My goal is to be as informative as I can here on the Home Front, but if I were to review all my posts — well, once or twice I may have fallen into the trap that Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry warns about in “Almost Everything You Read about Parenting on the Internet is Wrong.”
The parenting stories that are all the rage have all the hallmarks of why our current bourgeoisie is insane. Here are a few:
- A puritanical bourgeois view of success. The goal of education, if you read these stories, is for your children to have good grades, sit still, go to a good school, and have high lifetime income. That’s it… The idea that the goal of education should be the freedom and happiness of your adult child (let alone helping them grow into fellowship with, say, a deity) seems not to have occurred to anyone.
- A purely mechanical view of being a parent. None of these actually describe being a parent and helping a child grow. What they describe is the mechanics of being a parent. At what time should the kids go to bed. How much allowance should you give them… The very word “parenting”, the neologism being currently used, enforces this view. This is parenthood-as-sex-manual… Yeah sure technique is fine but it’s not the heart of it.
- A ridiculous pseudo-empiricism. …No parenting blog post is possible without citing A STUDY. Here’s the thing: there’s almost nothing that proves less than a parenting study because it is one of the fields where the causal density is the highest and where it is nigh impossible to isolate one potential cause from the others. The vast majority of parenting studies are just throwing darts on the wall, and the few that have some credibility merely corroborate common sense…
Read more here.