Family propaganda

What did your family instil in you as a bedrock truth about the world that you later learned was not… really that true?

For me it was “homemade is always better!” My parents are kinda hippies in some ways and this was a core credo. It applied to everything. And the way they cook…. I mean, it just had no chance of actually being true. But I really believed it for a long time. The homemade ice cream we had, I knew in my bones this was the best ice cream known to humankind. I now realise it was basically solid ice. The pizza they made in the oven.. I mean it was okay but it was basically sauce on some thick circular bread.

"You're a failure of a lad and you should be ashamed of yourself and try to behave differently" no I'm actually just gay

"you'll become much more conservative when you get older"

My parents were so different and divided on nearly every question that I struggle to think of anything they would have agreed on as a bedrock truth.

Well, maybe that's my answer: that opposites attract.

I'm still trying to figure out why my parents thought of laundromats as dens of iniquity.

I remember once having a screaming fight with my stepdad about the millennium. I was trying to explain how 2001 is the first year of the millennium and 2000 was the final year of the previous one, because of how numbers actually work, and being told that I was wrong because "everyone else said it was right." It descended from me being a bit of a know-it-all, like most eleven year old boys are, into a full barney. But I knew I was right. A few months later my stepdad brought it up again, this time he was in agreement, but he pretended we never had this discussion or argument despite it ending in some really vicious arguing, the kind of thing I haven't forgotten 23 years later!

lol I remember getting into arguments about that w/ other people but only BECAUSE my dad hollering about it ("there was no Year Zero!")

I was raised with a sort of left-fukuyamaism that aligned itself with the new europe and the more socially liberal elements of blairism while also seeking to protect the welfare state from the same movement's attacks - eventually the contradictions became irreconcilable and there has been much disappointment and dissolutionment since then

"English films are rubbish". That's what my mum used to tell me.

wise woman

2000 was the first year of the new millennium though

my dad was always really uncomfortable in thrift stores/junk shops (which I adored), I think he was afraid of being spotted in a poors place

"the world is a cruel and unfair place and it's foolish to wish it otherwise"

“Never marry an English man.”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The real answer is “Don’t go to bed angry,” which remains good advice.

I was staying at a friend's parents' house in Queensland years ago, and the family got into a raging fight about Chairman Mao - his father was an ardent communist - and we had to pack our things and leave, his mother was crying... the last thing his father said was "you're okay Andy, you know how to keep your mouth shut" and off we went to sleep on a beach

was it a long march?

lol

It was hard to follow, but it had to do with some period of mourning the family was forced to endure upon news of Mao's death, and my friend had some real pent-up resentment about it.. also alcohol

My dad used to say "there's no good reason to ever wind up in jail," by which he meant "don't do stupid shit that'll get you arrested," and I have mostly followed that advice, though of course as an adult I understand that there are a million ways one can run afoul of a cop and wind up arrested or worse, and actually "breaking the law" has little or nothing to do with it.

"people are stupid", universal explanation and solvent of meaning (but if you so much as allude to the word in connection with anything my dad thinks, says, or does he reacts like marty mcfly being called chicken)

I was wrong because "everyone else said it was right."

i'm afraid this is exactly why you were wrong, but he could have explained it better i'm sure.

hmm I'm not wild about the insinuation that groupthink is the thing that makes it correct

I sense a poll coming

I'll need to think on this one but one thing I wished my parents instilled in me was that "politicians are only in it for themselves". It's taken me a long time to see that this is largely true (at least as far as electoral politics goes).

But I think that thought drives a lot of apathy. Wish I had it.

groupthink is all a millennium is xp

the main thing I remember my mum saying is "never read The Sun" which is otm.

xxp My grandfather often said that a politician's first priority was to be re-elected, and as far as I can see he was absolutely otm.

Which was the first year of this Millennium?

Things I learned as a kid from parents and peers:

Swimming within 30-60 minutes after eating could give you cramps and kill you

Sitting too close to the TV is not good for you

Running cold water over your head makes your hair grow faster

Drinking too much coffee as a kid stunts your growth

Holding toads give you warts

Seriously though, religious propaganda had by far the biggest effect on my childhood

Like what?

Oh yeah, just remembered: sitting on cold ground will give you a cold in your kidneys (????)

cult of success and defending any behaviour that gets someone on your side ahead is what id go with i guess

a lot of these veer more into old wives tales rather than 'propaganda'

you're right of course

My religious indoctrination began early in my life though. It was intense and was hard to shake, and has reverberated throughout my life. I'm sure there are many others here who have had that experience

I don’t doubt my family instilled bedrock truths, I just think I found better modifications of them

"Never a lender nor a borrower be"

Well ok dad, how did you get your fecking mortgage then?

My parents generally went pretty easy on the propaganda front. They gave all their kids a goodly amount of slack to figure out the world on our own. The biggest thing they pushed on us was the necessity of a college or university education. We were all going to attend the college or university we chose and could get into. This was not laid down as 'the law' but we all knew it wasn't really optional.

My mom was a university brat (in the Depression era) the way some kids are military brats. Her father was a professor and she worshiped at the church of higher education. She earned her BA in 2.5 years and viewed the whole enterprise in the most idealistic terms possible.

Was she right? Maybe half right. My college expectations and my college experience occupied separate universes. I still strongly believe, as my parents did, in the worth of a liberal education, embracing as much of the arts and sciences as one can assimilate in the course of a lifetime. The actual institutions I attended convinced me they were flawed to the point I couldn't stomach the idea of post-grad work. I fled as soon as I had satisfied my parents' need to see me earn my baccalaureate degree and I never looked back.

Knowledge is where you find it and it is everywhere I look.

defending any behaviour that gets someone on your side ahead is what id go with i guess

My dad is extremely tribal and that extends from family to politics to sports. If, as a teenager, I wanted to hang out with my friends rather than attend some family function he would take that as a kind of dagger to the heart and passive aggressively seek revenge until it worked out of his system. "No no, go! Go! See your friends, they're obviously more important!" With politics it means that everything his favored people do is 100% brilliant. No gray area at all.

"Never a lender nor a borrower be"

my mum did a pretty good job instilling that one in me. I think probably for the best tbh.

other than that, not too much. she also taught me not to gamble (she worked in a betting shop in my late teens/20s)

shudder to think what I'd have picked up if my dad had been around more when I was growing up

I’ve been wracking my brain and can’t think of a single thing - just the sort old wives’ tales stuff already mentioned (my mum’s cold-concrete thing was that it would give you shingles???). But my parents never ever talked about religion (still have not the faintest idea what they believe in) and while they would comment on things in the news to each other, they never specifically talked about politics (I distinctly remember asking, when I was a tween, who they voted for and was told it was private and rude to ask).

We just weren’t a family that really… talked. Like, at all. We were yelled at or ordered about but we didn’t have conversations. And my parents were never the type to impart any kind of wisdom or advice (good or bad).

When we were kids my mother taught us never to tell people to shut up. For some reason she considered this absolutely the worst, rudest thing you could do. It was like a verbal slap, as far as she was concerned. To this day, hearing someone tell someone to shut up shocks me. I heard the Doctor say it on Doctor Who a couple of years ago and got all "what is the world coming to" about it.

your mom otm

I actually have a huge aversion to people telling me to shut up, like it provokes me in a way other, more ostensibly hurtful phrases don't.

yeah, there are very few people/situations that warrant a genuine "shut up", it's so contemptuous

my mama's rules for marriage: never marry an only child; never marry someone because you feel sorry for them; never marry someone because they need your help (y'all can guess who she married)

aside from the only child bit, seems like reasonable advice!

and then another nugget of ancestral marriage wisdom from great aunt helen was you can as leif love a rich man as a poor one. i guess theoretically that's true enough? she followed her own advice and kept marrying (and then being widowed by) successively richer dudes, so it worked out fine for her

(she totally didn't kill them) (probably)

My grandmother: never marry a man who can’t make a good Bloody Mary.

i'm not gonna talk about the things my family taught me that aren't true, because that would get _real_ dark _real_ quick, but i remember two things my dad used to say

whenever i said i hated something he'd say "hate is a strong word". i rolled my eyes at him at the time but as an adult i agree with him.

the other thing, is whenever we talked about doing things that were unethical, his response was "if you're going to steal, steal big". that's not actually good advice, but if you don't want your kid to become a thief it is. somebody who only steals big isn't gonna be much of a thief, but he didn't sound like a moralist saying it.

Maybe that's just another version of "go big or go home."

One of the bedrock truths I have tried to instill in my kids is that they will be siblings for life.

my mama's rules for marriage: never marry an only child; never marry someone because you feel sorry for them; never marry someone because they need your help (y'all can guess who she married)

I did the first one and it's worked out great. She was not just an only child but the only daughter of immigrants to the US, so she's super organized and responsible and accustomed to handling bureaucracy, though I actually wind up taking on lots of stuff because sometimes putting a white man on the phone gets things done a lot faster.

my folks were life-long Democrats but suuuuuper-parochial in an East Coast/NYC way. my father reads newspapers and watches the news all day but he still won't read crime novels - the only kind of novel he reads - that are set outside the U.S.
they both came from the *don't cry out loud/just keep it inside/learn how to hide your feelings" school. they got that from THEIR parents. which is why i always tried to tell my boys that they could talk about or tell me anything. i never told my parents ANYTHING that was going on with me. my dad was super sexist and homophobic too. but he never actually told me how to feel about anything.
i remember after i dropped out of school and moved to Philly in the late 80s i wrote a letter to my grandparents - his parents - and explained that i didn't know what i wanted to do but i thought that i wanted to write and i wanted to read and work and figure things out. young person stuff. he either saw or heard about the letter and called me and told me i didn't need to be so "maudlin" and not to write letters like that. i think it embarrassed him. it just wasn't done to be that 0ver-emotional in his family.
but they didn't give me ANY religion. God bless them! other than a Unitarian church in a barn in the 70s where they got the chance to have coffee with other swinging Connecticut Democrats. neither one of them believed in God. just art! so, it could have been a lot worse.
i think i just knew that i wanted to be open to more foreign things. people from other places. they never left the country. but other than a one week school trip to Spain neither have i. so, the apple doesn't fall, etc, etc. i'm a pretty parochial East Coaster myself!

I think one of the best things my mom did was to make sure to instill in us (but me more specifically) that it was not only ok but GOOD to talk about your feelings. I tbh k that’s an important one, though it took me until my thirties to fully embrace it and try going to therapy.

She also taught me that happiness is more important than success, and that kindness and patience were chief among the virtues.

<3 love u ian

but they didn't give me ANY religion. God bless them!

For all my complaints about my parents, if I had to choose emotional neglect or being under the thumb of their control, I’d choose neglect any day. Once I became an adult I haven’t had a problem arguing with my parents about their beliefs - eg my dad wasn’t a hateful homophobic but one of those “don’t flaunt it” types, and we got into a fight because he was complaining about effeminate gay men. They def didn’t ever try to indoctrinate me in any social, political or religious beliefs, so I got to figure out stuff on my own.

Same here, my folks were very casual (at best) churchgoers, and for the most part we were free to go or not as we chose. I sometimes went because we'd get something good for lunch on the way home. I've tried to take the same approach with my offspring, and they very much go their own way. My oldest worships the Norse gods, not entirely tongue in cheek.

Mum: “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”; always extremely fun to quote sarcastically back at her during any of her tirades (she’s a wonderful woman all up and doesn’t really say “not nice” things that often)

My parents didn’t really force anything upon me (besides religion, but I’m thankful for that). Study, work, life, relationships, it was simply “do no harm and whatever you do, we know you’ll do it well and we’re proud of you”. The words have been backed up by loving action throughout life so they both get 5 stars and two thumbs up from me. I don’t think I was their easiest kid either, I picked up my mother’s intense stubbornness and used it right against her the whole time I lived at home. She would always be the first to apologise though and I’m very thankful for that

ok so on the, uh, lighter side of things, my mom had this idea that... things never actually changed, that she should raise her kids with the same stuff she grew up with as a kid. i literally had these colored vinyl children's records that were pressed... i checked it out... literally pressed in, like, 1949 by rca victor, like the first 45s ever made or something. (no, they're not worth anything.) the same way i grew up reading, like, not just the hardy boys but the _bobbsey twins_. i don't think i ever met anybody from my generation who even _heard_ of the bobbsey twins. those books were terrible, for the record, terrible, but i was a voracious reader and i would read goddamn anything. (i know for sure that now that i've said that, it will turn out there are some people on ilx who are die-hard bobbsey twins fans who will excoriate me for making fun of those books. i mean it's been, like, 40 years now.) when i was older, like 10, i read a lot of bennett cerf. i remember my parents being into the terrible old 70s PBS program "meeting of minds" which was like, i don't know, abraham lincoln sitting down to dinner with jesus christ. something like that.

at least i know where i got it from, because when i was 13 my grand-dad sent me a photostat of a chic sale book that he _really enjoyed_ when he was my age.

i don't think of my parents as being the sorts of fundamentalists who won't let their kids watch anything but "veggietales" (i mean they were perfectly willing to let me read really off-color stuff like chic sale books), but it's true that i wasn't allowed to watch shows like "the a-team" and "knight rider". and they were adamant that i wasn't allowed to watch r-rated movies until i was 17.

but then again my mom would show us... oh wait that's getting into the dark stuff, never mind.

and it's not just... like one of my most vivid memories is my dad getting _really mad_ because he didn't approve of "sledge hammer!" and also he wanted to watch the mcneil-lehrer news hour. most people, when they tell those sorts of stories about their parents, it doesn't involve the fucking _mcneil-lehrer news hour_.

the ONLY shows i forbid my kids to watch in the house when they were young were South Park and The Family Guy. and also when i heard Rufus practicing "tears in heaven" after guitar class i told him in no uncertain terms that there would be no Clapton in the house. but that was about it. they could watch or read or listen to whatever they wanted to.

Lmao @the Clapton ban

You don't fight anyone - period.

After I managed to avoid any physical interactions during all of middle school, the superintendent's kid punched me repeatedly in the back of my head when I was leaving the last day of school. That was the first time I remember laying into my parents for their bullshit wisdom.

I'm thinking of sillier ones that were childhood misunderstandings, now. Like "dont swirl the bathwater around clockwise like that" mum would tell me and for years I thought "why, is it meant to go the other way or something?" only to realise later that she was prob just trying to stop me splashing all the damn water out of the tub.

I remember being completely shocked when I found out that I didn't have to be 18 to go see a R-rated movie or buy a CD with "parental advisory." I had just assumed all of my friends had cooler parents.

Oh and being told off for saying "she" instead of referring to someone by their name when telling a story about something.
"She's the cat's mother!" I'd be reprimanded.

...what in the feck does that mean anyway?

Omg my mum said the same thing about “she” and I still don’t understand it.

“Who’s ‘she’? The cat’s mother?” Never understood but took the lesson that when you can refer to someone by their name or by their pronouns you always choose their name.

My family was hands-off and zero-propaganda but (consequently?) I was always drawn to families who had intense bonding. Ended up being fully amalgamated into the eventual Mrs HD’s family who have this insane agnostic Catholic cultish ethic where “NOBODY WILL STAND BY YOU BUT YOUR FAMILY IN THE END” which ok but also isn’t this a self-fulfilling prophecy?

my stepdad's family believed it was rude to ask someone who they would vote for in any political circumstance. I once asked my stepgran and got banished to a bedroom until my parents came to get me, where my stepdad was annoyed to hear what I had done but thankfully my mother just laughed at them and told them to get a grip

this would probably have been around 1997 General Election so I would have been nine, which means my political question would have come down to "who do you think seems nicer, Blair or Major" rather than any substantial understanding of political values. The old cow could probably have saved the drama if she just let us watch The Simpsons instead of the news

lol

when you can refer to someone by their name or by their pronouns you always choose their name.

this is wild! and yet somehow not completely unfamiliar? a couple of times i have said "he" or "she" and had a vague nagging that it was somehow rude.. something deeply buried in my subconscious

Article therein:

https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2011/04/cats-mother.html

somewhat maddeningly it doesn't explain why this is considered rude

Ha! My gran used "cat's mother" as well...

Yeah, "who's 'she', the cat's mother?" was pretty common in our house as well. We have friends in California who are the nicest, most polite people you could meet, and I am still a little taken aback when they refer to each other as "he" and "she" when they first refer to each other. I mean, it's like writing, I guess. You can say "Trish doesn't like it when people say 'shut up.' She was told it was rude when she was little." You wouldn't have to use the name every time.

the ONLY shows i forbid my kids to watch in the house when they were young were South Park and The Family Guy. and also when i heard Rufus practicing "tears in heaven" after guitar class i told him in no uncertain terms that there would be no Clapton in the house. but that was about it. they could watch or read or listen to whatever they wanted to.

― scott seward

haha i was one of those people who walks in and violates the family rules, back in '09 i visited my cousin's kids, who were, like, three and five, and i made them listen to "layla" on my ipod

i've, uh, changed a little since 2009

my dad yesterday at the new town library. still reading the hard copy at 88. he brought the village voice home every week when i was a kid. #influences

https://scontent-bos5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/394337562_10168216749965298_7240668161732527510_n.jpg?_nc_cat=101&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=O3f85wMM0QcAX9xB0N9&_nc_ht=scontent-bos5-1.xx&oh=00_AfBnyksc7h9CuXeLkRnUaIUgLJ2YG7jLoG9oxnRB61D-tg&oe=653D899D

Less propaganda and just silly local superstitions we took for granted growing up:

- don’t whistle at night or you’ll attract snakes
- if you’re about to head to a party or an amusement park or do anything that seems fun: don’t be careless and have too much fun, cause that’s when bad things happen (sound advice tbh!)
- related: If something bad but not disastrous does happen e.g. you break your favourite bowl at the party or you lose your necklace on the rollercoaster, that's just "warding off catastrophe", a small sacrifice you accept in exchange for avoiding a bigger tragedy
- if you’re planning a big event like a party or a wedding: sprinkle salt outside a few hours before it starts and it won’t rain (obvs there is no logical or scientific basis for this, and I don’t believe in it and I’m still expecting to be proven wrong but… it has somehow always worked whenever I’ve done it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
- If you go to a place that’s secluded or don’t see humans very often (like an abandoned house, or camping in the woods), you say “salute grandfather, excuse me, your grandchild is passing through” as a way to let the spirits know you’re just going about your business and don’t mean them any harm
- And my favourite: come home before dusk or the giant boobs monster lady will get you

but despite all these worries, I would say both my parents taught me to be fearless. as a kid when I was scared of the dark, my mother would say there are always angels watching over kids and there was nothing to be afraid of. and when i was older, I told my dad during a family trip that I had wanted to go bungee jumping but my mom wouldn't let me. he replied "next time, don't tell your mother."

both of them are very religious but thankfully have never forced us to do anything we didn't want to e.g. praying five times a day, wearing the hijab etc. they're big believers in faith being personal, and that everyone finds their own way in their own time.

actual propaganda from my mother:
- you should only marry people who are your "equal or better" in terms of wealth, education levels, family status etc. whenever a relative marries someone she doesn't think is good enough, I love telling her "have you considered that (the relative) might be the equal or better in the partnership?"