father knows best?

One thing that bugs me is the idea that parents have the greatest insight into their children’s personalities, dreams, goals, needs, ideals. This came up in the context of For Better of For Worse, but it shows up all over the place – the Terri Schiavo case was one example. (Though I wonder if we’d have seen it if the parents’ and husbands’ positions had been reversed in that case.) It is very often true on the case of small children whose parents are with them most. Even then, it’s “very often”, not “always” because there are always parents who are too self-involved to notice anyone else’s needs, or even loving caring parents who just have deluded beliefs (like no medical care) or too much else going on (multiple jobs, another child with serious handicaps, whatever). In the case of older kids who are at home less and who tend to keep more to themselves, and especially in the case of adults who have moved away from home (even if they’ve moved back) it’s much less often true. Also, plenty of parents, even the most well meaning ones, are just not observant, or are too different from their children to have much insight.

This is partly about FBOFW; just because Elly and John seem to favor Anthony, I don’t think that automatically means he’s The One for Liz. It’s more about a silly message someone wrote in a discussion about it, in which he made all sorts of categorical statements like “females mature at age 24-26, and males mature at 30 or so” and back it up with his experience as a parent of teenage girls. I didn’t call Bullshit on that straight out, because I didn’t feel like getting into that kind of fight on that community, though I did politely point out that humans vary a great deal and at most you can only make statements about rough tendencies. I have other problems with that sort of statement as well; for one I don’t think that “mature” is a binary state, especially when you are discussing emotional maturity. (Speaking of tendencies, the one I’ve noticed most often over the years is that the people who talk most about the maturity of others (or lack thereof) are usually the ones most noticeably lacking that characteristic themselves.)

What really griped me about that message, though was the ideas that the writer knows all about young women in general because he’s helped raise a couple, and that John and Elly patterson are the people woh should and do have the most insight into what Liz should do next. Or maybe it wasn’t so much those things, as that they were stated as a matter of course: of course the father of a young women in her mid-twenties is the best one to tell her what mate to choose.

Nope. I don’t see it. If he hasn’t set a model already for what a mate should be (and actually, John Patterson has done that fairly well), if the parents haven’t modeled a good partnership and talked to their children at a much younger age about what one looks for in the abstract, then unless their relationship is so close that the discussion happens naturally, it’s not going to work. I’m thinking mostly of generalities here. Maybe the Pattersons are that close, especially since they’ve all been living on top of each other. I’m also thinking of specifics a bit closer to home; my mom says that Rudder and I are “a perfect match” (it’s just not the sort of thing Dad talks about) but I will guarantee he’s not the one she would have picked for me originally.

And of course, another part of what squicks me out about the whole thing is the many recent examples of where it goes too far, with all those websites about how the father should be the keeper of his daughter’s purity. Ew. (Sorry, no links, because I’m not only too lazy to go find them, I’m also too repelled to contribute to their site traffic.)

I just believe that a parent can be a perfect good, loving and caring parent and still not hold the key to every quirk of their child’s character. Some people like the idea of being thoroughly understood; me, I like the idea that Rudder and I can still surprise each other after all these years together, and I think I’m sufficiently different from my parents that they really *don’t* see to the roots of my soul. Also, I firmly believe that Understood Betsy is an excellent parenting primer. (Caveat: It is, of course, much easier to have firm beliefs about parenting when you have no children to disprove them.)