Parents

[nyuanshin]

Comments

Possibly useful

[dsgood]

http://adultchildren.org

Give me the child until seven, and I will give you the man

[queueball]

It was in the awful wake of the one major relationship I've had that I realized how closely real life parallels a stock Freudian tragedy in four or five acts, at least for me and for a shocklingy large number of the people I'm closest to. (I don't mean as in "Freud was right" but as in "oh my god, the father thing, and oh my god, the importance of childhood.") I'm seriously looking at making that realization the focus of my life's work, for pay if possible and avocationally if necessary.

I don't mean to cheapen what you shared (and I'm glad you did) by pointing out that the distant-father-plus-close-bonding-mother-equals-queer religious nutcases would appreciate it if you'd start sucking cocks with reckless abandon, lest you injure a fragile cosmology.

Re: Give me the child until seven, and I will give you the man

[nyuanshin]

Dude, injuring fragile cosmologies is, like, my purpose in life. (Matter of fact it's probably best to not let me near anything fragile.) If it's any consolation I've occasionally contemplated the gay and thought it might be a good idea in the abstract, but when it came to concrete thinking the cocksucking (etc.) just never appealed to me.

In addition to the researchers Caplan cites, the late David Rowe offers a pretty strong corrective to much intuitive thinking about family and childhood.

[smandal]

[...] she always was vaguely concerned about how I'd spend most of my free time in my room, playing with lego or reading.

My childhood in a nutshell; thankfully, my mother is still around and healthy, continuing to be concerned.

[_luaineach]

As the mother of a 9-year-old boy, reading at first caused me to feel as if I had a million things to say and then caused me to feel that there was nothing to say because even a million things wouldn't be enough.

I like to think think that my "parenting" amounts to providing my son with a wide range of experiences and behavioral adjustment strategies that his nature can then use as reference. I have always intuitively felt that nature sets the end caps and parameters [of traits] but that nurture can set the mark within those parameters.

[nyuanshin]

Well, the behavior-genetic studies on twins and the like have tended to converge on a 50/40/10 split in partitioning personality variance attributable to genetics / nonshared_environment / shared_environment. The way I interpret this is that V_g expresses how canalized the developmental state space is, V_n expresses how random the direction of each individual step through it is, and V_s is simply the complement of V_n, i.e. how deterministically the kid responds to any exogenous biasing force.

To put it non-technically, this what I think of as the Plinko model of parenting: genetics is the shape and location of the pegs, parental decisions set the location where the puck initially drops, and environmental stochasticity is . . . environmental stochasticity. The only thing is that this version is iterative rather than one-shot: you can think of giant Aztec pyramid of Plinko boards where the parent gets a chance to nudge the path at spaced intervals

[csn]

The other day I heard a woman walking down a street with a stroller and her friend saying, "..All the studies say that kids should.."
And I thought to myself, "That is a person who should never have children."

I've been meaning to ask how the two of you became acquainted, if you don't mind me asking, what with the long distance and all..

[nyuanshin]

Yeah, any sentence that begins that way is suspect: the actual literature, where it isn't just incoherent, suggests a pretty wei wu wei approach is best (as in most things). Don't give them junk food, help them learn the things they need to know, and live in the healthiest social environment you can give them -- and that's more or less it. They can pretty much handle the rest on their own, once they're walking and talking