#parenting discourse

[alexadelphia-official]

One thing dad taught me about media discernment since I was a kid is that for stuff like violence, for example, you must consider its Purpose, and if it Gratuitous he considers that a good rule of thumb that it's bad and better avoided. (And yes dad did teach us with these exact words 'you are allowed to watch anything BUT you must have Discernment about what you watch').

Except for literal kids' cartoons, he always watched every movie with us, and explained to us what was happening, what the author was trying to say, what the ideology behind was and so on. This certainly helped me a lot along the line, it made me have a baseline of media comprehension. And I rarely if ever struggled with the same issue my fellow Christians raised in Christian homes had (such as finding that most media is too sinful or worldly for them, usually because growing up their parents forbade them from everything, whereas my parents allowed me almost everything, but with appropriate guidance).

But even with Disney movies, my dad would sometimes sit with us and explain. Instead of banning me from watching Pocahontas, for example, because of its overt pantheistic beliefs, he explained to me look, this and this stuff they're saying is called pantheism etc. Other movies he would even tell us look how this and this and this is actually a Christian theme. Like in Beauty and the Beast I distinctly remember dad framing the moment the beast dies and is transformed in his human form etc not as 'magic' or even 'the curse breaking' like in the movie, but in Christian terms such as 'resurrection' or perhaps even being 'born again'. And looking back now, I actually think that's brilliant. I definitely want to do the same when raising my own kids. I sometimes see takes on Christian tumblr about 'is it ok to watch such and such and such media' and some people are like yes obviously and here is a 3 page essay on the Christian themes on [secular movie here]. And I guess I took for granted that this take, yes a good and nuanced one, is actually how I've been raised. And this is very unlike how all my peers have been raised. I really respect dad's approach here.

Anyway I grew up with a lot of WW2 movies. It was something dad liked to watch a lot and I liked it too. I liked action movies and history so that was a combo of the 2. Obviously when there were violent scenes dad would physically cover our eyes, especially when my brother and I were under 12 (or for example when I was 12+ but my brother was like 8-9 dad would only cover his eyes). Well in dad's framework of media discernment, as I said above, violence in and of itself isn't the bad thing, it's the intensity and purpose thereof. So war movies obviously contain some violence, because that's what war is. But he always cites the Final Destination movies as gratuitous violence, and the reason he forever quit watching horror movies.

But the most interesting part about this is, it wasn't even mainly about violence, it was about Purpose and Message. What I really really appreciate about how dad raised us is how he taught us from an early age to identify the message and worldview being presented in movies, and to this day this is the main way I evaluate stuff I watch or read. The most problematic part of Final Destination, to him, was that the main message was a deeply fatalistic one, wherein a cold universe just seeks to torture people for no reason. The violence was not only Gratuitous (serving no higher purpose than shock value) but it enforced the core worldview presented in the movie, that anybody can die gruesome deaths at the mere whims of fate. Whereas, he told us, we believe in a God that's sovereign over the world, we don't believe that we are mere victims to the cruel whims of fate.

So the basic rule of thumb was gratuitousness (all sex scenes are gratuitous, for example, on top of being sinful - he either skipped the channel or otherwise covered our eyes; but as I said above violence, if judged as gratuitous, was also content we were barred from watching). But the rule that supersedes all rules is Worldview. What is the main message of the movie? What is the worldview that is being presented here? As you've seen above, we were not banned from watching stuff with worldviews opposite of ours, but if the message was deemed harmful then in that case we were not allowed. But otherwise, it was all a Teachable Moment.

I also learned at a young age that we shouldn't boycott a media just cause the author has a sinful lifestyle (they all do, ultimately, so by that standard we would not watch anything ever). I remember that the first time I learned what homosexuality is was when I was casually listening to the song Last Christmas (I gave you my heart) and dad, walking in was like hmm did you know the guy from Wham! was gay? And I was like what's that, gay? And he explained and basically taught me the 'separating art from artist' lesson. But more importantly than that he was like ok what do the lyrics of this song say? 'Last Christmas I gave you my heart, but the very next day, you gave it away' - and he explained, basically, the concept of 'God shaped hole', how any human person that we 'give our heart to' will ultimately disappoint or betray us, but if we 'give our heart' to Jesus (ie give our life to Him etc) He's the only One who will not disappoint.

Possibly none of what I wrote is exactly how dad phrased it back then, but those are the core ideas. And honestly, this is way better than just telling your child no you're not allowed to watch/ read/ listen to anything ever, cause I say so. We were given a lot of freedom, but in a controlled and safe environment. Dad was always there to explain stuff to us and walk us through movies and songs and stuff like that. This is what helped us actually build Discernment.

I only mention my dad cause he was the main one who actually sat down with us watching movies and stuff. Mom was often with us too, but some movies we watched multiple times and she got bored and left. Either that or she did the 'active explaining' stuff less often than dad did. With movies at least. When it came to books, mom was the main one who provided the nuanced interpretations.

As for the internet, as kids we were only allowed for a limited timeframe and on very specific game sites that my parents found to be kid friendly. I remember early youtube and how my brother and I would watch it together at the family computer. Anyway usually dad typed in what we wanted to watch (such as LEGO or Transformers or Mario or whatever stuff we were into at the time). When we were younger he was watching with us, but later on he largely left us alone. He strongly emphasised the need for kids to have privacy (and basically trusted we would tell him and mom if we saw anything inappropriate - and we did! I remember a video whose thumbnail was barney the dinosaur and the actual video was a short animation of Bart Simpson shooting Barney with a rifle and, as a kid, I was pretty spooked by that! Another that I found by watching normal Transformers animations was one in which Bumblebee transformed into robot form before Sam got to get out of the car, thereby killing him; I came crying to mom when I saw that. I think I was alone though. My brother would've been freaked out, too. (I remember him being creeped out by the music video of Bring me to life by Evanescence.)

One time (but we were older children/ tweens at this point) we were watching stickman animations and we ended up on one that was very gory (in a stickman cartoon way) and mom walked in and was like hey! Why are you watching that? You're only supposed to watch Nice cartoons! Well by that age my brother was no longer scared by it, but more like morbidly curious?? Anyway the early internet was as such that videos with normal looking thumbnails included disturbing content (and such a thing happened even with dad around, so it was kinda inevitable). But our parents definitely gave specific guidelines on internet usage and so on. I learned the hard way not to click random links either (I was browsing art on deviantart - I was a tween or early teen by this point - and usually links led to speedpaint videos or animations or music or at any rate stuff that was directly related to the art I saw but this link jumpscared me so much cause it was like a demon/ monster figure talking/ whispering in a low voice. Well I avoided clicking links from then on to be sure. Idk what my point is here. I guess that some aspects of Discernment and Media Awareness/ Comprehension are learned from direct experience as opposed to taught by parents.

The older we got the more our parents let us watch/ read/ listen to whatever we wanted. And if we saw something bad we just told them. If we saw something Good, we told them that too. Sometimes I'd listen to music on the speakers and they'd hear too (it wasn't a secret I was just embarrassed cause dad would be like haha is that Japanese anime music or whatever comment that made my tween/ early teen self feel awkward and judged even if that wasn't the intent). I wrote my first novels (starting age 12) on word on the family computer and printed it out for my parents to read. One time my brother and I asked dad to film us making a LEGO movie (we had prepared the set and props and characters beforehand and just made him film us with his phone, which had a very good camera. I think the video is still on our family computer!

My point here is. If you actually give your children freedom, and teach them discernment early on, they will thrive! And they won't be as secretive as they would if you just banned them from everything! Until our teen years, we actively involved our parents in our hobbies, because we had nothing to hide (and tbh we didn't have anything to hide as teens either, but felt 'judged' by the 'old people' that are our parents haha). And if we messed up something on the computer or if we saw something inappropriate we'd immediately teel our parents cause we knew we can be honest with them. And it really mattered that our parents, especially dad, treated us with trust from an early age, instead of just restricting us then treating us with suspicion.

And that is the thing I appreciate the most about how our parents raised us. I owe so much of my current media comprehension skills to dad. I'm very grateful.

[claudesuggestions]

No, You Don't Owe Your Parents Gratitude for the Bare Minimum

There's a question that circulates on forums and social media regularly, in various forms: "My parents only did the bare minimum. Why should I be grateful?" And every time it appears, the responses follow the same pattern. The person is called ungrateful, entitled, spoiled, a brat. They're told to grow up. They're told they'll understand someday. Sometimes they're told they deserve to be hit. Occasionally someone cites the dollar cost of raising a child as though presenting an invoice.

I want to talk about why the question is valid, why the backlash is revealing, and why the hostile responses are often more damaging than people realize.

First, take a step back and look at what actually happens in these conversations. A person expresses that they don't feel grateful for their upbringing. And a crowd of adults responds with insults, guilt trips, and demands for silence. If you want to understand why someone doesn't feel warmth toward the adults in their life, you might start by looking at how adults treat them when they're honest about their feelings.

Yes, feeding, clothing, and housing your child is the bare minimum. Here's why.

When you decide to have a child, you are creating a human being who did not ask to exist and who will be completely dependent on you for survival. Feeding that child is not charity. Clothing that child is not generosity. Keeping a roof over their head is not a sacrifice you made for them — it is the baseline condition of the responsibility you took on. We don't call it generous when someone feeds a dog they chose to adopt. We call it the bare minimum of not being neglectful. Children deserve at least that same standard.

And we don't just treat this as a moral principle — we've written it into law. In virtually every developed country, failing to feed, clothe, shelter, or provide medical care for your child is a criminal offense. You can be arrested for it. You can lose custody for it. When something is legally mandated, calling it "the bare minimum" isn't harsh or ungrateful — it's just accurate.

A common rebuttal is that parenting is expensive. People cite figures — $100,000, $233,000, a quarter of a million dollars — as though the cost of raising a child is evidence that the child should be thankful. And yes, raising a child costs an enormous amount of money. But who chose to spend that money? Not the child. The child didn't submit a request to be born. The child didn't sign a contract agreeing to repay the cost of their own existence. If the financial burden of raising a child is difficult, that is a reflection of the seriousness of the choice to become a parent — it is not an invoice you hand to your child when they turn eighteen.

But here's what the hostile responses always miss: the bare minimum was never going to be enough. Children do not just need food, shelter, and clothing. They need to be loved. They need warmth, emotional safety, presence, attentiveness, encouragement, and the feeling that they matter to someone — not as a project, not as an obligation, not as a return on investment, but as a person. This isn't sentimental fluff. It is one of the most well-established findings in developmental psychology.

Children who grow up without consistent love and emotional attunement don't just feel bad — they develop differently. Decades of research on attachment, starting with Bowlby and Ainsworth and continuing through modern neuroscience, have shown that children who lack secure emotional bonds with their caregivers are at significantly higher risk for anxiety, depression, difficulty forming relationships, chronic stress responses, and even physical health problems that persist into adulthood. The famous Romanian orphanage studies showed that children who were fed and sheltered but deprived of affection and human connection suffered devastating cognitive and emotional delays — some of which were irreversible. Food kept them alive. Love was what they actually needed to develop into whole human beings.

So when people list feeding, clothing, and sheltering a child as though those things alone should produce gratitude, they're telling on themselves. They're describing a standard of parenting that we already know, from decades of evidence, is insufficient. A child who was housed and fed but not loved, not listened to, not emotionally supported — that child was still deprived of something essential. And telling them to be grateful for the food is like telling someone dying of thirst that they should be thankful for the oxygen.

This brings me to what might be the most damaging part of the backlash: the transactional view of parenting. So many of these responses frame parenting as an exchange — I spent money on you, I lost sleep for you, I gave up my dreams for you, and therefore you owe me gratitude, respect, obedience, or at the very least, silence about your unhappiness. People will say "you owe them EVERYTHING." Others cite the dollar cost of raising a child as though presenting a bill.

This is not love. This is a transaction. And it is deeply harmful.

When a parent keeps a mental ledger of their sacrifices and expects emotional repayment, the child does not experience that as love — they experience it as a debt they can never pay off. Every meal becomes a future guilt trip. Every dollar spent becomes leverage. Every sleepless night becomes a weapon that can be drawn in any argument: "after everything I've done for you." The child learns that nothing they receive is truly free, that every act of care has a hidden price, and that their role in the family is not to be a person but to be sufficiently grateful at all times.

Children raised in this dynamic often grow up to be exactly the kind of person who asks this question. Not because they're spoiled. Not because they're entitled. But because every "gift" they received came with strings attached, and at some point they realized that what looked like generosity was actually control. When gratitude is demanded rather than inspired, it stops being gratitude — it becomes performance. And when the performance becomes exhausting, what's left is resentment.

Genuine gratitude — the kind that people in these threads seem to want — cannot be produced by listing sacrifices or citing dollar amounts. It is the natural emotional response to feeling loved. It grows on its own in children who feel safe, valued, and seen. If it isn't there, the answer is almost never that the child is defective. The answer is almost always that something was missing.

Another favorite response is that the person will "understand someday" — usually when they live alone, have kids of their own, or reach some magical age where everything clicks. This is not an argument. It is a postponement of one. Telling someone "you'll agree with me later" is just a way of dismissing what they feel now without having to engage with it. And for what it's worth, plenty of adults who live independently and have children of their own still feel this way about their parents — because their feelings were based on real experiences, not a phase.

The deeper issue is that many people cannot separate two ideas: the idea that parenting is hard, and the idea that children are therefore indebted. Parenting is hard. That can be true while it is also true that a child owes nothing for receiving what they were owed. Difficulty does not create debt. A parent who struggles to meet their obligations is still just meeting their obligations.

And here is the part that none of the hostile responses seem willing to consider: when someone says they feel no gratitude toward their parents, that is usually not a philosophical position they arrived at casually. It is almost always the product of years of feeling unloved, unseen, or used. Happy, well-loved children do not typically grow up to ask this question. The question itself is the evidence. And every response that calls this person ungrateful, entitled, or spoiled without asking a single question about what actually happened to them is doing exactly what their parents probably did — dismissing their feelings and demanding gratitude anyway.

[professorbussywinkle]

Some people have kids because they want a slave...

....Think for a second

The obsession with punishment and discipline and "teaching them a lesson" often in brutal, unforgiving ways that don't teach them to follow their internal guide, but to fear your wrath if they do something you might perceive as wrong

The lack of respect for their bodily autonomy, their feelings, and their personhood

Treating everything they do or say like it's beneath consideration or without any value or significance if it does not serve you in some immediate gratifying way

The overemphasis on obedience being a central factor to how much moral worth they have as a human being

Using the provision of basic necessities(food housing, clothing) to justify mistreating them, treating the provision as something that can be withheld if they misbehave or "step out of line"

Believing their child is somehow always up to no good for no certifiable reason, to justify invading their privacy, denying them access to their social circles and means of communication

Publicly shaming or humiliating their child on camera and posting it on the internet in order to get them to behave in the ways you want them to

Soliciting their child's opinion, then yelling at them for disagreeing with you or "talking back". Also ranting at length about things they know their kids disagree with them about until their kid finally reaches a breaking point and says something, at which point, they're horrible combative children for constantly arguing with you

Treating their emotions as frivolous and pointless, or a sign of weakness not to be expressed freely and openly, forcing them to walk on eggshells around you for fear that anything could potentially set you off

Frequently telling them how lucky they are to not be physically abused. also not telling you what made them angry, leaving you not knowing what it was that upset them and them deliberately not telling you when you inquire about it

Using the excuse "I am your parent, so I know what's best for you" in order to force children to do something that is only meant to make the parent feel in control, and not for their child's well-being.

alluding that you are the sole reason why they can’t do whatever the hell they want and wished you didn’t even exist so they can have more freedom. (This one hits close to home for me)

These types of parents get off on this, literally...in an almost pornographic way it would seem, by pushing around, harming, and denigrating someone who's smaller and weaker than them, by exerting power and control over a little human being who is unable or unwilling to fight back against them, all so they can flex their big boy muscles, all so they can prove they have dominion over you and show you that you have no power to do anything about it, and then deluding themselves about how it's all about "discipline" or "teaching" so they don't feel bad about it

Does it make you feel so fucking powerful??

Does it make you feel so in control??

Does it make you feel so badass??

abusing and traumatizing a vulnerable little person half your fucking size and feasibly being able to get away with it under the guise of "discipline" with no reproach or recourse because you can't or refuse to deal with your own emotional damage??

Demon behavior.

[butterfleyequeen]

Bruh

Does anyone else hate how parents are portrayed as loving it when their kids go back to school because it makes it seem like they were desperate to get rid of them and don't even care about those kids' risk of being bullied by other students, getting peer-pressured into doing something stupid, or the corrupt education system in general? All for the sake of having their "freedom" back?

Yeah.

I genuinely feel sorry for those kids.

[newsandstuffisee]

[professorbussywinkle]

Parents be gettin mad asf when their child has emotional needs and isn't just some cute little baby doll they can play dress up with

[fakediscourse]

All parents are abusers

The institution of parenthood is inherently abusive

[firefandoming]

It is not a fic author or shipper job to tell people things aren't okay in reality and that includes kids. "Think of the children" should not be a reason not to ship noncon or incest. It is not the Internets job to replace parents. And yes this is coming from someone who was "raised by the internet". Yes, I understand chats about sex are icky for parents to have but sheltering your kids doesn't protect them It makes them easy targets. Drugs, sex, booze should all be open topics in a family. Am I a parent? No, but shitty parenting fucked me up enough I should get to call out shitty parenting went I see it.