Stop seeking social approval so much and do what you think is the best for you and your kids.
You are living a good life if your only problem is "someone wondering why you are bad parent". Seems a little narcissistic to think that people are analyzing/judging you so much. People are self obsessed, you can almost always be sure that they are thinking about themselves.
Also, interesting that people invent strange/vague/meaningless phrases like "social cost" to justify imagined slights against them.
You are product of society, you are "the society". Your thoughts/actions make up society. You cannot be in conflict with it. There is no evil society out there judging and analyzing you every move.
You know it's pretty childish to dismiss someone's experience right? He didn't say he was seeking approval, he said that when he does the most minor childcare thing he gets praise, while when neither he nor his wife do some completely asinine thing (dressing their daughter as a pirate) his wife (not him) catches flack from the teachers for not being "more involved". Dismissing this as "narcissistic" is completely misreading his comment.
>>is another drop in the "is it even fucking worth it?" bucket
I read that as seeking approval. Is it not?
What does "social cost getting higher" mean to someone not seeking approval?
He even invented a term for it. "social cost[1]" goes higher when someone judges you negatively and goes lower when someone commends your actions, like a carefully managed bank account.
When it's not happening to you it's very easy to tell someone else that getting told every day they are a bad parent is no big deal and they should ignore it.
But when it is happening to you, no matter how hard you try, it eventually gets to you. At least a little bit.
People aren't robots. It's hard work to ignore these things. And, in the case under discussion, it's work that falls more heavily on moms than dads.
Social cost isn't made up and it isn't really the same as seeking approval. It's related to, but deeper than simple approval. For example, you might not care that someone thinks you are a bad parent for not dressing up your daughter as a pirate, however, you do care that the PTA now won't take your opinion seriously because you "aren't invested in your child's education".
If you take not giving a flying fuck what other people think far enough, there can be very serious consequences, such as being investigated by a social worker for how you treat your kids. Parents cannot afford to be too blithe about "that's just your opinion, man!" Society will butt into your business and interfere with or remove your parental rights if they dislike your behavior enough. You do not have to actually be a bad parent for something like that to happen. Only a fool completely disregards the opinions of others, even if they care not one whit about "social approval."
I would contend that you are a product of your experiences, and that you are a participant in society.
Unless you are alone on an island, one person is not a society. One's thoughts and actions are inputs into society. Society itself would then be comprised of an aggregate of everyone's thoughts and actions. There would then be some sort bell curve for thoughts and actions, leading to an accepted norm for the society within some sigma value. Holding a position significantly distance from that sigma does make it part of society, would make it absolutely on conflict with societal norms.
Holding to the emergent norm theory, i would think that, yes, there is not an evil society judging you, but rather the society you participate in itself that will emphasize your contrast to the norms allowing others to judge you. Even if people are egocentric, a visible contrast to norms would be noticed and at best avoided, or at worst confronted.
The social cost is the degree in the action of others impacts an individual. there is a cost in dealing with the resulting time/resource/emotional effort with what ever action or inaction the judgmental individual(s) takes to address/correct/ignore you, directly or indirectly.
and... as other posters stated, i believe you missed the purpose of the previous post.
The way you know that people actually are thinking about you being a bad parent is they tell you to your face you are a bad parent. This has happened to me, it happens to my wife a lot more. There is a certain fraction of the population that sees nothing wrong with publicly shaming a parent for parenting in ways outside of their perceived social norms.
> There is a certain fraction of the population that sees nothing wrong with publicly shaming a parent for parenting in ways outside of their perceived social norms.
Why do you associate them with though? If they shame you then you don't want those people in your life.
You're missing a key point. These are unsolicited comments from strangers in public places. To not associate with them I would have to stop going out in public.
You are living a good life if your only problem is "someone wondering why you are bad parent". Seems a little narcissistic to think that people are analyzing/judging you so much. People are self obsessed, you can almost always be sure that they are thinking about themselves.
Also, interesting that people invent strange/vague/meaningless phrases like "social cost" to justify imagined slights against them.
You are product of society, you are "the society". Your thoughts/actions make up society. You cannot be in conflict with it. There is no evil society out there judging and analyzing you every move.