Nature VS Nurture

Mom’s Such a Martyr – Parental Sacrifice and the Six Year Challenge

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

 

One of my many differences with people in the parenting groups and with the prevailing climate in the gentle parenting movement is around sacrifice, around parents looking after themselves as well as their kids, because it’s important to model self-love and care, and because we figure happy, less stressed-out parents will have more success with their efforts to make the gentle change in their parenting. All this and more, and it’s obvious, impossible to deny in theory . . .

LOL. Of course I’m kidding!

My contrariness is not easily intimidated. I don’t know if you, the postulated reader realize it, but I’m kind of living on the edge here, when I start these sorts of rants, often the subject of my critique is something apparently unassailable like this. This is a high wire act in my mind, unconventional thinking, and it’s not easy. But with every new aspect of my study here, I’m gaining confidence and I don’t think I’m going mad. Fooling myself that I’m winning any points in these arguments doesn’t seem overly difficult or complex, which tells me I’m not so far diverged from the reality of things. Of course, for a curmudgeon, this is where the fun is. So to it, then.

This generation’s allergy to parental notions of sacrifice has some strange roots. The image of the sacrificing Mom is that of the Nineteen-fifties middle America, thing, Dad off at work and Mom at home, a slave to the house, the laundry, the kids, and of course Dad, and Mom lives out her life never doing a thing for herself, a martyr for the family. That, yes, a horrible standard for Mom, working twenty-four seven and the most hardworking of Dads not working those hours at all, home time being largely off-time for Dad. This is a situation at which to rebel, and when I was young, it was Women’s’ Lib, the women’s’ liberation movement, or more generally known then as today, feminism, that broke the spell and let us all know that this sacrifice was neither ‘its own reward’ or the model anyone should set their daughters up for.

All right and proper, not strange, I know, but here it is: was that also not the time and culture that beat the crap out of their kids, out of our parents, us and our friends? (I’m fifty-five as of this writing.) I know, right, parenting blogs and feminist blogs and never the twain shall meet, but, folks, it’s all one world out there. Our martyrs passed on their second-class citizen status and associated abuse to us, right? I know, many acted as protectors, shielding us from our more violent fathers, but really, in that demographic, who raised the kids? All I’m saying is, I get it, that culture of “sacrifice” was bad, that model needs to go, for both feminist and – childist – reasons, no argument for that larger thing: that whole culture needs to change, absolutely.

But (and here come the comments), was the sacrifice really the problem in it?

If it seems to be, I think it’s only because of its close ties to abuse, that Mom’s sacrifice means she allowed herself and therefore us to be abused. Does the feminist movement want to say that Mom was complicit in her own and her children’s’ abuse, that is, is Mom’s shared guilt what they want to shine a light on, or should we not just keep the parenting talk focussed on abuse? Abuse is the real scourge here, focussing on sacrifice is oddly misogynist when we’re talking about abuse or parenting, it’s a form of victim blaming – as though there are impersonal, automatic cycles of abuse with lives of their own, but these martyr women, they’re making a choice in it, like they’re the only ones who are. It just smells off to me. Mom may have done it as an adult, but abuse is still abuse, even if we seem to volunteer for it. It’s the driving force in the dark side of our parents’ and grandparents’ parenting and Stockholm Syndrome in itself is a reaction, not a cause. All I’m saying is, Ladies, mothers, feminists and those who are both especially, yes, no-one should model that, that was some misguided sacrifice indeed.

To give the devil and the dark side it’s due, though, some bullshit in the name of a virtue is not a new thing in the world, and many a callous abuser has beaten his chest and cried about his “sacrifice.”  As Dark Side as I can ever be: is the flip side of ‘happy parents are gentle parents’ an ultimatum: ‘Call me out on my bullshit and I will beat the tar out of this kid?’ Misreads and abuse exist for everything, including sacrifice; it doesn’t mean things can’t ever be the good, proper versions sometimes. Sacrifice was our mothers’ and grandmothers’ immediate personal problem, their battle, and maybe still many ladies’ battle today, and solving it saves women, absolutely. Suggesting that fighting this battle somehow saves children, and that the two groups, women and children (read adults and children) can never be in conflict, that one’s gains can never negatively impact the other, however, isn’t right and it’s not helpful. Your fight for freedom was and is against the men, the adults. It’s still OK to sacrifice a little for your kids.

How sacrifice hurts us as children is only one of the many, many ways abuse hurts us. Let’s keep our eye on the prize.

So. ‘One of my many differences.’

I don’t mind some sacrifice. Yes, I’m a cultural Christian, and while that doesn’t mean I agree with the sacrifice of human beings in the literal sense, nailed to trees, I do think sacrifice is, at least in it’s better forms, a good thing, a moral act. In fact, it’s a big part of my planned cure for abuse and punishment in the world. In it’s most practical, generational terms, what I’m advising is that some punished and also possibly abused generation swallow that pain and find a way not to repeat, in fact to sacrifice what they see as a “normal, happy life,” live with the pain and troubles their childhoods left them with and keep their fucking hands off of their own kids, even if they think “raising their kids right” will make themselves feel better. That is gonna feel like some sacrifice, I won’t lie to you.

I felt it, believe me.

I can’t imagine how many times I’ve told the half-joke that I sometimes wish I had beat my second daughter up at least once, just so that during all the frustrating times with her afterward, I could have just closed my eyes for a second and treasured the memory. Man, it would be nice, once in a man’s life to bark an order and see it swiftly carried out. That is an immediate gratification I have rarely enjoyed, believe me. I have fantasies of personal power, my worldview tells me we all do, and I have happily (usually happily) sacrificed getting the payoff those fantasies promise.

In practical terms in a slightly shorter time frame, I would say the sacrifice of our inheritance of parental power needed to last until my younger daughter was old enough to talk and reason with, old enough to understand things, and as I remember it, she was five or six. She was born a full three and one-third years after our older one, so the difficult years, where we manually did everything we might want to train our kids to control themselves for, were then over before ten years had elapsed from the first one’s birth. I mean, ten years into our life as parents, we never had another cause to consider punishing. This when the teen years were still before us, and they aren’t anymore. We sacrificed, and it paid, sorry if that sounds ironically old fashioned.

We sacrificed a lot, all the other things, besides the sense of parental power I will save for another post, but there was a lot of work, and we had opted out of much of normal life around normal families, we sacrificed the support normal parents get from each other. Not kidding, it was a lot, but again: for six years after the birth of your last child, then it’s payoff time. Not kidding about that either.

 

 

Conclusions

 

That old model of family life, yes, that was bad, let’s do away with that, but let’s also make sure we’re fighting the real devil here, not some victim proxy. Mom’s sacrifice didn’t help, but abuse and force, these are the issues that shape us, negative things like these. Sacrifice is still a moral tool, with a legitimate existence. Do we imagine that in harsh, unforgiving nature, sacrifice on the part of parents is not a survival adaptation for the young and so for the species?

Having said that, part of what was wrong with the model of Mom’s martyrdom is that it never ends, the payout is never made. They thought the payout was our success and our happiness – but again: they whooped our asses while they said that to themselves, so that payout maybe never came either, right? Sacrifice for nothing really isn’t, in hindsight. What I’m offering you here is old-time, tried and true sacrifice, hard work for actual results.

Face that Mom and Dad were and all your friends and colleagues are wrong about the benefits of any sort of punishing, and hold back your punitive urges until your kids are six years old. Make that sacrifice and see what happens. And don’t get me wrong, be nice to yourselves, that part is true, it will be easier if you’re getting breaks. If, however, when it gets hard, and you can’t help but feel you’re somehow repeating Mom’s errors, over-sacrificing, I promise you, six years. Six years of feeling like something of a fool, six years of letting your kids get away with stuff you never would have gotten away with, six years of feeling like your inner child has lost a fucking lottery, and after that the hard part is behind you – a decade or two earlier than it was when our parents parented us, if you recall. For my wife and I, it meant it was that long before it ever got any easier for many of the parents around us, and neither the strictest ones nor the least so were immune, which, BTW, fits the social science study data.

Some sacrifice is a good thing, sometimes.

 

Jeff

Jan. 16, 2016

#SixYearChallenge

Other Than Every Other Kind Ever Tried . . .

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. . . social science is the worst.

You know what? I’m tired of being four steps behind what’s going on in the worlds of social and brain science, really, really tired of still finding myself beating that nature versus nurture horse, an argument that’s really more of an elephant burial. That horse is dead and gone, trampled to dust and there is nothing to mark the spot where it was except memory.

Right?

I’m sure it was less than half a year ago that while reading The Blank Slate that I was forced to confess that my conception of the mind was suffering exactly the errors Pinker described, that I really wasn’t giving chemistry, biology, etc., their due, and I still unconsciously and tacitly thought of the mind as somehow magical. I could reject the soul, but it had only morphed into the magic, pure energy of the mind or something. I hadn’t thought it all the way through, clearly. I’m cured now, or at least I’ve taken the cure. On the one hand, I feel its immediate effect, and it certainly will work – but on the other, I’ve just seen how patient this disease is, so, vigilance, I guess.

All the ramifications of the work summarized in The Blank Slate are boiling over these days, and yes, it’s true: Left wing ideology has had far too firm a hand in social science generally. However, contrary to what all the talk out there about irreplicable  studies and the beating social science is taking, this isn’t news, that ideology is what drives the studies of human things, crime, child-rearing, politics, etc.

Most of those things have been the province of religious teaching and law, forever, right? That’s ideological. So let’s put this thing in perspective. Religious teaching and law is pretty static. The religious – fair to associate today’s political Right with religion, I think? – weren’t interested in social science, and if the great preponderance of social scientists were from the Left, then it’s probably true enough to say that the Right just wasn’t f@#$%^g interested. So social science just marched off towards the future and turned Left at nearly every fork in the road.

Right? I mean, correct?

So now, that’s the debate, between a science that has been left to its own devices, the checks and balances of the opposing viewpoint absent during the centuries of its development (maybe this is one major cause for the apparently widening divide between the secular and the religious generally) – and the same old static, incurious attitudes of the world’s churches (not to mention the world’s parents), now armed with the tools of medical and brain science and knee-jerk Twitter clickbait headlines. Of course the researchers in the articles rarely share the world-shattering enthusiasm of the headlines . . .

That is today’s academic scandal: headlines that say what their articles do not support, sometimes even saying the opposite. I wonder, how many times when we see “an internet search produced 10,000 articles that support X” was it only the flashy headline that did and not the text?

The point is that, just as Leftist ideologies emerged as a potential solution for the existing power structures of the church and aristocracy (remember, democracy was leftist and revolutionary against the conservative systems it replaced too), so too has the more particular Leftism of social science come into being as a counterpoint to the existing way people understood our human interactions. The existing system that the new Leftist social science would replace was religious, authoritarian and often brutal. The idea perhaps, that it was a new field of knowledge and that it somehow wasn’t ideology that drove it before, or that it doesn’t matter that it was, is bogus. The battle in this sense isn’t Left VS Truth as some might narrate it, it’s Left VS Right as always. Of course, as always, there’s not much room for truth in either camp.

From what I understand, ‘authoritarian’ is exactly the complaint levelled at the Leftist professors directing their researchers, so we should probably view that as an old problem, authority, not as an inherent failing of the Left alone. (That’s my focus, authority and force or not, there’s a meaningful way to view people and the world if you like social science.)

So yes, the political Right should keep a foot in the door of social science, get involved in the debate, provide necessary criticism and keep it from straying into dogma, it’s just that the political Right  may not have the will to do any science themselves and if they’re going to correct these wandering Lefties, they’ll need to get up to speed in the subject matter, they’ll need an opposing theory, and maybe one that’s better than ‘that’s just the way it is,’ that is to say, more detailed. It’s point by point that we (social scientists and Lefties, separately and together) have slid into an ideological compromising position, but it’s still going to have to be a point by point refutation. No scientific community is going back to the Church and rolling over to the doctrine of ‘that’s just the way it is’ anytime soon. Scientists aren’t declaring that the world is changed with the discovery of every new allele, that’s a writer’s function, and it’s there – here – where ideology has always ruled. Not a lot of academics are looking for a way to eviscerate liberal sciences, even geneticists . . . it’s cultural, this little war.

The scientists are producing some gems on the nature side of the old argument, and some folks are employing them as projectiles against social science generally, which is already hurting from no fault of anyone else’s, but there’s a too-easy mistake to make here. It looks for the world like good, secular science VS old, ideologically-tainted science, but that is a rare, PR friendly battle in a nasty old war. The general flow of this war is the world’s old guard, old money, authority structures, still the Churches, all against modernism, liberalism and against the science that supports it.

The geneticists, the scientists, they’re doing the tests, and they don’t seem to be doing it for any particular ideology today so far as we know, although it may be possible to say that the entire political spectrum has been sliding to the Right and so maybe that effect hasn’t exempted all scientists. If the gene crowd is Leftist, perhaps they are perceptually more so than in past days, but in reality probably a bit less. I mean logically, a committed Lefty’s motivations towards genetics while it’s making such gains would be comparable to the conservatives of the past’s enthusiasm for psychology anyway, but the point is, the geneticists are probably not pooling their money to fund campaigns against the psychology department, are they? Hmm. Come to think of it, maybe they are competing for the same funds . . . please don’t tell me that’s all there is to this!

The science that conflicts with the old social science, that’s how science works, point, counterpoint. The PR that’s out there about it, though?

That’s not really coming from science, at all, is it?

That’s an anti-science interest using one branch of science against the other and ultimately against secular science generally, maybe. It’s either that or it’s just the Biology department being sore winners and taking it upon themselves to finish the Psych department off once and for all.

 

Jeff

 

Dec. 4th., 2015

What if I’m the Dumb One?

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It was a funny tweet, a few or several days ago, I don’t remember who said it, I can’t give credit. It wasn’t me though:

“It just occurred to me – what if I’m the dumb one?” – Jeb Bush

I’ve always assumed that everybody thinks they’re smart. Well maybe everybody doesn’t think they’re smarter than the folks around them, but we all think we’re smart enough, right? Like we all have to think we know enough to get ourselves around, we have to assume we understand things, don’t we? Otherwise how do we get out of bed? How would we face the world if we really knew we were going to lose most of our transactions, if we really thought other folks knew so much more than we did?

My family all thought we were clever, well, except Dad, maybe, but all my siblings have or had degrees, mostly earned later in life, not straight out of high school. All but me, but I’m the only one that both survived and lived a surburban family life, same job for thirty-plus years and kids.

When I was maybe fourteen, we bought a supermarket IQ test booklet out of the comic rack and I think I beat everyone on it, got some crazy high number that made me think I had a brain forever afterwards . . . LOL. Doesn’t sound too clever when you put it like that, does it? (For the record, on better tests, it’s my oldest sister who has the most horsepower upstairs, I think we all concede it. Also, the evaluation I took when I got depressed and dropped out of school said I was “oh yes, very smart, but a real dreamer,” something like that.) I really do think my mother and my siblings were and are a smart bunch, and I think I was competitive around the kitchen table, but again – because we must trust ourselves and our minds, objectivity isn’t really possible, is it? Even our dog has to think he is looking after us, that he knows best. This is a huge source of conflict and stress for creatures in large social groups, I guess, to feel necessary and relevant in the face of some obvious redundancy. In order for us to feel important, apparently we need to think our minds are important too. We need to tell ourselves we know something they don’t. ‘Them’ meaning everybody else, our competition.

So it should be no surprise when a fool like me appears to think he’s clever – and it’s no surprise to me if you think you are too. We sort of have to.

It’s a puzzle, isn’t it?

How can billions of people and hundreds or thousands of distinct voices all think they’re right?

. . . so what I’m saying, Jeb, I guess, is . . . uh . . . yeah. Horrifying as it might sound, it’s a possibility we really do have to consider. Due diligence and all.

Sorry.

Jeff,

Nov. 14, 2015

Surviving Steven Pinker – Abuse with an Excuse and the Blank Slate

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Surviving Steven Pinker – Abuse with an Excuse and the Blank Slate

I’ve said many times that some folks could do with a better version of atheism, that the species of atheism I so often encounter online is weak and it’s the one the Church is happy to contend with. Having said that, even so, even though I thought I was already there waiting for folks to catch up, I must confess: the Blank Slate, Steven Pinker’s thorough dissection of residual spirituality in intellectual and scientific thinking, has busted me, uncovered some leftover magical thinking in me too. Specifically, I’m having to face that I was still subscribing to some version of the Ghost in the Machine (the idea that while our bodies have been shown to be physical things, subject to biology and evolution, we still imagine a soul, a spirit, or a “mind” as a magical, non-physical thing). I still wasn’t quite seeing thought and feeling, our complex inner life as resulting from the processes of the machine. I think I was denying the ghost, but I hadn’t yet re-assigned its functions to the machine – and maybe that’s the main failing Steven was addressing, maybe a lot of us go that far and no farther along that line of reasoning.

Maybe we all want to cling to that idea, spirituality. After all, life as a machine, or as a component in the Big Machine, doesn’t seem to us to fulfill all the needs our complex inner life has. It’s understandable, especially because the idea of the ghost may actually be an evolved thought, the built-in way we understand the difference between living and non-living things, between dead and only sleeping people. At some point in our evolution, that idea was probably a revolution, a new level of understanding. But all that was in a different world, the world where our development took place is not the world most of us inhabit today.

This is a strange sort of plagiarism, I’m mostly just sharing Pinker’s book with you here, getting the idea out there. I must say, though, while Pinker made a solid case, my efforts at supporting his case in the preceding paragraph are my own. He didn’t say anything about the effect of or the cause of our first inklings of the idea of the invisible spirit that we naturally think is behind the appearances of life. He simply made a case that we do tend to think in those terms, and for natural reasons. He’s making a case for genes and evolution in this book, and for the cultural effects of false, primitive ideas – but not so much the effects of them in the deep past, more just through the latest century or two.

I don’t purport to have explained The Blank Slate here, proved it or anything; for that, I strongly recommend the book. It’s probably the best non-fiction thing I ever read, I actually stayed thrilled all the way through. Learning can be fun and Nature/Nurture questions are very close to my heart – so buy your own. My copy will be kept for reference.

Moving on.

I once wrote a post or two, “Hearing What You Don’t Want to Hear,” in which I bragged that at this advanced age, almost 55, I was still willing to risk hearing opposing points of view, that I was still trying to escape the trap of Confirmation Bias.

https://neighsayersotherstuff.wordpress.com/2014/04/05/hearing-what-you-dont-want-to-hear/

https://neighsayersotherstuff.wordpress.com/2014/08/12/tearing-skeptic-magazine-a-new-one/

(not crucial to this post, the point’s been made . . . )

At that time it was about a Skeptic article regarding the objective reality of the existence (or not) of Jesus, which honestly, is only a tangential pursuit of mine.

The Blank Slate appeared to threaten my main cause – a damning critique of the use of punishment in child-rearing and elsewhere – I was pretty terrified to read it. Before I even began it, I already knew how my intellect, education, and access to intellectuals stacked up against Pinker’s. If Steven invalidated me, then invalid, incorrect and irrelevant I would indeed be, in my own estimation as well as in everyone else’s. Nevertheless, fearlessly, or rather with a strong faith in my ability to rationalize anything, I read it anyway. Let the chips fall where they may; if my cause didn’t survive, then it didn’t deserve to.

Still, tough to say after being on this train of thought for some thirty years. Worryable, to use a word coined by Jagger regarding Richards’ arrest and trial in Canada. Scary.

But I read it, and while my fears weren’t calmed through most of it, the joy of learning, and learning from as bright a light as Pinker, and about my favourite subject, made it a pleasure. As it turned out, “Children” was the second last chapter, so, non-fiction it may be, but he kept me in suspense almost until the very end. With that end, I shouldn’t probably have worried. First, he let me and anyone else who worries about abuse off the hook by exempting abuse from the discussion. As regards child-rearing, the disciplines of the study of Human Nature concern themselves with personalities, with traits – not with damage.

Spoiler Alert!

It was scary, though. He spent a lot of time refuting that a child’s personality is in any way under its parents’ control. Again, it was in terms of personality, and relative intelligence, but he basically pointed out that, other than providing a safe environment or not, parents have zero influence on their kids after conception. This, from some good theoretical science and a whole lot of adoption/sibling/twin studies and analyses:

First of all, intelligence and testable traits are somewhere between 40% and 50% heritable, genetic;

Individual, random stimulus (individual, personal experience, perhaps the meme that it’s not our problems but our reaction to them that make people what they are, really, still unknown factors) accounts for 50% of traits;

Common environment –shared households and parents – show almost no effect whatsoever! Pinker suggests that he’s being generous when he allows it to claim a large part of the remaining 10% of the pie.

A big part of the explanation of the parental inability to influence children is that kids learn their values and strategies from their peers, other kids. It’s certainly fair to say that the phenomenon Pinker is debunking is epitomized by the idea of increasing your kids’ intelligence by playing Mozart to her in vitro. It must be, because he said it.

I think what he’s said is that there is no way to make your child smarter than his genes, and no way to direct our children’s interest or capacity for what we hope they’ll do.

This seems to be the upshot of combining what I thought before and what The Blank Slate makes clear: the negative power of parenting (the destructive power of abuse) has no positive correlate. There isn’t a way to ‘enhance’ our children, only a myriad of ways to damage them. And the next thought that follows is this: if we have no power to improve the next generation of people, and only the power to hurt, then maybe that kills any sort of ‘greater good’ talk used to justify punishment of children, at all. Perhaps, with no up-side to punishing, no possible improvement, what I’ve always held to be true really is: only the down-side, only the damage matters. Maybe if our only function for our kids is safety and protection, then we need to practice it against ourselves a little more.

Perhaps, just like Steven says in the book, an honest look at the facts, free of magical thinking, will actually provide real life reasons why our morality is important, and why our moral sphere tends to expand, to be more inclusive. If our myths leave our kids out of the circle, maybe science and honesty will bring them back in.

For that bit of hope, Dr. Pinker, I thank you. Seriously.

In my personal life I recently witnessed an ongoing unfolding tragedy that would seem to bear out the idea, that positive influences have only a tiny fraction of the power of negative ones – possibly due to the simple fact that positive influences can’t be beaten into us, that backing positive influences up with force turns them into negative ones. We all enjoy hearing stories where a positive influence saves a kid, of course, but those stories are that good because of their relative rarity. If that was what we all saw most days, those stories wouldn’t be quite so satisfying.

That is a sad, sad state of affairs, isn’t it?

Again, my function, what passes for my talent, is only to help see the problems, the problems as they really are, in the hopes that eventually a solution might be found. Apologies, I know this was a real quickie. The conclusions here definitely want to be expanded, looked into a lot more closely.

Of course, I hope to do that. Sometime. Of course, I’m nobody, a tradesman. If anybody smart would like to pick this up, well . . . that’d be great . . .

😉

Jeff

August 31st., 2015

Oh yeah – Five Stars, for sure!

Somebody mind telling me who beat it out for the Pulitzer?

Nature VS Nurture – Traits

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Nature VS Nurture – Traits

I’m not saying that we are born with blank slates; that would be my first assumption too at this point in the conversation if I were listening rather than speaking, but no. Clearly, if our slates were really blank, how would we ever boot up, how would learning ever have a starting point? What I am saying is that we write very aggressively upon our children’s slates, and we start before we have any idea what it is we’re writing over, and before long what was there before we started our writing is buried forever, indecipherable.
The Nature VS Nurture argument has moved, I hope, finally, from the Blank Slate VS pre-determinism to the Unknown Slate VS Original Sin – at least that’s how I would frame it as regards children and parenting. Now I’m aware that the geneticists of the world will say that our slates are becoming known, more so every day, and yes, but I think we need some more social science before we have a meaningful list of traits to match with our genetic discoveries! I mean if ‘persistence’ or ‘mild-tempered’ are simple things that are either present or not, yes or no? If the qualities we ascribe to one another are also unimpacted by life experience and we can match them to a gene, terrific. But they’re not, are they?
The genetics, and its daughter-disciplines, they are coming along, no argument. Genetics and its offspring will have terrific success when it can be applied to things we understand, like medicine. However, they are already way out ahead of our ability to understand social things and how to live. Our DNA is real; of course, ‘traits’ are imagined things, mirages. I suspect that the old issues are not going away, and Free Will may still apply.
The traits, our behaviour – that we may still have to figure out in the human sphere, not with microscopes, but with honesty and love.
Jeff
06/20/2015