I chose zero-parenting, not having kids, and I was viewed by many as a traitor to the human race. I may just have been ahead of the times, as it now looks to be a more valid parenting-type among young folks.
I don’t think I have any form of emotional bond with my parents. I get along with them ‘fine’ but I know very little about them and they know very little about me.
I think they realized this and gave a lot more attention to my sibling (this is not jealousy speaking. They just spend much more time with them) which is good for them.
It’s like living with strangers. I don’t think I’ve ever had an actual serious discussion with them in my life, save for being scolded as a kid.
It’s odd. I don’t think I realized it until I was on a date and my mother called and when the conversation was over I just hung up. And my date said “You don’t tell your mom you love her when you hang up?”
I suppose it was never ingrained in me to love them
I have a better relationship with one parent than the other, but in both cases, I struggle to do the “I love you” thing. I think for me it’s twofold: 1) Those words feel weighty to me so it feels dishonest or cheap somehow to say them in an off-handed way if I’m not feeling it in the moment. 2) It feels like a very vulnerable place to go because of how I see the words, so then it’s like a more sensitive headspace to get into, which feels like an odd prospect for shooting it off at the end of a phone call or whatever.
Like I don’t have anything against people using it in a casual, affirming way, but the idea of me doing that with others just feels weird. Maybe if I was generally happier, it’d come out more easily, I dunno. But I do know that I’ve experienced loss before and I definitely cared and still care, so it’s not like I don’t care about losing loved ones. Just that specific social ritual does not come naturally to me for some reason.
The type that my parents did.
I saw there was a trend going around on TikTok of unschooling. I have no words.
Can confirm, terrible experience to deal with during what should’ve been high school for me.
The parents who alienate their children from a social life or force them to only interact with their preferred socio-economic group.
Homeschooling, racial segregation, passing down their own bigoted views in the name of education.
Would you oppose homeschooling even if the parents enlist their children in additional activities like sport or arts? where they do interact with other socio-economic groups?
Education needs to be a social activity for growing children.
Homeschooling surely stunted my social growth and I’d argue that impacts me to this day. Though given the area I was in, I’m not sure public school would have been better. Swap out extreme introversion due to limited social contact with others outside of family and replace it with most likely being bullied and immersed in a reactionary culture.
But also, some people both homeschool and make sure their kids participate in activities with other kids beyond it, so they’re getting a decent social life too. So it can vary how homeschooling is used.
I feel theres something intrinsically wrong with homeschooling and i cant really put my finger on it. Saymaz said that is because the lack of socialization, which i agree is a big part of it, but i feel theres something more.
And i thought it was because of childrens media centering on school, but i honestly dont know.
I can only speak from my experience with it, which largely centers around Catholic people doing it for religious motivation. I think that particular reason for it is shoddy as hell and has more in common with cults than anything else.
I could maybe see a legitimate argument for it in the context of a country as reactionary as the US if somebody was socialist and wanting to keep their kid away from the reactionary teachings, but even then, you can just get a dynamic going of talking to the kid regularly about what they’re learning and helping them understand it in the context of capitalism and all that (once they’re old enough to grasp it). But that’s not a real manifestation of it that I’ve personally heard of, only speculative.
Tbh, it’s kinda hard for me to look at the issue in a more detached way because it’s pretty personal for me. My parents are not horrible abusive people or something, but homeschooling was probably one of the more bad parenting decisions they made and it’s hard not to wonder sometimes about what I may have missed out on, not going to school. Can’t undo it now, so it seems pointless to wallow in that kind of thing, but it can still hurt. Just the plain fact that I can’t talk to another peer and go, ya know, “Yeah, when I was in school, it was like this” and bond over similar experiences. Because I didn’t. I can try to do similar for going to university, but not for my childhood. Or that I didn’t have “friends from school”. I know those friendships don’t always last through to adulthood, but it’s like, I didn’t even have that at all to build off of socially. I had siblings, which was something, but that’s not confidence-building in the same way as “you made friends with someone you didn’t know”.
But then on the other hand, there are people who did go to public school, who still didn’t have many friends, or even had an abusive relationship with another kid that held them back socially. So idk. Fucking capitalism…
How does it work? Do parents teach or does a teacher come home?
In my experience with it / understanding of it, a parent (typically the mother as a “stay at home mom”) teaches. Sometimes from a particular curriculum, sometimes more something they’re partly making up.
Im sorry you missed on having such core experiences and i understand how it still impacts you today.
Capitalism as usual puts us in a lose, lose situation. the only childhood i will accept for my children it will be for them to join the Pioneers.
This?
No, lmao, i meant the pioneers of the soviet union.
Pardon the pun, but hallelujah! 😂
Thanks, yeah, it really tends to make people choose between varying degrees of shitty. :/
I think the inherent problem of homeschooling is you will eventually have to leave home. Learning how to deal with shitty teachers, peers who are bullies, bigotry, and so on are all part of life after you leave school. Obviously, these are things that shouldn’t happen and ideally we’d eliminate these problems in a functioning society. But we don’t live in that world, nor can we build it if we don’t confront problems in front of us.
So when homeschooled kids eventually step out into the workforce, they encounter those same bullies, those same shitty instructors, those same bigots, etc. but they’re not 10, they’re 25 and have no idea what to do. They don’t know how to emotionally respond and their response isn’t appropriate for their age, so the problems are a worse experience than if they went through public school.
Essentially, it’s sweeping the rest of the world under the rug. Even the best parents with the best homeschooling skills ever can’t live forever to maintain that environment. Some day, they have to let go and hope their kids have the skills to handle themselves. Except that won’t happen because the world is the other way.
I think you make a good point and it somewhat accurately represents my own experience. I’ve often felt like I’m behind socially. Not in that I’m immature in the sense of entitled or dysregulating, but maybe the way to put it is simply inexperienced. Now some of that feeling may be owed to other causes, like ADHD or anxiety, but I think being homeschooled along with the other stuff made it a perfect storm for it kinda thing.
Like in my case, I would not quite agree with: “They don’t know how to emotionally respond and their response isn’t appropriate for their age” Because that makes it sound to me like I’d be dysregulating and acting out. For me, I think it’s more like, I’m not well acclimated, for better or worse. And I say for better or worse because let’s be real, being well acclimated to the horribleness that is capitalism isn’t necessarily a good thing. Like that saying, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” (or words to that effect). But when it comes to raw survival, you do need to be able to deal with it in the day to day.
To some extent, you can pave over these things with politeness to get by. It just makes for a very lonely existence if you’re not doing well at building and maintaining lasting ties with others (which requires maintenance and vulnerability, not just being a person that is “nice” or “fun”). But it’s harder to bond through, say, shared experiences if you didn’t share the same experiences. So this is one of the ways homeschooling can set people apart.
First time I’ve seen someone that’s gone through similar to what I’ve been through.Shit was rough, social relations are hard to maintain, and it defiinetly has negatively affected my education. Main thing I got out of it was a slight respite from stress via school, but the lack of structured learning has made things like studying theory more difficult for me than it probably should be.
I would not quite agree with “They don’t know how to emotionally respond…”
I probably didn’t phrase this very well. By “emotional response,” I mean the feelings you have internally and mentally. The thoughts in your head. For example, say your flight gets delayed. And internally, you get angry and flustered. You start doom spiraling about how this will destroy your life. A healthier response would be to acknowledge you’re angry, are justified in feeling angry, but then accepting your situation and to start thinking about your options. The person having the first type of response acts out like a child where they start screaming at airport employees, while the second type of response is one of a well-adjusted adult.
I think people who are homeschooled have something similar when they deal with uncomfortable social situations, like bullies or bad leadership (obviously they aren’t going to have a tantrum at the airport). They get stuck on the part where they’re angry or scared, but don’t know how to accept there’s a problem and to start finding solutions. When you go to school, you learn how to mentally navigate these problems in order to make physical changes.
I do agree it’s bullshit we have to acclimate ourselves to the horribleness of capitalism. Schools reinforce capitalist ideology. But again, as socialists, don’t we have to know how to be adjusted to capitalist society so we can navigate it? A socialist who doesn’t know how to interact with people conditioned by capital to be anti-communist will have trouble converting those people to the cause.
It’s a fine line and definitely unclear how much homeschooling can help or impede a baby leftist. More people have been completely destroyed by capitalist education than have been converted to communism.
overly paranoid parents. how will your kids grow out of the mindset that every adult is secretly out to kill them?
Adding to this … overly paranoid parents who only seem to check in when they are anxious about nothing, but not checking in when things seem to be going well
I’m biased because this is what happened to me personally, but the wierd lack of power combined with high emotional responsibility.
If someone has too little power but also not much responsibility, they’re usually spoiled but not mentally unwell. [I.e, a kid who has their parents baby them and do everything for them]
Someone who has too much responsibility but also a lot of power/independence is hurt by not having a childhood but they do still know how to be an adult [i.e, someone with negligent parents who needs to work to provide for them]
What I got was no power [helicopter mom, constantly paranoid about everyone else, basically anything she said went and I could never fight it or argue anything, and if something went wrong it was my fault, never had an independent income until i became an adult, etc.] but also way too much responsibility [Emotionally supporting her, having to be her therapist, having to deal with my emotions myself, having to make sure everything was in tip top shape so she didn’t have a mental breakdown and scream at me, having to solve her interpersonal disputes, etc.]. So i wasn’t able to be a kid emotionally but also didn’t know how to be an adult. Combined with dehabilitating anxiety, suicidal thoughts and actions, and literal ptsd, I think that’s my least favorite type.
So basically Parentification but worse.
This is it. To achieve full nightmare mode, add being neurodivergent and having no idea why your emotionally immature caretaker randomly explodes at you, while any attempt at trying to advocate for yourself or ask for an explanation of what you did wrong is met with increasing hostility. Took many years of my adult life to somewhat fix the crippling social anxiety, while overworking myself into recurrent burnout cycles in order to achieve autonomy from my family no matter the cost. I still have nightmares of being trapped in my childhood home every now and then.
I am sorry that this happened to you comrade. We all deserved much better. Children’s rights are such an important part of building a better world and we are seriously lagging behind still treating children like property of their parents and making endless excuses for abusers.
Your mom sounds like an exact replica of mine and your issues very similar to mine… it really does suck doesnt it.
Lack of discipline. I don’t even mean hitting/ yelling, but letting your kids engage in asocial behavior that harms other people/ is just generally inconsiderate.
I’m seeing this in my nephew. It’s really sucks.
Agreed… gentle parenting causes far more problems than benefits imo. If you choose to be a parent, act like a parent(!)
im guessing that u dont know what its like to be abused if you think ”gentle parenting” is automatically bad.
lol you’re wrong, keyboard warrior.
The real problem is that lots of “gentle” parents are actually doing permissive parenting, which is one of the various parenting styles known to not work at all and often leave lasting issues. The only one known for good outcomes is one called “authoritative parenting” that by the way is not at all the same as authoritarian parenting, which is another one known to not work.
