Reader question:
In this newspaper headline – The Trouble with Tough Love – what's tough love?
My comments:
Tough love is the harsh measures parents sometimes take in disciplining children. For example, some parents administer beatings to a kid who comes back from school with a poor report card. Others stand the child in the corner facing the wall for hours as punishment...
Alright, no more bad examples. But these terrible things are done by parents in the name of love. Parents fear that lack of discipline will spoil their children in the long run. A lot of loving parents, hence, mete out tough love on children and sometimes do it with a this-is-going-to-hurt-me-more-than-it's-going-to-hurt-you attitude. In Chinese, that translates to the age old 打是亲,骂是爱 – age old yet second-class behavior nevertheless. As babies learn to walk, run and learn adults' ways, mistakes are bound to be made. So children, if you ask me, could all use a little unconditional love from ma and pa no matter what good/bad they've done.
It's just a matter of parents not knowing better, I think, but you get the point about tough love, the term.
The term is used in other situations as well, such as in economics. For instance, Noam Chomsky, in Propaganda and Control of the Public Mind, I think, likens many US pro-capital policies to "tough love" – "love for the rich, tough for everyone else".
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