‘Far be it from me to advocate “family” entertainment. The word “family” as used in this phrase describes a dream unit presided over by a daughter’s idea of a father, kept spic-and-span by a son’s idea of a mother, and romped in (innocently) by a parent’s idea of children. In fact, if someone were to set up a production in which Miss Bette Davis was directed by Mr. Roman Polanski, it could not express to the full the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of an average family.’
I always appreciate your candor. There's the phrase "No regrets." It's more like "Mostly regrets." The people who say no regrets seem the most damaged. If asked, "If you had to go back again, would you change anything?" my response is I would change most things. That doesn't mean I dwell on the past. I don't believe in free will, but I see the "degrees of freedom" on the margins. The space where cause and effect creates the appearance of agency--a kind of free will. And it's in those spaces where there is a sense that one can get the correct neurons firing in the correct order to make someone else's life better on balance. That's what I go for.
Reading your essays, I often wonder how it is that you have been willing to look deeply into the things of your childhood and adulthood, analyze and make judgments about your ideas and thinking, and make significant, life-altering changes in how you live. It is a rare quality and one I admire greatly. Thanks Josh.
I don't know either, Karen. I've asked my therapist so many times why I can do this, but my mother couldn't. What makes some people able to see above it, and others not?
All I know is what my gut tells me: If I didn't change I was going to die.
I think I know why Josh! You're a natural born muckraker. That was the first career you chose. You can't settle. You want to get to the real story. ...and you want justice. It's your calling. It's your mission. And you wear it like a fine fitting suit.
The others, who don't care what's at the core, can be found everywhere. You see it in the doctor, the sandwich store server and in a lot of parents. They just want the customer or the child to stop whining. They've said no to truth and curiosity so many times that they seem dead to it.
Thank you for this. A thought that's been recurring for me lately is how often people confuse "normal" with "common." Just because something happens to a lot of people doesn't mean it's healthy, good, or normal. We truly have to consciously create healthy, normal family dynamics, making diligent effort to overcome unhealthy patterns. Thank you for speaking up on this. Much love to you and yours!
This is one thing that drives me nuts about conservatives. The idea that all adults must have children. Nothing drags a society down other than unwanted births, mentally and financially unstable parents or usually the singular one parent and parents that have never grown up themselves. Josh it’s a real tribute to your character you ended the generational cycle of abuse.
You assume facts not in evidence, sir. Conservatives don’t ipso facto assume that “all adults should have children”. Where did you hear that? Was it on wiki? Oh well, never mind.
I am a Conservative. I wouldn’t wish a child on anyone ill prepared to raise said child. Not in a million years. I’m also a tax payer and feel the burn of the unwanted children in our society. As a human being my heart also breaks for the damage inflicted on children raised by the ill prepared. I never judge anyone choosing to not have children. So see? Not “everyone” bc “me” right there.
And for those not wishing to procreate, USE BIRTH CONTROL—and abortion isn’t birth control.
I'm also a conservative raised in a very liberal family in very liberal Greenwich Village in the 60's and 70's, and its free-for-all philosophy of "letting it all hang out" gave my parents (father) a pass on his behavior which helped damage his 4 wild sons, one of whom just hung himself a few years ago, on the day he was being released from a 9 year prison sentence. Of the four of us, he was the only bro who kept our parents' liberal socialist mindset, and the only
bro who didn't have kids. I'm assuming: thank God. But I also NEVER saw or heard one single conservative say "we must have kids"... But I HAVE seen conservatives say, over and over, if you DO have kids, try as hard as you can to raise them responsibly. True that!
I have so much respect for a friend of mine who divorced his BPD/narcissistic wife rather than have children with her. He was able to withstand a lot -- and in some ways enabled some of the behaviour -- but once she started saying "let's have a baby" he well and truly woke up to the reality of the situation and drew a line in the sand, because he couldn't bear the idea of bringing a child into a dysfunctional household.
I cried reading this. Did I cry at the abuse you suffered-no, that just makes me angry. I cried at your realization of the importance of family and that you did not do so until fairly recently. How many people feel the same way you did? I would hope not many but I fear there is too many. You are a shining example that emotional growth can be lifelong.
Thank you, Josh, your voice on this topic is so important. I think emotional neglect in particular is far more common than people realize, and that it's been built into Western culture for centuries because of bad ideas about child development and child-rearing ("poisonous pedagogies" in parenting books go back at least 400 years). A lot of people who want to be good parents don't really know how to be, because of their own childhoods, their parents' childhoods etc (I feel this way, as a new-ish mom who was emotionally neglected as a kid and scared of my father's temper). But building functional families is the only way out of the hell we've created; figuring out how to raise children who are healthy and resilient in a screwed-up world. My dad's family in particular initially gave me a lot of flack for what they viewed as "coddling" my daughter with extended breastfeeding, bed-sharing, carrying her all the time instead of using a stroller (etc) ... but then after about a year, they were commenting on what an unusually "chill" toddler she was. I agree that many young people today who are sucked into gender ideology (and other toxic ideologies) are from families that are actually abusive, but I think in other cases a bunch of little things add up to poor attachment, even when the parents are not abusive or unloving, because of the unhealthy idea that it's important to push "independence" on a child early, and contemporary feminism's denial of the importance of mothers.
This. My daughter has 5 boys, ages 8 and under, and I have learned a great deal from her as she has navigated the breastfeeding, wearing, bed sharing, "no, crying it out isn't good parenting" commitments for motherhood. And it is a very committed and intentional way to mother. While I did some of those things, there was really no support for it back when my kids were born. And the mantra of be a working woman was ever-present. It took me until my daughter was 15 months old to say screw the big paycheck and power moves. I was the person who should be spending those hours with my child.
Kudos to you, momma. May there be more women who realize just how important the role of mommy/momma/mom is.
Yeah, it's definitely difficult. There's still not a lot of support for "attachment" parenting! I'm lucky that my husband, mother, and mother-in-law all supported my decision not to go back to work (with my mom helping us financially) and all the attachment stuff I was doing (and my obsession with feeding my daughter a healthy diet without refined sugar, seed oils, or processed baby foods). My dad's family has come around now because they can see the results, and my brother told me recently he was grateful that I'd modelled a "new" (his words) way of parenting for the rest of the family. I pointed out that pretty much everything I was doing was actually more "traditional" than common Western parenting practices today.
There's a theory that kids being put in nurseries very young (as so many millennials were) created an emotionally dysregulated generation with deep resentments.
My parents are loving towards me and their marriage is going strong nearly 50 years in. But my mother didn't spend much time with me when I was a baby/toddler. Almost immediately a nanny was hired to take care of me while my mother went to work and I was in full-time nursery by age 2. There was always an attitude that I should fend for myself and I had a tough time once puberty and adolescence hit.
This was one of the things that really woke me up to how toxic the "left" is ... all the calls for more universal daycare so mothers can focus on their careers, instead of calls for more support for stay at home parents.
If you (or anyone else) is interested in learning more about the history of Western parenting (why I'm claiming that neglect is common because of misunderstandings about brain development and attachment), I wrote a long read about the dark history of parenting books here with lots of examples -- https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-dangers-of-reading-too-much-part-df8
The ideal family is exactly that: an ideal. It doesn't matter if actual families often miss the mark a little bit; if they still hit close, they're better than no ideal at all or than the total absence of a model.
My husband's family strove towards the ideal and mostly hit it. Obviously there was some minor dysfunction (like there always is with fallen human souls) but for the most part they succeeded. Consequently he is a stable, loving, caring person with relatively few psychological problems (again, nobody is perfect in this fallen world, but he does well). The obvious connection between his stable upbringing and his stable personality was a bit of a revelation for me when we first started dating, and the initial epiphany fueled my transition rightward politically over the years. It makes no sense to me to tear down a fundamental ideal that serves as a foundation for a stable society.
My own family of origin was a bit more dysfunctional than my husband's: mildly BPD mother, absent biological father, indifferent stepfather (all of this somewhat mitigated by a supportive and largely functional extended family). Consequently I held some of the negative views of family you describe in your post, fueled of course by a lot of the negativity young gay men (or boys who will become gay men) receive. As I mentioned above, this changed after meeting my husband.
It's important to remember that ideals are models that guide us, they are not invalidated by failure to live up to them. This is true also of the ideals we Americans say our country was founded upon: not met in practice but still important to strive for. It is also true of religious ideals: we rarely live up to our spiritual models (Christ, Buddha, etc.) but we are better people for trying.
Josh, it can’t be easy to be so amazingly honest and real. Bravo! Much respect for you. And I won’t say you are “admitting your mistakes” because while you were mistaken, you were living in a pain that I can only try to imagine, and surviving that was the only thing that mattered. Lots of us are mistaken about lots of us. It’s the new normal, isn’t it? Hating, judging, encouraging depravity in the name of caring, and making assumptions about others, yeah?
I wish someone real and honest would have told you about Jesus back then—and then I wish the church was in the shape it should be to love you in your pain—-instead of being either judgey or stupidly sin perservere, neither of which are Christian.
Your observations are brilliant and breathtaking in their truth. Marxism (satanism) 101: Destroy the family by any and all means necessary, and thus you while destroy the society. That is what is at the heart of the culture war, not “inclusion” —because anyone with 2 brains cells to rub together can see DEI is anything but the things it mandates.
I am incredibly sorry for your pain, and also incredibly grateful that you are willing to lay it out there for the edification of those either going through it or floating on a breeze of denial.
I’m from one of those families people now love to deride. A long line of faithful, God fearing, Conservative challengers, and we feel the attacks. But in my world, we are taught that the battle is not against people, but principalities and dark powers. So I was taught, and I’ve taught my children, and they’re teaching their children, that love covers a multitude of sins. And since we are ALL sinners, we endeavor to love always, even and especially the wounded, hidden behind the piercings and the pronouns. It’s a love unreturned for sure, but nevertheless we persevere, because Jesus died for all. And all means all. Jesus wasn’t joking when He said that.
Dec 28, 2023·edited Dec 28, 2023Liked by Josh Slocum
I’ve been thinking like this for a while. A few years back when I began to understand the pain of how my mother treated me, I realized I had projected the hatred she had for me for succeeding at anything onto men “the patriarchy” etc. Thing is most men didn’t live up to the projection and are/were just decent human beings. It was very hard-I’m still in process-to accept the truth about my family- but very freeing.
Dec 28, 2023·edited Dec 28, 2023Liked by Josh Slocum
I’ve also been rethinking my ideas of family. Many who advocate it so strongly came from decent families and create decent families. In my case my parents were Christian and did all the virtue signaling but home life was very different. This soured me towards Christians for a long time as well.
Recently I heard Jordan Peterson say (paraphrased) that growing up with parents who punish you for doing the things the normally would be rewarded (i.e. doing well in school) puts a person in hell. It sounds hyperbolic but it sure fits with my life.
For sure. This is interesting with helicopter parents who demand academic success but punish independent thought at home. Seen this happen, this kids grow up excelling at school... but at university or post university they descend into nihilism and aimlessness. Some feel as if they lack meaning beyond their school work.
Bless you. Incredible vulnerability 💕
I just figured out what a good leader is. It’s the rebellious kid, the problem child, grown up and able to admit their mistakes.
You’re a good leader, Josh. I hope I can be the same.
Wow Josh.
That was a great piece.
I had no idea.
That you survived that and still function as an adult, is remarkable.
I very nearly didn't. It's a surprise to me that I did.
Thank you for reading.
Love this! 💕
I always appreciate your candor. There's the phrase "No regrets." It's more like "Mostly regrets." The people who say no regrets seem the most damaged. If asked, "If you had to go back again, would you change anything?" my response is I would change most things. That doesn't mean I dwell on the past. I don't believe in free will, but I see the "degrees of freedom" on the margins. The space where cause and effect creates the appearance of agency--a kind of free will. And it's in those spaces where there is a sense that one can get the correct neurons firing in the correct order to make someone else's life better on balance. That's what I go for.
So true! The list of my regrets is long!
So true.
Reading your essays, I often wonder how it is that you have been willing to look deeply into the things of your childhood and adulthood, analyze and make judgments about your ideas and thinking, and make significant, life-altering changes in how you live. It is a rare quality and one I admire greatly. Thanks Josh.
I don't know either, Karen. I've asked my therapist so many times why I can do this, but my mother couldn't. What makes some people able to see above it, and others not?
All I know is what my gut tells me: If I didn't change I was going to die.
I think I know why Josh! You're a natural born muckraker. That was the first career you chose. You can't settle. You want to get to the real story. ...and you want justice. It's your calling. It's your mission. And you wear it like a fine fitting suit.
The others, who don't care what's at the core, can be found everywhere. You see it in the doctor, the sandwich store server and in a lot of parents. They just want the customer or the child to stop whining. They've said no to truth and curiosity so many times that they seem dead to it.
I meant fine "fitted" ....you look fantastic and feel it when you're doing the thing that suits you.
Thank you for this. A thought that's been recurring for me lately is how often people confuse "normal" with "common." Just because something happens to a lot of people doesn't mean it's healthy, good, or normal. We truly have to consciously create healthy, normal family dynamics, making diligent effort to overcome unhealthy patterns. Thank you for speaking up on this. Much love to you and yours!
Like “common sense”, it seems to be anything but common. More like “rare sense”
Indeed!
Yet our society seems hellbent on creating and even justifying dysfunction.
Yup. And getting all offended when healthy people don't celebrate that dysfunction.
I guess I should say healthier, cos who the hell is healthy these days? 🤷♀️
This is one thing that drives me nuts about conservatives. The idea that all adults must have children. Nothing drags a society down other than unwanted births, mentally and financially unstable parents or usually the singular one parent and parents that have never grown up themselves. Josh it’s a real tribute to your character you ended the generational cycle of abuse.
I am unsuitable as a father and it would have been a grave moral error for me to have children. Would that my mother had known the same about herself.
But then we wouldn't have you! Wish she would have been better but grateful you are using your experience to help others.
I'm a conservative. No way in hell all adults need to have children. One trip to Wal-Mart makes that abundantly obvious.
Caveat, though - it absolutely should be *adults* who are having them.
You assume facts not in evidence, sir. Conservatives don’t ipso facto assume that “all adults should have children”. Where did you hear that? Was it on wiki? Oh well, never mind.
I am a Conservative. I wouldn’t wish a child on anyone ill prepared to raise said child. Not in a million years. I’m also a tax payer and feel the burn of the unwanted children in our society. As a human being my heart also breaks for the damage inflicted on children raised by the ill prepared. I never judge anyone choosing to not have children. So see? Not “everyone” bc “me” right there.
And for those not wishing to procreate, USE BIRTH CONTROL—and abortion isn’t birth control.
Listen to Charlie Kirk or Glen Beck both of who I agree on many things.
Agreed except those most likely to engage in risky sexual behavior are those who were sexually abused as children and have not healed from it.
I'm also a conservative raised in a very liberal family in very liberal Greenwich Village in the 60's and 70's, and its free-for-all philosophy of "letting it all hang out" gave my parents (father) a pass on his behavior which helped damage his 4 wild sons, one of whom just hung himself a few years ago, on the day he was being released from a 9 year prison sentence. Of the four of us, he was the only bro who kept our parents' liberal socialist mindset, and the only
bro who didn't have kids. I'm assuming: thank God. But I also NEVER saw or heard one single conservative say "we must have kids"... But I HAVE seen conservatives say, over and over, if you DO have kids, try as hard as you can to raise them responsibly. True that!
I have so much respect for a friend of mine who divorced his BPD/narcissistic wife rather than have children with her. He was able to withstand a lot -- and in some ways enabled some of the behaviour -- but once she started saying "let's have a baby" he well and truly woke up to the reality of the situation and drew a line in the sand, because he couldn't bear the idea of bringing a child into a dysfunctional household.
I cried reading this. Did I cry at the abuse you suffered-no, that just makes me angry. I cried at your realization of the importance of family and that you did not do so until fairly recently. How many people feel the same way you did? I would hope not many but I fear there is too many. You are a shining example that emotional growth can be lifelong.
it took guts to write this.
God bless U...
Thank you, Josh, your voice on this topic is so important. I think emotional neglect in particular is far more common than people realize, and that it's been built into Western culture for centuries because of bad ideas about child development and child-rearing ("poisonous pedagogies" in parenting books go back at least 400 years). A lot of people who want to be good parents don't really know how to be, because of their own childhoods, their parents' childhoods etc (I feel this way, as a new-ish mom who was emotionally neglected as a kid and scared of my father's temper). But building functional families is the only way out of the hell we've created; figuring out how to raise children who are healthy and resilient in a screwed-up world. My dad's family in particular initially gave me a lot of flack for what they viewed as "coddling" my daughter with extended breastfeeding, bed-sharing, carrying her all the time instead of using a stroller (etc) ... but then after about a year, they were commenting on what an unusually "chill" toddler she was. I agree that many young people today who are sucked into gender ideology (and other toxic ideologies) are from families that are actually abusive, but I think in other cases a bunch of little things add up to poor attachment, even when the parents are not abusive or unloving, because of the unhealthy idea that it's important to push "independence" on a child early, and contemporary feminism's denial of the importance of mothers.
This. My daughter has 5 boys, ages 8 and under, and I have learned a great deal from her as she has navigated the breastfeeding, wearing, bed sharing, "no, crying it out isn't good parenting" commitments for motherhood. And it is a very committed and intentional way to mother. While I did some of those things, there was really no support for it back when my kids were born. And the mantra of be a working woman was ever-present. It took me until my daughter was 15 months old to say screw the big paycheck and power moves. I was the person who should be spending those hours with my child.
Kudos to you, momma. May there be more women who realize just how important the role of mommy/momma/mom is.
Yeah, it's definitely difficult. There's still not a lot of support for "attachment" parenting! I'm lucky that my husband, mother, and mother-in-law all supported my decision not to go back to work (with my mom helping us financially) and all the attachment stuff I was doing (and my obsession with feeding my daughter a healthy diet without refined sugar, seed oils, or processed baby foods). My dad's family has come around now because they can see the results, and my brother told me recently he was grateful that I'd modelled a "new" (his words) way of parenting for the rest of the family. I pointed out that pretty much everything I was doing was actually more "traditional" than common Western parenting practices today.
There's a theory that kids being put in nurseries very young (as so many millennials were) created an emotionally dysregulated generation with deep resentments.
My parents are loving towards me and their marriage is going strong nearly 50 years in. But my mother didn't spend much time with me when I was a baby/toddler. Almost immediately a nanny was hired to take care of me while my mother went to work and I was in full-time nursery by age 2. There was always an attitude that I should fend for myself and I had a tough time once puberty and adolescence hit.
This essay about the effects of early daycare on kids is really good -- https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/universal-early-childhood-daycare
This was one of the things that really woke me up to how toxic the "left" is ... all the calls for more universal daycare so mothers can focus on their careers, instead of calls for more support for stay at home parents.
Brilliant essay, thanks!
If you (or anyone else) is interested in learning more about the history of Western parenting (why I'm claiming that neglect is common because of misunderstandings about brain development and attachment), I wrote a long read about the dark history of parenting books here with lots of examples -- https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-dangers-of-reading-too-much-part-df8
The ideal family is exactly that: an ideal. It doesn't matter if actual families often miss the mark a little bit; if they still hit close, they're better than no ideal at all or than the total absence of a model.
My husband's family strove towards the ideal and mostly hit it. Obviously there was some minor dysfunction (like there always is with fallen human souls) but for the most part they succeeded. Consequently he is a stable, loving, caring person with relatively few psychological problems (again, nobody is perfect in this fallen world, but he does well). The obvious connection between his stable upbringing and his stable personality was a bit of a revelation for me when we first started dating, and the initial epiphany fueled my transition rightward politically over the years. It makes no sense to me to tear down a fundamental ideal that serves as a foundation for a stable society.
My own family of origin was a bit more dysfunctional than my husband's: mildly BPD mother, absent biological father, indifferent stepfather (all of this somewhat mitigated by a supportive and largely functional extended family). Consequently I held some of the negative views of family you describe in your post, fueled of course by a lot of the negativity young gay men (or boys who will become gay men) receive. As I mentioned above, this changed after meeting my husband.
It's important to remember that ideals are models that guide us, they are not invalidated by failure to live up to them. This is true also of the ideals we Americans say our country was founded upon: not met in practice but still important to strive for. It is also true of religious ideals: we rarely live up to our spiritual models (Christ, Buddha, etc.) but we are better people for trying.
I admire you very much, Josh. And I am learning a great deal, thanks to you.
Josh, it can’t be easy to be so amazingly honest and real. Bravo! Much respect for you. And I won’t say you are “admitting your mistakes” because while you were mistaken, you were living in a pain that I can only try to imagine, and surviving that was the only thing that mattered. Lots of us are mistaken about lots of us. It’s the new normal, isn’t it? Hating, judging, encouraging depravity in the name of caring, and making assumptions about others, yeah?
I wish someone real and honest would have told you about Jesus back then—and then I wish the church was in the shape it should be to love you in your pain—-instead of being either judgey or stupidly sin perservere, neither of which are Christian.
Your observations are brilliant and breathtaking in their truth. Marxism (satanism) 101: Destroy the family by any and all means necessary, and thus you while destroy the society. That is what is at the heart of the culture war, not “inclusion” —because anyone with 2 brains cells to rub together can see DEI is anything but the things it mandates.
I am incredibly sorry for your pain, and also incredibly grateful that you are willing to lay it out there for the edification of those either going through it or floating on a breeze of denial.
I’m from one of those families people now love to deride. A long line of faithful, God fearing, Conservative challengers, and we feel the attacks. But in my world, we are taught that the battle is not against people, but principalities and dark powers. So I was taught, and I’ve taught my children, and they’re teaching their children, that love covers a multitude of sins. And since we are ALL sinners, we endeavor to love always, even and especially the wounded, hidden behind the piercings and the pronouns. It’s a love unreturned for sure, but nevertheless we persevere, because Jesus died for all. And all means all. Jesus wasn’t joking when He said that.
You are loved, more than you know.
Happy New Year!
Thanks for your reminder about who (what) it is we’re actually battling! I sometimes (often) forget.
I’ve been thinking like this for a while. A few years back when I began to understand the pain of how my mother treated me, I realized I had projected the hatred she had for me for succeeding at anything onto men “the patriarchy” etc. Thing is most men didn’t live up to the projection and are/were just decent human beings. It was very hard-I’m still in process-to accept the truth about my family- but very freeing.
I’ve also been rethinking my ideas of family. Many who advocate it so strongly came from decent families and create decent families. In my case my parents were Christian and did all the virtue signaling but home life was very different. This soured me towards Christians for a long time as well.
Can relate. A poor relationship with ones immediate family can literally break you.
Recently I heard Jordan Peterson say (paraphrased) that growing up with parents who punish you for doing the things the normally would be rewarded (i.e. doing well in school) puts a person in hell. It sounds hyperbolic but it sure fits with my life.
For sure. This is interesting with helicopter parents who demand academic success but punish independent thought at home. Seen this happen, this kids grow up excelling at school... but at university or post university they descend into nihilism and aimlessness. Some feel as if they lack meaning beyond their school work.