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My family did this too. It did make me a condescending asshole, but worse than that, it taught me to be paralyzingly afraid of doing The Wrong Thing.

Did it protect me from driving drunk when I was in college? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from having a healthy social life because I couldn't engage with any sort of normal behavior. Did it protect me from getting on drugs? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from getting on desperately needed psychiatric medication because that was for Other People, Who Are Too Weak To Handle Their Problems Properly. Did it protect my parents from sleeping around? Yeah, but it also locked them into a miserable marriage for half their lives, leaving both them and their children with heaping scoops of extra trauma.

Maybe that trade-off is worth it, but if you're going down this route, make sure your kids know how to experiment and screw up sometimes, too.

I'm inclined to say that a better solution is to recognize that none of us exist in a vacuum. When our societies are full of toxicity and manipulation and brainrot, we can't escape those things without cutting off a part of ourselves. Sometimes we have to do that, but ultimately what we need is a healthy culture to live in - and if we don't have one, we should be working to make one.

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onecommentman 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think you trivialize the benefit of avoiding early-life-damaging activities like alcohol (one in six to one in ten drinkers become problem drinkers, destroying lives, drunk driving), drugs (visit an NA meeting or walk down certain streets in San Francisco), and early unwanted pregnancies (smashing dreams or leading to the morally challenging road of abortion).

The struggles of single parenthood for both the child-rearing parent and the children of divorce are very real and well-documented, much less the trauma of the actual divorce process. (Why would you wish that on your parents and yourself?) Methinks you trivialize this too.

Keeping you away from illegal drugs meant you had the opportunity to get properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication instead of the too-common path of self-medicating with the recreational drug-du-jour, with much worse long-term consequences.

You had it good kid — there are millions of Americans who will happily explain why they wish they could have traded places with you. You know the YOLO fad passed so quickly because kids realized the permanent scars left by “experimenting”, especially if there are no rich parents to pick up the pieces.

There is a continuum between “living in a vacuum” (whatever that is) and swimming in human equivalent of sewage. You do have options: get out of the cesspool to pleasanter environments (which very much do exist everywhere…a vacuum analogy is bizarre), stay in the cesspool and try to drain it (noble but often misguided…there’s a new dump everyday), wallow in the cesspool (with various coping strategies), or by wallowing in the cesspool become one more contribution to it.

Often finding an alternative healthy culture is more effective than fixing a dysfunctional one…great truth of the 1970s. People happily cut off “a part of ourselves” all the time. Oncologists, for example, for big bucks and grateful patients. A tumor is a more useful analogy than a vacuum, in my experience.

And there really is no such thing as “culture” at the individual level, but many different shifting subcultures, overlapping, spawning, growing and waning. You pays your money and take your choice.

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anthk 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

On sex, sex is healthy, but you need contraceptives.

Alcohol it's a drug, with a literal letal withdrawal (delirium tremens). That's right. But I can't agree with your prudeness on sex.

I wish the American people began behaving like Europeans where sex is not taken like a drug or something harmful at all since decades.

If any, pregnancies are a thing because of the lack of sex education and safe learning/practicing.

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rachofsunshine 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not saying that this more conservative/cautious style of parenting has no value, or even that it is on net the wrong approach. I'm saying that it has costs of its own that are important to recognize and potentially devastating.

> The struggles of single parenthood for both the child-rearing parent and the children of divorce are very real and well-documented

The question isn't "does it suck to be a single parent or the child thereof". It's "is it worse than the alternative?" This is "people who see a doctor are more likely to die"-style reasoning that conflates a preexisting problem with an imperfect solution.

Kids need examples of loving and trusting relationships. That's how they learn how to build them themselves. They learn conflict resolution, compromise, and communication by observing their parents' relationship. And when that relationship is at best one of civil distance, a child can't learn what they need to learn. It's even worse when - as in my case - the kid is the channel through which a lot of the marital conflict plays out.

When my parents finally did split up (after I was already an adult), it was a relief to everyone involved. They're both better off. If they ever tried to get back together, I'm pretty sure I and my brothers and sisters would go slap them and tell them to not do the dumb thing.

> Keeping you away from illegal drugs meant you had the opportunity to get properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication instead of the too-common path of self-medicating with the recreational drug-du-jour, with much worse long-term consequences.

Yes, but you're leaving out the part where unmanaged mental illness almost killed me before I got on properly prescribed and managed psychiatric medication. In almost every timeline but this one, it probably did kill me.

> You know the YOLO fad passed so quickly because kids realized the permanent scars left by “experimenting”, especially if there are no rich parents to pick up the pieces.

I take a different lesson from this. I think your point about "no rich parents to pick up the pieces" is one of the reasons that millennials and zoomers are struggling: we/they've grown up in a competitive world that doesn't allow them room for normal human error.

Making mistakes - or the safety to make them - is a critical part of growing as a person. It's an investment, the same way a company invests in R&D. It pays dividends. But it has short term costs you can't pay if you're always trying to make ends meet.

Yes, there are experiments you shouldn't perform because their costs outweigh their benefits, but most youthful indiscretions are not irreversibly damaging. One way to tell is that many of the richest and most powerful people around had fairly wild youths and tended to be fairly aggressively risk-taking.

	▲	MichaelZuo 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Kids need examples of loving and trusting relationships. That's how they learn how to build them themselves. They learn conflict resolution, compromise, and communication by observing their parents' relationship. Since when? Many kids grew up learning these things from interacting with other kids, or via the school of hard knocks. I doubt it’s even 80% of the population that learned primarily from observing their parents.

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iforgot22 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It worked for me. The one negative side effect was a bit of arrogance, which I actively worked on in college. It was also crucial to figure out that some kids were better than me, and it was better to hang around them.

There was also an "everybody has problems" support group at school that they kept encouraging us to join, but I said nah, I don't have problems. Most of the kids in that group ended up with depression.

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juliusgeo 3 days ago | parent [-]

I am someone who was raised with a very similar set of values. I was homeschooled, and often believed that "public-schooled" kids had a worse, more limited set of values. I was not allowed to use computers till I was in 11th grade, and dove into reading as an alternative. Very little screen time, but I ended up with a lot of issues that did not even begin manifesting until I was an adult. I would urge you to re-examine your beliefs around this topic. It is too easy to elide the issues by reframing them as "a bit of arrogance". Based on my own experience, listening to the people around me, they are not experiencing it as "a bit" of arrogance. It is too easy, almost intoxicatingly so, to believe that you are better than those struggling. As long as you frame your own struggles as unique, you will deprive yourself of both 1) commiseration and 2) knowledge on how to progress past. Rather than say "everybody who sought solutions to their issues had issues", ask the question "how many people that did have issues did not seek solutions".

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iforgot22 3 days ago | parent [-]

Homeschooling is too far for my liking. Kids really need to be around other kids. If anything, my siblings and I needed a bit more of that, because our neighborhood had 0 kids and my parents kept forcing us to hang out with their adult friends. But it was still ok, we still had real enough childhoods.

I started going to Catholic church in college, against my parents' wishes. I realized that everyone does have problems. But that high school support group was the classic where... idk a nice way to say this, kids self-diagnosed mental problems to feel special. It wasn't about self-improvement.

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juliusgeo 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I can understand your POV perhaps surprisingly well, as my father was secular growing up and then chose to join Protestantism in college (against his parents wishes). I wonder if at the end of the day it's just teenagers wanting to rebel. My dad's parents were secular, so he became Christian, and I became secular again. I can definitely relate to not enjoying support groups where the suffering is "valorized" to a certain extent. I think I was mostly reacting to the sentiment of superiority in general, but that is also an interesting case because it is pretty clear that families like that tend to have better outcomes overall (at least in monetary terms). My POV is that WASP culture in general breeds these perspectives, and also reinforces them because of the monetary and social inertia.

	▲	iforgot22 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The flip flopping of religion is maybe just that. It wasn't really the case for me, cause my parents were Catholic but became quietly atheist, and I didn't know until they started complaining to me. But it happens a lot. It seems to work for WASP. Superiority (or I guess family pride) is also big where my parents are from, Iraq and Iran. But my parents didn't take it in moderation, so the outcome wasn't good in the end for them.

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graemep 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Kids really need to be around other kids

they do not have to do that in school. My (home educated) kids did lots of classes and activities where they met other kids. A lot of schools tell kids "you are not here to socialise!" and have strict rules about what you do when which also limits interaction (at least here in the UK)>

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iforgot22 2 days ago | parent [-]

They can also get some of this from non-school activities, but personally I would want it to happen during those ~7 hours they spend every day in school too. They'll even interact with other kids during class, just in an educational way (I hope).

	▲	graemep 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed. I was thinking more of home educated kids like mine who do not have a fixed seven hour day (you can cover what you do in school in a much shorter time if being taught one to one or teaching yourself).

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mixmastamyk 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe you’re expecting too much from pithy life advice to avoid bad habits? It’s not a silver bullet guaranteed to solve serious problems such as mental illness.