"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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Wnen my warders (aka: parents) enrolled me in St. Paul's Illiberal Day Carcel for Pubsecent Male Virgins except-for-omerta-sanitary-services-for-jocks in 7th grade, 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 (remember: this was after 1863 in USA!) decided to put me back half a year, for my Social adjustment.

I did not need to be socially adjusted, i.e., to have my spirit broken, but I desparately needed social support: nurturing to help my spirit flourish. The latter was not on the agenda.

Things came to head maybe only three times:

1. In 7th grade, The Battle of Handwriting. I did not want a fight, but the English teach — I have no idea what went on in that man's head or didn't, but he did. Had he won I would probably have lost the will to fight; having won, I gained it.
2. The Battle of the Obscene Word in winter's condensation on a school transportant ion vehicle's window and Mr .Middleton's prig secretary saw it and was offended. I refused to give them a "show trial confession" and they eventually tiredof trying to get it out of me.
3. When I captioned a picture in the class yearbook of their prize tackle football team: "We are the hollow men". I was right; they were wrong. They held this inquisitorial proceeding at lunch time but went away hungry.

Each time they tried to crush me but since I refused to help them hurt me, they eventually apparently decided i[t] wasn't worth the effort. And, in fact, only in case #2 was I wrong even by their own metrics.

The final solution

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 the 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 stop it.

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 eans necessary. But equally imperative: In no way to try to influnce what the child thinks of 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).

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, effectiely, a robot. "Now, do you love your mother, child?" "Yes, mommy💗, I love💗 you💗 with all💗 my💗 heart💗."

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?..."

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 beady-eyed Prude.

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