I’m talking about situations where, for instance, certain details associated with suburban American childhoods are held to be immensely important for development in ways they probably aren’t. ... It’s also like how on sitcoms whenever characters have babies it suddenly becomes important to their healthy development that they live in the suburbs.
Ugh. Yeah, I have waaaay too much experience with people doing this. I didn't grow up in that situation at all, and neither did most of the people I know, and most of the people I've met who did tend to assume that we've all been pining for that kind of life ever since we were children.
Part of it is that I grew up in the city, but I've found people are more clueless about non-two-parent households. I was effectively raised by just my mom even before she properly became a single mother. Lots of my friends were raised by single mothers. People who grew up in two-parent households tend to assume that we all have some kind of desperate longing to have our fathers in our lives, even those who have never met their fathers at all!
There are a few things to blame here, I think. The first is TV. Not so much the Ward Cleaver stuff, but the way characters who've grown up without a parent are always portrayed as being desperate for a relationship with that parent. If they don't act that way, it's because they're merely repressing the desperate need for said parent, and they will break down eventually. It's way harder than it should be to convince people that something they've seen play out on TV 1000 times isn't actually true. And of course, any TV show that does is now is just following an established trope.
The next problem is that people often have a limited ability to imagine the situation. They'll think they're imagining what it's like to grow up without a father at all, when they're actually imagining what it would be like if they suddenly couldn't see their own father for years. Or in my case, when I say I had next to no interaction with my father before a certain point, they'll imagine a time when their father was too busy to do something with them, as opposed to years of complete non-interaction while living in the same house.
It's really only when I try to take the word 'father' out of the equation that some people start getting it. As in, "Think of a random crazy bum you've seen shouting profanity on the street. Now, imagine people suddenly insisting you're secretly desperate for a relationship with him, whatever you might think your own feelings are..."
The last problem is psychology, and the BS idea of needing/seeking out "father figures". Believe it or not, the "ideal childhood" crap is very, very present in modern psychology, especially in family counseling. I was forced to undergo such counseling at thirteen because I was refusing mandatory visitation with my father.
The psychologist just wouldn't get at first that I didn't have any pressing need for a father figure. He'd ask questions like "What do you imagine when you think about having a better father?" And seemed confused when I was like "Huh? I've never done that."
I was old enough to demand an explanation for exactly why they were forcing me to waste three hours every week with my father, and what I got was basically the exact sort of nonsense you're talking about in the post. It was like, they saw two-parent (father and mother, of course) households as necessary for healthy development, and any deviation from this leads to DRUGS and ALCOHOL and UTTER DISASTER! So they tried to cram everyone back into something based on the father-mother model, even when it made no sense.
To be fair to the psychologist I got, he did realize how stupid the reasoning was once I made him say it out loud explicitly (and told him "You know that *I* have control over whether or not I do stuff like that, right?"). He recommended against more forced interaction. Other children aren't necessarily so lucky, though. The blind "children need a father" nonsense can lead to things like children having forced visitation with a father who's in prison for abusing them (<-this has actually happened).
And I think my comment is about as long as the post. Clearly I have Strong Feelings about this, but I will stop now.
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Ugh. Yeah, I have waaaay too much experience with people doing this. I didn't grow up in that situation at all, and neither did most of the people I know, and most of the people I've met who did tend to assume that we've all been pining for that kind of life ever since we were children.
Part of it is that I grew up in the city, but I've found people are more clueless about non-two-parent households. I was effectively raised by just my mom even before she properly became a single mother. Lots of my friends were raised by single mothers. People who grew up in two-parent households tend to assume that we all have some kind of desperate longing to have our fathers in our lives, even those who have never met their fathers at all!
There are a few things to blame here, I think. The first is TV. Not so much the Ward Cleaver stuff, but the way characters who've grown up without a parent are always portrayed as being desperate for a relationship with that parent. If they don't act that way, it's because they're merely repressing the desperate need for said parent, and they will break down eventually. It's way harder than it should be to convince people that something they've seen play out on TV 1000 times isn't actually true. And of course, any TV show that does is now is just following an established trope.
The next problem is that people often have a limited ability to imagine the situation. They'll think they're imagining what it's like to grow up without a father at all, when they're actually imagining what it would be like if they suddenly couldn't see their own father for years. Or in my case, when I say I had next to no interaction with my father before a certain point, they'll imagine a time when their father was too busy to do something with them, as opposed to years of complete non-interaction while living in the same house.
It's really only when I try to take the word 'father' out of the equation that some people start getting it. As in, "Think of a random crazy bum you've seen shouting profanity on the street. Now, imagine people suddenly insisting you're secretly desperate for a relationship with him, whatever you might think your own feelings are..."
The last problem is psychology, and the BS idea of needing/seeking out "father figures". Believe it or not, the "ideal childhood" crap is very, very present in modern psychology, especially in family counseling. I was forced to undergo such counseling at thirteen because I was refusing mandatory visitation with my father.
The psychologist just wouldn't get at first that I didn't have any pressing need for a father figure. He'd ask questions like "What do you imagine when you think about having a better father?" And seemed confused when I was like "Huh? I've never done that."
I was old enough to demand an explanation for exactly why they were forcing me to waste three hours every week with my father, and what I got was basically the exact sort of nonsense you're talking about in the post. It was like, they saw two-parent (father and mother, of course) households as necessary for healthy development, and any deviation from this leads to DRUGS and ALCOHOL and UTTER DISASTER! So they tried to cram everyone back into something based on the father-mother model, even when it made no sense.
To be fair to the psychologist I got, he did realize how stupid the reasoning was once I made him say it out loud explicitly (and told him "You know that *I* have control over whether or not I do stuff like that, right?"). He recommended against more forced interaction. Other children aren't necessarily so lucky, though. The blind "children need a father" nonsense can lead to things like children having forced visitation with a father who's in prison for abusing them (<-this has actually happened).
And I think my comment is about as long as the post. Clearly I have Strong Feelings about this, but I will stop now.