A couple years ago on a blog I follow I saw a recommendation for another blog, Dusk in Autumn. Since then, I've been following Dusk in Autumn, whose blogger calls himself agnostic (hurray for the edginess of a lower-case name!). If someone asked me to describe this blog's main feature, for a long time I would have answered, "It only sends the first few lines through a blog aggregator, so you either have to click through to read the rest or ignore the rest." Lately, though, I'd answer, "agnostic believes he can identify celebrity homosexuals through Google Image Searches, and then he uses highly-offensive terms when he blogs about his 'findings.'"
Anyway, agnostic has a running thesis, that Americans began "cocooning" in the 1980s, which fundamentally changed all aspects of our culture in the 1990s. And I mean all aspects, ranging from "how well R-rated movies do" to "how large is the modern female escutcheon." There's hardly anything that agnostic won't attribute to cocooning (including, interestingly, falling success rates among Mormon missionaries).
The other day agnostic had a post about selfies at funerals wherein he describes American culture as having "grabbed at its chest and dropped dead, rotting on the ground for 20 years now." He says those born after 1992 (1990 births are safe, but 1991 births are borderline--seriously) have been ruined by growing up in such a terrible culture.
Where he goes completely off the rails, though, is in blaming nuclear families for the problem.
Can it come as any surprise, then, that they don't have the slightest intuition for what is inappropriate, what is disrespectful, what is blasphemous? Their paranoid helicopter parents, especially their smothering mothers, have kept them from ever coming into contact with the real world and its moral codes, especially social interactions outside of the nuclear family.
To use a pre-1992 reference I'm sure agnostic would understand, "Whatchu talkin' 'bout, Willis?"
I asked in a comment, "So American culture has been rotting on the ground for 20 years, but parents should allow more contact with that culture to get normal children? I don't understand." He replied:
Parents should allow more contact with their children's peers. When kids have their own life, they don't pay as much attention to toxic culture or depend on it for some kind of grounding for their identity or meaning in their lives.
They're going to come into contact with mass culture at some point, and a weak sense of social and communal belonging is the main "risk factor" for getting sucked into the duckface-selfie culture.
And that toxic culture is an effect of all this anti-social, distrustful behavior. Cocooning began in the late '80s and early '90s, but you don't see hostile caricatured culture until later.
A follow-up reply summed up thus: "More simply: social isolation leads to self-absorption."
I completely disagree. The duckface-selfie culture is learned from peers. The desire to be accepted by peers who value the culture is what leads to culture adoption. Children aren't kept in isolation tanks, but are accultured with the parents' culture instead of the duckface-selfie culture. I find the assumption heroic that a child raised with extensive parental contact necessarily ends up with "a weak sense of social and communal belonging."
I think the problem is the idea that reduced contact with peers is reduced contact with society. That does happen, of course, when the kid's parents both work and watch TV and movies every night. But an involved parent provides social contact. The purpose of parents is to function as a model of adult behavior. This is true whether you think parents came from God creating a system to foster children, or whether you think evolution produced children incapable of surviving on their own for so long after birth. There is something beneficial from families over peers.
I commented again:
I'd say self-absorption is the infant's natural state, and that the maturation process is learning to put off self-absorption. Exposure to large numbers of people who aren't maturing teaches there's no need to mature. How does immersion in a group of 12-year-olds teach a 12-year-old to think and behave like an adult? If our problem is a continuation of youth culture beyond youth, isn't a possible solution the prevention of youth culture in the first place?
agnostic replied:
Children respond dynamically (mature) in each other's presence, they don't just continue on in their initial bratty ways. Why? Because the other kids will refuse to play with them, tease them for acting like a baby, ostracize them, or even beat them up if they're self-advancing enough.
They fail to change their bratty ways when their primary / only interactions are with genetic relatives. Blood is thicker than water, so kin will never give children the wake-up call that they need to sense that their behavior isn't going to fly.
Like ostracism -- are the parents going to throw the kid out of the house just for acting selfish? His peers will cast him out, but his parents won't.
Yes, peers are a maturing influence to a point. A kid at school is embarrassed of having the teacher tie his shoes or of crying when he loses at recess, so the social group provides motivation for maturation. But what of the early teen who thinks of sex as private and special, who then spends time with a late teen who views sex as a spectacle of superiority? Why do children and adults oppose smoking much more strongly than teens do? A modern teen hears all the wrong messages regarding maturity from his "mature" peers. Forrest Gump survives to adulthood; Jenny dies from her supposed maturity. [NOTE: the movie is post-1992, but the novel is from 1986, and as such is acceptable American culture.]
Finally, agnostic left a comment that tipped the hand of parody: "Hanging around the age group just above them would do the trick better, since they care more about what the 'cool older kids' are like." Now I knew he was having a go at me. Because no one seriously thinks that the culture will be healed by allowing impressionable children to hang out with older kids without regard to which older kids and what they are doing. Age-stratified children's groups didn't just turn up accidentally. My wife and I were in a freshman health class with a girl who had a graduated boyfriend in the Marines. We weren't in awe of her like, "Wow, she's so cool," we were in awe of her like, "Holy crap, that girl's going to be pregnant in a few weeks." And like, "Holy crap, her parents must be dead or on drugs."
Children need examples of how to mature. The best case is when mature parents provide those examples. When parents are immature, kids learn maturation (a difficult process) is unnecessary, and no one does an unnecessary difficult thing. When parents aren't examples because of absence, kids learn from those around them, typically no-more-developed peers, so maturation is arrested. When parents limit contact with peers to prohibit this, kids learn from celebrity examples, which produces the duckface-selfie culture. To say the problem is parents limiting peer interaction misses the first two steps of the problem and proscribes a solution that isn't a solution at all.
via oneofthebest
0 commentaires:
Enregistrer un commentaire