Regarding the question of victim blaming (a comment also brutally murdered), sometimes it's a sane question to ask: if you never look into the contributing factors of a situation you can never stop it from happening again.
Put your pretensions about the sacred nature of life aside and understand that children are a pain in the arse to have, and the disagreeable son of disagreeable parents even more so.
But I maintain to this day that I was never really an arsehole.
Also, if people stop having kids we're going just as extinct as if we have too many. Learn a bit of moderation.
Considering that, we need to make having kids a more viable option than it is (and for a lot of the most useful people in society).
everything that bothers me about my kids they learned from me and my partner. and everything bad about how we treat our kids we got from our parents.
same goes for some of the good things too.
but i hope that i manage to skip some of the bad things i experienced from my parents and add some good things that they didn't do so my kids have a better experience than me. and i hope the trend continues.
As for me, if I ever sort my shit out and get around to having kids, I'll try to teach them to challenge me when and only when I'm being unreasonable - and how to tell the difference between.
Then we'll navigate interpersonal difficulties as they inevitably come.
children have a very different idea of what's reasonable. for example my kids find it unreasonable that i don't allow them to take sodas and junk-food to eat in school, when many other kids bring that. they also don't understand that they can't watch tv and play on the computer all day, which is especially difficult because they see me on the computer all day due to my work. nevertheless, having kids is very rewarding, so i hope you'll get there some day.
It doesn't have to be that way: the best way to learn is by not repeating the mistakes of others, but we overpersonalise the situation if cute and innocent puppies were involved, and especially if we were the puppies.
Compare that to the situation where you saw some idiot kid fuck himself up at school, and immediately learned not to do that.
Why learn from the latter but not the former? The stakes in either situation are equally high.
As to how we act, in the negation of what not to do there is the freedom to think and be creative; just be reasonable about it.
it takes some time to recognize what are mistakes. i didn't notice many things until i saw my kids do them and only that made me stop doing that myself.
From my experience, people that respond with that kind of question aren't asking in good faith. They struggle to sympathize with the fact that parents can make mistakes and be wrong. I also don't agree with you that the implied question about victim blaming is sane to ask when the victim in question is a child, and the power imbalance is so large. I am under no illusions about how fun children are to raise. I can't say for sure what the intent behind the questions were because I didn't see them, but I personally do not give them the benefit of the doubt.
Honestly, I'm less concerned with whether or not a comment is made in good faith, as whether or not it fosters interesting or useful conversation.
Questions made in bad faith generally get rebutted (and downvoted) but bad faith arguments are really only fundamentally uninteresting if they've already been so thoroughly rebutted that there's no further conversation to have.
And the fundamental truth about it is that our society isn't even mature enough to ask the questions - which is why they even work as bad faith rhetorical devices in the first place.
But either way, I wouldn't go as far as asked in bad faith - his comment was more snarky or snide.
The reason why I called it bad faith is because I am not seeing the possiblity of a positive follow up to your response to that question. In my experience, it's usually a way for them to make a rebuttal that shows a larger lack of sympathy. More than a few times the follow up to me acknowledging that I was likely difficult to raise was them using that to dismiss or invalidate the seriousness of situation. I am not sure why the default assumption someone would have is that you failed to see the situation from your parent's perspective. But I also recognize that I may just personally be tired of having to respond to that question.
If the discussion goes on long enough, one of the more interesting conclusions is the classical ethics question, what kind of net benefit will justify an evil act? Not really on topic for HN though.
As per the guidelines, anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
The question of why we are the way we are and (even intergenerationally) we seem to be unable to do anything about it seems interesting enough to qualify to me.
For me, it is that implied assumption in it - if 5 years old (or whatever) is annoying he deserves abuse.
Because fact is, even when the kid is difficult, telling them stuff you wrote here makes everything worst. It is not about teaching them better behavior or otherwise working on them. It is adult taking revenge so that adult feels good.
It's not that the child deserves abuse, it's that parents are put in a situation that they cannot handle without the tools to deal with it.
The situation is never going to change if you refuse to consider the contributing factors - a stubborn child is hard to deal with, especially under resource restricted circumstances.
Denying that reality does nothing to improve either the child's or parent's behaviour or the manners in which each responds to the others.
I am parent and one of my kids is stubborn. (One of my friends described her as "prototype of stubbornness", it was really defining temperamental feature, and not just my observation.) Stubborn kid is not what causes abuse, commitment to absolute control over the kid does. There are definitely more difficult issues with kids then stubbornness.
And that is the issue with this argument - perfectly normal kids gets treated badly and blamed for perfectly normal behavior. Yes, kids with issues end up being abused more often, but you do not even describe yourself having adhd or autism or some other hard issue.
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When I became parent, I became less tolerant of these "maybe the kid was just too hard". Because, I realized that decision between abuse or not is fairly often conscious choice. Adults say hurtful things to manipulate kids into what they want or to vent their emotions. They know full well what they are doing, they just think they are entitled to do it. Or they genuinely think that the kid is not entitled better treatment and deserves it.
It is not always inability to do otherwise in technical sense. It is unwillingness to do so and sense that it is just to hurt the kid.
When I became parent, I gained some insight into some of what my mom did. More understanding did not lead to "parents were actually right I see now" nonsense. I became retroactively angry, because I realized how much of "bad stuff" was knowing and intentional. (It was not even abuse, nothing that bad. More of, stuff like insulting me to manipulate me into something. That sort of more minor stuff. But still, conscious.)
i think you are talking about very different experiences. neither can be generalized. and accepting that the parents had a weakness that led to their treatment doesn't mean that they were right. you can be wrong but still be unable to do it right.
ITB > Were you a troublemaker ?
I might've been a bit of a disagreeable cunt, but I was never fucking Hitler.