probably won't happen, but...

[tim]

A friend's Facebook comment on my previous post prompted me to ask myself: what would the world look like if parents were as concerned with raising their children to be ethical human beings as with protecting them?

Comments

[luinied]

Would they also make as many mistakes relative to their goal of raising children to be ethical human beings as existing parents make with regards to protecting children?

[tim]

You can do the wrong thing with the right intentions, but you're certainly not going to do the right thing by accident.

I'm thinking specifically, though, of people (like the self-identified feminist parents mentioned in the previous post who won't let their sons wear pink) who know what it means to be an ethical person (that is, if you asked, they would tell you it's wrong for a kid to bully another kid because he's engaging in some gender-inappropriate behavior) but are actively choosing not to teach that to their kids.

[luinied]

Knowing what it means to be an ethical person doesn't entail knowing how to raise someone else to be an ethical person, though. And I've had this tab open since yesterday thinking I had something more insightful to say here, but I don't think I really have anything beyond "raising kids to be a certain way is really hard". If I were even considering raising kids myself someday this would probably be one of the things I'd regularly panic about.

[blue_sky_and_jam]

I suspect that ‘fantasy violence’ in films would be as vehemently condemned as realistic violence. I’ve always found it odd that normalised violence (James Bond shooting dozens of mercenaries with no apparent negative consequences) is given lower ratings than horrible, bloody, nasty violence. In general, the entire film classification system would be overhauled.

Hi, by the way. :)

[tim]

Maybe so, though in this post I was more thinking about decisions that are trade-offs between what's short-term safest for your kid and what will encourage the kid to treat other people decently (in the context of my previous post: whether to let boy children wear pink, which may protect them from bullying at the expense of encouraging them to bully other boys-wearing-pink later).

Also, hi -- do I know you? It's OK if I don't, it's just that no one random has added me in a while :-)

[blue_sky_and_jam]

You don’t know me; I was just poking around looking for other people with the interest ‘drawing’, and I enjoyed your post about tutus and breastfeeding, so I thought I’d pop you on my list. No obligation to add back, though!