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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:56
Libertarian Parenting - A Freedomain Radio Conversation with Stephan Kinsella
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Hi everybody, it's Stephan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I have another Stephan, Stephan Kinsella, who I'm very excited to have on the show.
I'm a massive fan.
He is a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a member of the advisory panel of the Center for a Stateless Society, the founder and editor of Libertarian Papers, and was a book review editor of the Mises Institute's Journal of Libertarian Studies.
You can find him at Stephan Kinsella, S-T-E-P-H-E-N.
Kinsella, that's right, isn't it?
Thank you so much, Steph, for taking the time to come on the show.
He's a great thinker.
He's a leader.
And if you ever want to get your mind regularly blown by the buckshot of anti-IP sentiments, this is the go-to guy.
So thank you so much, Steph, for taking the time to come on the show.
Thanks.
Glad to be here.
So the topic that we...
I'm a newer parent than Stephan, so one of the things that we wanted to talk about was that there seems to be somewhat of a paucity of libertarian parenting material.
Some of the libertarian parenting material comes in through some of the more religious aspects of mainstream libertarianism, which has obviously some strengths and some weaknesses which we can talk about.
And there are two discussions that I've come across, one by Marie Rothbard called Kids Lib and another in Ayn Rand's Q&A sessions where they don't really talk about parenting very much and you'll notice that there's really no children in any of Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead or any of Ayn Rand's novels and she writes very little about child raising.
She herself of course was childless.
But they do talk about, you know, if you don't like your parents as an adult, the voluntary principles, freedom of association applies, and you can choose to see them or not see them as you see fit.
But they don't talk a lot about how to raise children using freedom principles, using non-aggression, using voluntarism.
And I have argued for many years that it is really essential that we raise children according to the principles that we want them to live by as adults.
And I just wanted to mention before we get into the discussion, I just spent a couple of days at the Porcupine Freedom Festival I know, the name maybe needs some work, but it's a great time if you can make it.
And there were hundreds of families around.
My daughter, of course, we were interacting a lot with the children and the parents.
One of the things that I really loved, which I've never experienced before, was I did not hear a single raised voice.
I didn't see any spanking.
I didn't see any threatening.
I saw lots of negotiation, the usual parenting cautions of, you know, be careful here, don't do that.
But it was a very gentle form of parenting, and you really saw that reflected in the fact that the kids didn't push, they didn't hit, they were very gentle.
They had the usual slight problems with sharing that's inevitable, and as adults we have those challenges as well.
But I was really, really impressed by the quality of parenting, and it was a beautiful thing because often when I'm around parents, I do see a fair amount of aggression and feel like I sort of have to step in if necessary.
So here I could really just relax.
So Stefan, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your own approach to parenting and how you manage the behavior of your son without using spanking or other forms of aggression, which I think would be pretty much violations of the non-aggression principle and also which I think would be pretty much violations of the non-aggression principle and also have some IQ and aggression seems to increase proportional to spanking.
So what's your approach been to the ever-present question of libertarian parenting, which is how do you manage the behavior of pre-rational creatures?
Well, I mean, you might have experienced some of the same things I did, which is that you figure things out as you have to because you can't start at, you know, we're going to get pregnant now and have kids and figure out where they're going to go to high school in the beginning.
So there's different stages, right?
I mean, first you do the… Pregnancy classes and then you do the, you know, figure out OBGYN and then you start figuring out how to prepare the house for the newborn and breastfeeding and all these things.
And the discipline stuff starts a little bit later.
I mean, you're not going to even consider spanking a three-month-old newborn, you know.
It's not even a consideration.
It only starts happening a little bit later.
And I mean luckily I am a libertarian, and I was hardly spanked when I was a child as well, and so it just didn't – I always had the thought that the overreaction against spanking was overblown is what I sort of thought.
I mean I didn't think it did that much harm necessarily.
Although it could be abused, but I never did really think about it much, and I stumbled onto the Montessori philosophy early on when my kid was not even six months old.
And this is – you asked about libertarian approaches to parenting.
One of the things that I've been hearing for 20 years by reading Ayn Rand and people like that is she was really high on Montessori.
I didn't know much about it.
I just had heard of it from her.
And in Houston, I live near one of the best Montessori schools around, which I didn't know much about.
I just knew it was near me.
And to be honest, I was probably a little bit leery of Montessori because of Rand.
Not because I disagree with everything she writes, but I mean, she didn't have kids, and I thought maybe this is one of these, it looks good on paper things to Rand, you know what I mean?
Right.
But as we started exploring schools for our son when he was about a one-year-old, I looked at all the regular schools, and I also looked at the Montessori school, and at that time, my wife and I had decided to Do homemade baby food, which I think I mentioned to you before, kid.
We're not big granola crunchers or vegetarians or anything, but we decided to just do it and just for the same reason you do breastfeeding if you can.
You figure in the first year or two of life, the better nutrients you give to the kid, the better.
So we did it.
It was a lot of fun.
We made everything, super baby food, oatmeal and kale and liver.
I mean, incredible how he ate the first year before he got free will.
And got picky.
When it could be a centrally planned economy, right?
Exactly!
He eats liver.
I'm like, yeah, because I put a spoon in his mouth and he eats it.
But so we went to the Montessori school, you know, we were telling the people there our approach and they said, well, you're pretty much Montessori already the way you're doing things with whole foods and with the Now, I might sound like a Montessori zealot as this goes throughout, although I really – I don't think I am.
I'm actually not persuaded that there's an entire cohesive, coherent science behind the whole thing, although a lot of it makes sense, and I think it's more their attitude that I like.
So I've drawn a lot from that, and I've learned a lot of – I've gotten a lot of book ideas and training ideas from them.
Including – so the discipline technique that you asked about, we try to use what the Montessori system uses, which is called positive discipline, and you may have heard of this.
There are some well-known books out there like – I think Jane Nelson has one on positive discipline, and Catherine Cavols, K-V-O-L-S, has one called Redirecting Children's Behavior.
So it's that sort of approach.
And a lot of parents nowadays, the ones that don't use spanking – you may have noticed they use something called timeout, which is common.
We hear about that.
We don't really use timeout because timeout is still punishment.
It's just non-corporeal punishment.
So it's not as unethical I guess as spanking.
But it's still punishment, and the idea of positive discipline is you don't want to teach your kids to fear things.
You don't want to teach them by instilling fear, which is the same reason you don't like to yell and raise your voice either.
You want to raise a civilized child.
So we've used positive discipline, and we've used it with luck.
I heard your stories about your daughter, and maybe good parents think they're lucky because they have good children, or maybe there's some connection.
Well, I wouldn't say that our daughter was easy for the first six months.
I mean, she never slept more than an hour or two at a time.
She always wanted to be carried.
It was a lot of work at the beginning, but I think that that sort of patience and pacifism has really, I wouldn't say turned her around, but it certainly hasn't exacerbated any of those difficult tendencies, at least for us that were a parent early on.
Yeah, no, of course patience is important and I mean that's the important thing about wanting to be a parent and if you go into it with open eyes and you want to do it and you really then don't have an excuse for being frustrated or you shouldn't be frustrated.
I mean it's – and most times you're not because you wanted the whole deal, the whole package deal and of course if you're frustrated with your children and you're You didn't really want them or they were an accident or something.
I guess that could, of course, affect their viewpoint of their place in the world and how they are with you.
So we use positive discipline, and it works very well, and to be honest, I don't have to use it that much.
I mean my kid is six years old now.
He's extremely smart, and we pretty much just have conversations now.
But as an example of the approach and of the general Montessori sort of way of dealing with your kids… You know, you get the kids to help you with things and do what they're supposed to do, and even if it's easier for you to do it yourself.
You know, for example, if your child has dinner, you know, it takes you ten seconds to pick the plate up and put it in the dishwasher, and then it's done with.
But, you know, I try to tell my child, you know, it's his plate, it's his job to do that, and it might take three minutes, and he might drop it, and it's a big disaster.
But it gets better over time, but it takes longer to actually do things It's actually easier for the parents to do things for their children, and that's why they do them, you know?
Right, but it robs them of the chance to learn and there are those times where you, oh, I'm in a hurry, but I have to slow down and wait for the child.
Oh, of course, of course, or sometimes when you don't do it, but as a general sort of approach.
I mean, this is a little bit more advanced down the line, but for homework, for example, in school, which I don't know what your approach to it is, but I mean, I think the schools nowadays are insane with this homework.
Ours, luckily, is not too bad.
I mean, it seems to me they should go to school during the day and have a life at night, you know.
The homework at say some of my friend's kids' schools, they give them Monday's homework on Monday.
They give them Tuesday's homework on Tuesday.
So the kid never learns self-scheduling and self-discipline.
They just do what they're told.
At my kids' school, on Monday, they're given the week's homework, and it's due on Thursday.
That's it and it's up to the kid to figure out how to pace it out and I could sit there and – but I could do their job for them and the school's job and I could – on Monday night I could say, son, you've got to do 45 minutes tonight because that's one-third of the whole thing.
But I don't.
All I say is at 7.30, your pencil is going down.
Because you're not going to work past that, so you do what you think you need to do, and they – so that's an example of how you – and then he's going to learn.
He's going to – a lot of kids, when they go to college, they're sort of thrown to the wolves because you're sort of – you're not handheld as much in college, but they're used to being handheld in high school and in elementary school.
Yeah, that's right.
I was talking to my neighbor's kids.
He's ten years old and he gets over an hour to an hour and a half of homework every night.
I think that's just horrendous and there is no evidence whatsoever that increased homework leads to increased test scores or intelligence.
It's become just this bizarre thing where you just keep children with homework and it's just another way, particularly in the public schools, that the government's kind of running your children's lives because you don't just get them during the day but then they have to do all of this Insane, dumb, non-productive, busy work in the evenings which doesn't help them at all learn anything other than it just fills their lives with chores, which I think is, you know, it's that old Soviet model.
I'd never give them a free moment and they won't ever develop a personality.
I agree completely and I think that I mean I think – I agree there's a lot of insidious and malintentioned – malintended aspects of it, but also the ones that are sort of just dumb and playing along, trying to figure out how to run a school.
It's like they're just throwing – it's like they say where the teachers need to get more pay or we need to have more teachers to reduce school size.
I mean classrooms – they're just throwing money at it.
They're just throwing a sort of a brute force approach at it.
Let's just throw more hours at the kid.
Maybe they'll do better that way.
Well, and wouldn't it be great if you never assigned homework but the lessons were so interesting and absorbing to the children that the children wanted to do it rather than having it be assigned to them?
Absolutely.
And that's the challenge.
That's the problem when you have this coercive system is you don't end up having to woo the children to get really interested and fascinated.
in knowledge.
You end up just having to order them to do stuff and it gives them that whole mentality of, I just have to do what the personal authority tells me to do.
My desires aren't that important and my free time isn't that important.
It's a stamp of ownership that's put on the children even outside of school, which I think is just brutal.
Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, I mean, a child is not working full time like, say, adults are, but in a way, school is their job, right?
Well, I don't go to work for eight, nine hours during the day and then have to come home and work three or four hours again at night.
I mean, unless, you know, unless I'm unfortunate or I want to, but I mean, your job is supposed to be your job, and these kids are supposed to have a well-rounded life, and, you know, I don't understand why eight hours a day is not enough to get what, to learn what you need to learn.
I couldn't go to school for eight hours a day now.
It would drive me insane.
And it also, I think it puts a certain bone of contention between parents and children, because the children don't want to do it, the parents have to nag them to do it, it reduces the quality of interaction between parent and child.
My nieces used to be in tears over the homework they got from, this was from even a private school, the French school that they went to.
They just hated it, and of course the parents are like, no you have to do it, and the kids didn't want to do it, and it just creates that much more friction at what should be a very pleasant time between the parents and children.
Absolutely, and the No, there's a place in life for having to do things.
I think you mentioned in your podcast, which I thought was a great point, which I've heard before, is that kids need to be bored.
I mean the other day I was with my kid and he said something like – I was talking to his mother or we were doing something and I had forgotten to bring a book or something.
He says, Dad, I'm bored.
I said, well, it's not my job to entertain you.
Also, he had forgotten to bring his book.
We're in this mode now where every time we go to a restaurant or we go on a trip, I'll say, you know, Ethan, you might want to bring your books because he reads a lot of books and he'll bring them.
But every now and then, if I don't remind him, he might forget.
I have to force myself to let him forget it.
In other words, I know that if we walk out the door and there's no book and I don't remind him and he forgets, we're going to be somewhere and he's not going to have his book.
Well, but I forced myself to let him forget it because next time he won't forget it.
So you have to sort of take the pain, right?
You can't shield them from consequences or they don't learn that there are consequences, right?
And that is exactly the heart of positive discipline is to let the children have consequences.
So it's hard to think of an example off the top of my head.
Instead of punishing a child for doing something that you view as wrong, you sort of amplify or exacerbate or at least make sure that they see the consequence that's somehow naturally connected to what they did.
Now, you're not punishing them, but it would be like – it's almost like withholding reward except you want it to be a natural part of the process because that's what real life is.
If you don't do something, it just doesn't – the results don't come.
Right, right.
Now, you mentioned something about the general philosophy of Montessori and you were tying it into some of the stuff that you were doing with the food.
I don't think for most of my listeners who may not be that familiar, you know, there's a whole world that you get into when you become a parent that you just didn't know anything about before, like all those weird sections of the mall that you used to just scurry past on your way to the video store or the electronics store or whatever.
So, people may not be that familiar with Montessori.
I was wondering if you could give us your outline of how Montessori approaches the challenges of learning and discipline and so on.
It's kind of hard to explain or hard to understand without seeing it, but once you see it, it's really easy to understand.
There was a woman, an Italian woman named Maria Montessori.
I think she was actually the first medical doctor, female medical doctor in Italy.
She was sort of Randian in a way.
I mean she was tenacious.
She was intelligent.
She loved children though.
This is like 1906, so over 100 years ago.
She saw these children that were like – not the retarded children, but sort of the ones that are relegated to – I don't want to say moron's houses, but there was a word sort of like that almost.
She took these special children, and she found a way to arrange their environment so that they could learn almost like regular kids.
In fact, some of them were regular.
They just had developmental problems or something.
So she started studying this and then studying it with normal children as well, and she came up with a theory that's been pretty well borne out by scientific evidence over the years, which is that children develop in certain phases.
They call them planes of development, and they basically are four six-year phases from zero to six, six to 12.
12 to 18, 18 to 24, and basically the idea is you're really not completely a fully developed adult human until about 24, and then each of those six-year phases is divided into two planes of development.
So what they do is – what they say is your mind is developing differently in each of these.
You have different interests, different social needs or whatever, so they sort of arrange an environment around the children.
In fact, in Italian, they don't even call the teachers teachers.
They call them guides.
So the teacher is just there to observe the children and what's going on, and if they get off track or if they need – like this kid is falling short in math.
They come and tell them you need to be off track in this, but they're supposed to find their own interest and direct themselves and basically learn themselves.
One example that impressed me about the school I went to, which was a Montessori school, when we were interviewing, my wife and I were sitting in the admissions director's office down in the administrative part of the school.
It was maybe two or three in the afternoon, and some – I don't know, 11-year-old, 10-year-old boy walked by carrying a tray of sushi.
Now, that was his – he just decided to make sushi.
But he stepped in the office.
We were strangers there.
He just walked in politely, but he said, excuse me, would you like some sushi?
He offered all three of us sushi, and maybe one of us took it or not, and then he walked on.
Wow.
The fact that he was number one in an environment where he felt – he wasn't intimidated by walking in this administrator's office.
He was confident enough to do it, and that was his project.
He made sushi.
Now, that's a learning experience, but you're not going to find that on the government multiple-choice standardization test that these teachers do.
Right, and the fact that he would view the administrator as an enjoyable resource rather than a sort of finger-wagging, threatening figure out of Pink Floyd's The Wall, I think that's a really nice relationship to have with authority.
It's very libertarian in spirit.
I mean I have not found – there's another amazing aspect to it.
… to be children of the world.
We're all humans on the same planet.
And from an outsider's perspective, especially if you're sort of culturally conservative and you're used to sort of fighting this kind of California New Age, kind of UN one-world BS, you might be a little leery of it.
But if you think about it, there's nothing wrong with it.
We are people of the world.
We do want peace with each other.
It's better to cooperate than not.
I mean this is all the essence of libertarianism, and in fact… One thing I love about the Montessori approach is every school – some of them implement it differently, but they often have what's called a peace table or a peace poll, and the young children in these classes – I'm talking three years old maybe and older.
If they have a dispute with each other, they're supposed to work it out themselves, and they have an escalating series of steps or procedures worked out already.
And Roger's not letting Johnny play with his toy or not playing with him on the – they're supposed to communicate with each other and tell them, I'm upset that you're doing this, whatever.
If they can't work it out, they're supposed to basically go to the peace table and get some of the community around, like three or four of their friends to hear their case.
It's almost like not arbitration but mediation, and then they can bring the teacher in if they have to.
But the point is, this is respectful of their nature as individuals, and it's giving them some responsibility for themselves.
Right, and the teacher is there to facilitate the mediation rather than to render a judgment.
Yeah, or an older child.
And that's the other thing, when the children, because they're viewed as having these three-year planes of development, the classes, at least from age three to about eighth grade, They put the kids into three years of age at a time, so my kid is not in first grade.
He's in what's called lower elementary.
So he's in a classroom with first, second, and third-year kids, and they only have one teacher.
They don't have 17 teachers.
They have one.
So the advantage of this is severalfold.
Number one, they have the same teacher for three years.
The teacher gets to know the kid very well, and she gives reports to the parents orally.
She sits down and tells them what she's seen with the kid.
It's not this… … standardized report, although they use that because they have to comply with the state for record tracking.
And the other advantage is when they come into the class at first, they're the young kids, and they are helped by the older kids.
And then when they're the older kids, then part of their job is to help teach and guide and mentor and protect the younger kids who are coming into the class.
So you sort of get this multigenerational effect.
I mean, there's many positives to that.
The two that pop into my mind is one, that it teaches care and nurturing for the younger kids.
I went to a boarding school which was quite the opposite reality of a social pecking order.
But the second thing is, I think the sooner that you can get children to teach other children, the sooner you can really gauge the extent of their knowledge.
Because if you have older children teaching younger children, there's nothing that makes you more humble about the quality of your knowledge than trying to instruct somebody else, because that really reveals any limitations you might have.
You know, at the schools I'm familiar with like this, I would say they wouldn't tolerate bullying, but I don't think it even comes up.
I mean, I don't think there's a single instance of it at these kind of schools.
I mean, maybe a little push here or there for little kids, and then they learn.
But the bullying, I mean, these kids are taught that they're friends, they support each other, and that's the natural condition.
Now, I do sound, like I say, like a Montessori zealot because I'm interested in it, but I actually don't.
I think that any particular thing you mentioned about it you could disagree with, but it's just the fact that they think really hard about how you would do it from the kid's perspective.
So they're just – they're focused on it, and they have a systematic framework that they can resort to to have some consistency.
Another example, like for summer school – or for summer school, you can send your kids there when they're younger.
Some regular schools would have Monday, Wednesday, Friday, if you don't want to go full-time.
Part-time is Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
Montessori says no, no, no.
Part-time is Monday through Friday, but in the mornings, so that there's consistency.
The kid is not jerked in and out of school one day.
So it's just not that that's a big profound insight, but it's that there's hundreds of these things that are the result of careful thinking about the child, which is what you and I do as parents.
You sit and you try to think about it, and we're going to stumble upon a lot of the same No, that's absolutely right.
And what I love about the Montessori approach, and it's not just Montessori, but more private schools than public schools, of course, is that the child is actually the customer.
The child is actually the client.
as you say, they try to figure out what is going to be the most engaging and interesting and exciting for the kid.
And that, of course, I mean, not even the parents of the customers in the public school system, the bureaucrats of the teachers of the unions of the customers.
So I really like the fact that it's built from what would the child prefer?
What's the most exciting for the child?
Because what that does is it assumes something that is not assumed in most cultures, which is the child is benevolent and wants to learn.
And all you need to do is figure out what's going to be, open the way to motivation.
And of course, anybody who's had kids and given them this kind of freedom, you see it all the time.
My daughter now is obsessed with trying to figure out how to put her shoes on.
She won't stop.
She won't let me help her.
She really wants to do all of that herself.
I think her judgment at 18 months is fantastic insofar as...
is she'll take a step down.
Like if I try to help her take a step down and she can do it, she'll actually push my hand away.
Like, no, I can do it myself.
And she's right.
But then when she comes to a step that's too big for her, she'll wait and she'll hold up her hand so that I can help her.
So her judgment even of what is physically safe for her is fantastic.
And it's not something you can teach a child that young.
And it's assuming that the child is competent and benevolent and curious, wants to learn, wants to explore, has good judgment.
And you just need to facilitate that.
That's the beautiful thing that I think I see coming out of the Montessori system that you're describing.
Yeah, and there was even one of her books was called The Absorbent Mind, and one of the phases of development is this very early stage where they get really, say, absorbed in a task, and so the Montessori approach is just leave them alone.
I mean, because you'll see a kid sitting there, you know, staring at some little task for maybe, maybe 30 minutes or so, which is great for a small child, but, you know, if you think, oh, she's been at that 10 minutes, let me go ask her about it, or let me, don't, you know, just leave them alone and let them Let them – let it run its course.
Let them be absorbed in something and explore it from every angle and maybe repeatedly over and over and over again, and that's perfectly fine.
Now, as a dad and as a parent, I think you and I talked before, and I heard you on one of your podcasts talking about the reading method, which is another Montessori thing, the phonetic idea, that you don't waste time teaching them the names of letters.
Yeah, I mean, that never shows up anywhere.
I still remember being really confused as a kid, probably at about four years old, looking at the word R and saying, well, I thought that that was R, but it's in the middle of the word A-R-E, which is also R, and it just made no sense to me.
Yeah, it's confusing.
And, I mean, I never did teach my child the alphabet.
He just learned it by osmosis, because that's just going to come naturally.
I mean, you don't have to.
Just teach them the sounds.
And that is a Montessori approach, too.
The system I used was a blend of that and this Glenn Doman approach, which is sort of a whole-word approach, but that just worked fine.
And in fact, Montessori says this, for example, which I actually didn't follow, although it makes sense to me.
They said what you do is first you teach a kid to write before they can read.
And the theory behind that is once you start learning what the letters sound like, if you could write C-H-T on paper… Because you're trying to spell the word cat out.
I mean, you could sound out cat.
So, if a child writes the word cat, well, he wrote it, so now he knows what that sounds like, because he wrote it himself.
So, he could look back at it, and then he could read it, right?
It's more active than just looking at the letters, right?
Yeah, but once he writes it, he knows what he wrote, and then he can read what he wrote.
So, writing is, in a way, easier than reading.
And not only that, cursive is easier than print, because your hand is more smooth, and it's also more elegant.
So if you combine these things, you teach the sounds of letters, you teach cursive, and you teach writing before reading, it makes perfect sense.
This is the Montessori approach of looking at it from the child's perspective.
Now, in my case, I just taught my kid to read really early, before he could even write.
So I didn't follow what they taught, and that's okay.
It worked for me.
Do you know what I mean?
Oh yeah.
That's fascinating.
And I think you said that your son was reading before he was two, right?
Oh yeah.
Yeah, he started – I remember his first word was like maybe 16 or 18 months.
He read the word red to me.
I was holding up these flashcards, and he just said red, and I freaked out.
I said, oh my god.
It's incredible because it's just not that hard if you – I mean they have a facility for picking up these patterns and this language at that age.
There was another thing that's not related to all this directly, but it was – I read a book or two about water babies, like teaching your kids.
There are kids that learn how to swim before they're one.
It's incredible, some of these pictures.
I didn't do it quite that young, but I did it really, really, really early.
But I do think of all the things I did, probably reading was the most important because reading… Even more than math and stuff because reading is the foundation for everything.
Once you teach a kid to read well and then you instill a love for reading in him, I think that is almost the greatest thing you can do for them because then they're independent, and they can just start exploring so many things.
Which is – and how do you instill a love for reading?
Well, you have – if your kid sees you – his mother and father reading all the time on the weekends or as a casual kind of a leisure activity, they think it's kind of a natural thing to do, right?
But if you're sitting around swilling beer and watching sports TV all the time, then they're going to – or watching NASCAR, they're going to think that's what you do.
Yeah, I've never felt particularly cool in my life, but I know that at this particular phase in my daughter's life, I'm cool.
Like, what I do, she wants to do.
So that takes a bit of getting used to.
Now, one of the things that I found, Steph, and I don't know if you found this as well, I found that restrictions weren't a big deal in my household, right?
We're obviously childproof, but there's some stuff that you just have to tell her, like if the stove's on or whatever, don't touch or whatever.
And I found that restrictions weren't a big problem.
And I think that there were two reasons for this.
The first was that Isabella has so few restrictions that she kind of doesn't care.
I think if you're constantly putting fences around the kid, they just fight back and they want to find ways around it.
But if it's like you can go anywhere except just this one place, they're like, okay, well, I'll just go everywhere else.
And she didn't really mind that.
And the other thing was that I made it ridiculous, as I always try to make as much parenting as I can ridiculous, which is that I came up with my own version of the MC Hammer song, which is, I would just, if she was going somewhere she shouldn't, I'd say...
Don't touch that, dude, and do a little dance, and she'd get distracted by the dance.
And I'm sure that she'll be enjoying that when she's 13 and we're at the mall, because I can't imagine she'll ever be embarrassed by that kind of behavior.
But I found sort of making it ridiculous plus having as few restrictions, like every time I'd want her to not do something, I'd really, really think about why.
Why don't I want her to do it?
Is it just something that's going to be kind of messy for me, like she wants to play with water so she might get wet?
I agree completely.
I didn't have that problem too much.
grit your teeth and just say, go for it.
I'd rather have an hour cleanup than put a restriction on that either isn't going to be consistent or isn't there for a good reason, because I think that kids can kind of smell that.
Yeah.
No, I agree completely.
I mean, I didn't have that problem too much.
I don't know why we did have baby proofing, but early on when he was, we started learning about the Montessori techniques when he was about nine months old.
You If I had learned it earlier, I never would have put him in a crib at all.
I put him in a crib for the first nine months, but as soon as I learned the Montessori approach, I got rid of the crib.
I took the mattress out.
I put the mattress on the floor in the corner of this big bedroom that was his bedroom.
Now, the room had baby gates on the room, so he couldn't get out of the room, but he would go to sleep at night as 11 months old, say, on a mattress on the floor.
And the theory behind that is if he rolls off, he's got to get back on.
It teaches them some self-responsibility and independence, and also they're not in a damn cage.
I mean if he's in a room and he – why would he – why should he be behind bars?
I mean literally.
It just makes no sense.
You don't have to do it.
And when they're two or three months old, you put the bassinet on the floor, and they start getting used to that.
So it's sort of that whole approach.
But as they get older, then you can explain things to them.
I mean, my son's actually a little bit paranoid, probably because I was always paranoid, and I know that I was raised in the country, and I almost killed myself 17 times.
And so I maybe warn him about too many things, but sometimes I'll do, I'll do the opposite.
Like, you know, sometimes I would see him fall, maybe 19 months old, a toddler about to fall over.
My wife would freak out and try to run to him.
I said, no, let him fall.
You just let him fall.
Now I don't want to poke his head on an ice pick, but you know, if it's something he can recover from, I would let him do it.
Cause you only learn from experience from a lot of, yeah.
Like a bruise is one thing.
Impaling is another.
My daughter's got this thing where she wants to go on her little wagon, we have a slight slope on our driveway, and yeah, so she just sits on it and wants to go.
And the first time that she goes, you're like, oh, you know, every muscle is contracting in horror, right?
But what she does is she goes to a certain amount of speed, she puts her leg down, she turns around and she says, stop!
Right, so she is able to gauge her own level of risk.
Of course, she's the one who doesn't want to get injured, even more so than I don't want her to get injured.
But I find that she has very good judgment that way and she doesn't do things that are risky.
But the only way she's going to develop that judgment is if you just sort of grit your teeth And where the risk for injury is minimal, or the injury itself is minimal, then you just let them go.
And she learns that way.
And that's a much better way of making her safe than me constantly moving things out of her way and keeping her from going too fast.
And she's very assertive that way.
If she feels she can do it, she will not want me to help quite vociferously.
Right.
No, they don't.
That's right.
You don't want to help too much.
Sometimes I'll even do something like Like, I'll be frying some eggs, and I'll say, ìEthan, stick your hand in here.î And he'll look at me and say, ìNo.î And I'll say, ìGood answer.î He'll say, ìNumber one, you learned that you don't have to listen to authority all the time.
And if someone tells you to do something stupid, don't do it.
And number two, you better be aware of how hot this plate is.
That's good, you know?î Now, if he tried to reach his hand up there, I wouldn't let him, but every time I've done this, he kind of looks at me and he says, ìNo.î No, and I think if my daughter, like when I try to help my daughter with stuff that she can already do, I absolutely am convinced that if she had the word, she'd say, Daddy, don't infantilize me.
I'm 18 months old now.
I'm 18, so please don't infantilize me.
I don't appreciate it.
And I'm sure that she will say that at some point in her life, but it is tough to withdraw that level of protectiveness.
What are the socializing aspects of the Montessori staff?
Because to some degree the kids get left alone, but also aren't they put into groups and teams to get particular projects done?
Yeah, they are.
In the great season now, it's usually by age, but not always.
But yeah, they do all kinds of cooperative things, and the cool thing is they get to... I mean, my son is really into dinosaurs.
I mean, you wouldn't believe how into dinosaurs he is.
Oh, I would, absolutely.
I mean, when you're, you know, you said he's seven, is that right?
He's almost seven.
Yeah, he's almost seven, so when you're six, the idea of being 30 feet tall and giant and having all the power in the world, I mean, it's a compensation, but it's a very good thing, I think.
That might be the reason.
A lot of parents wonder why dinosaurs are so fascinating to kids.
That could be part of it.
Because they're bigger than parents.
Yeah.
That's why they like those transformers and things like that too.
Anything that's giant and bigger than parents, children are naturally drawn to.
But I'll tell you one thing that was kind of interesting.
In a way, I think dinosaurs helped my kid learn to read early because he was interested in these things early on, like birds.
And I never liked to give him these fake.
You may watch Nemo, but by and large, like we won't go to Disney World and things like that.
We go to natural things like fly fishing in Colorado.
Do you know what I mean?
Because he likes that kind of stuff, and it's so much better than these plastic artificial vacations to my mind.
And so when he was I think like 18 months old, really young, I saw He Loved Dinosaurs and all the stupid cartoony things are just dumb, but I heard about this well-known documentary which I had never heard of before called Walking with Dinosaurs, and it's like this BBC production.
It was a couple years old at the time, and it's basically really good special effects recreations of dinosaurs on realistic sets, and it's very educational.
But they're very graphic.
I mean they show dinosaurs tearing each other's guts out and things, and my son would just sit there and watch.
He loves it because it's just natural.
So he's watched all these things for years, and he was learning to read them.
But he was learning words like Deinonychus and Struthiomyma, I mean things that are – most people I know can't even pronounce, much less spell.
And he's young reading this stuff.
And let me tell you, if you can say Deinonychus and spell it, then cat and dog are not a thing.
It's pretty easy, right?
I mean, literally, he was just so intensely interested in dinosaurs, reading these dinosaur encyclopedias, just forcing his way to read it because he loved them so much.
I mean, made reading no sweat.
Right.
Yeah, and that is hooking into the child's natural drive for knowledge, and then the learning, which so often is perceived as an end in itself.
Learning is always a means to an end, right?
Like everything is a means to the end of happiness.
So it's like, okay, so I want to get to the other side, I have to build a bridge.
But it's to get to the other side.
And children, I think, should be encouraged to pursue learning in order to facilitate what they're naturally interested in, which is, again, I think is the Montessori approach, right?
Yeah, but you can blend it with other things, too.
You can make a math lesson out of it.
You can make a chemistry or history lesson out of it.
Or I've blended this with a lot.
I mean, because he loves dinosaurs and earth history so much, we have long talks about global warming and things like this.
And he just laughs at these guys.
He goes, don't they know another ice age is coming?
We're in an interglacial period, Dad.
And blah, blah, blah.
And what do you mean there's a shortage of water?
The whole planet's water, Dad.
That's silly.
You know, these kinds of things.
Oh, that's fantastic.
All these environmentalists are silly.
Yeah, they're silly, Dad.
And I wonder, I mean, I can't imagine it would ever happen, but if he did, with that attitude towards authority and that outspoken skepticism, to me it's almost impossible to imagine him in a public school.
Again, I know it wouldn't be, but how would that even work?
I mean, he'd be sort of putting his hand up and saying, no, no, no, no, this is incorrect because this, this, and this, and blah, blah, blah.
I don't even know how the teacher would handle that.
Yeah, and luckily Montessori explicitly, I mean, they kind of warned us of this when we started interviewing.
They said, now we're going to warn you.
We teach the kids to think independently and to They didn't say challenge authority, but the kids are taught that if they don't agree or they have a different opinion or they have a question about even what their parents said, they're free to ask it, and we said that's perfectly OK with us.
No school nowadays is free of the clutches of statism and PC and all this stuff, and I know you've mentioned on some of your podcasts that you've thought about what's the best educational approach.
Should it be homeschooling?
I heard you talk about unschooling.
I wasn't sure exactly what that meant.
Did that mean like they go to a conventional school and then you try to undo the damage on the side?
No, it's really letting the child... I'm no expert on it, I'm trying to get someone on the show to give me more information, but what I understand is that you don't have a curriculum, you don't have... it's just whatever the kid is interested, that's what you facilitate.
So, there is no set program of things that they need to learn by... Oh, but it's homeschooling.
You mean it's a type of homeschooling?
Yeah, I think it's a type of homeschooling.
I think that there are schools that work in that genre, but it's really open-ended and absolutely child-driven.
It blows my mind a little bit.
I can't dismiss it, of course, until I learn more about it, but I'm not a huge fan of homeschooling just because I have a huge amount of respect for the profession of teaching.
I think it is a difficult thing.
I do my own dentistry.
I don't make my own clothes.
I don't make my own antibiotics.
I really have I'm big on specialization, I think, as any free market person needs to respect specialization.
And I did this.
I taught in a daycare, and I taught a gifted kids class when I was in my early 20s, or I was a teacher's assistant.
And a really good teacher is a complete gem, and I just don't think you can reproduce that at home.
It takes a lot of skill and experience to teach children.
I hope to find a good teacher, and so homeschooling to me is a last resort, but I don't think it'll be necessary.
We've got lots of good schools, private schools around here.
You and I think similarly.
We think similarly about this.
I've thought about it for a long time, and of course you and I, and I assume you, we don't have the hostility to homeschooling that a lot of conventional people do, who they're frightened by.
No, it's better than public schooling for sure, without a doubt.
To me, homeschooling is number two.
I think it's number two.
I think my personal view now is the best would be a good, private Montessori and preferably AMI.
That's the type my kids have.
So AMI is one of the two big accrediting agencies.
AMI is the original sort of philosophy from Europe.
It's sort of – you can think of it as Catholic, and then there's a second spinoff group called AMS, American Montessori Society, which is sort of like Protestant.
So they – and there's a long, interesting history behind what happened there.
My personal view is the best school for a child would be a good private AMI Montessori school, and then second, depending upon your schools in the area, second would probably be homeschooling.
But I agree with you.
There's a division of labor, and they have materials that work out there, although I think you or I and most intelligent libertarians for example could homeschool their kids.
Better than almost any public school is going to do nowadays, which is in a way a sad comment about public schooling, right?
I mean sure.
Oh, yeah, the public schools are just I mean I went to a fairly good public school and I just still found it grindingly boring and it was Lord of the Flies for the kids because they're so oppressed that they turn on each other like jackals and I just it was not a positive experience at all and and I didn't I mean I wasn't in some sort of inner city I was at a fairly respectable suburb when I was in Canada and
And it was rough, it was just boring and aggressive and cliquey and I just thought so many bad lessons were being taught implicitly through the very structure of public education, that you don't matter, that you're just a cog in the wheel, that you don't have a voice, that your choices don't matter, that your preferences don't matter.
All of that to me was just, it took a lot of time to turn that around when I got out of school and it doesn't prepare you for university at all.
Well, yeah, I agree.
I went to private Catholic schools in Louisiana, Baton Rouge, and they were pretty good, and even there, there's bullying and there's bad kids.
And as an adult, as a libertarian, I've written about this before.
I'm always struck now why kids – why schools allow this.
I mean bullying – now I've mentioned this before, and some of my macho friends say this is the problem society, too much litigation, but bullying is aggression.
It is a crime.
I mean when one child pummels another, it is a crime, and of course the schools shouldn't allow it, and if you get to the point where you have to do something as a parent because the school is not, then you have a big problem because they're already in a horrible environment.
But I think I said something like I sort of wonder if bullying is a genesis of a lot of libertarians because… You become aware of the evils of aggression at an early age, and it should be stopped.
In fact, I mean I don't know if you – I don't think you should put a young child in jail, but it is – technically it's a crime, and it should be dealt with some kind of way.
It should certainly be stopped.
Well, but I mean, the place you would look to is the home environment, right?
I don't think it would be fair to punish the kid.
I mean, I think it's a truism that's almost not worth stating, but just to mention that, I mean, bullies, of course, experience the bullying at home, primarily, and then act it out against others.
So you would, in the same way that a kid who has no energy, you would look into their diet at home, you would just look into the social environment at home.
Of course, as I've often argued, the non-aggression principle needs to apply to the most vulnerable person.
That's why we need the principles, right?
Mike Tyson in a bar doesn't need anybody to protect him from anybody else, but it is the kids, of course.
And this is the great challenge in a state of society, is that in whose interest is it to ensure that children are protected, right?
Families are kind of like this biosphere that's very difficult to get into and deal with.
Certainly your average public school principal and teacher aren't going to want to get involved in volatile situations where children may be aggressed against because parents can get quite aggressive to anybody who intervenes.
So that to me is one of the paradoxes.
We get to a free society, I think, by treating children according to the principles that we want reflected in society as a whole, but there's little incentive in a state of society to protect children from aggression by whoever, whether it's bullies or parents or priests or whatever.
Nobody has that kind of vested interest.
If the schools at least were private, then they would be facing the competition of other schools who had better ways of dealing with bullying, which would at least be some step in the right direction.
They could expel a bad kid if they had to, which in public schools is almost impossible to do it.
You had a good point on one of your podcasts about one of the purposes of public schools.
I had never thought about this.
I've always thought the purpose was indoctrination, which I think it is a large purpose, but you had the point that… It keeps these kids busy so the parents can both work and pay taxes to the state.
I think you're right, and so they're busy and they're too busy to rebel or something or to think too much about what the government's doing.
I think that's also a good point.
Oh, it's a terrible tragedy.
I mean, the children are raised without, for the most part, the majority of children are raised with both parents working, which means that other people, usually state-licensed daycares, or sometimes, of course, it's relatives and so on, which is better.
But, yeah, children are raised without their parents.
That's a real tragedy.
I think one of the reasons that society was more free in the post-war period was because usually the mom, but at least one parent, was home providing primary care.
for the kids, and you get all the bonding, you get that intimate moral instruction, you get the personal attention and so on, and that all began to shatter in the seventies, and correlation is not causation, of course, but you can see the size of government really beginning to accelerate.
When women go into the workforce, because of course there's more taxes, which means they can borrow more money, create more programs, and because of the void left by moms going into the workforce, you had a lot of demand for these social services, for want of a better phrase, right?
I just finished a whole speech about don't use this language, but to use the shorthand, these state programs had to come in to fill that void, and it really just accelerated from there to the point where Children have a much more intimate relationship with state representatives than they do with their own parents, you know, whether it's teachers or daycare teachers or whatever.
That's really tragic because it's hard for children to rebel against their parents and I think that's one of the reasons that the government likes to get its meaty little hooks into them early and long.
No, I think that's right.
I think that's exactly right.
You know, and you were asking just now about, we got on this because you're asking about, you know, children … disagreeing with what the teachers teach in school and things like this, and like I was saying, every school is influenced a little bit by this PC stuff and this pro-statism, although I've been pleasantly surprised at mine that it's not really an issue.
But I've – now this is more of a particular libertarian concern.
I mean my kid's old enough now.
I've made him aware that my views are not typical.
Now, he's got the right to state his opinion.
He should be able to express it clearly if he disagrees.
But I told him, sometimes it's going to be dangerous or people don't want to hear it or whatever.
When there's Earth Day at school or something like that, I'll say, did you tell the teacher what you think?
And he'll say, no dad, I kept my mouth shut.
He's shy, but he's aware that it might be different than the normal, and so that's kind of a challenge trying to explain to a child.
And the other challenge is – I mean you don't want to be brainwashing your own child, right?
I mean we believe what we believe, and I tell my kid repeatedly over and over and over and over again.
Now, Ethan, this is what I believe.
Yeah, I think that's an excellent point.
what I believe.
And I'll say, but dad, I want to believe what you believe.
And I'll say, well, but you need to have good reasons for it.
And you're, you know, I tell him, you're free to disagree with me.
You know, you don't have to agree with what I believe.
Yeah, I think that's an excellent point.
To teach a child even correct conclusions is still indoctrination because you're not teaching them how to think, you're just teaching them what to think.
And that is really tragic.
So, you know, I've often been asked about this, what am I going to teach my kid about the world?
And it's like, well, I'm not going to teach my daughter my conclusions.
A, that's not giving her anything useful, right, but just telling her what I believe without the process of how I came to believe it, which is the real point.
And secondly, it's assuming that I'm right about everything, which is far from the case, of course, right?
As she thinks she's going to correct me on a number of things, just as she's correcting me now on what she can do versus what I think she can do.
So, it's in the same thing.
You wouldn't teach a kid answers to math problems.
You would teach them how to solve math problems.
And it's the same thing with the content of libertarian ideas or any really philosophical or reasoning process.
I don't want to teach her my conclusions.
I really just want to teach her how to think so that she can instruct me better and apply it, of course, to every sphere in the future.
Well, I even used that early on.
I mean, I'm talking maybe three years ago now.
I used that as a learning opportunity.
He would actually sometimes disagree with me, like on whether dinosaurs came from birds, or some theory, or whether this dinosaur came from this era, and we didn't have a book to look it up.
He would insist that it was Triassic, and I would say, I think it's Jurassic or whatever.
And we couldn't agree, and I would say, well – I said, you know what we do?
We need to agree to disagree.
And so I taught him that early on, and that comes up every now and then now.
Sometimes it frustrates him when I do it too much, because I just won't accept what he says.
And I'll say, well, let's just agree to disagree.
But we have disagreements.
But usually when he asks a question like – about something, I'll say, well, some people think this, and some people think that, and I'll tell them the truth.
And he'll say, well, what do you think?
I say, well, I think this, and here's the reasons why I think this.
Unless he asks me a question about atheism or God, which I'm pretty careful about that one, because my wife is not quite with me on that one.
So I want him to come up with his own.
I know he's going to conclude like I have about that.
Right now, remember, son, mommy's going to atheist hell.
Now, listen, I want to be aware of your time.
I've really, really enjoyed this conversation.
I really wanted to, you know, for people who see or who listen to this, libertarian or atheist or whoever, I really do want to encourage More of a conversation among libertarians or anarchists about issues of parenting.
I mean there is this, you know, to put things into a ridiculous kind of black and white categorization, there are two general approaches to change in the world.
One is of course political action or political non-action if you're going to go the aggressive route and disengage, but it's focusing on the political structure.
The other is, my approach of course, which may be right or may be wrong, I think it's right, is to look at social change, particularly the kind of social change like a stateless society or whatever, a religion-free society, that is a multi-generational process that most people are too fixed in their ways, too set in their ways, and much like a scientific paradigm where people say, you know, bad scientific ideas never die out, only their followers eventually snuff it.
There is a focus, I think, an under-focus on the value of parenting.
And bringing up children with the non-aggression principle, with looking upon authority as a benevolent resource rather than a finger-wagging power structure.
And I think that's, we want to teach our kids to grow up without deference to authority, without fear of authority, and that way they simply won't speak the language of status hierarchy when they get older.
That, to me, is the way that society changes.
It's a drag because we won't probably get to live to see it, but I think it is, you know, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step in the right direction rather than, I think, political action, which I'm not a huge fan of.
So I really wanted to extend the invitation, if you're a libertarian or a philosopher, a free thinker, whatever it is, that maybe we can set up some more regular conversations about parenting, which I think would be a lot of fun.
I certainly have learned a lot from you, Steph, about stuff, because you're further down the road than I am, which is great.
I'd really like to learn more from other libertarian parents or free-thinking parents and to share the stuff that I've managed to pick up.
I think it's an under-represented and very necessary conversation in what it is that we're doing.
So thanks so much for taking the time and if you can think of anyone we can send this to who might want to pick up this.
Maybe we could do a semi-regular like once a month kind of thing because I really think it's under-talked about and really, really important for what we want to do as a movement.
Will do.
I agree.
I'd love to.
It's a good idea.
And thanks for having me on.
Thanks.
All the best.
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