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"Social adjustment is defined as the degree to which an individual engages in competent social behavior and adapts to the immediate social context." (Crick and Dodge, 1994)
"Why is social adjustment important? Social adjustment has been considered as one of the major contributing psychological factor in characterising the individuals. The learners have to develop the adjustmental ability which in turn will make the individuals to grow as responsible citizens of the society." (Google search)
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Social adjustment is a kind of mafia-style negotiation between the individual and the group: You give us what we want to get out of you and we'll give you what we want you to have. You are free to choose: Coke or Pepsi. Chevy or Ford. CNN or Fox News. Disneyworld or the beach. RightGuard or Ban. It's a free country. Obviously, this works for most people even if for a lot of them it eventually leads to messy divorces, alcoholism, occupational burnout, and, well, you name it but it wasn't what you set out hoping and expecting to get.[1]
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I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) seem to recall my female warder (aka: mother) telling me I was born "left handed" but they (i.e.: she and her male side-kick, aka my father, or combined: my "parents") trained me to always use my right hand because that was the right thing. Then the two of them enrolled me in St. Paul's Illiberal Day Carcel for Pubsecent Male Virgins except-for-omerta-sanitary-services-for-jocks in 7th grade, again, to help me: to provide me with "male influence" since I was alwsys around her but he was absent most of the time for his job. They did not want me to be afflicted with the maladjustment of being a left-hnded sissy.
I was on a Janary graduation schedule from my elementary school in Richmond Virginia. Since St. Paul'sMr. S. Atherton Middleton's school was not going to adjust itself to my schedule, they had to either move me up a half year or move me back a half year. Mr. S. Atherton Middleton, the school's Headmaster (Note: this was after 1863 in USA!) decided to put me back half a year, for my "Social adjustment": to diminish↧ me down↧ to the low level↧ of being like everybody else↧ including himself↧.[2]
I did not need to be socially adjusted, i.e.: to be metaphorically lobotomized and my spirit broken, but I desparately needed social support: gentle nurturing to help my spirit flourish. The latter was not on the agenda.*
Things came to head at St. Paul's maybe only three time in 6 chronically destructive years:
Each time they tried to break me but since I refused to help them hurt me, and time was passing, they eventually apparently decided I[t] wasn't worth them missing lacrosse practice or something else unimportant. In fact, only in case #2 was I wrong even by their own metrics; in case #3, which was the only one where anything material was at stake, they obliquely admitted I was right by giving me a punishment so frivolous I had no wish to dispute it (secretly I welcomed it).
But I should have been much more social: confronting every person every time they disrespect[ed] me or otherwise fail[ed] to help enrich my mind, my soul and my joy in living. I now in old age know that being social (not shying away from people) is very important, including to respectfully but also unstintingly struggle against attempts to try to make me socially adjust: "social adjustment" is a polite (i.e.: hypocritical) synonym for breaking a person's spirit: Passum sub iugum. [Note that I am not saying this is bad for everybody, only that applying it to me was destructive. Some persons are different from others.]
There are times when a child must do something they do not want to do. If the child has cancer and fights against having surgery and will consequently die a horrific death, the parents must coerce the child to have the surgery. Even in this case, however, everything possible needs to be done to minimize the child's suffering. Nobody should ever have to pay their dues. No boy should ever be told to "Man up!" Etc. Period.
In these extreme cases, first it needs to be verified they are extreme. If the child does not want to be "polite" or to believe in their God, the parents should just eat it. But if the child is torturing animals, that must be stopped. I know a lady who, when she was a teenager, her parents caught her older brother at the last moment from putting a bullet through her body. But prigs and prudes need to keep it to themselves.
So we are left with the kid who does not want cancer surgery or who is torturing animals or is about to murder his sister with a pistol. Such materially catastrophic behavior needs to be stopped, by any means necessary. But equally imperative: In no way to try to influnce what the child thinks or feels about it except by take-it-or-leave-it no-penalty-if-you-disagree rational discourse. No psychological warfare aka: "social adjustment". Bad acts must tbe prevented; bad thoughts need to be accepted (and parents need to look into themselves to see how they might be the cause of them and improve themselves. See, e.g.: here, but also: here).
I had an intrusive mother. I had no private space outside reach of her surveillance and control. No, that is not true: she never stuck a protoscope up my anus to look and poke around in my large intestine; anal enemas were as far as she went. I have no clue what was her aim or if she had any aim. She was a worm that burrows into an apple, thus rotting it, i.e.: me.The child's soul must not be tampered with. And that's what a lot of childrearing is: the opposite of what an oncologist does to a leukemia patient. The oncologist destoys the patient's sick immune system and reinjects healthy immune cells. Childrearing generally destroys the child's healthy faculty of judgment and replaces it with the parents' social conditioning. Thereafter the child's body continues to metabolize but his (her, other's) soul has been evacuated and replaced by the social conditioning ("Social adjustment"). You have, effectively, a robot (zombie). "Now, do you love your mother, child?" "Yes, mommy💗, I love💗 you💗 with all💗 my💗 heart💗."
Proviso: Everything I write here may apply to only one person: myself (BMcC[18-11-46-503]). If being socially adjusted is optimal for other people, let them have it so long as nobody would even entertain the fantasy of trying to impose it on me. But that's not how I was treated
A definitive text, by Dr. Sandor Ferenczi: here. This should answer all parents' and others' objections to everything have a written here. Perhaps I can put it a different way, so long as it does not urge a trip to the hospital emergency room, for a parent to smack the child in the face is preferable to, or, to be precise: less worse than trying to manipulate the child's feelngs or thoughts: "You don't really mean you hate your mommy and daddy, do you? What's wrong with you?..." is potentially far more irreparably damaging to the young person that a little transient swelling of his epidermis.
No! The parents need to say and mean it: "We understand and respect that you hate us. You may be right and we may be wrong. But there are very rare times when we feel we must do things to protect you and/or others from material harm. We are not asking you to agree with or to like it. But we will in these cases coerce complaince because we are convinced it is a matter of life and death, not just something we'd like to see from you." For one counterexample, in my case, they should never have made me get a haircut, no matter how dear to their social conditioning💗 it was to help keep America beautiful or what the neighbors might think of them for having a boy with long hair. Parents and teachers need to grow up.
Coincidentally, I cooked up the image at the top of the present page (here) at the same time as I was watching for the first time the 1927 silent movie "Metropolis". St. Paul's School, for me, was like the place below ground where the workers labored in the movie. Except that Mr. Joh Fredersen was a handsome albeit heartless business executive whereas Mr. S. Atherton Middleton, who was soulless, looked like what heit was, [fill in the blank]: here → a small beady-eyed Prude.
Christo-esque art project for St. Paul's Illiberal Day Carcel for pubsecent male virgins except-for-omerta-sanitary-services-for-jocks: Cover all the school buildings with a black cloth pall so symbolize that everybody there was no life or hope of it there even though a physician or even a lay person would still detect heartbeats and respiration among the socially adjusted.
I can't really criticize myself because I was not myself but what them had made of the helpless blob of protoplasm as which I came out of a birth canal into this, or more consequentially: their world: A Lockean "tabula rasa" (blank slate) for them to scrawl on: "Bradford do this!" "Bradford do that!" "Bradford don't do this other thing" — or even just wipe their feet on (my given name essentially means: doormat). But I can Monday morning quarterback.
I did not need to be nor should anyone have tried to make me socially adjust, conform, be like them. So far so good. But that's where I went wrong: I should have been social: I should have been in their faces with my needs instead of just "taking it" amd not even trying. I should have socialized, i.e.: compelled reactions from other people. I should have forced them to publicly aver they were mistreating me, that they didn't care.
I have previously written about one specific instance here which I have thought about for some years now: Mr. Tullai and physical fitness. But now (August, 2023) I see that should not have been an isolated incident. If I had to be subjected to involuntary celibacy, I should have made the girls at the school bus collection point at the end of each school day ridicule and reject me for all to see: "Let your light so shine before men tha tthey may see your good works" (Matt 5:16). I should have pressed my teachers and parents. Made them either help me or expose what they were, instead of just trying to not be noticed. What's the worst that could have happened? I could be reasonably sure they would not have tried to make me aet their feces because ethey tried to pretend they did not have bodily functions.Mske them identify themselves as friend of foe.
The one time I tried I won. But that is not true: I was minding my own business and the Mr. Mike Rentko attacked me unprovoked (except for shoeing intelectual initiative) and finally when he had abused me enough to tire himself out, he gave up. I won only objectively: I got to do what i wanted. But not because I stood up for myself. Maybe he had to go to the toilet or had to teach the class something before the bell rang. I should have stood up to him and challenged what he ws doing to me; that would have been social. I ws just a kid who had no self-esteem and just wanted to not be hurt more. Social should mean engaging with others, not being one of them except insofar as I might freely want to be, which latter is social adjustment.
Aside: There wa a lot wrong with my childrearing. but one thing I do not wish was different: Being deorived of the benefits of being the one and only, or as it is derogatively referred to by normalizing adolts: being "an only child". I think the adoltsideate that having siblings helps a child socially adjust to being a member of the herd, sorry, typo: family, and that thi is something good; it may be good for them. I needed to be recognized as special, as in Luke 2:41-52 in the Bible. Having siblings — well, suppose I had had a sister who was as gifted as me and my soul and sex mate? Not likely, of course, but I have an imagination, Rrose Sélavy and volume 3 of Robert Musil's novel "The man without qualities".
I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) never did nor ever will want to be socially adjusted: a 2-legged sheep in the herd of "normal" people. But when I was young I knew no alternative except social avoidance: if I avoid them hopefully they won't hurt me more. Now I have changed: I want to be social, i.e.: to engage with persons, but not necessarily to be sociable, i.e.: like they like people to be.
As I found Wilfred Bion said: All social customs are shared hallucinoeses aka social psychoses. I don't want to be psychotic, a waking sleepwalker (aka: "normal") like they are. As the woman who as a toddler was so cute that her father put her picture on every box of donuts he sold, said after she grew up:
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