All families are weird in their own ways, but my parents were weird in a perhaps more uncommon way than most: neither of them was, in any meaningful way, parented. The Man of Concrete's parents were alcoholic brawlers who spent most of his childhood in jail; he and his sister fell through the cracks and he, at the age of 8, had to become the parent of his 10 year old sister. Even younger than that, Mom's parents sold her into a life of domestic slavery and (I strongly suspect) sexual abuse. I mention this not to elicit sympathy or disgust, but to elicit curiosity about one fact: this means they came to parenting about as close toas it is possible to come. Parenting was entirely theoretical to them, something they'd heard about from other people, something they'd seen in movies, something they'd read about in books, but not something that either of them had experienced themselves. And so they made some ...... decisions about how they would parent their children, decisions that gave relatively-crazy me and my relatively-sane sister both interesting advantages that almost nobody else has, and also interesting disadvantages that almost nobody else can identify with. For now, though, I want to concentrate on one of the advantages. (Or, well, at leastconsider it an advantage.) It came up in conversation the other night when I finally got a chance to showandmost of one of my favorite documentaries of all time, Mark Achbar's and Jennifer Abbott's 2003And when we got to chapter (PDF) 11, "Basic Training," on the subject of the use of child psychologists as consultants to the advertising industry, specifically about training children to nag their parents into buying things that the parents don't want to buy, that I turned to, the only person in the room who had actually raised children that age. And in the course of that conversation, I was very vividly reminded of just how special The Man of Concrete really was, because I have yet to meet anybody else who was parented in the same way on this exact issue.You see, it started with one flatly simple rule: there was only one 100% certain and reliable way for either my sister or myself to flatly guarantee that we would not get something, and that was to ask for it more than once. Period. And Dad made very nearly absolutely 100% certain that there were to be no exceptions to this. We were raised from a very early age to understand that we were going to be held to a higher standard than inferior people were. We were told that there are people who nag other people into giving them their way -- bad people. Inferior people. People too stupid to win their argument any other way. People not like me and my sister. And, we were told, there are people who give in when they're nagged, who give people what they want against their will, coerced by the nagging -- bad people. Inferior people. People too stupid to insist that an argument be rational instead of merely repeated, people too weak willed to stand up for themselves, people so averse to pain that they'd set themselves up for future blackmail-by-nagging by setting a bad precedent, by giving in. People not like our parents.Twice, exactly twice, per year we were allowed to ask for things: we were allowed to ask for one reasonably-priced item for our birthdays, and we were allowed to ask for a list of a certain number of things (I forget how many) plus a short list of alternates or fall-back choices for Christmas. We were asked what we wanted for our birthdays about a month out. We were asked what we wanted for Christmas when the Sears "Wish Book" Christmas toy-advertising circular came out. Any other time? We learned, and learned the hard way, that it wasn't even smart to ask for somethinglet alone twice. My parents were quite generous people (considering the gaping top-secret hole in the budget they had), and not just to my sister and to me but to everybody in their lives. But you never, ever got what you nagged for, and were pretty unlikely to get things you just asked for if they thought that you were trying to emotionally manipulate them into buying it.Instead, we were given an allowance, a moderately generous allowance by the standard of the working-class neighborhood we lived in, and told that that was the family's maximum possible affordable budget for indulgences for each of us: all of our toys except birthday and Christmas toys, all of our candy except Christmas candy, had to come out of that money. We could spend it however we wanted, but we both learned, very early (I want to say no later than age 5) and very thoroughly, that when it was gone, there just plain was no more.(In later years, that rule very slightly relaxed, but only slightly: we were allowed to borrow against future allowances. But only under very narrow circumstances: we had to demonstrate, with documentation, that we needed the money now because what we wanted to buy was only going to be available for a limited time or because the price was going to go up between now and when we could save up the money. And until we'd paid off those loans, there just plain was no allowance. The only way we could get money above what was budgeted for allowance was by doing very specific chores, and the only chores that counted towards that were chores that my parents were going to have to pay someone else to do. Failing that, it was up to us to do chores for any other family who was willing to pay us. To get more money that was budgeted to us, we had to either save the family money or we had to bring money in from outside the family. Period. No exceptions. Not for any reason. Not at any age.)I also remember quite clearly that the first time my sister or I bought something based on a TV ad and it sucked, it was treated as a teachable moment. The first time I complained that the toy I bought wasn't nearly as cool as the TV made it look, a Very Big Deal was made out of it, both parents involved, to make 100% sure that this stayed memorable to me, and it still is 40+ years later. They both wanted me to see, and understand, and remember, two very important things. First of all, they wanted me to understand what personal failing, what personal sin I had committed: I had let the TV nag me into buying it. They reminded me just how many times I'd seen that commercial before I bought the toy, how I hadn't bought the toy just because I saw it and thought it was cool, but because somebody else had yelled and played manipulative emotional tricks on me until my resistance was worn down. I was told not to feel too bad for falling for it this once, since I was only a kid and some lessons you have to learn the hard way, but to always remember from now on: this is what happens when you let someone nag you into doing something, you always regret giving in.And secondly, and just as importantly, they made me repeat back the implied and explicit claims that the commercials had made for this particular toy, what the commercial had lead me to believe that the toy would do for me. And then they asked me, in minute and extensive detail, claim by claim, whether or not the toy had delivered on its promises. I remember becoming very emotionally agitated, I remember really intense cognitive dissonance, I remember really wanting to blame myself for obviously having remembered the TV commercial wrong, and then I finally broke through: "you mean theyto me?" Yes, Brad, both of them said, in a voice that brooked no contradiction and in a tone that made it clear that what they were telling me wasfor me to remember: people who are trying to sell you things willto you. I remember asking them, "How can they get away with that? I get in trouble when I get caught telling a lie! Why don't they?" Four decades later, after two and a half decades of studying business law, consumer protection law, and free speech law, I still think that that's an interesting question. But the sense of personal betrayal was intense and lasting.I learned, over the decades since then, that if you ask a salesman, in any venue, "does your product do (fill in the blank)?" he or she answers the question 100% truthfully -- but not the question you asked. The question they hear is, "do you want me to buy your product?" and the answer to that question is always yes. It's just like when you catch a child with their hand in the cookie jar and ask them, with the crumbs still on their fingers, if they stole a cookie. They always answer truthfully the question that they hear: "do you want to be punished?"These were emotionally painful lessons. When my sister got old enough to get her own allowance and I saw her falling for TV commercials, I tried to spare her this pain. But no, my parents were right: you can't be told these things. You have to learn them yourself. But once I had that taste of it, Dad also regularly went way out of his way to remind me that (in particular)Television advertising is expensive. That cost gets built into the product's price tag. Which absolutely guarantees that somewhere out there, and your friends will probably tell you where if you ask, and if not, it's up to you to do the research and find it: somewhere out there is someone who sells a product that's just as good, and it costs half as much, because they're not spending untold millions of dollars per year on TV advertising. Only inferior people let themselves get nagged and otherwise fooled into paying twice as much for the same product.(He also unambiguously felt the same way about enclosed shopping malls, pointing out quite accurately that mall rent is twice what strip-mall rent or free-standing store rent is, and you pay the difference there, too. I've run into rare exceptions to this, chains where the national headquarters sets the same price for both free-standing stores and mall stores, but it was still a good rule of thumb.)Hewanted me to understand, and reminded me often, that there areany gooddeals on television. Any time I brought one up, whether some mutual fund or brokerage, or some franchise deal, or whatever, Dad would invariably ask two questions. "First of all, Brad, why would they tellThey don't know you. They don't care if you make any money or not. If they knew of a good deal, they'd tell their friends; they sure as heck wouldn't tell you. And secondly, Brad, if it's such a smart thing to invest money in? Why are they investingmoney in TV ads instead of in that?"I've had it explained to me, in painstaking detail by several people who care about me, that the anti-nagging indoctrination my sister and I received as children isthat it produces behavior in us that no corporation or its employees know how to deal with, behavior that strikes them as anti-social, defiant, self-harming, and counter-productive. And it probably does. But I'll say this: it also made us bothhard to cheat or to rob. I think this'd be a much better world if more people had grown up with parents as relentlessly and ruthlessly anti-nagging as the Man of Concrete and his wife were, and I constantly feel sorry for people who fall for scam after scam because their parents didn't teach them the real, important, facts of life.