What’s up with everybody’s low expectations?

Schools don’t expect you to learn.

I wrote about this here, but the gist is that there is this thread in traditional education material that pooh-poohs the concept of learning itself. Teaching students that learning is just for nerds, and that us cool adults don’t need to learn.

Parents don’t expect their children to behave.

If you listen to parents talk, many of them talk about how hard and dismal having teenagers is. In order to fit in, parents of young children dread the fact that their kids will become teenagers. You might hear “right now it the terrible twos, when they are 13 it’s going to be horrible”. So what - are you just throwing in the towel on your child’s behavior? Are you just a victim of the system? Helpless to manifest your agency? Then these same people will mention how they can’t wait to be empty nest-ers. They (hopefully for show) espouse hate for their own children.

Bad media for children

Much of this is driven by what the parents teach their children, though many parents would not like to believe this. It is of my opinion that, for example, the whole idea of “kid draws on walls with marker while parents are away” mostly doesn’t exist in real life. It happens occasionally, sure. But I speculate that this behavior is mostly downstream of children’s media showing a character doing it, so the child replicates this media. Children’s media should be showing the children how to act correctly, 100% of the time. Flawed hero’s are a cool device for older people’s media, young children need more black and white than that.

Internal family enmity

Children (also for show) dislike their siblings and parents. This is all very unnatural. The extremely weird part is that you see people in churches playing into this fiction even though it’s not biblical. (Granted, evangelical church-goers.)

Men grovel at their wife’s feet

Men (again in churches, though it is unbiblical) openly bend to their wife’s every request. Quipping things such as “happy wife, happy life”. This is just setting up people for unhappy futures if they think that is actually how marriage works.