It's a matter of right and wrong

This article by Michael Medved, via Townhall.com, really sums up the The Core Of Conservatism for me, very well. Medved says it all boils down to making distinctions, and enforcing consequences.

"Above all, conservatives feel impelled to make clear distinctions between right and wrong.

We reject all notions of moral relativism. Though we’re obviously imperfect, and (like all human beings) often fail to do the right thing, we try to draw lines between the beneficial and the dysfunctional, between productive and destructive.

In policy as well as personal life, we seek to differentiate between good and bad behavior, and we want all of society (not just government) to encourage the good and discourage the bad.

In other words, conservatives insist on making distinctions, giving the individual broad latitude to choose, and then recognizing that choices must carry consequences.

A decent society supports and rewards good choices and discourages bad ones."

The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids -- New York Magazine

How Not To Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of Praise is about how the self-esteem movement has come full circle, to the realization that you can ruin your kids with the wrong kind of praise.

Since the 1969 publication of The Psychology of Self-Esteem, in which Nathaniel Branden opined that self-esteem was the single most important facet of a person, the belief that one must do whatever he can to achieve positive self-esteem has become a movement with broad societal effects. Anything potentially damaging to kids’ self-esteem was axed. Competitions were frowned upon. Soccer coaches stopped counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise.

...From 1970 to 2000, there were over 15,000 scholarly articles written on self-esteem and its relationship to everything—from sex to career advancement. But results were often contradictory or inconclusive. So in 2003 the Association for Psychological Science asked Dr. Roy Baumeister, then a leading proponent of self-esteem, to review this literature. His team concluded that self-esteem was polluted with flawed science. Only 200 of those 15,000 studies met their rigorous standards.

After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”

via New York Magazine

A new name for rebellion

According to certain psychologists, if you instinctively resist being told what to do, being deprived of complete freedom of choice, and want to do the opposite of what your mother/wife/boss suggests, you're not being rebellious, you're "reactant."

Tanya Chartrand and Gavan Fitzsimons had just gotten married when they came to Duke University as psychology professors. Then Tanya noticed that Gavan had a really annoying habit. Whenever she'd ask him for help around the house, he would do exactly the opposite. What's more, he didn't even seem to know he was doing it.
So they designed a formal research study. And for the first time, they proved that some people (like Gavan), unconsciously act in certain ways simply to avoid doing what their significant others want them to do. They call it 'reactance'.

Listen to "You're not listening" via The Story from American Public Media.