Controlling Parents

Parents who think not being controlling towards their children encourages kids to believe everything revolves around their personal wishes are usually just doing the same thing, believing and pretending like their own preferences are obligatory for children, and like everything revolves around them as parents.  Even when they hate this kind of parenting, children might be very influenced by the general push for people to overlook family faults and sacrifice almost everything about their lives for the little illusion of intrinsic importance that is family.  They could develop very complicated feelings about the situation despite probably not being rationalistic and thus not knowing how to truly evaluate these ideas as they are.  This in part means that they are not necessarily choosing to realize the difference between what a truly controlling parents is and what a parent who only subjectively seems controlling is.

It is not controlling to push children to avoid that which is immoral and pursue that which is obligatory.  However, given that many things feared or hated by the evangelical church (even as they practice many of the same things!), it does not matter if they dislike the thought of their children wearing revealing clothing, having opposite gender friendships, watching violent films, playing video games, using profanity, or any other nonsinful thing (Deuteronomy 4:2); they are in the wrong for forcing or pressuring anyone, including their own children, to do something which is not obligatory or to avoid something which is not sinful.  Even among the many non-rationalists of the world, not every parent necessarily gravitates towards controlling tendencies, and not everyone who does will be controlling to the same extents.  It is just highly common to find parents, Christian or not, who are controlling in various ways.

Children who either think their own philosophical preferences matter in themselves or who blame their parents for their own stupidity and moral failings are just as asinine.  Some children who were raised in a controlling manger (as in raised in an emotionalistic, legalistic manner) think that any form of authority being exerted over them is by default being abused or that their troubled childhood is an excuse to have their own emotionalism.  In one sense perpetuating the stupidity of their parents, and in another sense rebelling against one form of irrationality with another, they might go decades as adults without seeking out the light of reason because they, like their own controlling parents, really just want their own subjective will to be done.

It is easier for many people to more quickly align with rationalism when they are not oppressed by legalistic parents, and yet there is no excuse for someone to remain in irrationalism as they grow older because rationalism "was not taught" by their parents or whatever other pathetic excuses people desperately try to produce.  Reason is accessible to everyone.  Everyone is already relying on it whether or not they know it, though most misunderstand it severely all the same.  Parents, too, have no excuse for being irrationalistic because their own parents were or because many cultures pretend to varying degrees like parents have the moral authority to enforce their whims as opposed to actual obligations.  They nevertheless have the power to remove or avoid certain obstacles that might delay someone coming to the truth, and quite often this is not at all what they accomplish as parents.