good substack post by @moonbeamdreams_ 1/

2/ Question: How do parents avoid the problem of their kids drowning in the zeitgeit koolaid and growing up to hate you and everything you stand for?

3/ A common pattern I've seen in many such families, the family is so out of touch with the mainstream and filled with inconsistencies and unhappiness that it's a perfect storm to rebel against. When you're trying to get away from something, you don't just walk, you run, fast.

4/ You can shelter your kids from specific excesses of the zeitgeist, but you can't keep them away from drinking the koolaid.

5/ Make the world milieu a more desirable target for your children's rebellion than you.

6/ This seems pretty obvious but difficult without a lot of self-reflection, which is in short supply in these kinds of families.

7/ The parents of "Sarah" have drank their own koolaid, and don't have a strong internal grasp on why they live their lives like this, let alone an ability to explain those reasons to their children.

8/ This makes me think of JBP talking about how humans really struggle at independently inventing our own moral and value systems. As culture decays, the modal family is living from instructions which are copies of copies of copies, and there's a lot of fidelity loss.

9/ I don't know what the answer is, or if it even makes sense to continue following the copies of copies etc, if those instructions don't have enough "error correction" to be legible after the system passes thru generations upon generations of the telephone game.

10/ But the immediate problem is that people and parents are doing things because they're how everyone else does them, or because that's how they've always done them.

11/ Bit of a ramble there, but it leads me to the last section of @moonbeamdreams_'s post -- four things to try to do to avoid being the windmills your children eternally tilt against

12/ 1. Have a good relationship with your kids 2. Use humor 3. Understand what you believe, and *why* 4. Live by example

13/ #1 is pretty obvious (but incredibly difficult), and will certainly remove many impetuses of your kids to rebel from your entire way of life.

14/ #2 is less obvious but very important. As someone who had an upbringing similar to "Sarah", one of the things that bugged me the most about my parents was them not letting me watch really funny, smart comedies because they were somehow "bad for you", like The Simpsons.

15/ I assume the logic was something around that kind of humor was akin to wallowing with pigs so to speak, but one thing about comedy is that it can't be faked. If something is funny, it's funny, and no one can tell you that your laughter didn't happen.

16/ Banning subversive humor in your house can be the beginning of the unraveling of your children's respect. See, the rules you set for them everyone understand have a lot of subjectivity to them, and kids understand that, and there's no objective standard for lots of rules

17/ But with humor, you're banning something that your kids know they love, because it's a deep emotional connection honed over millennia of friends and family.

18/ The objective pleasure of sex is also similar to the objective pleasure of humor, but there's a lot more negative externalities involved there.

19/ Anyway, parents need to understand that when kids experience something really fun, and it's forbidden from them, it's going to draw them incredibly strongly. You really need to know *why* you're forbidding something, and it needs to make sense

20/ That "why" is the most important thing. Not just for parents but everyone. I don't know why it is so important, but it is. :) Humans are constantly asking "why" of everything in our environment, seeing patterns and building a model of reality in our minds.

21/ When something doesn't gel, we pull on that thread. Pulling on that string leads to small excursions outside the boundaries of our upbringing, and seeing what the results are.

22/ The more "unignorable" the signal is that's being forbidden, the more persistent and explorative the kid will be at figuring out what *other* things in their upbringing "aren't right"

23/ So that "why" is huge, and I think, also inextricable from the fourth point, living by example. Kids detect empty words really well, and if you're setting a rule and not following it yourself, that just increases how much your kids discount everything you say.

24/ The ultimate thing is that over the long run, ways of life which aren't self-consistent don't replicate. But that timescale is often multiple generations, and it's hard to see the disintegration of your culture and reality day to day, or even in one life.

25/ But the onus is on us to repair and improve the ship while we're sailing. There are no dry docks, not in this old world. -the end-

Thank you @moonbeamdreams_ for the thought provoking post!