Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2002-05-02 12:29 am
azurelunatic) wrote2002-05-02 12:29 am
On family isolation during childhood, especially for conservative families
Fortunately for me, my parents believed in free access to books and radio, and public schooling, after my one year of kindergarten home-school saw me refusing to repeat the experience. They did not believe in forcing me to submit to religion, instead choosing to teach me such moral laws as they felt appropriate ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," is especially applicable when it comes to behaviour with younger siblings) and left me to decide on my own when I was old enough.
Through general lack of neighbors and no television, I was raised without many of the things that my classmates considered important. The main damage was to my social skills, as I very rarely saw anyone other than my family outside of school hours, and was disinclined to join other children in talking about Transformers and Ninja Turtles and Care Bears at school. Meeting up with the "right crowd" in high school (the misfits: anime fans, programmers, witches, RPG'ers, and some creatively-inclined new Bujold converts[1]) quickly brought me up to speed.
Of course, the fact that my parents raised me to think for myself, with free access to books, and only gave me the basics on sex ed (this is how babies are made; don't do it until you're old enough to take care of a baby; babies are A LOT of work) and left the rest up to public school, led to my taking my favorite books as examples of proper behavior, reasoning that because my heroes had proper moral behavior as defined by my parents, then their sexual and religious behavior ought to fit for me as well. At some point during my adolescence, as I was calmly explaining to my mother one or the other of my life realizations, she said, "When we taught you two to think for yourselves, I didn't think you'd take it that seriously!" That phrase is going to remain as one of my all-time favorite parental lines.
My younger roommate was raised in similar isolation, but with religious indocterination and no public school until high school, at which point he hit college classes as well. He's now 21 and going through the hormone-rampant young stud phase he should have gone through at 17 or so, at once rebelling from his parents' standards and simultaneously latching onto anyone laying down the law and acting maternal towards him. This has great potential for difficulties...
I wouldn't trade my childhood in for something featuring more television and mass-market toys and sugary snack products with fewer books, but I would have liked to have had neighbor kids to ride bikes and play treehouses with...
[1] The new Bujold convert I made in high school would probably have blown up his chemistry class had I not kept him supplied with her books to read during it. I wasn't in favor of reading during class as opposed to paying attention to the teacher, but I was all for the concept of reading instead of sticking pencil "leads" (graphite is an excellent conductor of electricity) into electrical sockets, and other, similar, pursuits.
Through general lack of neighbors and no television, I was raised without many of the things that my classmates considered important. The main damage was to my social skills, as I very rarely saw anyone other than my family outside of school hours, and was disinclined to join other children in talking about Transformers and Ninja Turtles and Care Bears at school. Meeting up with the "right crowd" in high school (the misfits: anime fans, programmers, witches, RPG'ers, and some creatively-inclined new Bujold converts[1]) quickly brought me up to speed.
Of course, the fact that my parents raised me to think for myself, with free access to books, and only gave me the basics on sex ed (this is how babies are made; don't do it until you're old enough to take care of a baby; babies are A LOT of work) and left the rest up to public school, led to my taking my favorite books as examples of proper behavior, reasoning that because my heroes had proper moral behavior as defined by my parents, then their sexual and religious behavior ought to fit for me as well. At some point during my adolescence, as I was calmly explaining to my mother one or the other of my life realizations, she said, "When we taught you two to think for yourselves, I didn't think you'd take it that seriously!" That phrase is going to remain as one of my all-time favorite parental lines.
My younger roommate was raised in similar isolation, but with religious indocterination and no public school until high school, at which point he hit college classes as well. He's now 21 and going through the hormone-rampant young stud phase he should have gone through at 17 or so, at once rebelling from his parents' standards and simultaneously latching onto anyone laying down the law and acting maternal towards him. This has great potential for difficulties...
I wouldn't trade my childhood in for something featuring more television and mass-market toys and sugary snack products with fewer books, but I would have liked to have had neighbor kids to ride bikes and play treehouses with...
[1] The new Bujold convert I made in high school would probably have blown up his chemistry class had I not kept him supplied with her books to read during it. I wasn't in favor of reading during class as opposed to paying attention to the teacher, but I was all for the concept of reading instead of sticking pencil "leads" (graphite is an excellent conductor of electricity) into electrical sockets, and other, similar, pursuits.