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Maybe to clarify a positive point rather than leaving only negative ones behind... The thing about children is: they are already people when they exit the womb
by uoaei 3y ago
Maybe to clarify a positive point rather than leaving only negative ones behind...
The thing about children is: they are already people when they exit the womb (i.e. agents, at least in the ways we talk about LLMs today if not more than that), then they become adults with more or less consistent modes of being and acting, and then they get to exert their own influences on the world (read: other people). The duty of a parent is not to make their own lives easier or to assuage themselves that they "did everything right", but to create net-good lasting change through their parental legacy, whatever the cost to themselves. The choice to have a child has already been made -- the rest is owning up to that choice.
Of course, what's "good" is a personal matter, but suffice it to say that we can all agree that the good that is created by parenting exists far past immediate vectors of control and into the psyche of the child. So to treat children as anything less than agents in and of themselves is to instill in them a dangerously false ideology from the very beginning that morphs into antisocial pathologies as their belief systems and worldviews ossify in age. This lesson can be impressed on them in myriad subtle and apparently "correct" ways of parenting, in ways that the parent believes are backed by only the best intentions, but that ultimately harm the child and perpetuate their capacity for harming others.