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May 8, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:02
1348 Fatherhood and War

Some thoughts on war and parental uninvolvement.

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Good afternoon. It's me.
I'm not even going to introduce myself by name.
Or Vixen with three X's.
My stage name, really. Yes, my friends, we are in the car once more.
Everything new is old again.
And I'm going down to buy a breast pump, which is considerably less sexy than you might imagine.
And... Yes, I have a new theory, and I'm going to explicate it for you in gruesome and wildly inappropriately metaphor-laced detail, and hopefully it will make some sense, and so will I. So, I know that I'm not unique in this, but it is unusual that And to me, extraordinarily instructive.
The degree to which I am involved in Isabella's upbringing, right?
She's now a little over four and a half months.
And she's rolling, and she's stroking faces, and she's not doing ba-ba's yet.
She's not babbling yet, but she's, you know, sort of getting her habits and her rhythms and her sort of schedule down.
And, you know, turning into, as she always was, but more obviously now, quite the tiny and, frankly, wonderful little person.
And it's unusual...
For a father to be this involved in the raising of his child.
Even these days, right?
And now, I mean, these days it's become a little bit more like neither parent.
Often, and it's tragic, right?
And it arises, I think, out of grim, statist economic meltdown-y conditions.
But... It has become more common for most people to have, or at least most professionals, to have someone else, both people working, someone else raising their children.
But then the different thing with Christina and I is that I'm home, and Christina's home, right?
She's gone back to work, but she's not seeing a huge number of patients just yet.
And... So, it is very unusual for two parents to be home.
I was just saying this to Christina the other day.
It's not like I have a child.
It's a very strange thing.
It's not like I'm a guy with a child.
Because it's not like I have the life that I had before, you know, 16 hours a day or whatever, 17 hours a day of X or whatever it was.
And now it's that subtracted by 20% or 50% or 70%.
It's not my life before where the child added in.
It's not my life before at all.
And that is really, really quite staggering and something I'm still working to process on.
I'm still working to process.
It's not my life at all that I had before.
And that really, really, really takes some getting used to.
Isabella is the first thing that I hear and think of in the morning.
And because, I mean, she'll sleep for a while and I can get some work done, right?
A couple hours a day.
Although it's not just getting work done, right?
I mean, there's a house that needs to be maintained.
There's chores. There's, you know, all this other junk that goes along with living.
And it really is just astounding.
Because Christina takes her at night, I feel like I should really take her a lot during the day.
And Isabella is...
You don't have a baby in the room, at least at her age.
You don't have a baby in the room and do anything other than monitor, stare over, interact with, engage with, keep safe...
Keep entertained, keep amused, keep distracted.
This, the baby, right?
So, you know, she sleeps, she's in bed 10 to 12 hours at night, and then she, you know, she's up, right?
And she'll sleep for a couple hours during the day.
But for the rest of that time, that is what you're doing, is you are...
Keeping safe and keeping entertained and interacting with Isabella.
She's not at an age yet, and that will change at some point, somehow.
She's not at an age yet where she can entertain herself.
So it is constant.
It's constant and it's unpredictable, right?
We put her down to sleep, could be 45 minutes, could be two hours, right?
There's not a lot of ways to tell ahead of time.
So it's really tough to plan things.
And, you know, the constant changing and the bathing and, you know, all of the stuff that goes to doctor's visits, of course, much more rare.
And today, we moved in, you know, and partly because of FDR and all that, we haven't spent the money to get anything done with our backyard or, indeed, our front.
We just have all the concrete stadium crap that the contractors sort of gave us to begin with.
And, oh man, so we don't even have a concrete step on the back porch that leads straight into grass.
And the grass, you know, it's not really been too, too bad, although it does, of course, keep a lot of bugs and so on, right?
But... We haven't put any stones down or anything like that anywhere in her backyard.
Now, that's changed for me now because we have a baby.
So now we can't really put it off, right?
Because, you know, she loves being outside.
And yet, because she is a baby, and I think this is kind of unusual.
We sort of went through the list of high-needs baby, right?
And actually, it turned out to apply much more to me than to.
So we stopped that. But... And she's not a high-needs baby, but she is not happy unless she's carried.
That, oh my god, that's one of the reasons I'm on this trip now.
I just have to go and buy something where I can strap her to me because my forearm is hurting.
And it's uncomfortable because I'm holding this 16-pound weight with my arm bent like Napoleon for hours and hours and hours a day, and that's just too much for my aging musculoskeletal structure.
And so she always needs to be held, right?
And that's tough. I've learned how to spread...
You know, butter on toast using my hip.
I went to the grocery store today, and she was in her car seat in the trolley, and, you know, ten minutes in, she starts to arch her back, trying to twist out.
She just wants to be up.
It's not like she can't see, because she can see, right?
But she just wants to be up and held.
I think held more than up.
Although I shouldn't say that, because if I hold her with her chest to my chest, she gets kind of fussy, but if I hold her facing out, that's where she's happy, right?
And you end up with these ridiculous, you know, like one leg is up in her back and she's arched, just make sure you keep adjusting her.
So it's very tiring, and one arm thing gets tiring after a while.
And so, because of that as well, and again, I don't know how common that is.
I suspect that's not every baby.
At least it's not my nieces as I remember.
But she really is.
She loves to be held. And she's really not happy when she's not being held.
And that is a whole other world of investment, right?
Just time and energy and aches and pains and so on, right?
But that's the way it is, right?
I mean, what is the alternative?
You can't let a baby cry it out when she's four months old, right?
So... I'll get to the theory shortly.
Let me just whine for a few moments, right?
Because she's a great kid. I mean, she really is fantastic and wonderful and barely cries.
And, you know, she is just great.
But it is a huge amount of resources.
And for reasons I'll talk about in a bit, I was sort of reading The Life of an 18th Century Intellectual.
And he has a kid, his son, and, you know, kisses the boy and then goes away for 18 months and comes back, right?
And this is sort of a tradition in my family, right, that the men vanish.
Daddy long legs, we call them.
And this is when you read some of the stuff in the Psychohistory Journal that I get, that father involvement in early childhood care is really rare, is really minimal.
It's really small.
And often, you know, six, seven, the fathers will start to get involved if and when sort of the physical education of the child becomes important in ancient Greece.
They didn't see them until well into their latency period.
Or barely saw them, right?
And there is this historical aspect of things where the dads are just not involved.
In the education and the care of infants.
And it's pretty rare.
I don't know the degree to which there are stay-at-home dads, but it's in the single digits, percentage-wise, if I remember rightly, but it's pretty small.
And I think that's really significant.
Because, I tell you, I mean, it's a huge investment to parent a child.
I mean, excuse me, it's huge if it keeps up at night, but it's a huge investment to parent a child.
It's... It's bigger than I thought.
And, you know, not to whine too explicitly, because I'm aware, right?
But because she's actually a really good kid, right?
I mean, Isabella's a really good-natured, happy, you know, not sick, not colicky, not cry-y, not unknown, unexplained X, Y, and Z. I mean, she's a really good kid, but it is pretty mind-blowing.
I kind of had this idea, you know, you sort of read, oh, babies will sleep, you know, newborns will sleep 16 to 20 hours a day.
Ha! So you think, at least for a while, you know, she's not going to be...
She's just going to be like a lump, right?
And that's not really the case at all.
I mean, she's certainly sleeping better now than she was in the past, but sure as heck wasn't that...
wasn't sleeping that much.
And, um... And even then, you know, constant monitoring.
It was really good to be able to interact with her and so on.
And now, of course, she can turn over now, right?
And, of course, you can't leave babies unattended at any time, right?
But even if I just sort of go and get a glass of water while she's in her playpen, she could turn over, right?
And then she's over and then not happy, right?
So that's another challenge or issue, if you like.
So it's just, I mean, it's mind-blowing how much time, energy, concentration, distraction, investment.
And then this, and again, I say this as the guy, I mean, I take her perhaps a little more during the day, especially now Christine has gone back to work.
But I say this as the guy who, relative to my wife, has got it pretty easy, right?
I mean, I am really up with her at night.
And I... I'm not having this beast gnaw at my nipples and breast pumping and all that kind of stuff, right?
So, I have it pretty easy and I find it to be just an enormous amount of work.
For the most part, it's work I happily do, right?
So, I don't want to turn anybody off having kids, right?
I mean, she is just a delight.
She is just wonderful. But the other thing, too, that I've sort of noticed is that she, you know, she engages with me for sure, but she really wants to go out and explore the world.
So a lot of it is sort of her pointed at the world, if that makes any sense.
So you're just sort of helping her to explore her world rather than having these sort of deep, meaningful staring contests that, you know, I guess at some degree when you look at those Hallmark cards, that's sort of what I was thinking of.
But that's a little bit different than what I expected, but, you know, it's what it is, right?
And so I was sort of thinking, well, why would it have developed this way?
Well, obviously there's, you know, in the way that we evolved as a species, there's the breastfeeding and then the hunter-gathering, right?
There's some controversy about how much nutrition and protein and calories the hunter-gatherers, or the hunter part of the hunter-gatherers, actually put together.
But, if we just say that there was the breastfeeders and then the hunter-gatherers, right?
So, there was some practical evolution to having the women take care, be the primary caregivers of the infants, and then the men do not be the primary caregivers.
But, given that even the most dedicated hunter-gatherer has to stop when it starts getting dark, right?
Um... It's still not too clear to me, at least it wasn't until I've got this theory, which may not make it clear, but at least helps point me in some direction that's useful.
It's not entirely clear to me why, then, that there would be still such a degree of segregation between fathers and children.
Right, so let's say our dad's off hunting woolly mammoth or whatever, but he still comes back and he's at home or in the igloo or the cave or the hut or whatever.
For hours and hours, right?
And... Why would there then still be this segregation?
And... I have a sort of theory as to why, and I'll talk about it a bit.
There's no proof, right? But there's some logic, hopefully, and some empirical evidence, and hopefully that will be enough to at least excite interest in the possibility that this might be useful, as opposed to, ah, it's soft.
You know, when you've gone through this process, or you're going through this process of realizing just how much staggering investment it takes to parrot a baby, it's really hard to look at anyone,
or a mass, or a crowd, or a woman just walked in front of a young woman, couldn't it be more than 17 or 18, just walked in front of the car, And it's hard not to think of her as learning how to grab her own feet and blowing raspberries.
Because you see, as I've mentioned before, you see these trees and the roots go down to the center of the earth in terms of where we all came from and the crib and history and all that.
So it's really hard to look at the world and not see just how much work has gone into everyone who's made it to adulthood or even medium childhood.
You know, once you've been up, once you've done all of the work, once you've, or I haven't done it, once you're involved and you really do get just how much staggering work it takes to create a human being, it's hard not to think of human beings as innately more valuable, if that makes any sense.
It's sort of like realizing that the doodles you have sitting around in your attic were actually penned by Michelangelo.
It changes them from just a bunch of junk you're storing to a rare and wonderful collector's item, right?
And once you realize just how much work goes into raising and caring for and tending and feeding and changing and clothing a human being, it's really hard to To ever be cavalier about human life, right? The guy being waterboarded was, you know, swaddled, and his mother got up to feed and change him at night and was exhausted and worried.
And when he slept too long during the day, she might have panicked and done what you're not supposed to do, but which is hard to resist sometimes.
Check the breathing, right?
Hold up that Laertes mirror, right?
And it's really a kind of fundamental aspect of being a parent to just realize, dear, sweet Mother Lord Jesus above, it is astounding.
How much work goes into raising a human being?
And I'm just... I mean, what am I? Four and a half months in, right?
Plus some time beforehand to helping Christina with the pregnancy.
Plus beforehand not helping Christina with the non-pregnancy.
But... I'm four and a half months in, and it's true that they are in many ways the toughest four and a half months or the toughest, you know, first six months, first year.
But, I mean, I've got, I mean, so let's say four and a half years, right?
That's a long way in the future. You know, Isabella's still going to be pretty damn helpless, right?
I mean, it's not like she's going to be zooming off to college in a Camaro.
So, it's just so much work.
And it is. It's great work.
You know, FDR is a huge amount of work, or at least it was.
You know, I've had to scale back a little bit, but actually quite a lot.
But it's great, right?
And, you know, we're not going to let her cry it out.
We're not going to do any of those kinds of things.
So those are the additional challenges that we're facing as, you know, hopefully reasonably enlightened parents who are trying to learn from the mistakes of our own histories and so on.
But it's, sweet God, it's so hard to see humanity in the same way again.
It's so much work.
Every human being is the product of a staggering amount of labor.
And And that's one, so that's one aspect.
Sorry it's taken so long to explain this.
I'm just trying to get all of the complexity and the emotions.
I mean, I want to get just how, you know, everyone who is alive has just had this staggering amount of labor poured into them.
And it just makes human life and success just that much more staggeringly important and valuable.
So, what I sort of mean is that it's, you know, when you're a dad or a mom and you really get, in a way that it's hard to get really without in a way that it's hard to get really without going through it, just how much work there is in raising a human being.
Do you know what I find just so amazingly hard to comprehend is...
The draft. I can't get how parents who've put so much work into raising their children, the sleeplessness, the constant...
You know, I mean, my daughter, it's not always the greatest thrill in the world to pass the rattle back and forth 400 times a day, right?
I mean, you've got to find ways to make it engaging, right?
So it can be a little dull at times too, right?
And I just, like, with all of that investment behind you, how could you turn over your kid to the state in that way?
How could it just not be the most appalling thing?
And I mean, I'm even talking like, you know, I'm in so much work into Isabella, who's such a wonderful human being.
You know, it fundamentally offends my sensibilities that she would be turned over as a piece of tax cattle for men and women infinitely her inferior and mine and yours.
Right? That it's the tininess of our masters that is actually the most shameful thing about our slavery, right?
To be ruled by a god would be something.
A god called reason and evidence, perhaps.
To be ruled by a god would be subjugatory.
It would be subjugation, but it would be thrilling.
There would be some pride in at least having been conquered by a god rather than these Empty rhetorical little vermin that run humanity.
Sarkozy, Bush, Clinton.
These are the cockroaches who run the deities of the species.
It's ridiculous.
Think of the First World War.
The mortality rate was staggeringly high, and...
Moms and dads would tell their children, their sons, to go and fight.
There's a chilling scene in Fahrenheit 9-1-1, as I mentioned before, where this mother, her son's weeping, saying he doesn't want to go, he's terrified, to Iraq, right?
And it's not the draft, but she says, no, no, no, you've signed up, you have to.
It's your duty, your honor.
We fulfill our commitments, right?
That, to me, is completely bizarre.
It's like, I mean, there's no analogy that can do it justice.
It's like spending 20 years, 70 hours a week, painting the most beautiful painting, or a series of the most beautiful paintings the world has ever seen.
And then when some guy says, give it to me so I can burn them, you're like, here you go!
I was spending 20 years creating the most beautiful music and then handing it over to a guy so he can burn it.
Shred it. Writing the most beautiful poetry for 20 years.
40, 50, 60 hours a week.
Inspiration strikes you in the middle of the night and yanks you out of bed.
Some guy comes along and says, Okay, this poetry's mine now.
And you're like, Great!
Be sure to shred it well.
There's no metaphor that can do the horror of this justice, right?
It can't be done. It can't be done.
I mean, how fucked up, dysthymic, depressed, self-hating, hating of your children, hating of the world...
Must you be to hand over the treasure of your loins carefully raised, fed, watered, cleansed, inoculated, exercised, to hand it over to the disassembling butchers of the majestically petty state?
What must your mind be like?
I swear to God, if there was ever a draft...
And they wanted to take Isabella?
There is no fucking way on God's green earth that would ever, ever happen.
ever.
I would go and live with her and Christina in the Amazon rather than hand the treasure of my life over to these petty butchers.
And so, in a sense...
I don't know how the best to put this.
In a sense, the reason that fathers are kept away from young children is so that they don't see just how much energy and investment goes into their raising.
Because if they did...
Really get it.
Really get it in their bones, which you can't get if you don't see your kids very often or if you see them for an hour or two before bedtime because you work 50 hours a week or whatever out of the home.
If you just don't get in your bones...
How much work goes into children and how precious they are, you simply couldn't spend human lives like pennies falling from the purse of a billionaire.
You simply couldn't.
Because you would see the cloud of energy floating over these human beings As children, as teens, as adults, that made their existence possible and so fundamentally valuable.
And since it is men who determine war to a large degree, keeping men away from infants and toddlers and shielding them from the amount of work that goes into them means that they don't get it.
And the fact that they don't get it How much work goes into raising children?
Viscerally. You may get it.
If you don't get it viscerally, then it's easier to have a war, right?
Because, you know, it's just pins on a map, right?
Bodies in a costume. It is, of course, my hope that Fathers in particular will stay more involved with their children because then you can't miss it.
You can't miss how much effort and investment goes in and then you can't be indifferent to life.
You can't be indifferent to human life.
I'm not saying every dad who doesn't stay home is indifferent to human life.
I'm just talking about some extremes here.
And the larger pattern of why would men be kept away from children even when there was no particular need from a biological standpoint?
Well, because you can't have war without dehumanization and you can't have dehumanization if you view every human being as a pillar that goes deep into the bowels of the earth of their history from babyhood onwards.
If I see some tall, leggy woman in shorts, right?
It sounds weird, but it's true.
You can't look at that leg without imagining it.
Curled, wrinkled, and pudgy with its toes curling in.
Sitting on a change table.
Getting wiped because the poo ran down to the ankle, right?
You just can't...
It's hard to take people with that same kind of...
The poses don't work anymore, right?
I mean, if you've really been heavily involved in the raising of children, it doesn't mean that...
It doesn't mean I don't find women attractive or anything, but you can't help but think of it, right?
Someone with long, lustrous hair or whatever, or, you know, some guy with washboard abs, you can't help but think of them as, you know, mostly bald and with a nice little baby's chunky punch, right?
It's... You just can't look at people the same way.
And it deflates a lot of the posing, you know?
You know, the people who want to be sexy and edgy and contemporary and vivacious and all that.
You just can't help but think of them being their own diapers and making raspberry sounds when they're excited.
And so the people who...
And here, sorry, I'll just shift gears a little bit.
And this is where the true tragedy arises in the examination of people, right?
Because, I mean, Isabella is so blissfully not self-conscious, right?
I mean, she's just gloriously not concerned with how chunky her calves are, or, you know, whether she has back fat.
I mean, she's just so gloriously...
Unselfconscious and affectionate.
And her heart is open and, oh, dear God, you know, I mean, she smiles at people and they smile back or they smile at her and she smiles back.
And it is a simple, beautiful, genuine, open-hearted human interaction.
And, you know, if you're out there, please treat my girl nicely.
She is an absolute treasure.
Please try to...
To treat her well.
She is so beautiful. And she so much deserves all the good things that humanity can bestow.
And she will bestow back ten times more than you give her, I guarantee.
I guarantee it. Just be nice to her.
She deserves it. And you deserve it too.
So, the other thing that's occurred for me, other than this slow, dawning, staggering realization of the effort and the humanity of each individual, I'm also really getting a sense of firmness when it comes to corruption or evil.
It may sound strange, right?
To say, oh, there's all this empathy and so on, but it really is a double-edged sword for sure.
And I'll tell you what I mean by that.
that.
Hopefully it'll make some kind of sense.
I really get a sense being a dad, I really get a sense of just how horribly wrong it can be.
How horribly wrong it can go.
I mean, if you're the wrong kind of person, if you haven't done the work that you need to grow your empathy, if it's been undermined or to expand it, whatever you need to do to be a good dad, and I'm still figuring all that stuff out, but...
If you haven't done that work and how horribly wrong it can go.
Like if, for instance, and I think this is sadly common among parents, right?
You have these kids, I don't know why, because you think maybe they're going to, you know, be all kinds of affectionate and so on.
And, you know, my mom was, you know, she loved the attention when we were young and cute, right?
Just not so much when we were older and certainly.
But, you know, two little blonde, blue-eyed, precocious, verbal children, you know, lots of...
And, you know, I like that too.
I like the fact that people come up to Isabella and give her smiles and say how cute and smiley she is and all that.
I mean, that's nice. It's nice, right?
I mean, I'm not going to say that it's, oh, I'm indifferent.
It's really nice. But, oh man, if you had shit that you really wanted to get done in life...
And you hadn't got that done by the time you had kids?
Oh man, I could see that.
I could see this huge chafing against the life that you have.
Like you want to go north and the wind is just pushing you south and you're fighting the whole time and...
Man, I can totally see that if you were not happy with your life and did not have the life that you want and had these, you know, big unfulfilled, whether realistic or not, it doesn't really matter, these big unfulfilled ambitions or delusions of grandeur or things that you were achievable, it doesn't really matter.
But if you had all these other things that you just, you know, oh, so desperately wanted to get done...
Or felt that you could get down or I could be famous, rich, and beautiful if it wasn't for this squalling infant who wants to be held all the time.
I can totally see how, oh man, just resentment would flood in.
It wouldn't even ease in.
It would just flood in. And this constant, like then it would be like the child's natural, I mean children or babies at least for sure, just these black holes, right?
Of need and all that.
And I can completely see how you would just view every additional cry, you know, oh, I could just, I could be a famous novelist, I just need some time.
Oh my God, the baby's crying again.
Oh my God, the baby's hungry again.
Oh my God, I have to heat up some milk.
Oh my God, I have to change her again.
Oh my God, she's cranky.
Oh my God, I just put her down and she wants to be picked up again.
Oh my, like you would just be chafing.
The whole time, and I wrote about this a little bit with Alder in The God of Atheists, but I really, really get just how horribly wrong it can go if you view children as an accessory to enhance your drive towards ambition, fame, success, and riches.
Man, you'd just be running into a giant, enormous, pudgy, and often slightly damp statue of babyhood that would not let you pass, and you would just rail against it, right?
I mean, it would be awful.
It would be enraging.
And I think, I mean, again, not to pick on my mom, but I think I know that she really had this idea that she was talented, rich, and beautiful.
She was beautiful. She's a beautiful woman.
Physically, of course.
And this idea that, oh, if it wasn't for these kids, you know, I could...
I could be so much.
I could be so great. I could be so deep.
I could be all of this, that, and the other, and with ketchup on the side.
And that would just be horrible.
I mean, and that's relatively minor relative to all the other things that can go wrong.
So, seeing... How many and much resources infants need?
Boy, if you were set against them, and also how preternaturally sensitive they are to your moods, right?
If I'm not feeling particularly happy and I try to make Isabella laugh, it will not work.
If I'm genuinely happy and try to make her laugh, it will work.
She knows the difference. At a couple of months old, she knows the difference between when I'm faking and when I'm real.
And it's not a huge fake, but you understand, right?
I mean, she really is a fantastic barometer for authenticity.
Because she is so fundamentally authentic herself, is not trying to manipulate or achieve any kind of effect, right?
And it's a beautiful thing to see, but, you know, it is a challenge for all of us who have our little fakery tricks, right?
To remember to not, you know, to not express what you do not feel, to not fake, to not pretend.
And... So, I can...
You know, when...
You know, if it goes wrong...
If babyhood goes wrong, like really wrong, like you end up with some violent or abusive or narcissistic parent, oh man, I can completely see just how undoable that is.
Seeing the degree to which My mood has an effect on her, and I'm not a particularly moody fellow, but I mean, we all have our moments, right?
Seeing how much my mood affects her, seeing how much all of that just forms who she is, that Christina and I are the world which she inhabits.
We are more real to her than the ceiling in gravity.
And if we weren't available, if we weren't happy, if we weren't positive, if we weren't in love, if we weren't friendly, if we weren't these things...
I can just see how horribly wrong, how off the ditch it can go.
And that, to me, it has a kind of irrevocability to it.
And I don't know, I don't have any facts about this, and I don't think there are any facts to know for sure.
But it is also, you know, when you meet these cold, nasty people so often online, it is, you know, in that stake that goes into the bowels of the earth, right?
In that aspect of their existence, it is really, really, really easy to see just how embedded those dysfunctions are.
I know it's a pretty chilling thing to talk about, and I've had some intimations of it before, like the characters who can't adapt into Goa and other novels that I've written, but it is...
When you see how deeply embedded people are based on their histories and their infancies and how they were treated and what their experiences were, that really they're so embedded.
When you're trying to change someone's mind, you're not trying to push a sapling, right?
You're trying to push a sapling made of iron that has roots that go down to the center of the earth, right?
You can't do it.
It doesn't mean people can't change themselves, right?
But you can't change them, of course, right?
And Seeing, you know, when a personality is awry, seriously awry, you know, like trolley or abusive or whatever, when the personality is seriously awry, I mean, I really get in a way that I didn't before, other than at a really abstract level, I really get. Like, it's so embedded.
This is why the don't engage thing is so important, right?
It is such an embedded thing.
There is no... A little argument or interaction or a powerful argument or a big interaction or a long interaction that's going to change that person.
I mean, maybe they'll change over time if they want to, but it'll take years or decades and a huge amount of resources because reparenting in terms of infancy is really, really tough.
And so, seeing just how powerful the influences are over Isabella and her experience and how her personality is either being allowed to develop naturally or not in the same way her body is...
By positive and warm and friendly and happy interactions, that is going to give her such a strong rootedness in her life as to be taking pleasure in who she is and to really recognize and understand that she brings pleasure to others based on who she is.
But it really is clear to me that when it goes wrong, it just goes so...
It's enormously wrong. And to all intents and purposes, at least in terms of internet interactions, it is irrevocably wrong because it just goes so deep into history that, you know, IMs and typing and board fights can't change it, right? So these are just some of the thoughts that I had.
It's not really a parenting series so much.
I'm not really talking about what I'm doing as a parent, just sort of more me, me, me, I, me, me, I experience this as a parent.
But this idea about how deep it goes, about how it's so important to keep, like if you want to have a corrupt and violent society, it's so important to keep parents away from caring for infants, dads away in particular from caring for infants.
And there's another reason why the world's getting a little colder, right?
Because parents are having less interaction with infants than they used to because we have to come back to a two-parent family because of high taxation and so on, so...
I hope this stuff has been of interest to you.
Please let me know if it's not, and I will stop rambling about all of this sort of stuff.
And if it is of interest, let me know as well, and I will perhaps grace you with even more rambling.
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