Overbearing Parents

No matter what they say, it is as obvious as it could be from outward actions and the implications of professed beliefs that many parents, including Christian parents, enjoy the power of arbitrarily enforcing their own subjective whims on their children simply because they can.  They insist and might even truly believe that in being arbitrary, hypocritical, and emotionalistic, they are training their children for adulthood and to maybe become parents themselves.  In one sense, this is great "training" to encourage children to become just as philosophically inept and egoistic as many parents really are: most adults put on a facade of intellectual and emotional maturity, but in truth it is easy to get them to contradict themselves or to find pettiness and assumptions and selfishness in their worldviews.  Many adults are overt fools who appear to take the opportunity to exercise power as they subjectively wish to in order to feel existentially justified or to fit in with others.

Evangelical Christians generally excel at this, prohibiting their children from a whole range of Biblically innocent activities in complete violation of Biblical commands themselves all because of subjective conscience and church traditions or broader cultural norms (as is so often the case, Deuteronomy 4:2 refutes many evangelical moral ideas).  Secular parents also can easily excel at this in perhaps differing ways, pressuring their children to pursue academics or athletics to the point of burnout, depression, or being distracted from things like rationalism and friendship.  These are manifestations of the arrogance that drives most irrationalistic parents, the desire to twist a separate human being into an extension of their will.  Since most people are irrationalists, knowingly or unknowingly, most parents are by extension irrationalists of some kind.

The parents who mistakenly think that overwhelming their children with tasks in the name of impressing neighbors, satisfying extended family members, or gratifying their own often random desires for their children's future actually help their children might genuinely be very shocked when their children become shells of themselves, or ironically are too frightened or exhausted to realize their potential where it truly would matter.  With legalistic Christian parents, there is a similar intention to manipulate children into living up to their arbitrary whims, just in a religious moralistic sense rather than one of accomplishment through internships or school or some other achievement that is ultimately meaningless in itself--unless the latter is present alongside the legalism.  Either way, these two types of overbearing parenting already share similarities, as both kinds of parents want their child to appease baseless social expectations or live to please them as parents instead of living to understand reason for its own sake, which leads people to reject authoritarian parenting rather than embrace it.

Both of these parenting styles also can backfire when the child feels driven to do or become the very things that these parenting styles are meant to avoid.  Children burdened with expectations for the sake of reputation or perception by outsiders might yield to inactivity or despair when they are overwhelmed, and children who are pressured to partake in legalism might end up confusing legalism for Christian morality or rejecting Christianity because they do not like their parents.  Regardless of whether the direction they end up going in is positive or negative or what the parents did to "push" them that way, the child has full responsiblity for their own rationality, beliefs, and actions, so nothing they do, good or bad, is ultimately the parents' fault.  Legalism and overworking people are each irrational because of their own nature, not because of potential outcomes in how they impact people's lives, but it remains true that overbearing parents, Christian or not, are literally too stupid to realize how they are sabotaging some of their own parenting goals by clinging to these errors or arrogances.  Not only are these ideas either false by necessity or at the very least epistemologically invalid (no one could be justified in believing them anyway because they would be unprovable and only held to because of assumptions or preferences), but the likely consequences do not even align with the intended goals.

I have seen children and adults alike get overwhelmed by irrational, overbearing parents, parents who would deserve mockery and contempt for their philosophical idiocy and for expecting anything else to be the probable outcome of their parenting methods than the distress of their children.  However, no one needs examples to realize this, for it is a matter of logical necessity and proof that can be discovered without personally living under an egoistic, idiotic parent and without directly observing such parents in other families, though one will almost always be prompted to discover these logical truths by reflecting on some sort of general social experience.  Overbearing parents could at any time recognize their sheer folly, but that would put them in a situation where they would have to give up a way of life they are accustomed to, the false or assumed philosophical stances behind it, and perhaps feelings of power or importance they derive from that lifestyle.  Very few people are willing to do this no matter how invalid or even personally restricting the alternative is.