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April 18, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:17
196 Parenting Part 1: Credibility
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Well, good afternoon everybody.
I hope you're doing well. It is Steph.
It is 20 to 2 on the 18th of April, 2006.
Tuesday. Yes, I'm showing off my knowledge of the day of the week with no shame whatsoever.
So I hope you're doing well. I am heading back from my meeting, which occurred outside of Toronto, and we are going to chat finally.
I am getting to the topic at hand, the topic that I've been trying to get to or wanted to get to for the past couple of weeks.
And the topic at hand is, can children be raised in an absence of coercion or manipulation?
A very, very interesting question for me, because...
The principle of nonviolence should, I think, ideally be absolute, right?
The principle of the non-initiation of the use of force should be universal, should be absolute, and I think then should also include, if we can make it fit, I mean, not to squeeze the principle out of all recognition, but if we can make it fit, it might be a good thing, I think it would be a good thing, if we could do it in such a way that we could avoid using violence against children.
For a wide variety of reasons, which I'm sure we don't have to go into.
It's just better if you can make a principle consistent, then generally that principle is going to be more valid than if the principle is not able to be made consistent.
So, there are a large number of situations, of course, that people feel justify the use of force in the raising of children, or justify the use of violence.
And I understand those, and I would agree certainly with one of them, which I'll sort of get out of the way up front so that we can all agree, at least on that side of things, or at least on that understanding.
And that is that if your child is wandering into traffic, you can grab them, and you can stop them.
I have no problem with that as a general principle.
I think that makes perfect sense, but I don't see that that is necessarily restricted to children at all.
So, for instance, if a blind man is walking out into traffic, then I do believe that we can assume that that blind man does not want to get smushed by a truck or a bus, and therefore we can grab that blind man and say, by the way, you're wandering out into traffic and that's a bad thing, so you might not want to do that.
At which point the blind man could say to us, no, I do believe that the best thing in the world is to go out into traffic and risk getting smushed by the aforementioned truck or bus, in which case we can say, well, I guess that's your lookout.
Good luck with all that.
And so that would be one way of solving the problem.
It's not relative or specific to children at all.
It is simply the way that you would stop anybody who was doing something, you know, obviously self-destructive that they weren't or at least appeared not to be aware that they were doing.
So, for instance, if a deaf person is walking along a train tracks and you're walking with them and you hear a train coming, you don't sort of dart off the tracks and say with the implicit statement that the deaf person is like, well, good luck with all that.
You would warn the deaf person, realizing that they were not able to hear for themselves what was going on.
So, that would sort of be another way that I would approach that issue, that it's perfectly fine to use.
I mean, it's hard to say that it's using violence if you grab someone who's about to run out into traffic unawares.
I don't see that that's a principle that would be different for children as opposed to adults, right?
I mean, the fundamental distinction that children have between themselves and adults is a lack of knowledge, usually of consequences, comes around from experience, right?
They look at a fire and it looks like it's going to be fun to play with, And they don't have the knowledge to understand that the experience of playing with fire is not quite as much fun as it might seem to you.
So the knowledge is what is lacking, and children have the basic attributes, I think it's fair to say, they have the basic attributes associated that adults have as well as self-interest and rationality and so on.
So, I think, from my standpoint, the way that you approach the problems of child raising is, first of all, you establish some kind of credibility.
So, naturally, of course, the first thing that I should do is sort of say to you, why should you listen to me about child raising or listen to these theories about child raising?
Well, I worked in a daycare for about three or four years when I was a teenager.
And did have a class of 20 to 35 to 10-year-olds, usually from a pretty bad sort of section of town.
So I had my own challenges in terms of discipline, for sure, that this kind of stuff was really not that easy to manage.
I lived with my brother when he and his wife had their kids, so I spent a lot of time around babies and infants and so on.
If I do say so myself, I'm pretty good with children.
They sort of like me and I like them.
And I am very good at keeping children engaged and sort of warm and babysat a lot, that kind of stuff.
So I don't have kids of my own yet, but I think that I have some good...
I'm sort of working completely from the blank.
But, you know, also somewhat importantly, I think I have also had some...
I mean, I remember my own childhood very well, the things that I liked and things that I didn't like, so...
There's some empirical basis for what it is that I'm talking about, but since really great parenting, in my view, doesn't exist, except as a theoretical entity, unless you've experienced it, in which case I'd be more than happy to hear your experiences on this.
But this is sort of my theory about...
The establishment of credibility between parent and child.
So to take an example that comes up quite a bit in these kinds of discussions around children and how they should be managed or disciplined or whatever, one example is that you have your kids over at some other kid's house and you've been over for dinner and you've had your chit-chats and they've had their fun and they've played and so on.
And now it's sort of time to go home.
And you say, Junior, it's time to go home.
And Junior says, no, I don't want to go home.
And then you're sort of faced with this dilemma, right?
What do you do? Do you say, okay, well, that's fine.
You don't have to come home.
We'll just stay as long as you want.
And then whatever, right? Your kid comes home at two o'clock in the morning and they're cranky all the next day.
They fall asleep in school or whatever, right?
I mean, those are natural consequences of that kind of thing.
Or do you sit down and try and reason with the child who just walks away or who doesn't want to interact with you because they know that your sort of quote reasoning with them is just going to end up with them going home when they don't want to?
Or do you sort of say, okay, five minutes, and then if they don't listen, you sort of pick them up and carry them screaming and crying and kicking to the car and then sort of drive them home and explain to them later that whatever, whatever, right?
So that's sort of an interesting question for me, at least.
Like, what does it sort of mean? To have these kinds of interactions, what other choices are there from these sort of situations where you're either dominated by the child or you dominate the child?
I mean, this is not really the way that we want interactions to go in general.
We want interactions, I think, to be sort of win-win, sort of mutual respect and so on.
So I'm going to sort of cast about a little bit here in sort of my own experience and in the experiences of the children that I've known and talk about options by which these kinds of win-lose negotiations can end up being minimized or ideally eliminated, right?
So, one of the things that I recall, both as a child and also as somebody who worked in a daycare for a couple of years and spent a lot of time around kids, that one of the things that children desperately want is connection.
One of the things that I've really noticed with parents and children is that if you look...
At parents and how they interact with their children.
They manage their children.
They are not intimate with their children.
So, for instance, I mean, a friend of mine's over and he's got a young girl who's about 18 to 20 months and she's trying to learn how to walk and he's having a chat with me and he's also sort of managing his kid.
Like if she falls, he'll pick him up and prop her up and then he'll sort of do this and do that and he'll get her a toy if she seems upset.
He's basically just managing her.
Not actually interacting with her.
Now, of course, I'm not saying you go over to someone's house and spend the whole time staring into the soul of your child or anything.
But one of the things that I've found that makes children very engaged and relaxed is to interact with them.
To really interact with them.
Not to play a game together or sit down with them while they're working on a puzzle or whatever, but actually interact with them.
So, I mean, to take a minor example...
When a friend of mine...
A friend of Christina was over and they have a child who's about two...
Two and a half. Two.
Two and a quarter. That girl had some paperclips.
And so she had some paperclips and she was sorting through them.
And so I extended my hand and she gave me a paperclip and I said, thank you.
And then I handed it back to her.
And then she handed me... She stared a little bit back and forth.
She handed me another paperclip and...
We actually played this game of handing the paperclip for like 40 minutes or whatever.
I had no problem with that.
I thought it was perfectly charming.
And this girl was actually sort of...
That's what I mean by sort of interacting.
That the mechanism that's occurring there for her is the self and the other, right?
You want to get the self and the other always across.
Because if you end up with a child who grows up with no sense of other, you get a narcissist or somebody who is passive-aggressive or somebody who's always going to be difficult and problematic to manage.
So the self and the other is that she likes to pick up these paperclips and hand them to me.
I'm looking her in the eyes and saying thank you and taking the paperclips and then she can hand me another one and she's just getting a sense of reciprocity.
And then I hand her paperclip back so there's mirroring, there's reciprocity, there's self and other, there's all of these good things that are going on.
And I think, like, sort of my understanding is that in certain, like, if you invest that kind of time into the back and forth with the child, even at a pre-verbal stage, you're helping them develop empathy and understanding, and you're building a strong trust relationship with them, right?
That you'll give them back the paperclip, that you're not going to get bored and wander off if they don't stimulate you enough or whatever, right?
You really are training that child.
To deal with handing something over, being appreciated, getting something back, eye contact, you know, getting them to understand that there are in fact other human beings in the world that are pretty similar, and you're handing me the paperclip, I'm handing you back the paperclip, and I've played this game with a number of different children.
Simply around handing things back and forward, sort of at a pre-verbal stage.
And that, to me, is something that's quite important, and it's very calming for children.
I mean, they don't misbehave when this sort of stuff is going on, because they're very much enjoying, and they take great joy in, because children are naturally virtuous and want to do the right thing, and want to, you know, like most people, I mean, like, even as an adult, we struggle through our wretched childhoods, and we end up being virtuous people.
And so children want to be intimate, they want to understand things, and so on.
Now, when I had my nieces over once, when I was living downtown in Toronto, I had both my nieces over, and one of them was like two, two and a half, I think two and a half, and one of them was like four, four and a half, something like that, or maybe it was three and five, or they were very young, and I had to go and do some laundry.
Now, of course, taking two young children to the laundromat is usually considered to be a bit of a nightmare, so like taking children to the grocery store or whatever.
So, you know, what I did was I sort of sat them down beforehand, and I had my trusty little whiteboard out, and I talked about dirt in the clothes and germs and so on, and that I would really like to sort of spend the whole night playing with them, but I had to go and wash these clothes because I had to go on a business trip, I drew an airplane, I had to go away, and so on.
And so I had to get this thing done, and would they mind helping?
And of course, they were sort of curious once they understood the whole cycle of dirt and cleaning and so on, and they were sort of curious and wanted to come along, and So I helped them to help me sort the laundry, right?
It was much more efficient to do it myself.
But, you know, we're trying to do this because the colors will transfer and you don't want everything ending up the same color.
It would be like craning everything on the same square, all of your different colors.
It's not what you want to do. So they helped me with that and that became engaging for them.
I didn't actually have them smell my gym wear because you don't want to sort of slide over from instruction to abuse.
But that was, you know, it was exciting for them.
I gave them little bags of clothes to carry and we walked to the store and I was sort of explaining to them how washing machines worked and how dryers worked, you know, and just keep them engaged and have them ask questions to the best of their ability and so on.
And then I had them get the change out of the change machine and, you know, just sort of involve them, get them involved in what it is that I'm doing and then help them load and explain to them how the detergent works and all that kind of stuff and just sort of get them involved.
And then, you know, we sort of put the laundry in, and I took them for an ice cream or something, and we came back, and then I sort of said, it's important to fold, because otherwise you have to iron, which is a real drag.
You know, you have stuff that you don't want to do, right?
But ironing is one of them, so I explained to them about folding, and they folded really abysmally, but at least they understood the principle, and I just remember my youngest niece rolling up my shorts into a little ball and stuffing the bit of bag, and I was like, great, you know, at least she's understanding the idea.
And so that was sort of an example of taking children to do a chore, which normally most people would consider to be sort of a difficult or negative thing.
But to keep them engaged.
So when you take them to the grocery store and talk to them about calories and about good food choices and so on, and where the foods all come from and how they get delivered to the grocery store and how great the free market is and how so important it is to get off fiat money.
Oh wait, sorry, that's for when they're six or seven.
But it's just a way of staying engaged, involved, and intimate with them.
So you're not telling them what to do.
I mean, that's sort of important.
If you're on a cell phone having a fight with your, I don't know, wife when you're taking your kids to the laundromat and you're just sort of waving them and pointing them and jabbing your finger and saying, oh, sit down over there or whatever, then they're going to be bored.
They're going to feel alienated. They're going to be non-intimate and they're going to not have a lot of respect for you.
There's not going to be a lot of credibility there, right?
You're not engaged with them. So from that standpoint, I've never had a particular issue with chores, with children, right?
I mean, it's a learning situation.
It's a lot more fun for me, too, right?
I mean, if I have to go and do laundry, I would much rather be chatting with kids about how it all works and getting their questions and trying to explain it to them, like sound waves.
You can explain. I remember explaining sound waves with a skipping rope, right?
You just sort of flip it up and see these waves that go along the skipping rope, and you explain that to the sound waves to the kid and so on.
And there's so much that kids want to know about and want to understand.
And of course, reality is such a magical and wonderful place that you want to teach them as much as possible about all this so that they can really understand and appreciate the beauty and the wonder of the natural world and the man-made world, of course, both of which are sort of subsumed under natural.
So I've never had any particular issue with that sort of situation.
So, children, like everybody else, don't like to be told what to do in a peremptory tone.
They like to be involved to understand.
I remember as a child myself, my mother would just say, oh, brush your teeth.
And of course, like all other children on the planet, I didn't really like brushing my teeth.
It was boring, and it didn't really taste that good.
This is before bubblegum toothpaste.
It was pretty wretched alum stuff when I was a kid.
And... It wasn't until later, a sort of reading, when I found out about, oh, you know, well, the sugar stays on your teeth, which attracts bacteria, which causes your gums to recede, which makes it painful, and so on.
And, you know, ever since that, which was about the age of six or seven...
I have constantly practiced good oral hygiene because I don't want that to happen and I sort of understand it.
It's the same thing with flossing, right?
Flossing is a real pain in the neck, but do it, right?
Because if you don't, the food particles and attracted gums, it's all bad, right?
So once you understand something, then you do it with, you know, understanding and appreciation and it's not sort of a weird thing to do and you're not sort of fighting this battle of did you and you sort of put the toothpaste on your gums to make it sort of smell like you've brushed your teeth and so on.
That is all just... I mean, if you don't take the time up front to establish this relationship, I mean, it seems like a long time to spend, right?
I mean, every time you go with kids, you've got to explain physics and biology and all that kind of stuff.
Well, no. But it's well worth spending the time up front because it's sort of like I was talking about with Christina and the infamous horror of the bag of groceries on the carpet.
Yes, we did spend days off and on talking about this particular incident.
And some people are going to say, and nobody has to their credit said this to me, because I think you all understand what I was talking about, but you could say, somebody who's cynical or whatever would say, oh my god, it's just a bag of groceries, what on earth would you spend that much time spending?
Well, you're spending that much time up front because I'm going to live with Christina for the next 50 years, and wouldn't it be great if we built it on the right foundation of communication and trust and understanding and so on?
So if you don't spend those couple of days up front, yeah, okay, maybe you've spent a couple of days doing other things, but you've got 50 years to go.
It's important, I think, to get the right principles down so that you're doing things in a way that is productive and sustainable and growth-oriented and freeing and so on, right?
I mean, it just sort of makes sense.
It's the same thing with kids. You put the time in at the beginning to get them involved and to have intimacy and to enjoy them as people and to respect their contributions and to get them thrilled about being part of your family.
Then that's, to me, a good thing.
I mean, you want when you come home for the kids to run into your legs and be overjoyed to see you and so on and to want to spend time with you and to be interested and curious about your thinking just as you're interested and curious about their experience.
I mean, that's what you want with your relationships with your children.
Otherwise, for the life of me, I just can't understand why you'd have them because they're expensive and they keep you up nights and unless you're going to enjoy them as individuals...
It just seems like an odd thing to do, and I can't for the life of me figure out why most people have children, but maybe they just want someone to dominate.
Who knows? But I've just never quite understood most people's approach to thinking children, as it is with my brother and his wife when they had other people raise their children and nannies and so on.
It's like, well, what's the point of that?
I mean, why would you want to have kids and have other people raise them?
I never quite understood that, but that's a topic for another time.
So, the first thing that you get when you have relationships with children that are like that, that are sort of about curiosity and explanation and intimacy and back and forth and so on, is that you have credibility.
So, if you've asked children to do things or you've been involved in them getting things done...
If those children then, if you ask them to do something else, it's just less work each time, right?
Because you've built credibility.
So, I mean, for example, I, like most guys in the world, radically overestimate the amount of cold temperature that I can take.
I don't know if it's a manly thing or I just don't like to wear a jacket or whatever, but Christina will tell me to wear a jacket and I'll be like, I want to go, right?
I want to go, right? And so we go, and then I'm cold.
And it became sort of a running gag, right?
To pretend that I wasn't cold and so on.
And so now, given that she's right and has been right so many times about my temperature requirements, I simply turn to her and say, what should I wear?
I mean, she doesn't tell me, put a jacket on.
And I don't say, no, I don't want to put a jacket on her.
Fine, I'll put a jacket on.
I just turn to her and say, do I need a jacket?
Because obviously I'm not confident to decide, and you're right about this all the time, so do I need a jacket?
When it comes to ordering food in a restaurant, it's amazing.
The woman is a sheer genius. I mean, I can't figure out, as somebody who can eat everything, what I actually want.
Because what will happen is, I'll order something going off my preferences just to explore, and Christina will order something else, and her food will always be way better than my food.
And so now, I'm just like, honey, what do I want?
What do I feel like eating? What should I wear?
I mean, it just makes sense, because she's right so much.
And similarly with, you know, the finances.
I mean, she's so good at managing the finances that that's what she does.
And I'm good at managing the emotional side of the relationship, so that's what I do.
And of course, it took a long time for me to achieve that level of trust so that now when I feel that something is awry in our relationship and I express that, of course, at the beginning, not because she was like, Not trusting me or anything, but it would sort of make sense.
You wouldn't necessarily just assume that the guy from the crazy family background is right.
You would want to have those sort of feelings validated.
But I've been right so often and so consistently when it comes to figuring out whether something unusual is going on in the relationship.
That now, when I say something's odd, Christina's like, oh, okay, well, what?
Let's figure it out, right? Because you're right about these things all the time, so we don't have to go through that process.
And we did, of course, at the beginning of our marriage, but now we just dive in and assume that I'm right.
And, of course, there may come a time where I'm wrong, and we'll figure that one out.
We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
But, of course, I have built up a lot of credibility.
The credibility, of course, is efficiency.
I mean, we know this in the free market, right?
That's why you buy Coke products if you like that kind of stuff rather than, you know, Uncle Bob's house of personal brewed cola because you just don't know, right, if it's going to be any good or not.
So credibility is a hugely beneficial thing, right?
If you show up for a senior level job in a tracksuit, then your credibility goes down because obviously your judgment is not that great and so on.
And so when it comes to a relationship of any kind, whether it's a love relationship, you want to build up credibility, which is where the whole curiosity thing comes in, right?
So you can actually be accurate when you have instincts or feelings about a relationship and not waste a lot of time validating them, but just sort of get the hang of being right about things and not right relative to somebody else, but just right about something's awry here, I feel odd, let's explore it, let's be curious, let's figure out what it is, without having a position like, ah, it's this or it's that, right?
And you're exploring, right? I mean, if you knew, you wouldn't explore.
False knowledge is the opposite of wisdom.
It's the way you stop exploring and stop figuring things out.
So that's why it's so important in life not to think you know something when you don't.
In relationships, it's very hard to figure out until you've built up this credibility issue.
And of course, the credibility issue for me in my relationship with Christina is not that I know exactly what the problem is, but just that I know that there is a problem, and nine times out of ten, it comes out of her History, her relationships with her family as a child.
We get food, as we call it.
That's the reality of the situation.
So, credibility is very important in these situations, and credibility with children cannot come about through you telling children what to do without explanation.
It cannot come about through you imposing your will upon your children.
It cannot come about through you bossing people.
It can only come about through you having rational and sensible explanations of what is occurring, And then explaining it and being right.
So it's okay to let children, in my view, it's okay to let children within the realm of safety, within the level of safety, to have consequences.
And that is, I think, pretty important.
So, I mean, you don't let a child walk into the bonfire, but you give them a sense of what heat is so that they understand it, right?
So that they understand that it's dangerous and that when you say to a child that you have to be careful around heat, that they have some understanding, that you're not saying it because you want to boss them around, but you're saying it because you don't want them to get hurt, right?
You want to protect them.
You want to keep them safe. You want to keep them happy.
So once children understand as a parent or as an authority figure in their lives that you're really looking out for their best interests, that you want them to be happy, that you want them to be healthy, that you want them to have as great a life as possible, and you establish that over and over again through consultative instructions and through explaining why you're asking them to do certain things and so on.
Yeah, I know it seems a little laborious up front, but holy, does it ever pay off in spades?
Then the child is going to trust you, right?
So, you know, for instance, the situation that we started off with where you're talking to a child and the child doesn't want to leave the place that they're playing.
You're over at some kid's house, some other kid's house, and they're playing and they don't want to leave.
And you get into this, well, I don't want to leave.
Well, you have to leave, right?
This is all the result.
of a lack of credibility on the side of parenting.
Parents don't want to earn that for some weird reason with children.
They feel like they have to earn it in their job.
You have to show up and do a good job in order to keep your job, but to keep your children's respect, for some reason parents think all they have to do is snap at them and bully them and so on and not listen to them and not have any respect for them.
It's all mutual. You can't ask for any more respect in a relationship than you're willing to give.
And so parents that don't respect their children are going to end up in these conflicts for a variety of complex reasons, which we can get into perhaps Perhaps tomorrow morning.
So, this issue around credibility is absolutely central.
When you're in that situation where you're standing over your kid saying, it's time to go, and the kid's saying, no, I don't want to go.
Well, I mean, there's so much that has led up to that particular situation that you can't solve that situation in a productive way in that moment, right?
So, what you want to do is try and figure out how to avoid getting into that situation.
Prevention is always better than cure.
So, this would sort of be my approach to that kind of issue, right?
So, we're going to have to assume that the kid is at some level of verbal competence.
Because... Whether you are out with a two-year-old late having that kid play at some other kid's house, I don't know.
It sort of doesn't make as much sense to me.
But we can talk about nonverbal ways of disciplining in another time.
But what you do, of course, in my humble opinion, is when you're driving over to that kid's house with your kid, or we'll call him Bobby, right?
We'll say, okay, so we're going to go and play at this kid's house.
I want you to have the best time possible.
Now, I can stay for two hours.
Two hours. You know, the clock can understand.
You go on a conversation about time or whatever.
And I've got to stay for two hours.
I want you to have the best possible time in that two hours.
But I just want you to understand that at two hours, right, I've got to come back and we've got to go.
And we'll have a good time chatting about what you experienced and what kind of fun you had or didn't have at this party and who you liked and who you didn't, what toys you liked, and so on.
So we'll have a great deal of fun chatting about all of that.
But I've just got to tell you up front, two hours...
It'll go sort of in one ear and out the other and so on.
But let's just say that the kid will hear that at least to some degree.
So you sort of set that stuff up front.
And they know that you want them to have a good time because you've got credibility and so on.
And you say, okay, is that okay with you?
We've got two hours there.
I need you to just let me know, yes or no.
Is it good with you? If they say, no, I don't want the two hours, then we say, well, okay.
Well, then what we'll have to do is we'll have to restructure it for another time when we have more time because I don't want you to get all stressed out about two hours, so we'll just do it another time.
And because, you know, if two hours isn't going to work for you, so then the kid is going to say, yeah, two hours is fine, right?
Two hours, I mean, to a kid, two hours is like eternity, right?
So I don't think there's going to be any particular issue around that.
So the kid's going to be fine with two hours, and then...
The kid is going to say that you get there and you're going to say, okay, two hours.
Remember two hours, right? Just keep reminding them, right?
Because kids have a shorter attention span than like ferrets on a double espresso, right?
A pretty short attention span.
Pretty hyper. So, you know, you play with them for a while and you sort of say, okay, just so you know, like an hour goes by.
You say, okay, just so you know, we're halfway through.
You've got two hours. We've got one hour.
Here's the watch. You understand this.
We're going, right? Just want you to know.
Want to keep you happy. Want to keep you enjoying yourself.
Just let you know. You have all the fun you want.
We've got one hour, right? And you keep that going and, you know, whatever, right?
And then, you know, you have to sort of explain why it is that you have to go, right?
I got a job interview or I got to make dinner or whatever, whatever you're coming up with, right?
And then they're having a good time, you know, half an hour, 15 minutes.
You know, you spend your time, right?
And you don't have to do this every single time.
You can stop when they're 22 or 23.
But you do it, you know, so that they understand that you're not sort of jipping them for time or something like that.
And you don't need to do it every 10 minutes when they get older or whatever, just so they understand.
So that's a deal, right? They've already agreed to do something.
Everyone's hunky-dory. You're keeping them informed about the time so that it's not a shock, right?
So they don't get involved in some big thing.
And then, sort of in my humble opinion, if you can, you show a little flexibility.
So if they're in the middle of a video game or a card game and the two-hour mark hits, you know, sort of yank them out by their hair, you say, okay, well, that's fine.
You could say to them beforehand, you know, you only have five minutes, these games take ten minutes, can I suggest that you not start this one?
Just because we'll go over, right?
And if we go over, it's going to be stressful, and I don't know.
And you make your own choice about that.
But at that point, you see, when you then say, okay, it's two hours, can you pack up your things and go?
So then I want to hear all about what you thought, and I want to tell you about what happened to me at the party, then they're going to look forward.
It's not like... It's not like going with you in a car to chat about their time at the party is like the worst thing in the world, right?
I mean, if they desperately want to stay at somebody else's house rather than spend time in the car with you, that's, to me, sort of a symptom of not a great relationship with your children, right?
They should want to spend time with you.
I mean, I can't wait to spend time with certain kids.
I can't wait to spend time with Christina, of course.
It's not like it's a drag.
It's not like it's a problem to do it.
So I think that's a fairly important aspect as you look at these kinds of things as a symptom, right?
So if you end up in a situation with a kid, which is win-lose, where you have to end up bullying them, it's because you have not, as the parent, laid the groundwork in terms of trust, in terms of intimacy, in terms of credibility with the child, that the child then just says, yeah, okay. Or you haven't laid in the time frame and got their agreement on it.
You know, all of the sort of stuff that you would do as an adult to another adult.
I mean, if you're going to go on a date with someone, you say, well, I'll meet you here at this corner at 7 o'clock, and you show up 10 minutes early and so on.
You don't just sort of say, well, I'll go meet you somewhere, and then just hope they'll grab you, or someone will run into you somewhere.
I mean, I guess you don't want to go on a date with them.
That's the same thing with kids, right?
You give them sort of specific ideas about time frames and so on, and you've got credibility with them.
So, I mean, I've never had any particular issues with that.
And, of course, you invest into their lives, and you're curious about them, and so there's real intimacy.
And in the same way that I consult with Christina about food and clothing choices when it's cold out, and she consults with me about certain emotional issues, it's just a credibility that you build up over time that I think you want to feel comfortable doing.
You want to feel comfortable with all that, and I think that's all healthy and wonderful and easy.
You lay this sort of foundation in from the ground up, and it all becomes very easy as time goes along, because there's trust.
Now, the other thing that you need to do as a parent, of course, is to be open to being incorrect.
I mean, as a parent, you have a lot of, hopefully, a lot of knowledge and wisdom and communication skills, but you also have your own baggage, right?
And the child might be triggering baggage in you.
That you're not aware of, right?
And so you may fall prey to the problem of, or the curse of intentions.
And this is sort of a larger topic, which I'll just touch on briefly here.
But intentions is the great curse, of course, of relationships.
One of the biggest challenges that Christina and I had as a married couple, when we were dealing with this issue of zinging, or the blurping back, or the blurping that Christina was putting out, At times, the biggest single issue that we had in terms of communication was the problem of intentions, right? So I would say, oh honey, what you did just really stung me and I'm not sure why and this and that and the other, right?
Well, the problem that occurs with that is that...
Christina would then say, well, I didn't mean to.
The last thing that I wanted to do was to hurt you.
I didn't experience any anger towards you.
I didn't experience any irritation or any frustration or any of this, that or the other.
And so we were kind of stymied, you know, a bit at the beginning.
Which was that Christina was saying that she had no intention of hurting me whatsoever, and there was a big problem.
Because I would say, ow, that hurt.
She would say, I didn't mean to hurt you, and where could we go from there?
And, you know, as I'm sure you're fairly aware, the only way to solve that particular issue, of course, was for me to say that intentions don't count.
Intentions don't mean anything at all.
What matters is what occurs, right?
So if you do something that hurts me, it doesn't mean that you're wrong.
It could be that I'm oversensitive, but your intentions don't count.
Because if you are being run by something in your past, if you are being sort of food, in a sense, from your family of origin, if you're bouncing off or blarping back something from your own past, then you're not going to be consciously aware of your intentions anyway.
So the fact that, and of course, it's taken for granted in a love relationship, I mean, anything that's worth anything, that you don't want to hurt your partner.
I mean, that's sort of one of the basics, right?
I mean, if you don't have that, then you're in a sadomasochistic relationship, and you should be charging or paying top dollar for that.
You know, for the right outfits.
So, that's a pretty important thing to understand, that intentions simply don't matter.
What does matter is what actually happens.
And we know this as libertarians, right?
Because we're always saying this when it comes to communism, social programs, welfare state, or war on drugs, right?
The intentions of the planners don't matter.
Of course, let's just say, let's give everyone the benefit of the doubt, everybody who's a socialist wants the poor to be better, to have opportunities to become wealthy and contented and self-satisfied and all this kind of good stuff.
Well, that's wonderful, but it doesn't mean anything.
What does matter is what actually happens, which is that this does not occur, right?
The poor get more miserable, get more enslaved, get more ground down into the fine, choking dust of poverty.
So the intentions of the people don't matter at all.
The same thing, of course, is absolutely true in relationships, and it really is the only thing that I've found that helps break down the problem of passive aggression, right?
Passive aggression is a complicated topic.
We're just touching it really briefly here.
But passive aggression is you can't feel something, so you make the other person feel it and then reject their feelings.
It's one of these sort of classic patterns.
And so if I'm in a bad mood, then I'm going to make the other person angry by being uncooperative or sulky or baffled or repeating back to them something that I thought they said in a manner which is obviously true that I obviously states that I didn't listen.
So somebody says, meet me at John.
And I say, we're going to the zoo.
Obviously, I haven't been listening.
But then I say, no, no, I was listening and just frustrate that person because I'm in a bad mood and can't deal with it.
so I make them angry and then I get to express, reject their anger and control my own There's lots of complicated things around this, but...
The passive-aggressive person is usually completely unaware that this is what they're doing, so they will always take refuge in the claim of good intentions.
I mean, this is so common, it barely even needs to be mentioned, right?
So, I wasn't trying to upset you.
I didn't mean to hurt you. And, of course, the sort of innocence, the cry of innocence is common, especially with women, in my humble opinion.
Women say this all the time because they're usually not trained very well on how to be assertive or...
You know, not aggressive.
Unfortunately, they're often trained to be aggressive, but they're not taught to be assertive.
And so they end up provoking other people, provoking men or provoking the boyfriends or husbands, and then the boyfriends or husbands get upset and they say, oh, the last thing I ever wanted to do was to upset you, which does a lot of things.
It gets you even more frustrating, right?
Because then it's clearly putting the entire ball in your court for the whole problem, that they're completely innocent of any intention, therefore it must be your own insecurity or paranoia that is causing the problem.
There's lots of things around this.
And the toughest nut that Christina and I had to crack was this problem of intentions.
Because Christina, absolutely and genuinely, positively and honestly, had no malicious thought in her mind when she zinged me.
This is how unconscious it all was.
So, realizing that, getting her to sort of give up the defense of intentions was very difficult, right?
To get her to be curious about why I was hurt, just as I was, just as I was curious about why she would do something that did hurt me, All of that was a sort of beautiful free vista that we could only access by going through, by busting down the door in a sense of good intentions.
I didn't mean to hurt you.
Well, that's fine, but you did hurt me, and so I'm not blaming you for that, but your intentions don't mean anything.
They don't get us anywhere, because we can't be curious.
If it's true that you didn't mean to hurt me, and I ended up being hurt, we then have to assume that it's entirely to do with me.
But we don't know that yet.
So let's forget about whether you meant to or didn't mean to, because it could be that you did mean to, you just don't know it yet.
Like, we're exploring. We really don't know.
That's the excitement of this kind of exploration.
That's the power of curiosity.
Who knows what happened just now?
We do know. I know for sure that I got hurt, and you know that you didn't mean it.
But we don't know what the cause is, so I'm not going to take me being hurt as an indication of what happened.
Just the only thing being happened is that I got hurt.
Whether that's due to me or you, we don't know yet.
But your intentions also, you can't take those as granted either.
That you didn't mean to hurt me, therefore you didn't do anything wrong, therefore everything that I'm feeling is entirely based on my own paranoia or history or whatever.
Now, exactly the same thing is true with parenting, right?
You have to give up as a parent the tyranny of good intentions, right?
The erasure of the other person's experience that always occurs when you say, but that was not at all what I meant, right?
So if you try to praise your kid and the kid ends up bursting into tears, you then have to, I think, look in your own heart and say, okay, well, I really did not achieve the intended effect.
I'm not motivating this other person.
I'm not helping them. What I wanted to do doesn't matter.
What I claimed was my intention doesn't matter because I did not achieve my intention.
What the other person is experiencing is something I really need to explore.
Because when I don't achieve my own goals, in terms of I want my kid to feel good that I'm praising them, or Christina wants me to feel motivated to not put the groceries on the carpet, when I don't achieve my own goal, then obviously I'm doing something outside of my own conscious intention.
So therefore my own conscious intention is not a valid means for judging it, right?
If I say that I want to win the Olympics, but instead of going to training, I take up chain smoking and mechanical bull riding, then for me to say, no, but I really want to go to the Olympics, it doesn't mean anything.
I have to sort of judge the actions and the effect, right?
I'm getting emphysema and hemorrhoids.
I don't know. What comes out of mechanical bulls?
Who knows? A pulled groin or something.
And so the intentions don't mean anything at all.
What matters is the actions.
We have to be curious about the actions and their results.
So if you're trying to praise your kid, your kid bursts into tears and says, I've never felt worse, then saying to that kid, no, no, no, I'm praising you.
I'm praising you. You shouldn't feel bad.
I mean, I'm trying to make you feel better.
It's just a way of disowning your own actions, of not being curious, and of basically putting the entire onus on the other person to deal with their issues, and basically you're calling another person completely insane.
If you say that your intentions are what you should be judged by, then whenever your intentions don't achieve what they want, the fault is always everybody else's, and you're inevitable.
I mean, it's a terrible place to be.
It's a terrible place of...
Sort of sad and slightly pompous self-justification combined with a complete inability to change the course of actions, right?
There's a problem with blaming everyone else.
It gives you sort of an immediate emotional relief, but it renders you powerless to change anything because you spend all of your energies convincing other people that you were right and they were wrong rather than trying to figure out, okay, well, I didn't get my intended effect, so what can I figure out?
What am I not aware of? What am I not understanding?
And so on, right? No curiosity, right?
As soon as you justify, as soon as you have a defense, you have no curiosity.
So that's not where you want to go, and this is something that happens so continually with parents and children that they sort of mock their children, right?
I mean, I saw this last night.
Christine and I went for a nice hour and a half walk chatting about stuff, and on the way back, we see a kid who's playing in a playground, and the parents say, it's time to go, and he's like, no, and they just pick him up, and it's completely dismissing the kid's feelings and the kid's crying, and You know, they just roll their eyes and it's like, oh yes, I know, he's only had 12 hours of play, now it's too much.
I mean, it's all just brutal to children.
All just completely brutal.
No curiosity about why the child is feeling the way that the child is feeling.
It's an immediate dismissal of the child's experience as selfishness.
And that we're so much wiser and the kid is selfish and so the kid by nature needs, you know, human nature is problematic and needs to be sort of reined in and bullied into something more sensible and rational by adults.
It all comes back to original sin and Christianity and the idea that human nature in and of itself in its natural state is greedy and malevolent.
It's all this sort of nonsense that goes on with children all the time.
All the time children have their emotional reactions completely poo-pooed by their parents because of parental corruption, in my humble opinion.
So, the idea being, of course, that you can, once you give up your own tyranny of good intentions, then you can actually be curious, right?
So, if you praise your kid, your kid bursts into tears, then you say, oh, of course you can say, wow, I didn't mean to do that, so I'm really sorry that I did, right?
That's sort of very important. I didn't mean to is fine to say, because, of course, you want the kid to understand that it's not your evil intention to make them burst into tears, right?
Say, oh, I didn't mean to do that, and I'm so sorry that I did.
So what happened for you?
What did you hear? What went through your head that made you feel so sad?
Because then you can learn something about yourself, right?
You have to allow your kids to teach you as well, because they are closer to an uncorrupted state, and I speak this for myself as well.
They're closer to an uncorrupted state than you are.
So it's definitely something that you should listen to with your kids.
They're more authentic, they're more in touch with their emotions, they are more healthy in a lot of ways than you are, and they're less scarred by the large-scale corruption that's all over the world.
So I think it's important as well, once you give up the tyranny of your own good intentions and actually become curious about a child's emotional experience, then the child can teach you, as children very much want to contribute and want to be a participatory member.
Of the family. And they want to, with their own parents, have a participatory relationship.
Because if your kid never gets to give anything back to you, never gets to teach you anything, then obviously it's sort of parasitical, right?
Their self-esteem is going to go down.
You know, sort of make up stuff like, oh, wow, the world is round?
I didn't know. But it's very important to let your kids teach you back in a real way, and they really can do that.
And so you have something to learn from your children as well.
But you can only do that if you absolutely honor their emotional experiences, which doesn't mean that you agree with everything they say.
I mean, I certainly, with Christina, I absolutely said, of course you don't want to hurt me.
I fully accept that. I fully accept that as your intention.
But the problem is that I got hurt, so we need to deal with that as a sort of central fact.
But I certainly respected her.
I didn't say to her, no, I think you really do want to hurt me, and it's all affront, and you've just been nice to me for whatever.
I absolutely honored her experience and her perception of it.
But, you know, you always have to go back to the facts, right?
It's like a scientific method.
You can have all the theories in the world that you want, but you continually have to go back to the facts, right?
And so, you might say, if I drop a ball, it should bounce this high, but then you should have to measure it and see what happens.
It's the same thing with relationships, right?
Your intention may not be to hurt someone, but if you do hurt them, then you need to be curious about why, because you don't have an answer, right?
Because if you had an answer, you wouldn't have hurt them, right?
I mean, if you know your partner well enough, and you, I mean, if you've been with them for more than a couple of weeks, right, you know their buttons, you know their hotspots, so if you end up hurting them, Obviously, if it wasn't your intention, then you don't know what's going on.
That lack of knowledge is very important.
So if you end up hurting your kid or you end up in a fight with your kid, it's important to say, I don't know why we just fought, but let's figure it out.
It's very important that I don't want to do this sort of stuff.
I don't want to hurt you so much that I'm willing to figure out from a complete state of no knowledge how this ended up happening, what ended up happening, how we ended up in this position.
And your feelings are totally valid.
I really want to hear what happened for you because I want to know what occurred so that we can find ways of avoiding it and finding better ways to deal with stuff.
I mean... You have to be willing to let your kid instruct you.
This idea of parental lecturing is just mind-numbingly dull for kids and completely eliminates credibility.
Parents are incredibly touchy, in my experience.
It's not all parents, I'm sure.
But parents are incredibly touchy about their children criticizing them, about their children having problems with them.
Everybody wants the unearned.
Everybody wants the respect of their children without actually being benevolent and beneficial to their children's lives and experiences.
Everybody wants to be the boss, but people don't necessarily want to I work for the kind of maturity skill set and knowledge and negotiation skills and humility and all that it takes to be a good boss.
So that to me is a number of ways in which you can avoid the issue of ever having to raise your voice at your kids, except in emergencies, which of course you would do with a blind man wandering into traffic.
You'd yell at them to stop too, right?
So, I think that you can have a relationship with your children where you've never raised your voice to them.
You can have a relationship with children where you don't manhandle them, where you don't grab them and pull them away or smack them or anything like that.
I think that that is all a symptom of a failure.
To perform the kinds of actions and have the kind of relationship that you can have with your children where it is based on curiosity and you do get rid of the tyranny of good intentions and you do allow yourself to be instructed by your children and you are intimate with them and you do explain to them why you do what you do and why you're asking them to do what they're doing so that they can participate rather than just being a bunch of livestock that you sort of lead around and feed and clothe and take care of which is to me sort of missing the whole point of being a parent.
So, I hope that's helpful.
I hope that it's so helpful that you feel like absolutely dropping by to get your soon to be announced Staggeringly amazing gift from Freedom Aid Radio, from yours truly, to come by and donate, to get your cash into me, if you'd be so very kind, and you will, I think, be very happy with the results, both in terms of continued and enthusiastic Freedom Aid Radio shows, and of the gift which I am planning on handing out, or not just planning, which I will hand out, the series of gifts.
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