Reply to Gross Things Your Parents Did

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "Gross Things Your Parents Did"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My parents did not wash their hands enough. Like they often prepared food or ate food with their hands without washing their hands first, and I only started doing this as an adult when I realized it was unsanitary. They did wash their hands after the bathroom, but otherwise were pretty loose with it.

We also wore shoes in the house and now that seems disgusting to me.

My dad would pick his teeth with a toothpick or sometimes with his fingernails after certain meals. But that I knew was gross -- my mom would give him a hard time about it and ask him to leave the table. Ironically, I have more sympathy for my dad about this now because I have similar teeth and have discovered in middle age that I am very prone to getting things stuck between my teeth during meals. But I excuse myself and take care of it in private, and also carry flossers in my purse for this purpose.

That's it though. I actually don't think this is is terrible. My parents both grew up quite poor, in huge families with minimal parenting. I grew up middle class and it's not surprising there were some manners deficits given their backgrounds. I actually think they did really well considering they really had to work at it. Moving up classes is challenging and requires a lot of attention to detail and and discipline. I didn't appreciate how much my parents had to do to transcend their backgrounds until I was much older.[/quote]

My parents both grew up quite poor, too, but their parents made it clear that money/wealth had no bearing on manners.  My grandmother lived in a house in Ireland with no running water but had impeccable manners. I've met billionaires who are incredibly gauche. I don't think there's a 1:1...[/quote]

It might not be a 1:1 but there's a strong correlation. It's not a personal failing, it's built into conceptions of class. A lot of manners are not intuitive, but part of a code specifically designed to help upper class people identify one another. So if your grandmother had impeccable manners, she went out of her way to learn that code and apply it, or her own parents did. It didn't just come naturally -- it takes effort. It especially takes effort if someone is raised in a lower class household where that code is an unknown mystery.

Which is also why billionaires sometimes have terrible manners. They have money but they don't know the code because they didn't grow up with it.

You think manners are a sign of a person's inherent goodness but they are entirely separate.[/quote]

There is an argument that the "elite" serve a really important civilizing function for the rest of society--specifically b/c people try to emulate them--and that it's big reason society has become increasingly dysfunctional today. For example, if the upper-class divorces or chooses to have children outside of marriage, it's not a huge deal. There are dozens of supports in place that ensure that the children grow up in a functional setting. When the lower classes emulate this it's a disaster.

I.e. there is a direct line from "hold the door open for ladies" to "don't beat your wife." These social norms aren't needed by the upper class, strictly speaking, but they are needed for those who struggle to function in society to maintain some guardrails.[/quote]

It's hard to see the elite beat their wife and children from the other side of the gated estate.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics