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.
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.
So basically Parentification but worse.
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.
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.
Thanks, yeah, it really tends to make people choose between varying degrees of shitty. :/
This?
No, lmao, i meant the pioneers of the soviet union.
Pardon the pun, but hallelujah! 😂
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.
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(!)
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.
im guessing that u dont know what its like to be abused if you think ”gentle parenting” is automatically bad.
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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
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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.
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.
yeah people are almost offended by my choosing not to have kids. my sister started sending me weird shit about antinatalism or something like that trying to see if i was into that. i wasn’t and im not.
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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.
