Shitty Parenting = Shitty Politics
One flaw, many consequences
What’s the worst kind of parent?
Maybe it’s the kind I’ll call “ticking time-bomb pee wee football coach”. You know this guy: He makes his kids call him “sir”. He thinks children have gotten soft since they stopped fighting wars of colonial conquest. When his son gets hurt, he douses him with iodine and yells at him like James Corden at a bistro. His kids’ chore list would overburden a Russian serf, but he feels it’s important for his kids to learn valuable skills like how to remove a mountaintop with dynamite and how to apply a tourniquet to a blast wound.
On the other hand, maybe the worst parent is the kind I’ll call “manic pixie nightmare Montessori mom”. Her children — Candy Cane and Dinosaur — were allowed to name themselves. She coos every time her kids do something adorable, like farting on an airplane or playing with matches at a gas station. She has a lenient attitude towards substance abuse, figuring that, look: Kids simply will soak a tampon in ketamine and put it in their rectum, so it’s better that they do it at home.
I’ve been thinking about parenting a lot because I’ve been a dad for two whole weeks. I’m wondering what kind of shitty parent I’ll be. Will I be too much like Football Dad, or skew more towards Montessori Mom? These archetypes — which, yes, I gendered, because they tend to correlate with gender — seem to represent opposite extremes of bad parenting. I think we can learn something from them. I think that digging into what, exactly, is going on with these cartoonishly-awful parents sheds some light on where certain bad political attitudes come from.