Children as extensions of yourself

[Heimdallr]

What is the idea behind this concept?

Parents push their kids into activities they themselves enjoy and discourage or are indifferent to ones they do not enjoy because they want to live vicariously through them?

Its not really a healthy thing.

 

[millais]

You just answered your own question in the second line

 

[Lurkman]

Parents that do this are horrible at what they do, if they're forcing it I mean.

 

[Vitriol]

Please put more than two sentence ops. This was an issue with adk aswell and leads to threads people mostly ignore.

 

[DuskEngine]

You should have intellectual property rights over your children and they should have to pay you royalties if they ever have kids of their own

 

[vertexwindi]

I wanted to learn piano as a kid, but neither me and my mum knew where to start and there was no money for lessons, so I got bored and called it quits. I regret that now because it's become much harder to pick it up after all these years. When I get a kid, I'll want them to have the options available to them that I didn't. If they really enjoy something like art or music, I'll have the money and knowledge to help them git gut.

If they don't want to, though, I'll simply call it off. Pushing your kids into those kinds of things only builds resentment.

 

[TheProdigalStunna]

You need to lose your cultural virginity before even worrying about children being extensions of yourself.

 

[Broseph Stalin]

My dad does this shit to me all the time. I kinda started to stop giving a fuck and just do what I want to do.

 

[BT 075]

It's kind of hard to ignore how much a child can resemble a parent sometimes. They often mimic their parents, idolize their parents and want to be like them at an early age. So it's not "unhealthy", necessarily, for your offspring to be similar to you. It's very natural, in fact. And in a way they ARE undeniably an "extension of yourself"; they share like 50% of your DNA after all. Of course extension of self does not mean "little clone who needs to be pushed to forever remain a little clone", and that's where some parents fail.

 

[mulliganfarmer]

I think all parents are guilty of doing this at a subconcious level. There is this idea that because the child has your genes that it's predisposed to behave a certain way and the idea is cemented in physical reality when the child has features similar to the parent ie: height, colouring, curly hair etc. Beyond that it's natural for a parent to look for traits they themselves identify with to build a bond.

Because I work with children, I get to see the disconnect between the child as its own person and the child as the offshoot of the parent. A lot of parents go into raising a child with this idea of what their child will be like as a result of their rearing, and are baffled when the child turns out to be a person with wants and needs of its own. So you might have a mother that starts off saying her kid won't eat sugar and will sleep through in their own bed, two years down the line she's shoving chocolate at them and sleeping in shifts on the couch just to stop the screaming because she's realized her idea of parenting was not applicable to real life.

Likewise, you have mothers who think their relationship with their adult daughter is going to be all shopping trips and mother/daughter manicures and then their daughter takes a hard left in adolescence and turns goth or militant vegan and has nothing in common with the mother anymore. Or fathers who envisioned going to football games and sports bars with their son who turn out to be camp gay football-phobic. It's a hard lesson to learn.

 

[Caesare]

It's kind of hard to ignore how much a child can resemble a parent sometimes. They often mimic their parents, idolize their parents and want to be like them at an early age. So it's not "unhealthy", necessarily, for your offspring to be similar to you. It's very natural, in fact. And in a way they ARE undeniably an "extension of yourself"; they share like 50% of your DNA after all. Of course extension of self does not mean "little clone who needs to be pushed to forever remain a little clone", and that's where some parents fail.

That's true, and I think mostly they just want them to do well in life. They know what you are up to, they have lived it and done the same shit when they were your age. I think when parents are being "harsh" about something (at least harsh in their kids minds) that they are just trying to save the kid from embarrassment and humiliation.

 

[ICametoLurk]

There is a way to not have kids be an extension of yourself, and that's to have feral children.

They would prolly survive more if you put them in a fenced area instead of letting them run wherever they want when they are growing up (You know, trucks). Though I guess a forested area would be better as wolves are now pretty much hunted to extinction so no need for fences.