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Jan. 29, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:27
1570 Philosophical Parenting - Part One - Freedomain Radio
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Alright, so this is an idea that I've been cooking around for a little while, which is a book on parenting.
Ah, I hear you say, perhaps, up front, dude, you've been a parent for a little over 13 months.
Who are you to tell me about parenting?
Well, I think, of course, that the most important things are at the beginning, and I would say that it's really the first year, or at least 18 months of parenting.
That is most important. And so I'm fairly along that road.
And I went in with a strong theoretical basis for my parenting experiment.
And I will not kid you, it was an experiment.
And it was really philosophical.
It's philosophical parenting is what I'm talking about.
And my philosophy, of course, is informed by voluntarism, by the free market, by empiricism, and by a fundamental acceptance of the power of morality, because the world is ruled by those who define moral systems of punishment and reward.
And so, I assume that everybody wants to be good, and that's why everybody works so hard to figure out how to define virtue to serve their own, sadly, nefarious ends.
But... My parenting was very much informed by these traditions.
Of course, as a full supporter of the non-aggression principle, I clearly could never in any way, shape, or form initiate violence against my child.
And one of the challenges in that context, of course, is that violence against children includes verbal violence, verbal aggression, raising your voice, calling names, harsh tones, and it also includes withdrawal.
This is a form of aggression.
Unwanted aggression against children.
Why? Well, because clearly we understand that if I just walk up and bop somebody in the nose with my fist out of nowhere, they can't really avoid it unless they just stay home forever, right?
So they can't really avoid it, and therefore it is the initiation of force.
If I say to somebody, you know, meet me at this street corner in New York in 12 days at 6 a.m., and I will bop you in the nose, and they show up, we can understand that they have at least to some degree participated in their own boppedness.
So, children don't have the capacity to avoid, obviously, physical violence.
They don't have the capacity to avoid verbal aggression, because if you're in a verbally abusive relationship as an adult, then you can choose to leave, and you've also chosen to be there.
But children, of course, fundamentally don't choose their parents in any way, shape, or form.
And therefore, verbal aggression against children, obviously, it damages them.
And if you have any doubt about that, you can look at my Bomb and the Brain series on YouTube or in the podcast stream.
But it does damage, verbal aggression does damage to a child's mind.
And so it is the initiation of force to verbally aggress against a child because a child has no choice whether to be there or not.
Now, the other aspect is withdrawal.
And since children can't fend for themselves or even find their home if placed two blocks away, at least at Isabella's current age, because of that, withdrawal is a threat.
Right? I mean, we understand that if I place somebody in solitary confinement and refuse to feed them, or threaten to refuse to feed them, then that is a significant punishment, right?
If I say to you, who I don't even know...
Sorry, she's back there, but she's just a little too much light coming in.
I can't solve that. If I say to you, I'm not going to feed you, I'm sure you'll survive.
But if I lock you in my basement and then say, I'm not going to feed you, or I'm going to withdraw from you, or I'm not going to come...
And bring you water, then that is a significant punishment.
That's different than if you were just some guy.
And, you know, children are essentially locked in the basement of the family.
They didn't choose to be there. They've been kidnapped, so to speak.
They're locked in the basement of the family.
That doesn't mean that the family is bad or wrong, but it means that we have to approach the ethics of child raising with that understanding that children are morally equivalent to prisoners in the home.
And, again, that doesn't Nothing to do with the fundamental ethics of the family.
That is just the reality, that they didn't choose to be there and they can't get away.
That doesn't mean that they can't have an enormous amount of fun and so on, but you need to parent.
My approach to parenting has always been that Isabella didn't choose me as a father, but I want to parent as if she had that choice and therefore would choose me.
Or I would like to ask her when she's older, is there any other father that you would rather have in the world?
And if she says yes, then I need to figure out why and adapt my parenting to meet her needs better.
I think that's really, really important.
You have to parent so that your child would choose you out of a voluntary situation even though she's not in a voluntary situation.
So I think that's really, really, really important.
You have to have greater... We understand that if you were assigned a wife, and you wanted her to really love you...
And you really, really wanted her to love you, then what you would do is you would have to be extra attentive and extra romantic and extra loving and extra empathetic because she was assigned to you, so you'd already have that barrier to overcome.
Whereas if your wife chose you, at least you could say, well, you know, you're here by choice.
So the standards should be higher in involuntary relationships than they are in voluntary relationships.
Far, far higher. And I think that's really, really important.
But that's something that unfortunately so often just goes the other way, right?
That the standards are lower in involuntary relationships than they are in voluntary relationships.
And therein, of course, lies the tragedy of the family that so often plays out with such negative effects in the world.
So, I think that it's really, really important as a parent to recognize that you don't have the right to initiate force against your child, you certainly don't have the right to initiate physical force, and you don't have the right to initiate verbal aggression or abuse, and you don't have the right to threaten withdrawal or to order them away.
And I am growing increasingly skeptical towards the concept of timeouts, but I'm going to withhold judgment on that because I don't think I've hit that stage yet.
So I have a theory as to how it's not going to be necessary, but I'm not going to put my entire hat on that.
We'll see how that occurs going forward.
So, if you don't have the right to aggress against your children verbally, emotionally, physically, or through the threat of withdrawal, then the question always arises, well, how do you discipline them?
And that, of course, is a question that I believe is answered by free market economics.
Free market economics, wouldn't you know?
And the answer to that is that, I mean, there's sort of two fundamental ways of trying to get things done in the world, right?
I mean, you can either threaten people or you can entice people, right?
That's really all there is to it.
It's a difference between the free market and the state, right?
So to inflict education on your children, the state forces you to pay for that education.
And if you don't pay for it, they throw you in jail and blah, blah, blah, right?
And if you compete without a license, they will throw you in jail.
So I understand that's just compelling people, right?
On the other hand, and this is, I'm sure, going to date the podcast in the future, but Apple has come out with something called the iPad, which is, you know, it's an iPod touch that ate a very large meal of steroids.
And in that, nobody's forcing anyone to buy it.
They're just trying to entice you with, you know, sexy features and, you know, cool touch interface and so on.
And that is something that is very different.
And it's very much in opposition to what occurs in the state.
The state forces you to do things.
The market entices you.
To consume things or to utilize things.
And those are huge differences.
One is the threat of punishment.
The other is the promise of reward.
And the reward is, interestingly enough, the reward in the free market is not something that is kept from you and then provided to you.
It's not a reward to say, Or you don't get any dinner and then if the child complies, you then feed the child dinner.
That's not a reward because you're withholding something that the child would normally get.
And it's not like I normally get an iPad, but if I don't praise Apple, I won't get one.
It's not like that, right?
I'm getting a net positive in my life, not the removal of a negative or the removal of an expected positive.
So, saying you won't get paid your allowance if you do your chores, that is threatening to take something away that the child is expecting, which is not really how the free market works.
The free market works with the massive challenge of positive enticement.
And so, for many moons before my wonderful daughter was born, I thought long and hard about how discipline is going to work.
And I guess the first thing is to try and figure out what is meant by discipline.
I mean, I think that's really, really important.
What is meant by discipline?
And for me, discipline fundamentally comes down to keeping my daughter safe.
That's really what it comes down to.
There's no discipline in roughhousing and tickling her, right?
There's no discipline in that.
But there is, you know, we don't want her to touch plugs, we don't want her to touch electrical cords and so on, and so we've been sort of persistent in the nose as far as that goes.
So that is discipline in terms of keeping her safe.
She's a fantastic explorer of the world, and she's very keen to get around and figure out new things.
So that's one aspect of discipline is that the most fundamental discipline is for the child to engage in behaviors that are going to keep her safe or not engage in behaviors that will endanger her, of course.
But there's a more fundamental aspect to discipline.
So, for instance, if you don't want your child to be aggressive, then you can do, I guess, one of two things.
You can either not be aggressive with your child and thus model that peaceful behavior.
And therefore, the child, certainly in my experience, Isabella doesn't have an aggressive bone in her body.
Because she's never heard a harsh word.
She's never had anyone raise their voice at her.
She's never had any sort of, there's been no threats of withdrawal or anything like that.
So she's never experienced any aggression.
And so she doesn't exhibit aggression.
That to me is the most fundamental way to, quote, discipline the child, which is to model the behavior that you want.
And that's really tough for parents because a baby really is a mirror of who you are.
A child is a mirror of who you are.
And if you don't like that mirror of who you are, Then you're gonna have, sort of quote, a problem with the baby.
But the problem really is with your own behavior.
It's not with the baby himself or herself.
So rather than be aggressive with Isabella and then have to discipline her for being aggressive, which again just causes an ever-upwards escalation in aggression, I have simply chosen, I'm not saying it's an easy choice, but I've simply chosen to not model aggressive behavior for my daughter.
She doesn't know what aggressive behavior looks like.
I don't expect her to be aggressive any more than I expect her to break into fluent Mandarin, a language that she's never been exposed to.
She does not speak the language of aggression.
And to me, that is the most fundamental.
I mean, it's a big risk, right?
Say, well, because children need, you need to be assertive or aggressive with children in order for them to, you know, because children are born bestial and aggressive and they'll just push and take.
And that's really not the case.
At least, it's certainly not the case in our family.
Isabella is exceedingly gentle.
And very sensitive.
And I believe that it's because her natural empathy has been allowed to flower in the absence of any kind of aggression or harsh language or ugliness or unpleasantness or hostility or anything like that.
And that's equally true between my wife and myself.
We never raise our voice at each other.
We don't call each other names.
It's not part of our vocabulary.
And so my daughter doesn't see that In her parents, and she doesn't experience that from her parents.
And so, it would, to me, be a proof of demonic possession, in a sense, if she were to have all of these aggressive tendencies, because it would be like her learning a language that she'd never been exposed to.
And I think that's really, really, really important.
People say, and they reverse this all the time, right?
They say, they do this with the free market all the time.
They say, well, financial crisis is the result of the free market.
No, no, no. The financial crisis is the result of The initiation of violence through government regulation and intervention, through government control and manipulation of money supplies and interest rates and housing markets and so on.
And so people then say, well, we need regulation to cure the free market, but in fact it is regulation that has caused the problems in the same way, in the same way.
Parents say, well, I need to be aggressive with my children because my children are aggressive and I need to restrain them.
It's like, no, no, no. They are aggressive in my opinion because you have modeled aggression towards them.
Your aggression came first and their aggression as a response is as a modeling of your behavior.
Children are just incredible sponges and almost perfect mirrors of your behavior.
They will do what you do, for better or for worse.
They simply... Aw, boo-boo, almost done.
They simply mimic everything that is occurring around them, and it really is astounding.
I mean, you use the broom twice, and Isabella now wants to sweep the entire house, including the roof and the ceilings.
But that is a very, very important aspect.
If you don't stimulate the behavior, you don't need to control the behavior.
If you do not model aggression and inflict aggression, you will not need to manage aggression in your children.
Again, is that a universal proof?
Of course not. But it is certainly my experience.
And what can happen to one person certainly opens it up as a possibility.
And I would really, really strongly advise you to consider this as a possible way of parenting.
So that, I think, is very, very important to recognize.
So you've got two options. You can either model the behavior that you want in your children or...
You can act in a way that you don't want them to act or act in a manner that you don't want them to act in and then use additional control to manage that behavior.
And the second one, I just never wanted to do.
I never wanted to do and this went against almost all of the grain of what I had been taught growing up, of what I had learned about parenting.
I mean, the parenting that is sort of mainstream, and I'm no expert on this, right?
The parenting that is sort of mainstream, in my experience, is that you need to control your children, that you need to be the boss, that you need to restrain their bad behavior, you need to give them negative consequences for bad behavior and positive consequences for good behavior.
And all that. And that has just not at all turned out to be the case.
And it's not easy to go against these cultural myths because part of me and perhaps part of you says, well, these myths have to be there for a reason.
These accumulated experiences of the species have to be there for a reason.
But when you start to think creatively and originally and compare systems which don't work with systems that do work, and of course I'm a massive fan of the free market because it works so well when it's allowed to be free, you have to look at what does work versus what doesn't work.
And It's true, for instance, that you can get things done using the power of the state, using force, but what you get done is very temporary and very difficult to maintain, and you create resistance and you create the need for an ever-escalating state of power.
I'm very much around, if you want the man to take off his cloak, turn up the sun, don't turn up the wind, because the wind will just make him clutch his cloak tighter to his own chest.
So I think that's really, really important when it comes to discipline, is that what kind of behavior exactly are you trying to control in your child?
If it is behavior that you yourself Have indulged in, then you have no right to control it in your child through using aggression because that is just utterly wrong.
That is just utterly wrong and will be, in my opinion, incredibly counterproductive to your child's positive relationship with you in the long run.
Alright, so another principle that I have used in my parenting that I think has been really helpful to me Is things like there are certain times when I've had to muscle my daughter, right?
And those times are when she's hungry or needs a change.
Let's say we go to the library and she has a poop and I have to go and change her and she doesn't want to get changed.
Well, then you have to impose your will, unfortunately.
But that is a reality of parenting.
I'm not going to pretend it's not. It obviously does happen.
It's very rare. I would say that it maybe happens...
Maybe once a month I've had to do that.
And of course, when she's going to get her physical, if she's going to the doctor, if she doesn't like it, if she has injections, she's not happy.
And these are all challenges.
And you kind of have to make it happen.
There's really not a lot of choices there.
And also, of course, with sleep training.
We have a daughter who was not a good sleeper at all, to say the least.
She was waking up every hour or two for an hour or more and was just unsustainable.
I mean, we weren't being the kind of parents we wanted to be.
She wasn't getting the sleep she needed for proper development.
Sleep is as important as other kinds of nutrition.
And so we ended up sleep training her, which obviously she didn't want, she didn't like, and caused her some suffering in the moment.
So that, to me, is the question.
And it comes down to a question that has long floated around moral philosophy circles.
A guy on a flagpole is, you know, let's say you're a strict advocate of private property and someone's drowning.
Do you grab somebody else's life jacket, even though you don't have permission to grab it ahead of time, or do you not?
And I think that the way that I've attempted to solve this problem, I think with some success, and this is relevant to parenting, is I do think that it's A valid moral proposition to say, if you have every reasonable reason to believe that somebody is going to grant permission after the fact, then it's okay to act without that permission ahead of the fact, right?
So, if you didn't throw the life jacket to someone because you didn't own it and that someone drowned, I'm sure that the person who owned the life jacket would say, are you crazy?
Why didn't you throw the life jacket?
And you'd say, well, it wasn't my property and so on.
It's like, but I wouldn't have had any problem with it whatsoever.
I think those are reasonable standards to apply.
You can't always get permission ahead of time, but if you reasonably anticipate that permission would be given ahead of time, if the person were able to get permission, right?
If you were to shout to this person and say, someone's drowning, so can I use the life jacket?
They'd be saying, why are you even asking?
Just go save that person, right?
So my life jacket gets wet.
That's what it's for. And I think that's really, really important.
On the other hand, you take somebody's Maserati and you swerve to avoid an ant in the road and you say, well, but the ant, you know, they might say, well, it's okay to drive over the ant.
My Maserati is quite expensive.
So there's some degrees, but there's pretty clear-cut cases on the one hand or the other, and particularly if you provide restitution afterwards and so on.
So, we all understand that grabbing somebody and yanking them is not a particularly nice thing to do, but if that person that you're grabbing and yanking has, you know, headphones on full blast and is about to walk in front of a speeding bus, then the grabbing and the yanking would be received with extraordinary gratitude after the initial surprise and perhaps anger.
It would be greeted with extraordinary gratitude, like, thank heavens you just saved my life, I would have been creamed by that crosstown bus.
And this is another example.
If you weren't to yank that person back from walking in front of a speeding bus, and somebody would say, well, why didn't you save him?
It's like, well, I didn't have permission.
It's like, well, of course, you know, he wasn't aware, he couldn't give permission, and, you know, it was a ridiculous thing that you respected his, quote, personal space and property, personal property or self-ownership, and he died as a result of you respecting that, quote, principle.
So, I think we all understand that, that if...
It's reasonable to assume you would get permission after the fact.
Then it's okay to act as if you had that permission before the fact.
I think that's all perfectly valid.
Now, how does that relate to parenting?
Well, when it comes to inoculations, to getting her vaccinations, she does not like getting vaccinations.
Of course, no kid does. I'm very...
Much remember not liking getting vaccinations when I was a kid.
But I think about when she's 18, if she hadn't been vaccinated, and she might have gotten sick, she might, you know, have not gone to particular schools because they have vaccination policies.
She may have had to stay home all the time because we were afraid of her getting infections or diseases.
And so it would come down to Would it have been okay for us to inoculate you at a time when you could barely, well, she couldn't even remember it in her first year, so would you rather have had that pain, which is, you know, a minute or two, come and gone, and be protected against all these diseases?
And, of course, when she was 18, she would look back and say, well, of course that's what I want.
Now, as far as sleep goes, there are significant studies which say if you have sleep problems at the age of three or two or four, then it's very likely that you're going to have the same sleep problems when you were a senior in college.
This is pretty scientifically well-established.
Now, I'm one of those people who has sleep problems, and it goes all the way back to my childhood.
I've been a light sleeper.
It's partly an active mind, but it's also partly just the way I was raised.
Now, so I know what it's like to have sleep issues, and it is a real challenge to have sleep issues.
It can be quite debilitating.
Now, if somebody were to ask me if you had no memory of the discomfort or the upset or the trauma, if you had no memory of it, and yet you ended up with a lifetime of good and stable sleep, would you have liked to have been sleep trained when you were eight months old or six months old?
And of course, I would say, hell yes, I would be overjoyed to have been sleep-trained when I couldn't remember the trauma and ended up with a lifetime of healthy and good sleeping.
That would be much, much more preferable to me.
So after the fact, right, and this is the way that I assume it is with my daughter, that of course she doesn't like being sleep-trained and it's genuinely upsetting to her, like really upsetting to her, which I completely understand and really sympathize with.
But if I were to give her, when she's older, the choice to say, well, we didn't sleep train you because it was upsetting for you for a short period before you could even form long-term memories, but you've ended up with a lifetime of sleep problems, or at least sleep challenges, were you happy that we didn't sleep train you?
She would say, no, I'm not happy that you didn't sleep train me.
I would much rather have ended up with a lifetime of good sleep habits and have trauma that I can't even remember at a time when I couldn't process or store long-term memories.
I would much rather you have sleep trained me.
Similarly, of course, we can get to sort of silly extremes.
Like if we didn't change her diaper, then she would get skin rashes and skin sores and might end up with some significant health issues and so on.
And if we were to say to her when she was older, if she had scabs or scars or whatever, right?
Skin grafts or some godforsaken thing.
If we were to say to her...
When she got older, we didn't change you because we thought that you'd rather have an extra half an hour or 45 minutes playing at the library than change you or make sure that you were changed and clean you up and so on.
Well, she would say, well, I don't remember the half an hour play at the library when I was one year old, but I do now have these scars or health issues or problems or whatever, right?
So, that clearly would be permission after the fact, which is, I think, perfectly reasonable.
Now, on the other hand, you know, I don't think that even after the fact, children would, when they sort of grow up, would say, I'm totally glad that you yelled at me a lot, right?
I'm totally glad that you hit me.
Like, I'm totally glad you spanked me.
I'm totally glad that you, I don't know, put me in endless timeouts or whatever.
I don't think that children would say that.
And I think that's the fundamental difference, that you would not get permission after the fact for a lot of contemporary parenting choices.
Airplane, boo-boo, that's right.
Good eye. Man, she's got good eyes.
And that's the real difference.
And that's how I guide my actions when it comes to parenting.
And here's the challenge, though.
Here's the challenge, which comes up with parenting.
And the challenge is this.
I think we all understand around diapers and sleep training and so on and inoculations.
But I think the real challenge comes with this.
Which is, would your children, after the fact, give you permission, right?
Give you permission to work as hard as you work, to be away from home as much as you are away from home, if you are away from home a lot.
Would your children give you that permission after the fact, right?
So, if you were to say... Well, you know, I worked a lot and really hard because, and I'll take a sort of silly example that obviously serves the case I'm making, and I'm not saying it's the only one, but because we wanted a second car and, you know, we wanted to take you to Disney World every three years.
And we wanted a house that was, you know, 20% bigger than we would have been able to afford otherwise.
If you were to say to a child in the moment, do you want the family to have a second car or do you want mommy or daddy to stay home with you?
That's a really, really important question.
What permission would you get after the fact?
It's really, really important to ask yourself these questions when you're a parent.
Would you get permission after the fact to act in this way?
Would you rather have mommy home or would you rather have your own room?
If you're working, gets you a bigger house or whatever.
And I'm very much at the inclination and a very strong conviction that what children want is their parents.
At least that certainly is the case with my daughter.
She's incredibly hungry for parental company and just loves spending time with my wife and myself and doesn't particularly care about that much else.
It's time with the parents.
That's what she really, really wants. When it comes to asking those questions about your own parenting, I think it's really, really important.
I mean, if I didn't do this crazy philosophy stuff and was still in my real career...
Well, we'd have more money, right?
So, we'd be able to, you know, not go on vacation once every two years, as we're doing now, but twice a year, right?
But if I were to say to my daughter, after the fact, was it better for you to go on vacation more often, or was it better for you to have your father home with you every day?
What would you prefer? What did you prefer?
What was best for you? Now, if she could speak now, I'm quite convinced.
I mean, if she could really process that and respond, I'm absolutely convinced that she'd say, no, I want daddy home.
I don't really care about vacations, you know, having a few more vacations every year.
I want my daddy home.
That's what I like and that's what works for me.
At least I know she would say that.
After the fact, I think that's also a very important question to ask after the fact.
When my daughter is 15 and I say to her, well, you know, because I say to her, look, I made the choice to leave my lucrative career and come and spend time at home, right?
That's what I chose to do.
And because of that, we had less money.
So looking back, are you happy that you had a full-time stay-at-home dad, or would you have preferred that we lived in a bigger house, that you didn't drive around in a car that was 12 years old?
What would you have preferred?
It's inconceivable to me that she would say, I wish we'd had a bigger house, I wish we'd had newer cars, and I could frankly do without the big chatty forehead circling me 24-7.
That's hard for me.
It's hard for me to imagine that that would be her preference.
And so I have to sort of make my decisions.
And to some degree, you know, I mean, if I were my own parents, I'd want me to be around and that kind of thing.
It's just the best you could do.
It's not perfect. I'm not always going to come up with the perfect answer.
But it's sort of, would I get permission after the fact in the future?
Or if my child could articulate now, what would she choose?
And of course, the reality is that Children are articulating all the time.
Children are articulating all the time.
In my experience, if you really want to know what your child is feeling, figure out what your child is causing you to feel.
So we had like, I don't know, 25 people over for Christmas and Isabella found it.
It was good for an hour or two or three and then sort of started to get a bit overwhelmed as she was surrounded by these walking ends of people who were in her house.
And she got, you know, very fussy and needy and whiny and all these kinds of things to the point where I began to feel really stressed and overwhelmed.
And so that was my...
I mean, that's what she was feeling.
She couldn't communicate it verbally, but she could create those feelings in me.
And that was how she communicated what she was feeling.
And so I would submit that your children are, in fact, saying to you what their preferences are.
So, for instance, my wife gets up earlier than I do because she is a saint and...
She takes Isabella and then I will get up after her and brush my teeth and wash my face.
But the moment my daughter hears me upstairs, because I'm not the lightest spam on the planet, the moment that my daughter hears me, she rushes to the foot of the stairs and starts climbing them because she wants to spend time with me.
So that's some indication that that's important for her.
And so she really is communicating, I think, extraordinarily clearly about what her preferences are.
And so I have to sort of accept that.
If she really wants to spend time with me, if she doesn't sort of...
She has this thing where if she wants to spend time with me rather than my wife, then she's got this arm.
It works like a sort of subway turnstile.
It just levers around. If she...
If I want to pick her up and she doesn't want to be picked up, she'll just push, like, quite assertively, she'll push my hands away.
And so we know when she doesn't want to do something and when she doesn't want to spend time with someone, you know, she's very clear about that.
She'll sort of push you away, push you to one side, and you really can't be in a whole lot of doubt as to what her real intentions are.
And so if she didn't want to spend time with me, that would be really clear, but she really does want to spend time with me.
And, of course, the question then arises, well, is wanting to spend time with me the same as, say, not wanting to get inoculated or not wanting to have her diaper changed?
Well, no, obviously.
And, you know, do I really need to go into the reasons for that, right?
Not at all. Of course, the science is very positive towards fathers spending time with children.
Fathers help children develop empathy even more so than mothers.
So there's lots of science to back it up.
But those are some standards that I have found to be incredibly helpful.
I do not look at modifying my child's behavior.
I look at modifying my own behavior because I'm fully aware the degree to which she is enthusiastic.
About imitating me, right?
That she's a carbon copy.
I want to look into my soul. I just look at my daughter's actions and that's the reality.
Now, the last thing that I'll talk about and please people let me know if you find this stuff helpful and interesting.
The last thing I'll talk about is the role of enthusiasm in parenting.
I was at the library the other day, and there was a mom who was quite down about her daughter not being particularly active, not walking.
She was sort of holding herself up a bit, crawling a little bit, but her daughter seemed very listless.
And the mom seemed kind of down about it, and of course the dad was off reading his computer magazine, or no, photography magazine somewhere, which I didn't even want to bother getting into.
But... I didn't sort of tell her, but I showed her.
So when Isabella did something that I thought was really cool, as she is wont to do, I was enormously enthusiastic.
Half my parenting day is, yippee, and well done, and yahoo, beautiful, wonderful, being incredibly enthusiastic.
And I think it's an error to say that children are not as interested in pleasing their parents as their parents are in pleasing their children.
I think that children are very interested in pleasing their parents.
Certainly, that's my experience.
And I did work in a daycare for a couple of years as a teenager and found that enthusiasm was a very, very powerful toolbox.
It's a very, very powerful tool. Piece of ammunition in your parenting toolbox, so to speak, to mix my metaphors prominently.
But enthusiasm is extraordinarily powerful when it comes to parenting.
So, when Isabella does stuff, I'm like so enthusiastic, right?
So, I went to pick up some child safety devices from Babies R Us and she learned the word fan this week because I'm slowly getting her to build my name.
But she learned the word fan, which I taught her at the supermarket and she was saying fan and I couldn't figure out what she meant because articulation is not perfect, of course.
And then I finally saw that she pointed up and there was a rotating fan on the ceiling of the Babies R Us.
And I was like, oh man, that's fantastic.
Well done, I'm so proud of you.
My voice goes up and I get really enthusiastic.
I do a yippee with my hands in the air and all that kind of stuff.
And I would, I mean, that was pretty conscious on my part.
I mean, I'm not faking it. I genuinely do feel enthusiastic about what she's doing.
But I would not ever underestimate the power of enthusiasm.
As a parenting, as a way of, in a sense, encouraging the behavior that you want or the behavior that, you know, hopefully is just.
Because, I mean, if you're a good person, then I think children are naturally drawn to want to please you.
If you're a bad person and you're sort of bullying and controlling them, let's say bad person, but if you have those habits as a parent, then your children are going to be less likely to want to please you because they feel manipulated.
Whereas if you're genuinely enthusiastic, I have found that the application of just mad enthusiasm is a million times better than any negative consequences I could invent to encourage my daughter to do things that I like.
And that way, I need a very light touch.
Because I'm so enthusiastic for the most part, I need a very light, quote, negative touch.
So if she's going to put her hand towards the plug, and I will say, no, Isabella, no.
And because it's so different from what it is that I'm normally doing with the yippies and the yays, she's really quite surprised and she will stop and she will look at me and cock her head and she's perplexed.
But I don't need a lot of strong negatives because I have so many strong positives.
I think that's really, really important.
I'll say that again. I don't need strong negatives because I have so many strong positives.
And that means that any deviation from those strong positives is something that is surprising to her.
It's of interest to her. And she actually doesn't.
She does get the no, which is not perfect with it, of course.
But hey, I'm not one to talk.
But I think that's really, really important.
You know, there's so much that enthusiasm can do to encourage best behavior that I think that's a million times better.
And of course, that's good capitalism in a way, right?
To be enthusiastic about a product that is good rather than fear-mongering about, you know, if you don't take this, then X bad will happen.
I think that's not so good.
So, these are some parenting things I've thought about and have found to be incredibly effective and positive.
I mean, I have a kid who barely cries.
You know, she doesn't cry during the day.
She doesn't cry. She'll cry a little at night if she wakes up and she wants playtime.
But she does not cry during the day.
She's incredibly good-natured, incredibly happy.
Her development is incredibly rapid.
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