Introduction

It is a dangerous thing to be overprotected or over-controlled by anyone, and much more so your parents. Much like TRP teaches you to look at what people do, and not what they say, you should apply this concept to close friends and family. Make sure their controlling overprotective behavior is at the very least coherent and aligned with a long term success strategy . If you think they won't hate you after you fail at life after following their instructions, you're wrong. They'll make you sick and they'll make themselves sick because much of their happiness stems on your success. You need to save them from themselves by saving yourself from them. There is an epidemic of people with no identity, no risk tolerance, who are becoming damaged and dysfunctional as adults - and this is a concept that just emerging in the mainstream collective.

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Summary

Lack of risk taking early in life depletes people's sense of purpose and demotivates their dopamine system to even bother with anything meaningful. Instead of learning from their mistakes and trying new things, they retreat into their tightly knit familiar activities or close family with zero life excitement and many regrets. I wish I could say they end up just living boring lives paying bills, but today, with the epidemic of burnout, anxiety and depression, and lack of rewarding physical labor jobs, most people with this mindset are lucky if they can function in society at all.

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Main Idea

Coming from a 2nd gen immigrant background living in North America, I have come to believe and witness that many overprotective or controlling parents aren't so much concerned with the end-to-end success of their offspring, but they are instead living day-by-day with self-masturbatory virtue signaling on what behavior their kids should and should not do. They are afraid of making some mistake that will directly lead to failure or harm to their kids, but they have no conceptualization of long term harm caused by control and keeping them "close" and living with them. They can't at all accept a young adult who talks back or defies them in any way, but they are not all worried with gradually raising an overly compliant failure with major issues. While they do a good job of raising kids who go to school, have good manners, who stay away from drugs, crime, and teen pregnancy, (compared to under-parenting cultures), they generally fail badly at preparing young adults for real life.

Once they begin to realize their kid is not moving forward they can't admit that they played a part in this, so they begin resenting their own kids and accuse them of failing to follow one of their many micromanaged instructions. "If only you'd be organized, like I told you your life wouldn't be such as mess".

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Useful Parenting for raising Young Adults

Becoming a functioning adult requires a number of skills and physical attributes that must be developed. Is your family actively hindering you in any of the following critical young adult development activities?

- Reasonable safe experimentation with alcohol or drugs and dating in your late teens and 20s, in order to take risk and develop into a complete person

- Encouraging regular social outings with a wide variety of people of different walks of life

- Discouraging cancerous overuse of social networks

- Regular exercise even if it's just walking

- making an effort to maintain a relationship with aunts and uncles whom your parents are not fond of; not turning their personal resentment into a barrier for your to explore other family dynamics

- Encouraging you to take student jobs outside your immediate comfort zone

- encouraging you to participate in engaging activities with the opposite sex for reasons other than securing grandchildren

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Red Flags of toxic parenting

- Excessive concern for physical damage to the family's home (after all, they want you to live there forever)

- All conversations are about doing homework and succeeding in university, without any meaningful conversations about the content of the classes

- Virtue signaling about violent video games, alcohol use

- When you leave the home, the most important thing is that you don't forget your scarf and boots. it could be a huge job interview that you're late for, but hey, not dying of hypothermia is the real thing to be concerned with here.

- time spent on the phone discussing how disgraceful someone else's kids are

- And the biggest one - Uncomfortable conversations quickly shut down or explosive argument very likely

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tl-dr;

Controlling and stubborn people in all walks of life are cancer. People generally do what makes them feel right, not what's in your best interest. You'll survive their BS if you're really IQ smart or really resistant to anxiety naturally. IF. Is that what you really want? The best-case scenario is you're a shell of what you could be, and the likely scenario is that you're miserable - and the people who love you, loved you so much that they hate you now, and hate themselves?

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