Strangely reading about high achievers having had a difficult childhood and how it might have actually "enabled" them to achieve what they did, is soothing in a way. It's nice to think of your own scars as a thing that helps you sometimes instead of only a burden.

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19 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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noduerme 27 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm from a family that believed strongly in what some might call "useful child abuse", but that term has become poisoned; it doesn't imply any actual abuse as it would have been defined even 20 years ago, and it isn't without love. Every one of my brothers will admit that our parents loved us deeply, but that our upbringing was extremely stringent and intellectually rigorous, with seemingly unjust punishments for poor grades of words spoken disrespectfully. But never was it abusive in a physical sense (if you have to get physical, you've failed. You're missing the point of educating the child and doing damage to future generations instead).

I still believe in this, because it produces self-reliant, ultra-high-performing people, and if your goal is e.g. to have your lineage survive and thrive, then that's what you would want. So we're all lawyers, doctors and engineers, and we talk to our children like they're adults and have high expectations of them and are gravely, mortally disappointed if they let us down somehow.

Really, the only thing I'd like from low-pressure and low-performing people with too much time on their hands is for them to leave people like us alone, and go back to maxing out their credit cards, taking drugs, watching reality shows and crashing their cars, without thinking they're capable of judging people they'll never understand. But hey, that's the world we live in, and it's all sour grapes from them, so the main thing is to make sure they never get an upper hand no matter how many ill-behaved children they have.

That's the perspective from this side of that.

I expect to be downvoted for this, but before you click that arrow, remember the good news is that our kids will be smart and self-reliant and yours will be helplessly reduced to voting on social platforms, if they can even read ;)

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BlobberSnobber 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

That's a lot of inefficiency being displayed by such a high-pressure, high-performance, individual. You could've just written "my childhood fucking sucked and I obviously developed some issues, but I justify it as it being good, since I have achieved some level of success, as defined by the circles I dwell in". Also, wasting time commenting on a social platform? Disappointing.

Edit: clicked the profile, it's just a troll, lol. Joke's on me.

	▲	noduerme 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		heh. Well, I do comment here when I just finished a project and I'm up late drinking. My childhood didn't suck at all. That's really a misinterpretation. Here's an example. When I was 5 years old, my parents took me on the Concorde from New York to London. I remember the trip very well and learning what the Mach sign at the front of the cabin meant. The flight attendants gave me some neat models and stuff that I still have 40 years later. A member of the British Parliament was sitting in the row behind us. Toward the end of the flight, he spoke to my father and said that he'd been worried about sitting in a row behind a child, but that he'd been listening to our conversation for two hours and had to comment on how much we'd talked about and how well I'd behaved. Children do live up to your expectations of them, and you can talk to them as adults. None of this makes a childhood suck.

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n4r9 3 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> have high expectations of them and are gravely, mortally disappointed if they let us down

That sounds like a recipe for long-term psychological complexes. I know plenty of high-achievers that don't constantly feel like they have to prove themselves. And I wish I didn't have to work so hard to challenge that feeling in myself.