Response # 5

Alan Wood

ENG 102

9/7/11

Obsessive Parenting: Response # 5

            A lot of parents throughout history and even today have been very obsessed and engrossed in the lives of their children, attempting to control every aspect of their lives. Parents believe that if they are in charge that they can live a good life for their children, they won’t misbehave and everything will go according to plan. Now this kind of parenting is understandable because it just shows that these parents care about the well-being of their children, but no matter what the justification is for the matter it is still quite ridiculous.

            There have been many times that parents have caused their own children to develop phobias due to their obsessive parenting. Parents trying to protect their children almost through scaring their children out of doing things. Through this though, it can cause children to become a little too scared, hence the development of phobias. Obviously parents do not understand the harm that these kinds of things can do, because they are the one doing it and not the one receiving it. Children need to be able to prepare for the outside world and its actively advancing society. This kind of behavior is just hindering their abilities, and when one day these children have to deal with the outside world, they won’t know what to do or how to act. So these parents attempt at protecting their children ultimately become vain.

According to the movie Dogtooth, the home of the kids in the movie becomes like a domestic fortress barricaded against modern world. Inside, the few indications that the media world exists at all have been manipulated. The house contains a tape recorder which the children use to learn new vocabulary, such as a telephone, is a salt cellar, a highway is a weather phenomenon, and a zombie is a small flower. There is a TV, on which the family only ever watches home movies, and a record player which father uses to play a song written by a man who he refers to as grandfather, which turns out to be Frank Sinatra singing the song Come Fly With. It’s a kind of postmodern paternalistic protection where toys of aircraft replace real aircraft; where home movies replace real movies, where faked song lyrics replace real lyrics (Williamson). Because of these attempts to protect their children, the children basically develop Technophobia, or a fear of technology, so due to the parents attempts to protect their children they have ended up hurting their children causing them to develop a mental defect.

The movie Dogtooth  depicts what is called as the paranoid style. Which is characterized by heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.  The parents of Dogtooth represent a paranoid parenting style which detects amoral conspiracies in popular media, household consumables, and even in the very vocabulary of modern culture. Dogtooth’s parents construct for their children a simulated or fabricated fantasy of domestic simplicity and family love, free of the supposed contaminants of culture (Williamson). To some degree this is what the majority of parents are like today.

But in Dogtooth the significance is amplified because it is the movies which are the source of the father’s paranoia and conspiratorial imagination. In the paranoid style the father in Dogtooth views the media suspiciously through a conspiratorial imagination. The children’s access to media throughout the movie is closely controlled and regulated, even manipulated or fabricated so as to conform with the domestic ideal of filial acquiescence. The parental paranoia is unsettling because of what it suggests about the control of children’s learning and their development of understanding and meaning (Williamson).

This type of paranoid parenting is good for nothing and for no one, as children, they need to be able to go out into the world and do what they need to do. They need to be able to make their own mistakes and learn valuable life lessons. When parents try to shelter their kids from life, they are undoubtedly preparing them for a hard life once they have to actually go out into it. Now it is very understandable that parents would want to protect their kids, which is a great thing. However, it is the kind of things where you need to pick your battles. Parents cannot always protect your kids and there are times where parents shouldn’t protect their kids because every now and then kids need to be able to protect themselves without any help from mommy and daddy. Even though this kind of behavior by parents is understandable, that does not make it something that’s good or something that should be done, because nothing can justify that kind of behavior.

Works Cited

Williamson, Ben. " AboutMissionIn the NewsMedia ReleasesPeopleHub StaffBloggersPartnersSummer 2011 FellowsResourcesOnline LearningParticipatory MediaNew Media LiteraciesGames and LearningDesignMedia ProductionCivic EngagementLearning Institutions & OrganizationsEquityAssessmentProjectsResearch NetworksIndividual GrantsCompetition WinnersWorking GroupsWorkshopsEventsFuture EventsPast EventsOn Parenting, Media, Education and Phobias." DMLcentral (2011): n. pag. Web. 3 Sep 2011. <http://dmlcentral.net/blog/ben-williamson/parenting-media-education-and-phobias>.