The people on this planet who embody the default world mindset see success in a materialistic definition with high values of wealth, prestige, and luxury items being the optimal outcome for an individual. Some people within this cohort decide to have children and naturally their parenting style is derivative of the economic environment and perceptions of success within that environment. An adoption of the default world mindset becomes the default parenting style of significant portions of the population which ensues a dampening of the autonomy of the child and a “hollowness” that continues into adulthood. This hollowness is a severe consequence of the default world mindset where a child is unable to fully express in their development and understand what their own likes, dislikes, and feelings are. Here at Redefining Children we label this Transmitted Parental Vacuity or the passing down of hollowness from parent to child. Therefore, unless the kid has a rebellious intuition, inner questioning, or becomes more conscientious down the road then they will attempt to find their happiness/purpose through the only avenues they knows how; by looking for answers referent to the parents who are in turn referent to a society that encourages the default world mindset. The behavior is learned from the parents and enforced by society; the marginal happiness it brings (high salary, house ownership, marriage, child birth, higher education achievement, luxury goods, etc.) becomes addictive because everything else around our youth is empty and unfulfilling when operating under the default world mindset. This addiction fuels the industries and ideologies that are detrimental to our planet morally and economically. This is not sustainable and we argue that the beginning to the solution is through parenting styles.
Parents have old mindsets that were ingrained by their own parental upbringing as well as being influenced by the society that they were raised in and live in on a daily basis. The cultural influence from our grandparents taught into our parents (indirectly and directly) accompanied by the societal mindset of our parents’ generation leads them to provide an ideology that is not represented by the current time variant societal climate. People change. The products and preferred actions of previous generations were the most efficient/productive ways of acting and consuming leading to a high utility from undertaking said actions. However, the utility derived from the actions of our parents do not translate to the same utility / efficiency / sustainability that our generation could seek to obtain if we pursued policies that were not influenced by heavily ingrained parental forces and societal forces (that can be seen as an indirect parental force as society today is significantly influenced by age 35+ persons i.e. people who define themselves as “adults” have an enormous influence on what is the “right” way to live and want).
During the eighteen years before a person enters the “real world” substantial nudges and cues encourage/discourage (maybe even punish) all types of behaviors and thinking. Influences include parents (mindsets, behaviors, ideology, philosophy, relationships, etc.), family / friend / work groups, society ( which should be understood as nothing more than a micro intergenerational ingraining of parental prominence that manifests as macro institutions and cultural norms that we refer to as “society”). So, children are being raised by parents that have embodied a particular way of instilling the ideas that they value as imperative for success, through their bias outlook and subjective definition of success; otherwise known as parenting.
We trust academics and governments to tell us the best way to raise our children. But where do they get their information from? Researchers who they themselves are inside the default world mindset? Who said they were right? In our opinion, the foundational way to help people raise children is to know them and we definitely do not know our own people. Everything we have come to understand from any data set or publication and taken as absolute truth has to do with people’s behaviors / needs / wants being averaged, grouped, or nationalized to provide an explanation or represent outcomes. This seems greatly flawed and a horrible way to make an individual feel confined to a “best” way to raise unique, individual, and highly creative little minds. Households operate on an individual level and so to even begin to accurately and effectively estimate the preferences and rational knowledge of an individual you have to fundamentally understand that individual. We believe that the conversation begins in the home (parents), what the world wants is almost certainly not what our children want.
Through these stories and posts we quite literally want to begin the process of redefining the given image and perspective of what a child is and who they ought to be. Children should be seen without judgement or any thought of being different than “adults”. They have the same desires, understanding, and decision making as anyone in power in our society today and if we could recognize this early and talk with and not to children then these future adults might be able to provide our world with something a little different than the cycle of life that we have become accustomed to as the only way to live.
This is a gradual process, a process of peeling away the stigmas, the societal meaning of having a child and being one, and we thank you for accompanying us on this journey of writing our own definitions.