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You didn't get that I was not talking about the original author? That suggests you didn't read my original comment very carefully, nor my subsequent ones at all. I was talking about a common pattern in our culture right now (over the last two or three decades). It's interesting that although some people found what I wrote objectionable, no one actually disagreed with me about this.

Perhaps I should let you in on a secret: I don't really believe children should be neglected. That use of the term was ironic. What I believe is that we, as a culture, have redefined the healthy autonomy of children as "neglect" in order to justify our belief that they need parental attention all the time, for reasons that have little to do with children's real needs and a lot to do with us. My guess is that this is because we haven't grown up ourselves. Emotionally, in some important way, we're still children, and this causes us to think of our children as peers. Ironically, this means we're actually failing to fulfill the parental role for them even as we make parenting the central meaning of our lives.

By the way, all these ideas come from my own struggle to understand what it means to be a good parent, something I by no means claim to have mastered. I do believe that to do it well, it is vital to distinguish one's own fantasies about parenting (which are always self-centered) from the real requirements of the job.

I noticed that too, but in fairness, it's worsened by the poverty of the medium (online forum discussion) which doesn't provide for emotional calibration. Our brains tend immediately to snap into a binary formation in response to what's presented. Since what I said on this (pretty charged) subject was provocative, it must mean that I oppose nurturing children and favor abusing them. Rationally that's absurd, but emotionally it's quite logical.

But in person, it wouldn't as likely come to that, because we could use many tools to calibrate - tone of voice, personal warmth, listening, etc. - and mitigate the extremes. Or we'd efficiently detect that a discussion can't get anywhere right now and save ourselves the trouble.

Anybody who figures out a technical solution to this problem is in a position to make a major contribution. Unfortunately, it may not be possible short of teleportation. We are wired for physical proximity.

p.s. For what it's worth, I have found every bit of effort toward becoming aware of this binary dynamic in oneself to pay off a thousandfold.

Yeah, I feel a little bad about that (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3005079) since I wasn't responding to the author in particular but impersonally to the pattern in the comments. I have no idea of where the author falls on this spectrum; quite possibly he's resolved these issues better than I have. A blog post isn't nearly enough information to make any judgment. The cultural pattern, on the other hand - that I've been observing closely for years. In myself as much as in anybody!

Obviously I'm not advocating violence against children. Nobody does that, not even those who practice it.

I was referring to nature films we've all seen where a bunch of adorable cubs are crawling over a mother lion and one of them crosses a line somehow and she swipes it with a paw. What I'm advocating, which I think was pretty obvious, is quick, clear, and loving boundary-setting in response to bad behavior. How one does this is beside the point; that's why I said "figuratively". The point is that we ought to do it, children need it (have you never seen a child calm down after being stopped like this? they need it for their own security), but parents who identify with their children tend not to do it.

Violence is all about the emotion of the violent one - trying to relieve a feeling of rage or whatever. Discipline is about giving the child something they need. It's impossible to do that when in a violent state oneself, so in fact these two things are mutually exclusive. It's possible to be violent to a child without any physical contact. That's our preferred form of violence nowadays.

On the whole, it's better for people not to hit their kids than to be as brutal as past generations often were. But to turn that into a virtue, as we have, is self-righteous.

My comment got a bit distorted by this subthread moving to the top of the page. When I said "this is getting unctuous" I meant this thread, not your post. I was responding to the comments that were on this page when I saw it, certainly not criticizing you personally. My fault for not making that clear.

I'd never let loose like that on anybody personally (well... almost never!) I'm criticizing our culture. Since our culture isn't a person, I figure it's ok to be rude to it.

But there is not a "fine line" between these things. In fact there is a great expanse between them. This is binary thinking. You can see a lot of this in the responses to what I wrote. (e.g. the ones saying that I advocate child abuse. How likely is that?)

As for the "growing fear ... that our kids are simply going to be whisked away while we aren't looking", I do take this into account. It's utterly foolish and irrational, not to mention childish, and to assuage it we are depriving our children of the simplest and healthiest freedoms. So as to give ourselves the feeling that we're protecting them against this (essentially imaginary) bogeyman, we're actually depriving them in reality. That is a poor and neurotic tradeoff. (Edit: and it's a really good example of what I wrote about downthread, that we act out our own unresolved personal issues through our kids. What's really driving us here is our own fear. But we call it "protecting the children" so as to make it a virtue. Fear is not a virtue.)

George Carlin has a marvelously sharp piece called "Fuck the Children" which is all about this. I'd post it, but people would accuse me of advocating child molestation.

Generalizing? Sure. Recklessly? I don't know. If you take your point literally, it's impossible to make any social observations at all. That can't be right. An observation needn't be true of everyone (you, for instance, or the OP) to have value.

As for "two completely separate issues", they're not completely separate. They're connected not by necessity but by a model of parenting that is common in our culture.

I certainly did not say that about American culture. God Bless America.

Your last paragraph (if I'm reading it correctly) leads to a point I've often mulled over. We tend as parents to overcompensate for what happened to us as children. I think this happens at the social-historical level too. Traditional child-rearing was something between harsh and brutal. Physical and emotional violence was common. We have rightly come to abhor that. But, typically human, we (or at least the educated white North American middle class) have merely flipped a bit and gone to the opposite extreme of elevating our children to little gods. This can't be good for the little buggers, deceive ourselves and adore our own virtue though we may. (Side note to the indignant: I like children. Including my own!)

Back to how, as parents, we overcompensate for what happened to ourselves in the past: we do this unconsciously, so it's hard to know that we're doing it. And it's a bad thing, because almost inevitably we end up creating a mirror image of the old mistakes. But there is a way out of this dilemma: personal healing and growth. To the extent that one can integrate one's own experience, feel one's own feelings, etc., one becomes free of the compulsion to resolve them through one's child and able to behold the child as an independent being.

"Damn them all to hell!"

A true Russian!

That's a good point about the suburbs. Indeed a major part of it. I've seen grad student family residences like you describe, too. They were great. Kids running around randomly all over the place.

My eight-year old niece lives across an alley from her school, but isn't allowed to walk to school. There might be a car going down the alley! The irony is that she is a brilliant strategic and tactical thinker about whom the running joke is that she's already engaged in a project of world domination. As my wife put it: this kid could organize the assault on Dieppe, how can she not cross an alley?

Parenting is off topic in a thread about family responding to a post about parenting? I don't think so.

Actually, I was reacting more to the triteness of the thread than to the OP. But it's pretty clear that the OP is imbued with much the same values. In fact, the author is making a case for them. Why else call it a "manifesto"? The thing is, the case is -- as it always is -- lined up on the side of love, nurturing, and what-really-matters-in-life. Stuff nobody could reasonably oppose. Which means that, whatever the argument is, there must be something wrong with it. If it were correct, it wouldn't exist.

Sorry, but this is getting a little unctuous.

I don't think the trend in our time of parents organizing their lives around their children is very good for anybody, especially the children. I'm thinking, for example, of fathers who call their kids "buddy" and think it's the meaning of life to play with them. This is pandemic where I live. People have convinced themselves that the good life consists of being child-centered parents in child-centered families. Everybody [†] is busy confirming to everybody else that this is true (consider the platitudinous tone of most of the comments in this thread), but I doubt that it is true. It has much to do with parents' emotional needs (edit: specifically the need to Be A Good Parent, which if you think about it is actually a selfish concern) and little to do with kids'. Children ought to be running around outside playing with other children and depending on nice-but-otherly (not pseudo-peer) adults to keep their world secure and stable and fix things when they cry. Children raised by child-centered parents seem at a loss when they aren't at the center of attention. This bodes ill for inner strength. Most such parents fail even to teach their kids basic manners. They're so identified with their child, or rather with the mini-me they imagine their child to be, that they don't notice if the child is routinely disrespectful to others. When they do occasionally notice something egregious and limply intervene, it's always with the same whiney "Honey..." followed by a feeble plea which the child ignores with no consequences. What they ought to do, of course, is what any ordinary mammal does when their offspring goes too far - smack them. Figuratively if you prefer.

The problem is that we're immature and infantilized ourselves, so we've forgotten all of this. Perhaps it's an outgrowth of postwar youth culture.

One tell-tale symptom is that children have fewer friends than they used to, and adults consequently have fewer friends and less time for the ones they do have. (Nowadays when a friend has a kid I tell them "See you in 20 years." Not my choice.) Adults' time is taken up with the sacred family-ness we all must bow before. Children's time is taken up by their parents. I remember how hard it used to be to arrange for my son to play with a classmate after school. (Arrange! When such a thing need to be arranged in the first place, we're already losers. This whole subject really needs a Louis CK to do it justice.) Parents would look up times for "play dates" in a calendar. I swear they were jealous of their kids seeing other "buddies".

In short, a little neglect never hurt anybody.

p.s. Maybe it seems like the above hasn't much to do with "work-life balance" (blessed be its name), but it totally does. However, I'm over quota.

[†] Well, everybody in my lily-white liberal world.