The truth about family stories…
Parents will tell these pleasant stories about your childhood when so-and-so did this and it was just so funny.
That’s the common view of what is happening here.
Let’s break it down:
–Pleasant stories – where is the empathy for whether the story was pleasant for you or not? Do your parents actually gauge your response to the story or just blab it out like NPC’s? Be honest.
-Your childhood – the story is from a parental point of view and since parents aren’t philosophical and on principle, engaging with curiosity first, the story is often told to manage a difficult internal feeling on their part.
-It’s just so funny – the funny haha stories are usually the ones where there was some sibling to sibling predation that resulted in someone’s embarrassment – yours.
Haha Jimmy, you little butthole!
Consider the basic attitude of parents to their children: I own my child, children are less intelligent therefore inferior, and my house, my rules.
Let’s break it down again:
-I own my child – parents err here. Yes, in a strict, legal sense, you own your child. We have to have it this way or the State will claim ownership, which leads to all manner of insanity. But the truth is that parents are stewards of their children. Says as much in the Bible. Susses out from a libertarian perspective, as well. Your work as a parent is to relinquish unto an 18 year-old a fully functioning body and brain, absent of damage due to your parenting style. Check out my book Peaceful Parenting for more on this.
-Children are less intelligent and therefore inferior – this is where parents’ programming comes through. People come from a domination-submission background (aka the entirety of human history): where performative disadvantage on the part of another kicks online programming in us meant to seek an advantage. The tenderness of peaceful parenting can be seen when you take that disparity as all the more reason to equalize with the child. How else can they best learn?
-My house, my rules – this is just impatient tyranny on the part of a parent, usually the father but more and more so the woman these days. This is communicating to the child that power is the adjudicating factor in human conflict, not reason, evidence, or truth. If you’re too lazy to try and universalize the rules in your home, to make them make sense for everyone – just admit it!
What is really going on with these nostalgic stories?
The older parent, now with adult children, is typically trying to put their adult children back into state dependence – to harken back to a time when the adult-child was dependent on them. This induces in the adult-child a sense that their parent still has the wisdom and authority now that they had then.
Consider it – are you, as the adult-child, asking for stories from the childhood so you can get an honest perspective, some relevant feedback that you can use today? Or are these stories just kind of randomly offered up by nervous people with guilty consciences?
There is a dominance that creeps into these stories, particularly when they’re at the expense of the adult-child present for the retelling. They’re little humiliation rituals meant to prop up the waning authority of the aged parents. Sometimes they’re told in exquisite detail but suddenly the aged parents practice selective memory if the adult-child asks for a painful memory – such as the time he was spanked or yelled at or degraded with some punishment in response to a transgression.
One of the most common stories is the, “Remember your first day of school?”
This story is told quite unconsciously by aged parents, oblivious in their certainty that the adult-child will simply buy into the bit and nod and smile.
Remember your first day at school? You were so nervous! You cried but then, after a bit, you found it wasn’t so bad.
There are people out there who will also quite unconsciously proclaim, “I was excited to be at school! See, I’m a winner. I ate school up and you can find no fault in what I’m saying. School was a great experience for me and you’re weird for taking issue with my enjoyment of what turned out to be something really great for me.
This is a way of propping up their parents’ systematic breaking down of them before school happened so that they would be inured to its effects by the time its presence in their life became fact. People like this speak as puppets of their parents’ denial. The reason for this is because school is philosophically evil and retarded, done with stolen money and modeled after sociopathic “pedagogy” from the late 19th century.
School is emasculating, people-breaking.
But good luck arguing with people’s programming.
The next time you hear a hardy-har-har Boomer story about the time you fell on your face or your sibling shit their pants on a beach trip or you were awkward with a girl or, “Remember the nickname we used to tease you with?” – consider the power dynamics at play.
Consider empathizing with your younger self.
Consider the philosophy of the scenario being presented, as opposed to the nostalgia programming welling up inside of you.
Consider the limits in empathy of the adults in the memory.
Consider saying what actually needed to be said then but couldn’t be said because you were a powerless, dependent child.
Consider if that sovereign voice inside of you was sought out by your parents.
Then sit with the answers you hear and feel your wisdom increase.
Me at the Studio Ghibli Peaceful Parenting Denmark Conference 2025 – sorry to have missed you!
Could use some empathy and feedback? Work with me professionally.
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