I'm from a family that believed strongly in what some might call "useful child abuse", but that 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 or for words spoken disrespectfully. Many immigrant children or people from cultures that prioritize education will understand this. 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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bgilroy26 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Once you've made it this far, the new spectrum everyone is measured on is their magnanimity.

It's okay that you didn't turn out to be that magnanimous, but don't lie to yourself and pretend that you tried as hard as you could

You had more in your humanity tank than you knew you had

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BlobberSnobber 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | 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 33 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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jl6 14 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So where did it all go wrong, to end up with you posting comments like this?

	▲	noduerme 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Ahhh, finally a good question.

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OtherShrezzing 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>So we're all lawyers, doctors and engineers,

I'd assume from the rest of your post that you'd all become olympians, astronauts, high ranked politicians, or founders of mega-corps. These are all fairly run-of-the-mill careers your family entered into, and plenty of people (I'd guess close to 100%) enter these roles without the type of abuse you suffered.

Hopefully the mortal disappointment you project onto your kids is a little lighter than that your parents projected onto you.

	▲	noduerme 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Why? When I was a teenager I really thought their demands were unfair. When I was a dropout and a taxi driver in my 20s, I blamed my parents. When I became a millionaire based on finding something I loved and doing it very well, even though they disapproved and didn't support me in it, I finally was able to thank them for giving me the intellectual tools to do that for myself. And interestingly, unexpectedly, they finally respected my choices as well. Life without a struggle is meaningless. My brothers, worth noting, are far far more interesting and successful than I am... I'm still a dropout loser to them. Megacorps and politics are their games. Our father had a thing about no television and only books. We had to read 50 pages a night of a book he chose, after school, and report to him what we had read. Every night. No video games either, and computers only if you were writing your own code. My eldest brother was severely dyslexic. He had a very hard time reading 50 pages a night. He found all kinds of ways to fake it. He makes $20 million a year now, give or take, as a senior law partner, still faking it. Tell me that ain't a good story.

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n4r9 31 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.

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noduerme 27 minutes ago | parent [-]

I don't know any high achievers who don't feel they have to prove themselves, so maybe I'm in the wrong cirles. It absolutely is a recipe for all kinds of long term complexes. But when you do work hard and you are satisfied with yourself, that satisfaction comes from something greater than yourself. Having no goal is worse than having an artificial one... and achieving something to make your dead parents happy is better than achieving nothing at all.

The measure of whether it was done in the proper proportion, I think, is whether you find later in life that it was, on balance, a service to you.

	▲	n4r9 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> when you do work hard and you are satisfied with yourself Ime if you constantly need to prove yourself then you rarely feel this; when you do, the feeling is ephemeral. > achieving something to make your dead parents happy is better than achieving nothing at all This feels circular. It assumes a value judgement about achievement which stems from your upbringing.