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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
14:40
Philosophical Parenting - The Terrible Twos!
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Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux.
Hope you're doing very well. Sunday, October the 31st.
Almost time for Blue Cake Scary Time Halloween.
It's 2 p.m.
in the afternoon, Eastern Standard Time.
Time for the regular Sunday show.
So, we've been requests.
People like the parenting updates.
So, I thought I would give you one.
My daughter is... A couple of months shy of being three years old.
And I must say that we have entered into, I've entered into, I mean, it's been really over the last six or eight months, an incredibly magical time in parenting.
The flights of fancy, the imagination, the language skills are incredible.
And obviously two days ago, I woke her up from a nap and we just sort of fell to chatting.
And we were discussing everywhere that we could fly if we had giant butterfly wings and what we would do where we flew.
So we were going to fly to SeaWorld.
We were going to fly to the pet store and to the donut store.
We were going to fly right through the chocolate fountain at a restaurant near here.
And for like half an hour, we were talking about all the places we would fly and all of the things we would do.
And it's just fantastic.
I think her level of compassion is just developing beautifully or rather is developing naturally without interference.
She likes the movie Shrek where the dragon, the big dragon, breathes fire.
And she says that her approach to problem solving the fire-breathing dragon is as follows.
That the thing you do, and this may be useful for you in general, the thing you do with a fire-breathing dragon...
As you walk up to it, you give it a pat and a big hug and you play with it so that it switches from breathing fire to breathing rainbows.
And really, she's just described the entire business plan of Free Domain Radio, so I really commend her not only for her empathy but for her psychic abilities to divine philosophy plans in a whole.
So Rainbow Breathing Dragons is the way forward and hopefully somebody can put that on a logo and we can get that tattoos, bumper stickers, what have you.
She was great fun.
I told this story at Libertopia. I'll tell it again.
She was great fun at Libertopia.
I was trying to explain to her what I do, because she's sort of having some idea that I do something other than be a dad.
And, you know, it's hard to explain.
What do I do? I yell at people on the internet for money.
How do you explain that?
And when I try to explain it, she gives this funny face like, that's not a real job.
Well, I mean, so does my wife, so I can't really complain about that.
So I sort of took her up on the stage, and what a stage it was at Libertopia.
I mean, this place is incredible.
You had Aretha Franklin there.
You've had Sheryl Crow has played there.
Aerosmith has played there.
Ringo Starr, well...
But, I mean, it's quite a stage.
And Tony Bennett, so the sound system is incredible.
And so I took her up.
I was on the stage and I said, I talk to people and I try to give them ideas that will make them even happier.
And that's pretty abstract. So she was sort of in my arms while I was explaining to her while we were looking out from the stage.
I said, this is what I do.
I try to make people happier by telling them, giving them ideas.
And she said, show me. It's a challenge, right?
So I took her down and I put her in the front row in a seat and then I ran back up on the stage and I took my microphone and I talked into it and I said, you can hear me?
She nodded. I said, are you happy?
She said, no, I'm sad. Because, right, I've got to make her happier.
She said, I'm sad. And so I said, so here's how Daddy's going to help make you happier.
And so how do you be happy?
You get a nice big hug from Daddy.
I jumped off the stage and I gave her a big hug.
And she's like, okay, okay, my turn.
So there was a little microphone there, you know, the ones that go into the base of the drum kit.
There was a little microphone there. So I set her up with a tiny little microphone.
So cute. Tiny little microphone standing.
She's there. And she's booming away.
And so I run down to the front of the stage and I sit there.
And she says, Daddy, are you happy?
I said, No, Isabella, I'm sad.
I'm sad. She said, Can I make you happy?
I said, You can make me happy, please.
And she said, Daddy, Daddy, here's how to be happy.
And she just scrunched up her face and stuck out her tongue like this.
You know, it may sound crazy, but if you try it, it's really hard to be unhappy if you're scrunching up your face and sticking out your tongue like that.
So anyway, I wanted to mention that.
I also wanted to mention, people have asked me because this is sort of the quote terrible twos, and what do I do when Isabella says no a lot?
And she does, but...
For me, the important question with regards to that is to not focus on her, but to first focus on her experience of me.
This is kind of tricky, right?
So if you're going to look at something that your kid is doing, the first place to look, it's not the only place to look, but the first place to look is to say, what is her experience of me?
In other words, I have a relationship with her, and I experience her as saying no a lot.
But my question, I think a much more important question, is to say, does she experience me saying no a lot?
Because that's sort of the basis of empathy.
And she does.
I mean, she's at that age where I have to say no, you know, 30 or 40 times a day.
You know, she wants candy, or she wants to run away, or she wants to go on the road.
Actually, the road thing is pretty much done.
She doesn't go on there anymore. But she just wants to do stuff that is not good, right?
So I have to sort of say no and explain it and so on.
So, but there's other times where I say no in my head, sort of before I say no out loud, that's not reasonable, right?
I mean, I don't know if it's, maybe it's just me, maybe it's just my own history because I had a pretty uninvolved mom.
But when she wants to do stuff, a good deal of the time, I just want to say no.
I just want to say no.
You know, she wants to, it's, you know, maybe half an hour to bedtime and she wants to pull out a bunch of trains and make a track and make a choo-choo train.
And I know it's going to be long and involved.
It's going to be lots of cleanup. You know, it's wet outside and it's windy and she wants to go out and jump in the puddles.
No! I get all these things where I just want to say no a lot.
No, it's not quite convenient for Daddy.
No, I don't want to do this.
No, I don't want to go and get all your balloons from the basement and put them up in your crib.
I don't want to...
I turn into this grouchy old guy with short suspenders and a big sign saying, Hey kids, get off my lawn.
And... So I sort of have to really...
Focus on shifting my own parent from the cranky no to the eternal yes.
Let's do it. You know, let's do it.
Let's go and do this. Let's go and do that.
She wants to swish her hands in the fountain at the mall.
Yeah, we can go wash your hands afterwards.
And so, you know, she wants to put her hands...
There's a restaurant with a waterfall coming down glass.
She wants to put her hands in there. Sometimes that makes her sleeves all wet.
And so you say, no! No!
Right? But what's wrong with her sleeves getting wet?
They'll dry. So it's for me, it's a lot of it is shifting away, not from focusing on whether my daughter is saying no, but focusing on the degree to which I'm saying no.
And, you know, sure as night follows day, the more I say yes, the more she's likely to say yes.
Now, that's something that we're working on that's solving.
Her toilet training is going great, and so all of that's fantastic.
Her socializing is great.
When she plays with friends, she has a blast and wants to go back.
I think all of that's progressing just fantastically.
I guess the sort of challenge that we're working through at the moment is she goes through phases where she's really friendly to people who are strangers, like waiters or whatever.
She goes through a phase where she's really friendly, and now she's going through a phase where she's really not very friendly, bordering on rude, where she'll hide from them.
And it got to the point.
We were at a restaurant the other day. And I was chatting with two waitresses about a variety of things.
And after the waitresses, my daughter hid under the table, and after the waitresses left, she wanted me to come down to her level, so I did.
And she reached up and she cleaned my mouth.
And I said, what are you doing?
She says, I'm wiping away you talking to the waitress.
She needs to clean it away.
Clean it away because she's very possessive.
So, you know, that's my daddy kind of stuff.
So, we're just trying to get her used.
And, of course, occasionally people will sort of pat her on the back or whatever and she doesn't really like that.
She's got a very strict sense of personal boundaries except with, you know, some close friends and with...
With her mom and I, of course.
So we're trying to sort of reorient her to, you know, people are generally nice, they're being friendly, there's no need to be rude, you don't have to play with them, but, you know, it's nicer to be nice to them.
Sort of explaining why and so on.
And those explanations really do work.
I strongly, strongly recommend that.
And know it takes time.
You need to sit down and explain why it's important.
So if you wanted to go and play with someone and they just ran away or they hid, how would you feel?
I wouldn't feel very good. I would feel sad.
And I would get sadder and sadder and sadder and sadder.
And I said, yeah, so if you're not nice to people, it makes them feel a little sad.
It's not like the end of their day or anything, but it makes them feel a little sad.
And for a little bit of effort, you can make them feel quite happy just by saying hi.
And if they say, how are you?
You say, I'm fine. Or how old are you?
I'm two and a half or whatever.
So those are the kind of things that we're just sort of navigating along a little bit, just sort of trying to adjust that course a little bit.
And it takes a while for all of these things.
Patience and repetition is key.
And so anyway, those are things that are going on as far as parenting goes.
But it's just a completely fantastic time of the growth at this point.
It's like it's incredible. It's like she's an accordion being pulled apart by two giants.
She's stretching out so quick.
It's just amazing. And I think those are the major things that are going on as far as parenting goes.
She's had a bunch of colds lately because we've been traveling and she's been meeting a lot of people and so on.
So she's had a bunch of colds. But she's great when she's sick.
I mean, she gets a little cranky.
We do occasionally when she gets stuck in the sort of broken record crying thing, we have to kind of ease her out of that.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. When she sees something that she likes, she will ask me if I like it.
Right? So she'll see, you know, a poster with some pretty colors on it.
And she'll say, Dad, do you like those colors?
And, you know, if it's not a color I don't like, well, of course I'd say yes.
But it's really fascinating to me because that's, to me, that's very advanced.
Like, so she knows that she has an experience...
Of the poster, say.
She knows that I have an experience and she also knows that the two experiences are maybe different and that it's interesting and worthwhile to get my experience of it.
That to me is a real triangulation.
Of empathy, which is just fascinating to watch.
Her negotiation skills, I mean, it's just astounding to see how rapidly and how powerfully her negotiation skills, how instinctual negotiating is.
This is why the free market is just so humane at a very fundamental level in that it reflects humanity.
So the other day, she likes to be carried a lot.
And of course, who wouldn't? It's more fun to be up top where you can see and hear rather than down below and so on.
We could have a nice conversation with people's kneecaps or whatever.
So she likes to be carried a lot.
But, you know, after a while, 40 pounds, get tired.
So my wife and I were carrying through the mall the other day.
And my wife said, okay, you have to walk until we get to the bay.
It's the name of a store at the end of the mall corridor.
And so after a bit of negotiating, she agreed.
And so we're walking through.
And then, like, the moment we cross the line to get into the store, you know, she starts to kind of climb up her mom.
And Christina said, oh, we just get to the elevator.
And she said, no, no, we're in the store.
We're in the bay. Right?
And that's, you know, bang!
You know, five minutes later, she's perfectly aware of the commitment that was made, of where it was supposed to happen.
She's waiting for it to happen, and now she's fulfilling, that she's expecting or asking for that commitment to be fulfilled.
Bang on! Like, right on!
And she was doing, she wasn't sitting there staring at the store waiting for it to come.
She was doing all this other stuff running around and that, but she remembered.
And she's like, my leverage is, you said the bay, we're in the bay, now you must carry me.
And it's like, wow! I mean, that's amazing!
That is, that is just astounding.
And, um... Yeah, so the question, how am I going to explain the police to her?
I'm going to say, well, the police were a band, I guess, in the 80s and 90s that I quite liked, but it's not always necessarily great to dye your hair.
I think I'm evidence of that. It's fairly clear.
Oh, I don't know. We'll figure that out.
We'll figure that out. I mean, I'll explain the facts and not the morality or anything like that, because that's something that she has to figure out through conversation as we go forward.
Yeah, it's just a fantastic time.
I highly recommend Parenthood if you have the time and the interest in it.
It's just an amazing thing.
It's giving me a lot of compassion too because as I see the personality phases or the developmental stages That Isabella is going through.
It's giving me a lot of patience, in a sense, love and compassion because it really helps me realize in the people that I deal with where people have gotten stuck, where they have maybe missed a move forward in a developmental stage.
And for a lot of people, it's pretty damn early, sadly enough.
And so it's giving me a lot more sort of patience because the reality is that we kind of look at, and I sort of have to resist this meme in my head, we kind of look at children like, They're sort of broken adults, that they need to mature, they need to become like adults, they need to be fixed.
And the reality is that I actually look at adults as broken children.
And, you know, a little bit of guidance here and there, which may not even be necessary.
Maybe she would outgrow this stranger thing without any prompts.
But I still think it's worth putting a bit of nudging, just so I sort of feel like I'm doing something as a parent.
But, yeah, I don't view children as broken adults that need to be sort of Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
That helps me really understand the challenges that people are working with in trying to navigate their way through a negotiation-based, semi-mature world.
That's been a very interesting eye-opener for me as well, just seeing how deeply embedded personal problems can be, how early on this stuff can happen, and in a sense, without a huge amount of work, how there's almost no chance to change it when you get older.
Anyway, that's the update.
I guess we'll turn to the gorgeous listeners.
And thank you for your patience.
And remember, you can go to fdrurl.com forward slash donate if you would like to help support this philosophical conversation.
We're catching up with you, Khan Academy, in Lessons Delivered.
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