There's an assumption underpinning both the book (per your review) and the review itself that I find problematic — that parents actually raise their kids, or that parents are the arbiters of this trauma/resilience continuum. And no — I will not be echoing the rationalist zeitgeist by bring up nature versus nurture. I think the genetic de…
There's an assumption underpinning both the book (per your review) and the review itself that I find problematic — that parents actually raise their kids, or that parents are the arbiters of this trauma/resilience continuum. And no — I will not be echoing the rationalist zeitgeist by bring up nature versus nurture. I think the genetic determinists with their beloved twin evidence are even more misguided. Instead, I will paraphrase Neufeld and Maté (of Hold On to Your Kids) and suggest that parents don't really raise their kids.
Culture raises kids. Of course parents are a part of the culture equation, but an increasingly small part.
Most kids are wards of the state for 6-10 hours per weekday. Overlapping with much of the school day, but extending well into after-school hours, they are under heavy peer influence. Besides that, they feed heavily on media (with social media tipping that scale by an order of magnitude). As such, parents are a distant 4th place — even the helicopter ones.
So, while the problems raised may be legitimate, and the psychological analysis may have merit, the snake oil here is parental agency. And that's the case for 95-99% of Americans.
If we roll the clock back 100 years, will we find more parental agency? Yes. But we'll also find a completely different culture in terms of school/peers/media — so good luck figuring out "what changed". It all changed.
I like to use Dazed & Confused as exhibit A of this change being long in the making. You can already see the transition from resilience (not necessarily enviable resilience, btw) to trauma in early 70s Texas depicted in that movie.
Christina came from bad things and was fortunate enough to land in a foster home with a truly resilient head of household. It didn't matter — culture did a number on her and she still can't see how lucky she had it.
For the most part, nobody wants to hear that parents don't matter. But at least with the genetic determinist argument, parents are given a digestible excuse for why their kids might suck. The tough part about my alternative "parents don't matter" take is that they actually do have the ability to do something — it's just (nearly) impossibly hard, a la Viggo as Captain Fantastic.
So I don't think we disagree as much as you think. I can see where you could read a strong parental responsibility vibe, since it was told from the perspective of a parent, and most of the anecdotes are (necessarily) from the perspective of parents, but I think this is mostly a cultural shift (as evidence by the reference to therapeutic culture and all the statistics on the broader rise). Also the final story of the egg-eating pre-schooler was a story of culture.
That said, I think parents can have a great deal of impact as it relates to the occasional extreme negative experiences. It's hard to guarantee a great kid through parenting, but I think the probability you can really screw a kid up is much higher (the canonical example would be massive physical abuse) and I also think there are some experiences which are so singularly negative that if you can avoid them through parental intervention then there's a decent chance you will have dramatically changed the trajectory of things. (To flip the previous example by preventing some horrific experience like being assaulted or raped.)
So yes culture and society mostly trumps parenting (if we're putting genetics off-limits) but parents can have an outsized impacts when it comes to negative black swans.
As it pertains to black swans, I guess I would double down on my assertion. Culture will determine how the child deals with black swans.
As evidenced by the examples and your discussion, perception is nearly as variable as experience — with similar black swans serving as character building events (resilience) and character damaging events (trauma). In case of a black swan, if a parent says "I love you, but you will have to toughen up" and culture says "you poor thing, you're damaged and we need to nurture your damage", the same formula as I described above will play out. For the majority of the population, culture will determine the path.
The only way parents get to win is through "extreme" parenting combined with "extreme" barricading from culture.
So, I'm not sure we disagree at all. It's just that I think the gulf is SO wide, that the discussion is only relevant to extreme outlier parents, which stands in contradiction to the very idea of pop psychology/sociology and its incremental solutions.
There's an assumption underpinning both the book (per your review) and the review itself that I find problematic — that parents actually raise their kids, or that parents are the arbiters of this trauma/resilience continuum. And no — I will not be echoing the rationalist zeitgeist by bring up nature versus nurture. I think the genetic determinists with their beloved twin evidence are even more misguided. Instead, I will paraphrase Neufeld and Maté (of Hold On to Your Kids) and suggest that parents don't really raise their kids.
Culture raises kids. Of course parents are a part of the culture equation, but an increasingly small part.
Most kids are wards of the state for 6-10 hours per weekday. Overlapping with much of the school day, but extending well into after-school hours, they are under heavy peer influence. Besides that, they feed heavily on media (with social media tipping that scale by an order of magnitude). As such, parents are a distant 4th place — even the helicopter ones.
So, while the problems raised may be legitimate, and the psychological analysis may have merit, the snake oil here is parental agency. And that's the case for 95-99% of Americans.
If we roll the clock back 100 years, will we find more parental agency? Yes. But we'll also find a completely different culture in terms of school/peers/media — so good luck figuring out "what changed". It all changed.
I like to use Dazed & Confused as exhibit A of this change being long in the making. You can already see the transition from resilience (not necessarily enviable resilience, btw) to trauma in early 70s Texas depicted in that movie.
Another example I like to use is an episode of the Heavyweight podcast: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/heavyweight/j4hlkd/11-christina
Christina came from bad things and was fortunate enough to land in a foster home with a truly resilient head of household. It didn't matter — culture did a number on her and she still can't see how lucky she had it.
For the most part, nobody wants to hear that parents don't matter. But at least with the genetic determinist argument, parents are given a digestible excuse for why their kids might suck. The tough part about my alternative "parents don't matter" take is that they actually do have the ability to do something — it's just (nearly) impossibly hard, a la Viggo as Captain Fantastic.
I have talked about the dominance of culture as opposed to parents before:
https://www.wearenotsaved.com/p/the-ineffability-of-conservatism
So I don't think we disagree as much as you think. I can see where you could read a strong parental responsibility vibe, since it was told from the perspective of a parent, and most of the anecdotes are (necessarily) from the perspective of parents, but I think this is mostly a cultural shift (as evidence by the reference to therapeutic culture and all the statistics on the broader rise). Also the final story of the egg-eating pre-schooler was a story of culture.
That said, I think parents can have a great deal of impact as it relates to the occasional extreme negative experiences. It's hard to guarantee a great kid through parenting, but I think the probability you can really screw a kid up is much higher (the canonical example would be massive physical abuse) and I also think there are some experiences which are so singularly negative that if you can avoid them through parental intervention then there's a decent chance you will have dramatically changed the trajectory of things. (To flip the previous example by preventing some horrific experience like being assaulted or raped.)
So yes culture and society mostly trumps parenting (if we're putting genetics off-limits) but parents can have an outsized impacts when it comes to negative black swans.
As it pertains to black swans, I guess I would double down on my assertion. Culture will determine how the child deals with black swans.
As evidenced by the examples and your discussion, perception is nearly as variable as experience — with similar black swans serving as character building events (resilience) and character damaging events (trauma). In case of a black swan, if a parent says "I love you, but you will have to toughen up" and culture says "you poor thing, you're damaged and we need to nurture your damage", the same formula as I described above will play out. For the majority of the population, culture will determine the path.
The only way parents get to win is through "extreme" parenting combined with "extreme" barricading from culture.
So, I'm not sure we disagree at all. It's just that I think the gulf is SO wide, that the discussion is only relevant to extreme outlier parents, which stands in contradiction to the very idea of pop psychology/sociology and its incremental solutions.