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Re: Authentic childhood

Posted by Dante on Sunday, August 31 2014 at 10:26:30PM
In reply to Re: Authentic childhood posted by EthanEdwards on Sunday, August 31 2014 at 6:57:22PM

"My concern is for the pedophile who thinks he wears a halo but doesn't."

Understood.

And I believe that the child matters more. More than me, more than you, more than her parents. I know its not a popular view; to believe that she is more than what adults believe her to be, but it works for me as a Pedo, as a Parent and as a Human.

Though, I don't see how your assumption that some are self-deceiving ( without any proof required ) promotes anything. You single out Peds for this, without applying this human flaw to either parents or LEOs. If you believed that it extended to other adults then you would surely promote a girl's independence from their selfish manipulations of her that might cause harm or mental anguish.

But now we're back to focussing on your imagined assumption that kid's libbers have base motives.

"Your ideology is geared to be very skeptical of parents and ready to conspire with a child against parental rules and notification at little provocation."

Its not an ideology. I was a child, and I was a parent. No concept of the rules can avoid the realities of the examples I cited. Heck, I'll go further and say that no parent can have avoided having to deal with those very realities.

In contrast, your image of the "innocent" who is lured away from the lessons of her own experience by shiny objects is the projection of a protectionist ideology no real parent has encountered. It is true that some parents remain so fearful that they smother their child and push them away. But there peers and other adults usually emerge as a support structure there to encourage the child's necessary independence at every stage.

If you never had a life apart from obeying your parents rules, and never found others to support you without acting as surrogate enforcers, then I'd have to believe you were never a child yourself. As it is, I believe that you were. But that for some reason, your ideology you wish to promote won't allow you to betray anything authentic about what you learned as either a parent or as a child.

This is a shame, as the realities are far more complicated than the myths, but far more rewarding; even if they require adopting ethics different than "Father knows best."

"But most of them will inevitably find that a child tends to follow a much older person's opinions and desires. Children are built to learn from and emulate grown-ups they like and trust."

Not the ones I knew as a child nor raised.

A child's trust is not some eternally renewing naivete. Children grow because they see stuff played out, and they learn that like and trust are based on what works, not what another would like to work.

They soon learn to dissemble to others. They figure out who likes them as they are and who values them because they need them to be someone else. Ordinarily this results in breaking off relationships. But when the company is enforced ( school bullies, relatives ) they learn that its easier to lie to those they can't trust rather than open themselves up.

Its not just the individuation process in pubescents that drives them to socialize with peers and strange adults over family, its also a desire to find a place where they're accepted as themselves.

( The reason I speak less about my older step-daughter Janie here is because I never knew her as a preteen. And she was more of a social butterfly than Ellen at any age. So I didn't see as much of her as her friends did. But that's life. That's the reality of raising a teen daughter. )

"Basically decent grown men lie and cheat and contort reality to get sex with women,"

Then you and I have a clear impasse over what you believe constitutes basic decency. Further, while I'm not naive, we also clearly differ in just how common we think these b*stards nice guys are, and how effective they are at reducing women to slavish obedience.

Again, you conflate rapist with male in everything you see. And you aren't remotely interested enough in women ( or girls ) to study rapists as a distinct class. If you had, you'd notice that they prefer their victims already submissive. Studies with both psychopaths and rapists show that they can tell a brutalized woman by how she walks; and that those already raped make up a very large portion of the subsequent victims of other rapists who did not know about previous assaults.

If you remotely cared about molester-proofing children you would see that being a parental-enforcer isn't part of the plan. Again; where she has decent ( my reading, not your's ) parents, there is no reason to keep them out of the loop. If they value her autonomy and are molester-proofing her already, then everyone who wishes to be of value to her can "conspire" as her friends do. ( Though this also includes not betraying anything she wishes to confide. )

But parents who victimize their children and groom them to be submissive are another story.

Julia and I took in far too many street kids when we lived in the Wicked Metropolis to be naive. Janie was like that. She ran with street kids and never saw a stray she didn't have sympathy for. So we'd sometimes end up providing temporary shelter and food to some of the kids who were trying to avoid gang life, or who had been abandoned by "Father knows best" when he couldn't get his way.

In either case what the kid wanted mattered more than what their parent wanted. And sometimes the best way to get them back on the path to autonomy was to instill more self-confidence than their previous environment wanted to.

Now that's not a "typical" parent story. But I suspect that if your kids have a wide enough social circle that some of their friends will come from dysfunctional homes which the laws would award custody to. And in your rose-tinted fantasy of parenthood, there is no room for other parents valuing the child enough not to replicate the same dysfunction that the kid is escaping from. I suppose that you've never encountered this quandary. But Julia didn't have to be a Pedo parent to support the strays who clustered around Janie.

RLY. Its not all about us and our public-image problem.

"The ideology that can be justified for those few who truly deserve a halo will be appropriated naturally by those who don't deserve it. And it is a recipe for sexual abuse."

If you think that self-esteem, either Pedo or child is a recipe for sexual abuse, then I don't see you engaging much with reality.

Though again, this exchange is nice. Its been a while since I thought about Lucy, the one who was abandoned on the streets with her twin brother. Last I heard she was entering college, but that was years ago. Or about "Grvr" the hulking graffiti tagger who "painted" as a way to avoid being jumped-into a gang. ( In his hood, the taggers could avoid doing greater criminal activity because their "art" was a crime. ) Unfortunately the cops didn't link the tag to the guy until after he'd just turned 18, so he did more time than he would have in juvie. But last I heard he'd settled down with the girl he was seeing and their baby in a neighborhood where gang-life wasn't the only option.

( And here this whitebread comic-geek earned the awe of a 6'2" chicano by introducing him to underground comix legend Vaughn Bodē whose style accidentally shaped NYC graffiti art in the late '70s. )

Being a parent means that any preconceived notions of parenting promoted by too much viewing of TV sitcoms goes right out the window. Certainly one can't help but have their notions of parenting shaped by being on the other side of the transaction.

But I suppose to those who remain naively idealistic that any ethic spare enough to be inclusive must sound even more like an ideology. Just as the notion that the distinct laws for each gender, race and religion could be pared down to "human rights" must sound simplistic to the party who believes that they're truly reflecting more nuances when they argue for double-standards.

Dante

Dante





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