Children of delinquent parents often become ethical by learning what not to do.

Evidence

Today, most of my friends who aren’t dead or in prison can’t believe how ethical a young woman my daughter has grown into despite such poor examples set in her childhood. I tell them bad behavior skips a generation, and it was because I was a delinquent that my kid turned out so good. Or maybe I just got lucky and my daughter learned what not to do because of the poor examples we set. — Dolores DeLuce, Blow Jobs, 66

Categorization

• XREF: The notion of the next generation moralizing against the prior connects to Things Fall Apart’s generation-gap dynamic and generational reversal. — connects to: Learning from below requires mutual ethical responding with a compromised teacher — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2217

Broader Connections

• Learning from below requires mutual ethical responding with a compromised teacher #expands (0.75) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2217