I think this thread has sprouted at least 3 topics that might be worthy of their own threads.
1) Optimal Child-rearing/Education of the Gifted Child
2) Motivation related to transmission/preservation of means/memes into the future
3) Description of the most effective (not to be confused with most efficient), or the most reality-based, boundary between communal or ecological based economy vs. libertarian or money/price based economy
BRUTE wrote:interesting, too, what the "optimally raised human child" looks like. poor humans seem to believe that it's best to leave their offspring with a maximum of material wealth. middle class culture instead dictates maximum education. certain middle-class culture (MMM comes to mind) dictate that the child should NOT inherit wealth itself, but the right mindset and work ethic and what not, basically "character", which presumably made the parents successful (at what?). upper class culture probably dictates other goals again, but brute isn't very familiar with it.
I am kind of laughing at myself to the extent that I have somehow veered towards portraying myself as some sort of uber-hard-working, self-sacrificing martyr in my maternal functioning. My parenting style was about as far down the spectrum towards liberal-laissez-faire as you can go without falling over the cliff into neglect. IOW, pretty much the opposite of Tiger Mom. This was due to a combination of my personality, my relative youth when I had kids, and my parenting philosophy which was somewhat based on my own upbringing, and it would be difficult to completely untangle this ball of wool.
My mother was upwardly-mobile, 3rd generation immigrant, first person to get a college degree in her family, and my father was from an upper-middle-class, highly educated, came over on the Mayflower background. My grandfather was a distant, domineering figure who argued cases in front of the Supreme Court and grew roses. By the time I knew my father, he was "dear old Dad" and Yankee-frugal, but there are photographs of shiny cars, jazz clubs, and attractive females in 1950s bathing suits with straps slipped off shoulders, that give testament to the fact that he was a bit of an affluent playboy in his 20s. My parents met while vacationing in cottages with friends at a resort town on Lake Michigan. So, my father was a proponent of some sort of early 20th century child-rearing philosophy, perhaps developed in the spas of Dr. Kellogg, that advocated putting children out-of-doors for at least a couple hours everyday, no matter the weather, and my mother was the sort of person who did read "The Drama of the Gifted Child" when it was first published in 1979. Therefore, my sisters and I were pretty much expected to grow up to be lawyers who played a decent game of tennis while looking decent in a tennis dress while raising a couple of our own children - give or take. Maybe this is what would have straight-forwardly happened if my mother hadn't flipped into full-blown bi-polar disease after the birth of my youngest sister when I was 10, dunno...The funny thing is that in spite of a couple of decades of "running with scissors" dysfunction, and every possible form of bratty and/or Bohemian rebellion, at this juncture of mid-life tally, my sisters and I have ended up mostly (69.9% ?)fulfilling these mostly unspoken expectations.
My parents moved out of Detroit before the riots, and my first home and school was in the most white-bread, safe suburb imaginable. I had already mastered the curriculum when I entered the 2nd grade, so my teacher allowed me to quietly read whatever book I preferred. The next year (1973),I was placed in a program for gifted children. We rode in a bus to a facility that was completely stocked with supplies and tools for independent learning. We had notebooks in which we were told to record our plans for study or projects, and then keep track of our progress. The adults on-site mainly functioned as facilitators or leaders of round-table discussions. I chose to listen to Hebrew language learning tapes, watch instructional speed-reading film-strips, and create artworks using acrylic paint and styrofoam spheres. This program lost funding or was discontinued for some other reason after a year, but my sister and I were placed in a similar environment for another couple years when we attended middle-school in an even more affluent district.
So, very early on I internalized the message that intelligent, civilized people should be allowed to self-organize and learn or create independently. Rote instruction administered along with ruler raps on the knuckles was for the likes of Carl and Carl (2 Appalachian youth I was assigned to "peer"-tutor when I was 12), not moi. Nothing I experienced in the 15 years between my enrollment in this gifted program and the birth of my own children, caused me to doubt this philosophy or practice. In fact, the two years I spent living in a semi-vegetarian co-op with 30 other youth, half of whom were the children of Ann Arbor academics, just prior to becoming a mother, completely validated this perspective. Breast-feed for a year or two, teach them to read, keep them out of traffic, stock the house with books, piano, paint, yogurt, oatmeal muffins, otherwise set them free, was pretty much how I did parenting. My son went through a phase of late adolescence, shortly after I divorced his father, which caused me to worry myself sick and writhe about in anguish of maternal doubt and guilt, but I did an 82% good job of sticking to my guns, sitting on my hands and not rescuing him, and now he is a man.
Very few opportunities for "do over" in parenting, so I can't judge what to ascribe to luck or practice. If I had to do it again, I think the only thing I would do differently would have been to practice a bit more Montessori than Absolute Laissez-Faire. IOW, I would have been even more inclined to assign my children fun little skill-oriented challenging jobs. In one of the cutest photographs I have of my son, he is wearing a nothing but a cloth diaper and rubber pants, standing on a little stool, happily washing dishes in the kitchen sink.
So, in retrospect and/or conclusion, I would say that my primary goal in parenting was raising not just "good company", but "best company" (like the members of this forum
) , so mission successful, and on to other things with my excess life-energy.