,
9 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
I grew up in the non-rural Midwest, and this was still a thing. My mom picked on us about things she knew hurt us so we would "toughen up," mocked us for crying, and refused to listen to requests to stop. Many of my friends' parents did the same.
It took getting out of there to realize how fucked up that is. The cruelty was the point, and it's hard not to see a parallel between those cultural elements and the cruelty-as-the-point attitudes of Trump voters, even though my family were lifelong Democrats.
And, look, I absolutely think it's incumbent upon parents to teach kids to deal with cruelty, rather than putting their heads in the sand about it. But there are ways to teach without engaging in it.
You can roleplay this stuff, making it clear that you don't mean it, and the purpose is to develop strategies to shut it down, rather than just grinning and bearing it. You can talk ABOUT it.
But for a parent to jeeringly "teach" a kid to "toughen up" by engaging in cruelty doesn't teach kids to attempt to reduce the amount of cruelty in the world. And in many cases, it teaches them to engage in it.
And to be clear, I'm not talking about affectionate teasing here. There are differences between loving teasing and teasing designed to humiliate: the most significant being whether the teaser stops if it's clear the person they're teasing is being hurt.
And as an adult, I can look back and say with confidence that it didn't teach me resilience--friends who supported me taught me that. All it did was teach me not to trust anyone with anything that genuinely bothered me, which took decades to unlearn.
And teasing--of the gentle sort--absolutely CAN help teach resilience, and the ability to laugh at oneself. But the difference is it teaches *affection* for one's own foibles, not shame. It says, "yeah, you might be odd in some ways, but I love your oddness."
Teasing is ultimately like stretching: it might make you slightly uncomfortable, which means you're growing, but if it actually hurts, it's going too far.
