mx3m @mx3m@merveilles.town

Positive reinforcement: process by which we communicate to the child “whatever you just did is not worth doing if not for the reward, the tender word or gesture. Synonym: manipulation.”

Extrinsic inducement: bizarre faith that people cannot be motivated by the task itself but need external compensations for doing so. It is told some people give cash to children who read a book. Some pay them in slices of pizza. Everything is a job.

Love as a lever

https://www.mx3m.net/fragments/12.html

Pardon me for I had to use the language and the perspective of the master.

There's a product called Freedom out there and that's the copy on one of their landing page. That's the toot.

That last image of the almost dead is in this excellent book called “Les enfants d’abord” from Christiane Rochefort but sadly don’t think it was ever localized in English.

Unlike women and minorities who at least could ask loud enough to be heard, we do not see children as oppressed. But they are. And they also are the most silent among the oppressed for they have no rights and no voice. And the worst of all is we’ve all been children. Oppressing children is a traitor crime. It’s the ex child murdering the new child, not until they’re dead but almost dead. Just the right amount of dead so they can do it again when it’s their turn.

It’s a bad outlook on life when family is not (seen as) a nurturing ecosystem but a complicit producer of domesticated human workers. So are schools, juvenile prisons, summer camps, Boy Scouts, any institution which business is turning raw material called child into the better and finished version of us called adult.

All the good will on earth won’t change the fact that in a western and modern society, parents and children aren’t equals. We do not start in life as a person connecting with another person. Most of us connect as the oppressed. The centrifugal force of society and our families oppress us and adult us into obedience. Most families aren’t loving but working for a Project. And yes the project is to use hands and mine brains.

If you took a better look at parental love and removed everything that isn’t really love, what remains?

Care, protection… all these things we’ve been taught to consider as love, are they really love or parents meeting basic moral expectations?

If my voice isn’t heard, that I am not an equal in rights, that I cannot feed myself, that I can’t free myself, that I rely on all authorities around me to do anything, am I actually in a position to love?

When this is established as truth and you find yourself out in the world with nothing but confusion about your feelings for your parents… how can you not feel guilty? If filial love is natural, and my parents didn’t beat me, no they fed me, said I love you a few times, why am I such a monster for not loving them in return?

One area where fiction literally is a better source of truth than social studies is filial love. The subject is so taboo, we can only learn about it in art.. well for the most part.

Filial love is the mortar of the patriarchy. And because it is essential to its survival, we are told it is a natural thing to love a parent. Two persons, two bodies like any other body but this one in particular. Special, special duty of love (nb; it’s either a duty or love, sorry can’t be both).

And by “hope” I do not mean to say from the perspective of the parents obviously. I mean self determination.

People spend too much time wondering about whether screens are addictive when we should be spending time making the real worth living at all.

I find it very curious that we associate the child's "resistance" fault to how addictive the screen is rather than discuss the direct tentative of control from the parent.

I would like to argue that if the child offers resistance to an order, there's probably still a little bit of hope with them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/parenting/big-kid/child-screen-addiction.html

"In a study by researchers at the University of Washington involving 27 parents of children ages 1 to 5, 93 percent of parents said that their child “throws a tantrum, whines, or resists ending screen time at least occasionally.” And 37 percent said screen time “almost always ends in a fight.”

Let's not even talk about these studies samples size or methodology, or the fact that babies aged 1 or 2 are even part of this at all...

A lot more people now recognize that rewards-centered design in software and games – let's call them doggy biscuits – are a problem. They say the rewards (loot, levels, notifications, and so forth) keep the kids addicted.

Yet fail to see the much bigger problem is that we are "educating" kids with the same tools: scores, praises, gifts – all doggy biscuits too.

We use doggy biscuits to manipulate children to do what we want them to do. It's only a problem when it's a developer doing it.

Climbing a mountain is made easier when there are stairs. Rewarded with a 25C at the top. Very breathable.

Watching people at the hospital cafe try to reconcile with their results / blood tests while waiting for their food is a mood I could live without.

At the hospital this morning, all the smartphone disaster alerts rang in unison in the hall, it was not a pleasant experience.

Oh and I forgot to credit the author. That is an extract from Myth of the Spoiled Child from Alfie Kohn.