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Comment by perfmode | Hacker News Reader

Be careful with the coldness.

This may backfire on you down the road.

Your children may stop respecting you as they gain independence.

Yes, but also my role as parent is not necessarily to be liked: I'm concerned to help him develop resilience and self-reliance above my own desire to be liked. It's a delicate balance.

> my role as parent is not necessarily to be liked

I wish more people understood/accepted this.

As long as you do not burn bridges, I think this is spot on. In the long run, when your kids are adults they will like you more for it than if you had been their "friend" during childhood.

"Liked" and "respected" are not the same thing. You can be one, both, or neither. You are right that the role of a parent is not necessarily to be liked, but it is to be respected.

Does anyone care to actually rebut this, or is it just going to be silent downvotes?

Umm my parents had this idea. It seems that me and my siblings internalized the idea that our parents didn't like/care about us and ended up with quite low self esteem. Most of us developed some anxiety disorders or depressive issues. Now my 24 year old brother sits in my parents house and plays DotA all day and my parents just complain about how he needs to get a job.

e: this is after massive academic self sabotage that ended up with him barely graduating from high school on the special ed track despite being probably 130+iq. He would show up late to every class, refuse to do his assignments, and roll his eyes and loudly yawn to mock the teachers the teachers before falling asleep at his desk. Despite this he'd still end up topping out exams in physics, chemistry, etc. But there were other issues at play like my mother being sick our whole childhood and my father having emotional and social problems from an abusive childhood.

I don’t think tough love makes children lose respect for their parents. Anecdotal, but my parents were pretty strict when it came to discipline and habits, and weren’t really warm people, and I have tons of respect for them.

Children lose respect for parents that are inconsistent, don’t have their shit together, or that do literally everything for them.

Telling your kids to knock the shit off and do X is not "being cold."

As pointed out in sibling comments your job as a parent is not to get your children to like you.

Your job is to get your children to behave in a way that keeps _you_ liking _them_.

I don't mean that in the sense of "unconditional love" but a pragmatic day to day annoyance and dissatisfaction that keeps building up. Don't accept that as normal.

If you start resenting the presence or behavior of your children you need to act. Better act long before that.

Kids are little psychopaths when they are young; they will manipulate the shit out of you if you let them. They can bring this behavior into adolescence and adulthood if not corrected. They absolutely need to be told, in no uncertain terms, to cut out the shit every once in a while, that teaches them you aren't going to put up with their manipulation and shows your high expectations for their behavior. It also shows them that there's going to be people in the world (bosses, for example) who are just going to expect something from you. That's not being cold, that's being a damn good parent.

And you know what, they actually do learn over time and their behavior does improve.

Saying "okay darling, I'll take your shoes off," doesn't built respect, quite the opposite, it teaches them to continue to manipulate you and that leads to a massive amount of disrespect.

The person I respect most in life is my grandma and she is the only one who called out the bullshit in me when she saw it. Same with my baby cousin (I'm more than 20 years older than him), he's a teenager now and I'm his favorite person in the world and I was the only person who called him out and let him know I expected him to behave around me, his parents let him walk all over them. He certainly had and still has zero respect for his parents.

Speaking of my baby cousin, his dad once asked me why I correct his grammar. I told him I didn't mind how he talks around his friends, but I wanted him to learn to speak correctly for the times he needs to portray himself professionally, like a job interview.

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