"WHAT IS WRONG WITH STRICT RULES?"

From a young age Mormon children are taught that they are a child of God, AKA Heavenly Father-- a title coined to promote the more warm and fuzzy aspect of this particular God. Even the adults love to sing that sick song, "I Am a Child of God." And how do we know god exists. Cuz Russ says so.

And what does this Omnipotent Heavenly Father, who holds your eternal future in his hands, want? Strict. Unquestioned. Obedience! And, if you do exactly as Russ says HF says, HF will love you with eternal blessings instead of loving you with punishment like losing your family forever. It's your choice, haha.



In Mormonism the church is the Strict Parent and the members are the Obedient Children. Not hard to apply the gist of this article from ahaparenting.com to Mormonism:


1. Strict parenting deprives kids of the opportunity to internalize self-discipline and responsibility.

Harsh limits may temporarily control behavior, but they don’t help a child learn to self-regulate. Instead, harsh limits trigger a resistance to taking responsibility for themselves.

2. Authoritarian parenting -- limits without empathy -- is based on fear. It teaches kids to bully.

Kids learn what they live and what you model, right? Well, if kids do what you want because they fear you, how is that different than bullying?

3. Kids raised with punitive discipline have tendencies toward anger and depression.

That's because authoritarian child raising makes it clear to kids that part of them is not acceptable, and that parents aren't there to help them learn to cope and manage those difficult feelings that drive them to act out.

4. Kids raised with strict discipline learn that power is always right.

They learn to obey, but they don't learn to think for themselves. Later in life, they won't question authority when they should. They're less likely to take responsibility for their actions and more willing to follow the peer group, or to dodge responsibility by saying that they were only trying to “follow orders.”

5. Kids raised with harsh discipline tend to be more rebellious.

Studies show that children raised with a strict parenting style tend to be more angry and rebellious as teenagers and young adults.



Is this an indictment of Mormonism, or what?

Mormon leaders don't have, at least don't see any other way to maintain their authority.

It's a shame that gawd hasn't revealed a Middle Way to them
(reference to Buddhist practice)

Exactly. No middle ground where reason is to be found, where you think for yourself, trust yourself.

I have two TBM brothers who both went rebellious to the extreme in their youth. Drugs, smoking, heavy drinking , and all that goes with that. But then the pendulum swung back to the church--one extreme to the other. They finally believed that had been wrong, sinners, and flew right over the middle ground on their way back to the strict obedience of Mormonism.

Hmmm...

I was raised with minimal supervision and a large allowance.

You young parents out there have now been warned!


EDITED TO ADD: Oh, yeah, and almost zero consequences!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/11/2019 02:09PM by elderolddog.

Hmmmnnn . . . Oh that puts a new light on things.

All considered then . . . perhaps the Mormon Strict obedience way IS the way to go.

Yeah, but then you miss the tears of laughter.

Laughter. Yeah. That tips the scales all the way back the other way.


Bad boys win. It's the way of the world. Take it from someone who was a goody-goody for way too long. The EoD's of the world rock.

4. Kids raised with strict discipline learn that power is always right.

This was my big takeaway as a child and I hated it. Then I learned that preferential treatment by people in power is very fickle in the world. Sometimes knowing who to fear is better since the people in passive aggression appear to be friendlier than the people to fear.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/11/2019 02:37PM by Elder Berry.

This sounds like my childhood, yet my parents weren’t mormon.
Kinda makes me think i was primed for the mormon church. Although before that I did rebel. Then my conditioning kicked in and I felt guilty. Strange that this is when the missionaries appeared.

My family have their own views on this.

My view is that I went to hell and back again.

To hell and back. Haha. And not.

I just finished reading all your replies on the "going back" thread and they make this statement here particularly eye opening. So easy to let the way we were raised derail us and then even searching for something better, that original "nurture" can still follow you and have too much impact. I always seem to be drawn to your slant on things and this gives a glimpse as to why.

The opposite of strict rules is teaching I think. Life should be learning, not a set of instructions.

I wish I could say I have conquered it all, but these decades later, those storied formative years still form something.

My non-mormon parents were neither bullies nor disciplinarians. So, seeing that in a church was foreign to me. And, thank God they didn’t drag us to every soccer, baseball, mutual, scouts, church cleaning busywork in order to look like devoted parens. That would have caused mutiny for this introverted kid. Along with the “obey” crap, that’s what the church did to me—ran me ragged—which started extreme rebellion in me.

I'm curious about how much of the nonMormon normal child hood you seem to have had. How old were you when you converted and when you finally left Mormonism, how important was the nonMormon childhood in recovering yourself?

Done & Done Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm curious about how much of the nonMormon normal
> child hood you seem to have had. How old were you
> when you converted and when you finally left
> Mormonism, how important was the nonMormon
> childhood in recovering yourself?

My first husband was enamored with the church and asked me to hear the missionaries. Their story that "Christ walked the Americas" struck me as true when it brought back memories of second-grade California history where Native Americans thought Cortez was their "white, bearded god" who promised to return to them." Turns out that was bunk also, but, I didn't know that then. Anyway, I got baptized in my early 20s.

The first thing my ex did was try to cut me off from my *gentile* parents. That didn't work.

I found out about polygamy and I instantly knew the excuses for it were ridiculous lies. By then, I had made friends at church, and so did my sons. That kept me hanging around way too long.

I'm ashamed that I let my name remain on the rolls of that monster for about 40 years until five years ago when I resigned on my mom's birthday. Yes, my beautiful mom who was bound for some lower kingdom because she thought mormonism was "asinine and insipid." That Only-True-Church crap made me madder than hell because if anyone loved Jesus Christ it was Mom and Grannie. Pop was an atheist, but Christ-like if anyone ever was. Pop had me thinking that I was brilliant and wonderful--not the *lesser vessel* that mormonism had assigned to me.

Mom and Pop had both passed by the time I got out of the whole mess. They'd have been happy.

My parents had what mormonism could never compete with--unconditional love and infinite forgiveness. And their house always smelled like coffee.

And you still have what you had as a child with those parents. No one could really take it away from you--just put it on lay-away for a while? Lucky to have that.

Why do I get the feeling you were the "wild card sister" at church? (That's a good thing btw.)

My name was on the roles for nearly 40 years too. Back when I left there was no resignation though, and I didn't have anything to wear to a Court of Love, so had to pass.

Done & Done Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Back when I left there was no resignation though,
> and I didn't have anything to wear to a Court of
> Love, so had to pass.

Apostate apparel is just a tie of different colors for horses asses of all the same color.

Same here, but I DID do all the things you mentioned, as a kid and with/for our kids. I thought I was doing the right thing and our kids, by and large, enjoyed the busyness - they're all extroverts. Where that came from I have no idea - I am intensely introverted and my husband is too, although to a lesser degree. Still, I look back at the busy work and I am alternately angry and heartbroken at the time I lost doing what others thought I should. I can compartmentalize it much of the time these days, but sometimes it still boils over.

I think the goal of parenting is to raise children who can make good decisions on their own, and good decisions in novel situations. Mormonism never rises to this level. Church authorities want to make decisions on the members' behalf always.

Lawrence Kohlberg developed a theory of the stages of moral development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_of_moral_development

I think that Mormonism is stuck at best at Kohlberg's middle Conventional stage 3 or stage 4 of moral development. To quote the above Wiki article, at the Conventional level, "adherence to rules and conventions is somewhat rigid, however, and a rule's appropriateness or fairness is seldom questioned."

In the advanced, or Post Conventional stages, people are able to better appreciate those who are different from them, and are able to develop an internal system of ethics that makes sense to them. IMO Mormonism does not rise to this level, nor does it aspire to.

To me, a church is worthless if it simply encourages obedience at the cost of helping to develop an internalized morality and system of ethics in its members.

That was excellent. Was much the same as the article I read on Extreme Obedience but goes into much more depth and I couldn't help seeing it all as talking about Mormonism.

There were two phrases that really stuck in my mind as relating to Mormons: "paying for a benefit" and "social contract orientation."

Thanks, Summer. Your point of view here is always so grounded.

Was / Wasn't Russ the natural progression (?) of the development of the Mormon path / culture? He's, at least to me, a sort of amalgamation of all the claimed prophets before him;

On his appearance, he's as gentle as Mckay was (not many here now remember, ha ha), but he seems to be seeing that Mormonism needs changes, so he's flailing at the leaves & branches of the tree knowing that diseased roots are the real problem.

To me, all the 'prophets' between McKay & Russ were merely minor stops on the way to an unknown destination, perhaps Russ wants to pull the train into the end of the line.

I doubt he'll be allowed to do that. Oaks is chomping at the bit and the money still flows in.

I was raised by strict parents, one bordering on donbagley dad level of strictness. None of the results of that that OP described apply to me.

IMHO, children have inborn personalities, and parents have less effect on that than they like to imagine.