Why Low IQ, Low Self-Esteem People Shouldn’t Reproduce
I have been a nervous, socially awkward, lacking-in-confidence, cowardly person all of my life. I am now in my mid-fifties; and though I can say that I have made some progress in overcoming my psychological hangups, I still have work to do; and, unfortunately, the description of my personality as detailed in the first sentence of this paragraph is still, to some degree, a part of my programming and who I am.
In the middle of 2021 I started contemplating why it is that my personality is such a mess. I have now come to understand the dynamic of my early childhood development and how it has affected me all my life; and that is what I wish to discuss here.
When people coddle, over comfort, over protect, baby talk, and fawn over babies, toddlers, and small children, they intimate to them the idea that the world is a great place where everyone cares about them, thinks they’re amazing, and are supposed to treat them as such – a belief which is not real. When these deceived children have to actually see the world as it really is (indifferent to them at best), they become confused and go into a state of shock. Having to face the fact that the world does not care for them as they were tacitly taught it should, they have trouble coping with this newly-discovered reality and develop psychological issues.
I was born to a mother who, even to this day, believes in coddling babies, toddlers, and small children. She has always talked to little people in a somewhat high-pitched, gentle, delicate, goofy manner – in other words, baby talk. She treats her great grandson Elliot with kid gloves and engages him with that stupid baby talk nonsense when my brother brings him to visit her. Stated differently, she engages in small child worship and fawns over them.
This is exactly what happened to me. My mother convinced me that the way she treated me was how everyone was supposed to treat me. That is, people were supposed to think I was awesome, be gentle, be loving, and fawn over me.
That false view of reality worked for me for the first five years of my life, and then something major happened: I began the public school era of my life. I then had to face a newly-discovered, previously-never-considered, strange reality which was that my first grade public school peers and teacher didn’t particularly give a damn about me; and it was downhill from there.
The way I reacted to this foreign, new world in which I was not anything special and was not considered worthy of others’ fawning was to panic. I absolutely did not know how relate to this new state of affairs, so I did what people often do in such circumstances; and that was to become scared and nervous.
This nervous, anxious state of being which is caused by babying, coddling parents we now know as separation anxiety. Unfortunately, the staff at the elementary school I attended and my first grade teacher in particular had apparently never heard of separation anxiety; and their method of dealing with nervous, scared children was to yell at them and spank them which only served to make matters worse for me.
Being scared and nervous, crying, and wetting my pants – these behaviors were common for me. The reaction of my teacher was anger as she apparently saw my behavior as somehow threatening to her. The reaction of my peers was ridicule and laughter as they saw a vulnerable target which could be used as a means of enhancing their own levels of existential value.
This dynamic being my reality, I became less self-confident and developed an inferiority complex. I was unable to develop and hone social interaction skills with my peers. As it was obvious that I was awkward, unsure of myself, and scared, my public school peers came to think of me as backward, nerdy, and stupid. I was made fun of and picked on. When my name came up in conversations, there was probably laughter involved. I did poorly in school and made bad grades. In a desperate attempt to gain some measure of worth, I behaved in goofy, laughable ways which was the result of not having any sense of proper social skills and accomplished nothing more than to reinforce my peers’ belief that I was a joke.
Both this mindset and the behaviors it fostered accompanied me throughout all of my public school years and are still with me to this day to some degree. I am still uncomfortable in small group settings and with certain individuals in certain circumstances. Even now, people pick up on my “vibe” and treat me as though I am odd. I can’t really blame them: They are only reacting to what they see. I have no sense of assertiveness and panic if involved in some sort of altercation with others.
Having gained an understanding of the circumstances that led to my lifelong psychological issues, I found myself pondering another question: Why would my mother engage in this coddling, fawning, babying behavior toward me in the first place? Well, the answer is a fairly simple one: She herself, for reasons I am unaware of, has suffered all of her life from a sense of inferiority and self-doubt; and her treatment of babies, toddlers, and small children has been an attempt to secure love and acceptance from them – love and acceptance she feels she has been unable to get from others. In other words, her overenthusiastic displays of affection for little people are a bribe. Her abnormal treatment of small children is her way of saying to them, “I’ll show you love and acceptance, if you’ll love and accept me.” Back in the summer of 2021, she and I were sitting on the deck behind my house (my mother lives with me now, as she is elderly and broke down); and she said something really telling. In regard to her two-year-old great grandson, she said, “I wish that baby was over here to love on me.” That statement speaks volumes.
I could have done so much better for myself had I not been hindered by these psychological hangups. I am not a dumb person; I have an above-average IQ. I don’t really know what to do about all of this. I have considered seeing a counselor; but I’m not exactly sure what I expect a counselor to do about me and my issues. Perhaps just getting an outside, objective opinion about all this would be helpful. I don’t know.
I guess the point of this post is two-fold: (1) Perhaps it is a form of self-therapy, and (2) To state that low IQ, low self-esteem people have no business reproducing. Such people only make a mess of things for their children.
I'm just a regular guy who likes to write about that which I find interesting. I am keeping my identity undisclosed because I am a small business owner and am well known in the community I serve.
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