#Family problems

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digital ermine
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I'm a game theorist so I'm going to approach this in a game theoric way, so this may sound less like comforting but more on understanding and advices to actually navigate the situation you have.

So firstly, we need to understand your parent's incentives, why do they act this way against you. What you're referring here sounds like a collectivist culture.

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This means that the performance of a single family member, especially the children, directly reflects the whole family image. And how other families perceive your own is really important to them. This naturally incentivizes family members with authority / power such as your parents to be more demanding and controlling of their children. Imagine if you're a parent and if your children scores bad in school, other families or friends that you have will call you stuff like:

"You're a bad parent", "Your child is stupid, that must mean that her mom is also stupid." and so on.

Also imagine that other families are constantly gossiping about you or shutting your family off from friend groups because of a single mistake your child makes.

This would naturally make the parents want to force their children to perform good. And this incentive naturally flows into obedience as well and makes the whole power dynamic of the family feel like an authoritarian.

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and that feeling to borderline want to force your children to perform good makes them literally argue with you from the very small mistakes you make. Guilt-trips etc derive from that aswell.

So yes, in this case good performing children will be given peace and autonomy, while bad performing children will not get any. And this is very common in these types of cultures.

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So how can you navigate this effectively? There are a lot of ways actually, and they kind of fall into different moral umbrellas

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  1. You can either just focus on performing well, which is what the collectivist system is DESIGNED to do

  2. You can use art of persuasion to highlight your unique selling point, or lessen the threat signals caused when saying "no" to your parents, like using framing / mirroring techniques

  3. You can also try to build relationships with your parent's close friends and make them vouch for you

  4. You can also try to not be part of the system, but it takes a very stable and disciplined mentality