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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
50:50
An Introduction to Peaceful Parenting :)
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And so, with that, maybe you could give us a little, you know, brief introduction into Pisa Pantheon.
Sure.
Thanks for the introductions.
Very kind.
And I'm, you know, congratulations on being a dad.
It is a very exciting roller coaster of an endeavor.
So, good for you.
Yeah.
I mean, most of the people, I guess, who are listening are libertarians or ANCAPs or something like that, so we all are down with the non-aggression principle that you cannot initiate the use of force against other people.
You can use force in an extremity of self-defense and so on, but, you know, parenting, unless you're like Mr. and Mrs. Menendez, parenting doesn't really fall into the category of self-defense.
So, violence that is used in parenting is not morally legitimate.
It is the initiation of the use of force to spank and to withhold food and to imprison and so on and lock in the room and so on.
So, if we take those off the table, As far as parenting goes, if we say, okay, look, I have these principles as non-initiation of force, so can't spend, can't deny food, can't imprison, you know, in the same way we couldn't to any other human being who's an adult.
What are my choices?
What are my options?
The first thing you have to do is deny yourself the capacity to use that kind of aggression and then a whole bunch of things open up.
You know, like when you privatize something that the government runs, a huge amount of creativity kind of flowers up to solve problems.
So once you deny yourself coercion, you get to be So there's some basic realities around the parent-child relationship that are really essential.
And, you know, it may seem obvious, but it's not something we think of very often.
And I would sort of analogize them or compare them to a marital relationship, right?
So first of all, children do not choose us as parents themselves.
They don't choose to be born.
They don't choose the family that they're born into.
They don't choose when they're born.
They don't choose what kind of person you are, where you are in your life, what your history was.
They don't choose any of that stuff.
Now, when I got married recently, I just had a 10th wedding anniversary.
When I got married, my wife and I, we got to date, we got engaged, we got to test drive each other.
We had 11 months from the time we met until the time we got married and that's relatively rapid.
And we had the choice to not get married.
We had the choice to marry other people.
I'm thinking certain states in the Union you can marry sockpockets and penguins and things like that.
But we had the chance to test drive each other.
We made that choice and that I mean obviously a good thing.
And we can also choose to leave the marriage at any time.
My wife could wake me up at two o'clock in the morning and say, "That's just one too many husbandly farts for me.
I'm out of here," with a fan blowing hard behind.
So the fact is that it's very different between a parent and a child than even sort of a man and a wife.
And yet, we generally will try to treat adults in our life better than we treat our children.
And that doesn't mean we're always treating our children bad.
It just means in terms of their preferences.
We all understand that, you know, we should have the right to choose to get married.
We should have the right to leave marriages if they turn out to be abusive or destructive in some way.
But these options are not available to children.
Children didn't choose you.
They didn't date you.
They didn't say, hey, of all the people I could have as my mom and dad, I'm going to choose you because you are just fantastic.
And they also can't leave.
They, you know, until they're 16 in some places, 18 in other places, they can't leave a negative family environment.
They have obviously no legal independence, they have no financial independence, they just can't do anything about it.
So they don't choose to be there and they can't leave.
And so if we sort of really mull over that, if we really absorb that reality, I think we can very quickly come to the conclusion That the people we should be treating the very best in our lives are the people who never made the choice to be with us and who can't leave.
Obviously, I want my wife to love me.
I try to be a good husband and a good friend to her and all of that.
But if my wife had been assigned to me by the state or by the tribe or something like that and she simply had to get married to me and she couldn't leave and she didn't choose to be there, I think we all understand that I would have to work even harder to win her love because of the involuntary nature of the relationship both in its inception and in its continuance.
I would have to work like super super hard to win her love much more than if She had chosen to be with me because you know chooses to be with me because hopefully she loves me already and so on.
And so once we recognize and absorb that lesson we really understand how important it is to treat our children as best as humanly possible far better than any other relationship that we can imagine because of the involuntary nature of the relationship and because not only because they don't choose to be there and they can't leave we have to treat them the best to win their love.
And the way we do that, of course, is we live principally.
We don't use aggression.
We don't spank.
We don't hit.
We don't yell.
We don't threaten.
And what we do is we ask for feedback.
And we say, you know, I mean, my local pizza joint, every time I order there, sends me a little flyer or includes something which says, how did we do today?
Did you like your pizza?
Was it a good pizza?
Could it have been better?
Was it too hot?
Was it too cold?
Was it too grainy?
Was it too much of this?
Not enough of this?
And if you fill it out, then you get some prize or whatever if you win it.
But how many parents do the same thing at the end of the day?
Say, what worked for you in the family today?
What didn't work for you?
What would you like to see more of?
What would you like to see less of?
You know, me as a pizza customer is not the most moral relationship in the world, but me as a parent to get feedback from my children is absolutely essential that they actually Get an enormous amount of feedback into the quality of their experience of me as a father.
So I'm asking my daughter every day or two.
Hey, what did you like?
What was your favorite part?
What didn't you like?
How did this work out?
We had this conflict.
How did it work out for you?
And all that kind of stuff.
Is there a better way I could be doing stuff?
And all of that kind of consultation and feedback and principle living with regards to the rejection of the use of force I sort of encapsulate around peaceful parenting.
It brings, I think, the best of libertarianism, the non-aggression principle, and a customer-focused kind of lifestyle.
You know, children are customers.
Now, they're involuntary customers because they don't choose to be here, can't leave, but they are customers of our parenting and I think if we were to treat them as well as, say, your average pizza joint treats a customer who has choices, I think we would understand that I don't think that we're really being as effective as we can be as parents.
I think we kind of take it for granted.
Well, they're here, they can't leave, and blah, blah, blah.
We tend to blame kids.
Even you at the beginning of the show said, well, I was spanked because I was a bad kid.
I would definitely question that, and if we have time, we can perhaps do that.
So, that's really, I think, the essence of what it is that I'm trying to talk about.
You know, do the research before you become a parent.
There's lots of great parenting books out there which teach you how to negotiate with your kids from a non-aggressive standpoint.
There's parental effectiveness training, tons of books by lots of different people about how to parent peacefully and solicit feedback at all times.
You are the provider of a service, the most important service in the world.
which is the raising of children, how often do you poll your customers about how well you're doing and what their preferences are?
And I think if we really treated children as if their preferences were the most important thing, and this does not mean of course everyone says, oh, indulge their every whim and so on.
If children are listened to, they don't have whims.
You know, whims is kind of a degrading way to talk about how children experience the world and how they feel and want things.
But if we were to treat children as extra special, full-on human beings plus, which is really what they are, then I think the world would see a radical change in a generation or two away from these oligarchical hierarchies, these states and sort of hierarchical religions that dominate our society so much.
I think it's a huge blow against public education to raise peaceful children who are able to negotiate.
And I think in a sense it's the most revolutionary thing that can be done.
Okay, so the comment was that this person was saying that they were spanked, and they feel like it taught them respect, and they don't feel like their parents were violent, and that they didn't have any self-esteem damage from it, and that it made them act better in public, etc., etc.
Uh, you know, is that kind of like a Stockholm syndrome that we have, that we kind of make excuses for violent behavior because A, we grew up with it and that's the model we learned, um, and, and B, maybe that's the model that we're currently using so we want to defend it.
Yes.
Look, I mean nobody wants to look at perhaps well-meaning parents who spanked because they genuinely believed it was the right thing to do and recognize that as a violation of the non-aggression principle and an immoral action.
Nobody really likes to look at that.
I can understand that.
I can really sympathize with that.
But the person's feelings While important to the person, are philosophically irrelevant.
And what I mean by that is, it doesn't matter whether you feel this banking was justified.
That's like someone saying, well I'm happy to pay taxes.
That doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter whether you're happy about it or sad about it.
It matters whether it's a violation of the non-aggression principle, and it is the initiation of force to hit a child, and so it doesn't really matter whether you're okay with it or not.
You know, it's like going to take an extreme example, and it's an extreme example I recognize, but it's like going to some slave who says, well, look, I'm really happy being a slave, and then saying, well, I guess there's nothing wrong with slavery.
Well, it doesn't matter what the subjective experience of the person is.
It only matters whether philosophically it violates the moral principles.
Now, Stockholm Syndrome is a pretty strong phrase because of course it's usually to do with like kidnapping and torture and so on.
I mean, but the reality is that you don't know because you don't have a comparison to.
So you don't know what you would have been like If you had not been spanked.
So you can't compare and say well I turned out fine and I was spanked because you don't know.
Like compared to what?
If you hadn't been spanked you might have turned out a whole lot better.
There are certainly grave risks in spanking that have been known for decades in the psychological community which is why most major medical associations and pediatric associations are against spanking.
Spanking shaves off a number of IQ points and so there is a tragedy.
It's almost for certain you would have been smarter if you hadn't been spanked and whether that's to do with the fear response or whether that's to do with if you're spanked you're not negotiated with.
And if you're not negotiated with, that's going to just shave off some intelligence points.
So it really doesn't matter what your subjective experience is.
It only matters whether it violates the principle and it also matters whether you've looked into the data about the effects of spanking.
I have an interview with Dr. Elizabeth Gershoff who did a meta-study of dozens of spanking studies and found that almost universally they produce negative effects like a loss of IQ, a loss of social skills, increased hostility and oppositional defiance towards legitimate authority and more problems among socializing with peers, which is why you say, when you increased hostility and oppositional defiance towards legitimate authority and more problems among socializing with peers, which is why you say, when you say, I was spanked because I was a bad That's not what the data says.
The data says, and they've done quite a lot of work teasing out the cause and effect, right?
Which is the data says that you were a difficult child or a bad child or a, quote, remarkable child.
quote, romanticist child, because you were spanked.
The spanking didn't come after the behavior.
The behavior came as a response to the use of aggression.
Right.
You know, I think that you touched on a great point that when you – this is kind of something that I've learned just from being a parent, just from interacting.
I'm a stay-at-home dad, so I spend a lot of time with my son.
And one of the things that I just kind of learned through that experience was that when we do something, we're providing a model for them on how they behave.
So if I raise my voice, or if I go to strike him, that's what he's learning.
That's how he's learning conflict resolution now.
So he started to imitate me.
I would raise my voice, and he would raise his voice right back at me.
And he kind of thought it was a game.
And that's when it started to really become real for me.
I was like, wait a minute, I can't even really raise my voice.
I feel like that might be, what's your opinion on that, raising your voice?
Because my feeling is, I feel like that in and of itself is kind of like, maybe it's not a technical violation of the NAP, or maybe you feel what it is.
I just think that even raising your voice is kind of teaching them that that's the way you resolve conflict, by being louder than the other person.
Yeah, it is intimidation and there's a lot of moral obligations that accrue to parents that do not accrue to adult relationships.
Right, so I was at the park a little while back with my daughter and I saw a dad And the dad had a, I don't know, maybe a three or four year old little girl and he wanted to go home and she didn't want to leave.
Of course, this is an incredibly common thing that happens in parenting and there's lots of different ways to deal with it.
But what he did was he basically, he asked her two or three times to leave and then he basically said, okay, that's it, I'm going.
And he just started walking off.
And his daughter was like, her jaw dropped, like he's going to leave me.
I don't even know how to get home.
I've got no food.
It's getting dark.
And in her mind, this is kind of like a death sentence.
There are wolves out there.
I mean, I don't know, but is he coming back?
Now, if you and I are at a movie and I'm like, I got to go.
I forgot I have an appointment and I leave.
Well, you're fine.
You're a big guy.
You can find your way home.
You can probably even find some popcorn.
But children require a huge amount of moral obligations.
They generate a huge amount of moral obligations that nobody else in the world generates.
So I mean I don't worry about feeding you every day because you've got tons of sources of food.
My daughter, if I don't worry about feeding her, she's out of food, right?
I mean she's got no – they're like people locked in your basement, right?
I mean if you don't feed someone who's locked in your basement, they don't have any other They're locked in your basement.
So, the moral sensitivity we need with children because of their dependent and helpless state is so huge.
It's so far in excess.
Now, I mean, if you're trying to go through the airport and some TSA agent starts yelling at you, I mean, you'd probably be pretty alarmed, pretty scared, pretty nervous about that.
Some cops start screaming at you.
But they have much less power over you than a parent does.
Right?
Because you can have a lawyer, you can complain, you can call the media, you can go on Facebook, you have all of these choices that children just don't have.
So if we understand that somebody who has much less authority over us, like a TSA agent or a customs agent or whatever, if they start yelling and screaming at us, it's pretty terrifying for us.
Well, it's even worse and it's much, much worse on the part of a child.
To use aggression, intimidation, to use your size, to use your volume as a parent, It's a complete confession of failure.
You have lost control of the situation.
So, I mean, and it has a lot to do with preparation.
So, the guy at the park, what could he have done?
Well, he could have done, if you don't have the option to just walk off and abandon your kid to the dark, then what's he going to do?
Well, he's going to teach his kid time and say, well, you know, when this hand touches this, we have to go and here's why.
And if there's a good reason why, because kids, you know, they ask why all the time.
And you keep reminding the kid, oh, it's getting closer.
We got to go in five minutes.
And I've done this many times.
And then, you know, let her have one or two negotiations to stay an extra few minutes or five minutes or whatever.
But you just manage it that way.
And then it's just like landing a plane.
You don't just sort of jump in there blindfolded and try and push the stick forward and hope everything's going to work out.
It's a lot of preparation to get ready for these kinds of negotiations.
And you teach your kids very important skills through that.
So, I agree with you.
I think that yelling at a child is such a... My daughter doesn't owe me any obedience.
She doesn't have to do anything I say.
She's not obligated to obey me at all.
I mean, what a crazy situation that would be.
It is up to me to find ways, imaginative, creative, storytelling ways, whatever it's going to be, to convince her of the right thing to do.
And that can be a challenge and that requires a lot of creativity and you know I had to teach her a lot about how the body works so that she's not just some complete sugar monster.
But you can do these things but you cannot intimidate.
They are too fragile, too dependent, too helpless.
They ain't there by choice and they can't leave you if you're being a jerk which means you have to not have any of those behaviors in your repertoire.
Yeah, you know, I think that kind of the feeling that I started to get was if you resort to raising your voice or using violence, that's just kind of lazy parenting.
It takes less creativity, as you said, or energy to just kind of raise my voice and intimidate them into obeying rather than treating them like an intelligent human being.
And reasoning with them.
I actually kind of used to have this issue with my brother because his kid, you know, he kind of resorted, you know, to mainstream parenting techniques.
And for me, I used to try to have conversations with them and reason with them.
And I feel like that's how you're going to teach kids to reason.
When you treat them like animals, basically, they're going to grow up to be animals.
If you teach them by trying to, by relating to them, Not as if they're adults, like they can understand the same concepts we can understand, but, or I guess in a sense they can to a lesser degree, but if you relate to them, maybe a little bit above what you feel that they can relate to, that's how they learn to stretch and challenge themselves and kind of progress forward. that's how they learn to stretch and challenge themselves and Yeah, look, it's bullying.
I mean, it's just bullying in plain and simple.
You're bigger, you're louder, you're stronger, you've got more independence, and you have the law on your side.
I mean, it's just bullying, and it's wretched.
I mean, so if you yell at your kid, or you hit your kid, or you threaten to leave your kid in the middle of a park at sunset, what have you done?
I mean, all you have done is you have taught your child that you're bigger.
Well, your child already knows that.
It's like, no shock there, Dad, I got it, like me leaning over my daughter and saying, He's both, right?
All it does is teach the child that you're bigger and stronger, that might makes right.
And for people who say, well, children can't learn better and therefore we have to be aggressive to them, I say, fine, then universalize that.
And then when you're old and your brain is starting to go and you're starting to forget where you left your keys and you're starting to leave your mittens at the mall, then you should be happy with your adult children bending you over their knee and slapping your ass until it's red.
Just to remind you not to lose your keys or your mittens.
So, if cognitive deficits justify the use of violence, we should be treating our old people a whole lot more inhumanely, and of course we wouldn't accept that.
Why would we accept it with children?
It's funny, what kind of logical framework are you setting up for a child when you teach them that the appropriate response to her wanting to stay in the park a few minutes longer is abandonment?
Yeah, I mean, talk about a nuclear option for an ant on your toe.
I mean, gosh, bringing in violence and yelling and screaming and abandonment just because the child wants to stay in the park for a few minutes longer.
I mean, dear God, are people mental?
I mean, that's just insane.
It's like using Godzilla to break a sugar cube.
It's just so over the top and hysterical.
Well, it requires parents to think outside of themselves, look at the child's perspective instead of just their perspective that they want to be in.
I want it now.
I own you because you belong to me because I created you and therefore you're going to do what I tell you to do or else.
With that, we do have a question.
I'm going to bring up Cheryl so she can ask a question from the chat room.
Cheryl, you're live.
Hi, yes.
The question was, Does Stefan think about how his daughter has become an inadvertent celebrity?
A lot of people would be closely watching her life via your stories about your experience as a parent.
Is she aware of this attention, and if not, do you plan on telling her about that in the future?
Yeah, I mean that's a good question and it's something I try to be quite sensitive to.
I certainly don't try to reveal anything personal about her.
So I'll mention a little bit about our interactions and so on and maybe jokes that she's made or something like that.
But I am definitely sensitive to the fact that she's not, I mean she's four, she's not at an age where she can give knowing or rational or informed consent to any of this kind of stuff.
So I'm aware of that, where I do sort of draw the line is to not reveal things about herself or whatever that are not to do with an illustration for parenting.
But of course, if I were to say, well, I think I have some useful things to say about parenting, and then it'd be a complete black box about my own experiences as a parent, I think that would be non-credible.
So I think that, you know, I'm sort of trying to walk a line, and I try to err on the side of privacy, but If I'm sort of a public figure and I'm talking about parenting, which is, I think, the most essential aspect of virtue and philosophy, and I am a parent, I think that to not mention anything about my parenting or what happens would not be beneficial.
And I hope, of course, when she gets older, and I think it's going to be the case, that she'll say, well, okay, so you told about a joke I said when I was three or you told about a way we resolved a conflict when I was four.
You know, I think that did some good.
And, of course, you know, I will explain to her that I get, you know, like 50 or so emails a week about people who said that they stopped being aggressive to their kids, they stopped hitting, they stopped yelling.
And I'll say, you know, that occurred to a large degree because I told a story about how we resolved the conflict when you're four.
I think that when she's old enough to understand, I think she will say, well, I think that was good.
In other words, I'll give up that tiny shred of privacy to do all this good in the world.
I think that will be the case, you know, fingers crossed that that's the way that I'm trying to work it.
But that is a very good question.
Thank you for bringing it up.
We have Tracy, my co-host on Ragamuffin Radio, who's off this week, but she wanted to call in and ask a question.
What's up, Trey?
Hey, how you doing?
Hi, Stefan!
Hi!
Hi, I was doing a training today that got done a little bit early, so I was able to just make a quick call.
I just, you know, I don't know if you remember me, I sat with you at the table at Liberty Fest two years ago, and we took a number of funny pictures together, and you You actually started talking to me about this.
Do you remember me now?
I do, I do.
How are you doing?
Nice to chat with you again.
I'm doing well.
Thank you.
After you spoke to me, I actually really rethought how I was parenting my children and kind of looked at what you had said about how I had been brought up and how most of us have been brought up with the violence and the spanking and the yelling and things like that.
And I altered the way that I parent my kids.
And my question to you is, You know, what I see in trying to not yell and not raise my voice, and I never spank my children, it's not necessary, but, you know, my kids are too smart.
And it's almost like you still have to have this sort of, you know, disciplinary stance because you can't let them just run free and do as they choose because they don't have the knowledge about life that most of us have after living it.
So my question to you is, when you tell a child no, for some reason, let's say they had too much sugar and they want another snack, and they come back at you with a rational answer why they should have another snack, what would you do in that case?
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question and that, of course, I, you know, I sort of sometimes say to myself, why did I ever, ever introduce sugar into my daughter's life?
I mean, good heavens, if she just thought that, you know, vegetables and carbs were the only thing that you needed, but, you know, it's such a fun part of childhood, it's kind of tough to deny it.
So, the way that I've worked with this is I've explained that there's her tongue and then there's her belly.
And her tongue loves sugar.
But her belly likes a little bit of sugar but not too much because then it gets sick, right?
She's actually learned the word ambivalence.
I'm sort of trying to give her an understanding of the word ambivalence, that sometimes we want things and we don't want them or sometimes one part of us wants something and another part of us doesn't, right?
So your heart wants to go run in the snow but your nose is worried it's going to get cold.
Or for me it's like my muscles want me to go exercise but my fat wants me to sit on the couch and eat another bag of Cheetos or something.
So I'm trying to sort of explain to her that there are times when we want different things or parts of us want even things in opposition and I think she really sort of understands that.
And also there's stuff that feels good now and stuff that doesn't feel good later.
So if you had like two pounds of chocolate, you'd probably enjoy eating it and then you'd get really sick.
And explaining also, and you can find videos on this, we watched a little bit of I think it's called Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead or something like that.
It's a documentary about a guy who's trying to lose weight.
And in it, there's a bunch of antibodies and fat cells and all that.
So explaining diabetes, I explained it to her when she was three and said, you know, if you eat too much sugar for too long, you know, bugs live in your teeth and they bite your teeth and then you get sick and then you can get diabetes.
It means an injection every single day and blah, blah, blah.
And this takes a long time to explain.
Yeah, it takes a long time to explain, but I say to her, I am responsible not just for your tongue.
I'm a dad, so I'm responsible for making sure you don't get diabetes.
I'm responsible for making sure your teeth don't owie.
I'm responsible for making sure that you don't get... So I have to think about your belly, because you're really young, and so you think just about your tongue.
And I get that, because I do that too sometimes, if I had a piece of cheesecake when I shouldn't.
I'm just worried about my tongue, not whatever later.
And so you sort of, you have this as a lengthy conversation that's very educational, extends that time frame, it explains why it is that you're doing.
And if you really want something, like tonight she wanted, what did she, oh yeah, she wanted a cookie or something after dinner but she'd already had some hot chocolate after we were playing outside.
And I said, Oh, I would love to give you all the sugar in the world.
I mean, I would love to just open up the sugar truck and you could just swim in there and eat whatever you wanted.
I mean, I would love that for myself sometimes, you know, but we can't.
I mean, this is just, you know, we can have lots of fun with stuff, but we have to be limited with it because we have to stay healthy.
And I've also explained to her, which I think is worth explaining to kids, you know, The tongue wants sugar because sugar was really hard to find and we really wanted that energy because it was great energy for us.
So we'd brave the bee stings to go and get the honey because the honey was so good for us and was so hard to get.
But now sugar is everywhere, you know?
Like we didn't care that much about vegetables because vegetables were everywhere.
Aren't you then still exerting some sort of power over the child?
Like tell them they can't do something or Or kind of, like, interfering with their wants, and then isn't that, like, neglecting them of some freedom?
Well, sure, it is.
But, I mean, it's no different than me neglecting myself of some freedom as well and not doing some things that I would think would be fun.
I mean, I've heard crack cocaine is really fantastic, but I manage to resist the urge every day.
So it's nothing that I don't do with myself.
And the way that I try to work with it logically, and there, look, I'm in conversations with some parents who blow my mind about permissiveness, so I'm still working on that.
But what I try to figure out, Tracy, is When my child is older, will they look back and say, thank you for X?
Right?
And I think that's an important thing, right?
So will they look back and say, well thank you, I'm really happy that I don't have juvenile onset diabetes.
I'm really happy that I have all my teeth.
And thank you.
Because I'm happy to have all my teeth now, whereas missing a couple of candy bars when I was a kid is not exactly the worst trauma in the world.
So I do try to parent like when my child is an adult will they look back and say that was a good idea.
And so I think that's something to it.
There are times when I will not let her have something else.
Like I will not let her have another juice because it's too much sugar and I know that it's going to be tough for her digestion and all of the after effects of that.
down the road and but at the same time it's a constant conversation to expand her mentality to understand why and also with the humility of saying I sometimes eat too much sugar because I'm a human being and we sure do love that stuff so so it's not common and it becomes more and more rare as time goes along like now maybe it's once or twice a month where I absolutely just have to say no I'm sorry you can't have any more of that and and I'm really am sorry and I really am I mean I really would love
to not ever have to say no but there are a few times but they diminish over time as she understands the why and we keep talking about health and and nutrition and and exercise and all of that it does diminish I mean if you put the work in what I'm willing to do is put all that extra time and work in explaining to her which is fun I think for the most part in order not to have fights for the next 15 years over over sugar which I think they certainly are diminishing over time and now she's saying sometimes she'll I have one more quick question and then I'll let you guys finish.
some and put it away or whatever.
And she was at her birthday party, she was the only kid asking for carrots.
So it does kind of work out, but you just got to be persistent with it.
I have one more quick question, then I'll let you guys finish.
My next question is, when do you let them make choices you know will lead to a failure or a mistake or a consequence?
And let them then do that without shielding them and kind of let them grow in that way.
How do you pick and choose those situations?
Yeah, I mean I'm still, I mean she's still young enough that there's not a huge amount of that and that is one of the toughest aspects of parenting.
I'm a little hovery around physical injuries.
They just unnerve me.
And so I'm probably a little bit, I mean, I'm probably a little too cautious about that stuff, but I'm working on it.
As far as mistakes go, I think that if you say as a parent, I don't think that's a good idea, they go off and do something and it turns out to not be a good idea.
I mean, you don't want to be the, I told you so, kind of parent, but I think it is important to reinforce that you said it wasn't a good idea and here's why.
And you know, I say that to my daughter, not with the goal of being right, but with the goal of next time maybe you'll understand why.
I want her to be able to forward think.
and anticipate things that are going to be problems or negative experiences but I'm certainly not infallible in any way shape or form about knowing what is going to be a positive or negative experience in the long run.
I mean, I don't even know half the time.
It's half the time stuff in my own life that I think is banned turns out to be fantastic and vice versa.
So what the hell do I know?
But I will say that as long as obviously it doesn't leave them with some permanent injury or whatever, but there are times I'm not willing to sort of let her eat so much chocolate she gets sick.
And I'm just, maybe that's something that I still need to work on.
I'm not willing to do that as yet.
I'm sort of loosening up and letting her do more and more stuff.
I'm trying to be as maximum freedom as possible, but I'm not willing to do stuff where there might be any, obviously, permanent damage.
I think that's taken for granted.
And I know this isn't too helpful an answer and hopefully I'll keep people posted as I go forward down the parenting path but certainly failure is an important thing to not be scared of in life because Lord knows most of life is failure and life itself inevitably is failure because we get old and die.
So I think failure is something you have to become more friends with when you're a child and so I try to avoid praising her for innate abilities like she is very smart.
She's very verbal as you can imagine.
And so I try to avoid saying, you're a great talker.
I try to focus on praising her for the work that she's putting into things.
Like, oh, you did a fantastic job working on that letter.
It looks really great.
As opposed to, you're just great with letters.
Because I think, as far as I've read, if you praise a child for an innate capacity, it actually makes them less secure.
Because then they think that they just have to get things right because it's innately good, not that they have to work at things.
And of course, most of the things that are great in life, you have to really work at.
So, I think those kinds of things would be my approach.
But again, I think I'm way behind the curve as far as that goes relative to where your kids are.
I'll keep you posted as I go forward.
That's wonderful.
I think that, honestly, what I'm talking about more is when your kid gets to be about 16 or 17 and I haven't crossed that path yet.
It seems like you're kind of learning as you go as well, as much of a scholar and a wonderful mind you are on this topic.
You haven't been faced with the situations that young adults face and the decisions that will change their lives for good or bad.
And you know when you know that something's a bad path and you want to shelter them from making that bad decision, what good comes of them making that bad decision?
And what do they learn from that bad decision?
And when is it good for you to step back as a parent and let them make it as opposed to stepping in and shielding them and sheltering them from that decision?
You might not be able to answer that right now, and I appreciate you... Well, did you make any bad decisions when you were a teenager?
Oh, yes, of course I have, and they shaped the way my life has been, and I would never go back and change them.
So, you know, my parents tried to tell me not to do A, or not to do B, or you have to be in by this time, and don't be out after this time, and nothing good happens after 2 a.m., and, you know, all this stuff, but I chose... Don't get that tattoo.
Don't get that tattoo, don't get that piercing.
And I chose to not listen to my parents as well as they brought me up, and they did a great job.
But, you know, I lived my own life.
I made my own decisions, and I didn't necessarily fall back on my parents to help me through those things.
I did what I wanted to do, which I think is a keynote of being a free person and a free individual.
So, you know, it's almost like, you know, do I let my daughter decide to go out with the motorcycle-riding, you know, gangster-type looking guy?
Just so she could learn for herself that that's really not the type of person she wants to associate with.
Or, do I say, no, you're not allowed to do that, you can't do that, it'll be a...
Well, yeah, the not allowed thing we know doesn't work.
I mean, that's the war on drugs.
I mean, the not allowed for sure isn't going to work.
I think that by the time your kids are 16 or 17, I mean, your job as a parent is so, it's so much done already years ago, right?
I think my job as a parent is about three quarters done now because she's, you know, almost five, which is where her personality is largely set.
But I think, you know, just keep working on reinforcing the values and also recognize that you don't know what is always best for somebody else.
I mean, that's the whole point why we're into the free market, not central planning, is we don't know what is best for somebody else.
I think that if the values have been put in place correctly and the respect has been put in there and the negotiation has been put in there, I just don't think that they'll, I don't think my daughter's going to be attracted to a motorcycle guy.
I mean, some, you know, creep with, you know, swastika on it.
I just don't think that's, I don't think that's going to happen.
I'm, you know, maybe I'll cross that bridge if and when I come to it, you know, but I just, I don't see how she's going to end up having anything in common with people who don't treat her respectfully, given how she's been raised.
And I think she's going to look at those people as like, well, I'm sorry, I don't speak that language.
So there's really not much for us to talk about.
Well, thank you so much for entertaining my questions, and Danny, I'm sorry I wasn't able to be here with you the entire time.
Thanks so much for having me as a guest on my own show for a few minutes.
Well, you know what, we actually have to take a quick break.
So, you know, I have a question about boundaries.
You know, my son is entering his terrible twos, quote unquote, and he does not like to go to bed, and How did you handle that, in terms of, did you allow your daughter to kind of make her own bedtime?
Is it better, in your opinion, to set up a structure where you encourage them?
I mean, obviously, you don't want to battle with them every single night, but, I mean, is that something you would negotiate?
You know, if you say, I want you to be in bed at 7.30, and they really prefer to go to bed at 8.30, I mean, you can be a little flexible and move it up an hour, but if they want to stay up until 10.30, what's your feeling of that?
Yeah, I mean, that's definitely a challenge as a parent.
She doesn't, I mean, certainly when she was younger, she's going to get it now, but she didn't have the real ability to look over the hump of the night, so to speak, and to figure out whether she was going to be tired in the morning or something like that.
I mean, it's a little different because she doesn't have to get up at any particular time and so it's not, you know, got to get up at seven o'clock to get to daycare or whatever.
We definitely have had lots of conversations.
She is kind of a night owl.
I mean, she will say, but she also doesn't know whether she's tired or not.
I mean, this is something that you just have to know by being around your kid a lot.
So she'll say, I'm not tired.
I'm not tired.
And then, you know, we go to bed and I read her a couple of pages of The Hobbit and she's like out for 11 hours.
You know, she doesn't know when she's tired.
And so this is something that I don't think she can learn if she just doesn't know it yet.
So it's like trying to ask her to do physics.
I mean she just doesn't.
She's not even close to being there.
So the way that I work with bedtime is just in my own mind like I want time with my wife and I can't have my daughter up all night because I want to be able to spend some time.
I mean you know what it's like when you have an energetic kid around.
I mean, adult conversation just goes out through the window and seemingly goes to South America for a couple of years to hibernate.
And so I had one time with my wife.
I know that my daughter needs a certain amount of sleep or she's just not as happy the next day.
But she's not quite aware of that.
And it's a compliment.
The kid wants to stay.
If a kid's like, oh, it's 6 o'clock, Dad.
I don't want to play with you.
I want to go to bed.
Be like, hey, what am I, chopped liver?
So it's kind of a complimentary.
Your kids want to stay up.
So, the way that I try and work it is it's just gradations, you know.
You have to have a ritual for bedtime, whatever that's going to be.
Have a ritual, start the ritual, and it just starts to feel after a while like a kind of conveyor belt where you get the kid to bed.
I do sort of ask, you know, no jumping around right before bed, no riling yourself up because, you know, I say that that makes your body confused like you just want to, now your body thinks we're going to go exercise and actually we're trying to get to bed so your body gets confused and doesn't go to sleep.
And I also will say if, you know, if after half an hour you're still not asleep, we'll get back up.
I don't want to just have her sit and lie there not asleep for a long time.
And I'll also go to bed with her and wait till she's asleep before getting back up.
So, it's a fun time of night where we chat about the day, we can tell stories, make jokes and so on.
So, that kind of the intimacy of sort of curled up in bed waiting to go to sleep is a nice fun time.
So, it's not like horrible.
And so, staying with her till she falls asleep is important as well.
Just trying to get her started on the ritual and say, well, in 10 minutes.
And she said, well, I don't want to go to bed and so on.
It's like, well, yes, but you remember the last couple of times you stayed up, you were really tired.
I want to have as much fun with you as possible tomorrow.
I don't want you to be too tired tomorrow.
And I'm also quite tired.
I mean, to be honest with her too, if I'm tired.
Or if I have some work to do, like there's some things I need to get done.
And so you don't know when you're tired.
You know that, right?
So if she admits that she doesn't know when she's tired, then the fact that she wants to stay up is no longer an absolute.
And so those kinds of things can be really helpful.
I still am not like, get to bed.
I mean, that's just not who I am or how I want to parent.
But there are ways of sort of bringing them in for a softer landing so that they end up getting to sleep at some reasonable hour.
So you get the rest of the evening for more adult stuff.
Great.
We have Andrew, and Andrew has a question.
You're live on Nagamuffin Radio.
Well, hello there.
Hello, Stefan.
I just first want to say that I'm a big fan of your stuff.
I have purchased your Practical Anarchy and your Everyday Anarchy, and I read them both, and I really like them.
My question was, me and my older brother, he's one year apart from me.
Uh, raised under the same roof, uh, the same, the same rules and the same, you know, basically the same structure.
Um, however, he is vastly different than I am.
Um, you know, he takes advances from work and gambles all the money away and, and, you know, has, you know, girlfriends left and right, has a kid with probably maybe three or four different girls.
And of course, every girl he picks up, they all have kids too.
Um, and I'm quite a little bit different.
I'm wondering what you can say to explain the difference.
If the parenting structure is the same, what explains the difference with a year apart?
Why are him and I so much different from each other in those regards?
Yeah, that's a big question and I can only take a completely amateur swing at it.
Well, obviously there's choices, right?
People make different choices and those choices tend to set them on different paths.
I'm a big one for free will, so people make different choices and those choices end up snowballing sometimes to the point where it seems very hard to bring them back to the fork in the road and have them go a different direction.
So that's one possibility.
The other possibility, of course, is it could be a matter of intelligence, right?
Intelligence has some genetic components.
It's certainly not common across like not all kids.
They're going to be roughly the same, but they're also just in The various randomness, there could have been something different.
There might have been something different in the womb environment, of course, in the prenatal environment where maybe your mom was under a lot of stress with the second pregnancy because she had you as a kid.
I mean these are possibilities that could have had an effect on emotional development.
You, of course, as the firstborn, would have got a huge amount of attention, whereas the secondborn, particularly when they're close in age to that degree, is simply going to get less attention.
I mean, that's just inevitable.
Bill Cosby's got a funny... Sorry, go ahead.
You know, maybe I had misspoken.
It was actually quite the opposite.
He was the firstborn.
Oh, he was the firstborn.
I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry.
Okay, okay.
He was the firstborn, and so maybe attention is bad for him.
I don't know.
I'm starting to sound like I'm adapting the theory to fit the circumstances.
He was the firstborn.
Sorry, are there any other siblings other than you?
Yes, there is a younger one than I am.
Okay.
I mean, this is something I've just been thinking about lately, so I'll try not to shoehorn it into your very important question.
Firstborns, to me, unless parents take a lot of time and attention to remind them of this, they can get a very false sense of achievement just because they're older.
So they're the first to do stuff.
They generally tend to be bigger and stronger.
First across the finish line, they're always a little smarter.
They're always a little ahead.
And if the person takes that as I'm better, whereas it's just coincidence, right?
It's like saying you're better because you're taller or have blue eyes.
These aren't things that you earned, right?
It's just who you are.
So the fact that he happened to be first may have given him some sense of I'm better.
And therefore, if he thinks he's innately better, he's going to be risk avoidant and therefore more seeking out low rent or easier relationships.
I mean this is just a rough guess.
I mean there could be a huge amount of stuff that's going on but it's not and the other thing too is that susceptibility to peer relationships, right?
I mean if for whatever reason his peer relationships were... Did you guys all go to public school?
Yes, we did.
And I will also note that him and I both were adopted as well.
Were what?
Were adopted?
Yeah, four and five.
Okay.
Well, okay, so that's quite an important thing as well.
I would really recommend reading In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté.
I pimp this book every time I can.
He's been on my show because there's stuff that happens.
I mean, we all like to think it's genetics or environment, but the two, of course, are so closely linked.
How old was he when he was adopted, do you know?
About four and a half.
You can lead off with that next time.
At the age of four and a half, 80% of brain development and personality development, if not more, occurs in the first four or five years of life.
So, his personality was largely formed by that time and I'm certainly no expert on there is neuroplasticity the brain can reorganize itself but unfortunately the part of the brain that says I need to reorganize myself is the first part that is rendered inoperative through various traumas and dysfunctions so again not knowing what happened to the skid in his first couple of years of life but certainly understanding that it can't have been great if he ended up being adopted at the age of four and a half
I think we can assume that he probably went through some pretty hellacious stuff early on in his life and for whatever reason, either it wasn't reversible or your parents didn't have the skills to reverse it.
That would be my guess.
Andrew, thank you so much for your question.
We're running out of time.
We just have a few minutes left.
I just have one quick question and we have about three minutes left if you could Kind of talk a little bit about schooling versus homeschooling.
Maybe if you want to share what your plan is and what you recommend.
Sorry, cut off there.
I'll just start and keep my fingers crossed.
I don't know yet.
I mean, it's really going to be dependent on my daughter's preferences.
I can't tell.
I'm certainly not going to send her to public school.
I mean, I'm just not going to do that.
I mean, I would live in a tent before I would do that, and I say this as a Canadian.
So, no public school.
If she wants to try school, she can try school.
I think that she's probably going to want to stay home.
And she is doing a fantastic job of learning things in and of her own steam that in a very impressive way.
I, you know, I'm continually in awe of how much she learns every day and how far she advances.
So as long as that keeps up, I'm happy to have her learn at her own pace in her own desires as she likes.
She's just fascinated by so many different things.
She's curious about so many different things.
Her thirst for knowledge is unquenchable, it seems.
So if she wants to keep doing it that way, where she's just unschooling and learning as she goes forward, I'm certainly open to that.
If she wants to try something more structured, I'm open to that as well.
And so I don't have any particular plans, but it will be a continual negotiation as we go forward.
Sure.
Do you know of any or have you maybe written yourself any curriculum or stuff for kids that we could use, people who do want to homeschool could use to kind of teach these philosophies?
No that's a very interesting idea though.
I mean I'm certainly trying to teach her as many concepts as possible right so we can have conversations like she asked me what my show was about and I said like every Sunday you do a call-in show and she asked what the show's about and I said I see the other day I was saying oh yeah so you know somebody was asking can we have a world without policemen and she's like well a world without policemen What do you mean?
So we started talking about, you know, how the world could work without policemen.
And so I really want to teach her these kinds of concepts.
You know, I really want to teach her reason, to think for herself, to process evidence.
So I think that the philosophical foundation, which is really just a mirror of how her brain is developing at the moment, which is trying to develop as many abstractions in as wide a context as possible, as quickly as possible.
So I think that philosophy is a fantastic subject for We started when she was around three, and now that she's four, she's really moving forward quite quickly in that.
And so, you know, if this would be of value to people, just shoot me an email, host at freedomainradio.com, and maybe I can write up sort of what's going on and how it's working so that people can use it if they're going to find it helpful.
That's a great idea.
Yeah, I would definitely love to see something like that.
We've got about 30 seconds left, so why don't you just plug your show and your website and any book that you want to push?
Oh, well no, the books are all free at freedomainradio.com.
If people listen and like it, I'm happy to take donations.
I am currently working on a documentary, or rockumentary if you will, and I hope that people will check that I'm going to release a teaser in the next week or two and it's hopefully going to be done at the end of March.
So I'm very excited about that.
I think it's going to be, you know, our movement needs its zeitgeist and so this is going to be my swing at the ball and I hope that people will like it.
Awesome.
Thank you so much.
Stefan Molyneux of FreeDomainRadio.com.
We really appreciate you.
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