This is all so fascinating to me. I was born and raised very working class in the UK, and the main message I remember taking from my upbringing was "study hard; get out of here." It was hopefully my ticket to a more stable future than my parents' past - and that's proved to be true. I also learned in many other ways that I could really only rely on myself, mostly by emigrating alone, and it did take me a long time to unlearn the idea I'd internalized that my feelings/experiences were a burden to other people.
I'm fascinated by how I see these themes working out in higher ed. A lot of my colleagues are 'hard knocks' people - courses that "weed out" people; a derision toward what they think of as "coddling" - and yet very few of those educators are working class. Yet statistically a good many of the students who are "weeded out" are - and i wonder if there's some sense among the professorate that hard truths are for precarious, lower-class students, or students who are marginalized on any other number of fronts, students who come into college with fewer resources whether those are financial or educational or something else. Or perhaps if you come from a background with more resources, and perhaps a different relationship to the self from your parents' choices, hard-knocks approaches land differently?
I think there is a generational component to it as well that is influenced by how your older colleagues grew up. I think most Gen X and Boomers got a lot of hard individualism during their childhoods
I’m Gen X and also work in academia. It’s fascinating to see my colleagues propagate the hard individualism to their students even if they aren’t doing it with their own kids.
Oh my god yes. Same. Recently on campus I’m listening to colleagues complain about students weaponising mental health to get out of things. LOL Thank you for bringing this into sharp focus.
One idea that I've long been gestating is that the idea of a "gentleman's C" presumes that your college is filled with gentlemen.
Weeding out students, especially from programs like pre-med or engineering where you can tell a story (that might be true, or at least true-ish) about how you only want the best and brightest in those professions, is a lot more palatable when you know that the weeded-out are only really at risk of returning home and taking over their father's insurance brokerage or their uncle's factory or whatever. This more or less worked out when universities, or at least elite universities, were the province of elites and the odd super-star scholarship student. But that's not really true anymore.
My dad was a Queenstown adult who succeeded at class ascension but did not know how to raise us other than with the same information he had been given which was “you can do whatever you want, but you’d be able to take care of yourself”. I would really emphasize that for people who grew up extremely poor, and especially poor and brown in America - preparing kids with that ethos is a form of love and responsibility, not neglect and uncaring (as it could be seen from the outside).
Observing (city) upper middle class parents of this era, there is definitely a visage of “explore your individual interests”, but only *certain* interests and only so much as they will add to your prep or college resume, and parents will manipulate and bully on their child’s behalf to be sure that they are as high up in the crab barrel as possible. Which is interesting, because it’s a very modern subthread of the fake individualism that has prevailed in American culture. Like, parents are *aware* they are socially expected to encourage their kids interests in order to effectively class signal, so they pantomime encouragement, but they are manipulating those hobbies to an extent that they might as well go the more rugged straightforward route.
Not saying I’m doing it any better, just an observation!
As a latchkey kid growing up in the '70s, this is an unsatisfying choice. Is it even a taxonomy? I feel like something is missing in the middle. I would like to advocate for the kind of individualism that education, household stability, and benign neglect seems to produce.
Watching the new Steve Martin doc on Apple TV+, I was reminded again how emotional coolness was common with parents of my generation. There was an unreflective code of individualism, neither pugilistic nor therapeutic, and resting on the belief, not a bad one, that if you educate and show up, you'll find your way.
My mom (the two men she was married to deferred to her judgment in these matters) doubtless had aspirations for me, but she wasn't too interested in my feelings lol. Unsupervised play was the norm, and while it wasn't exactly a Huck Finn existence, the loneliness taught me some things.
I grew up middle class in the 80's and relate to this too. My mum is definitely the sensitive type, but still my emotional education was more about getting access to books, friends, pets and free-range space, and less about talking/talent searching/therapeutic care. But maybe this parenting ethos is less common these days? I don't see it very often anymore.
All of it is spot on, but the section on preserving class status really resonated. I see this so much with my fellow parents, but I’m not so sure how self-aware people are about it. It seems like most parenting choices we make about how we spend our time (where the kids go to school, the bedtime reading routines, extracurricular activities, etc…) are all externalizing the worry of falling down the class ladder.
One aspect of this I’ve struggled with the most as a parent of two boys is the balance between what is good for my city/community collectively and ensuring that I’m doing enough my children don’t struggle (excessively) when they grow up. We opted out of white flighting to the suburbs, we didn’t participate in the city’s “choice” system (which perpetuates racial and socioeconomic inequality) but we did send our kids to our neighborhood school which is gentrifying due to parents just like us (because of its dual language immersion program). I’ve sort of excused this with “there are literally no good choices or choices that I can feel good about in this racist school system” but all of it still gives the ick.
It’s even worse when I consider the extracurriculars. Are we doing them because we want our kids to enjoy music and to stay healthy through exercises? I’d like to believe so, but it’s hard to ignore the class aspects. I did not realize what a moral dilemma parenting would be when we started this journey.
Oof. Evangelical child here to say the only thing my parents wanted for me was to get marry and produce grandchildren. But then rather than making that a viable option they both gave up on the work of parenting when I was fifteen and would never have offered childcare if I had kids. The advice or feedback my parents gave often fell under the umbrella of spiritual bypassing: God has a plan for you. Pray on it. I’ll pray for you. I cannot imagine either of them taking an interest in me. We still keep in touch occasionally, but the advice hasn’t changed. I would say this falls under the hard parenting, but still not quite in the way described here. Both sides of my family were farmers, so while I grew up seeing and hearing a need for collectivism, so rugged individualism never resonated with me. So despite the discernible shift to (or demand for) grit and resilience in the larger culture I could never get on board the way I’m expected to because it never seemed to fit.
Just sending you a bucket of ex-vangelical love...I ended up more religious than my parents (youth group!) and my whole family is now non-religious, so my adult experience is very different, but I ache for the loneliness and pain of this for you. There are few philosophies crueler than this supposedly love-based one.
We have two (nominally) grown children so please take my views as coming from that special place. I think each parent learns at some point that at some point, kids will have to make their own way, meaning come to their own conclusions about which parts of the world are worth accepting and which parts are worth rejecting. In other words, parent’s don’t have much control over their kids after a certain point. Is this “medium” individualism or something different. I guess my philosophy of parenting is to be sure that my kids are in a position to make as many choices as possible without being overly constrained by material pressures.
Last, let me suggest here that books like the one discussed here often seem to flatten people’s views into relatively narrow categories when by my experience their opinions are “complicated.”
Thinking of the individualism of my childhood (more of the Kelley neighbourhood and hard individualism, but lacking a close knit neighbourhood) there was a significant lack of relationality or community that left a lot of gaps. Do it yourself and trust no one could be taken to a new height because we had enough money to take care of ourselves, but not enough to pursue extras or passions or "culture." Just enough to be effectively self-sufficient.
We didn't know neighbours or attend a religious service or volunteer or protest or unionize or attend cultural events or festivals, or go to public parks even. We were not embedded in... Anything. All our efforts went into our own family or ourselves. This suburban distance is very individualistic in a way that doesn't feel quite captured by any of the examples, but has fundamentally shaped my life.
I see how it happened though. My parents worked hard during the day and on the evenings and weekends were exhausted. They didn't have much to give that they weren't already giving to me and my sister. They relied on paid child care, as we were raised far from family, and I always had a sense that someone paid to care for you was a transactional relationship. I assume that came from my parent's attitude towards the care givers?
More fundamentally, self-sufficiency was an early virtue that meant my parents didn't have to tend to us as intensely, and I saw how much work they did very early. The kind of attentive and emotional parenting I see now is hard to imagine. The best and kindest thing I thought I could do for any adult, really any person, was not need anything from them. I'm curious if others also found this the path of least resistance.
Interestingly, my parents were clear that you needed friends and family, but because they had no language for emotional needs or describe their friends in terms of care, I filled in the rationale as: being likable and having friends is strategic and demonstrates worthiness (losers had no friends), NOT that having relationships is emotionally fulfilling and community is supportive. That felt like a discovery I made for myself, thank God.
"The best and kindest thing I thought I could do for any adult, really any person, was not need anything from them." Finally! Words that capture my (flawed?) thinking. I even feel queasy requesting professional references.
Oh my God, requesting references is a nightmare. Reqs for scholarships were even worse than job references--absolutely against all I'd been taught. Ask someone to help you get money?!? That you didn't even earn?! Did it, needed it, but hated it.
It seems hard to apply this framework to my own life without a less-individualistic ethos to compare it to. A lot of us are still stuck in "this is how you prepare kids for adulthood" naturalism. The alternative isn't "never allow your child to become a grown-ass person"; the alternative is "teach your kid with your actions and your words how to prioritize community" (sometimes over your own interests!).
My parents were mostly "soft" individualism with some of the aspects thrown in from their own working-class backgrounds. But they also always took their friendships and mine/my brother's seriously, and we had the joy of being partially raised by neighbors and church people. We're definitely individualistic at our core, but more community-minded (and less consumption-minded!) than most of our cohort from the same Atlanta suburb.
I didn’t meet many rich people (prep school, trust funds, European vacations) until I was finished with college and working. With several older brothers, I figured I could do whatever I wanted, which proved to be mostly true. I wish now that my parents had given me advice about, really, anything. They were very hands off. I made my own decisions and lived with the consequences. My mother’s childhood was so difficult and poor—I learned from one of my aunts. The thing that United and unites my extended family is stories…most of them very funny. My cousins (of my moms poor siblings) are all engineers or doctors), as are my brothers. Our parents were all on the same page: find something you think you want to do and do it; if you don’t like it after a few years, do something else.
This is refreshing to read. My children exist a different societal arena (class etc) for the most part, and yet, everyday the micro and macro adjustment of what’s mine and what is there’s (to experience in this world.. soft. hard parenting) is an internal dialogue. So often I find myself calculating these themes against what was true for me and where society may place them. Do they get to idk… not care about college after high school because they look Black (they are, but their dad is white— and again, here, a larger dialogue on passivity and proximity to whiteness). I find that I’m often teaching them to rely on their community (not just themselves). But also trying to instill that they me be asked to ONLY rely on themselves?
Someone above wrote armor and maybe that’s what most of it is? Often a failed balance (but an attempt nonetheless).
My parents are very loving, attentive parents. My dad values order and tidiness, while my mom is more prone to disorganization. My dad’s mantra was “do what you’re told, when you’re told, the first time you’re told” with household tasks.
I’m 34 and don’t really see my parents in either of those descriptions. I think there was a lot less pressure to have a ~parenting philosophy~ when I was a kid.
My dad had a few additions to your dad’s mantra: do what you’re told, when you’re told, with a smile on your face, and in the property appointed uniform of the day.
Another was “time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted.” Is this hard or soft?
My dad is named Kelly :) He had a senior management position in the auto industry and his most recent email to my siblings has the same level of precision and formality that he would have used at work.
Grew up with hard individualism (Kelley without the upward part). It hardened even further when surrounded by the privileged class. Found hard individualism really doesn't serve you once you waft up to the soft individualists, but damn that hardness sticks. And that collision, friends, is very hard indeed.
Our communities can't teach the soft or hard skills they don't know about.
Secondly, having tried to lead my own child for the last 9 years, I disagree about shyness or creativity being taught. Once you have a child, there is a shocking realization that you have far less influence over who that being truly is than you think. We all come in with a blueprint. It revises and reveals itself over time but revising takes trauma, work or big experiences.
I too was raised working class, by Holocaust survivors. The message was that we needed to prepare to take care of ourselves emotionally and financially, because it was dangerous to count on anyone else or any institution. Coldness and negativity was a huge part of my mother's strategy. My father was warm but very untrusting of anything outside the family.
My parents were high school educated and didn't pretend to understand or try to guide post-secondary education except that college was assumed, and we were expected to study something through which we could eventually earn a living. And we were to be extremely frugal in life.
When I was in college, the majority of my classmates wanted some kind of business jobs that would get them into big companies where they could climb, climb, climb. They were obsessed with the interview process: everyone had an interview suit. My mum (my dad was dead by then) never pushed me in that direction. She knew I was good at writing, even before I had the confidence to think about it as a career, and told me that I should pursue it. At the same time, she never minced words about how tough the world was, especially for a professional woman. She gave me individualism and armor.
So interesting to contemplate! My parents learned a certain communalism due to being raised in the Christian church and in very traditional, patriarchal families, but were also both very individualistic temperamentally. They carried forward a lot of Christian ideas about being of service, and a lot of commitment to family, but they also roundly rejected a lot of the bigotry and materialism they grew up with. They were also very idealistic people, so they took their Christian ideas about service and community and found a new home in Quakerism, which felt like it wedded their rebellion with their desire for the beloved community.
I would say that I was raised with some support for my individual self, but only insofar as I conformed to their ideas about what was right, what mattered to me, what direction I wanted to take in my life. For all of their personal rebelliousness, neither of them were particularly open to mine. It was an odd, and often infuriating and heartbreaking dissonance.
I don't know that I ever thought of my own desire to allow my children to be who they believe themselves to be even if who that is doesn't entirely make sense to me as "soft" individualism, but perhaps it is. In my own life I have found, ironically, that being seen clearly as a unique individual and loved with an open hand that allows me to grow in the way I am called to rather than trapped in other people's definitions of me makes me more open to connection and obligation, more willing to temper my individual desires to accommodate the needs of others. When I feel silenced or erased I become more defiantly individualistic. So, I have tried to the greatest extent possible to really see my children as their own people in order to facilitate our deeper connection as they move out into the world. I don't know if this underlines their position in the social hierarchy, but it has provided us with a better quality relationship than I ever had with my own parents.
This is an interesting breakdown and indeed fascinating. As a Gen X, growing up a 'base brat', the style of parenting in our house and in that somewhat closed community was definitely 'hard', and the emphasis of individualism revolved around being self-sufficient, possessing of skills and pulling one's own weight, as opposed setting you up to achieve your own fortunes in life. Not consulted on so-called 'family decisions' (I mean, the military is going to move you wherever they want, it's not like they consult even the military member), but definitely part of the familial workforce - we all did a lot of chores, that was the only form of equality. My brother and I, now in our fifties, have talked recently about exchanging the hardness we learned out of protection for a more generous confidence that we now use to mentor others, since neither one of us had children, which in itself is also telling.
This is all so fascinating to me. I was born and raised very working class in the UK, and the main message I remember taking from my upbringing was "study hard; get out of here." It was hopefully my ticket to a more stable future than my parents' past - and that's proved to be true. I also learned in many other ways that I could really only rely on myself, mostly by emigrating alone, and it did take me a long time to unlearn the idea I'd internalized that my feelings/experiences were a burden to other people.
I'm fascinated by how I see these themes working out in higher ed. A lot of my colleagues are 'hard knocks' people - courses that "weed out" people; a derision toward what they think of as "coddling" - and yet very few of those educators are working class. Yet statistically a good many of the students who are "weeded out" are - and i wonder if there's some sense among the professorate that hard truths are for precarious, lower-class students, or students who are marginalized on any other number of fronts, students who come into college with fewer resources whether those are financial or educational or something else. Or perhaps if you come from a background with more resources, and perhaps a different relationship to the self from your parents' choices, hard-knocks approaches land differently?
I think there is a generational component to it as well that is influenced by how your older colleagues grew up. I think most Gen X and Boomers got a lot of hard individualism during their childhoods
Oh, you are very kind to imagine I am not older! I'm thoroughly Gen X.
I’m Gen X and also work in academia. It’s fascinating to see my colleagues propagate the hard individualism to their students even if they aren’t doing it with their own kids.
Oh my god yes. Same. Recently on campus I’m listening to colleagues complain about students weaponising mental health to get out of things. LOL Thank you for bringing this into sharp focus.
Exactly!
One idea that I've long been gestating is that the idea of a "gentleman's C" presumes that your college is filled with gentlemen.
Weeding out students, especially from programs like pre-med or engineering where you can tell a story (that might be true, or at least true-ish) about how you only want the best and brightest in those professions, is a lot more palatable when you know that the weeded-out are only really at risk of returning home and taking over their father's insurance brokerage or their uncle's factory or whatever. This more or less worked out when universities, or at least elite universities, were the province of elites and the odd super-star scholarship student. But that's not really true anymore.
My dad was a Queenstown adult who succeeded at class ascension but did not know how to raise us other than with the same information he had been given which was “you can do whatever you want, but you’d be able to take care of yourself”. I would really emphasize that for people who grew up extremely poor, and especially poor and brown in America - preparing kids with that ethos is a form of love and responsibility, not neglect and uncaring (as it could be seen from the outside).
Observing (city) upper middle class parents of this era, there is definitely a visage of “explore your individual interests”, but only *certain* interests and only so much as they will add to your prep or college resume, and parents will manipulate and bully on their child’s behalf to be sure that they are as high up in the crab barrel as possible. Which is interesting, because it’s a very modern subthread of the fake individualism that has prevailed in American culture. Like, parents are *aware* they are socially expected to encourage their kids interests in order to effectively class signal, so they pantomime encouragement, but they are manipulating those hobbies to an extent that they might as well go the more rugged straightforward route.
Not saying I’m doing it any better, just an observation!
As a latchkey kid growing up in the '70s, this is an unsatisfying choice. Is it even a taxonomy? I feel like something is missing in the middle. I would like to advocate for the kind of individualism that education, household stability, and benign neglect seems to produce.
Watching the new Steve Martin doc on Apple TV+, I was reminded again how emotional coolness was common with parents of my generation. There was an unreflective code of individualism, neither pugilistic nor therapeutic, and resting on the belief, not a bad one, that if you educate and show up, you'll find your way.
My mom (the two men she was married to deferred to her judgment in these matters) doubtless had aspirations for me, but she wasn't too interested in my feelings lol. Unsupervised play was the norm, and while it wasn't exactly a Huck Finn existence, the loneliness taught me some things.
(My sisters and I sometimes lovingly joke about being raised by wolves.)
I grew up middle class in the 80's and relate to this too. My mum is definitely the sensitive type, but still my emotional education was more about getting access to books, friends, pets and free-range space, and less about talking/talent searching/therapeutic care. But maybe this parenting ethos is less common these days? I don't see it very often anymore.
I relate to this completely. Thank you.
All of it is spot on, but the section on preserving class status really resonated. I see this so much with my fellow parents, but I’m not so sure how self-aware people are about it. It seems like most parenting choices we make about how we spend our time (where the kids go to school, the bedtime reading routines, extracurricular activities, etc…) are all externalizing the worry of falling down the class ladder.
One aspect of this I’ve struggled with the most as a parent of two boys is the balance between what is good for my city/community collectively and ensuring that I’m doing enough my children don’t struggle (excessively) when they grow up. We opted out of white flighting to the suburbs, we didn’t participate in the city’s “choice” system (which perpetuates racial and socioeconomic inequality) but we did send our kids to our neighborhood school which is gentrifying due to parents just like us (because of its dual language immersion program). I’ve sort of excused this with “there are literally no good choices or choices that I can feel good about in this racist school system” but all of it still gives the ick.
It’s even worse when I consider the extracurriculars. Are we doing them because we want our kids to enjoy music and to stay healthy through exercises? I’d like to believe so, but it’s hard to ignore the class aspects. I did not realize what a moral dilemma parenting would be when we started this journey.
So, I homeschool my kids - and I have some guilt about not participating in the local school.
So much of what you’re saying, resonates with me
Oof. Evangelical child here to say the only thing my parents wanted for me was to get marry and produce grandchildren. But then rather than making that a viable option they both gave up on the work of parenting when I was fifteen and would never have offered childcare if I had kids. The advice or feedback my parents gave often fell under the umbrella of spiritual bypassing: God has a plan for you. Pray on it. I’ll pray for you. I cannot imagine either of them taking an interest in me. We still keep in touch occasionally, but the advice hasn’t changed. I would say this falls under the hard parenting, but still not quite in the way described here. Both sides of my family were farmers, so while I grew up seeing and hearing a need for collectivism, so rugged individualism never resonated with me. So despite the discernible shift to (or demand for) grit and resilience in the larger culture I could never get on board the way I’m expected to because it never seemed to fit.
Just sending you a bucket of ex-vangelical love...I ended up more religious than my parents (youth group!) and my whole family is now non-religious, so my adult experience is very different, but I ache for the loneliness and pain of this for you. There are few philosophies crueler than this supposedly love-based one.
We have two (nominally) grown children so please take my views as coming from that special place. I think each parent learns at some point that at some point, kids will have to make their own way, meaning come to their own conclusions about which parts of the world are worth accepting and which parts are worth rejecting. In other words, parent’s don’t have much control over their kids after a certain point. Is this “medium” individualism or something different. I guess my philosophy of parenting is to be sure that my kids are in a position to make as many choices as possible without being overly constrained by material pressures.
Last, let me suggest here that books like the one discussed here often seem to flatten people’s views into relatively narrow categories when by my experience their opinions are “complicated.”
Thinking of the individualism of my childhood (more of the Kelley neighbourhood and hard individualism, but lacking a close knit neighbourhood) there was a significant lack of relationality or community that left a lot of gaps. Do it yourself and trust no one could be taken to a new height because we had enough money to take care of ourselves, but not enough to pursue extras or passions or "culture." Just enough to be effectively self-sufficient.
We didn't know neighbours or attend a religious service or volunteer or protest or unionize or attend cultural events or festivals, or go to public parks even. We were not embedded in... Anything. All our efforts went into our own family or ourselves. This suburban distance is very individualistic in a way that doesn't feel quite captured by any of the examples, but has fundamentally shaped my life.
I see how it happened though. My parents worked hard during the day and on the evenings and weekends were exhausted. They didn't have much to give that they weren't already giving to me and my sister. They relied on paid child care, as we were raised far from family, and I always had a sense that someone paid to care for you was a transactional relationship. I assume that came from my parent's attitude towards the care givers?
More fundamentally, self-sufficiency was an early virtue that meant my parents didn't have to tend to us as intensely, and I saw how much work they did very early. The kind of attentive and emotional parenting I see now is hard to imagine. The best and kindest thing I thought I could do for any adult, really any person, was not need anything from them. I'm curious if others also found this the path of least resistance.
Interestingly, my parents were clear that you needed friends and family, but because they had no language for emotional needs or describe their friends in terms of care, I filled in the rationale as: being likable and having friends is strategic and demonstrates worthiness (losers had no friends), NOT that having relationships is emotionally fulfilling and community is supportive. That felt like a discovery I made for myself, thank God.
"The best and kindest thing I thought I could do for any adult, really any person, was not need anything from them." Finally! Words that capture my (flawed?) thinking. I even feel queasy requesting professional references.
Oh my God, requesting references is a nightmare. Reqs for scholarships were even worse than job references--absolutely against all I'd been taught. Ask someone to help you get money?!? That you didn't even earn?! Did it, needed it, but hated it.
It seems hard to apply this framework to my own life without a less-individualistic ethos to compare it to. A lot of us are still stuck in "this is how you prepare kids for adulthood" naturalism. The alternative isn't "never allow your child to become a grown-ass person"; the alternative is "teach your kid with your actions and your words how to prioritize community" (sometimes over your own interests!).
My parents were mostly "soft" individualism with some of the aspects thrown in from their own working-class backgrounds. But they also always took their friendships and mine/my brother's seriously, and we had the joy of being partially raised by neighbors and church people. We're definitely individualistic at our core, but more community-minded (and less consumption-minded!) than most of our cohort from the same Atlanta suburb.
This is SUCH a good point
I didn’t meet many rich people (prep school, trust funds, European vacations) until I was finished with college and working. With several older brothers, I figured I could do whatever I wanted, which proved to be mostly true. I wish now that my parents had given me advice about, really, anything. They were very hands off. I made my own decisions and lived with the consequences. My mother’s childhood was so difficult and poor—I learned from one of my aunts. The thing that United and unites my extended family is stories…most of them very funny. My cousins (of my moms poor siblings) are all engineers or doctors), as are my brothers. Our parents were all on the same page: find something you think you want to do and do it; if you don’t like it after a few years, do something else.
This is refreshing to read. My children exist a different societal arena (class etc) for the most part, and yet, everyday the micro and macro adjustment of what’s mine and what is there’s (to experience in this world.. soft. hard parenting) is an internal dialogue. So often I find myself calculating these themes against what was true for me and where society may place them. Do they get to idk… not care about college after high school because they look Black (they are, but their dad is white— and again, here, a larger dialogue on passivity and proximity to whiteness). I find that I’m often teaching them to rely on their community (not just themselves). But also trying to instill that they me be asked to ONLY rely on themselves?
Someone above wrote armor and maybe that’s what most of it is? Often a failed balance (but an attempt nonetheless).
My parents are very loving, attentive parents. My dad values order and tidiness, while my mom is more prone to disorganization. My dad’s mantra was “do what you’re told, when you’re told, the first time you’re told” with household tasks.
I’m 34 and don’t really see my parents in either of those descriptions. I think there was a lot less pressure to have a ~parenting philosophy~ when I was a kid.
My dad had a few additions to your dad’s mantra: do what you’re told, when you’re told, with a smile on your face, and in the property appointed uniform of the day.
Another was “time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted.” Is this hard or soft?
Our dads sound like kindred spirits. What did yours do for a living?
Believe it or not but he was an Army officer from one of the “Kelley” neighborhoods in Queens.
My dad is named Kelly :) He had a senior management position in the auto industry and his most recent email to my siblings has the same level of precision and formality that he would have used at work.
Grew up with hard individualism (Kelley without the upward part). It hardened even further when surrounded by the privileged class. Found hard individualism really doesn't serve you once you waft up to the soft individualists, but damn that hardness sticks. And that collision, friends, is very hard indeed.
Our communities can't teach the soft or hard skills they don't know about.
Secondly, having tried to lead my own child for the last 9 years, I disagree about shyness or creativity being taught. Once you have a child, there is a shocking realization that you have far less influence over who that being truly is than you think. We all come in with a blueprint. It revises and reveals itself over time but revising takes trauma, work or big experiences.
I too was raised working class, by Holocaust survivors. The message was that we needed to prepare to take care of ourselves emotionally and financially, because it was dangerous to count on anyone else or any institution. Coldness and negativity was a huge part of my mother's strategy. My father was warm but very untrusting of anything outside the family.
My parents were high school educated and didn't pretend to understand or try to guide post-secondary education except that college was assumed, and we were expected to study something through which we could eventually earn a living. And we were to be extremely frugal in life.
When I was in college, the majority of my classmates wanted some kind of business jobs that would get them into big companies where they could climb, climb, climb. They were obsessed with the interview process: everyone had an interview suit. My mum (my dad was dead by then) never pushed me in that direction. She knew I was good at writing, even before I had the confidence to think about it as a career, and told me that I should pursue it. At the same time, she never minced words about how tough the world was, especially for a professional woman. She gave me individualism and armor.
So interesting to contemplate! My parents learned a certain communalism due to being raised in the Christian church and in very traditional, patriarchal families, but were also both very individualistic temperamentally. They carried forward a lot of Christian ideas about being of service, and a lot of commitment to family, but they also roundly rejected a lot of the bigotry and materialism they grew up with. They were also very idealistic people, so they took their Christian ideas about service and community and found a new home in Quakerism, which felt like it wedded their rebellion with their desire for the beloved community.
I would say that I was raised with some support for my individual self, but only insofar as I conformed to their ideas about what was right, what mattered to me, what direction I wanted to take in my life. For all of their personal rebelliousness, neither of them were particularly open to mine. It was an odd, and often infuriating and heartbreaking dissonance.
I don't know that I ever thought of my own desire to allow my children to be who they believe themselves to be even if who that is doesn't entirely make sense to me as "soft" individualism, but perhaps it is. In my own life I have found, ironically, that being seen clearly as a unique individual and loved with an open hand that allows me to grow in the way I am called to rather than trapped in other people's definitions of me makes me more open to connection and obligation, more willing to temper my individual desires to accommodate the needs of others. When I feel silenced or erased I become more defiantly individualistic. So, I have tried to the greatest extent possible to really see my children as their own people in order to facilitate our deeper connection as they move out into the world. I don't know if this underlines their position in the social hierarchy, but it has provided us with a better quality relationship than I ever had with my own parents.
This is an interesting breakdown and indeed fascinating. As a Gen X, growing up a 'base brat', the style of parenting in our house and in that somewhat closed community was definitely 'hard', and the emphasis of individualism revolved around being self-sufficient, possessing of skills and pulling one's own weight, as opposed setting you up to achieve your own fortunes in life. Not consulted on so-called 'family decisions' (I mean, the military is going to move you wherever they want, it's not like they consult even the military member), but definitely part of the familial workforce - we all did a lot of chores, that was the only form of equality. My brother and I, now in our fifties, have talked recently about exchanging the hardness we learned out of protection for a more generous confidence that we now use to mentor others, since neither one of us had children, which in itself is also telling.