Always chuckle when I see people APAB posting. I wonder how much of it is posters here having legitimately terrible parents, vs how much is just stupid teenagers getting mad because they were grounded.
Edit: I think a big part of the problem is that parents are forced into wage labor that keeps them away from their kids for most of the day. Completely unnatural situation.
I get that the meme is kind of over the top but my issue is the suffocating, boring and isolating nature of the nuclear family and the abuse, big and small, it permits. I think parents being away from their children is good actually, at least after a certain age. Being around the same two people constantly can easily drive you crazy.
the nuclear family is a recent invention and hasn't existed in its current form for more than a century. it's not about the individual moral character of this or that parent, but the entire structure of family that puts the entire onus of raising a child on two people with exclusive, unquestioned, unrestricted control over that child.
rape and incest
this is why rape is so common within a family. structuring society around a nuclear family, where kids are left to a particular caretaker whose authoirty cannot be questioned by outsiders, enables rape. every time an institution puts children in the exclusive, unchecked control of adults - and more specifically adult men - the result is usually a child sex abuse scandal. it's why the catholic church has a sex abuse scanadal, because priests can have that exclusive, unchecked access to children that have to obey them. boy scouts, same thing. and why would that not hold true for the nuclear family?
the unchecked authority of parents over their children is also why we get people raised to be fucking awful. youth liberation doesn't mean that as a child you don't get to live with your mom and dad, but that your mom and dad would be but one facet of your upbringing - much like how the aforementioned issues brought up earlier tend to get reported when kids go to school, where there's a lot more checks and so the teachers there can serve as something of a check on parents, assuming they notice signs of abuse, have the energy to fight it, or have any power at all to change anything that isn't legally recognized child abuse.
there's plenty of good people who even make good parents, but even then it's placing a massive burden on just these two people who have to be the only ones funding their kid's upbringing. grandparents, neighbors, autns and uncles, the larger community being able to raise kids so that parents don't have to bear the entire burden, connecting children to a larger community so that they aren't growing up isolated and without connections and then forced into utterly alienated adulthoods where they just live alone in apartments they can barely afford.
Always chuckle when I see people APAB posting. I wonder how much of it is posters here having legitimately terrible parents, vs how much is just stupid teenagers getting mad because they were grounded.
Edit: I think a big part of the problem is that parents are forced into wage labor that keeps them away from their kids for most of the day. Completely unnatural situation.
I get that the meme is kind of over the top but my issue is the suffocating, boring and isolating nature of the nuclear family and the abuse, big and small, it permits. I think parents being away from their children is good actually, at least after a certain age. Being around the same two people constantly can easily drive you crazy.
the nuclear family is a recent invention and hasn't existed in its current form for more than a century. it's not about the individual moral character of this or that parent, but the entire structure of family that puts the entire onus of raising a child on two people with exclusive, unquestioned, unrestricted control over that child.
rape and incest
this is why rape is so common within a family. structuring society around a nuclear family, where kids are left to a particular caretaker whose authoirty cannot be questioned by outsiders, enables rape. every time an institution puts children in the exclusive, unchecked control of adults - and more specifically adult men - the result is usually a child sex abuse scandal. it's why the catholic church has a sex abuse scanadal, because priests can have that exclusive, unchecked access to children that have to obey them. boy scouts, same thing. and why would that not hold true for the nuclear family?
the unchecked authority of parents over their children is also why we get people raised to be fucking awful. youth liberation doesn't mean that as a child you don't get to live with your mom and dad, but that your mom and dad would be but one facet of your upbringing - much like how the aforementioned issues brought up earlier tend to get reported when kids go to school, where there's a lot more checks and so the teachers there can serve as something of a check on parents, assuming they notice signs of abuse, have the energy to fight it, or have any power at all to change anything that isn't legally recognized child abuse.
there's plenty of good people who even make good parents, but even then it's placing a massive burden on just these two people who have to be the only ones funding their kid's upbringing. grandparents, neighbors, autns and uncles, the larger community being able to raise kids so that parents don't have to bear the entire burden, connecting children to a larger community so that they aren't growing up isolated and without connections and then forced into utterly alienated adulthoods where they just live alone in apartments they can barely afford.