“How is the parent-child situation more complicated than the adult-adult one?”
Why parenthood can seem unexpectedly challenging even if you have thought about it beforehand.
anti-rational memes
The evolution of culture
How anti-rational memes sabotage culture, education and the Enlightenment.
“How do you raise a child to believe in freedom?”
This question is in effect asking “How do I mould and shape my child into a person who believes that individuals should be free from unwanted moulding and shaping by others?”
Fallibilism as a way of being and acting
People sometimes say explicitly that they are fallibilists, but inexplicably they are ‘saying’ that they are infallibilists. They say people are fallible and not omniscient, but they act as if they think people see the truth yet are wickedly choosing evil.
“Isn’t taking children seriously a risky experiment with children? Is there any evidence that it works? Has it been studied?”
If you were in the American slave-holding South in the days of slavery, and a supporter of slavery was demanding studies and ‘evidence’ to justify your argument for ending slavery, would that not strike you as a highly immoral stance?
“How can I drop the anti-rational part of my mind that interferes with me taking my children seriously?”
When you struggle against or take a coercive approach with another person, the natural response of that person is to defend their corner and fight back. The same happens inside our own minds. When you are fighting a part of your own mind, that causes the part you are trying to stamp out to dig in, to entrench itself, to defend its corner more vigorously.
“How can I become more aware of anti-rational parts in my mind?”
Drop the second guessing and scrutinising and judging. It is as toxic for us as that kind of thing is for our children. If you are not feeling free—free to think, free to be and free to act in accordance with your own ideas, your thinking flying free as a bird—it might be that you are seizing up your thinking with scrutiny and judgement, objectifying yourself as a parent.
“How can I overcome the antirational memes disabling my creativity, with my disabled creativity?!”
Although antirational memes as it were fight attempts to criticise an drop them, that does not mean that they are immutable. We can use our creativity to dissolve them. The situation is not as devoid of hope as “disabled creativity” makes it sound.
“If antirational memes are compelling me to coerce my children, what hope is there?!”
There is every reason for hope! And the fact that we have noticed that coercing our children is problematic is progress compared to how things were in the static society of the past. (And hey, maybe the fact that coercionists these days seem to feel more need to justify their advocacy of coercion is itself progress?)
“Why did my mother’s coercive words fly out of my mouth?!”
There are probably antirational memes operating when parents are feeling compelled to go along with the standard coercive approach with their children despite their doubts about its rightness.
“Why do parents coerce their children despite having been through it themselves?”
If parents knew that they could reject the conventional approach and it would not ruin their precious child’s life, many more would do so. If you cannot see that rejecting the status quo is not only right, but also will not have any disastrous unintended consequences, it feels safer to stick with the tradition of paternalistic coercion.
“If a parent has an aversion to something a child enjoys doing, how do you solve that problem?”
Such questions are in effect asking how we and our children can solve the problem created by us in effect having a visceral aversion to our children innocently enjoying themselves learning. Why is that the case, and when we are in such a state, what can we do about it?
“If coercion has impaired my ability to correct errors, is taking children seriously even possible?”
Focus on having fun playfully solving whatever problem you have in the present moment, and move forward from where you are now. Notice just how brilliant and amazing you are and how much you have achieved, alleged impairments notwithstanding!
“Why does it sometimes hurt to think about Taking Children Seriously?”
Life can be messy for all of us. Sometimes when we try to make improvements, part of our mind panics, and that can hurt.
How they feel about the coercion at the time
Can one be taking children seriously if one defines ‘a good relationship’ in a way that is independent of how the children feel about it at the time?
Reflections on self-sacrifice and fundamental assumptions
When you have decided that it is fundamentally unkind to coerce people, but an authority figure is pressuring you to coerce your child, calmly say ‘sorry but I don’t agree with your fundamental assumptions’.’ All you need to concentrate on is that this is a difference in fundamental assumptions. Both the authority figure and you want what is best, and are trying to be kind. You just see things differently, because you view children differently.
Can an emotion be wrong?
We all feel angry sometimes, but we should take great care not to act out the accompanying impulse to blame, shame, hurt or threaten the other person. We can admit to our child that we feel angry and try to make sure that the child knows that this is a fault in us and not in the child. It is vital not to make our child feel responsible for our anger. It is our own stuff, not caused by them, no matter how it seems to us in that moment.
Memes survive by being good at getting themselves replicated
The ideas that have been around for a long time have not survived because they are the best at helping their holders survive or prosper. They have survived because they are successful at getting themselves replicated.
The fittest memes—survival of the meme
Enacting an anti-rational meme causes other people (typically one’s children) to lose the ability to think critically about the behaviour in question, and to become unable to refrain from enacting the meme themselves.
Breaking the spiral of coercion
What can we do about coercive antirational memes passed down the generations?
Aunt Cynthia and cleanliness
What makes housework so grim is not the time it takes—it takes little time and can be done while conversing, listening to stuff, etc.—but all the other stuff—the resentment, the coercion, the battling, the idea that if you didn’t make the mess, you shouldn’t clean it up. Stop thinking in terms of trying to get others to do what you want them to do, and you will find that housework is not a problem.
The heavy societal pressure to coerce children
The societal pressure on parents to control and coerce their children can be immense.