Jan. 15, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:42
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| Yay, parents and children time! | |
| And others. These are some great letters I just share. | |
| I mean, I get so many of these a day, but I share a few of them, which I think are interesting. | |
| Dear Steph, you've changed my life and I wanted to write you a letter of appreciation. | |
| I had a pretty terrible childhood. | |
| Basically, I scored a 10 on that Adverse Childhood Experiences test. | |
| That's the ACE test. | |
| You can look for that online. My husband and I have a three-year-old son, and I used to be one of those brain-damaged people who thought that it was okay to hit children for, quote, discipline. | |
| My husband was against it and tried his best to get me to see how wrong I was. | |
| Eventually, I did get it intellectually, but I didn't stop. | |
| The truth is I derived a sick pleasure from inflicting terror on my son, of having power over him. | |
| I'm so ashamed of that. | |
| I'm ashamed that I ever laid my hands on my baby like that. | |
| I knew what I was doing was wrong while I was doing it. | |
| And I didn't stop. Then I watched your The Bomb in the Brain series. | |
| FDRURL.com forward slash BIB. It changed everything. | |
| I saw the why of the violence in my family. | |
| I saw why I was violent. | |
| I saw why I enjoyed it. | |
| There was a part where you talked about the statistics of people that regretted having children. | |
| And if they had to do it all over again, they would not. | |
| I was one of them. I can't put my finger on why, but something in my brain clicked. | |
| I committed to never again visit violence on my son. | |
| I have not hit him since. | |
| Something more, I have gained an appreciation for my child. | |
| I no longer regret having him. | |
| If I had to do it all over again, I would. | |
| I do believe that the root of all evil is born in violence against children. | |
| Thanks to you, the cycle is broken and my son will be spared. | |
| I just wanted to say thank you from the bottom of my heart. | |
| I truly, truly appreciate your hard work and efforts in spreading peaceful parenting and everything else, of course. | |
| Thank you so much and keep fighting the good fight. | |
| You are making a difference. You are saving people. | |
| Well, I appreciate that. That's very kind, but that's not true. | |
| You are saving people. | |
| I'm putting out videos. | |
| I'm talking to people. I'm putting, you know, I'm doing Excel graphs. | |
| You are saving people. Your commitment to refrain from using violence in your parenting, you are the one who is saving people. | |
| You are the one with the courage to admit the truth, to deal with your history, and to stop using violence. | |
| You are the one breaking the cycle. | |
| I'm just blambering away on the internet. | |
| So, I don't mind being a spark, but you are the actual fire. | |
| So, thank you, thank you, thank you. | |
| Dear Steph, I am a single father of seven girls. | |
| This sounds like the beginning of a Broadway musical. | |
| I am a single father of seven girls and have recently come around to embracing the non-violent ideal. | |
| I have long been an angry person. | |
| A big moment of realization for me came when my cousin, who, like me, is a large, intimidating man, and he became angry with me. | |
| He didn't threaten me or hit me, but his face and his voice were so angry, so distorted, that I couldn't really even face him for weeks. | |
| I realized I had done the same to others, to my own children, and I realized I had to stop. | |
| It's incredibly difficult being the only parent, but it's incredibly liberating to be able to implement a philosophy like this without interference. | |
| Thank you for everything you do. | |
| There are seven little girls who now know and appreciate you and your weird accent. | |
| That's true. Well, thank you again. | |
| I mean, I've sort of made the argument, and you can go to freedomainradio.com forward slash podcast to get the series on philosophical parenting. | |
| Imagine. I mean, Go down, my daughter's just turned three, so go down to her level and look at the world from her level, right? | |
| So go down to her level and look up at another adult, just how huge they are, and then imagine. | |
| So about ten times the weight. | |
| I have a little less than that now, but imagine. | |
| So let's say somebody five times your size. | |
| So if you're six feet tall, imagine somebody who's 30 feet tall, who's as big as a house, screaming at you. | |
| Or threatening to hit you. Somebody who was literally as big as a house. | |
| A giant that size. | |
| I mean, how unbelievably flooded with terror. | |
| And if you were dependent upon that person, and if you could not, you didn't have any choice to be with that person or not. | |
| That person controlled your food, and your shelter, and your activities. | |
| I mean, it's unbelievably terrifying. | |
| This is why I say, when you have so much power as a parent, you need the very lightest, lightest touch. | |
| Lightest touch. I mean, you wouldn't be in a very fast car and turn the wheel suddenly unless you wanted to do a whole bunch of flips, right? | |
| When you're driving very fast, it is a very light touch that you need when you're turning the wheel. | |
| With a parent, it is the very, very lightest of touches. | |
| You short-circuit your relationship with your children by being five or ten times their size and yelling at them or abandoning them or threatening to. | |
| Right? By saying, well, I'm leaving, you can come if you want. | |
| No, they don't have that choice. There is no if you want as a kid. | |
| You're dependent upon parents. So when you're a parent, you have so much power, you have so much power, so much knowledge, so many options, so many choices, so much size. | |
| You have so much power as a parent that you need the very lightest, lightest, lightest of touches. | |
| It is a tiny change in your tone of voice. | |
| That's all you need. To hit someone, to yell at someone, to bully someone, to threaten someone when you have that much power and that much size is such a ridiculous overreach. | |
| I mean, to cast aside the morale, it's such a ridiculous overreach. | |
| It's absolutely unnecessary. | |
| It's absolutely unnecessary. | |
| But thank you again. | |
| I mean, those seven girls are very, very lucky. | |
| Somebody else wrote, I'm a longtime listener to your podcast since I was 17. | |
| I'm 21 now. I just wanted to tell you thanks. | |
| I've met you a couple of times at conferences and once at such and such a place where I had a debate with you. | |
| I wanted to thank you in person, but I tend to get nervous and can more easily formulate my thanks in text anyway, so here it goes. | |
| Due in part to your podcast on self-knowledge and parenting, I had some important conversations with my parents around when I was 18 or 19. | |
| They were surprisingly receptive about these conversations, and admittedly after some persistence they actually went somewhere. | |
| That was the catalyst that caused us to address some of the problems of my childhood, abuse, religion, etc. | |
| Our relationships have very much improved thanks in part to you. | |
| I feel as though my parents value and understand me, and I feel the same way about them. | |
| I'm still working through the philosophical concept of love, but I'd even say that we love each other now. | |
| Also, as a somewhat less important matter, but still one of interest, coincidentally, or rather not so coincidentally, after we addressed some of the more fundamental problems of our relationship, my mom and dad drifted into the non-theist and libertarian camps as well. | |
| Oh, that's wonderful. And, I mean, it sounds probably very ridiculous for me to say congratulations to your parents, but congratulations to your parents. | |
| I know this as a parent. | |
| Admitting that you're wrong to your child is not easy. | |
| I mean, you want to sort of have this authority thing, but it's really, really important to do so. | |
| To give your child room to disagree with you and to voice those disagreements and to be critical of you as a parent is absolutely essential. | |
| If you impose authority based upon threat or punishment, you're simply recreating statism in the future. | |
| You're guaranteeing a world where people will be fearful of and obey And justify those in authority. | |
| The state is an effect of the family. | |
| So to all those parents out there, and I get letters like this, to all the parents out there who are listening to children's complaints about how they were raised when the children become adults, kudos to you. | |
| I mean, that is beautiful. That is fantastic. | |
| That is wonderful. I know how hard that can be, particularly, I would assume, if that's not how you were raised. | |
| But it's just wonderful and beautiful, and I just can't encourage people often enough. | |
| I've got a podcast out there which you can look for, which is, you know, if you've done wrong by your kids when you were raising them to some degree, here's ways. | |
| I've got ways to suggest on how you can have a better conversation with them as adults. | |
| Dear Steph, I've been following your podcast for three years now. | |
| I wanted to tell you you've helped me make a difference. | |
| I'm a full-time college student with a part-time nanny job, the greatest job I could have at this stage of my life. | |
| I believe very, very fully that you are correct on how we need to change the world, through how we treat our kids. | |
| I've been with my current family for two years, and the changes in the children are definitely apparent. | |
| Both parents work high-stress jobs and have come home on many occasions to their children and taken their anger out on the children. | |
| This can be anything from being short when the kids try to tell them about their day or grabbing the 11-year-old girl by the arm and shaking her when she doesn't make eye contact. | |
| Oh my God, that's terrible. | |
| Oh, that's just terrible. By what right would you do that? | |
| By what right would you grab and bully and shake a child because she's not making eye contact? | |
| What gives you the right? She's not there by choice. | |
| She has no choice to leave. The 11-year-old girl actually may have a stomach ulcer from how much she worries. | |
| She tells me she doesn't understand why her parents are mad at her sometimes and will worry about making them happy. | |
| She also feels like she needs to step in and be the caretaker for her six-year-old brother, so she'll lose sleep when he's sick. | |
| She's been taking medicine for her stomachache for months now. | |
| She's brilliant and loving and desires to feel close to people. | |
| The six-year-old is a brilliantly hilarious kid with infinitely many fart jokes and the most contagious laugh I've ever heard. | |
| He'll come home from school angry a lot, so we have lots of talks about emotions and why we feel the way we do. | |
| The other day we had a breakthrough. | |
| He told me, I feel angry, I think, because I'm sad. | |
| I know adults who cannot make this connection. | |
| I'm always aware of my emotions when I communicate with the kids and will always communicate how I'm feeling. | |
| If I start to feel hurt by our interaction, I'll let them know, etc. | |
| I always tell the kids, I will never make you do anything. | |
| I run off of rewards only and have established that I do not know everything and I will always give you a reason if I want you to do something and if you have an alternate idea, please tell me. | |
| And on many occasions, either of the children will have a better idea and we'll go with that. | |
| We work together out of respect and love for one another and it's such a wonderful experience. | |
| Sure, we have our rough days, but talking about our emotions always works." Yeah, I mean, I've got a free book out there called Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love. | |
| And you talk about, I feel this way, not jump to conclusions. | |
| You know, I'm angry because you did X. No, I feel angry and upset. | |
| I'm not sure why and have conversations about that I'm not giving any names the elder child actually came to me the other day very upset and said mom and dad hit the six year old She used to say spank and didn't find a problem with it. | |
| Hitting a six-year-old. Really? | |
| That's the best that you've got as a parent, is hitting? | |
| That's just a confession of failure, and you should have the humility to recognize that when you're hitting a six-year-old, you're out of control. | |
| You've lost it. You don't know what you're doing. | |
| You are lost, and you need to get help. | |
| You need to get directions. You need to get therapy. | |
| You need to at least get some parenting books. | |
| It is absolutely unacceptable. | |
| Absolutely unacceptable. You can't hit your wives. | |
| You can't hit your boss. You can't hit your co-workers. | |
| You can't hit the guy who delivers your pizza. | |
| You can't hit other people's children. | |
| But then we create this magical exception for your own children. | |
| Oh yeah, you can hit them. I think in Canada, between the ages of 2 and 12, you can hit your children. | |
| Right. Only when they're the most vulnerable. | |
| Only when it's the most formative years. | |
| Because I'm not the parents, I dance along a line and do not say openly, your parents are doing wrong. | |
| Instead, I show them an alternative in the hopes that they will make this connection themselves. | |
| I introduce logical reasoning into everyday life. | |
| Well, if you do not like it when people say that to you, should you say it to them and get them thinking about these connections to the real world? | |
| I cannot explain how awesome it is to come home from my job feeling like I've made a difference. | |
| I have made many speeches in school into friends about how great nannying is and always explain how children keep you young and aware of the black and white world. | |
| I recently did a speech and research paper for class on corporal punishment and I'm always talking with my other nanny friends about our different methods for caring for our kids. | |
| I have also become extremely aware of how difficult being a parent would be, and my belief that a child needs a stay-at-home parent to be completely fulfilled. | |
| That's true. I will be a mother someday, but for our future and my future child's sake, I'm going to continue to perfect this method of raising kids in the hopes I will one day be good enough to raise a child into the world happily. | |
| Thank you, Stefan. | |
| This story shows three lives you've touched, not including the uncountable individuals in my speeches that we may have touched as well. | |
| I've made a difference. You have! | |
| I assume this is a woman, and thank you, thank you, thank you. | |
| I appreciate the letter, but you're doing the work. | |
| You're doing the work, and those kids are incredibly lucky to have you in their lives, and I hope that the parents will see this and perhaps start to change their ways of approaching You know, all these euphemisms, right? | |
| We call violence laws, we call assault discipline. | |
| But spanking a child is a form of assault. | |
| It certainly would be if I grabbed someone on the subway and hit them on the butt with a giant hand, that would be assault. | |
| And I would go to jail for that, or I would be severely disciplined for that. | |
| And that's just grabbing someone on a bus who can get away, who has access to police, and so on. | |
| It is a form of assault. | |
| If it's wrong to do that to an adult, it is almost infinitely more wrong to do that to a child. | |
| The adult has choices, independence, and so on, which a child does not have, and the child's not chosen to be with you. | |
| So congratulations. I want to be reincarnated as your kid, because I think you're going to be an absolutely wonderful... | |
| Oh yeah, she did say mom, sorry. | |
| She said an absolutely wonderful mom and your husband is going to be very lucky to have all of the wisdom and experience that you have. | |
| The difference that you're making is enormous. | |
| This is how we change the world and thank you everybody so much for taking the time to write to me about all of these wonderful stories. |
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