"Are you or your parents failures? A bare-minimum checklist"

[TheMikeness]

Here is my modest (and not final) proposal for an easy to follow checklist for determining whether one has passed or failed the bare mimimum requirements of being a parent. It is not to be confused with a checklist for how to be a good parent, but rather as a simple tool for determining whether a given family definitely requires work, and perhaps is usable as one of many criteria for determining whether or not a given person requires therapy in order to resolve some basic issues in their life.

 

"Are you or your parents failures? A bare-minimum checklist"

How to interpret this checklist:

- This checklist was produced by a son of parents who would not be marked as failures by this checklist, and so it may not be definitive

- This checklist is not to be confused with a checklist for determining whether a parent is successful

- If your parents are failures according to this checklist, they owe you closure on this at the very least, and likely also therapy for you and themselves as well; conversely if you are a failure as a parent according to this checklist then you also owe the same to your children

- If either parent is a failure according to this checklist, then both should be considered to be failures


Checklist:


1) The parents' marriage must not end in divorce unless the alternative is for the children to be exposed to a loveless marriage or an abusive environment. In the case of a divorce, the parents must either remarry for love within 5 years, or ensure the children have significantly increased access to non-divorced families, and other family members who love them (Therefore, parents should take the time to acquire the level of self knowledge required to be able to correctly pick someone for a sustainable and loving marriage).

2) The parents must plan, and adjust their plans, such that the children are emotionally and financially able to leave the home permanently before age 25, and never need to come back for more than 6 months, except in exceptional circumstances. This age is flexible only if the parents do not live in a first world country.

3) If the parents become gravely ill, guilt must be no factor in the decision of the child(ren) to either come back to care for them, or at least pay for good care for them.

4) The parents and children must love each other unconditionally until death, unless a physical brain defect prevents this.

5) The children must have never hid a critical fact about themselves (such as their sexuality or if they were raped) from the parents for over a year, whether out of embarrassment or fear of how they might react or otherwise.

6) If by any of the above criteria a parent would be considered a failure, they may be able to redeem themselves by making it their number #1 priority to rectify the issue(s) before their oldest child reaches the age of 30, and only if they eventually succeed in rectifying it. This criteria holds even in the case of premature death. This will only be considered to be completed if all the children read this checklist and concur. Being unaware of being a failure of a parent is also no excuse, and is an additional failure in itself.

[MysterionMuffles]

Hmm...I guess I'm a failure that I'm 25 and still live with my parents who nag the hell out of me to find a full time job so that they can retire(they got almost a decade left before they can)...meanwhile, they never taught me anything valuable about work or money. Just horded money for themselves and denied me almost everything I wanted unless I jumped through numerous hoops of whining for what I want, all until it got to the point where I didn't even want it for the sake of having it anymore, rather to justify the time I invested in making my desires known. It was actually me who had to initiate an allowance system in order to feel like I can earn a game that I wanted at the time, but it never stuck for reasons I don't even remember. I was encouraged to get my first job a paperboy when I was 13, but there was no goddamn point in doing it since my mom took 80% of my menial income to pay her back for something she bought for me before that, and that set me in a spiral of confusion with money. The only way I could ever make money throughout high school was ask for weekly lunch money that I just ended up saving to get stuff with, and never did I feel motivated to get a part time job because school was already bad enough as it was with tons of homework. I didn't even start working until I was 18 and did such a good job at my co-op placement that they decided to hire me on a paying basis.

Wow, what a post. I would love to say to them "you fucked up!" but I think it's kind of irresponsible to make them shoulder ALL the blame for my vocational incompetance. Don't know if you can provide this too, but I would like to ask you how I could bring this up to them without falling under the trap of making it a guilt trip session?

 

 

[Stefan Molyneux]

hitting, bullying, yelling at, manipulating, indoctrinating?

[TheMikeness]

Whoops! I meant to titled this article "Are you or your parents failures at parenting? A bare-minimum checklist". To anyone whom I have just offended with this editing-caused mistake, please accept my humble apology. I meant to say that this is a checklist for determining whether you are a failure as a parent, or whether your parents are failures at being parents.

The original reason for this checklist is that while it is known that people will just shut down when told not to spank or do other abusive things, they might give it more credibility if they're told a list of symptoms which indicate that their parents or themselves as parents have done something wrong, at which point it is on them to determine what they might be. This is instead of simply handing them a value judgment about their specific actions, as I believe that guided self reflection is often more useful for figuring out things than to be outright criticized for one's actions.

[TheMikeness]

While I am trying to avoid listing specific things as this is supposed to be a sort of symptom checklist as opposed to an action checklist, (which IMO is much simpler but also more likely to be ignored or justified away rather than deeply considered), I should probably add a point specifying that if the child has developed certain traits, they might have failed as a parent as well. One of those would be if other people perceive them to be a bully, another might be if they themselves fail this checklist, etc.

[MysterionMuffles]

In that case I am succeeding as a parent, and at least my mom is beginning to. I've opened the line of honest communication with my parents about my history and so far only my mom seems receptive and intellectually competent enough to start opening up.

As for my own parenting, I don't have a child of my own, but I do babysit for my cousin. Suffice to say, I think I'm doing a dandy job at connecting with my neice. I let her play as much as she wants to, and give her the space to nonverbally tell me when she's hungry or sleepy instead of forcing specific times that she needs to. I've only yelled at her once and I felt horrible for it, so I've made a point not to do it again. All in all...now I am not a failure. Maybe at least not in the sense I built that story around me in the above post.

[Andersfilosof]

To me this list reads more like "The threshold above the bare minimum checklist" as it doesn't include abuse or neglect, but you could make a strong argument that if there was no abuse or neglect, the child wouldn't struggle with moving out before age 25 or avoid telling their parents significant facts.

 

[TheMikeness]

Yeah. It's simple to make a checklist of specific actions that if you do, or specific types of abuse you use, you're a failure as a parent, but it is also easier to justify away for the person reading it. My goal with this is to have a thing I can post to various places like Facebook, etc, where people will read it without seeing it as a personal attack, as that will cause them to shut down immediately. The goal is to get people to read the whole thing, so as to slip in these ideas of what things they should make sure do NOT happen if they want to be able to think of themselves as good parents, without telling them how to do their job or risk offending them, as that I believe is what people are going to be more responsive to.

 

Some may see this as taking a sort of apologist stance towards child abuse, etc, but the way I see it is that the people who are open to having things spelled out for them such as "do not spank or emotionally bully your kids" already have plenty of opportunity to hear such things, whereas there's a much bigger market in my opinion for ideas which do not provide the readers with an easy excuse to dismiss it and justify their actions. With that all in mind, I realize that each point is going to have to be DRASTICALLY shortened in the final version, due to the realities of the "sound-byte" culture around us.