kids pick up on the cognitive dissonance

of their parents' contradictory behaviors.

For instance, if your dad is always giving lip service to the ways in which girls have it so good in the world, how we're all equal and everything, all these great opportunities, and whatnot, and yet every day of your childhood you see him treating your mother like shit, guess which message we're going to really 'hear'? That's right, Watson. Brilliant. But somehow when we were little you thought you could slip all this stuff past us. You could get credit for being a 'nice guy' while in reality you were being an asshole, a real jerk.

Which is why I still have trouble sorting the assholes from the good ones even today: My perceptions got skewed as a kid. They intentionally scrambled my wiring with their bullshit parental (and cultural) propaganda.

Of course I don't really think he was conscious of all this, most people aren't. But if I'd had the ability to call him on it way back then? His ass would have been grass. And I think he knew it. So he did everything he could to keep me continually off-balance, doubting myself, so that he'd never be subjected to my instinctive truth-radar (which I think all kids possess and have beaten or warped out of them by the time they've reached about the age of 8 or 10, maybe even earlier).