‘Rotten Legacy’ and Morality in Little one-Rearing » PopMatters
In 2018, I confronted significantly difficult conditions in my skilled and private life—challenges whose decision required prayer, reflection, and conversations with a number of trusted people. Seeing the arrival of my son and first little one was one other issue that knowledgeable how I made a decision to navigate these conditions. Netflix’s 2025 drama Rotten Legacy (Legado) has stirred these reminiscences.
With a new child in my arms, I imagined a future dialog with my son round a scenario characterised by one or each of the identical ideas underlying my present scenario. What would I say when he asks me for recommendation? If I give him recommendation, would it not be legitimized by my having upheld stated ideas up to now? These are legacy-related questions raised by Rotten Legacy.
[Spoilers ahead.] Created by Pablo Alén, Briexo Corral, and Carlos Montero, some view Rotten Legacy as Spain’s reply to Jesse Armstrong’s Succession (2018-2023). The present follows media mogul Federico Seligman (performed by Jose Coronado), who, after efficiently getting back from an illness-related hiatus, tries to salvage his firm, El Baltico’s legacy, which he considers in jeopardy by his grownup youngsters. They’re performed by Belén Cuesta (Yolanda), Maria Morera (Lara), Diego Martín (Andrés), and Natalia Huarte (Guadalupe).
…properly, as a result of I’m a father. And being a father doesn’t ever include its personal set of instructions. – Federico Seligman, Rotten Legacy
Whereas El Baltico’s legacy is entrance and middle all through the collection, I’m within the questions Rotten Legacy raises concerning the ethical, moral, and normative legacies folks construct, alter, and in the end depart for others. Legacy questions regarding ethical understanding raised within the collection are a useful context for analyzing similarities and variations between socialization and constructivist approaches to ethical growth. I examine these approaches in my developmental psychology and ethical growth lessons.
Various Forms of Legacies
Some caveats are so as. First, I distinguish between materials (e.g., cash, bodily buildings, and so on.) and immaterial (e.g., time, cash, values, norms) legacies, and focus completely on the latter. Second, whereas legacies often consult with what somebody who has died up to now has left behind for others within the current, I strategy legacies in a broader sense, each when it comes to the people behind stated legacies (e.g., contemplating what legacies are being constructed, elaborated, and altered in actual time) and the affect of these legacies on those that “obtain” them (e.g., how a given legacy impacts an individual within the current will subsequently have an effect on what that individual does and doubtlessly leaves behind sooner or later, and so on.).
Third, “recipients” of legacies might be construed broadly, starting from slender (youngsters and household) to large (i.e., the subsequent technology). Whereas the previous is likely to be extra readily understood on a sensible stage, given the significance of households within the human story, social scientists acknowledge the latter’s significance, with Psychologist Erik Erikson’s center maturity psychosocial stage of Generativity vs. Stagnation being a notable instance.
Lastly, given the difficulties in making use of social science theories to well-liked tradition, the transient discussions of socialization and constructivist approaches depend on broad characterizations. Characterizations that don’t do justice to their areas of settlement.
Relating to Rotten Legacy, I centered on Federico’s relationships along with his grownup youngsters (the extra slender conception of legacy), significantly as they inform what they seem to know about what he expects of them (the immaterial dimensions of legacies). I additionally centered on how the grownup lives his youngsters created for themselves have been possible tied to the social contexts they grew up in, which Federico was largely chargeable for (how the previous informs the current). How may ethical growth inform our understanding of such dynamics?
Rotten Legacy’s Socialization Strategy
You wanna let your youngsters take flight, and on the similar time cease them from making errors. – Federico Seligman
One technique to interpret the collection’ important occasions is thru Federico. His character has viewers study his actions as a father and media mogul, his relationships along with his youngsters, and the way he teaches them proper and unsuitable, simply and unjust, and so forth. His actions, in addition to his phrases, signify what’s necessary and worthy of modeling or adopting.
This interpretation of legacy is in step with a socialization strategy to youngsters’s ethical growth. Though the strategy’s basic assumptions concerning the position of youngsters and the efficacy of fogeys are being up to date attributable to new proof, a key function of socialization views is the sturdy position mother and father (and in different contexts, different particular adults) play in youngsters’s ethical growth.
From this angle, then, understanding the important thing legacy questions raised by Rotten Legacy possible begins with contemplating why his youngsters search their father’s approval within the methods they do, together with angering him in the way in which they do. Nonetheless how far will they go of their ethical actions to guard El Baltico, in any respect prices?
Additionally necessary is the extent to which Federico is complicit. He comes to a decision that haunts him and impacts his youngsters all through Rotten Legacy. This characterizes a sort of “parenting context” inside his family, whereby he values the corporate and its success in such a manner that it “bleeds into” how he mother and father, what he rewards and punishes, and the conversations he has along with his youngsters about what’s necessary in life, and so forth.
Viewing Rotten Legacy Through a Constructivist Perspective
You need them to be good folks, however you don’t need them to get walked throughout both. – Federico Seligman
The socialization perspective views the parent-child socialization context in co-constructive phrases (the place mother and father and kids co-construct pointers and norms to control the kid’s conduct). Nevertheless, some socialization students argue for a extra sturdy altering of the strategy’s basic assumptions alongside these and associated strains, a constructivist perspective on ethical growth suggests a special focus.
In Rotten Legacy, the influences on the kids’s ethical understanding are heterogeneous. Their reflective, evaluative, and meaning-making capacities recommend that Yolanda, Lara, Andrés, and Guadalupe, not Federico, ought to take middle stage. That is knowledgeable by and influential inside many social interactions between individuals (e.g., friends, siblings, and fogeys/caregivers) and inside individuals between contexts (e.g., siblings at residence versus college).
A deep dive into how a constructive perspective on ethical growth differs from a socialization one when each account for the position of co-construction and share meaning-making is past the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say the approaches differ in diploma and type.
A constructivist place towards legacy tends to give attention to many components, together with peer and sibling interactions, the standards youngsters use to differentiate between social guidelines and norms, the objectives inside their households and broader cultures, and whether or not they need to comply or problem these guidelines. Kids attempt to navigate conditions involving competing objectives/ concerns, ambiguous objectives/ concerns, and conflicting messages and directives from completely different adults (e.g., as when a classroom rule enforced by a instructor might battle with that of a mother or father/caregiver). The sturdy and various methods youngsters mirror on and (re)think about their actions bear on the ethical therapy of others and the consequences of these actions on others.
One potential implication of this strategy for understanding key occasions in Rotten Legacy is that the “legacy” the kids should navigate as they develop throughout childhood, adolescence, and maturity is discovered of their social worlds, which incorporates Federico but in addition others and conditions. Furthermore, to the extent they are often understood holistically, these social worlds usually are not static, inalterable modes of affect the place messages are communicated to Yolanda, Lara, Andrés, and Guadalupe. It’s as much as them to simply accept or reject them.
As lively brokers establishing their understanding of the world by way of quite a lot of informational, affective, and behavioral sources, they’re able to remodeling the that means of values, norms, pointers, interactions, relationships, they interact with by way of their relationships with others and others themselves with their concepts, actions, beliefs, and so on. This implies, for example, that their ethical understanding of their father (when it comes to their relationships with him and his actions associated to the corporate), and their beliefs about what might be morally justified to protect the corporate, have dynamic and multifaceted influences that can not be diminished to their relationships with Federico or anybody else.
It additionally implies that inside varied contexts, their social interactions, reflections, and ethical judgments had (as youngsters and adolescents) and have (as adults) the potential to affect Federico’s selections and people inside his social world in ways in which may lead him to alter. His try to restore sure elements of his relationships along with his youngsters alters how they could bear in mind him, in the end making amends for a number of the “rotten” elements of his legacy.
Rotten Legacy and Morality
Latest efforts in ethical growth scholarship have tried to bridge some elements of socialization and constructivist approaches to ethical growth. Each approaches discover the complicated methods folks affect and are influenced by others, a phenomenon Rotten Legacy explores in thought-provoking methods.
Whether or not one is inclined to aspect with one strategy over the opposite or stay impartial, as people who care about, for, and alongside others, questions associated to legacy will ultimately animate a few of our actions within the ethical area. Integrating these questions into our selections will hopefully make us and people round us higher off in the long term.
Works Cited
Gibbs, John C. Ethical Improvement and Actuality: Past the Theories of Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt. Fourth Version. Cambridge College Press. 2019.
Grusec, Joan E. “Ethical Improvement from a Socialization Perspective”. In Handbook of Ethical Improvement, third Version. Edited by Melanie Killen and Judith G. Smetana. Routledge. 2023.
Kuczynski, Leon, and Jan De Mol. Dialectical fashions of socialization. In Principle and Technique, edited by Willis. F. Overton and Peter. C. M. Molenaar. Quantity 1 of the Handbook of Little one Psychology and Developmental Science, seventh Version. Wiley. 2015.
Recchia, Holly, and Wainryb, Cecilia. The Position of Conversations in Ethical Improvement. In Handbook of Ethical Improvement, third Version, edited by Melanie Killen and Judith G. Smetana. Routledge. 2023.
Smetana, Judith G., and Yoo, Ha Na. Improvement and Variations in Ethical and Social-Typical Judgments: A Social Area Principle Strategy. In Handbook of Ethical Improvement, third Version, edited by Melanie Killen and Judith G. Smetana. Routledge. 2023.
Slater, Charles L. Generativity versus Stagnation: An Elaboration of Erikson’s Grownup Stage of Human Improvement. Journal of Grownup Improvement, Vol. 10. October 2003.