Yeah, I get that, but there's screwed up and there's screwed up, ya know? Sure you can be in the top 50% of parents by just not actively trying to screw them up, but I'd like to do better than that, within reason, and tech/screens/Web seem to me like pretty big things worthy of a little attention and care, especially as they get older. Finding something like a least-harm/most-benefit way to fit that into our home lives is probably worth spending some thought on.

My kid tells us we did her/him a big disservice by just who were were: an in love couple with a good marriage.

She/he tells us ahe/he was so unprepared for relationships and the knowledge that others' sid not come from our style home (happy marriage filled with love, imo)

Now how does one predict that??? Introduce my kids to broken marriages?

Offtopic: are we now so gender neutral we even cannot address our own kid as he or she? Or did you do this on purpose to hide the gender of your kid as part of your privacy?

No flame intended. Honest question. Never thought about the gender of my kids being a privacy thing.

Ontopic: As a parent I (we) try not to restrain things like screen use. Instead we actively promote all other forms of spending time we prefer more. This means I usually enter the room before my kids get up and put the devices away and put other toys in sight. My wife is a montessori (method) teacher which makes her quite skilled at knowing which kind of toys/lessons our kids like at what time in their life. Meaning each couple of weeks the things we prepare change. Result is they usually first pick a bit of everything in plain sight and only after, at the end of day, ask for a device. We didn’t tell them not to, it is just they really like their puzzles, painting, and what have you. In real life preparing means putting things in sight instead of in a closet and one of us being downstairs before the kids is normal as well. Not much effort there.

Disclaimer: my oldest is only 3 right now. Older kids may be entirely different though I believe promoting better options has a better effect than restraining the negative ones.

Hide gender

Thanks for clarfying. What, if you don’t mind me asking, makes you feel their gender in this context is worth censuring?

You made me think about it and it is quite interesting. From reading your post I was surprised. Thinking about it makes it interesting. I work in the Healthcare sector and gender definitly is part of privacy information (as is age for that matter). However, I would have not thought about it twice sharing it here. Now I’m in between.

I sprinkle all my online posts with random lies and inconsistencies... Gender. Location. Age.. Job.. Not many but enough to make me believe it would be harder to find out who i am

Many people do this as well, but mostly for fun.

Weird. I've been online since I was 12 and I never made stuff up about myself. I'm 39 now.

Why not just use the opposite gender of your child? Or imply this child is one of several, given that you only have one?

What's wrong with gender neutrality?

Nothing is wrong with gender neutrality. However, referring to one’s child in gender neutral form is not (that) common.

Gender neutrality is there to avoid distinguishing roles according to people's sex or gender, in order to avoid discrimination arising from the impression that there are social roles for which one gender is more suited than another [0]. That is hardly the case when referring to one’s own child. Hence my follow-up assumption in the same comment that it might be for privacy reasons.

The first statement in that comment on gender neutrality was led by the media taking the whole gender neutrality thing a bit too far nowadays. Some sources just follow the hype instead of looking at the argument for using it as stated above. That is my own opinion though and might be a deluded view on media articles i came across that went into the “did you just assume my gender” mode for stories where gender was totally irrelevant.

I do realize the first sentence of my comment was a phrased a bit provoking because of the whole media thing. Sorry if that offended you and provoked you into this question (comment). Hope this answer helps to show I was not here to fight gender neutrality as a whole.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality

> My kid tells us we did her/him a big disservice by just who were were: an in love couple with a good marriage.

This is just their perception and proposed solution. Ruining your marriage so they will be comfortable in a bad relationship is crazy.

Parents often fail to teach their kids how they got to this point. I have made a point to make sure I don't just take for granted my kids know everything I know.

What to look for? What not to look for? Where does this action come from? Why do I get a funny feeling about this person? What fear causes this anger response. The fact that everyone is nice at some point. On and on the list goes...

Right and wrong, life, is either taught... or learned the hard way.

<Parents often fail to teach their kids how they got to this point.

What a great statement. So true! It may seem trivial but this is important..

It takes a great deal of self-awareness to recognize how different your relationship/marriage/household/raising is from the norm and how this may affect your children. What messes kids up sometimes is just that their home is different from that of others so they don't know how to cope with others' expectations. Your kid sounds a little too cynical though. I'd say what he/she has is a blessing, because he/she has the opportunity to not only introduce someone to a good relationship, but also with some work, have a good marriage later on.

That model that you gave them will help them in the future as they figure out how to deal with not ideal people in relationships, and be a good person that attracts the right kind of people.

They just have to learn how to deal with non-ideal people, mostly by dating a bunch, maybe reading a few books so they can better recognize borderline and other personality disorders.

Teach them about the monumental complexity and difficulty (but ultimately rewarding nature) of human relationships. Also, why didn't they have enough direct experience with the home lives of their friends to be familiar with marriages that didn't work out? Why had they never spoken with an adult whose marriage failed and been able to ask what happened and why?

We do not seek to teach our children how to form or maintain human relationships, much less intimate relationships. As a result, they do not spontaneously learn these things, especially in a society that isolates young people to an increasingly radical degree from their community, their peers, and society in general.

Maybe they are having trouble with their current relationships. It may be an expectation management issue, worthy of discussion with them.

Also if she is young (< 21), this is a phase and it will pass.

We used to think it was awful my kid stayed up late and watched Johnny Carson as a very young kid. Too much tv?? HORRORS! ( now her/his family doesn't even own a tv)

Go with the flow.. Man... Your kid will surprise you

As someone who was actually, legitimately, very seriously screwed up by my parents... I don't agree. "Screwing up your kids" and "parenting" are not at all synonymous.

Can we please treat this topic with the seriousness it deserves? This dismissal attitude makes me feel physically ill.

You're projecting a bifurcation. "Screwing up your kids" isn't a proposition; it is relative. Every single kid gets "screwed up" in some way (some severe, as you claim you are). The lessons they got taught in life during child and teenage years is their manual for getting themselves fixed afterwards, in order to function in society. If they fail to succeed by themselves, professional help can aid them.

See also Dr. Ingeborg Bosch on Past Reality Integration [1] or this Wikipedia article [2] for an introduction.

> This dismissal attitude makes me feel physically ill

Argumentum ad misericordiam [3].

[1] http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/introduction-psycho...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrative_psychotherapy

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_pity

That's an extremely fatalistic attitude, and I don't think it is true either. The problem with most parents is that they don't take the time to see the bigger picture, to reflect on their methods and to evaluate their results. Instead, it's mostly a series of ad hoc decisions that are more often than not driven by their own worst impulses. In fact, this is the same way many people handle their own lives, too.

Raising a child should be a seen as sort of project. You need to figure out what they need to learn while they grow, and then you need to figure out ways of teaching it to them. Of course, you will probably have to adjust your plan along the way, and you yourself will have to learn how to do this properly. But if you view things from the end, it is easy to see why "helicopter" parenting is harmful and will likely result adults who are incapable of managing their own lives once the time comes