Shouldn't it toughen them up? How does his proposed coddling differ from the bad coddling?
Pushing through discomfort and, god forbid, seeking out discomfort. Being OK and perhaps wanting discomfort. Knowing that discomfort is 9/10 a healthy stress that builds you.
Not playing the victim. Taking responsibility for your circumstances, no matter how shit of a hand you were dealt. Yeah it sucks XYZ happened. The answer is to work through it and build from it, not give XYZ power to hold you back.
Sometimes things suck, and sometimes things are sad, and that’s okay. Common notion in many cultures is you can’t know happiness without sadness, light without darkness, etc.
Many of these things are better handled in a good upbringing. A stable household which has a motherly figure there to provide you warmth, protection, and love. A fatherly figure that provides structure, pushes you when you have room to do better, and sees potential in you and sets you up for success. Sometimes people don’t have this structure, refer to the above point.
It’s odd to me some of these things seem outside mainstream rhetoric, but that’s the Overton window at work.
Having all the responsibility fall on two mostly unsupervised, inexperienced people is fragile and "traditional" gender roles do not alleviate this.
I would also argue, why does the community automatically bear the responsibility for a decision made by two?
With all due respect, Given that you’re on the path to population control and all that’s implied with that, I find it difficult in myself to take what you say seriously.
<< "traditional" gender roles do not alleviate this.
I would personally argue that the "traditional roles" seem to help the offspring on several levels, but I didn't see many studies ( as opposed to non-traditional that is ) to that effect.
Lots of quantitative evidence that having two committed parents means healthier kids (IQ, emotionally, physically, etc.)
Basically, gaslight yourself into believing that other peoples actions are your fault? Sometimes you are in fact a victim of something, no matter how uncomfortable that thought makes Haidt feel.
> Sometimes things suck, and sometimes things are sad, and that’s okay. Common notion in many cultures is you can’t know happiness without sadness, light without darkness, etc.
Effectively, be passive. Do not try to improve things.
> A stable household which has a motherly figure there to provide you warmth, protection, and love. A fatherly figure that provides structure, pushes you when you have room to do better, and sees potential in you and sets you up for success.
And we are back to gender essentialism, where moms are not empowered to provide structure making them dependent on father in work for it. And dad has a role of threat that comes home after being absent whole day just to punish you for mistakes during the day.
This is a very uncharitable interpretation. If anything, parent is saying that staying engaged and not giving up just because an issue came up, is a positive, valuable and, most importantly, not passive at all. In other words, if you can't even deal with the problem you received, how are you even begin to 'improve things' overall? You can't even handle your own circumstance to a reasonable degree.
It is easy to generalize ( see? ) and be cynical.
<< And we are back to gender essentialism, where moms are not empowered to provide structure making them dependent on father in work for it. And dad has a role of threat that comes home after being absent whole day just to punish you for mistakes during the day.
Is it maybe because it seems to have better outcomes?
Is having a dad and a mom so bad that you cannot accept those positive outcomes ( and I can easily grant there are bad ones as well )?
It is not uncharitable interpretation. It is exactly what it means. What the cultures that internalized "can’t know happiness without sadness, light without darkness" have in common is that they are not trying to improve those things. Often for good reasons - the political system or powers to be prevents improvement. But, what cultures that improve things have in common is that they are not happy about stuff they want to improve.
> Is it maybe because it seems to have better outcomes?
They did not. Societies with "father is the disciplinarian mother is not" thing had larger social issues then us - juvenile criminality, alcoholism, smoking, you name it. Fun fact: it was prevalent in Weimar Republic and they were as disordered as it gets.
> Is having a dad and a mom so bad that you cannot accept those positive outcomes ( and I can easily grant there are bad ones as well )?
This is beyond uncharitable interpretation and in the realm of "completely twisting what I said". Having both parents does not imply what you wrote at all.
>> And we are back to gender essentialism, where moms are not empowered to provide structure making them dependent on father in work for it. And dad has a role of threat that comes home after being absent whole day just to punish you for mistakes during the day.
Response:
> Is having a dad and a mom so bad that you cannot accept those positive outcomes ( and I can easily grant there are bad ones as well )?
Statement:
<< This is beyond uncharitable interpretation and in the realm of "completely twisting what I said". Having both parents does not imply what you wrote at all.
Response:
Is it uncharitable though? I maintain it is a valid interpretation.
You explicitly said gender essentialism[1] explains why mothers can't seem to get the same results ( "they are not empowered enough" without actually explaining what would that entail I might add so you may want to expand on it a little ) and I simply followed that thread out of sheer curiosity of your frame of mind and responded with a clear counter which suggests that positive outcomes seem to be common to family units that are not, lets call them 'unstructured'.
<< "completely twisting what I said"
It is possible I am misreading you. What are you saying, exactly?
<< Having both parents does not imply what you wrote at all.
How so? It seems the few studies that were done support that notion[2]. Granted, it is not enough to simply have two parents. They need to be engaged, stable, have decent income so there are other factors at play, but I will boil it down to something really simple. Raising valuable members of society is hard work ; having kids is not that hard in abstract. It is doubly as hard for one person, because there is no one to share that burden with.
There is also some empirical data suggesting otherwise including amount of parents, who stay in otherwise 'bad' unions for the sake of the children suggesting rather instinctive understanding that it is not exactly a 'one man job'. Now, that is being countered by individualistic nature of US, but that is a separate conversation in itself.
In either case, you may want to expand on your thought process to convince me. Right now I don't really see an argument.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_essentialism [2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4553416/
late edit:
<< But, what cultures that improve things have in common is that they are not happy about stuff they want to improve.
I somehow managed to miss it. Can you elaborate a little further on this? I am genuinely curious about examples of such cultures.
> which has a motherly figure there to provide you warmth, protection, and love. A fatherly figure that provides structure,
This is not even closely "having two parents" situation. It is prescribing specific roles to the two parents.
Um. First, I would like you to consider the possibility that you are not accurate and maybe a little too hasty in your judgment.
When you look at the post history, you will note that it is GP that used that quote so accusing me of lying is a little much. If that is the case, It is possible that you may be a little too emotional about this issue to see the argument clearly.
<< This is not even closely "having two parents" situation. It is prescribing specific roles to the two parents.
I am willing to agree, but I am not certain I can continue this conversation in good faith when you ascribe quotes to me that are not mine.
I never hid that I have opinions; some of those are strong and maybe even controversial in some ways, but I like clear statements. I would like to point out that you chose to respond to neither of my questions and instead attempted to derail this conversation by attempting to point to inconsistency that.. well.. does not exist.
<< It is prescribing specific roles to the two parents.
But even assuming all of the above did not happen. The question becomes: so?
No, it’s empowerment to make change to improve yourself and not wallow in it. Life’s unfair, everyone has their own circumstances with which to grow from. Unfortunately some have much worse to grow from. But staying stagnant and not taking the first step will keep you in that state.
> Effectively be passive…
Not at all what I mean. You should try to improve things, but during such improvement the work might suck and that’s okay. That’s what people mean when they say something is hard.
> Gender essentialism…
There’s a multitude of studies that show if a feminine and masculine role are not present cohesively in a child’s life, they do not grow up in the best situation.
I never mentioned threat, but there has to be an authoritarian aspect of parenting. You cannot have cookies before bedtime, no matter how loud you’re going to cry. Benevolence is desired, but having both parents be pushovers sets the child up for drastic failure. This does not imply abuse. It’s called socializing a kid.
Single parent households on both sides of the equation are horrible. Yes people persevere, but much of the issues we see in inner city are due to single mothers and men leaving their family or being incarcerated unjustly. No amount of money injected into those communities counters this.
And it is, frankly, idiotic to have that authority put on parent who spend least time with the kid. While making parent who spend most time with the kid helpless.
> Single parent households on both sides of the equation are horrible. Yes people persevere, but much of the issues we see in inner city are due to single mothers and men leaving their family or being incarcerated unjustly. No amount of money injected into those communities counters this.
Frankly, bullshit. Single parents households are not universally worst across cultures. And the "being incarcerated unjustly" implies way bigger stress factors in play then just single motherhood.
And for that matter, money being injected into those communities so that you don't have single mothers working two jobs would actually do good. Or so that people are simply not desperate and stressed. Do you even listen to yourself?
For 11 years now Haidt has very deliberately identified as a centrist, partially because folks like yourself unfamiliar with his work find habit in dismissing his research as being politically motivated. Just because a researchers findings don’t align with YOUR politics doesn’t make the research itself politically motivated, it’s more likely your worldview was politically steeped from the beginning.
I don't see how Haidt identifying as a centrist has any bearing on anything; the idea that "centrism" is apolitical is also untenable.
As far as centrism goes, you're totally right, it's a political ideology like all the others. What I was trying to point out though is that despite being a very vocal American social critic, he's staunchly deciding _not_ to take a public position on American politics. Despite this, I've seen people on either side of the aisle still accuse him of shilling for the other side, a take I've found super exhausting. I'm not in total endorsement of all of Haidt's research or methodologies, but I do think he's operating from a place of scientific earnestness and honesty. Framing him as politically motivated is inaccurate.
Centrism focuses on feasibility, and on incrementalism. The possibility that We're Just Doing It Wrong isn't a part of that worldview, and so should it turn out that we are, in fact, doing it wrong, centrism will never address it.
Put differently, centrism is philosophically equivalent to a local minimum/maximum from which any significant change makes things worse than the status quo (and legitimately so). This metric fails to note that there are better minima/maxima that are reachable, but only if things get worse for (hopefully a short) period of time.
Second, the actual role centrist do is to actively work against improvements. They do not say "I think it is infeasible, but good luck". They say "trying to do this is wrong".
Yes, I'm sure such easy accusations exist. Not long ago, climate change was "left-wing", and now that we know that it's just science, people should remember who often scientists that were just doing their job were dismissed for being left-wing.
But on the other hand, on the left and the right, scientists are human and are biased by their understanding of how the world works and should work.
For Haidt, I don't have a specific opinion yet, but there are few elements that make me think that, even if he is not conscious about it himself, he may be politically biased:
1) In a lot of his writing, I never really see him taking bias-control measure seriously. He seems, at the end, despite what he may say sometimes, to consider himself "too smart to be biased", which is not a good thing. Having bias-control measures (aka starting from the hypothesis that maybe my conclusions are biased) is an easy and harmless way to do good science (even CERN is doing it by asking members of the Atlas and CMS collaboration to not exchange on non-published results).
2) The scientific critics are pointing at scientific elements that are legitimate. They are not saying "I don't like these findings, so I will say Haidt is right-wing", they are saying "there is a scientific problem with these findings". The large majority of them don't even say that Haidt is politically motivated. The "politically motivated" is appearing after, when people try to understand why Haidt will prefer some conclusions over others while they both are as scientifically grounded. In particular, I'm far from convinced by his counter-argument. For example, "the map for the territory" argument seems to say "stats is hard, so it's ok to claim we are sure even if stats say we are statistically not sure", or "the pascal's wager" argument seems very political "dropping some left-wing values and reinforcing some right-wing values is just all benefits, because obviously we are better off in a right-wing value society"
3) Scientists that are "neutral" will sometimes find findings that are politically neutral (for example: "I find that butter has an impact on mental health"), sometimes left-wing (for example: "I find that some traditional values have a negative impact on mental health"), sometimes right-wing. But if a neutral scientist is studying different topic and, by chance, always ends up with the findings that corresponds to what a right-wing person would think, this is suspicious. Haidt have worked on different topics, as you say for 11 years, and apparently, his reputation for preferring a conclusion more aligned with moderate right-wing is not due to his last topic, but from the observation that a truly neutral scientist will sometimes align with right-wing, but sometimes with left-wing too.
What the various kinds of "avoid coddling" types want is determining the details of what should be allowed to traumatize them, specifically, in order to shape society.
As far as I understand all Haidt calls for is to remove the boundaries that have been established over the past couple of decades, or what selectivity are you hinting at here that are part of that supposed plan to shape society?
More generally, the discourse tends to boil down to "I was spanked and I turned out fine!".
Yes, there is an inconsistency in his writing regarding why social media specifically is something we should protect children from. But Haidt is not suggesting that a return to a corporal punishment regime, or anything like it, is desirable. His concerns are things like free play, independent movement, negative (not only positive) interactions and so on.
He literally wrote a book calling for Universities to stop creating "safe spaces".
When the expected university environment is considered too hostile (considered to be too lion -like) you get safe spaces (more coddling)
Daytime problems for kids are usually problems with other kids and teachers, but those kinds of problems are much easier for kids to deal with alone. Particularly if their home situation is stable.
There's no shortage of boomers who've been ridiculing participation trophies from the day they first became aware of them.
Younger people in particular are susceptible here due to peer pressure at a critical stage of socialization, meaning if all your classmates are using it is much harder to opt out for a middle schooler than a working age adult. This isn't simply a test of ones own character in isolation.
In fact that is why they are targeted in the first place. Get them hooked young. It is the ones who get hooked who might spiral into problems as a result. That seems like a plausible theory.
"Coddling up" is about preventing them from making experiences which form and harden their characters.
You'd know, if you weren't coddled up yourself, as evidenced by your lack of understanding of what you're actually talking about.
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