It’s About Making Babies!

The stated problem

ME Strauss posed a blogging question: A friend wrote an online diary in her blog a couple of years ago. Since then she ‘got savvy’ and keeps her posts polite, written for public reading. But some of the early stuff was personal and not edited for sensibilities. Now her sister finds the blog, and finds the early stuff hurtful. And the sister calls the rest of the family and neighborhood. All are outraged.

My take

I feel that the family must take some lumps. Either they raised their daughter to do hurtful things to loved ones, or they hurt her; the question isn’t clear whether the ‘hot’ material is an expression of actual hurt on the blogger’s part, or something said purely mean, meant to be hurtful. Or something innocuous that the family objected to. It isn’t clear that the family only feels their privacy breached, and has no other complaint.

I am not sure why Liz wants to hold the family entirely blameless. Perhaps for this exercise it helps, though it wasn’t stated, to assume that the fault was entirely the bloggers, implying that our ‘friend’ the blogger was at least ignorant, maybe stupid or plain mean.

And I cannot get past the fact that the family let her grow up not knowing she has to think about other people’s feelings. As a minimum family problem. Especially if the family response is to involve others rather than quietly work out the issues, it appears there is a family-wide tendency to cast blame rather than accept responsibility and seek a solution.

As for the blogger, I found she should have gone through her archives the day she decided to write with more sensitivity. As her friend I should have recommended that to her at the time.

My solution

Now, the best that she can do is to stand firm. She wrote the posts, early and current, and like any published documents, she gets the praise and the condemnation. She should apologize for mistakes in her work, but not for the work. She should apologize for hurting feelings where appropriate, including a new post apologizing for not ‘cleaning up’ the early material sooner, for causing unhappiness, and for any mistakes she made that caused harm.

Back to the Family

But the question posed shows me that the family has problems to confront, other than simple exposure. And I also contend that the family does not deserve a ‘you can’t write about us because that breaches our privacy’ protection, if the blogger writes about her own interactions with others. A perfect cloak of ‘privacy’ kept many abused children from receiving help, for too many years. And even a parent should know that their grandkids and their neighbors will always hear everything worth telling, plus some. It has always worked that way. It is better not to have shameful secrets, or correct mistakes and not make them secret.

Liz asks at what point we hold the child responsible, and stop blaming the family. I hold the child responsible when he/she recognizes there is a problem to be corrected. From that moment, whether they choose to correct the problem or not, their actions are their own responsibility. Even if they are doing what their parents did, or they were taught to do.

Once our blogger ‘got savvy’, presumably she will go through life influencing friends, associates, and family to be more considerate than she had learned up to that point.

Families have it tough

When the Dr. Spock baby book came out spanking became a horror that was clearly abusive, and much of the US changed, over a span of years, but the connection to discipline was lost. I believe this contributed to the ’60′s drug infatuation, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, and the rise of anti-war protests. Some good, some bad, but a break with previous generations. This change wasn’t universal, we didn’t lose gender or racial prejudice.

Before that we had the great migrations from farm life to city life, during the Depression 1930′s through WWII and through the 1960′s. Family wisdom appropriate to farm life, around livestock, and with kids working with their parents all day, suddenly wasn’t as relevant any more. And families had to learn an urban style of parenting, by guess and by golly. Another break between generations.

Since the 1960′s we had the AIDS scare, Dr. Dobson and others have made really fabulous livings joining the debates on parenting and discipline, and we have seen the flags for ‘this is good’, ‘this is bad’ move back and forth, depending on who you talk to.

I have been told that when you raise a daughter, if she marries a man that her daddy can respect (not necessarily like), her father did a good job of raising her. As a software developer, I am really uneasy using that kind of quality control, I like more reviews. Especially because by the time you get to the pass/fail test, it is too late to correct any problems. But that is life, that is parenting.

In the 1980′s the courts held that failing to teach your child discipline is criminal child abuse. It took those 20 years to begin to correct one of the egregious flaws in the ‘kinder, gentler’ world as posited by Dr. Spock. Since then some states have re-instituted corporal punishment while others still consider spanking or slapping to be criminal assault and child abuse. We are also getting more people that have horses or other pets in their lives, which also teach the value of discipline, both personal and with regard to those in our custody.

Maybe families aren’t the only source for problems with how our kids grow up, but they are the ones that should first detect the problem, and the ones there at the time when it could be corrected at the earliest moment, saving the kid and the community needless waste and trouble.