738. WADWMUFGAO

The abbreviated title won’t become popular, but that’s okay. It serves here to represent We All Do Whatever Makes Us Feel Good About Ourselves. Sometimes it costs us, as with these examples:

• Anytime women provide knowledge about their sexual willingness outside of marriage, they become disadvantaged to capture whatever they’re after except for sexual union.
• Egotism reflects out of low self-esteem. Brought on by difficulty making Self feel good about Self, egotists use other people to inflate their sense of worth.
• People memorize and use trivia to obstruct others from upstaging the trivia-master on broad or deeper matters. It helps change the subject or regain control when conversations make the trivia-master uncomfortable.
• Parents and teachers try to improve the self-esteem of children by indulgences that make the adults feel good about their selves. They mistake self-esteem for self-image, and do the wrong things.
• How uplifting are tattoos? After a few days the uplift goes away, as does one’s attention to a new picture hanging in the home. If done for fashion, fashions change, so what follows? No tattoos? If done to make a statement, time makes statements obsolete.
• How inadequate a man’s self-image, if he resorts to tattoos to perceive himself better off? How low, disrespectful, or perhaps self-hating is a woman’s self-esteem, if she tattoos her body?

It’s our nature: WADWMUFGAO. It often explains how we produce mistakes, regrets, or unintended consequences.

632. Mothering Sons — #04

Parents—The way to earn respect is to give it. If kids have to show respect out of fear, it never grows in their heart.

Helicopter Moms—Whether from ego satisfaction, fear of harm, or good intentions, continually hovering over son kills initiative, stifles growth of self-image, and likely makes him co-dependent on someone or something. (You may win his extreme allegiance for your old-age care, but he won’t be valuable to another woman.) 

Toddlers—The drive for male independence and freedom starts earlier but becomes obvious in toddlerhood. It’s son’s opening statement about the picture he has of himself, his self-image. 

Mothers—A reminder: Our self-image sits like a governor on our life. If we think we can, we do. If we think we can’t, we don’t. It keeps us tracking down the road of life that we visualize for our capabilities and interests. If we venture off that road, accidentally or deliberately, we correct ourselves and alibi or explain it even to ourselves, if correction is beyond us.

Infants—Dad’s primary responsibility lies with taking care of, encouraging, rewarding, and entertaining mom. The baby can become drudgery, when father shows apathy about mom’s needs, wants, and expectations for support and caring for her.

Teens—Son’s independence hormonally shuts out the authoritarian leader roles of mom and dad. Coaches are authoritarian only in a narrow window that involves their game. Coaching for parents means authoritarian about specific things and allowing freedom off of that ‘playing field’.   

More follows.

474. What Moms Never Hear — E: Parents develop too

There’s no such thing as motivation, there’s only self-motivation for both parents and, except in the earliest years or under threat of hurt, children.

Parents inclined to see their parental roles as ‘motivators’ may want to consider other methods. Love and nurturing fade in effectiveness for influencing and changing a child’s mindset as a child ages. Common sense counsels parents to develop new skills and techniques. These work: leadership guided by principles in the tweens and coaching guided by respect and trust in the teens.

Ø Self-interest is the psychological force that energizes self-motivation. The same psychological function motivates each child, albeit underdeveloped, unpredictable, and often nonsensical.

Ø Except to relieve anxiety and assuage hurt, both love and nurturing become increasingly ineffective to energize children after age six or seven.

Ø A leadership hierarchy, one parent more powerful and respected than the other, shapes toddler thinking best as the little ones transition toward the tweens.

Ø Leadership overpowers love and nurturing in the development of tweens.

Ø Good leadership specializes in respect and trust downward before it’s earned and upward after it’s earned.

Ø Parents that split leadership roles into primary and secondary functions enable their selves to balance practical hard-headedness with loving soft-heartedness—the essence of raising tweens. 

Ø Effectiveness of both parent leaders depends upon acceptance, endorsement, and backup of each other in front of the kids. Otherwise, respect for one or both weakens, and kids pick up more details for later getting their own way.

Ø After puberty, love and nurturing don’t work well in the teens, although they can help with angst and hurts. Leadership also weakens. Consequently, coaching works best to retain parental leverage.

Ø Mutual respect and trust exchanged between leaders and followers in the tweens provides the best foundation for successful coaching in the teens.

Considering only parental leverage in the teens, leadership principles provide good guidance for parental development in the tweens.  

NOTE: More later about leadership principles and coaching. Nurturing is addressed in the series of that name listed in the CONTENTS page at blog top.

Details about the perils of co-equal leaders follow as next post facto.

468. What Moms Never Hear — A: Intro

I dedicate this series to Her Highness Marianne. Dealing with teen boys concerns her, as it does others, so this series will look at prepping boys and girls for the teens.

Raising kids can be simplified with clearer terms and concepts. I place on the table the following high-impact themes as openers:

M RESPECT—How parents respect and treat each other is more vital than how they treat their children. (This presumes conscientious parents and the absence of abuse and maltreatment.)

M AUTHORITY—When parents disrespect adults and discredit authority figures, kids learn and will act the same way toward the parents.

M ROLES—By not specializing in distinctly different roles, parents generate unneeded confusion, mistakes, resentments, and power struggles that confound parental development. It compounds to weaken child development.

M VALUES—Children inherit, adopt, and otherwise absorb their values from three sources: parents, heroes, and peers. But it happens respectively in three phases of development.

M DISINTEREST—Mental growth causes disinterest with techniques and ‘motivators’ that parents use. One impact: Love and nurturing lose their energizing influence after the weans. This mandates that parents develop themselves.

Next post facto: Mom’s Song.

449. VIRTUE— Magnet for Males —SECTION III

Virtue is learned best before puberty and when taught by parents and authority figures such as teachers. Learned after puberty or taught by peers, behaviors are predominately adolescent. Few appear virtuous to mature men. 

What’s the difference? In today’s social marketplace, popularity and wishful thinking overrule experience and wisdom learned the hard way. Boys do, but men don’t find attractiveness in either female popularity or wishful thinking.   

Teen peers lack the maturity to match parental teaching and transfer of values, especially those regarding virtue.

Mature parents combine experience, wisdom, and personal concern. They promote cultural standards based on moral and religious values that generate respectable and admirable behavior among girls; boys follow and learn to be men accordingly. You can see it in action, as I recap some results it produced a half-century ago.

♥ Females didn’t have to fear vulgarity and disrespectful treatment, because males anticipated a female’s sensibilities and honored her expectations.

♥ Violence against females was rare.

♥ Violence of all kinds was much less common, because parents and especially females tamed, civilized, and domesticated males much better than today.

♥ Girls providing fellatio in school buses and elsewhere was never thought about, much less done and even copied to become popular.  

♥ Mothers directly taught and fathers indirectly coached daughters about boys. Brothers revenged harm to sister’s reputation.

♥ Sexual predators were not unknown, but their numbers were extremely small and audacity weak.

♥ Girls were too easily embarrassed to talk about sex with boys. They explored the subject in the dark, as they were felt over by a boy’s hands. Modesty caused embarrassment in the light, and her virtuous character slowed or stopped his hands in the dark. Or she yielded, self-respect plummeted, virtue took a hit, and his respect and admiration wavered.   

♥ Teen pregnancy was shameful and special care was given usually out of town, if the father didn’t marry her. Shame held down the incidence. (I knew of only one teen girl that reputedly had given birth, and I grew up in a mid-size city with four junior high and two big high schools. I got around to half of them socially during my school years: dances, dates, visits, hanging out.)

♥ Female modesty and feminine unknowns taught boys to respect girls in general. Chastity taught boys to respect each girl in particular. Silent admiration flowed easily out of respect, whether she was liked or not.

♥ Pre-pubescent girls knew nothing about sex and were embarrassed by thoughts of it. Boys of that age were ‘educated’ earlier, if they had bigger brothers. But disinterest usually prevailed until puberty set in. (Plenty of challenges other than sexual interests exist for boys and girls in the tweens.)

♥ Children aspired to become mature adults, not adolescent idols. Few grew up and retained the immature mindset of adolescence, because parents set examples to be admired and respected. Kids sought to duplicate parents.

You can imagine that parents used to have it much easier raising kids than do parents today.

The next post describes how moms and grannies exploited virtue.

346. Weans, tweens, and teens #12 — Puberty

    What we do with what we have before puberty is the fault or to the credit of our parents. What we do after puberty is our own fault or to our credit, because that’s when our own judgments come into play.

The value systems of children at puberty scatter beneath a bell curve. But, I’ll focus on the ends and describe the extremes.

At the low end a few children reach teenage with an empty mind. Having not been nurtured in the weans and led and taught properly in the tweens, mature values were never instilled and encouraged to flourish.

They pass through puberty without learning to live up to adult, parental, and teacher standards and expectations. Then they spend seven or so years vacuuming up immature fun and adolescent values designed to stretch teen independence beyond that acceptable to most adults.

Their minds congeal into adulthood at about age 21. It has a fullness of beliefs: Either those implanted before, or those adopted after puberty, or the mixture that we along the bell curve develop. Such kids grow into what we see as adult immaturity—that is, physical adult but mental adolescent.

Also, the hormones of puberty shift responsibility and authority from others to us. At the low end of the spectrum children don’t hold themselves accountable for their own behavior. So, parents and authority figures that try to inject measures of accountability find their efforts often go for naught. Their influences are mostly rejected, and the children easily become burdens to society.

———————————

The spectrum’s high end represents kids with moral convictions and strong ambitions—albeit still under-developed—about their future adult life. They are guided by someone or something bigger than themselves—e.g., God, parental pressures, dreams, adult opportunities.

They accept personal responsibility. They give themselves the authority they need to do the right things. They hold themselves accountable for inadequacies they should not have. They demonstrate maturity far beyond their years.

Their belief system fills the mental vacuum of early childhood. Without that vacuum, they have little interest in sucking up contradictory values from teen peers. Adolescence for such kids is merely a pass-through phase enroute to what they seek to become as adults. They cause few problems for parents.  

 Most of us grew up somewhere between these extremes.

More about the Weans, tweens, and teens can be found in the CONTENT page near the top.

304. Lifelong husbands—made, not born — Part I

Many complications muck up lifelong marriages in modern America. Five follow.

1.     The wisdom of the ages is lost. Women can’t learn from their moms, because their moms didn’t listen to their moms. It exploded four decades ago. Girls and young women rebelled and spouted slogans with revolutionary zeal: Don’t listen to anyone over thirty, Down with authority, Distrust parents, Ignore authority figures. We’re several generations deep now with women shaping their lives around these adolescent values. What one generation allows, the next practices.

2.     Men do whatever they have to do to have frequent and convenient access to sex. Because many women provide unmarried sex, men are encouraged not to swap independence for responsibility.

3.     The feminine nature presented with pride and charm appeals and turns men ON for female influence about helping fulfill a woman’s hopes and dreams. Our forefathers followed that model. But not modern men. Feminist politics, theory, and dogma turn men OFF for yielding masculine independence.  

4.     Men seek justice. Women seek equality. As women seek greater equality with men, they give up justice. The PC crowd—political correctioneers— destroy justice. PCers and feminists disconnect females from male empathy and sympathy. They reject the separate but equal roles that family life requires for mutual respect, harmony, success, and longevity.

5.     Morality serves women more than men. Women can use it, men don’t need it. Our Judeo-Christian cultural heritage serves women even better. It goes beyond morals to guide men and women into separate but equal roles in home and society. However, ideologies such as humanism, secularism, relativism, and elitism replace morality and religion with values that expand male dominance, serve males over females, and throw away what’s best for families.*

* See the Worldviews page for more about these ‘isms’.

297. Newlywed Bonding #8 — Evil incardnate

Rely on the card and then fail hard. Success at handling money tightly bonds a couple. Failure splits them even faster.

♂$♀  Adolescent decisions can kill good decision-making efforts. For example, newlyweds can’t spend their way into the middle class lifestyle their parents provided for them. Neither can they keep up with peers still living with parents. Try either and couples turn their lifestyle over to creditors.

♂$♀  Outrageous credit card interest rates and debt drag down anyone’s lifestyle. So, wiping out credit card interest payment is the fastest way to move a couple’s lifestyle upward—except for more income, of course.

♂$♀  Dealing with credit cards, good intentions are not nearly enough, not nearly enough, not nearly enough. Determination, firm plans, and loyalty to each other and their budgeting process are required. Both minds must be convinced that credit card interest payments are the financial equivalent of bringing home STDs.

♂$♀  Only one way out: Every couple should stop immediately charging on credit cards except as they set aside the money to pay it off with the next billing. Develop a system of tracking and the habit of paying cards off each month. Promise and deliver on the promise to never incur credit card interest payments, once current debt is paid off.

Empty promises deliver empty nests.

The next post facto is “Plan Ahead” at post 301.

[More about newlyweds appears at posts 261, 257, 254, 247, 242, 230 and 224. Scroll down or search by number with dot and space following it.]