5 ms·

No, I think the OP is correct. My father and ex husband were career military and I was a full time mom. Both the military and parenting have this in common: Yo

by Mz 10y ago

No, I think the OP is correct. My father and ex husband were career military and I was a full time mom. Both the military and parenting have this in common: You may not be in control of certain things, nonetheless, you are responsible for the outcome. In other words, kids are autonomous beings and may do things the parent does not want them to do. When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, they come after the parents. In the military, if you are in charge, you take the fall when things go wrong, even if it wasn't your fault. The world gives us endless obstacles between us and our goals. If you want to make excuses, there is never any shortage of them to be found. But if you want a thing to happen, at some point, you just have to decide that "The buck stops here" and not accept excuses.

sdiupIGPWEfh 10y ago
Now imagine you as a parent are robbed of any authority over your children: not even so much as calling time-outs, sending them to their room, groundings, suspending electronic devices, or whatever. You're as good as an officer who can't discipline his own troops. Responsibility for outcomes when you have no control at all is no way to run a family, a military unit, or a business, yet many businesses happily create such situations and expect us to suck it up.
- Mz 10y ago
  yet many businesses happily create such situations and expect us to suck it up. In the long run, such businesses tend to reap what they sow. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/02/i-met-one-of-founders-of-aflac-once.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/02/i-met-one-of...
derefr 10y ago
> When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, they come after the parents. In the military, if you are in charge, you take the fall when things go wrong, even if it wasn't your fault. Ah, but these are both situations where, to my phrasing, there could have been "enough planning [to] circumlocute the problem." In other words, the punishment falls on the parents or the officer who trained those who failed, to complete the feedback loop back to their training style. If they had trained their children/soldiers better, the event in question perhaps could have been prevented. And it might be prevented in the future, due to that negative feedback. A CIO of a large corporation usually would be fired if the company's business halts for 48 hours (losing money) because a datacenter got hit by a meteor. This is not because the CIO could have seen a meteor-strike coming, but rather because they could have put processes in place for fault-tolerance/high-availability, such that any random act-of-god that takes out the data-center wouldn't have mattered to the business. It's not the CIO's fault if a datacenter blows up, but it is the CIO's fault if "a datacenter blowing up" is able to halt their business, when there is something they could have thought of that and put in place, long ago, that would have interrupted that causal chain in the present. But a parent, or a military officer, or a corporate executive, usually isn't blamed for what amounts to "enemy action"—where something intentionally malicious out-thinks every preparation you've made and goes ahead and ruins your day anyway. Parents, for example, aren't blamed for what their children do when they've been told to do that thing by another authority figure. Executives aren't blamed for rival companies' industrial sabotage. Generals aren't blamed if a sudden trap is sprung during a retreat, turning it into a rout.
- Mz 10y ago
  But a parent, or a military officer, or a corporate executive, usually isn't blamed for what amounts to "enemy action"—where something intentionally malicious out-thinks every preparation you've made and goes ahead and ruins your day anyway. Parents, for example, aren't blamed for what their children do when they've been told to do that thing by another authority figure. Executives aren't blamed for rival companies' industrial sabotage. Generals aren't blamed if a sudden trap is sprung during a retreat, turning it into a rout. High ranking officers can be relieved of command for doing the right thing, but breaking the rules to do it, a la this based-on-a-true-story movie: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_Enemy_Lines_(2001_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_Enemy_Lines_(2001_fil... I pulled my kids at homeschooled when it turned out the public schools were a mess where we moved for one duty station. I am "The buck stops here" kind of parent. Other adults being assholes and fucking up my kid is not an acceptable justification for letting my kids get fucked up. My kids are intensely loyal to me. They know I can be trusted to do what is in their best interest, no excuses.
  - derefr 10y ago
    > Other adults being assholes and fucking up my kid is not an acceptable justification for letting my kids get fucked up. To be clear, I wasn't talking about things that have negative impacts on your child, but rather things that society blames your child for, and then redirects that blame to you. An example: if your 10-year-old child just grabs a loaded gun off a table and shoots someone, whether this ends up deemed "accidental" or not, whether someone else is to blame for leaving a loaded gun there or not, people will still (at least partially) blame you for that—for (presumably) not instilling gun safety rules into your child. But if your 10-year-old child is handed a gun by another adult, and told to shoot someone, blame for that would never land on you: society would deem that coercion, due to the power-imbalance between adults and children, just as much as if an adult were told to shoot someone with a gun held to their own head. You might blame yourself for the trauma your kid suffers from having shot someone, sure. But, in the situation above, I don't think even you would think you somehow held ultimate causal responsibility for the shooting occurring in the first place. It'd be like blaming yourself for a drunk driver driving through the front of your house and killing someone you love: essentially an "act of god" that happened to have been performed by another human being.
Confusion 10y ago
The Fort Hood commander, nor anyone else in the line of command at the time of the shooting, took the fall for that instance of 'things going wrong'. If a child turns out to have a mental disorder, a parent is not held responsible for the outcome of actions of the child. If the brakes of my car fail due to a manufacturing defect and my passengers die, I will not be held responsible.

by Mz 10y ago

sdiupIGPWEfh 10y ago

Now imagine you as a parent are robbed of any authority over your children: not even so much as calling time-outs, sending them to their room, groundings, suspending electronic devices, or whatever. You're as good as an officer who can't discipline his own troops. Responsibility for outcomes when you have no control at all is no way to run a family, a military unit, or a business, yet many businesses happily create such situations and expect us to suck it up.

Mz 10y ago
yet many businesses happily create such situations and expect us to suck it up. In the long run, such businesses tend to reap what they sow. http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/02/i-met-one-of-founders-of-aflac-once.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/02/i-met-one-of...

derefr 10y ago

> When the law says money is owed due to the child breaking something, they come after the parents. In the military, if you are in charge, you take the fall when things go wrong, even if it wasn't your fault. Ah, but these are both situations where, to my phrasing, there could have been "enough planning [to] circumlocute the problem." In other words, the punishment falls on the parents or the officer who trained those who failed, to complete the feedback loop back to their training style. If they had trained their children/soldiers better, the event in question perhaps could have been prevented. And it might be prevented in the future, due to that negative feedback. A CIO of a large corporation usually would be fired if the company's business halts for 48 hours (losing money) because a datacenter got hit by a meteor. This is not because the CIO could have seen a meteor-strike coming, but rather because they could have put processes in place for fault-tolerance/high-availability, such that any random act-of-god that takes out the data-center wouldn't have mattered to the business. It's not the CIO's fault if a datacenter blows up, but it is the CIO's fault if "a datacenter blowing up" is able to halt their business, when there is something they could have thought of that and put in place, long ago, that would have interrupted that causal chain in the present. But a parent, or a military officer, or a corporate executive, usually isn't blamed for what amounts to "enemy action"—where something intentionally malicious out-thinks every preparation you've made and goes ahead and ruins your day anyway. Parents, for example, aren't blamed for what their children do when they've been told to do that thing by another authority figure. Executives aren't blamed for rival companies' industrial sabotage. Generals aren't blamed if a sudden trap is sprung during a retreat, turning it into a rout.

Mz 10y ago
But a parent, or a military officer, or a corporate executive, usually isn't blamed for what amounts to "enemy action"—where something intentionally malicious out-thinks every preparation you've made and goes ahead and ruins your day anyway. Parents, for example, aren't blamed for what their children do when they've been told to do that thing by another authority figure. Executives aren't blamed for rival companies' industrial sabotage. Generals aren't blamed if a sudden trap is sprung during a retreat, turning it into a rout. High ranking officers can be relieved of command for doing the right thing, but breaking the rules to do it, a la this based-on-a-true-story movie: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_Enemy_Lines_(2001_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_Enemy_Lines_(2001_fil... I pulled my kids at homeschooled when it turned out the public schools were a mess where we moved for one duty station. I am "The buck stops here" kind of parent. Other adults being assholes and fucking up my kid is not an acceptable justification for letting my kids get fucked up. My kids are intensely loyal to me. They know I can be trusted to do what is in their best interest, no excuses.
- derefr 10y ago
  > Other adults being assholes and fucking up my kid is not an acceptable justification for letting my kids get fucked up. To be clear, I wasn't talking about things that have negative impacts on your child, but rather things that society blames your child for, and then redirects that blame to you. An example: if your 10-year-old child just grabs a loaded gun off a table and shoots someone, whether this ends up deemed "accidental" or not, whether someone else is to blame for leaving a loaded gun there or not, people will still (at least partially) blame you for that—for (presumably) not instilling gun safety rules into your child. But if your 10-year-old child is handed a gun by another adult, and told to shoot someone, blame for that would never land on you: society would deem that coercion, due to the power-imbalance between adults and children, just as much as if an adult were told to shoot someone with a gun held to their own head. You might blame yourself for the trauma your kid suffers from having shot someone, sure. But, in the situation above, I don't think even you would think you somehow held ultimate causal responsibility for the shooting occurring in the first place. It'd be like blaming yourself for a drunk driver driving through the front of your house and killing someone you love: essentially an "act of god" that happened to have been performed by another human being.

Confusion 10y ago

The Fort Hood commander, nor anyone else in the line of command at the time of the shooting, took the fall for that instance of 'things going wrong'. If a child turns out to have a mental disorder, a parent is not held responsible for the outcome of actions of the child. If the brakes of my car fail due to a manufacturing defect and my passengers die, I will not be held responsible.