Discussion»Questions»Family» Our parents teach us how to value ourselves and others. We learn gender/racial/religious/political/social bias from them. Don't we?
Our parents teach us how to value ourselves and others. We learn gender/racial/religious/political/social bias from them. Don't we?
We will never produce children who are kind, thoughtful, accepting, polite if their parents aren't all those things. How do we make parents better people BEFORE they ruin their kids? BEFORE they have kids?
That's an excellent question Rosie, Good children come as a result of good parenting, Bad children are the result of bad parenting (in most cases ) it's a shame how some people blame everyone but themselves for their own predicament.
Some folks on this thread don't agree with thee and me Tom. SIGH. No matter. I think that is very true. Children of folks who are kind, accepting, thoughtful tend to be that way too. I've seen (sadly) too many little kids carrying hateful signs at rallies and it breaks my heart. I think it would be very hard to grow up in a family where only whites are acceptable and everyone else is "less than" without it affecting you. Could it happen? Of course it could. How often does it happen? I have no idea but not often enough . Thank you for your reply and Happy Sunday! :)
Sure do, Rosie. Our parents first our peers, our schools, our churches, our environment. Nobody said it better than And nobody explained it better than Oscar Hammerstein II:
You've got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made, And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade, You've got to be carefully taught.
You've got to be taught before it's too late, Before you are six or seven or eight, To hate all the people your relatives hate, You've got to be carefully taught!
Ask yourself this question: do you believe everything your parents believed? I don't. I have ***profound*** disagreements with my mother. I had significant disagreements with my father. My siblings and I respect each other's views and there is a certain amount of congruence among them, but there are also significant differences.
Why would prejudice be a special case where children blindly follow what their parents teach them?
As for another AMer's assertion that prejudice has to be "carefully taught," that is wishful thinking, not an evidence-supported assertion. Consider the ad hoc "blue eyes-brown eyes" experiement by schoolteacher Jane Elliott in the 1960s.
The children in her classroom didn't have to be carefully taught. Elliott simply stated blue-eyed children were superior, starting altering her behavior as if it were so, and within a week the children were full-blown eye color bigots.
No, the truth is human beings are HARD WIRED for prejudice and kin selection. It's the acceptance of diversity which has to be carefully taught and reinforced by a mulititude of social institutions, not just parents.
This post was edited by OldSchoolTheSKOSlives at December 4, 2016 2:26 AM MST
So your position is that children of racists don't become racists? Is that the gist of it? Mahalo for your reply and Happy Sunday. All the kids carrying racist signs at rallies are there because?
@RosieG -- It is my position (backed by a great deal of research) human beings are inherently prejudiced. It is a fundamental consequence of Type 1 associative thinking and our propensity to make ingroup-outgroup distinctions.
Certainly, parents can reinforce that tendency, and almost all do to some degree. Have you ever encountered a child who genuinely believed some random Lower Elbonian was as important a person in his/her life as a family member? Maybe such paragons exist, but I've never encountered one.
Blaming the pervasiveness of prejudice on parents without recognizing the broader biological and social context in which parents behave strikes me as unproductive. Yes, parents play a role, but that role is not necessarily determinative or even dominant.
Can't put the chicken before the egg, or vice versa. Can't go back in time. Can't force people to learn or do anything. Only option left, make the education desirable and easily available everywhere.
Perfection is impossible, but improvement is always possible, and that attitude makes a positive difference.
Thank you for your reply hartfire and Happy Sunday. So your position is that we take what we get and make the best of it. That parents are not teachable so kids are stuck with whatever it is their parents are. Is that it or am I missing something?
We have proof from recent discoveries that the brain is plastic, meaning that neurons and dendrites can continue growing until death. This means that with the right nutrition and physical and mental exercise we can repair brain damage, prevent or reduce dementia, and continually enhance whatever mental endowments we have. Hence - all people can learn and change if they want.
What I said above is that we need to make the educational opportunities attractive and easily available. OldSchool is right about humans being innately predisposed to identify with their family group. So the way out of racism is to remove the perception of difference.
Here's an example. Back around 700AD, the Norsemen began raping and pillaging Britain. The dark haired Celts soon came to hate the blond and red-haired invaders. A thousand years passed with lots of interbreeding. Today we view hair colour as matters of chance inheritance, not as socially significant. Cops don't see red hair as a reason to be too quick on the trigger of a gun. Kids of different hair colours play in their backyards together, grow up at school together and later have affairs, marry and work together. That is what is needed with different skin colours.
Visual appearances can have tremendous variety, but those differences have no significance unless people make it so.
So we need structure our social life in a way that allows us to live, work and intermarry together, and in this way we can work to eliminate prejudice.
Law is a helpful and essential tool, but because it uses force it can never fully achieve the goal. Education works best.
And everything OldSchool has said is correct. It's backed by so much research that just the reference list would overload this site.
This post was edited by Benedict Arnold at December 4, 2016 3:51 PM MST
TomThumb 