instinct

I am convinced that people, for the most part, either thrive completely on instinct or have absolutely no instinct at all. It's un-nerving.

A mother actually said to me, before she dropped off her child at daycare, that it was "important to let your child cry at night because the idea of 'self soothing' is a necessary part of development." Her dumb friend chirped in "yes and if they don't learn to 'self-soothe' they will have problems in college."
Thoroughly stunned at the pure stupidity of such ridiculousness, my inarticulate brain silenty said: What The Fuck. Hey, at least my reaction was real and not quoted from some mass market paperback.

I mean, seriously, are these people trying to trim the perfect bonsai or raise a human soul with nurturing and real emotion. What is going to happen to these experiment children raised in the same calcuated fashion as a fungi under a microscope. Are the Harvard professors going to scrutinze in years to come, trying to decipher which child was ignored in the right or wrong fashion. Before we know it, a parent who neglects his/her child will simply have to quote some callous Phd pod who self-published a shitty book and be let off the hook, backed by scientific termonology as a child cries in the corner.

The current obsession, yes OBSESSION, with trying to systematically create a 'perfect' child strikes me as unatural verging on the side of evil. Everything that these psuedo-intellectuals, who mask themselves in the marketable positions of 'child specialists', do is convince the parent to seperate from their child. Somehow, they have managed to make these easily persuaded parents believe that a happy and healthy child is one who is in daycare, cries at night and does not have to 'share' because they may be 'working on something.' Well, if anxiety, fear and narcassism are virtues then I guess I am wrong.