Lynch stood up and said, "thank you, have a good day" and walked out the door.

With my own 'difficult' childhood all I got was, according to Gabor Maté, a hard time focusing on stuff that I actually care about and a whole load of mediocre attempts.

I guess this is one of those that you can only judge in retrospect, although you can never know for sure.

I still believe in this, because it produces self-reliant, ultra-high-performing people, and if your goal is e.g. to have your lineage survive and thrive, then that's what you would want. So we're all lawyers, doctors and engineers, and we talk to our children like they're adults and have high expectations of them and are gravely, mortally disappointed if they let us down somehow.

Really, the only thing I'd like from low-pressure and low-performing people with too much time on their hands is for them to leave people like us alone, and go back to maxing out their credit cards, taking drugs, watching reality shows and crashing their cars, without thinking they're capable of judging people they'll never understand. But hey, that's the world we live in, and it's all sour grapes from them, so the main thing is to make sure they never get an upper hand no matter how many ill-behaved children they have.

That's the perspective from this side of that.

I expect to be downvoted for this, but before you click that arrow, remember the good news is that our kids will be smart and self-reliant and yours will be helplessly reduced to voting on social platforms, if they can even read ;)

You don't have to abuse children for them to grow up into functioning and healthy adults. That simply is ideology not rooted in any kind of data.

There is a parenting style called authoritative (not authoritarian! Authoritarian is what you had to suffer through) that is characterized by both clear and unwavering secure attachment (i.e. the kid always knows it is loved and protected, even if it got a bad grade in school or did something stupid) and clear, well-communicated and understandable rules and high, but achievable performance targets.

signed, an educational science phd who never was punished for a bad grade in his entire time in school even once, yet developed the discipline of doing a part time phd while already working and being a parent anyway.

I grew up the same way. There was a lot of arguing—it rarely turned physical, but they didn’t take much interest in me, either. I had to sort out many of my own issues on my own. Fortunately, I had grandparents on one side of the family who loved me dearly and made me feel like I belonged. They also always encouraged me and supported my talents.

Now I have children of my own and think about this a lot—especially since my wife’s experience was similar, yet different. We decided to do things better with our kids, and we try to put that into practice every day.

Here’s something that crossed my mind: I’ve certainly achieved a degree of success in life, partly because I had to be very independent from a young age. If I wanted something, I had to take care of it myself—at least in most cases. But I’ve come to the conclusion that while my sons might turn out to be more "normies" or conventional, the psychological toll of that kind of upbringing—the low self-esteem and the lack of pride from one’s own parents—far outweighs those benefits.

I never said that we weren't loved or that basic affection was withheld.

We were expected to do beyond what we thought was our best, or else we would be disappointments to our parents. Would they still love us? Sure. Kick us out...? Not unless our responses involved gross insubordination. But we were called to explain ourselves as one would in a court of law.

What was at stake, and this is what I think you may misapprehend, was not parental love. It was parental respect.

In order for that to function, you actually have to love them and know that they love you. Otherwise you wouldn't give a shit whether they respected you.

Which is why withdrawing respect at times is not abuse, it's teaching someone how to conduct themselves.

Don't bring your dog collars around then

> as one would in a court of law.

such as this loud symptom, if you don't want the shame of it to outlive you. It's what you're looking for in fact. Your highly disagreeable post, followed by the very reasonable replies you wrote to the reactions it caused, is a hint you're still looking for that kind of stimulation. It's a form of self-punishment.

Edit: clicked the profile, it's just a troll, lol. Joke's on me.

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.

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.

I've just been sucked into the same online shitstorm as everyone else, I guess. I'm posting right now directly after reading tonight's clickbait about the woman who got sentenced for child abuse for letting her 5 year old kid walk a few blocks alone in a gated community. Transposing that to all this, it makes me think about what impacted me, my family and my cohort and allowed us to be self-sufficient, and further, the whole commentary demonstrates that such things are perceived by a good chunk of the population as "abuse" when they're really tools you need to give your children which other people would love to deprive you of giving to your children. I am an example of someone who would be nothing without the framework of expectations and responsibilities I was given at an early age (including at times radical freedom that I had to use judiciously or else face extreme disappointment) so I'm speaking in defense of that style of parenting.

But as to why I'm here writing in the middle of the night, it's pretty much on myself and my own addictions. I should be doing something more productive.

Blame the game, not the player! In today's kind spirit of early-internet you're also not a dog on the internet communities, there you go...

No warranty granted or implied: A bit of sarcosine in the morning, and a bit more glycine at night I say. :-)

But if your definition of success is remotely related to any form of leadership, then your suggestions are extremely flawed. To be a good leader, you need to manage people, have empathy, sympathy, tact, charisma, and so on.

Adding to that - many things in the real world end up being a mix of both, which means you need both to get to the top. Tom Brady or Michael Jordan don’t become the best in the world by being assholes to their teammates. Significant political / activist figures don’t start movements by belittling people. And so on.

Which means that the attitude you’re displaying here really kind of locks you into the upper middle class overachiever definition of success as a doctor, lawyer, etc. and not into the class of the truly successful.

It's okay that you didn't turn out to be that magnanimous, but don't lie to yourself and pretend that you tried as hard as you could

You had more in your humanity tank than you knew you had

I've got lots in the humanity tank.

I just reserve the right to speak honestly, and I'm also willing to have my mind changed. Lots of hypocritical assholes are magnanimous as a gesture. I'll spend 2 hours telling a homeless guy he's not Jesus and he's ruining his life and try to find him a job. I did that a couple nights ago. But that isn't magnanimity, fuck no. It's some kind of sheer Dostoevskyan desire to see humanity in everyone I meet because the token value of mine is only as good as theirs. That's how I define morality. Magnanimity can go to hell.

I felt very seen when I read this story of Nathaniel Hawthorne's https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/ebrand.html

It's about a man who left home on a journey because something was bothering him and he didn't stop investigating until he figured out what it was.

It turned out (spoilers!) that he regarded his fellow men at an arm's length. He saw himself apart

I am of that kind and it causes me great pain. If I'm reading you right it seems you feel yourself in the thick of it with everyone. I hope you do not take that feeling for granted

you sound like a cunt, seriously, and have no idea what this attempt at stepping back tells about you. That makes you transparent, really any shrink would be like "ah yes, of course, that was to be expected". It's the only reason I'm replying back (no downvotes though, those are for spam). We get it you absorbed sadism from your parents. Why don't you tell us about the other side as well, all these moments of astheny when you're not flamboyant but ashy?

No one hates so bitterly as the lazy and poor contemplating the energetic and prosperous. --Dale Worley

I'd assume from the rest of your post that you'd all become olympians, astronauts, high ranked politicians, or founders of mega-corps. These are all fairly run-of-the-mill careers your family entered into, and plenty of people (I'd guess close to 100%) enter these roles without the type of abuse you suffered.

Hopefully the mortal disappointment you project onto your kids is a little lighter than that your parents projected onto you.

When I was a teenager I really thought their demands were unfair.

When I was a dropout and a taxi driver in my 20s, I blamed my parents.

When I became a millionaire based on finding something I loved and doing it very well, even though they disapproved and didn't support me in it, I finally was able to thank them for giving me the intellectual tools to do that for myself.

And interestingly, unexpectedly, they finally respected my choices as well.

Life without a struggle is meaningless.

My brothers, worth noting, are far far more interesting and successful than I am... I'm still a dropout loser to them. Megacorps and politics are their games.

Our father had a thing about no television and only books. We had to read 50 pages a night of a book he chose, after school, and report to him what we had read. Every night. No video games either, and computers only if you were writing your own code.

My eldest brother was severely dyslexic. He had a very hard time reading 50 pages a night. He found all kinds of ways to fake it. He makes $20 million a year now, give or take, as a senior law partner, still faking it. Tell me that ain't a good story.

I guess I'm happy. I can't complain. I need more challenges.

I think that's a really awesome honest answer. I find it very cool you're still looking for challenges and setting the terms yourself. I wish you the best life ever possible.

That sounds like a recipe for long-term psychological complexes. I know plenty of high-achievers that don't constantly feel like they have to prove themselves. And I wish I didn't have to work so hard to challenge that feeling in myself.

The measure of whether it was done in the proper proportion, I think, is whether you find later in life that it was, on balance, a service to you.

Ime if you constantly need to prove yourself then you rarely feel this; when you do, the feeling is ephemeral.

> achieving something to make your dead parents happy is better than achieving nothing at all

This feels circular. It assumes a value judgement about achievement which stems from your upbringing.

It is a value judgment. It's one that not everyone shares. It's surprising to me that a majority of people find it to be a controversial.

I think what's actually going on here in this thread is that people think any value judgment must be a bad thing. Right?

As far as I can make out, your argument goes like this:

Strict parenting is good because it produces high achievers. I think achievement is good because I was conditioned to think it was good. I was conditioned to think it was good as a result of strict parenting.

Effectively: strict parenting is good because I was strictly parented.

No need, they have videos.

It's Poe's Law in action. We can't tell if you're unhinged enough to post that or you're imitating people who would post that to make fun of them.

About two thirds of these can make great fuel, depending on your temperament and coping style (i.e. overcompensation style seen most commonly among our billionaires).

Though "unrelenting standards" is probably the most obvious one. I've noticed this in several men who are getting a lot of attention recently. Their fathers taught them that anything less than absolute victory was unacceptable.