> Throughout most of history, parenting was largely focused on equipping one's children to survive. The idea that one could impart specific qualities onto one's children is very new - until recently one instead struggled to impart religious rules onto them, with sufficient impact that they would continue to be followed.
That's a big pile of self-contradiction. Both survival skills and religious rules are specific qualities.
Skills are skills, and religious rules are behaviors or habits (depending). You can of course define 'quality' incredibly broadly if you want, but I meant it in the sense of 'personality characteristics' or 'character attributes'.
What is the objective distinction between each of the following: a skill, a behavior, a habit, a personality characteristic, and a character attribute?
Seems to me that all of them, when they describe anything that is objectively meaningful, refer to patterns of action adopted in particular circumstances. The only thing that changes over time seems to be the name applied to the patterns of action that parenting seeks to impose on children, not the actual substance that parenting is about creating desired patterns of action.
While I don't want to get bogged down into details of definitions, I'll take a swing at it:
A skill is a capability learned through experience which is wielded with intention.
A behavior is simply a way of acting - it could be conscious or unconscious, it could be enforced or intentional.
A habit is an unintentional behavior.
A personality characteristic and a character attribute are basically the same thing: unconscious ways of perceiving value and making decisions.
There are of course dozens of ways to define each of those terms, and I'm not interested in debating which of them is 'correct' - I am here primarily focusing on the distinction between instilling value-judgments via rituals and enforcement and attempting to control the self-perception or decision-making styles by behaving in artificial ways.
Describing them all as 'patterns of acting' is like calling all matter 'arrangements of chemicals'. It is of course accurate, and even in some cases useful, but you muddy very important distinctions by generalizing to that degree. In the case in point, the distinction lost is between valuations and perceptions.
I think the distinction you are making is illusory in the sense of the discussion -- you cannot influence outward action of the type you describe as skill, behavior, and habit without describing the internal processing you describe as "personality characteristics" and "character attributes", and you cannot observe "personality characteristics" or "character attributes" except as they manifest through skill, behavior, or habit.
That's a big pile of self-contradiction. Both survival skills and religious rules are specific qualities.