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The best thing my parents ever did for me was cultivate a sense of familial superiority. Other families had the TV on all the time, but we read books instead b

The best thing my parents ever did for me was cultivate a sense of familial superiority. Other families had the TV on all the time, but we read books instead because we were 'better'. Other kids did drugs and drank, but we were better than that. Peer pressure didn't have much of an impact on me because I was raised to believe that I was better than 'that' for most values of 'that'. And my parents never had to force me on any of this—they just invited me to be a part of their exclusive club. There might be a way around this that doesn't involve cultivating a mild condescension towards peers, but I can say from experience that the condescension does work!

siavosh 2y ago
I think you're on to something...
ckz 2y ago
Agreed. So much of it is identity (going back to James Clear in Atomic Habits). "I'm not a smoker" is more powerful than "I'm trying to quit". "We just don't watch Youtube on our phones in this house." [and you work to develop that into healthy self-confidence rather than ego] Growing up homeschooled, we had the same simmering sense of pride in not doing what others (e.g. "public schoolers" did). Never had a rebellious teen phase, etc. Some families overdid it, but...idk...I'm still quite close to my parents, so I never felt stifled. It makes it -very- natural in life to focus on what my SO and I think are optimal and more or less disregard what's normal.
iforgot22 2y ago
My family didn't exactly say "better," but they meant it.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Yeah, I put 'better' in scare quotes because we didn't use that word exactly, but that was definitely the idea. I realize now that that's the opposite of what a quote usually means, but too late now!
rachofsunshine 2y ago
My family did this too. It did make me a condescending asshole, but worse than that, it taught me to be paralyzingly afraid of doing The Wrong Thing. Did it protect me from driving drunk when I was in college? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from having a healthy social life because I couldn't engage with any sort of normal behavior. Did it protect me from getting on drugs? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from getting on desperately needed psychiatric medication because that was for Other People, Who Are Too Weak To Handle Their Problems Properly. Did it protect my parents from sleeping around? Yeah, but it also locked them into a miserable marriage for half their lives, leaving both them and their children with heaping scoops of extra trauma. Maybe that trade-off is worth it, but if you're going down this route, make sure your kids know how to experiment and screw up sometimes, too. I'm inclined to say that a better solution is to recognize that none of us exist in a vacuum. When our societies are full of toxicity and manipulation and brainrot, we can't escape those things without cutting off a part of ourselves. Sometimes we have to do that, but ultimately what we need is a healthy culture to live in - and if we don't have one, we should be working to make one.
- iforgot22 2y ago
  It worked for me. The one negative side effect was a bit of arrogance, which I actively worked on in college. It was also crucial to figure out that some kids were better than me, and it was better to hang around them. There was also an "everybody has problems" support group at school that they kept encouraging us to join, but I said nah, I don't have problems. Most of the kids in that group ended up with depression.
  - juliusgeo 2y ago
    I am someone who was raised with a very similar set of values. I was homeschooled, and often believed that "public-schooled" kids had a worse, more limited set of values. I was not allowed to use computers till I was in 11th grade, and dove into reading as an alternative. Very little screen time, but I ended up with a lot of issues that did not even begin manifesting until I was an adult. I would urge you to re-examine your beliefs around this topic. It is too easy to elide the issues by reframing them as "a bit of arrogance". Based on my own experience, listening to the people around me, they are not experiencing it as "a bit" of arrogance. It is too easy, almost intoxicatingly so, to believe that you are better than those struggling. As long as you frame your own struggles as unique, you will deprive yourself of both 1) commiseration and 2) knowledge on how to progress past. Rather than say "everybody who sought solutions to their issues had issues", ask the question "how many people that did have issues did not seek solutions".
worik 2y ago
> The best thing my parents ever did for me was cultivate a sense of familial superiority. Odd! It was the worst thing my parents did for me, I believed them. Took a long time to realise I am, we were, quite ordinary.
- superfrank 2y ago
  Same. I think cultivating a sense of superiority is the wrong approach and could lead to other unhealthy behaviors. Cultivating a sense of self esteem and self acceptance is a better approach, IMO. "I don't drink because I'm better than you" seems like a problematic mindset. "I don't drink because I don't want to and I'm comfortable with that choice, but it's okay if you want to do something different" seems like a much healthier mindset.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > "I don't drink because I don't want to and I'm comfortable with that choice, but it's okay if you want to do something different" seems like a much healthier mindset. Possibly. It's certainly a healthier place to arrive at, and it's where I'm at now as an adult. But I'm unsure if it's a strong enough position to get a kid through the intense peer pressures of middle and high school. The difficulty that I see is that in order to truly hold that position as you describe it you have to have a really strong sense of self, which adolescents pretty much by definition don't have. Our brains aren't fully developed until 25, and in the developing stages our own sense of identity is pretty weak, and in those weak stages we all reach out for something larger than ourselves to hold on to. The 'superiority' approach (which I put in air quotes because no one ever actually said "we're better", it was a very subtle thing) gives the adolescent a strong identity they can adopt while they're still molding one of their own—it gives them a tribe to which they already belong. You can work with them from there to have empathy for people in other tribes, but if you give them something thinner and less tribal right away, even if it's healthier in an adult, I would expect them to end up drawn to a tribe offered by their peers.
  - BytesAndGears 2y ago
    What about the harder ones that come up? A personal choice like that is easy, but “I don’t drink when I know I’ll have to drive home because…” It’s harder to empathize with those who do drink in that situation
ropable 2y ago
Nothing beats "othering" the out-group members to really pull the tribe together!
- gosub100 2y ago
  Politics 101
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  > "othering" the out-group members This statement is othering me.
- mitchellst 2y ago
  I know this is a flip dismissal. But it illustrates one of my deeply held beliefs pretty well: there are things that are virtuous at small scale that are disastrous at large scale, and vise versa. In society "othering" out-groups leads to many wrongs. But it's hard to argue there's much evil in cultivating a sense of family pride. The vice turns to virtue at very small scale. I believe in giving more help to those who need it. But does that mean I should skip Christmas presents for my kids because there are people starving in [insert poor country or war zone]? The virtue becomes vice at small scale. A unified theory of moral behavior is actually hard to come by.
glangdale 2y ago
I'm sure you are a great person and all that, but in my experience, this particular recipe has produced absolute legions of smug, arrogant people who are nowhere near as smart as they think they are. Many of these people were dangerously unprepared for a world where they weren't the smartest person in the room in a not-very-smart room.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
moomoo11 2y ago
This truly works. And honestly we live in a competitive, entropic world. Why some people so sensitive? Maybe because it’s true? So yes. Some people are better than others, not due to some intrinsic features but because they cultivate some self defining attributes that set them apart from the rest. I know there are definitely trashy, destructive, and self-imposed low class people. I don’t associate with them. I am not bothered nor do I lose sleep thinking about them. There are others who have everything but decide to be losers and awful people. Again, not my problem and not my associations. Maybe we work together. But we aren’t friends beyond whatever means to an end. They chose whatever they did today. I did what I chose today and I’ll be going to sleep happy af and refreshed for tomorrow. Another day to crush and a life to enjoy. And I yearn to be even better tomorrow. No drugs. No junk food. Discipline. Experiences over screen addiction. Learning and growing. Cherishing life and its fine moments. Not every day is perfect, but at least each day is constructive.
jaapz 2y ago
That's one way to make everyone around your kids hate them. You don't have to put yourself arrogantly above others to still teach your kids values. IMHO, not doing that probably breeds a better moral value system...
- gosub100 2y ago
  Agreed. There's a certain age where kids will parrot back whatever you tell them, to whoever they feel like telling. "My parents say you don't value your kids because you let them play video games all day" is a very efficient way to lose friends and alienate people.
theoryaway 2y ago
Same experience for me For my case though, they refused to give smartphone access to me(despite multiple requests).They instead encouraged me to use laptop, while my friends were buying new smartphone while joining college.
theoreticalmal 2y ago
This is SUCH an interesting comment. There’s a “homeschooling” post elsewhere in HN with a comment that espoused the exact opposite view as this one: raise your kids with humility and openness to other people and families.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

siavosh 2y ago

I think you're on to something...

ckz 2y ago

Agreed. So much of it is identity (going back to James Clear in Atomic Habits). "I'm not a smoker" is more powerful than "I'm trying to quit". "We just don't watch Youtube on our phones in this house." [and you work to develop that into healthy self-confidence rather than ego] Growing up homeschooled, we had the same simmering sense of pride in not doing what others (e.g. "public schoolers" did). Never had a rebellious teen phase, etc. Some families overdid it, but...idk...I'm still quite close to my parents, so I never felt stifled. It makes it -very- natural in life to focus on what my SO and I think are optimal and more or less disregard what's normal.

iforgot22 2y ago

My family didn't exactly say "better," but they meant it.

lolinder 2y ago
Yeah, I put 'better' in scare quotes because we didn't use that word exactly, but that was definitely the idea. I realize now that that's the opposite of what a quote usually means, but too late now!

rachofsunshine 2y ago

My family did this too. It did make me a condescending asshole, but worse than that, it taught me to be paralyzingly afraid of doing The Wrong Thing. Did it protect me from driving drunk when I was in college? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from having a healthy social life because I couldn't engage with any sort of normal behavior. Did it protect me from getting on drugs? Yeah, but it also "protected" me from getting on desperately needed psychiatric medication because that was for Other People, Who Are Too Weak To Handle Their Problems Properly. Did it protect my parents from sleeping around? Yeah, but it also locked them into a miserable marriage for half their lives, leaving both them and their children with heaping scoops of extra trauma. Maybe that trade-off is worth it, but if you're going down this route, make sure your kids know how to experiment and screw up sometimes, too. I'm inclined to say that a better solution is to recognize that none of us exist in a vacuum. When our societies are full of toxicity and manipulation and brainrot, we can't escape those things without cutting off a part of ourselves. Sometimes we have to do that, but ultimately what we need is a healthy culture to live in - and if we don't have one, we should be working to make one.

iforgot22 2y ago
It worked for me. The one negative side effect was a bit of arrogance, which I actively worked on in college. It was also crucial to figure out that some kids were better than me, and it was better to hang around them. There was also an "everybody has problems" support group at school that they kept encouraging us to join, but I said nah, I don't have problems. Most of the kids in that group ended up with depression.
- juliusgeo 2y ago
  I am someone who was raised with a very similar set of values. I was homeschooled, and often believed that "public-schooled" kids had a worse, more limited set of values. I was not allowed to use computers till I was in 11th grade, and dove into reading as an alternative. Very little screen time, but I ended up with a lot of issues that did not even begin manifesting until I was an adult. I would urge you to re-examine your beliefs around this topic. It is too easy to elide the issues by reframing them as "a bit of arrogance". Based on my own experience, listening to the people around me, they are not experiencing it as "a bit" of arrogance. It is too easy, almost intoxicatingly so, to believe that you are better than those struggling. As long as you frame your own struggles as unique, you will deprive yourself of both 1) commiseration and 2) knowledge on how to progress past. Rather than say "everybody who sought solutions to their issues had issues", ask the question "how many people that did have issues did not seek solutions".

worik 2y ago

> The best thing my parents ever did for me was cultivate a sense of familial superiority. Odd! It was the worst thing my parents did for me, I believed them. Took a long time to realise I am, we were, quite ordinary.

superfrank 2y ago
Same. I think cultivating a sense of superiority is the wrong approach and could lead to other unhealthy behaviors. Cultivating a sense of self esteem and self acceptance is a better approach, IMO. "I don't drink because I'm better than you" seems like a problematic mindset. "I don't drink because I don't want to and I'm comfortable with that choice, but it's okay if you want to do something different" seems like a much healthier mindset.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > "I don't drink because I don't want to and I'm comfortable with that choice, but it's okay if you want to do something different" seems like a much healthier mindset. Possibly. It's certainly a healthier place to arrive at, and it's where I'm at now as an adult. But I'm unsure if it's a strong enough position to get a kid through the intense peer pressures of middle and high school. The difficulty that I see is that in order to truly hold that position as you describe it you have to have a really strong sense of self, which adolescents pretty much by definition don't have. Our brains aren't fully developed until 25, and in the developing stages our own sense of identity is pretty weak, and in those weak stages we all reach out for something larger than ourselves to hold on to. The 'superiority' approach (which I put in air quotes because no one ever actually said "we're better", it was a very subtle thing) gives the adolescent a strong identity they can adopt while they're still molding one of their own—it gives them a tribe to which they already belong. You can work with them from there to have empathy for people in other tribes, but if you give them something thinner and less tribal right away, even if it's healthier in an adult, I would expect them to end up drawn to a tribe offered by their peers.
- BytesAndGears 2y ago
  What about the harder ones that come up? A personal choice like that is easy, but “I don’t drink when I know I’ll have to drive home because…” It’s harder to empathize with those who do drink in that situation

ropable 2y ago

Nothing beats "othering" the out-group members to really pull the tribe together!

gosub100 2y ago
Politics 101
robertlagrant 2y ago
> "othering" the out-group members This statement is othering me.
mitchellst 2y ago
I know this is a flip dismissal. But it illustrates one of my deeply held beliefs pretty well: there are things that are virtuous at small scale that are disastrous at large scale, and vise versa. In society "othering" out-groups leads to many wrongs. But it's hard to argue there's much evil in cultivating a sense of family pride. The vice turns to virtue at very small scale. I believe in giving more help to those who need it. But does that mean I should skip Christmas presents for my kids because there are people starving in [insert poor country or war zone]? The virtue becomes vice at small scale. A unified theory of moral behavior is actually hard to come by.

glangdale 2y ago

I'm sure you are a great person and all that, but in my experience, this particular recipe has produced absolute legions of smug, arrogant people who are nowhere near as smart as they think they are. Many of these people were dangerously unprepared for a world where they weren't the smartest person in the room in a not-very-smart room.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

moomoo11 2y ago

This truly works. And honestly we live in a competitive, entropic world. Why some people so sensitive? Maybe because it’s true? So yes. Some people are better than others, not due to some intrinsic features but because they cultivate some self defining attributes that set them apart from the rest. I know there are definitely trashy, destructive, and self-imposed low class people. I don’t associate with them. I am not bothered nor do I lose sleep thinking about them. There are others who have everything but decide to be losers and awful people. Again, not my problem and not my associations. Maybe we work together. But we aren’t friends beyond whatever means to an end. They chose whatever they did today. I did what I chose today and I’ll be going to sleep happy af and refreshed for tomorrow. Another day to crush and a life to enjoy. And I yearn to be even better tomorrow. No drugs. No junk food. Discipline. Experiences over screen addiction. Learning and growing. Cherishing life and its fine moments. Not every day is perfect, but at least each day is constructive.

jaapz 2y ago

That's one way to make everyone around your kids hate them. You don't have to put yourself arrogantly above others to still teach your kids values. IMHO, not doing that probably breeds a better moral value system...

gosub100 2y ago
Agreed. There's a certain age where kids will parrot back whatever you tell them, to whoever they feel like telling. "My parents say you don't value your kids because you let them play video games all day" is a very efficient way to lose friends and alienate people.

theoryaway 2y ago

Same experience for me For my case though, they refused to give smartphone access to me(despite multiple requests).They instead encouraged me to use laptop, while my friends were buying new smartphone while joining college.

theoreticalmal 2y ago

This is SUCH an interesting comment. There’s a “homeschooling” post elsewhere in HN with a comment that espoused the exact opposite view as this one: raise your kids with humility and openness to other people and families.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]