Counterintuitive Fall 2024

Is Extreme Parenting Effective

It seems counterintuitive that parents want their child to grow up and become a successful member of society while also monitoring every facet of their life to go in line with their own plans but many believe that it is a proper path to success.

Parents what their child to succeed in life whether that be academically or professionally and in a lot of instances both. The path to such success however is a point of contention to many parents as their styles can class with their child and society as a whole, some parents want their child to follow their ” yellow brick road” so to speak following a path that they set out for them that they believe will lead to their success and with it their happiness. Other parents however are a bit more laissez faire with their approach wanting their child to make their own decisions and brave the wilderness of life in a effort to make them more independent. The truth is there is no secret formula for a successful child everyone is different and one form of success will be different from another’s and trying to force a one size fits all measurement of success( commonly a high paying job and good grades) can be detrimental to their children; A low profile performance artist that lives in a small apartment and cant afford a car can be much happier than a brain surgeon who lives in a penthouse and owns a merchandise benz but didn’t want to become a doctor and only did so to make their parents proud.

Extreme parenting comes from a combined place of genuinely wanting their child to be great, wanting all their hard work raising a child to be worth it and wanting them to prepared for the world when they become adult. This helicoptering can develop a prolonged reliance on the parents however tangling the lives of grown adults who should be able to handle their own duties and older adults who still want to ensure the success that they crave their child to have causing them to be incapable of fending for themselves and unable to make big decisions which is the exact opposite desire that parents want. Bashing Parents for caring to much is ineffective because their supposed to care but when deciding when that care transfers from them to their child can be hard to let go, when a child should dress themselves, care about their own appearance, what their grades are and what’re they gonna be when they grow up are all examples of a transference of care from parent and child that can go on for to long due to more controlling parenting styles.

Minorities especially those of Asian descant have gotten a stereotype of being these types of parents pushing their kids to be academically and professorially outstanding and punishing anything below perfection. The rather inaccurate and harmful stereotype aside it brings another angle to hands on parenting which is the cultural aspect. What can be seen as extreme parenting in one country can be just been seen as parenting in another. Different expectations and styles for parenting can come from popular believes in a country or even a defining event such as Chinas one child household rule they put in place can warp parents perception of things practice in a form of social Darwinism that effects their kids in the process .

Free heroin to battle addiction

It seems counterintuitive that in an attempt to solve drug addiction hey decide to give addicts free drugs but it is happening. Due to the city of Vancouver being a port town it is a breeding grown for drugs such as heroin. There have been attempts to combat this epidemic for years and their latest strategy is a InSite zone where addicts can shoot up.

The InSite center is used as a safe environment for addicts allowing them to indulge in their addictions without the fear of police intervention. Supervised by trained professionals and given clean ” supplies” they have access to some of the best heroin in the world. The attempt here is not to stop the addiction outright at least not right away but keep addicts in a safe controlled environment where they arent in risk of dying due to a spiked dose, dirty needles or even dying due to the addicts getting or in the process of getting cash to buy the heroin with. This is called harm reduction by minimizing the the risk of getting heroin they are in theory minimizing the risk of heroin addicts becoming a danger for themselves and others the difference between stealing and killing for it and going to a clean center to acquire it.

Encouraging a path of least resistance to addicts leaves some moral difficult moral questions however. The heroin is killing them regardless of how they get it and just giving them it can be seen as loading the gun. To its credit Insite centers are mainly for addicts who are hopelessly addicted to heroin and heroin alternatives and attempts to quit entirely just don’t work it still puts into question on why do it in the first place? Is it more ethical to kill someone in a hospital bed or let them be killed in the street, is this just a attempt at controlling the fallout because tourists seeing someone dead on the street with a needle in their arm looks bad for the city so they user them in these centers so that their deaths don’t bother the non addicted citizens. This program atleast in its current iteration is nothing more than a fancy band aid for a bigger larger problem that they cant seem to find the solution to.

paper or plastics

It seems counterintuitive that cutting down trees to make paper could be less harmful and could even provide a albeit lesser positive effect but still a positive effect to the environment but its seems to be the case.

The argument that paper is a effective form of carbon storing form of pollution is a interesting one, it is in theory a renewable resource but what renewability in actuality can take decades to regrow causing a deficient in oxygen. There are some sources that claim that paper actually contain a good about of carbon dioxide. The paper gets this effect due to photosynthesis the tree undergoes keeping the residual water in its bark. As long as the the tree wasn’t burned in the process the paper being recycled can recycled stopping a large amount of carbon emissions in the air. While it seems plausible at the end of the day paper and wood based products will never substitute the real thing and overall is still harmful the environment and all that debt will add up and when it hits maximum capacity it will be to late to stop it.

While the paper does contain carbon its not as effective as it might seem. Paper degrades to quicky for it to be a be all end all solution for carbon storage in fact when the paper degrades it becomes methane a even more dangerous greenhouse gas. its not that it is not a option for carbon storage it can store it for about two to three years and would be more effective if more people recycled in general. Some other methods prove more effective at the moment like building wooden houses and toys because the wood can hold the carbon better. Carboard boxes for shipping is also much more effective as carbon has a better structure for keeping carbon and is growing in use due to the increase of shipping. We want to save the environment but at the same time we need to destroy it for us to live humanity is a lumbering titan our steps crushes mountains our breath burns down forest our grith is enough to destroy where we live. Theres damage we just cant help it just cant be stopped because of how big we are as a race but what is important is what we can help and by using the most effective methods possible we can try to stave off our destruction.