Raising Children is an Act of Philosophy
It should not surprise Americans that in a culture where we benevolently dictate to our children, our government benevolently dictates to us. If we don’t want our government to be a benevolent dictatorship, our households cannot be benevolent dictatorships. If we want to live in a more free society, our households must change.
Human beings can relate to one another with either mutual respect and freedom or mutual attempts to control and force.
Human beings can relate to one another with either mutual respect and freedom or mutual attempts to control and force. Though Americans idealize the former, almost all of us were all raised with the latter. This makes it hard for us to imagine any other way to parent.
Most books I have read on parenting start with the premise: children regularly have to be restrained from doing what they want to do and forced to do something else. They have to be put to bed and made to wash.
We have been offered this dichotomy our entire lives: Either we control our children, or they live lives of chaos. Either we make our kids go to bed and wash, or they won’t. But this choice we have been offered is a trick. This is not the choice.
Similarly, most parenting books advise parents to be warm but authoritative and cite a scientific study that was done in which four types of parents were studied—warmly authoritative, coldly authoritative, warmly permissive, and coldly permissive. If those are the only choices, then by all means, I agree that parents should be warmly authoritative. But again, the choice is a trick. What we are being offered is a false dichotomy, a dichotomy that only makes sense as long as we are stuck in what I call the “operating system of control and force.”
If a study were done on whether people prefer to exploit or be exploited in trade, proponents of Capitalism would see right through it. We would explain the operating system of freedom and respect in which we trade value for value, in which we would neither exploit nor be exploited in a trade.
But this explanation would be incomprehensible to those who operate in the paradigm of control, in which employers and employees are always adversaries trying to take advantage of one another. No matter how hard we try to explain that trade can be win-win, people who operate in the paradigm of control can only see things on the spectrum of control—either you are exploiting me, or I am exploiting you; either I sacrifice myself to others, or they sacrifice themselves to me.
When my son was two years old people kept asking me, “Is he defiant yet?” This is a question that would only make sense to someone who operates in the control paradigm. I don’t operate there, so I would say something like, “To be defiant, one must have someone to defy. There must be a ruler and a subject, someone in control and someone being controlled. I don’t relate to my son in that way.”
“Ah,” the people would reply, smiling sadly at me, “you’re permissive. You just let your son do whatever he wants!” If I am not authoritative, I must be permissive; if I’m not the master, I must be the slave. This is the same false dichotomy. It’s as if there are two operating systems, and to live in one negates the existence of the other.
The choice isn’t control or chaos. The choice, in human relationships, does not change based on the age of the people involved. The choice is: mutual respect or mutual attempts to control. Mutual respect is the other way to parent.
In my relationship with my son, I see myself as an ambassador for this fabulous place, Galt’s Gulch.
In my relationship with my son, I see myself as an ambassador for this fabulous place I live in, Galt’s Gulch, and I see my son as a distinguished visitor from a far-off land who does not yet understand my customs. It is my goal to help him thrive in my land, but not at the point of a gun. Instead, I strive to respect him, to understand his strange culture, and to show him how to respect me in my strange culture. When we run into a situation in which one of us is doing something that bothers the other—perhaps he wants to throw beans on the floor, and I don’t want him to, or I want to leave the park, and he doesn’t want to—I think some version of: “This is what I want; this is what my distinguished houseguest wants; what can we do to get both of our needs met in this situation?”
Thinking about our relationship in this way means we make no attempts to control or manipulate one another; there is no fear, resentment, obfuscation, or subterfuge. There is no “power struggle,” just two people relating to one another with presence, visibility, accurate information, honesty, and integrity.
Relating to children in this way can be extremely difficult at first as we must learn a way of relating to children for which we have had no models, a way of relating to children that contradicts everything we have been socialized to believe.
The good news is that if we take the time to learn this way of relating to children, it makes parenting much easier in the long run. This has been my experience. I have never made my son go to bed or wash, yet he does both of those things every day (and if he didn’t want to one day, it would not be an issue). Rue Kream wrote:
You say you ‘have to’ pick him up and take him [to the bath]. I like to question my have to-s, especially when they are leading to unhappiness for my children. What would happen if you didn’t pick him up and take him? What would happen if he didn’t take a bath that night? What message is he getting from being picked up and put somewhere he doesn’t want to be? Is it truly more important that he take a bath than it is for the two of you to build a respectful relationship?
I think the best way to clarify these ideas is with concrete examples. I will start with a newborn baby because some people can imagine how they would treat older children with respect, but it is very hard for them to understand how one could show respect to a lump.
These scenarios involve real interactions I had with my son, or with those children for whom I cared, and were inspired by the writings of Magda Gerber, Emmi Pickler, Ellyn Satter, and Kathleen Kendall-Tackett.
Scenario 1: A newborn baby and how he is fed
Mom A sees it as her job to get food into her baby, so she brings her baby to her breast, tickles his cheek to trigger his mouth-opening reflex, and puts her breast in his mouth.
Mom B, the mom I propose, does not think it would be respectful to just put something in someone’s mouth, even a quadriplegic’s. She brings her baby to her breast so that her nipple is near his nose and mouth and he can smell what she is offering. If he wants to nurse, he can open his mouth and do so.
Scenario 2: A newborn baby and when he is fed
Mom A believes that to be a Good Mom she is supposed to feed her baby every two hours. She has a handy little device that goes off every two hours, so she knows it’s time to feed the baby. If he acts hungry before the two hours is up, she distracts him so that he learns to wait two hours.
Mom B thinks refusing to feed her distinguished visitor, when she is capable of accommodating him, is disrespectful, so she feeds her baby when he’s hungry. Maybe it’s been one hour; maybe it’s been three.
Assuming these are interaction patterns, and not single events, here is an analysis of what has been learned:
Baby B is responsible for his eating: his mind is learning to connect the sensation of hunger with the solution—food. He must learn to recognize the sensation of hunger and communicate it to his mother. He has found a benevolent universe and already sees himself as a capable actor in it.
Baby A has food shoved into his mouth whether he wants it or not, and it will be done when the clock says, whether he is hungry or not. In his mind, the connection between hunger and food has not been made. Likewise he has learned nothing about communication or self-assertion, except that there is no point since it doesn’t work. This baby will oscillate between feelings of frustration and anger as he fails repeatedly to communicate to his mother, and passive resignation as he tries to accept the universe that he has found.
For the moms: Mom B is getting in tune with her baby. Mom A is getting in tune with her alarm clock—and whether she means to or not—showing her baby who is in control. It’s not him. It’s also not her. It’s the alarm clock and the script it represents. She is just doing what she has been told.
Scenario 3: A teething one-year-old bites his mom while nursing
Mom A believes it is her job to teach her child not to bite people. When he bites her she gives him a disapproving look, and says “Bad boy! No Biting!” Then she picks him up and puts him in time out for one minute, because that’s how long time outs are when you are one year old.
Mom B first responds authentically to what happened. She says, “Ow! You hurt me!” She looks her baby in the eye, communicating her pain, and says, “Please don’t bite me, but,” and she looks around and grabs a nearby doll, “you want to bite. Here is something you can bite. It won’t hurt the doll.”
Analysis:
Baby A has learned that he is bad, that his desire—to bite—is bad. He has learned that some people get to control others, that he is not the one in control, and that he has to please those who are in control or he will suffer. He has learned that not only should he not want what he wants, trying to get what he wants could lead to pain.
Baby B has learned that it is okay for him to want what he wants. He wants to bite, and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with him; there’s no shame. On the contrary his mother supports his desire to learn what he wants to learn, and she will help him get those needs met in a way that also works for her.
Scenario 4: Eating dinner with a four-year-old
Mom A believes it is her job to get food into her child, especially vegetables. In order to accomplish this goal she does a variety of things: begging him to take one more bite, bribing him with desert, making macaroni and cheese every night because he won’t eat anything else, and making vegetable purees and sneaking them into his macaroni and cheese.
Mom B knows she wants to eat dinner and shares whatever she makes for herself with her child, just as she has since he was a baby. Tonight she makes bratwurst, sauerkraut, and mashed potatoes. What her child decides to do at this point is his business. She talks to him during dinner; she never even looks at his plate.
Analysis:
Child A has learned that he has to eat whether he is hungry or not. He has been taught not to listen to his body, to ignore his own perceptions of reality. He has been taught that sometimes you have to be sneaky to make people do what you want. He has learned that he does have some power in his relationship with his mom—the power to refuse food. He enjoys using that to get a little revenge on her.
Child B has been in charge of his eating since he was a baby. He has been eating whatever his mom makes since he was a baby. Sometime he eats it, sometimes he doesn’t. Especially if it’s a new food, sometimes he doesn’t even taste it. He eats vegetables when he wants to, but there has never been any pressure or guilt. He has no guilt associated with food! Eating is all his deal, his responsibility. He has learned that he is capable of taking care of himself in this way. He has learned to trust his body to tell him how much to eat, that his perceptions of reality are valid. He knows that his body belongs to him.
For me, the easiest part of moving into the system of respect was relating to my son as a foreign dignitary. The hardest part was learning how to deal with my son’s strong emotions.
All children (and adults) experience very strong emotions. Communicating in a respectful way with children (and adults) who are feeling strong emotions is a learned skill. Failing to learn this skill is the main reason why many parents who want to have respectful relationships with their children revert to various control tactics. In fact, I don’t think having a mutually respectful relationship with children is even possible if the adult does not learn this skill.
Here is the wonderful problem with my parenting theory: we cannot give our children what we don’t have—psychological economics! That means that this skill we must learn starts with us, the adults. It starts with how we think about our own strong emotions.
Current American socialization involves many ideas about emotions that are extremely destructive, one of them is the idea of “emotional control.” Since most people begin with the assumption that emotions are primary, they seek ways to control and influence their emotional states. But our emotions let us know how we are doing; they help point us in the right direction; they let us know what is working and what needs our attention. Our strong emotions tell us: pay attention to this! If we listen, our emotions can be great aids in the pursuit of our values. But attempting to manipulate them, like attempting to command what we see or hear, is just refusing to acknowledge reality. It doesn’t change reality and does not serve us. Nathaniel Branden writes:
Mental health does not require total omniscience about the contents and operation of one’s subconscious, just as it does not require total omniscience about the external world . . . But it does require the total absence, on the conscious and subconscious level, of any premise forbidding knowledge. It requires that man place no value above awareness, which means: no value above the ability to perceive, the ability to be conscious.
What would it look like to raise children in a way that leads to no repressions, no forbidden knowledge—external or internal? It’s hard to picture because most of us were raised to believe that we are good when we keep ourselves “under control” and bad when we “lose control.” When we lose control we must, as quickly as possible, get ourselves back under control, often by hiding, alone and ashamed, until our strong feelings have subsided, perhaps with the help of alcohol, food, sex, pharmaceuticals, television, computer games, excessive sleep or work, etc..
But we’re not actually getting “in control,” so much as we are repressing our feelings. When I first pictured what unrepressed feelings might look like, I imagined a horror show of people freaking out irrationally all the time. Then I realized that I was still thinking in the control paradigm.
It’s the same false dichotomy as before, only this time the threat is within: Either you control your emotions or they control you; either you are the master of your emotions, or you are their slave. I would like to propose that, again, this is not the choice.
The actual choice, when it comes to our emotions, our inner reality, is not between control and chaos, but again between control and respect. The path to emotional awareness starts with treating emotions with respect. The choice is to know what we feel or not to know what we feel: consciousness or unconsciousness. Ayn Rand said:
If men identified introspectively their inner states one tenth as correctly as they identify their objective reality, we would be a race of ideal giants. I ascribe ninety-five percent or more of all psychological trouble and personal tragedies to the fact that in the realm of introspection . . . men are not only not taught to introspect, they are actively discouraged from engaging in introspection, and yet their lives depend on it.
Introspection means constantly asking the questions, “What do I feel?” and “Why do I feel it?” and having the emotional skills to answer these questions with a great deal of conscious awareness.
Our children will only be able to acknowledge, feel, and examine their uncomfortable feelings if we can model this for them and guide them from day one.
Recall scenario 2 from above concerning when to feed a baby. When Mom B can accommodate her hungry baby, she does. But sometimes she cannot accommodate her baby. Perhaps her baby communicates to her that he is hungry, but she is in the middle of cooking dinner. Or perhaps she is driving home, and it would be dangerous to pull over.
At these times Mom B tells her baby honestly that she knows what he wants, but she cannot accommodate him. She does not attempt to distract him from his disappointed feelings, but rather, she listens empathetically to him while he expresses his disappointment. Her baby learns that sometimes his actions will not yield what he wants; sometimes he will feel disappointment—and that’s okay.
Compare this to what Baby A learns: Whenever he is upset, his mother distracts him from how he feels, sometimes with bouncing motions and sometimes by shoving something shiny in his face. Baby A has gotten the message that the emotion he was expressing is not okay, and when he feels that he should distract himself. As he gets older he will likely continue to distract himself with television, computer games, pharmaceuticals, work, sugar, alcohol, sex, or some other drug that enables him to maintain a façade of “control.”
If we do not get to be warmly authoritative benevolent dictators to our children, but we absolutely do want to influence what kind of people they become, our only option is to have an awesome, present, respectful relationship with our children, and model how to live an awesome life.
This is actually a far more effective way to parent because, regardless of what we think we’re teaching with all our force and control, we actually teach by example. The only way to raise a hero is to be one. So instead of obsessing over our children and trying to control them, trying to make them be the person we dream they could be, the best way to parent is to focus on ourselves and make ourselves the person we dream of being. Instead of, “How can I get my kid to do what I know is best?” we can think, “Be the hero you wish to see in your children.”
Audre Lorde said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Our current parenting tools are not the tools with which a more free society can be built. In fact, they are the tools that tear it down.
About the Author: Roslyn Ross
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