Family

There are very few things we have absolutely zero control over about ourselves. But, beyond most of our physical attributes and where we were born, our family ties are one of the few we’re stuck with.

All aspects of group dynamics are adaptations off our first responses based on expectations from the people who originally raised us. They gave us the first context for understanding the world, as well as most of our social skills.

Since we spend more time with them, we’re more closely familiar with our family’s habits and customs than anyone else’s. Unless the dynamics are particularly dysfunctional, we tend to favor those relationships more than non-family.

In some situations, such as close friendships and Christianity, “family” associates with a friendship that’s as close as blood relation.

Healthy family dynamics come through combining several different components that feed off each other:

Marriage

The most significant way we can choose to extend our family to is through marriage. It’s usually a male and female mutually choosing each other, but historically the choice was from both family groups coming to a contractual agreement.

Even though the people who marry are most influenced by a wedding, every family member is profoundly influenced in small ways over that marriage, especially before the courtship process and after the wedding. This is the cause of most family conflicts (e.g., mother-in-law vs. daughter-in-law).

While both genders play a part in the formation of a child, the female has a more clear role in the formation of a family:

  • While men have to find all sense of meaning in the establishment of a family, a woman has the inherent biological qualities of producing and nurturing children in their formative years.
  • The quality of a woman’s education has the most impact on a family, since it she imparts more of it to her children than a man who has to work a career elsewhere.

Parent Switch

The role of a parent is to give everything a child needs to succeed:

In everyone’s brain stem, they have a unique switch that should activate when they first become a father or mother. At that point, their role shifts from simply focusing on themselves to a desire to preserve the well-being of a helpless new person.

This switch, when activated, can provoke a broader form of love for all of humanity if fostered correctly. The new understanding empowers and encourages people to associate more strongly in other groups and helps them connect their role to society at large, and is a huge reason why conscientiousness hikes upward as people age.

The “parent switch” isn’t specific or guaranteed with biological parents. If someone is particularly selfish, that switch won’t engage. If, for whatever reason, someone else takes on a parental role (e.g., extended family, adoption) that switch can still activate.

Children

The entire family model starts with the parent-child relationship. Children are obsessed with finding purpose that conforms to their parents’ expectations, so they will either reproduce their lifestyle to be the same as their parents or will partially be (in the case of certain dysfunctional patterns) the near-complete opposite.

Children have their own initial culture, preferences and self-interest mixed into their decisions that did not originate from their role models. A child’s culture starts relatively simple, but is often unpleasant to coexist around:

  • Conflict Style: They confront every issue directly and need guidance on how to be more subtle and tactful.
  • Context: Completely low-context and absolutely oblivious to any implications until they learn.
  • Individualism/Collectivism: living entirely for themselves, since they’re not even aware of others.
  • Masculinity/Femininity: Focused strictly on their purposes, which is implicitly very masculine.
  • Power Distance: Depending on their willpower and how they feel about their parents, they can often be more powerful than their parents where the only way for parents to compensate is through a well-communicated and well-enforced disciplinary standard.
  • Time Flexibility: Insistent on every deadline for themselves, immediately, but considers everyone else’s deadlines unimportant.
  • Time Orientation: Extreme focus on the present moment.
  • Thought Mode: A complete focus on applications, with little to no ability to understand principles.
  • Uncertainty Avoidance: Complete uncertainty avoidance, where they want to know something irrespective of the consequences if they don’t know.

With respect to human universals, children are the same as their parents with a few notable exceptions:

  1. Children are very preoccupied with their parents’ approval, so they don’t need friends nearly as much as they need reliable and loving authority figures.
  2. Children have very little context to self-learn, so they need more clarification than any adult would to understand anything. But, they also have an insane rate of learning, so they don’t need as much repetition as an adult.
  3. Children have an “invisible authority” in their minds, which is a reproduction of how they envision their parents will respond. Later, they’ll remix that role with other authority figures of various types to form their own self-discipline.

Most of the challenges regarding parenting aren’t because the tasks are particularly vague or difficult, but more because the experience is emotionally extreme. We’re influenced by others’ feelings to the degree we love them, and a child will express an emotional range between anxiety, fear, and elation within mere minutes. Since our experience intensifies as our love intensifies, the experience does as well. The only way to stay sane is to live by virtue.

Growing Children

As children grow, they tend to find a middle-ground culture between what their parents teach and what they prefer, often transitioning toward their preference as they become teenagers and understand the world a little more clearly.

Once those children have come of age, they are now co-members of their groups. Barring major dysfunction somewhere, they’ll identify with that group alongside other groups that fit their purposes, and their personal style of culture blurs together with the collective.

Success is a self-determined matter, so a child still must make choices for themselves. Most parents don’t trust their children will believe them when they should, and those children know they’re distrusted and respond to it.

Maintaining a baby, then a child, then a teenager, is difficult. Every child experiences at least some failures from their parents due to human nature, and some of them will become severely traumatized by it.

Parents often inaccurately communicate expectations to their children. Often, a parent will merely prefer something from their child, but the child will believe the parent insists on it. Other times, the child won’t even get the hint at all!

In the absence of a sufficient parent, children tend to find their parental roles in other places. In early childhood, it’ll be other authority figures (e.g., teachers, police). Starting in adolescence, they’ll look for it in peers (e.g., gangs, clubs). On occasion, highly intelligent or antisocial children can find it in principles.

Once a child reaches adulthood, the balance of how they prioritized their role models determines how they’ll start adulthood.

Generations

Every culture needs parents to give value to children. Otherwise, without that belief, all of society would unravel simply from a severe drop in reproduction rates mixed with an elder-balanced population demographic that wouldn’t be able to sustain itself.

After a child becomes a parent a few decades later, they will deliver more pain on their children than they realize, and sometimes worse than a generation prior. Parents usually trust their intuition, which creates an illusion they’re doing a better job than their parents, which can begin a downward spiral of conceit for many parents.

If parents do succeed, their children will create children of their own, and becoming a grandparent means a child was successfully taught enough to find a mate and reproduce again.

Unfortunately, parents often feel threatened by the successes of their adult children, which makes very little success since those childrens’ success can often come from the investments their parents had initially made. This comes from their inherent egotistical competitive drive against everyone else, but is foolishly misused to destroy the greatest possible contribution to their legacy.

A people group made of one set of genetics will have a certain cultural/personality mix that’s shares more in common with each other than a people group made of individuals who share a set of ideas. That homogeneity is actually a risk, since the diversity of ideas is far less.

Classes

Unless they have amazing parents, a child raised by a powerful family is at an unusual disadvantage. By having their power from birth (as opposed to building it), the child has no legitimate aptitude with what they wield and can only learn to grow from that position onward. If their family name ever loses power (which they often can’t control), they will likely never recover if they drop down a social class.

On the other hand, a child who came from a low-ranking family has an unspoken advantage within their domain. If their parents taught them well, they’ll be able to weather more hardship from having grown up without much privilege. While it’s more difficult than it sounds, if they can hide their shoddy background, they will often be a class above any of their peers.

Unfortunately, the love of a parent means they will be willing to perform unethical behavior for the advantage of their children. That motivation transcends any institutional rules that could ever exist, and represents a huge portion of why cultures create unfair systems.

Failing

Some parents fail from not caring, but because of the animal impulses in ourselves it’s far more common for parents to fail through bad methods instead of bad motives.

Parental failures express through a few possible modes:

When a parent fails, a child must discover the good life outside of their parents’ influence.

A child’s model from how they were parented determines how they process the rest of the world. When the rest of the world pushes back, that child can only conclude a few possibilities:

  1. Blame other people for their problems, often falling into addictions to cope with the unrelenting nature of reality.
  2. Continually re-learn society’s boundaries by trial-and-error until they figure them out.
  3. Prematurely end their life.

Most parents don’t want to admit failure, so they tend to blame other things for the way they failed:

Often, parents will realize they can’t change their child, so they’ll try to get rid of them to avoid being blamed. To avoid public shame, they’ll wait until their child attains adulthood, then will exile them.

Other times, the child will want to leave as soon as physically possible. This is why many kids go to college on the opposite side of the country.

One benefit of advanced civilizations is that any individual person doesn’t need social associations anymore like they had. The means to communicate with other people across the world can empower someone to join or found a community based on shared ideas instead of mere necessity.

Education

Most motivations to protect a child’s understanding are through fear. While those fears often move around, it’s usually to maintain peace or protect their innocence.

Many parents will use small lies to rebuild the child’s version of reality to an ideal. By doing this, children will still be motivated to do moral things. This expresses most clearly when they use elaborate myths to explain a fact they don’t want their children to know.

While it may seem harmless, it becomes egregious when they try to sidestep evil and its consequences:

Parents try to avoid those subjects, but it’s an inevitability that children will discover them. When they ask their parents for an explanation, the parents will often try to only communicate the adverse consequences of those things without ever explaining the good feelings that may drive people to do them in the first place.

The aftermath of this practice once the children grow up is horrific. By only communicating the bad sides of things, the children will still wonder about why people even form purposes for an object. They’ll experiment or research for themselves, and often fall into substance abuse, or worse.

Naturally, their trust with their parents will be eroded, which affects the entire family dynamic in the process.

Underestimation

Unless a parent is making conscious decisions as they experience life with their children, habitual patterns will emerge that don’t change with the children. For example, parents perceive babies as incapable of doing wrong but don’t accommodate the scope of immoral actions toddlers are capable of performing.

As a child ages, they very quickly learn to bend those fixed patterns to their advantage. For example, they’ll endure a five-minute lecture to get out of doing chores. The fulfillment of a subversive purpose is far more rewarding to them than results from the task itself.

Most parents won’t realize their creativity and will assume the child is merely defying them. Parents are typically unaware of what children are thinking, since they remember a point where the child was unaware and find no harm imagining they’ll stay that way.

This often intensifies as the child grows older. By the time they’re a teenager, they know exactly how to exploit the system, and often don’t respect the parents who raised them from how easy they were to deceive.

Application

Our favoritism for family members creates some of the most screwed-up relationships on the planet. We will endure unbelievably inappropriate boundary violations on the pretense of “family”.

Children are completely uncivilized, and it’s the parent’s job to fix that before the child grows up. If they succeed, they create a profound legacy and the back end of a good life, and the parents bring shame on themselves if they fail.

What a parent expects is often different than what a child thinks the parent expects. Having frequent conversations about it can alleviate that discrepancy, but it’s not perfect.

Every parent wishes for their child to succeed, but that parent should deeply consider why they want something for their child. It might not be for the child’s benefit, and often comes more from fear than a legitimately good desire.

For most of recorded history, parents communicated all the facts of reality, but also conveyed that children had poor decision-making skills. That arrangement works much better than withholding information from them than when parents feel they’re “ready”.

A grandparent is a success story, just by the fact that they built a legacy. This doesn’t necessarily venerate them, especially if their adult children never talk to them.

If you were to create a completely fair society with zero chance for children to receive an inheritance, parents’ love would quickly make creative solutions to give their children an unfair edge and would invalidate any balancing efforts or rules the leaders had made.

While family is often more tight-knit, the absence of diverse culture and ideas is a severe risk to families. The only solutions are to either marry people into that culture (traditionally through foreign females) or force everyone to disperse through some sort of hardship.

It’s easier to build a community than it ever has been before. All someone needs is the motivation to do it, some relatively easy-to-acquire technology, and the willingness to persevere with it.