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ok fine, I guess I'm talking about the bean discourse: I went through adoption training in recent years, listened a lot of very smart professionals talk about healthy childhood development. There's also some therapy to deal with my own childhood stuff...
They key takeaway from healthy childhood development experts I heard: our adult anxieties are mostly the product of not feeling assured as kids that our basic needs would be meet. As kids we figure out what our parents expect of us to make sure we get food, shelter, and love.
But if our parents make us feel like that basic level of care is dependent on jumping through their hoops, then we learn to do it, but the anxiety that that care is conditional resonates on into adulthood.
If kids trust that love and food and support will be there when they need, then they feel safe (as kids and adults) taking basic risks because they know their basic survival isn't at stake.
But if they learned as kids, for example, that that basic support was conditional on their parents' approval, they probably grow up to be adults who are afraid to stand up for themselves because deep down they're still afraid demanding respect puts their basic needs at risk.
Again I'm just parroting what I heard from experts on this stuff. But I've also lived it, and I'm still grappling with it in my 40s.
Making your kids struggle to feed themselves isn't teaching them self-reliance, it's just stoking your own masturbatory libertarian insecurity.
Making your kids struggle to feed themselves isn't teaching them self-reliance, it's just stoking your own masturbatory libertarian insecurity.
