3 ms·
When I was a pre-teen, my mother once told me "I never want to hear about you...". I expected to hear a sweeping restriction and my brain was already primed to
by ergothus 9y ago
When I was a pre-teen, my mother once told me "I never want to hear about you...". I expected to hear a sweeping restriction and my brain was already primed to file the next tidbit with other adult "advice" - material that had no supporting context in my experience (largely because my experiences were so few, though I didn't know that then).
Instead she finished with "...committing any crime you can't retire on". It was a game-changer for me. This advice...had context. It wasn't a absolute "no", nor did it rely solely on experiences I didn't have. It extended on experiences I _did_ have into a broader area.
Throughout most of my teenage years I avoided all the worst situations that peer pressure was steering me towards, not because I suddenly properly calculated the risks - I could no more visualize the impact on my life that any kind of conviction would have than I could before - but because I was better weighing the _gains_. Instead of "doing this will prevent me from losing ranking in my social hierarchy" it was "doing this will not gain me material improvement". Instead of "if I fail I will get in trouble" it was "I will be disappointing because I tried, regardless of success".
Eventually, of course, I built my own ethics structure about why crime/rudeness/unnecessary risk-taking were undesirable, but this one statement gave me time to do so that I might not have had.
I highly recommend it to all parents.
- jcsnv 9y ago>I never want to hear about you committing any crime you can't retire on This is pretty interesting "advice", but curious how on that would have impacted my younger self
- ergothus 9y agoI think it had a big (and net positive) impact on me, but anecdote is not data - If you think the advice would have been bad for you, I'd love to hear how - not because I think it's impossible or that you'd be wrong, but because I have no idea what is probable without more people weighing in.
- dllthomas 9y agoI mean, if instead of smoking pot with friends you decided to rob a bank, that sounds like a bad outcome in line with the advice...
- BoorishBears 9y agoRobbing a bank has a poor average payoff, so not likely to be able to retire on it. Becoming a CEO and indulging in embezzlement on the other hand...
- ergothus 9y agoI never thought of the CEO angle (not sure what that says about my intelligence, but hopefully it says something good about my morals). I know that my thinking as a 10 year old was that if I got caught robbing a bank, my mom wouldn't have been bothered that I tried to rob a bank, she'd have been bothered that I _failed_. As an adult I realize that she'd not have been happy in either case. (I think. Probably.) But it was exactly that shift of thinking from "should I do this" (prone to peer pressure) to "is the payoff worth the risk" (which leads to "what is the risk?") that kept me from doing anything particularly stupid and why I brought the story up in relation to the article. As adults we normally relate "should I do this" to "what is the payoff" and "what is the risk". As a preteen/teen the life experiences to encourage those connections aren't there, so the decisions will be different from the average adults'. This crazy advice (my mother doesn't remember making it, so it was probably an off-the-cuff attempt at humor that altered my life) created a temporary bridge between those concepts until I had the experiences to build my own bridges. In retrospect it's actually similar to how certain religious doctrines provide reasons for moral decisions when you wouldn't necessarily have those morals on your own. mindblown.
- bitL 9y agoPlaying GTA too much? ;-)
- nerfhammer 9y agoJust become a CEO. Embezzling after already being the CEO is just gratuitous.
- anonytrary 9y agoRight, because suddenly we're positing that a pre-teen can correctly calculate how much money they would need in order to retire.
- jjxw 9y agoSounds like the type of advice that some of the more brash tech CEOs (e.g. Travis K.) would have taken to heart.
- DoreenMichele 9y ago"Is that for your brother? I don't think so." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5J5swxSLnE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5J5swxSLnE
- gowld 9y agoThat sounds like amoral sociopathy. Whatever works for you...
- Fnoord 9y agoIt is solid (albeit it strange) advice because that difficult goal is very hard to reach without getting caught. So essentially the advice is: "I never want to hear about you committing any crime" or "don't get caught." Of course, it is questionable what is worse for a parent: learning their got caught committing a crime, or learning their child committed a crime. Its basically akin to defeatist attitude, or perfectionism (which is defeatist). It also helps against self-incrimination (or well, incrimination by the parents). The idea is that if you cannot even tell your parents about it, you must keep it secret. Of course the easier one is "I never want you to commit any crime" but once you go down the route you told there's evidence the child is already down that dark path, or might get influenced to walk it. Instead, I'd rather give my child the required confidence that they have self respect, and that I am a listening ear when they need me.