Committed to finding ways out of the coercion/self-sacrifice mire of conventional parenting. We are variously critical rationalists, libertarians, home educators, attachment-parents, but we take our ideas where we find them.
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Actually, Mickey Mouse did pretty well for himself. Decision-making, stained-glass and golf-management wouldn't have got him where he is today...
People in the UK are starting to notice the mass university degree con at last. There is much material for comedians and parodists here in the Guardian (of all places). My advice to young people considering university is not to commit to it until they are sure that they genuinely want the vast majority of what knowledge the course has to offer, for its own sake, or that they are genuinely prepared to work as hard as necessary at the course in order to gain some other benefit at the end eg. a certain career path. If you don't want to work hard and do well, then are you sure spending money on a degree certificate is going to gain you more in three years than some other course of action?
Someone needs to set up the "How to avoid doing a degree and still succeed in life" website soon. Or maybe they could make a business out of that. I bet they could undercut the universities...
I feel very strongly about this. "Well done in your school exams," does not a close relationship make. Nor do, "That dress looks pretty," "What a tidy room your have," or, "Happy birthday, love Father". Many of us adults grew up with stiff-upper-lip parents who were not brought up hugging and being demonstrative and talking about love and watching Oprah Winfrey. They voiced and passed on such ideas to us as a deep suspicion of physical and verbal affection, and a belief that duty and properness and a first at Oxbridge are more important to one's personal moral satisfaction than snogging on the sofa on Saturday nights.
This is wrong and sad. Genuine physical and verbal affection are some of the most valuable things we will come across in life. What's wrong with Oprahness is when it's fake and false. There is such a thing as fake parent/child affection too, and it makes me want to heave. Both confusing and irritating for the child, and liable to turn them off intimacy forever, if it gets too nauseating. If you hate your kids, don't bother pretending otherwise, just try and sort it out (yes, it is almost certainly your own fault, but at least that means you can change it).
I'll come back to the subject of not liking your own kids another time. What I want to say today is, if you do ever feel and think good things about your children, please let them know. Please tell your children that they are fantastic, that you love to see them being happy and enjoying themselves, that the way they run or eat or knit or watch TV makes you feel happy and proud, the nice things they say inspire you with joy and love, that they are beautiful and good and wonderful.
Imagine what it's like to grow up without anyone ever telling you what a fantastic, sensitive, kind, caring, talented person you are, and how wonderful those things make them feel because they love you (I bet plenty of you won't have to imagine that one with too much effort). Then think what a difference these things make. Don't just absorb the good feelings your children give you: give them back again, keep them going round, create a healthy good-feeling-economy in your family. Respectful helping distance isn't enough, and oppressive emotional demonstration isn't right either. Just say what is true, and good, that they might want to hear, and keep saying it and trying it out, and don't give up.
Go and tell your kids how wonderful they are, and exactly how and why, right now. I don't think you'll regret it.
If you write a comment on this blog, you will see a box pop up which says at the top: "Please do not reveal personal information about identifiable children without informed consent".
Parents embarrassing their children is a widepread well-known phenomenon, and often a cause for adult humour. But it is unreasonable and unpleasant to be insensitive about children's feelings in this way, as well as a lost opportunity in terms of getting to know them and building really good mutually caring relationships. If we don't care about hurting their feelings, we shouldn't be surprised if they disregard ours in return. And we shouldn't regard any of this as necessary or good, when basically it's just about not being bothered. There's nothing good about emotional crassness.
Parents are very often absolutely amazed when their children object to being talked about as if they were their parents' property. Their enjoyment of sharing funny potty-training stories with Great Auntie Sue, or telling strangers on the bus how "naughty" someone was yesterday, means a lot more to them than their child's crushed feelings. Children get their feelings crushed fairly often, on the whole, and many people think that's a good thing. Rationality tells us, however, that putting innocent people down is no way to teach them how to be good and happy.
So the comments guideline is a request to bear your child's feelings in mind, respect their right not to have personal details revealed to strangers on the internet, and pause for a minute to ask yourself whether the thing you are about to say just might potentially cause more harm to someone else than it does good to you. And lifelong parent/child friendships are made or broken out of such choices.
Less Wealthy Students More Likely to Drop out of University
The Guardian's implicit argument seems to be that grants should be restored to stop the drop-out. But I wonder whether "working class" students are possibly more aware than their less-working (?) peers that many of the university courses young people are being persuaded to sign up to are simply not worth the time or the financial investment, either in terms of personal educational growth or as advantages in the job-market?
I like rap music with swearing and explicit lyrics (when it is good). Millions of people like to watch wife-beating, deceit, emotional trauma and death on "Eastenders". Children like computer games and "Cowboys and Native Americans". Well, they like toy guns anyway. They like toy guns so much, they will use pieces of toast and their fingers for guns if they don't have plastic ones to hand.
In the Brothers' Grimm version of "Cinderella", the ugly sisters chop off bits of their feet to make them fit into the tiny glass slipper, in the hope of marrying the prince. In the Old Testament, Herod has all the baby boys slaughtered in an attempt to head-off the competition for power. In history books, people fight wars, commit genocide and plunder other people's villages.
I wonder if you are following my argument yet. In blogs, people sometimes type the word "murder". In children's TV drama, there are baddies. Enid Blyton books are full of them, there are nasty goblins in many of her nursery stories and I haven't even started talking about the extreme and bizarre violence of "Tom and Jerry" yet...
I live in a very quiet town, where probably a couple of hundred toy guns are freely available in the shops. I imagine there are thousands if not millions of examples of fantasy violence in this one small town, if you include cartoons, playstations, fairy tales and poetry books. Yet we haven't had any shootings here for, hmm, about ever. And I will even bet real money that no-one in my family is going to go out and try and stab or maim a single person in the next few weeks, despite having access to kitchen knives and boxes of matches.
Fantasy is one thing. Reality is something else. People who confuse the two we should be very very worried about. Especially as rather a lot of them seem to be members of governments.
In a comment below, Charmane says: "moving to find the right circumstances if the current ones don't suit" is, "idealistic, in modern day reality".
A lot of people think that. But at the same time, we only have to look around us to see that human beings are capable of solving the most appallingly dire difficulties and gruesome problems, by the use of commitment, optimism, belief in the rightness of what they are doing and general wherewithal.
As the subject of the blog below was finding a job that one enjoys, and not climbing Mount Everest or surviving long-term torture, I think it makes plenty of sense to say that we can and should regard this as a problem we have a lifelong commitment to tackling and solving, and not give up on it unless or until we are genuinely happy with whatever we are doing to earn money (which can happen by a change of attitude, as well as by a change of job). There are always methods of improving things, in some kind of way, even if it is only small, even if it is very long-term indeed. We can look to those who have achieved them before us for more knowledge and ideas. That's not a belief in anything ideal or perfect, just a responsible moral approach to moving forward and making progress in one's life.
