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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Paracelsus" data-source="post: 1154136" data-attributes="member: 8098">Are you raising a whole generation's kids, or are you raising your own children?Newton's First Law applies to raising children: an object will continue in a direction it is pushed in by a force unless there is an opposing force to it.  Where the parent does not provide an opposing force, such culture as there is will provide it instead.  I'll concede it won't be easy to oppose the cultural forces against you, but if you're going to be a parent and you're serious about raising a kid into the sort of adult you believe to be right-thinking, you're going to have to provide that opposing force.  Not because doing so is in support of your identity as a good parent, but because you believe in your soul that it's the right example to set for a child.You point out the next generation of kids is likely to be materialistic.  First question: since materialism is not inborn to a child any more than capitalism, communism, or asceticism is, who do you think taught them to be that way? I'll give you a hint, culture might have pushed them, but the kids could only have moved because there was no opposing force involved in their lives to keep them from so being pushed.There was no parent really there; there was only another overgrown child (or two, where the kid was fortunate enough to have two parents).  There was no person there prepared to give over their own all-consuming need to create and maintain an identity for their children's sake.  There was instead an epidemic of parents who wanted to brand their kids as college students but not actually teach them how to want, how to be adults.  That generation of adults is now reaping what it sowed, just as their own parents reaped what they sowed and are now at war with Generation X to hold onto all the shit they acquired in the wake of World War Two.None of these generational changes have much to do with how an individual child grows up: that is, always and everywhere, the responsibility and the fault of the parents and the parents alone.  It was the Jesuits who said "Give me a child until the age of 7 and I will show you the man."  Most children are with their parents until the age of 7, and you can see the men those parents generated.If resources is all that a father gives you, he deserves no respect.  That's literally trying to buy your children's love.  A kid doesn't remember the toys he's given, he remembers the time and the love and the insight and the parenting.And how did that work out for the French monarchy? Hint: there isn't one anymore.Or let's look at a more recent example in the English experience, Prince Charles, if we're talking about distant fathers and whatnot.  He had the whole stiff upper lip upbringing: fuck me, the kid was sent to Australia for two terms of his schooling, and even he called his school in bloody Scotland as "Colditz in kilts".  He describes Elizabeth as a distant mother and his father a bully who forced him into marrying Diana.  He, his brothers, and his sister all fucking sucked at forming lasting marriages, topped by the near-destruction of the monarchy that resulted from Prince Andrew marrying Fergie, let alone their poor selection of Sloane Ranger Diana Spencer.</blockquote>

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