I’m not going to teach my daughters “how a man ought to treat them.” I think these sorts of rules have a lot of downsides that are highly problematic.
When you erect barriers of entry, you restrict the pool of candidates. Teaching your kids to respond to cultural customs keeps their candidate pool to specific subcultures. People can have perceptions that paying for a date, pulling out chairs, or any other “rules” convey respect. However, this only translates to specific people and subcultures. Most people don’t hold these perceptions of respect. On top of this, it has them focused on rules and arbitrary standards more than intuition, individual perception of respect, and the values that are deeper for the individual.
I desire to raise my children in such a way that they have high self-respect, good social intuition, the capability of navigating social environments, a strong sense of justice, and values productive to their well being. Adding any artificial standards merely muddies the vastly more complex internal processes that is integrated into the person.
