Gongol.com Archives: February 2025
February 20, 2025
Aside from clothing (where "fast fashion" is a very real market force), few areas of culture are as subject to trends as parenting. Even if not everyone becomes a parent, everyone has been on the receiving end of parenting -- so feelings run high and nobody much doubts that they, themselves, see how it should be done. ■ The latest in the ultra-long line of parenting trends is "FAFO parenting", which derives its name from an off-color phrase that effectively means "You'll get what's coming to you, and you'll deserve it". ■ To a narrow extent, there is some room for parenting via natural consequences -- when the stakes are low and the feelings run high, it can be useful for children to see that the world is indeed ruled by cause and effect, and that their choices can be those causes. As some people represent it, "FAFO parenting" is just an extension of that logic. ■ Yet it's noteworthy how many approaches to parenting -- and management, teaching, coaching, and law enforcement -- depend upon a faulty model of the person who is being influenced. The flaw is in seeing them as objects, rather than as complete human beings. Certainly, the whole experience of childhood is formative; there's lots of shaping and molding that takes place. ■ But we recognize fairness before we can form sentences and we remember circumstances of our treatment from our first years, even if toddlers can be unreliable narrators. Everyone has at least a hazy memory or two of how they felt in the midst of a pre-school experience. That memory is part of the integral whole of the person. ■ We are, in terms of temperament, personality, and lots of other orientations, whole not long after birth. And a lot of parenting would be better if it started from the assumption that the child is, in fact, complete, rather than some kind of puzzle still under construction.
