I asked the following question today on Facebook:
“When did the idea of sending our children off for the day to school become the norm?”
The answers I received were interesting. Within 35 minutes I had received 3 comments, all from women, that implied that they inferred something other than what I had originally asked. All 3 of them have children, and only one of them, to my knowledge, home schools. All of the answers seemed to trigger an emotional response, most likely based on the experiences each of them have had with their children.
Answer 1: Answer one was actually a question that implied that my original concern may have been centered around the amount of time that a parent may be separated from their child during the school day. “What do you mean? Too long of a day?”
Answer 2: One respondent focused on what she believed to be the norm for her. She has raised her children in a home-school environment their entire lives.
Answer 3: The third response was the one that sparked this article. The commenter stated the following:
“Because society expects both parents to work now and to keep up with the [Joneses]. And society tells us the school environment can offer your children way more that you can at home.”
There are a few things I gathered from these answers:
- Women are more likely to answer questions about raising children than men are. Is this an indication that men are not as involved as women are, or is it just confirmation that the men are probably off working.
- None of the responses actually answered the question. That’s expected. It’s often that a man who asks a literal question may not get the answer to his question because of the differences in communication styles of men and women. I have found that women rarely answer literal questions, and usually go for the perceived hidden message, of which there usually is none. This is also something that happens when the written word is misinterpreted due to lack of body language and vocal inflection.
- Respondent A may feel like she doesn’t get to spend as much time with her children as she wants.
- Respondent B may be very pleased with her choice to home-school her children.
- Respondent C is probably not happy moving with the crowd and craves escape from the social norm.
And so, my response to answer 3 illustrates something I learned from Dave Ramsey. It’s a story about primates and behavior.
A study was conducted where scientists placed monkeys in a room that had a tall pole in the middle. At the top of the pole was a bundle of bananas. The monkeys would clamber up the pole towards the bananas, but the scientists would knock the monkeys off the pole with a fire hose. The monkeys learned that it was “dangerous” to attempt to go for the bananas. Every time the scientists added a new monkey to the room, that monkey would head straight up the pole and get himself knocked off with a blast of water. As time passed, and this happened over and over again, the other monkeys, in an effort to “protect” each other, started to pull the new monkeys off of the pole as they attempted to reach their goal. Pretty soon, the scientists stopped using the water to knock the monkeys off the pole because they had all learned to pull each other down. They started to replace the monkeys one at a time, and each new monkey would be pulled off the pole, until all of the original monkeys had been removed from the room. None of the monkeys in the room had actually experienced the blast of water, yet they had all passed down a learned behavior; they had all agreed socially to drag each other down and prevent reaching their goal.
Humans behave as stupidly as monkeys do.
If you’re around people who drag you down, you may be at risk of believing that the goal you set isn’t allowed by “society.” Don’t listen to the masses, because they’re often leading you nowhere.
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