I'm not sure if citations needed has ever done an episode on articles like this, but as a parent and a leftist it's hard to not start noticing that nearly all parenting "experts" or "success" stories seem to basically boil down to people 'richsplaining' how to raise your kids into successful CEOs and career paths.
I find this incredibly frustrating because this bassically accepts as a framework that your kid becoming a CEO is an inarguably laudable goal, rarely if ever asks questions about how psychologically well adjusted they are as people, and perhaps most importantly never addresses the elephant in the room of the role class plays.
I feel like my entire life, in basically every form of media I've ever seen: helicopter parenting has been assumed as being wrong and harmful. These days it's hard for me not to ask if this isn't just an extension of the culture of "personal responsibility" and "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps."
My friend Maye Musk, a successful model and the mother of Elon Musk, agrees on the harmful effects of helicopter parenting.
She never checked her kids’ homework. She couldn’t. She was working five jobs to make ends meet.
:doubt:
Slave Driver, Slave Trader, Child Slave Driver, Child Slave Driver, Mine Owner...I mean it adds up!
Solid parenting advice would be DO THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHATEVER ELON MUSK'S PARENTS DID. Everything I've ever read about them is that they are absolute monsters that almost make me feel a twinge of sympathy for Elon.
Elon has a trans kid who wants nothing to do with him and IIRC changed their last name.
When I read that sentence I gave up, I didn't know if I was reading satire or what.
Wikipedia says:
*Musk's family was wealthy during his youth.[16] His father was elected to the Pretoria City Council as a representative of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party, with his children reportedly sharing their father's dislike of apartheid.[7] His maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was an adventurous American-born Canadian who took his family on record-breaking journeys in a single-engine Bellanca airplane to Africa and Australia.[18][19][20] After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk mostly lived with his father.[10] Musk later regretted his decision as he has become estranged from his father.[21] He has a paternal half-sister and a half-brother.[18][22]
In his biography, Ashlee Vance described Musk as an awkward and introverted child.[23] When Musk was 10, he developed an interest in computing and video games, so he brought a Commodore VIC-20[24][vague] and taught himself programming from a user manual. At age 12, he sold his BASIC-based game Blastar to PC and Office Technology magazine for approximately $500.[25][26]*
I wouldn't classify helping a kid with their homework as helicopter parenting. Obviously don't do the homework for them but talking it through with them is pretty helpful as is making sure that they actually do it
Research shows that children are in fact not clay to be shaped and molded into future senators but more like malleable plastic that spring back when you stop forcing outside pressure.
Helicopter parenting is bad when neither of you WANT to do it. Your kid hates soccer, you're tired of the obligation, there's a good chance you're both doing it for no reason and should do fun things instead.
Being anti-helicipter parenting isn't bootstrap mentality.
It's like spanking. Parents don't want to hit kids and lord knows kids hate it but there's this unscrutinized wisdom that you turned out how you did because your dad spanked you. Ok but what if you didn't and your dad was hitting you for no good reason. That's something to be heavily scrutinized.
Yeah there’s a weird distinction between parents who view spanking as a necessary evil and those who call their uncontrolled outbursts of anger “spanking”. But the latter usually gaslights their kids into believing they’re the former and the research is pretty clear that the former are still wrong and doing damage to their children and their relationships with those children.
Some people are just cruel. And a lot of people love most of their lives not knowing how cruel some people are to children in particular.
anytime the corporal punishment of children is mentioned on :reddit-logo: you get hundreds of comments of anecdotes and stories justifying it, it is pure horror.
And the classic: "Telling people they can't beat their children is socialism!"
For real through, at least in the US there's going to have to be a lot of re-education around the idea that children have rights and they are not the personal property of their parents after the revolution.
Thinking of that American ad campaign that was just reminder boomer parents to not take out their day on their kids
Susan is the CEO of YouTube, Janet is a doctor, and Anne is the co-founder and CEO of 23andMe. They rose to the top of ultra-competitive, male-dominated professions.
I mean Kudos to Janet I guess, but Susan is the CEO of a company kept afloat entirely by Alphabets gajillions and everybody trusting that eventually, it'll become profitable without destroying itself and 23andMe is at best a marketing company for shit you could always do if you were so inclined. 2/3 of her kids basically fell down the stairs upwards for all it's worth
and everybody trusting that eventually, it’ll become profitable without destroying itself
That's a terrible thing to hope for.
Nationalize Youtube.
You want your daughters to be like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
I want my daughters to be like Angela Davis and Rosa Luxembourg.
We are not the same.
It would be better to say that “helicopter parenting” isn’t a particularly accurate or precise metric for measuring parenting quality.
There are things that are, on average, developmentally appropriate for a kid at a given age. Some kids will reach a milestone sooner, some later. Treating it like a checklist with deadlines will, frankly, make you significantly more ableist as a parent, among other things. But, once you’ve adjusted expectations to the context of a particular kid, if someone is not developmentally prepared for a given task, forcing them to do it, punishing them for not doing it, or simply leaving a bed unmet because you didn’t do some necessary thing for them, is very likely to result in some kind of trauma.
On the flip side of that, regularly performing tasks for a kid who is able to do them can have all kinds of effects, everywhere from making them to entitled, to disconnecting them from the machinations of their lives, to causing them to fail at higher level tasks which would be appropriate for them to be practicing, to making them resent you for taking away their autonomy.
I don’t know if it needs said, but my mom also worked 5 jobs and didn’t have time to double check my homework and I didn’t turn out to be Elon Musk (thank god). Maybe helicopter parenting isn’t a personal failing of poor people (or let’s be honest, the PMC and petit boug who this article is meant to shame). Maybe inheriting a bunch of money is a prerequisite to becoming an adult billionaire. I understand that most people who inherit their parents’ wealth lose it within a generation, but even those people still end up in some form of elite with a chance to rise again. It’s almost like the top 10% plays an intergenerational game on top of a safety net funded by imperialism while the rest of us struggle.
In 1998, Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page rented Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park, California and developed Google's search engine there.
She was hired in 1999 as Google employee number 16, and worked on everything from AdSense and Google Analytics to Google Books and Google Images. In 2006, she advocated for the $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube, which she has run since 2014. Before Google, Wojciki worked in the marketing department at Intel and as a management consultant at Bain & Company
That's what hard work and parenting will get you.
So if they did it as a favor to their landlord, how did Sergey and Larry decide which sister would get the job?
One got the YouTube job, the other married Sergey. Oh to be a fly on the wall.
I don’t disagree with her parenting style at all as I’m the same way with my two children. I know if I am a helicopter parent to my daughter then she will hate me. But my son definitely needs to be hovered over a bit. I got one outgoing child and one who stays to himself. I know that I need to build his self confidence at this age because I don’t want him turning into a :reddit-logo: user. But I think the important thing about raising children is you have to actually have to raise them. I know it sounds simple but with the amount of hours we are working, it’s hard for most of us. And income is not that big of a factor as environment. Currently I’m making way less but spending time with my son. No job is going to pay me in the fact that my SO and I are catching these milestones together.
How to raise your children to be highly successful CEO's and doctors:
- Provide a safe, nurturing and accepting environment for them
- Encourage them to follow their passions
- Own a giant blood-soaked pile of exploited wealth
- Allow them to act independently and make their own mistakes but always be there to keep them safe and provide health if they ask for it.
23 and me CEO
Wojcicki was born in Palo Alto, California, and has two older sisters – Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube,[2] and Janet Wojcicki, an anthropologist and epidemiologist.[3] Her parents are Esther Wojcicki (née Hochman), an educator who is Jewish, and Stanley Wojcicki, a Polish-born physics professor emeritus at Stanford University. The three sisters grew up on Stanford's campus.
She also married Sergey.
Holy shit! These outcomes had nothing to do with parenting and everything to do with their proximity to the google founders.
If my parents had hovered over me all the time I would still hate them for it, let your children make their own decisions, help them carry them out if they need it, but just let them be people and not things to shape.
