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heh. Well, I do comment here when I just finished a project and I'm up late drinking. My childhood didn't suck at all. That's really a misinterpretation. Here'
by noduerme 24d ago
heh. Well, I do comment here when I just finished a project and I'm up late drinking.
My childhood didn't suck at all. That's really a misinterpretation. Here's an example.
When I was 5 years old, my parents took me on the Concorde from New York to London. I remember the trip very well and learning what the Mach sign at the front of the cabin meant. The flight attendants gave me some neat models and stuff that I still have 40 years later.
A member of the British Parliament was sitting in the row behind us. Toward the end of the flight, he spoke to my father and said that he'd been worried about sitting in a row behind a child, but that he'd been listening to our conversation for two hours and had to comment on how much we'd talked about and how well I'd behaved.
Children do live up to your expectations of them, and you can talk to them as adults. None of this makes a childhood suck.
- akho 24d agochildren from families flying Concorde grow up to be doctors and lawyers, news at 11
- noduerme 24d agoThat's not really the news. Guy grew up in Russia with no indoor plumbing, forced to drop out of school at 12, has 7 brothers and sisters killed in a genocide, flees conscription at 15, broke on a train to Holland then a boat to Argentina where he speaks no Spanish, ends up in America at 21 and becomes a Spanish translator, works as a cloth cutter and a bartender, buys a farm on a patch of arid desert, sends his kid to college, the first person in the family ever to go to college. Kid becomes a lawyer. Kid has kids and takes his children and his father on the Concorde, where they meet members of the British Parliament. This man also locates and rescues his brother from a displaced persons camp in Cyprus after WWII. Brother could barely speak. Brother marries woman he met in Auschwitz and has two children who are the next people in their family to go to college. They become doctors. I grew up with this man. He believed in achievement and a human soul. The news is this: Dismissiveness, anger and dejection do nothing. With regard to my grandfather's style of expectations and parenting, it was less than my father's. A young man in my grandfather's village had hung himself after getting bad marks in school. My grandfather was afraid my father would hang himself if he pushed him too hard. He was gentler.
- deleted 24d ago[deleted]
- akho 24d agosob stories of your gramps life have nothing to do with you
- xyzelement 23d agoNot the person you are replying to, but I was greatly influenced by my grandparents who were themselves greatly influenced by how they were raised and their life experience. That seems very common and normal. Of you weren't influenced by your grandparents that is a reflection of something too.
- akho 23d agoOf course everyone is influenced by their parents and grandparents. That does not mean their achievement is yours. The person I was replying to started the comment chain from an abhorrent position of Social Darwinism. Failing to see their privilege, and failing to distinguish their lives from their grandparents' is very common for people holding those opinions.
- xyzelement 23d agoHaving great parents who overcame a lot and taught you how is the privilege
- noduerme 22d agoWhat would you suggest, doing away with good parenting in the name of equity?
- akho 22d agoThe kids of everyone on that flight went on to good educations and some measure of success. It takes a lot of effort to fuck up. That is the privilege, yes. Attributing that success to strict parenting and hard work requires quite a lot of extra argument, which the thread starter does not have. Refusing humanity of people who were not on the flight, and did not achieve the same success, is something else entirely.