I would be too, if I thought it was going to have any impact on Claudia or anyone else. If a person in real life “acted out,” (yes, I know not everyone posting in this thread likes the term), I wouldn’t judge them and accuse them of airing dirty laundry, even if I thought that their behavior could be characterized that way. Instead, I’d lend a sympathetic ear, and if it were possible to help/offer advice, I’d try to do so.
(Funny because this is kind of relevant to my real life today. My son expressed a bit of anger/confusion because I still keep in touch with his ex-girlfriend. He thinks that is weird, and I suppose it is. But she needs a sympathetic, non-judgmental person in her life, and having benefited from such people myself when I was finding my footing as an adult, I am glad to pay it forward and be that person for her.)
ISTM that, as she is a member of a generation that shares everything with the world, this is just something else that she’s sharing along with everything else that she shares with the world.
@CairoCarol: I’m glad you aren’t as dismissive of kids in real life as you have been in this thread. But I would argue that the Internet is still real life. And you are saying it public, in a way it could back to her, same as you think poorly of her for doing.
It’s not the words “acting out” that bother me as much as it is the underlying idea: that the kid can be dismissed because they are clearly just misbehaving. Even if she were misbehaving, it tells us nothing about whether or not she has a legitimate issue. But I don’t even think we should assume that she’s misbehaving.
My personal issue is that I think adults are too easily dismissive of kids and what they have to say. I’ve thought this since I was a kid, and I’ve seen no reason for this to change. Yes, kids are more naive and their brains are different (until around age 25 or so), but I do not believe that this means they should be dismissed.
It wouldn’t matter to me if she didn’t actually file for emancipation. For one thing, it could be a rational threat to get her parents to back off, after having been dismissed when she said it to them in private. For another, they could change enough that she doesn’t have to go through with that threat. They are stepping down, after all, suggesting some care about their kid.
But even if it turns out it was entirely an idle threat, and part of a pattern of misbehavior, I don’t like the assumption that it must be, as I think that’s one way kids are dismissed in ways an adult would not be.
I actually think most kids realize this at least by their teens but then seem to forget as adults. I haven’t. And I’m male–it’s worse for teenage girls, as society has made it acceptable to hate on anything they do or like or whatever.
My initial reaction is that it’s a joke. I don’t even mean a practical joke. I mean, she didn’t actually do it. She’s just chatting with her friends about an idea she thought would be hilarious. And kids have done that forever.
That said, it’s possible she actually did it. That would actually suggest a better relationship with her parents than I initially thought. Abusive parents aren’t exactly known for accepting their kids playing pranks on them. But many non-abusive parents have that sort of relationship with their kid. It starts when they’re young, and the parents play jokes on their kids, and then the kids of course do it back. Given that context, it’s not disrespectful at all.
I think that a lot of what is labeled “respect” in the past was deference and censorship. It’s not really respect if you’re just keeping quiet because you’re afraid of punishment. Real respect means you think highly of someone. It’s also earned, and cannot be given automatically.
I think that a large part of the reason the tired trope of “kids are so disrespectful these days” is that adults forget how they felt about their parents in a day-to-day sense. We all remember the overarching respect, but not the times when we were disrespectful. You can’t tell me that kids in the 1960s/70s counterculture, going against their parents wishes, were all really respectful of their parents at all times, even if they do respect them now.
The whole point of showing that parents have been saying the same things for at least a millennium now is to say that, if it were true, society would have totally broken down by now. There just isn’t enough respect in existence for respect to have eroded as much as they claim in every generation to get us to where we are today.
Then there’s stuff like the invention of the teenager, rather than being a young adult. A lot of times we’re comparing actual children with teens. Or the movement towards seeing minors as people and not objects to be seen and not heard. The more you give respect to a group, the more they feel comfortable acting like they really feel. It happens when any minority gets more respect, too.
I don’t at all think that what was described was testing boundaries. That would be more stuff like not returning home when you were told, trying to see if you can choose not to go with your parents somewhere, stuff like that.
It’s not bad enough to be the sort of thing overly permissive parents would let their kid get away with. It’s utterly innocuous–if she ever actually did it.
You assume that I would think any young person who “acts out” can be dismissed. On the contrary. If someone acts out, I think there is a reason, and it is up to compassionate adults to see if they can find out more and help.
Seriously? Her, with her hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter? I am not going to lie awake at night worrying that I’ve hurt her feelings. I mean, I worry about a lot of things I probably shouldn’t obsess on, but thinking that I personally might damage Claudia’s well-being is not one of them. (But just in case you are reading this, Claudia - I think you are most likely a swell kid dealing with pressures that for most of us are hard to even imagine accurately.)
It’s not that i think Claudia Conway is going to see it. It’s more that I feel like the paradigm of “keep your business off the street/kids should shut up and be grateful for what they have/it’s just attention seeking” as a bundle of reactions is a toxic one. And I don’t want to perpetuate it. I’m more worried about other people who don’t speak out will see their own future in society’s reaction to her, and stay silent.
Some of what you say is undoubtedly true, respect is usually an earned thing but as a parent with kids, it is also something on occasion to be demanded of your kids. Respect has eroded, has it eroded to the levels some folks claim? I certainly don’t think so. But that erosion happened at progressive intervals and upon some reflection, it has come with the giving of some freedoms, the lessening of censorship (Tv and radio) but music lyrics these days would have been banned years ago are now freely given to teens. The stuff you can find on the internet is rather scary as a parent also. So we teach our kids what our values are and what we expect out of them, and hope that they follow the rules or work within whatever bounds or ground work we lay out as parents. We all hope to mold them into productive, polite, strong willed, think for themselves, responsible young adults.
I see all of those things slowly eroding under the guise of progressivism. I don’t want to teach my kids that it is ok to have sex without first letting them know that doing such is likely to result in things that come with life changing repercussions.
The bottom line is that kids (and people in general) are really fucking bad at risk assessment, and the prevailing though is that “it won’t happen to me”. They do need to give respect to the people around them until they are adults or they are on their own. Teachers, Parents, Police, other civil servants should all be there to help, not hinder but the kids are usually the ones who can’t get out of their own way to accept the help being offered. They want respect that they might not have earned yet.
How is keeping your business off the street a toxic one? I think airing it is the toxic version (my cite is this thread)
If she was indeed grown enough to be able to stand on her own, she wouldn’t need to run to twitter and cause drama. Drama is toxic.
Speaking out is all well and good, but the first place to speak out is to her parent’s. If that fails, the next step isn’t to 500,000 followers on Twitter.
And yes, I expect my son to blindly trust me on certain matters, because my judgment is better. And I tell him that, explicitly: that I will always explain as best I can, but sometimes, on some things, he needs to trust me. And so far, at least, he does. But that’s because he had piles and piles of evidence from his own lived experience that I have his best interest at heart. Lots of kids have evidence of the opposite.
You think? I feel like previous generations were much more effective at convincing kids that the shame of going public would be worse than putting up with physical and sexual abuse, let alone criminal neglect.
When I was a kid, not that long ago, ANY family wp
would have covered up incestuous sexual abuse, because of the shame. The church told itself that hushing up sexual abuse was the best thing for victims, because of the shame of going public. Rape victims were counseled by police to withdraw their reports so as not to go through the shame of a public trial.
There is no evidence parents of yesteryear were less selfish and abusive. It just was considered imperative to keep that shit secret.
Always a child of wealth, she would have been 10, when this celebrity/White House phase started. At that age your parents are still sort of super heroes. Perhaps they were very open at home with their politics, their children still being quite young, not really aware of politics in any meaningful sense.
Four years later, she must have some understanding of issues like the children in cages, the pandemic, the BLM protests, etc, and her parents hand in these events in the press. Just maybe, what was being said at home was at odds with the public performance. Perhaps that home conversation made the parents look like shams, or immoral, or complicit in misleading America cravenly for fame, access and profit.
If she began Trump’s term by defending her parents on the school grounds, how damaging would it be to learn an ugly truth or ten? Crushing, I should think. And just maybe she won’t really spill the tea to anyone but the judge, if he’ll only just emancipate her from her hell.
You are conflating progressivism with bad parenting but there is no logical connection between the two. (And need I remind you, the presumably bad parents here are far from progressive.)
I drilled into my kid, when he was a child, that he needed to take having sex seriously for three reasons: pregnancy, STDs, and hurt feelings. It was practically a mantra and sometimes a joke: I’d say, “quick, what are the three reasons you shouldn’t have sex lightly” and he’d rattle off the three reasons, then roll his eyes saying “I KNOW already, mom!”
Funny how I, a progressive, was able to teach my son about the “life-changing repercussions” of sex and raise a healthy, responsible kid who wouldn’t go near a sexual relationship without both birth control and love. Or do you think a more conservative message, a la, “you should feel guilty about sex and if you do it outside of marriage you’re bad and god will punish you!” would have been more effective?
I think you did fine, I have since added that sex is meant to be shared between those whose love will endure, al la marriage but that is just what I tell my kids and think that you did just peachy.
But if you don’t think the free love era as well as the erosion of “appropriate” words and lyrics have effaced society today, I’ll point you back to the Cardi B song already in evidence.
Those lyrics are stamped M for mature, she’s 15 how do you think she got the freedom to listen to/ buy them? TV has eroded as well, and those changes can be laid directly at the feet of progressivism.
Yeah, this line really stood out. I’ve been in a lot of conversations with progressives for nearly half a century now, including professionals who conduct sex-ed classes for kids. I have yet to meet someone who wants to teach “kids that it is ok to have sex without first letting them know that doing such is likely to result in things that come with life changing repercussions.” That’s a bizarre fantasy distortion of the progressive left.
What progressives tend to want to teach kids is far more respect-based than traditional abstinence education:
You should be very thoughtful about your decisions around sex.
You should be informed about the risks–medical, emotional, psychological, legal–surrounding sex, and what measures can mitigate those risks.
You should treat enthusiastic consent as an absolute prerequisite for any sexual interaction.
Contrast this to the alternative of abstinence-based education:
Children don’t need to learn about birth control or other risk-mitigation strategies.
Children need to learn about only one strategy: no sex until marriage.
Girls should be taught to value their virginity, and it should be taught about in terms of “purity.”
Boys do not need to be taught to value their virginity, but they should be taught to value the virginity of girls, and to consider girls as less valuable if they aren’t virgins.
Enthusiastic consent is not prioritized, but heterosexuality, monogamy, and marriage are.
Once more, you’ll have a very hard time convincing me that the latter approach is more respectful than the former approach.
The best way to keep your thirteen year old from being sexually active is to raise them with good values and self-esteem from ages 0 - 13. There is no logical connection between holding progressive values and being incapable of, or unlikely to, do that.