I think I figured out a way for me to understand why conservatives and liberals tend to parent so differently.
Most conservatives are blue collar workers from their teen years to death, and many of them joined the military as teens. Most of them started their families in their teens or young twenties.
Our brains don’t fully mature until age 26-30ish. Our ability to keep our cool while stressed and sleep deprived isn’t fully developed until we’re around 30.
Liberals, at least the ones I’ve gotten to know, mostly did their education as teens to mid twenties, and start their families in their thirties, plus or minus a few years. I had Aiden at twenty seven, and before I had him I studied birth, baby care, and parenting like it was my job. To me, it was.
So, if you have to wrangle 3 or so kids and you are under the age of thirty and you have to work full time, and your kids don’t want to do their homework or their chores or help you when you ask…every day…and since you are “working class,” you don’t get vacations like your managers do. You don’t get a living wage, like your parents did, because Reagan started the policies that allowed inflation to grow without raising minimum wage. And tip culture…what a croc!
The customers end up paying the wages of their servers, and their servers have to be perfect and even entertaining even while in pain earning $2.25 an hour plus whatever their customers deem “enough.”
No benefits for low wage workers. No retirement package.
If you are disabled and can’t work, you better have people who love you so you don’t die on the street.
My liberal friends I think all have degrees. College teaches you how to learn for yourself. College is nothing like high school. Getting college credit in high school will save you a lot of money if you can’t qualify for scholarships…or have no one to help you.
College doesn’t indoctrinate like kids schools do. Local politics decides which schools, which kids, get the better educations.
So if you can afford to be liberal, you probably grew up in a stable home with regular visits to extended family, and church or temple. You probably had parents who didn’t spank but probably still yelled sometimes. You probably never knew poverty.
Or like me, you grew up among conservatives and were the first, or among the first in the family to complete a four year degree.
My Dad’s Dad was in the military, I forget which branch. They were stationed in Hawaii for public school, but Dad was born in Orlando, and he wanted to raise us here.
My mom had me at 19. Dad adopted me when I was 6. He was 18 years older than me, and worked his whole life until he passed at 59. He met my mom in the Air Force.
Working class people tend to have more trauma than the liberals I’ve met, or maybe we’re just more likely to talk about what we’ve been through. Some of us.
Anyway, to conclude my theory: we’re segregated by class from birth to death. Poor people have poorer quality stores and products, fees for running out of money, cuz that helps keep them poor, poorer quality schools for poorer educations, less patient underpaid teachers, or like me, military parents who served, got their educations for their service, and broke out of poverty and into the middle class.
The middle class is the managers, from small businesses in the green to doctors and lawyers…often both parents are doctors or lawyers nowadays. Liberal people don’t live in the same neighborhoods, or shop at the same stores, watch the same entertainment…everything nowadays is about separating us from each other. It’s not us being a team, working together to make our country and the world better.
It’s everyone in competition with everyone else, with 70% of our population living in poverty…because inflation grows but our wages don’t.
Unless we’re educated or manager class. Then we can negotiate for higher wages and better benefits.
You know who sucks at negotiating?
Mentally and emotionally disabled people.
You know who family tends to hate?
Mentally and emotionally disabled people.
You know who can go buy a gun at any Walmart but can’t negotiate with Walmart or McDonald’s or wherever to give them living wages?
Any American. And any immigrant or visitor, especially without the right paperwork.
Adventures of an Earthborn Alien 