Making Your Children Crazy

Move over Dr. Spock. Move over, Tiger Mom. We have a new way to bring up children, reported by Bethany Mandel in the New York Post.

I cannot tell you how prevalent it is. I do not know whether some enterprising mother is about to write a manual, instructing other mothers on how best to make their children crazy.

Specifically, the problem is Trump Derangement Syndrome, an offshoot of Bush Derangement Syndrome, first identified by psychiatrist Charles Krauthamner.

Apparently, some number of women suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome have chosen to visit their anxieties on their children.

Mandel reports:

Here’s a sampling of social-media posts I’ve seen since the re-election of President Donald Trump.

“My six-year-old son kept hugging me this morning and saying ‘don’t worry mama, I won’t let him hurt you.’ ”

“I told my 3yo to never have kids… I’ve been sobbing since I woke up.”

“I scared my poor 1-year-old son because I was crying so hard.”

“My 10-year-old broke down crying this morning saying ‘mommy now we’re going to die I’m worried.’ [I told her] to unite with all the kids that wanted Harris to win.”

On X, liberal commentator Wajahat Ali posted, “My 8-year-old girl just asked me, ‘Baba, do we have to move? Trump doesn’t like us.’”

These are real people, and unfortunately, real parents, who have decided to inflict severe emotional distress upon their children as some kind of political virtual signal.

In some cases these are small children. How does it happen that mothers think that it is acceptable to scare the bejesus out of small children. That is, traumatizing them. Are they incapable of keeping their feelings to themselves?

I will not on this occasion opine on whether women are more emotional than men. Did their therapists tell them that it was the right and healthy thing to do?

Or else, Mandel suggests, it’s a “political virtue signal.” She also calls it “hysterical posturing.”

But it’s especially odious to see this kind of hysterical posturing from mothers and fathers, showcasing their children’s fears and anxieties about the next president.

These parents are weaponizing the grief they themselves sowed into their own children, claiming that someone else caused this kind of fear for their kids.

Is it all just child abuse?

Observing the phenomenon on her own social-media feed, Emily Rose Chadwick, founder of the nonprofit Mama Wilder Foundation, posted, “If your young children are in tears over the election results, it’s because you’re the kind of parent who traumatizes your kids to feel good about your political choices.”

If they are in a lather over the harm Trump might do to their children, we note, with Mandel, that their outrage is highly selective:

Where was the outrage from these same liberals on the fainting couches when progressive teachers unions and their Democratic supporters closed schools for over a year and a half in blue areas, denying children the right to literally show their faces in public, play on a playground, let alone get an education?

They don’t care about the well-being of children.

Naturally, these parents are happy to take their children to therapy?

A therapist is seeing patients as young as 10 consumed with anxiety over the election showing up in her office.

She shared with me, “The parents are not mentally well themselves. I see it as performative emotionality but some of it is true emotional instability.”

Instead of working through their own emotional distress, they inflicted it on their children.

It is the ultimate betrayal of our most sacred duty to our children to intentionally harm them, yet that is what these parents are doing.

I will take a slight exception here. Such parents are anything but liberal. They do not believe in free thinking or even free speech. They do not respect differences of opinions, as classical liberals used to do.

They are cult followers who have learned that you do well to hew to the party line and to affirm the depth of your commitment to the right cause by losing their minds, giving your mind over to the cause. The extent of your derangement is the extent of your commitment. And if you do not show a severe and serious commitment to the cause, you risk being shunned and canceled.

The shorthand explanation is this. If a normal group coheres because everyone speaks the same language, uses the same table manners, follows the same customs and norms, obeys the same dress and grooming codes-- this means that everyone knows who is and is not a member because of outward, visible signs.

When that breaks down, the default position, especially prevalent in multicultural hodgepodges, involves groupthink. Presumably the group coheres because everyone thinks the same thoughts, feels the same feelings and believes the same beliefs.

And yet, this is a problem, Whereas dress codes and table manners are objectively verifiable, no one really knows whether you believe the right beliefs. So, the spectre of doubt always falls over everyone’s claim that he or she believes the right beliefs. If everyone doubts your beliefs, they are doubting your membership in the group. In that case you need to resort to more extreme behavior, laden with out of control emotions, to erase all doubt and to show that you are a true believer.

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