Stuart Schneiderman
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2015
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May
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- India vs. China: Competing Cultures
- Liberty and Rights in the Magna Carta
- A Long Hot Summer Begins
- Harassing Laura Kipnis
- The World Is Watching
- A Psychiatrist Becomes a Life Coach
- Why Are So Many College Students Suffering Anxiety?
- An Alcoholic Commits Egotistical Suicide
- "Escaping into Blank Mental Oblivion"
- The Perils of Paid Family Leave
- Lena Dunham Finds a Therapy That Works
- The Mental Health of Women Warriors
- To Sue Or Not To Sue... for Sexual Harassment
- Are You Afraid to Die?
- Is Meditation Risky?
- "Hill, Can I Ride in your Lap...?"
- Are Women and Corporate Cultures a Bad Fit?
- What Would We Do Without Science?
- Is Frexting the Next Craze?
- Who Is Marsha Linehan and What is DBT?
- An Extraordinary Achievement Squandered
- An Online Treatment for Social Anxiety
- Is the GOP Becoming the Vanity Party?
- Can Any Good Come From War?
- The Problem with Greater Awareness of Sexual Haras...
- What Good Is Casual Friday?
- Leaning In Is Bad For Women
- Down With Ovid; Up With Therapy
- What Happened to "Start-Up New York?"
- Needed: Humility
- The Limits of Positive Thinking
- Sheryl Sandberg Deals with Grief
- The Democratic Party Is Crashing
- Notes on Kirsten Powers: "The Silencing"
- The Danger of Sexting
- Richard Milazzo Reviews "The Last Psychoanalyst"
- Is Work/Life Balance a Trap?
- Water, the Other Wet Stuff
- Cultural Sensitivity and the War Against Terror
- Megyn Kelly Unleashed Again
- Family Devalued
- Megyn Kelly Unleashed
- Overmedicated
- Thomas Sowell Explains
- Hillary Clinton's Achievements
- The Uses of Anxiety
- Beach Body Ready
- Communism and the Will to Destroy
- The Death of Hope and Change
- An Ill-Defined Relationship Is All Drama
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May
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9 comments:
That's David "I love the crease in his pants" Brooks, IIRC. The Left does not WANT our children to do well; it might make them "exceptional" and proud of it, and that's "just WRONG".
Pride is a form of love. It is also a deadly sin.
See this take on Brooks:
http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=4434
But, see this post about testing the millennials:
http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2015/03/american-millennials-too-proud-to.html
Didn't you recently quote Brooks confessing he was paid an excessive amount to bloviate about topics he was barely familiar with,Stuart??
- shoe
Absolutely... surely when he discovered that it had to count as an epiphany... putting him on the road to grace.
And yet, to be fair and balanced, I have also had occasion--not very often, I admit-- to praise him when I think he is right.
So does this obligate Brooks to avoid discussing the topic of 'Shame' or 'Character'?? Or is speculation still allowed? /sarc.
-shoe
My head certainly spins reading all of this, trying to sort it out.
The first difficulty is to see there are huge differences in families, now, so upper class, and middle class happily married parents may be more active parents and may be very different from single parents and lower class parents. So any generalizations become uncertain how universal they are.
And the same problem exists for Stuart's monolithic opening "Everyone knows that something is wrong with the way Americans bring up their children." as if all families are the same, equally troubled, and in the same deficits.
And near the end Stuart's prognosis "America’s real problem is an excess of unconditional love, thus, too much mothering, too much protection, too much coddling."
What's a good parent, father or mother, to take from all this divergent analysis?
Here's one quote from Brooks "Children in such families come to feel that childhood is a performance — on the athletic field, in school and beyond. They come to feel that love is not something that they deserve because of who they intrinsically are but is something they have to earn."
I can see some possible confusion. The words "deserve" and phrase "have to earn" both seem unhelpful.
One helpful phrase I found when I was a young teen and feeling rebellious is "I didn't ask to be born" and for me the meaning was "I didn't choose to come into this life and be a part of this family, but I have a choice how to participate or refuse to participate." So I discovered I "deserved" autonomy, which is a different meaning than Brooks was expressing.
And secondly "have to earn" itself contains a sort of resentment, as if kids didn't want to please their parents, and accomplish things.
But then again, I didn't grow up in a family where my parents pushed me, although they did support the activities I wanted to participate in.
I can see I'd probably have rebelled early against a Tigermom, passive resistance or passive-aggressive styles as needed. I bet I could get out of violin practice after one week, and then I'd wonder what she wanted me to fail at next.
But kids are all different too.
Just read The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller. Better than anything else ever written about how children are raised by so-called civilized parents and caregivers.
She uses the term "poisonous pedagogy" to identify the pattern where the impulses of the child to seek love, approval, and guidance to develop his or her natural talents, are subverted to the unconscious needs of the adults who cause pain to the child while sending the message it is For Your Own Good." (another great book by Alice Miller debunking Freudian theories of childhood experience).
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