My gut feeling is that I was successful in spite of these things, not because of these things. With counterfactuals there's no way to be sure though.
> One could argue it was a failing on your parents to set proper boundaries/discipline. I’m a lot of environments, you’d certainly not be helped by it.
My parents did everything short of beating me to try and get me to do my homework. After school they sat me at the dining room table with nothing but my textbooks, pencil, and paper. I had to have my list of HW assignments signed off on by my teacher; if it wasn't signed I wasn't allowed to go out and play after school. All of that resulted in me sometimes doing my homework.
By the time I was in high school they loosened up on the structure just because they believed that I only had 4 years left to figure out how to do this on my own, but I still was banned from attending various social events because of my lack of effort in school. By the end of 10th grade, I had grown distant from my main group of friends just because I essentially never hung out with them outside of school so there was a lot of missing shared-experiences.
As a parent now, I have no idea what they could have done differently. My own personal nightmare is one of my kids acting like I did (despite my parents saying I was the "easy kid")...
I was the same way, and share the nightmare with kids. Personally i’ve spent a lifetime learning how to say No to things I don’t want to do (very hard) and finding the things that work for me.
It’s far from perfect, and it has sometimes come at the cost of heavy mistakes before I figured out why something wasn’t working.
It does give me the ability to explain and help my kids try and find what works for them, and I have been materially successful enough to afford them options sometimes.
Which is huge. I’ve been very lucky. I’ve also faced many hard truths that others have refused to, and worked my ass off too, to get there.
I still do need to work my ass off every day.
One consolation perhaps - I have several friends who were similar that I grew up with whose parents didn’t stop short at beatings.
They succeeded very well in a specific environment afterwards (military), but at the cost of non-trivial mental health issues that are hard to properly describe. A inability to say No to an authority figure being one of them, perhaps, even when it leads to catastrophe. And a severe difficulty in trusting themselves to be independent thinkers.
They’ve objectively done well for themselves by societies standards, as have I. But each of us has our own regrets.
My gut feeling is that I was successful in spite of these things, not because of these things. With counterfactuals there's no way to be sure though.
> One could argue it was a failing on your parents to set proper boundaries/discipline. I’m a lot of environments, you’d certainly not be helped by it.
My parents did everything short of beating me to try and get me to do my homework. After school they sat me at the dining room table with nothing but my textbooks, pencil, and paper. I had to have my list of HW assignments signed off on by my teacher; if it wasn't signed I wasn't allowed to go out and play after school. All of that resulted in me sometimes doing my homework.
By the time I was in high school they loosened up on the structure just because they believed that I only had 4 years left to figure out how to do this on my own, but I still was banned from attending various social events because of my lack of effort in school. By the end of 10th grade, I had grown distant from my main group of friends just because I essentially never hung out with them outside of school so there was a lot of missing shared-experiences.
As a parent now, I have no idea what they could have done differently. My own personal nightmare is one of my kids acting like I did (despite my parents saying I was the "easy kid")...