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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
14:07
Parenting and Credibility - Or, how to avoid shooting your daughter's laptop
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
So, a large, large number of people have written to me asking for my comments on the recent Facebook post by a father.
Who pumps some lead into his daughter's notebook as a way of teaching her respect for persons and property.
I'd rather not.
It's so ludicrous, so wrong, so over-the-top, and such an act of fundamental desperation and not knowing what to do, that I'd rather really talk about prevention rather than cure.
I was sort of thinking, what is the one thing that I think is most essential for happiness as a parent?
And at a very practical level, like absent love and devotional, at a very practical level, I think I would have to answer that the most important thing for happiness as a parent is credibility.
It's credibility to not have your kids resist and oppose and kvetch and complain and nag and avoid.
All that sort of stuff, everything that you say that you want them to do.
And that is, that's a great challenge.
How do you go about, with your children, building credibility so that when you say something, that you want them to do something or want them not to do something, they'll at least listen or at least if they don't want to do it, you can have a discussion about it and that you don't have to watch them comply on the surface and then kind of skulk away and do the opposite in the background.
And I think fundamentally children are a mirror of the way that we treat them.
I think that children will treat us in the long run the way that we treat them, and particularly as they get older and have more power relative to, you know, when they're infants or toddlers or going through the latency period and so on.
So to say that you're angry at your child for not respecting you is, to me, Really tough.
Look across the world.
You see children are a mirror of the cultures.
Muslim kids grow up generally Muslim.
Kids grow up in Mozambique with the culture and values of the Mozambique culture and its values.
They are a mirror, we understand this, of a society that they live in.
Culture, values, ethics, interactional standards.
This is a language that we teach our children.
And if you want your child to speak the language of respect, But you don't speak that language of respect to your child, then it's like you're expecting your child to grow up speaking Mandarin when they've never been exposed to Mandarin.
It's not going to happen.
It's not going to happen.
And the language of respect towards your children is something that you have to speak before they can speak, before they can reciprocate.
In the same way, you have to teach them the word for orange before they know the word for orange!
And if you teach them the wrong word for orange, you can't get mad at them, you can't reasonably get mad at them, for not knowing the right word for orange.
So, if you as a parent want to be treated respectfully by your children, then you have to teach them what respect looks like by respecting them first.
That is so fundamental.
So there are a couple of things that I've done, and I'm enormously pleased with my daughter's level of respect for myself and for my wife.
It really couldn't be better.
She obviously disagrees with us and we will talk things out and try and find reasonable accommodations that work for everyone, but she doesn't do things without asking Both of us.
I mean, if we're both in the house and she wants to do something, she'll ask me and then she'll go ask her mom and vice versa.
And she is very careful.
She's never injured herself.
She's never run into the street.
She's never tried to grab anything off a hot stove.
And so, you know, the people who say, well, you have to smack your kids because they're going to do all these crazy things.
If you take the time and patience to explain and explore these possibilities before they arise, then your children will listen if they understand.
My daughter doesn't want to get injured, and so it really is a matter of just being proactive in helping the children to understand the risks that are in their environment.
A child being in a dangerous situation is a failure of parenting.
It's not a failure of a child.
It's a failure of preparation.
It's a failure of child-proofing.
It's a failure as a parent.
It doesn't mean you have to beat yourself up over it.
It just means that you have to recognize that you can't get mad at your kids for being in a dangerous situation that you're responsible for preventing them from being in.
I mean, that's just something you have to recognize.
So I was thinking about the factors that have led to a satisfactory level of respect within the household.
Well, of course, the first thing is, and this is so obvious it barely needs to be spoken, you continually have to put your children's needs first.
You have to put your children's needs first.
When my daughter was born, she didn't sleep, really, and she wanted always to be carried and walked around, which got to be really exhausting.
You couldn't just hold her and sit with her because she would start crying and fussing and she'd want to be up.
She always wanted the vista to be moving.
She has her daddy's sense of... SQUIRREL!
I'm sorry, what was I talking about?
Right, something about a squirrel.
I like squir... oh no.
Ah yes, okay.
So yes, she wanted a continual sense of stimulation.
She didn't want to go out her whole first summer, she didn't like the light, she cried, so frustrated though I was, I had to stay in.
You have to put your kid's needs first and foremost.
She wanted and had a hunger for my wife and myself and so we stayed home and we took care of her and we played with her and all of that.
And there's this Confusion between hunger and addiction, right?
So people feel that if you give a kid what the kid wants, then those needs and those wants will escalate to the point where they'll devour you like a snake eating its own tail.
And this is not true.
Addiction cannot be satisfied.
In other words, if you are addicted to something, the more you have of it, the more you want or the more you need.
But addiction arises from a lack of happiness and intimacy as a child.
And so providing happiness and intimacy as a child is the exact opposite.
Not only is it not an addiction, it will help prevent addictions in the future.
And so it's like expecting that if you have a very full and satisfying meal that you'll immediately want to start eating another meal again.
No, this is not the case.
If you have a full and satisfying meal, you're full.
And the amount of attention and love and care that was lavished on my daughter from Day minus nine months is entirely enough for her and what has happened out of that is a continual regard for her preferences and desires.
is not has not created somebody who's selfish has created somebody who's enormously empathetic and so I've been giving her back rubs from when she was a baby and over the last few months she has insisted I insisted that she give me a back rub in return and if she has something that she really likes the first thing she wants to do is share it with other people and show other people if she has candy she will give you some of her candy.
The provision of empathy has resulted in The reciprocation of empathy.
You teach a child how to treat you by how you treat the child.
And you can see the tragic results of not doing this in these kinds of videos where the parent's behavior is mirrored.
Now, a lot of parents will say, well, I will treat my child with respect when my child is worthy of respect.
Well, I think that's like saying that I will teach my child the word for orange when my child already knows the word for orange.
You have to teach your child the word for orange.
You have to teach your child what respect looks like before you can ask to be treated with respect.
I think the difference is, if you mistake your child for an adult, then I can understand that.
Now, respect as adults has to be earned, but respect as children has to be taught, in the same way that I expect somebody that I'm talking about citrus fruit with in English to know the word for orange.
I'm not going to sit there and say, this orange thing, strangely enough, is called orange and rhymes with nothing!
As an adult, when I'm dealing with an adult, then yes, respect has to be earned.
The word for orange already has to be there.
But that's not how it is with children.
And you can see this sort of tragic misunderstanding of this sort of fundamental premise showing up over and over again in people's parenting.
If you treat your child as if your child were an adult, and should already know what respect is and how to treat people and this and that.
Well, that's fine, but then you have to go all the way and treat that child as an adult.
In other words, if you're going to give a child the responsibilities of an adult, then you have to give them the rights of an adult.
And I'm sure that this judge and this other father, this bullet-pumping-into-the-notebook father, would not Act as they did towards their children, if their children were just other adults.
So if this guy gave a notebook to a friend, and then his friend did something he didn't like, like at his adult friend, then he wouldn't go and shoot up his laptop, because the guy would have legal recourse to that.
And the judge, well, I don't know, a slightly different situation.
But you understand that if you're going to treat children as adults, then you can no longer discipline them Because you would not discipline your friends or other adults.
If this guy in the field, he works in IT, if he had a customer...
Who did something that he didn't like, didn't come through with the contract that he wanted, made a promise and broke it, he would not go and shoot up the guy's office.
Of course not.
But that's taking the standards of adulthood, applying them to children, but then retaining the power over children that you only have as a parent.
This is a big contradiction.
And it's a big problem.
Of course, a 15-year-old is still 10 years away from brain maturity.
Reasonable expectations is very, very important.
My daughter, it's like herding a soap bubble sometimes to get her out of the house because she's three.
So she wants to bring all her toys.
She wants to change her shoes ten times.
This is just how it is.
So recognizing that as a reality is very, very important.
So it's very, very important to have a look at brain development issues and maturity development issues to make sure that you have reasonable standards.
for your children based upon their age and the maturity of their brains, the maturity of their nervous system, and so on.
That's really, really important.
The other thing that I think has really helped contribute to empathy and mutual respect in my family is to steadfastly, as a parent, and sometimes it can be a little teeth-gritting, I know, but as a parent, to steadfastly refuse to ever exercise power Simply because of being bigger and older and, you know, let's suppose, let's say wiser.
I cannot and will not allow myself to dictate to my daughter and ask her to accept anything on faith because I am larger and bigger and older.
I have more experience in certain areas, but my job as a parent is to find a way to communicate that experience to my daughter so that she understands it.
And if I have to draw pictures, if I have to make little block diagrams, if I have to act it out with hand puppets, then I'm going to explain why she has to do what I think is important.
I think maybe one exception was she just didn't understand.
I couldn't explain to her why she needed to brush her teeth, so at one point I did have to have her brush her teeth, and that was a timeout, which I think is the only time I've ever exercised that one time in three years.
I think that's okay.
But to just grit your teeth and say, I am not going to exercise authority over my child Simply because I am bigger and stronger and more independent and have all the adult freedoms and so on.
That everything that I need to communicate to my child I must find a way to communicate to her in a way that she understands and is willing to accept.
That is a challenge.
I started that, my wife and I started that when she was about 18 months old and could understand her first words and that has worked out really really well.
Now when I ask her to stop if she's running she stops.
She comes right back.
There's no particular conflict.
I mean, we have a conflict.
She's three, so no is her favorite word.
Again, that's entirely appropriate to her stage of development.
It's the beginnings of the buddings of the exercise of negatory will.
It's exactly what you want.
She's experimenting with lying.
That's beautiful.
That's exactly what you want, so that she can develop a sense of morality through options.
If you don't have choices, you don't have ethics.
And she doesn't know what lying is.
I have the choice to lie.
I can't lie.
She can't actually tell the truth.
So this is all beautiful and wonderful and what we want.
I don't know how this, like if you haven't done this for 15 years, I have no idea how this is reversed.
And maybe, you know, family therapists or whatever would know more about that.
I'm sure they would.
But prevention really is the better, better, better part of cure.
When you want to stop smoking, you don't want to figure out how to cure stage 4 lung cancer.
At least I don't.
And so, you know, treat your children with respect.
From the very beginning recognize that it is a language that you're teaching them and that language will come back to haunt you and bite you if you teach them the wrong language.
If you teach them the language of power, if you teach them the language of evasion, if you teach them the language of size, might, makes, right, authority, it is going to cost you in the long run.
Aggression or Blind authority as an adult is like a drug.
It'll make you happy in the short run.
And there are times where I just need my daughter to do something and sitting down and explaining to her, sometimes for the fifth or tenth time, feels like it is a big waste of time.
I'll just get her shoes on.
But she needs to understand why these things are occurring.
Otherwise she may submit to me.
She may submit to me in the moment because I am bigger and stronger and have much more power in the relationship, infinitely more power in the relationship.
She may submit to me.
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