Parenting 101 Part 2

When Parenting Theories Backfire

I found this article particularly surprising. The book basically told mothers to give their children a choice without actually giving them a choice. It was meant to make children feel like they were getting a choice but still put the mother in control...but of course it backfired. As for this mother, her children seen that they were getting an upperhand and took advantage of it. They were adapting to how they were being parented and used the same method to manipulate the mother.

Parenting 101

What were the best parts of how you were parented (since the worst parts don't really belong in a public class blog)?

Based on my life, the best part about how my parents parented was having a sit down dinner everyday. Many families do not have sit downs dinner but I still do. I feel that sitting down with your family for dinner plays a vital role in connecting with your family members. When the family sits down to have dinner together, they are able to talk to each other about their day and their problems. It's a sort of bonding for the family. When I go over to a friend's place most of the time they do not sit down with the family for dinnertime. When I observe those families, they seem more disconnected. They do not seem to know how to interact with each other comfortably. I'm not saying that my family is all lovey dovey and happy but at least we are able to talk to each other about our issues. Many children lack an adult in their lives that care about them enough for them to be sit with them and chat about life. Every person is the same, without an outlet for their emotions, they become secluded and tend to have more emotional problems than someone with a release. If people don't have family members to turn to, they often confide in a friend but how often do secrets within friends stay secret? It's hard to find a friend good enough that deserves your emotions, many would turn around and end up hurting you. I personally have had too many bad experiences to not know how it feels to not have anyone around and I know first hand how it is to seclude yourself from the world. I went through a stage, well many stages rather, where I confided in people who I thought were my friends and lets just say that none of those situations ended well on my side of the relationship. I stated earlier that people have grown up with sit down dinners should not have to experience a lack of emotional release but I can account for this easily. Yes, the best part about my parents' parenting was the sit down dinners but that was when I was younger. As I grew older, my dad was out of the table because he took an overnight job that resulted in him only coming home once a week. Next to leave the table was my mom. Unlike my dad, she is very capable to eating dinner together with the rest of the family but instead, she chose to go either swimming or to her friend's place after work. My parents "leaving" the dinner table resulted in a distant relationship between them and I. But even with them gone, I always had dinner with my brother and sister in law because they took up cooking the meals and setting the table. Even with my parents not present or there for me, I always have my brother and sister in law by my side. They've been together for 11 years this past Friday, do the math and they've been playing an active role in my life since I was 7 years old. They have been providing the parenting that I had missed out on since then.


Do you think parenting will "come naturally" or do you think you'll have to research multiple perspectives and come up with a (possibly evolving) model in collaboration with other family members? Did your family read books about how to parent you or do informal research such as talking to other family members?

Personally, I think parenting will come naturally. Parenting is not a role that can really be taught through books and research and such, people will normally go back to analyze how they were parented and use that as a model to curve how they will parent their children. Parenting is also based a lot on morals. Many people use their morals or "human nature" to make decisions on how to raise their children. I think one major way of parenting is using common sense. Without common sense, the world would be lost. I feel that morals and common sense can go hand in hand. Morals are just a person's "right" judgment and common sense is just what's normal. Sometimes I wonder where common sense came from. Why the hell do we all think alike? I really don't get it sometimes. How did people come to realize that the decisions they make and how they do things is considered "common" "sense". Where did it start?? Anywho let's leave that for a whole nother conversation. Parenting should come naturally to humans. We are just another species of animals, why should we need to learn from books where as wild animals don't? Maybe it's because our minds are corrupted by all the propaganda and negative things in the world that causes us to worry about and doubt our natural skills.

As I mentioned earlier, my brother and sister in law are more or less another set of parent figures for me and have always been there since I was 7 years old. They did not need any research or learning in order to make me feel like they cared. They were fresh out of their teenage years, how could anyone have expected them to do what they have done for me? My parents were well in their 40s and they weren't capable of doing that for me. Everybody provided a different form of comfort and care but in the end I think parenting is jsut a natural skill that should not need to be taught.

My Research Question

Does a mother's support directly correlate with the respect they receive from their children?

ESTP - "Promotor". Action! When present, things begin to happen. Fiercely competitive. Entrepreneur. Often uses shock effect to get attention. Negotiator par excellence. 4.3% of total population.

Free Jung Personality Test (similar to Myers-Briggs/MBTI)

I sort of agree with the results of my test. Usually I don't start projects when people are not doing their work, rather I keep to myself and do my own work. I may not start projects directly but my actions sometimes affect the actions of others so this result is fairly correct.

Comparing Films

Ok I've tried over 10 times to watch Esther's Film in her class but it stops at 54 seconds everytime I've tried so I'm going to do this hypotheticallly. For my class, we had planned on filming about a group of delinquents who normally did not work hard in school, study for an exam that they will pass to show up their ignorrant teacher. With what we had filmed, I did not play a major role. I was merely an extra student who seemed uninterested in the teacher's tactics to ostracize the less motivated students in his class nor what he was actually trying to teach. In the beginning I had thought I wanted to play a bigger role in creating the film but for some reason the idea did not really catch my attention. I was not very interested in what our film was based off of. It might be because I had sat in on another class and helped with their "initial directing and scene-making" that I felt was more interesting and matter of fact more fun to be in. In that class I had my word of say and people to bounce ideas off of about their video and it seemed really interesting. Don't get me wrong I enjoy my own classmates but its just that their "idea" seemed so much more fun to bring to life. In the end I guess all I'm trying to say it that I felt that I played more of an active role in another class than I did my own based on my interest.

The message of the film for my class was basically just about a small group of underachievers who are thought less of what they really are that want to show up their teacher. They want to show their bias teacher that they are not the dumb quiet kids at the back of the classroom. They wanted to show him that if they really wanted to succeed in school they could, and they do this by passing all on their own that they were not expected to pass. When they were accused of cheating they passed the test yet again and that really just shows that the teacher needed a little knock on the head. It's not always the students that need to be "saved" it is sometimes the teacher that has a wall up in his/her mind that gives them a false point of view of school stereotypes. The film was meant to show teachers to not think less of certain students because of what they may lack but to see every student as an equal with equal potential and opportunities.
From personal opinion, not matter how much we will try to teach each other new perspectives of life and other people, one cannot change whats set in stone and that's human nature. All humans are the same. We may look different, wear different clothes or act different but we all think alike. Everyone shares the same bias and every is judgmental. Sure people can be judgmental in different ways but in the end we are all judging each other. We are no better than the people sitting next to us on the train. My mind is not better than yours and your mind is no better than mine. We all travel on the same train of thought.

Unlike the teacher/ savior films we watched, our film-to-be was like the flipside. It was the opposite. Instead of a teacher trying to prove him or herself worthy of the students attention, our film focused on a teacher whose drive was to pick on the less successful students in his class. The savior films focused on molding the roudy students into well behaved civilians in a calm and quiet environment. Whereas our film was to focus on rebellious students showing the teacher that he was a jerk but proving to him that they were intellectuals who did not blatantly flaunt their smarts.

Taking the Survey

It didn't take very long for me to complete the survey and it wasn't too "hard". Some questions I went through pretty quickly while others I really had to think about. The easier questions for me were mostly the friendship questions that asked about how I act around others and how my relationships were friends were like. I found the family questions a little harder. Some of them were easy but most of them I had to really think about if my family felt a specific way about me. As for the ones that questioned my goals for the future, they were easy for me to answer. They were only easy for me to answer because the larger part of me feels so definite about my plans for the future but there will always be that little part of doubt. The little part of me that wonders if I am really capable of achieving my goals. Not only do I doubt my handiwork, I also wonder about all the things that can go wrong. There can be so many incidents that might trigger something negative in my future. "The future" is a hard concept to really wrap my head around. It is so broad. There's so much to think about. So many possibilities. This is a pretty cliche answer that many other people will give you if asked to think about their futures. It's hard to think about things in "your own way" sometimes since your own way is just the same as anybody elses ways. This really goes to show how together and alike many people are. So alike that someone may be having the same "insight" into the survey as I am right now. I feel like no matter how different we are, we are one species, we are all together as one. It's almost like we all share a mind.

Initial Theories of Human Relationships

Humans can be so smart yet dumb at the same time.
What we have in intelligence, we sometimes lack in common sense or rather, "social skills".
In terms of technology, we may have the most amazing brains working on it but put those minds in social situations and they go blank. Humans can only focus on something for so long before that something is ALL that we can focus on.

Common sense is a more of a talent rather than something one is born with. Life is pretty much based on common sense. Without common sense, people may often be thought of as dumb or just can't seem to be able to think right.

Many people in this culture conform and those people will immediately separate themselves from those who had not conformed. There are borderlines between the different personalities of this society and they will most often disagree with each other. In the different "sections" there are dominant personalities and styles that will show and all others will be looked down on.