the reasons that young people are not marrying and having children is because they have too high expectations of parenting, that many of them feel their parents have failed them, and therefore they believe they will fail their children.
I am not interested in the author's thesis, but I am interested in the existence of a therapy culture on the internet which seems to have hooked many young people into blaming everything upon their parents. I have placed that portion of the article on my website; it has a link to the full article.
2. There is no doubt in my mind that parents in many cases are the abusers, and that children of abusers become abusers themselves. But children do have exposure to persons other than their parents, who are often abusers. So, we can't blame it all on the parents.
3. There is no doubt in my mind that parents often set unrealistically high goals for themselves and their children. One of my psychology professors in graduate school said he was a convinced behaviorist until he had children. One of them was simply a bundle of energy from day one; the other was calm and placid from day one. He said a managed to calm the first down a little and liven the second up a little bit over the years. In other words parenting 101 should say don't think that your children will be like you because they have your genes or because you raised them. Rather start with the assumption that a random number has assigned you a child, and deal with it in the same way as if a random number had assigned you a coworker.
4. My discipline of social psychology says that the social environment determines our behavior far more that any internal traits, values, etc. Therefore when you want to change the behavior of anyone (child, spouse, coworker) think about how you might change their environment rather than their personalities. I have found it surprising easy to change environments, even large organizational environments, in comparison to trying to change personal behaviors, beliefs, values, etc.
5. Finally, to what extent do you think internet subculture environments such as therapy cultures exist and have a large influence over internet users.
I think there are a lot of groups on the Internet that harden and radicalize people's existing opinions and perceptions along certain grooves, for example QAnon. But I can't quite envision a therapy-pushing, parent-blaming Internet group. Sounds pretty niche. But as you say, parent-blaming, especially mother-blaming, has been around since Freud.
ReplyDeleteI used to read a lot of advice columns, which I don't anymore because I let my WaPo subscription lapse (for some reason NYTimes doesn't have any entertaining ones) But I definitely noticed a lot of mother blaming. And mother-in-law blaming. And what I would say to that, is yes, mothers (and fathers) can be a-holes. But so can kids. I'm not speaking personally, my kids are great. I don't know that I was a great mom, but at least I didn't screw them up too bad.
DeleteJack, that's interesting about changing people's behavior by changing their environment.
Right now, I’d blame the culture, which presently includes the internet, social media and smart phones everywhere. Now we have AI. No matter how parents try to raise their kids today, the electronic culture has more influence. I don’t mean necessarily in a propaganda way but mostly a McCluhanesque way. It’s the media itself.
ReplyDeleteJack, I know you take a dim view of talk therapy as self-perpetuating and not very helpful (never mind prohibitively expensive except for the well off and we'll insured). Having tried therapy twice (and been forced to deal with Social Services counselors as a teen for a year in high school), I would agree.
ReplyDeleteI got a lot further with behavior mod programs like AlAnon (tho that is self-perpetuating in its way for some folks).
But I would say that neither therapy nor AlAnon indulged me in parent-blaming. Both took the tack that adults were responsible for their own lives and errors. Therapists perhaps try to ease people into that realization. AlAnon is much more astringent, but blaming your parents was viewed as backsliding and a symptom of your co-dependency.
I do think that people throw a lot of psychological terms around. The way people try to psychoanalyst Trump and obsess about his family dynamic seems to be the Left's favorite game, though IMO it distracts from discussing the flaws in his EOs, policies, and proposals.
Anyway, I sense there's some point about mental health care, behind your post that maybe you'd like to clarify.
I wonder if things like AlAnon become self perpetuating for some people is that they become a "third space" sometimes; an outlet where they interact with other people in a safe environment. I don't know that that is necessarily a bad thing.
DeleteI don’t have any familiarity or knowledge of internet therapy culture groups. Also, it seems to me that mothers and mothers in law have always been “ blamed” for however their kids turn out. Nothing new there.
DeleteAs the mom of three sons though I do relate to this
“ One of them was simply a bundle of energy from day one; the other was calm and placid from day one. One of them was simply a bundle of energy from day one; the other was calm and placid from day one. He said a managed to calm the first down a little and liven the second up a little bit over the years. “
Nature v nurture. Both. I realized within a few days of our second son’s birth that his personality/temperament was very different from his older brother’s. Number three arrived in the world with yet another temperament- basically a happy medium between his two older brothers. O read many, many parenting books. The best book by far that I read when my sons were growing up addressed the problems that can arise when the innate temperaments of the children and that of parents clash. The book was called “ Your Child is a Person”.
There are 10 brief reviews, one of which was written by a family member of one of the researchers. The reviews are worth the read.
“…it is still a good place to start learning about the Temperament project, the basic categories of Temperament, what your own Temperament is, and how it fits or does not fit your child's Temperament. In her later research and child psychiatry practice, Dr Chess came to understand that the "goodness of fit" between parents' Temperament profiles and the child's profile explained a lot of behavior difficulties for which the parents later sought psychiatric consultation. At first the authors thought that Temperament could not change over time, but they later found, through observation and interviews with the original infant subjects (who had since grown up!) that sometimes Temperament does change.”
https://www.amazon.com/Child-Person-Herbert-George-Birch/dp/0140044396#customerReviews
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DeleteI don't know what the answer is. I'm sure my wife and I tried to be good parents, and maybe we were - our kids are pretty good as adults, although they're not forming romantic relationships, which is driving both of us crazy. I don't think that's our fault, but maybe I'm missing something that's obvious to everyone else.
ReplyDeleteMy kids are of the same generation as the author who was influenced by social media, had an eating disorder, depression, was at least 'suicide-curious' and so on. Various of our kids have had the same or similar things.
I share others' skepticism of talk therapy. I have virtually no first-hand experience of it* so hesitate to say too much about it. From what I have observed of the experience of other family members, they have been pretty self-motivated and diligent about attending, which leads me to suppose that they thought it was helpful in way, even if it was only fostering the sense that they were doing something concrete to address their issue. I haven't seen any dramatic turnarounds from anyone in my family via talk therapy. I do think there may be something to the notion that corporate insurers have figured out how to make money from offering the benefit and have worked out the logistics of billing, payment, tracking policy limits, etc.
I have seen medications have significantly positive effects on family members, especially on depression and anxiety. The meds can make someone who is in danger of not being able to cope as a student or employee into a reasonably well-functioning person. But I think there is also a cost there, in that they seem to 'flatten' the patient's personalities. That's just my personal observation.
* When I was in middle school - a miserable time for me and the family - one of my siblings really turned into a 'wild child': rebelliousness, drug use, running away from home, etc. My parents seemed thoroughly unprepared to deal with something like that. They handled it the way they were taught by the families and culture they grew up in during the WWII years, which didn't include sparing the rod. Someone referred my parents to family therapy. We attended a handful of therapy sessions - both parents and the children - I think there were six childen by that time. They turned into venting sessions in which everyone in the family got off their chest how frustrated and angry they were at the child who was running off the rails, which left the subject of these tirades in tears. My dad called a halt to it after 2 or 3 sessions. Today, 50+ years later, that sibling is still wild and has never really gotten his/her life back on the rails - indeed, has drifted much further away from the straight and narrow.
Ideally, in such family sessions people are supposed to becoming accepting of each other's viewpoints. The MIS person in a senior management group of a mental health center once described the therapy culture of the management group as "they talk and talk; in the beginning no one ever mentions that they are disagreeing; eventually they all seem to be on the same page, but no one does anything about it" He contrasted this with his own electrical engineering culture "where we fight like hell about the best solution, but when a decision is finally made we all pitch in and get the job done."
DeleteIn the particular situation of Jim's family, things might have worked better if all the family members other the wild one had met with the therapist, did their venting and then collaborated around finding ways to change the wild one's environment. These would have focused upon finding positive interests of the wild one that might have been built into creating positive environments for interactions with others.
In the olden days, a wild child was farmed out to extended family better equipped to deal with them. My dad was one of those. He lived primarily with his grandparents from birth to age 8, with summers on his aunt and uncle's farm, because his step-dad clashed with him. My mom had an unofficial foster sister, a neighbor girl who lived with her family for several years when her father, shell-shocked from WWI, had to be institutionalized. My mother was a very sensitive child, but she was much happier when her grandfather lived with them. He was a buffer between mom and her mother, who was driven around the bend with a whiny child. I loved the summers I spent with my grandparents. They voted for George Wallace, but they were sober. That extended family/neighbor help is gone now. People don't need to talk things thru so much as get the heck away from each other sometimes.
DeleteI confess I've never read a parenting book, something I suppose I have in common with 99.5% of American fathers. Like many other parents, I sort of winged it. In retrospect, I wish I would have read at least one or two, as it would have given my wife and I a common basis for discussing various kids' issues over the years (she is more likely than I to read such books). But one does run across newspaper and magazine articles from time to time (at least if one is as old as I am - I don't think Gen Z as a whole so much glances at newspapers or magazines), so I can't claim to be wholly ignorant about parenting theories.
ReplyDeleteIn the Catholic high school I attended, a required religion course for all seniors was called "Christian Marriage". I don't remember much about it - I was a senior, and had pretty much mentally checked out of high school by that point - but I believe the course's main focus was just about what one would expect from a course taught by a priest: don't have sex before marriage, be faithful to your spouse, don't get divorced, and so on. I don't think they ever got around to contraception or abortion, but that may have been my lack of attentiveness: by that period (late 1970s), it doesn't seem likely that a Catholic high school would have glossed over those topics, does it? At any rate, I managed to get married in the church a few years later without being aware that contraception was against church teaching. Imagine my surprise when it finally penetrated my skull.
But sorry, losing my train of thought here. The point I was hoping to make regarding the Christian Marriage class is: I don't think they taught us anything at all about parenting. Or if they did, it would have been at an abstract spiritual level about the beauty of bringing God's children into the world or some such. In retrospect, what would have been helpful would have been more of a psychology course than a theology course.
I guess that here I'm doing something similar to the Gen Z children, blaming the school for my lack of preparedness for parenthood. But as I say, I don't think I was a terrible father, so I'm not sure how much blaming is necessary.
Jim - “ The point I was hoping to make regarding the Christian Marriage class is: I don't think they taught us anything at all about parenting….what would have been helpful would have been more of a psychology course than a theology course.”.
DeleteOne of my objections to official church teachings is the insistence the couple have children if they marry, barring infertility issues. If they don’t promise to do this - sorry, no Catholic wedding for you. They spend a lot of time and put up a lot of hoops for couples these days who want to marry in the church. One of our three got married in the church. What an obstacle course they faced! One reason of many that marriages in the church have declined drastically, as have infant baptisms. Unsurprisingly.
The hoops should go up when married couples start thinking about “ starting a family “, as so many outsiders want them to do these days, from trump on down. Now it’s the government pressuring them too, not just families and churches.
The RCC’s marriage doctrines have been developed by unmarried, celibate males who have never walked a baby in pain, screaming with an with an ear infection all night, or comforted a six year old who is being bullied, or waited up, chewing their nails, when the teenagers aren’t home on time, or caught with the school system to obtain appropriate education for their non- standard kid, or….- The RCC has always pushed parenthood but the folk who wrote the rules don’t have a clue.
A lot of people, including women (who now have many vocational options besides motherhood than earlier generations did) , are not really interested in being parents, or are not psychologically or emotionally equipped to be “good” parents. Couples should be left alone , not forced to make a promise that they are not ready to make when getting married. If they do have an interest in becoming parents at some point, then the church might then offer some kind of professional counseling to help the TWO individuals look at themselves and their own personalities to honestly evaluate themselves as far as being equipped with the “ right” psychological and emotional skills to take on the most challenging job anyone ever has. And, though of the greatest importance, it’s a task that they can so easily and innocently mess up, causing long- term harm to their children.
Fought not caught
Delete"The RCC’s marriage doctrines have been developed by unmarried, celibate males "
DeleteCertainly in our days, those with the authority to teach and enforce the doctrines are unmarried, celibate males. The doctrines themselves I suppose to be pretty ancient and traditional, tracing back to Old Testament times and to the early Christian times when celibacy wasn't a requirement for church elders. To be sure, those times were 'pre-feminist', and I guess the discernment on the church's part will go on for some time in seeking to harmonize the insights of feminism with the church's own wisdom tradition.
If the move toward synodality continues past Francis's pontificate, the synodal process at least provides a forum for church leaders to hear the testimony of their own people. And in the academic dimension of the church, the theological study, thinking and discernment continues apace.
It doesn’t really matter who originally came up with this nonsense but its roots probably go back at least to Augustine’s (or to Paul) notion that the point of marriage was not love, but procreation. According to Augustine ( still feeling guilty about his own sexual history probably) enjoying the process required to procreate was a sin. It took 16 or so centuries before the church grudgingly accepted the idea that sexual relations in marriage have a unitive effect and that begetting another child isn’t required to have the unitive effect. It still refuses to officially accept modern contraception, asking couples instead to deal with an obstacle course that blocks the natural rhythms of marital love and have anything but a unitive effect on the relationship. The church has been hung up on sex from the very beginning really.
DeleteI don’t know if the couples are still asked if they intend to have children or not. We were asked that 50 years ago when we married. I hadn’t realized then that if we had said No or Maybe we might not have been allowed to marry in the church. It may sound strange, but I really hadn’t thought about it much. I loved my husband to be and wanted to marry him, but we never actually discussed plans for having kids much. Or at all, that I can remember anyway. After a few years we finally started discussing the possibility of having children. Having Kids was sort of an assumption when marrying and the pill was still a fairly new option back then. I considered it a gift from God, but the church didn’t . However, the question from the priest when we were engaged did cause me to think about it after we were married - and I wasn’t a bit sure that I wanted to have children. It was a very hard decision for me, whereas some of my friends could hardly wait to have a baby after getting married. .
Do couples who are getting married at your parish still have to declare that they intend to have children? You say the priests “enforce “. Does that let you off the hook? And how do they “enforce “? Tell the couple to go somewhere else if they don’t want to have kids?,,
I don't remember that the priest asked us if we were going to have children. I guess it was kind of assumed that we were?
DeleteLately I think the emphasis is more that whether you planned on it or not, that if a couple conceived a child, they accept the responsibility of bringing it into the world, and loving and nurturing him or her.
In my 20’s, I did around two years of talk therapy with an actual MD psychiatrist. My social anxiety was through the roof, pathological, though I still forced myself to socialize. I don’t think of it as “curing” me but I think a bit of reflexive thinking for a limited amount of time is a good thing. I also read books by guys like Erich Fromm and Rollo May. Nowadays, I have zero social anxiety. I think it has a lot to do with the cognitive therapy technique called not giving a ****, about myself anyway.
ReplyDeleteHaha, old age is great therapy. What can anybody do to you at this age that nature isn't already doing. Might as well let 'er rip.
DeleteAmericans are not empathetic people, and they tend to look at mental health problems as a form of self-indulgence or attention-seeking. Unless you have some underlying physiological issue that can be fixed with a pill or procedure, snap out of it. I certainly have that attitude about addicts.
ReplyDeleteJack notes that changing someone's environment can change their behavior. Children, of course, have no control over their environments and they learn good/bad behavior depending on the family environment mixed with their own proclivities.
My brother and I talked a lot about having to unlearn coping strategies we developed living in a home with two alcoholic parents. Both of us are skeptical of authorities--teachers, clergy, guidance counselors, and, in his case, doctors and The Government. He had to unlearn a hair-trigger temper that nobody wanted to set off and had his own struggles with substances. Those wrecked his first marriage. I had to unlearn people-pleasing and a tendency toward "never let anyone know what you really think" subterfuge.
I suppose our parents were partly to blame for our crappy personalities, but blame just perpetuates resentments and childish behaviors.