It's the war cry of every adult who is in fact anything but "alright." Has anyone ever used this phrase to describe a healthy upbringing from informed parent trying to foster positive human development in their child? No. No they haven't. Ever. Is it not, by and large, a defense of unhealthy parenting techniques and stressful upbringings caused by uninformed parents? Yes. Almost always.
"Well, my parents practiced extreme patience and gave me choices and went out of their way to make sure I was eating healthy meals and developing secure attachment and being intellectually stimulated...and I turned out alright."
Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Of course you turned out alright, because that's what parents are supposed to do. No one has to defend good parenting; it's self-evident.
"Well, I lived on Little Debbies and Mountain Dew and my parents never read to me and spanked and yelled at me all the time, and I turned out alright. They did what they had to do; I was a little asshole."
Sounds more familiar, doesn't it? Are children ever really "little assholes"? I mean, yes, sometimes, but only if you define "little asshole" as a young human with an under-developed brain and poor communication skills trying to assert his independence. Sadly, many adults still look back at their childhood and think, "I was such an asshole." You weren't an asshole, you were a child, doing what children do and being treated like an asshole by parents lacking an understanding of human development. If you continue to act this way as an adult, you're an asshole (though, to be fair, you were taught to be an asshole by assholes).
(And I will now stop using the word asshole. You're welcome.)
"I turned out alright," is a phrase that doesn't just apply to parenting techniques, but to parents' worldviews, values, education, biases, life-lessons, ideologies, traditions, activities in which they involve their children, and so forth. These are all things that carry an enormous amount of weight and influence in the development of children. They hang with us for life no matter how convoluted we later find them to be. We see people every day in the news spouting off information that is factually untrue, and saying it with complete conviction as though they have no doubt they are correct. We hear people everyday--even people with higher degrees and professional careers--discuss things they were told as children as though they are common knowledge when they have long been accepted as false by experts studying the topic in question. One would think these people would have learned this new information sometime during their studies, but alas, this isn't always the case. And, sometimes, even when it is the case, not everyone is willing to let go of what they were taught as children in lieu of what an expert on the topic tells them, even despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
Ay, and there's the rub.
Think about this for a minute. Everything we know, we were taught, or we have inferred from our personal experience with the world. Everything. Unlike our new computers, we do not come with information already installed at birth. Impulses, yes. Information, no. Babies aren't born knowing what is happening in the world, nor are they born with brains capable of inferring correctly what is happening in the world. Rather, we are born with brains prepared for anything (more on this in a minute). Thus, parents, teachers, communities, leaders, friends, etc. play a huge role in "programming" us with information necessary to survive and hopefully thrive in our new environment. However, people can only pass on the information that they have learned themselves. Is the information we are passing on true, or is it what we believe to be true? Or is it what we want to be true, even though it isn't, or what we were taught is true and never learned otherwise? Or--and this is the worst of all possibilities--we were taught something was true, later learned it is not true, and willfully chose ignorance over reality.
It would be reasonable, in my humble opinion, to define education as the act of replacing belief with fact. At one time people believed the sun came straight-up in the morning from some undefined place beneath our flat Earth and lowered back down into that unknown place at night. They believed multiple gods controlled the elements and that doing random things that they felt pleased the gods would make it rain or shine or warm-up or cool-off, etc. Of course, we now know these beliefs were incorrect and we can study the sun and the rotation of the spherical Earth and the complexities of weather with such precision as to predict what will happen a week in advance (no random god-pleasing rituals necessary). Those who have adapted to this new information have thrived and those who either have not received the new information or have chosen not to believe it have struggled.
With this in mind, we can see how important it is first for children to develop critical, analytical, creative, healthily-functioning brains and then to be given correct information about the world based on the best evidence available. When a baby is born, she has billions of potential neural connections in her brain. Think of it as all of the phone numbers in the world with which you can connect should you find such a call necessary. However, within the first year of life, her brain has pared those connections down to the necessary "phone numbers" that she actually needs to call in order to survive in her surroundings. So, if a baby is spoken to in English, her brain focuses on the connections that form the sounds necessary to speak English. If she is spoken to in both English and Spanish, her brain will hang on to the connections necessary to speak both languages. However, her brain will not focus on the connections that make it possible to understand and speak German (even though those connections are available). Our brains do a great deal of "paring-down" in the first year of development, and continue to do so throughout life--engaging certain connections more than others depending on what is needed to function appropriately in different environments.
This is why appropriate parenting techniques are so necessary. If a child lives in fear of being yelled at or physically abused because their parents lack the information and skills to engage and discipline them in appropriate ways, their brains will focus on fear connections, which do not involve much thinking, but rather engage fight or flight impulses more appropriate for primal animals. Instead of developing a neural map of appropriate behavior to get what they want/ need they become frightened and frustrated because they are incapable of articulating their very large emotions and their caregivers are angry and hostile with them for something they cannot help. Engaging their fight or flight response teaches them nothing except mom and dad don't care about what I'm thinking and feeling and are potentially dangerous. These unfortunate children lose a great deal of their ability to learn right from the get-go because their brains are frequently relying on impulsive brain-stem responses instead of developing connections necessary to become more articulate, competent, and intelligent people.
Not only is their brain suffering from parents creating stressful environments (or doing nothing to decrease a frustrated child's stress levels), but the child's body fills with the stress-related hormone Cortisol, which weakens the immune system, inhibits proper bone and tissue development, causes gastric and renal issues, causes increased blood pressure, and a whole host of other negative physiological issues. Thus, for a person to truly "turn out alright," they need to grow up in an environment that is low-stress and high stimulation, and be exposed to as many healthy life interactions as possible in their early years. People using this phrase and citing a high-stress, low stimulation, low positive-interaction childhood most likely have a very low bar for "alright," which isn't really their fault since they have likely fallen in with a community of people raised similarly who share their low standards of "alright."
There are better ways out there. Yes, they will require most to do some research since an unfortunately low number of Americans grew up in households that refrained from corporal punishment and impulsive disciplining, but these new techniques are available. The alternative is creating people who may find a way to make money; they may even overcome their poor start (the brain is mutable after all) and rise to positions of power and be viewed culturally as "alright" or even "successful," but this won't make these lucky few good or happy people, just wealthy and powerful, and potentially detrimental to the rest of us. The vast majority will not overcome a poor start. The vast majority will struggle academically and socially, they'll become hostile adults with limited capacity for creative and critical thinking, and they'll be a burden on their families and communities. They'll view experts as threats to their beliefs instead of gateways to their intellectual growth, and they'll literally become psychologically incapable of change without a great deal of work (i.e. therapy). Perhaps worst of all, they'll continue the cycle of misinformation, unhealthy behavior, and archaic beliefs and practices that lower the quality of life for society at large. In a place where everyone gets a voice and a vote and can contribute great things to the world or cause great havoc and suffering, NOT doing what your parents did may not only be your best option, but your responsibility to the rest of us.
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