Breaking science news! According to a CNN interview astrologers are having nothing to do with the demotion of Pluto to dwarf planet status. Much too important to certain behavior patterns on earth… Now, back to our regularly scheduled program.
Since it’s Friday and since fathers around the globe are blowing up each other’s children I thought it would be interesting to offer a post on other ways of being a father.
The book is question is “The Good Father: On Men, Masculinity, and Life in the Family” by Mark O’Connel.
A nice discussion of it begins over at ScienceBlogs by Bora Zivkovik, “a Red-State Serbian Jewish atheist liberal PhD student with Thesis-writing block and severe blogorrhea trying to understand the world by making strange connections between science, religion, brain, language and sex.”
The money quotes are:
… the difference between authoritarian and authoritative … To be authoritarian is to use too much force for wrong reasons (e.g., to make a child do something for selfish reasons). To be authoritative is to use the right amount of force for right reasons (e.g., to make a child do something for the sake of the child).
And then, meet George!
with our focus on the two Lakoffian categories (because they neatly map onto two core political ideologies), we forget that there are more than two parenting styles. There is also an Abusive Parent (definitely authoritarian), a Neglectful Parent (too physically or emotionally absent to have any authority), and a Permissive Parent (too weak and non-confident to have much authority).
It is the Permissive Parent that the Right stereotypes the Left with, as the Core Conservatives (Regressives) are cognitively (and/or emotionally) incapable of comprehending Nurturant Parenting – it is too complex for their mental developmental stage. Thus, they talk about the “Nanny State”, “everything-goes liberal philosophy”, “moral relativism”, etc. – all reminiscent of Permissive Parenting, not Nurturant Parenting that liberal ideology really maps to.