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by latentsea 21 days ago
> The system we got for this is called parenting

And it fails miserably.

4 comments

It's been working for tens of thousands of years. What changed in the last few decades wasn't parenting or technology. It was the rise of the nanny state where the parents gave up the parenting of their kids and entrusted that to educational institutions instead.
I genuinely think it’s all three:

1. The cultural factor is rising expectations for children and their parents, costing both time and money;

2. The political/social factor is nanny states and academic institutions that the public expects to not only teach but raise their kids;

3. Technology. Especially the Internet, mobile devices, social media, and short form content. Technology distracts and isolates both kids and parents.

An example of the three factors at work is the all-too-common local news trope of ”Nosy neighbor calls CPS because the family next door lets their kids walk to school. Whole family traumatized as a result.”

It both works and fails, like many other things. But if you hold the goal that it must never fail in sufficiently high esteem, you invariably end up with a system like the one we have now.
>the goal that it must never fail

That's a good way to put it

I'd prefer to just accept the reality is it fails sometimes and not try to get a 100% foolproof solution. That lies the way of madness.
If the goal of a system is to never fail, then the bureaucrats in charge of running that system will just game the metrics and cover up all the issue, while it fails first very slowly then very suddenly.

In fact that's why nothing ever gets done to improve things in the EU/west, because we expect perfect outcome in every new change and we want potential risks to be zero before something new is implemented, so it's easier for leaders to just never do anything, never change anything, just sit and maintain the status quo while we go through managed decline complaining things keep slowly getting worse.

I think if you were able to get accurate statistics on rates of sexual abuse for the last few thousand years you'd find there's a baseline that we don't seem to ever learn to do better than.
>It's been working for tens of thousands of years.

I mean, I'll gladly send you 10k years back and have you tell me how it goes.

Not really. Yes most kids will see porn before they're 18 but it doesn't damage them or give them the wrong idea about consensual behaviour.

If anything I find GenZ a lot more focused on explicit consent than GenX.

Well I remember starting to watch it from about 11 years old and now at 38 I can thoroughly said it did some pretty bad damage.
Porn is definitely damaging. It doesnt make people rapists but it screws up their sex drives.
Do you realize you'll end up in fascist dystopia where your children belong to the state, with this line of thinking?

Or is that where you want other people to end up while you peddle propagandist fairytales about failed parenting?

Do you realise the solution is just to accept some kids will wind up as collateral because parenting alone can't solve it, and rather than trying to solve it through technology (which won't work anyway) we have to accept that we'd rather have the crime and our freedom? We can't kid ourselves that parenting is a solution, just as we shouldn't kid ourselves that technology isn't either. The answer is maybe stop thinking of the children.
Sorry, your POV wasn't entirely clear to me from your original comment.

Of course I'm on your side here, there must be a healthy balance, which modern child micromanagement, and zealous survellance in general, are quite an opposite of. Saying this as someone who survived my happy 80-90-s childhood, roaming freely wherever we wanted with my friends, doing kid things many modern parents would be terrified of, like climbing various industrial structures, crashing on our bikes and sleds and whatnot. And still being an exemplary homeboy in the eyes of my parents and neghbours. Sure, some of my friends didn't make it through perfectly unscathed, some broke a bone or two, and I still have that scar from the sled blade, but that's the way of life.

One can't turn the world into a perfectly safe utopia without turning it into complete dystopia in the process. Education and culture is what makes it safe without such side effects.

>And it fails miserably.

No it doesn't. That's just needlessly reductionist doomerist take with no argumentation to back that up.

Define failure and success of the system in this context.

> No it doesn't

Yes it does. If you're of the mindset that drives one to build a nanny state that is. My assumption is the mindset is that any amount of CSA is completely intolerable and that we must try to reach zero cases and there can be no other goal. If that's the framing then parenting alone fails miserably at it.

I think that's a terrible goal, because it leads to the nanny state.