More on Kids
I was unexpectedly surrounded by consensus on the weekend and it didn’t go unnoticed.
The subject was children, homes, parents and co-parents.
That latter moniker is just one of the many used for what used to be labelled as step-father or step-mother.
Since the spouse has become a ‘partner’ you’d think the co-parent would have become a partner-parent, but no matter.
It appears that there are two motivating forces that drive parenting styles; those that believe that the primary role of parenting is to instil a sense of good behaviour in kids, and those that focus of ensuring that kids feel safe and secure at home.
In practice, I am told, these are opposing forces that often lead to loud noises.
And often this is correct. Let me explain.
Humans naturally follow the path of least resistance. Very few freshly minted humans volunteer unnecessary labour.
So children in an environment where safety and security is foremost naturally take advantage of this by adopting an attitude in which their sense of safety and security is threatened by an insistence upon onerous behaviours.
And conversely, kids in houses where higher levels of entropy-defying contributions are the norm don’t necessarily feel unsafe and insecure. Mostly they are quite comfortable indeed.
But when there is a clash of parenting styles the kids may get confused and feel genuinely threatened.
The paradox here is here of course is the psychological source of the parenting styles. My mostly ungrounded hypotheses for these, based on a quick review of past friends and acquaintances, is as follows:
Often the parents that prefer the ‘safety and security’ gig have this preference due to an absence of the same in their own childhood homes.
It goes without saying that these homes were often low on the consistent behavioural model as well, so this is considered an optional set of mostly unwanted free steak knives that might get in the way of the primary goal.
These parents are trying to correct past wrongs and good on them, I say.
Those that grew up in homes with high levels of behavioural expectations insist on the same, and take the safety and security angle for granted.
So what to do when two co-parents unexpectedly find themselves with different thermodynamic driving forces for their parenting styles?
Obviously there needs to be a parental consensus, a middle ground that is adopted to avoid childhood confusion.
Or you hire servants.
Or send the kids to boarding school.
Or you run an experiment to see if the kids really do get confused and see if the human brain can cope, contrary to expectations.
As I have said previously, if you want your kids to have different values to those that you harbour, it’s probably best that you get someone else to raise them.
Other than that, there’s only three certainties in life; death, taxes and the fact that you have no chance of shielding kids from your true nature.
So just maybe the answer is to seek partnership from those with similar parenting to yourself. Yet another filter on the long list of “must-have’s”!
Or, if you are sufficiently evolved as a human, you can in fact moderate your parenting style towards a compromise.
But that would involve first understanding this blog and, secondly, that both co-parents do so.
In which case you need two sufficiently evolved humans under the same roof. Sounds bloody unlikely but not impossible.
This sounds like a more inclusive relationship filter, even if it does result from a statistical anomaly.
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