Real-Life Soap Operas

Note: the following article was originally written, for a personal blog I used to run, on 20 April 2009, and it has been brought up-to-date and edited for this site.

Working with a couple of customers recently has reminded me how fascinated I am with people, and how they behave.

These two particular customers are sort of related in a soap opera kind of way – one is the brother of a girl who is pregnant by the other customer’s son, who lives across the hall from the first customer’s ex-girlfriend, if you’re still with me. (Shades of the TV series Soap, for those old enough to remember this parody of daytime soap operas.)

They’re in and out of each other’s apartments all day long, and from the background noise that you can hear (and can’t ignore) when you’re on the phone with one of the two, life seems to be one long round of total chaos: there are multiple conversations going on, the TV’s on too, there are dogs barking, and listening to this whole thing simply gives me a headache.

But how do people’s lives become like this, what drives them to live such a complicated social and familial existence, and do they do they ever get anything done?

My gut feel is that this is some sort of reaction to the way they were brought up – maybe it’s normal for them, within the context of their own upbringing.

I fully accept that many people never seem to question the rules, principles and standards of their parents and other close family members, although I know, because I’m one of them, that others do, and sometimes from quite an early age.

Parents have a lot of power over their children, although some seem not to realise this. Others, of course, abuse that power in all sorts of ways.

To a large degree, this is how the religion meme is perpetuated – children are indoctrinated, explicitly or implicitly, although the result’s pretty much the same, and by the time they’re old enough to think for themselves, it’s become a way of life that they never question.

I know somebody, for instance, who was brought up in a household where his parents fought constantly, to the extent he grew up thinking that’s how couples are meant to behave towards each other.

Needless to say, his first marriage failed, and his social skills are as close to zero as you can get, which is a real hindrance to him professionally as he’s chosen to try to make a living in a performance art that requires a great deal of interaction with his audience.

If only he’d stepped back and questioned what was going on, his whole life could have been different – he could have made much greater play of his natural musical talents, and who knows where he’d be today if he weren’t held back by his childhood experiences?

I, on the other hand, grew up in a household where I never saw my parents fight or argue.

You could say that’s a good thing, but I’m pretty convinced (and so was my therapist) that this is largely the reason why I hate confrontation of any kind – so much so that I’d rather suffer exploitation, indignity, or insult than stand up for myself.

(I’m a bit better these days, but that’s more the result of a very unsuccessful first marriage where I had to put up with a ton of shit that ultimately proved to be too much, so I had to learn to fight back.)

And my first wife used to work with two journalists who, by their own admission, rarely knew who they’d be waking up next to (even though both were married). They actually envied my wife’s simple life, where she knew exactly who’d be next to her in bed, every single morning.

How does this sort of behaviour begin?

How much is really nature (i.e. genetics, innate abilities), and how much is nurture (i.e. environment, upbringing)?

Are there such things are genuinely bad children, or is all of their badness learned behaviour, in which case, where does it come from?

Common sense would dictate that the people closest to the child during its formative years (up to the age of six, or maybe less), have the greatest influence, and that is, of course, the parent, although excessive exposure to television may play a part too.

But most parents don’t seem to consider what a huge role they play in their children’s lives, often unwittingly.

For example, parents seem to forget, or be ignorant of the fact, that young children (and maybe even babies) are the ultimate learning machine, soaking up pretty much everything they witness, even if they can’t emulate it at the time (maybe they’re too young to talk yet, but their ears are still working, and if you swear in front of a toddler, you shouldn’t be too surprised to hear your child throw the words back at you in a year or two’s time, as some friends of mine found out, to their horror – the grandmother was not pleased at all to hear her four-year old granddaughter use the F word at her!)

So that begs the obvious question – how should you bring up your child, so as to give them the best possible chance to be successful (however you define this), but without causing them problems in later life?

How do you provide the right mix of experiences, uncover their innate talents, make sure they don’t end up as serial killers or social misfits?

And is it even possible for the parents’ opinions, prejudices, beliefs not to rub off on their children?

How is it that some children are able to detach themselves from their normal (or worse) childhood and environment and go on to become rich and famous, breaking free of the shackles that appear to restrain the majority of children brought up in less than favourable surroundings?

Are parents even the best people to raise their children at all?

This may be a heretical question to some, but you only have to look at the way society is going to realise that this may not be such a stupid question after all.

Already, both parents have to go work to earn a living in many households (and even then they barely scrape by), which means when they do get home, they’re tired, they’ve got stuff to do, and they therefore don’t have much time to interact with their children.

Instead, they’re farmed out to nannies, day care centres, or just the good old square box in the corner of the room.

I myself was sent to a boarding school at somewhere between seven and eight years of age, until I’d just turned 17, and although I believe my parents did it with the best of intentions (e.g. a better education, and although that may be true from an academic perspective, the fact that it was a single-sex school meant that it was an artificial environment, where you never got the chance to interact with girls, for example), they only saw me for three months a year, for almost ten years, and therefore had few clues about how I developed into the person I became.

If I were a parent, I’m not sure I’d like that at all.

For some, where their parents were in the armed forces, for example, or travelled the world a lot, then it did provide a more stable base than home might have done, but the majority of the pupils at my school lived a few hundred miles away at most.

Anyway, I digress (again).

And finally, should some people even be allowed to have children? After all, some people are banned from owning dogs, for example, and that’s far less of a responsibility than bringing up a child for the first 16 or more years of its life (which isn’t to say that owning any pets doesn’t entail a fair amount of responsibility, because it does).

Some parents, of course, do have their children removed by the government, and in many cases, it is in the children’s best interests, but you could see this as a dangerous precedent, and since moving to the USA, I have read about many cases where children were taken away for what I would not consider legitimate reasons.

In general, the more the government tries to insert itself into the everyday lives of people, the more you’re going to hear about abuses of such power.

I only wish I had the answers to some of these questions, but until I, or somebody else does, life for many will continue to resemble the TV soap operas, which I used to believe were too far-fetched to be believable – sadly, I now know that there’s nothing stranger than true life.