Children learn by observation more than I think most people understand.
If you constantly yell at a child, you are telling that child that yelling is acceptable behaviour. And that child, if he cannot correct himself, will carry that behaviour into adulthood. He will yell at people in his life. I think everyone has met people like that: people who yell without reason, or when their point would be just as (if not more) powerful without yelling. When somebody else, whether that’s a child, a spouse, an employee, or a stranger on the street engages in some behaviour that this person does not like, he will resort to yelling as a form of correction and to most people, that makes him look like a child himself. I believe it is infantile to yell as a form of argument. It is persuasion by intimidation, whether they know it or not.
I do not yell. I am also not one of those people who claims “I don’t yell, I’ll raise my voice if I don’t feel heard or want to get my point across.” Those people are yellers in denial. No, I never raise my voice unless I am literally in a situation in which the environment dictates that I would not physically be heard if I did not raise my voice. The kitchen where I work is such a place. Anybody with an impossibly intimate knowledge of my childhood would be absolutely shocked to hear that I do not yell. Because, really, I should. It would only make sense. If a child is yelled at every time he does something wrong for years of his life such that he begins to physically recoil at loud noises, then you ought to expect that child to yell in his adulthood. It only makes sense. It’s what he’s been taught. But somehow I don’t do that.
I did when I was very young though. My mother used to yell at me all the time, especially when I was very young. She yelled at me all the way up until I moved out, and even did it once after. This obviously affected me when I was very young.
I remember my childhood friend Eric came over one day to play. We were both about six or seven years old. We played dinosaurs and also watched Spiderman. I remember he said something about Spiderman being an adult, to which I yelled at him.
“No he’s not! Spiderman is a TEENAGER!”
To be fair, I can’t blame him for the mistake, as the movies did cast a 40 year-old Tobey Maguire. But as a child, I found that a valid reason to yell.
Another thing that children learn, perhaps more than people understand, is violence.
If a young child is physically abused as a corrective behaviour, then guess what? That child will learn that hitting others is an appropriate response when others engage in behaviours he does not like.
Yesterday, I wrote about a poor girl who brought me into a cult. I hold no ill feelings towards her, to be honest. But regardless of being raised in a cult or not, people ought to know better. At some point in your life, yes, it is your fault. That’s really the core of how I feel about all those people: It is sad that you have wasted a life (and a HUMAN life at that) but ultimately it is your choice, your loss, your fault, and if it weren’t for the fact that you subject your children to it, I would pity you. But I have absolutely no pity for those that abuse children. That said, I can’t be sure any of them would’ve amounted to anything had they not been in the cult.
Here’s a curious thought. If you ever find a cultist spanking their child for something they said, go up to their face and call them a cunt or a faggot (whatever applies better) and really lay into them. If they’re fat, bully them for it; if they’re stupid, call them retarded. See if they spank you. I’ll bet they won’t. Because you’re a relatively even match. One of the reasons these people take it out on children is because children can’t fight back. When you become aware of that, you might understand why I have no pity.
Anyways, since she had been raised being physically abused much more than I had, she had a stronger propensity to it. She hit me before and to be completely honest, I don’t remember what it was about. But that’s exactly what she had been taught. Though she and the rest of those people can and should be blamed for a LOT, the physical abuse is something I would dismiss as an entirely learned behaviour. It would be very difficult for them to correct that in themselves.
When I was a very young child, I remember being in some sort of after-school program. I went to a lot of after school programs when I was homeschooled which might sound kind of ironic. For me, playing video games was an after-school program. Anyways, I was in some sort of after school program, I don’t remember what, and I went to a water fountain to drink.
Being that I had not yet gone to public school, the water fountain was alien technology to me. So I pursed my lips, touched them to the actual fountain, pushed the button, and started to drink. When I finished, a kid behind me told me that I wasn’t supposed to put my lips to the fountain. He had an older friend or brother with him. One of them might’ve laughed. Regardless, I didn’t like that he pointed out my mistake and I grabbed his cheeks and pulled them. Then I rejoined the group to go do whatever was going on.
Eventually they tracked me down with a supervisor or teacher of some sort. The older kid told the supervisor and pointed to me. The supervisor came to me and asked me to clarify if I did what I did to that other kid. I lied and said I didn’t.
I wish I could resolve the story somehow, but that’s all I remember. I’m pretty sure my mom had to come and pick me up, which definitely wouldn’t’ve ended well for me.
I remember another time separate to this incident where I went to a science centre with my brother and a kid in our hockey program (which I will expand on another time) I would’ve been a little older, my brother was probably roughly the age that I was during the water fountain incident.
There was a room in the science centre where you could build a Rube Goldberg type machine by sticking half-pipes to the wall and pressing a button. A ball would roll down the pipes and you would watch it and it would be awesome. My brother, the other kid from our hockey program, and I were playing this thing when another unrelated kid came along. I don’t remember what he did, but I’m pretty sure he was fucking with my brother, so my brother walloped him in the face. That cut the whole day short. My mom drove us all back with my brother crying the whole hour plus car ride home.
I don’t remember if it’s accurate, but I recall having the thought that my mom was being a little too courteous and that the other parents should’ve apologized for their shitty kids behaviour. But it seemed to me, even as a child, me and my brother were always held to a higher standard than other kids. I had the impression that other kids could get away with more than we did. That might not sound like a bad thing, kids need to learn discipline, but it is a bad thing when that means the other kids can walk over you a little bit.
If somebody is physical with you, they might not realize it, but they are inviting you to do the same thing. It’s an unspoken communication just like when someone scrunches their nose when they see or hear of something that disgusts them. When someone hits you, there’s that moment afterwards where there’s one very obvious thing that sometimes needs to be done. After all, you can’t just hit someone in the face and stare at them after. That would take some balls. Unless of course, you’re a full grown ape who knows that children can’t fend for themselves. In that case, you can abuse your children all you want.
Which is an interesting thought, at least for me. There’s a lot of responsibility to having children. You can beat them, abuse them, ridicule them, molest them, and just be an absolute inhumane monster towards them, and you might just get away with it. Because they’re little kids and they can’t fight back, and when they’re really really little, they can’t even tell anyone. It’s actually easier than we might like to admit for these types of people to get away with it. It’s hard to think about.
There was a huge child sex abuse scandal in the cult I used to be in. Pastors in the church went to jail for it, but most of them were covered up and swept under the rug. A lot of them would do it when they lived in the houses of the cult members. When the stories broke loose, the church would simply move them to another province where nobody knew them so they could continue living in houses with children.
I’ll probably talk about that later. Really my thought about that now is how sad it is that the people in the cult didn’t even give a shit. They didn’t think about it. They knew, some of them, but they didn’t allow themselves to feel moral disgust.
That’s something I think is a huge problem. People these days, from what I can tell, are manipulated into thinking that it is wrong to feel moral disgust or contempt for anothers choices in how they live their life.
The contemporary philosophy seems to be that if somebody decides to sit down and watch TV and play video games and drink wine with a needle of heroin in their arm all day for the rest of their life, “Hey man, that’s just, like how they want to live, man, just let them live.”
I find that to be a lazy approach that displays a negligent attitude towards humanity.
I say it often. You should never feel shame in being human. It sounds like something that doesn’t need to be said, but I think a lot of problems have this in their roots.
A corollary to this is that you should expect something from humanity. Humanity is separate from the animals. If a bear decides to sit around eating honey and blueberries all day for the rest of it’s life, nobody cares because that’s literally what bears do. But humans have the capacity for much more.
So, if you refuse to let yourself feel contempt when you see the wasted potential of a human life, you are admitting to your Self that you see humanity (and therefore your Self) as no better than the animals. I think that is one of the vilest evils there is.
MyShelf 