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Oct. 6, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:41
An Introduction to Peaceful Parenting
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If you don't know much about peaceful parenting, peaceful parenting is the idea that where you have the greatest power disparity, you have the greatest moral responsibilities.
And this is something that was kind of drilled into me when I was younger, and I think there's some real truth in it.
If you and I are co-workers and we ask each other out or we go on a date or something, it may be a little bit awkward in terms of the corporate structure, but it's a whole different thing if...
I'm your boss and I'm responsible for your continued employment and your performance review and your salary and all of that.
And I ask you out. That's kind of a different matter because it's not so voluntary when there's a great power disparity.
So this idea that where the power disparity is greater, the moral responsibility is higher.
In other words, the best behavior has to be where you have the greatest degree of power over someone.
And there's this weird thing in society where we say, well, that's true in general.
Yes, that's true, but not with parent-child.
So parent-child relationship has the greatest power disparity in the world ever.
And so we have this kind of funny thing where we say, okay, in general, where the power disparity is greater, the moral quality has to be higher, but not in the realm of parenting.
In the realm of parenting, the power disparity is the greatest, and in general, in the parent-child relationship, and I don't just mean individually, in terms of individual parents and individual children, I'm sort of also talking about society as a whole, With the parent-child relationship, the moral quality, the moral requirements are by far the lowest of any social relationships that exist.
So I'm not supposed to ask an employee out on a date because that could be an abuse of power, potentially.
So you've got to be really sensitive about this kind of stuff.
But... When it comes to children in society, we completely throw that principle out the window.
It's very sus when you think about it.
We completely throw that principle out the window.
And what we do is we say, oh, yeah, no, if you've got kids, man, well, you can scream at them, you can yell at them, you can call them names, you can hit them.
And for a lot of people, not everyone, of course, but for a lot of people, not only is that okay, that's good!
You don't want to be raised in those spoiled brats.
Boy, you know, when they hit kids in the 50s, you've got real quality kids, and now they don't hit kids at all, and they just pander to the kids, and everything's wonderful that the kids do, and nobody ever says anything or resists any of their impulses, and you've got these spoiled brats who can't hold down a job and are snowflakes.
So not only do we say...
That where the greatest disparity in power is, not only do we say we have the lowest moral requirements for good behavior, but in fact we completely break through that bedrock, that permafrost, and we drill down in the opposite direction and say, Well, you know, men are bigger and stronger than women, so men have a special duty to not be violent towards women.
I mean, nobody should be violent towards anyone, we say, but men in particular, because they're bigger and stronger, should not be violent towards women, because there's a power disparity there, don't you know?
But parents are, in a sense, infinitely bigger and stronger than children, but there we say, oh no, you should hit your kids, you should discipline, kids need discipline.
And even if you don't hit your kids, there is confinement.
You take them and you set them on that step for the time out, one minute per age.
If they do things that you disapprove of or are, quote, bad, you take them and you confine them and you punish them.
That's really apparently quite important as far as quality parenting goes.
So we have this very – I mean logically, morally – It's completely strange that, you know, you think of, I guess, a less than sign, right?
Sort of two widening lines.
Greater power disparity, higher moral requirements.
Ooh! Except for the situation where we have the most power disparity and then we have the opposite moral requirements.
You can't hit people, especially if you have power over them, but it's really good to hit children.
And people would never really make jokes and say, well, I'm an airline pilot, but I sure do like my wine.
And sometimes I'll drink wine on the job because that's kind of funny and cool.
And people would say, they wouldn't make those.
I'm a surgeon, but boy, do I ever like to have my red wine right before surgery.
Because, you know, surgery is just really stressful.
But you have all of these...
Women. Some men, I suppose, but it seems to be a female thing.
Where they say, well, parenting is stressful.
I need my wine. Gotta have my wine moms.
Gotta have my red wine.
Wine, wine, wine. This alcoholism while parenting is considered to be like a funny thing.
But there's no, boy, you know, I like to drive a truck and I gotta have my wine because that would be illegal and rightly so.
So we have this do not operate heavy machinery while under the influence, but, you know, apparently you can't get through the day with your kids without some wine.
And that's...
Now, again, there are people who are alcoholics, and I have some sympathy for that, but people don't generally try to make it cool or funny.
And this is just kind of a trope that we have.
So we have these standards of interacting with each other where we don't Verbally abused.
We don't call names.
We don't hit.
We don't confine.
We don't lock in rooms.
I mean, can you imagine if you have an employee and the employee is late on providing some TPS report?
You know, TPS report is supposed to be done at noon and they don't get it to you until 1 p.m.
Can you imagine, in full view of all of the other employees, picking that employee up, sitting them down on a vent and say, you sit here!
For the next half an hour, and then you've got to apologize to me, and you've got to think about what you've done, and you've got to promise me to never do that again.
And if the employee says, I'm not sitting on this vent, what am I playing among us?
I'm going to get up, I'm going to walk around.
And you pick them up and you carry them back to the vent.
And you sit their butt down on that vent, because they were late with the TPS report, and they've got to learn.
And it's in view of everyone else.
Anyone who did that would be in unbelievable trouble.
It would be jaw-droppingly, incomprehensibly awful to do that to an employee.
But we do that with children.
This is the time-out, right?
We do that with children. People consider that a vast improvement.
Well, I used to hit my employees, but now I just force them to sit on a vent for half an hour, and I'm saying one minute per year or whatever, right?
Because, you know, when you're three, three minutes seems like half an hour to an adult.
So peaceful parenting is simply the consistent application of the morality we take for granted everywhere else in the known human universe.
I mean, philosophy is about universality and consistency.
Just as science is about universality and consistency.
We don't say, well, the theory of evolution works really well on amphibians, but it doesn't work at all on lizards.
It works on mammals, but it does the opposite for birds.
Right? It's universality.
We don't say that the theory of gravity works really well on matter that's painted blue, but when you paint that matter red, it completely reverses gravity.
That would be crazy. I mean, that would be insane.
And we have this bizarre, when you sort of look at it logically and morally, we have this completely bizarre approach towards children.
Where the most vulnerable people in society are the children.
They have no economic independence, no legal independence, no political independence.
They can't vote.
They can't leave.
They can't choose their parents.
All adult relationships are voluntary.
But children who choose their parents And children have almost no recourse to legal protections.
I mean, I remember I was working in a restaurant.
I was about maybe 16 years old.
And the restaurant had a little bar, and there was a bartender.
And there was a, just sort of around closing time, bartenders have a volatile deplanting situation when it comes to closing time, right?
You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.
And the guy was kind of drunk, the customer was kind of drunk, and at one point he threatened to punch the bartender.
And the bartender shrugged and said, yeah, go ahead, I'll call the cops, you'll go to jail.
I mean, that's a pretty wild thing.
It was wild for me to think about that, that you could just call the cops and somebody who hit you could go to jail.
Now, if you grew up with a single mom who's violent or a single father who's violent, in particular, I mean, it happens with two-parent households, but in particular, a single mom who's violent or single dad, And you get hit by your mom.
You can't call the cops.
I mean, I suppose you could, but if you were to be like, I don't know, 10 years old and say, my mom hit me, you call the cops, you say, my mom hit me.
I mean, I know in Sweden they banned it in, I think, 1966, but, you know, for the most places, people would be like, oh, that's...
And even if it's illegal, let's say you call the cops, you say, my mom hit me, and then the cops come.
And sternly tell your mother to not hit.
Well, there's lots of ways to punish children that don't involve hitting.
You can confine them, you can take away their treasured possessions, you can lock them in a room, all of which are perfectly legal.
You can't do that with your wife, but you can sure do that with your daughter.
I mean, it's so completely bizarre.
When you think about it, you know, I think it was Dostoevsky, you know, the humanity of a society is ultimately determined or prima facie determined by how well it treats its prisoners.
No. No, that's nonsense.
The humanity of a society is displayed most evidently by how it treats its children.
Primitive societies are child sacrifice societies.
So if you just take the basic moral rules that we apply, not just to and between adults, but to and between children, right?
If a child were to attempt to give a time out to another child, let's say that Bob and Sue are playing with a toy, and Sue has it, and Bob says, will you give me the toy in five minutes?
Yes, they put a timer on, five minutes comes, and Sue doesn't want to give him the toy, refuses to give him the toy.
Now, if Bob picks up Sue and puts her in a timeout, child to child, that would be considered aggression.
And wrong.
And of course, we do have the brain-bending contradiction of a parent literally hitting a child saying, don't hit people.
Or we have this ferocious brain-bending contradiction of talk back.
Don't talk back!
So if the parent is yelling at the child, this is parenting.
if the child then yells back at the parent, well, that's just shocking and appalling.
I mean, I remember when I was in my early teens, when I got big.
I was not too big a kid, and then I got almost six feet tall, 190-odd pounds, fairly fit.
And I started working out in my mid-teens.
But before that even, my mother was advancing to hit me, and out of anger and fear, I grabbed the door and swung it towards her so that she would be blocked from coming to hit me.
And it hit her on the hand and she was just, you know, she was just appalled and screamed and how dare you and blah, blah, blah.
And this is, we don't generally even think about these kinds of things as out of the ordinary or out of the norm, which just shows how nutty we are as a society.
And of course, if we look at children...
If we were to fundamentally make decisions as a society on what was best for our children, I write about this in my novel, The Future, which you can get at freedemain.locals.com.
And if you use the promo code UPB2022, all uppercase, you can get it for free.
But if we were to structure our society around what's best for children, what would it look like?
Well, we wouldn't be putting our kids in daycare.
Daycare is not great for children at all.
In fact, I mean, there's studies in Quebec, that's a province in Canada, where you can see the negative outcomes that occur to children in daycare.
And the earlier they're put in, generally the worse the outcomes are.
We wouldn't be putting them in daycare.
We would be, I mean, my moms would be breastfeeding and staying home.
Breastfeeding adds IQ points, skin-on-skin contact grows empathy.
So we would be doing all of that.
We wouldn't be putting our kids in traditional or government schools.
There would be other ways of educating them that children would be enthusiastic about.
We wouldn't impose various curricula upon them without their feedback and say-so.
A kid's movie is not released without a whole bunch of tests.
Audiences saying which parts they like the best, which characters they like the best.
That's how the movie is developed and released, so it's not accidental.
You say, ah, well, children don't know what's best for them.
In other words, we can completely ignore the preferences of children and just inflict our will upon them, which is very strange.
Why would we not respect the needs and preferences of children?
How are they supposed to grow up with empathy if they're not empathized with?
How are they supposed to grow up thinking that other people have important needs that they should take into account when making their decisions if the children's needs are never taken into account when society makes its decisions?
And how on earth, how on God's green earth could we have A national debt and unfunded liabilities if we cared about our children.
If we cared about our children.
How could we have them born into, in some places, about a million dollars worth of debt before they even draw their first breath?
No wonder they're crying. How on earth could we use them as collateral to bribe voters and buy political power in the here and now?
This is why when people say, well, you know, it's really, really important that we leave a clean earth and a sustainable planet for our children.
Oh, I don't know. How about if we leave a sustainable economy for our children?
Is that possible? I mean, people make about a million dollars over the course of their life.
Being born a million dollars in debt makes you worse than a serf.
A serf in the medieval world.
Economy, a surf was somebody tied to the land.
Couldn't leave the land, was bought and sold with the land.
Not quite a slave, but not far off from it.
But you see, the surf would usually work about 20 hours a week and not really at all in the winter.
In the medieval period in Spain, you got five months off every year.
So in many ways, children are born into an economic subjugation that's worse than Than being a serf.
They can't ever work their way out of it, for the most part.
So, peaceful parenting is simply the radical notion that children are worthy of consideration.
Now, people say, of course, well, but, you know, you have to yell at, hit, and confine children because their brains are undeveloped.
Don't you know? And because their brains are undeveloped, you have to control their behavior.
You can't reason with them.
And so you have to yell, hit, confine, beat, whatever.
You can't reason with them.
Really? All right.
Can you reason with a dog?
No. Are you allowed to beat a dog?
No. Are you allowed to confine a dog for misbehavior?
Most people would view that as pretty negative.
What about old people whose brains are not doing so well, right?
They're called senior moments where you can't forget where you put your keys or you forget to mail something or whatever.
You have a senior moment, right? Okay.
So their brains aren't functioning that well.
Are we allowed to hit seniors for leaving the stove on when they shouldn't?
It's dangerous. You can burn the whole house down.
Are we allowed to confine and beat seniors because their brains aren't working at top notch?
No. That would be elder abuse, you see.
And it is. It would be.
What about people who have significant cognitive challenges?
They have some damage to their brain or something failed to develop their significant cognitive challenges.
Let's say somebody with Down syndrome or something like that.
Are we allowed to use violence and confine them?
No. So the idea that we can be violent towards those we cannot reason with is in no way, shape or place, Enacted with moral justification except in the realm of parenting.
What we say to our children is that might makes right.
That's what we say. That's how we act.
I'm bigger. I'm stronger.
I have political and economic power.
So I can inflict this upon you.
And then we're just shocked.
Shocked, don't you know? When children turn out to be bullies.
When the bigger children end up bullying the little children.
Well, of course they do. It's like raising somebody in an English-speaking household and then being shocked that they end up speaking English.
When you raise children with the lived experience that bigger people can impose their violent will on smaller and weaker people, That their needs and preferences mean nothing.
That the fact that they hate school means nothing.
They've got to go anyway. The fact that they find nothing of use in school doesn't matter.
They've got to go anyway.
We have all of that in society that we can yell at, insult.
And I say in my book, when I talk about this, or rather when the characters debate about this, I put verbal abuse in the category of a violation of the non-aggression principle in parenting.
Now, verbal abuse is a terrible thing in general.
But between adults, it's voluntary.
In other words, if you have a friend who puts you down or insults you repeatedly or whatever, then you can just choose not to see their friend.
If you have an abusive boss, you can choose to quit or transfer or work to get him fired, as I've actually had to do in points in my career.
You manage upwards with a spike, with a kind of economic shift, so to speak.
So you have lots of options and the relationship fundamentally remains voluntary.
And your brain has already developed, right?
So you already have your adult personality.
Your brain is not nearly as plastic or malleable.
But verbal abuse in an enslaved or trapped situation with regards to parent-child with a forming and developing brain has a huge effect on the personality.
It is a form of toxicity that is introduced into the child.
It gives them difficult things to wrestle with for the rest of their life.
Verbal abuse has, in many ways, more lasting impressions upon the personality than physical violence does.
Physical violence is clearly wrong for children, and it's a wound that heals usually, and they can remember it.
It's not justified by society as a whole, but some of the subtle personality reforming poison drip of negative language has many more effects And I think if you talk to people who've been physically abused and verbally abused, the physical abuse is often in the past, the verbal abuse is something they usually still have to wrestle with, even as an adult.
So, yeah, peaceful parenting is simply the idea that you can reason with children, you should reason with children, and if you can't reason with children, you don't get to hit them.
Can you imagine? If we have this rule that says, well, you know, if you're not being rational, I can just belt you.
Can you imagine? Can you imagine like a husband hits his wife, the cops come by and the husband says, hey, she wasn't being reasonable.
I was giving her facts, data, evidence.
She wasn't listening.
She wasn't being reasonable. She thought I was having an affair.
Right? I heard from...
I had a message of affection from somebody called Tiffany.
She thought I was having an affair.
So we called Tiffany.
Turns out Tiffany is my second cousin.
We grew up together. No affair.
She lives in Thailand.
Tiffany from Thailand. But she still thought I was having an affair.
So she's being irrational. She's yelling at me.
So I hit her. She wasn't being rational, you see.
So I get to hit her. You try that in a court of law.
Won't happen. They'll say, okay, even if we accept that your wife was being completely irrational and not listening to reason, you don't get to hit her.
See, that's the standard we have, adult to adult.
My boss fired me even though I had a perfect performance review.
He wasn't being rational. So I hit him.
I mean, this would be crazy.
Couldn't have a functioning society like that.
But that's how parent-children works, parent-child works, authority-child works, and that's how our economy, our economy is based almost entirely, it's funny because, you know, they say, oh, child labor, boy, child labor is about the worst thing ever.
Can you believe they used to put children to work at the age of six?
Now, the fact is that society was so poor back then that if children didn't work, they generally would die.
But we say, child labor, child exploitation, can you believe that there are people in Singapore or China who get paid a pittance per hour, children who actually have to work?
And I saw this when I, in 1999, actually spent Y2K in Morocco with a friend of mine.
It was a really fun trip.
And I remember a couple of things from that trip.
First of all, the four main colours of Morocco.
And also going to the dye, the place where they made all the dyes and you had to hold mint in your nose, up against your nose because the stench was just so appalling.
And there were children making carpets.
Their little fingers, nimble fingers and so on, there were children making carpets.
And of course I emptied my pocket of all my money and gave it to the children because children are making carpets.
Child labour is the worst thing ever.
Can't let children work!
Really? So, exploiting children for economic gain is just this great and fundamental evil.
Yet still we have a national debt.
And still we have, in America, what is it, close to $180 trillion unfunded liabilities.
U.S. national debt, past what, $31 trillion?
Now, who's going to pay for that?
The children, if it can indeed even be paid for, it's the children.
So you see, exploiting children for economic gain is just the worst thing ever.
But national debt, well, that just happens, man.
You see, putting children to work at the age of six is terrible.
But having them borne a million dollars in debt, well, that's just politics, man.
And people don't even talk about it.
I mean, you see debates People don't even talk about paying off the national debt.
I mean, nobody talks about that.
Trump didn't talk about it. Biden obviously didn't talk about it.
Nobody talks about that. Because that shines a light on a very dark place in society.
People don't want to look there.
So instead of a society which is like an inverted pyramid where the people at the bottom have the least power and are the most exploited, And the most mistreated.
How about... And here's the funny thing, too, is that, you know, even on the left, while they'll say, well, you know, we've got to protect the exploited, the proletariat, the workers, the powerless, we've got to have unions and legislation and laws to protect these people.
But even they don't talk about the injustice of having children born a million dollars into debt.
Children born into economic serfdom to foreign banksters.
Don't talk about that. And the last thing I'll say about peaceful parenting is what's very strange, foundationally bizarre about parenting is that when you look back at the mistreatment of, say, blacks in American history, Yeah, it's pretty explicit, right?
There was slavery, there was Jim Crow, segregation, right?
It was embedded in the laws.
Blacks were second, third, or non-class citizens, exploited and rejected.
And that at the time, there were some people who were uneasy about it, of course, but that at the time was accepted.
People didn't say about blacks in the past that Oh, you know, they're wonderful, noble, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then behind the scenes or under the table would oppress them.
No, the oppression was right up front, right?
It's front and center, right?
And you can think about this about a wide variety of groups and races and sexes throughout history.
In the ancient world, and I've talked about this, of course, in my History of Philosophers series, which you can also get at freedomain.locals.com, but in the ancient world...
There were a lot of slaves.
And people didn't say, well, you know, slaves are just wonderful and equal citizens and we would do anything for our slaves and slaves are the very best among us and we would sacrifice anything to make the slaves' lives better while still holding them in slavery.
No, they said, well, we won the war, we get to keep the slaves.
And other people would argue that, well, slavery was, you know, some people are better off, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, this was the argument that was put forward by just about every ancient.
Think of it. The idea that we would have a society without slavery is 18th century England and onwards.
Before, the fact that there were slaves and people's view of slaves was congruent.
Wrong, but congruent.
There was no contradiction. But here's the funny thing about parenting.
Across the world, parents say, I would do anything for my children.
My children are the world.
I believe the children are the future, is that old Whitney Houston song.
And we worship and venerate our children and promise them the very best and say that we would do anything for them.
No sacrifice is too great.
My kids are my life. I would do anything for my kiddos.
This is what we say.
We elevate them to the highest moral standing.
And that's not all.
Peaceful parenting, I was taught that in many ways.
Now, the abstract, the philosophy, that I worked on myself.
But when I was growing up, and this is still the case, right?
When I was growing up, what did I watch?
I don't know, The Flintstones, Lever to Beaver, My Three Sons.
Scooby-doo. Wait till your father gets home.
And in all of these shows, children were never hit.
Children were never insulted.
Children were parented peacefully.
And my three sons, was it Fred Ward or Leave it to Beaver?
And the older stuff was sort of beyond when I was watching many shows, but...
There was family ties with Michael J. Fox, where the children were all treated reasonably by some hippy-dippy parents, negotiated with.
You had family ties with the Olsen twins and...
Oh gosh, John Stamos and that other comedian who died recently, Bob someone or other.
And... What happened?
Well, they had a talking stick. Everybody was reasonable.
Everybody negotiated.
Nobody was ever hit. Nobody was ever yelled at.
Nobody was ever put in a timeout.
Nothing like this ever happened.
So this is the truly insane thing about the world.
It's not just the modern world.
It's the world throughout history, but it's particularly acute in the modern world is that there's all this virtue signaling about how children are wonderful and we love our children.
We do anything for our children and everybody, everybody who has a TV Got thousands of hours of instruction on peaceful parenting through sitcoms.
Eight is enough. No spanking scenes.
Now, you would see spanking scenes occasionally in some of the shows set in older periods.
Oh, Little House on the Prairie.
I think occasionally kids would be taken out back to the woodshed, but you'd never see it.
You'd never see the hitting. And this was, I think, a nod to an older time.
We're set in the 19th century, I think, right?
Swiss Family Robinson. Children treated well.
When I grew up, the books that had a significant influence on me were the Enid Blyton books.
Mallory Towers and The Famous Five were the two that I read the most.
I actually had a great time reading them again with my daughter.
She was a wonderful writer.
And In those stories, they were all written, I think, in the 40s and 50s or something like that.
In those stories, there were parents and there were children.
And the children were never hit, never insulted, never yelled at.
In the 40s and 50s, these were massively popular books in England.
Ina Blyton was like the children's author for at least a generation.
So peaceful parenting is what people...
Say is their ideal and how they actually live.
It's all over the media.
I mean, tell me, the last movie, I mean, there's been a few, obviously there have been a few, but they're specifically around dysfunction, right?
So, the movie Precious was set in the black community.
There was child abuse.
There are a couple of other movies that you can think of where children are abused and mistreated.
Of course, you can...
And here's the interesting thing too.
Even in the Jeffrey Dahmer series on Netflix, the child is not directly mistreated, but he witnesses mistreatment.
So he's got a mother who's a drug addict, he's got a father who has a temper, and the father yells at the mother, and the mother yells at the father, and the mother passes out from drug use.
But the child himself is not directly abused.
Now, to produce someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, you have to be directly abused, but they can't show that.
It's far too painful for people to see children being abused.
And so peaceful parenting is the absolute sacred value of society, and people receive thousands of hours on how to negotiate with peacefully children through media, through movies, through television, and so on.
And yet, with this unquestionably elevated ideal, with thousands of hours of instruction...
When you talk about people actually living the values that they proclaim and love, when you say to people, oh, okay, so you want the very best for your children, here's the data on how bad spanking is,
on how bad verbal abuse is, on how bad some forms of pedagogy and instruction are, on how bad it is if you go to work when your baby is little, If you divorce, the statistics that come out of the single mother universe, if you say to people, oh, you want what's best for your child.
You'd do anything for your child. You'd sacrifice anything for your child.
Well, then try not to get divorced.
Try and work things out. I do what's best for my child.
Anything for my children. Oh, okay.
Here's the facts about what's best for your children.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I say that I want what's best for my children, but now you've given me the facts about what's best for my children, you're just a cult leader.
I mean, this is the view that a rational person has of this generalized madhouse called society.
Oh, you want to get to...
Dallas? Oh, you have to take this highway to get to Dallas.
You're desperate to get to Dallas?
Because Dallas is the closest hospital and you're bleeding out and you're desperate to get to Dallas?
Oh, just take this highway, man.
This will take you straight to Dallas.
You evil bastard.
It's crazy. It's wild.
I mean, even Whitney Houston, right?
I believe the children are our future.
Teach them well and let them show the way.
How does she treat her daughter?
She's got the ideal.
She's got the training.
She does the opposite.
And so the ideal is camouflage.
Like the guy who pretends to be really pious but is kind of a degenerate.
The piousness is a camouflage so that he can be less likely to be suspected of Degeneracy.
And of course, proclaiming your endless devotion and love for your children is camouflage in general so that you can...
Mistreat them. So again, for more on this, you can get my book, The Future, at freedomain.locals.com.
And yeah, sorry, I hope that wasn't too long a rant, but obviously this is a topic very close to my heart.
And so the reason why I think it's interesting, I mean, Izzy likes doing the shows, and I, of course, enjoy doing the shows with her enormously.
But you see, she's almost 14, right?
She's taller than my wife, which is not...
The greatest achievement in height known to the universe.
But, you see, she is, I mean, approaching her mid-teens, right?
Now, from before she was born, I said that parenting as a whole is generally targeted to the teen years.
So when your baby's a little, you can't spoil them, you do everything that they want and need because they can't supply anything to their own comfort, even comforting themselves when they're upset.
And then there's supposed to be this terrible twos.
The terrible twos is when the child is reacting to the hypocrisy of the adults.
Right? Right.
So, you know, oh, you're my daughter, I love you, I would do anything for you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Oh, can you stay home today?
No, no, no, I gotta go to work. I don't like this school.
Can we do something else? No, no, no.
You've got to go to school. So any time that the child asks the parent to do something, the parent says, oh, I'd do anything for you.
Oh, can we build a fort out of the couches in the living room?
No, it's a big mess. It takes a lot to clean up, and I think I'm getting a headache.
I certainly mean to laugh, but children are constantly scanning for hypocrisy.
And so, my daughter's never had a temper tantrum.
Ever. Doesn't mean she never gets upset.
Doesn't mean she doesn't get angry, but it's rare.
And why would she? Anger is a form of self-defense when your preferences are being violated unjustly.
That doesn't happen. And so, what I think is interesting is that The teen storms, as I called them from the very beginning of this show, the teen storms are what you parent for.
So right now, she's got a peer group.
She's got independence. She'd love to get a job, right?
It's tough to do that at that age.
Now, back in the day, I had already a job for two years by the time I was her age, but it's tougher to do now.
But you see, she's supposed to be going through all of this really difficult, eye-rolling, to heck with you, mom and dad, all of this teen storm stuff, right?
And the theory was, peaceful parenting will not result in hostile, dysfunctional teenage years.
That's the theory. And I hope that you can tell that in practice, Well, it's worked out even better than I thought.
Why would you be angry at people who love you and treat you well?
I mean, that would be incomprehensible.
It'd be like saying, well, I'm working out hard, but I'm losing muscle mass.
That would be incomprehensible, right?
I'm eating fewer calories than I burn, but I'm gaining weight.
This would be like a violation of the laws of physics.
This object at rest tends to stay in motion.
These things just don't happen. Why would you be hostile towards people who love you and treat you very well?
I mean, the only reason that people would ever be like that is because they're suspicious because in the past they were treated really badly.
I mean, of course, some people are just waiting for the theory to fail because they don't want to believe that it's true.
I understand that. I understand that.
I mean, if you've already been an aggressive parent, then you're not particularly happy at the peaceful parenting thing working out.
I understand that. I understand that.
I mean, too bad, so sad.
Sorry. It doesn't matter.
I mean, if you've already been a smoker, For 20 years, and then you find out that smoking is bad for you, you're going to feel bad.
Does that mean we should never tell people that smoking is bad for them?
I mean, of course not. Society has to progress.
If you made your living as a slave catcher, and then slavery gets outlawed, as it bloody well should have been even before, does that mean you're going to feel bad, man?
You're out of a job! Well, too bad, so sad.
We have to progress. We have to progress.
And I have some sympathy, but not really since the 1940s, right?
Since peaceful parenting was continually displayed in mainstream media.
And what I mean by that is that people would not have tuned into a show that reflected to them accurately back how they themselves parented their children, right?
So most people still, even now, most people hit their children.
But there's no show wherein children get hit.
So how would people react if, in a popular show with parents and children, if a child was hit?
How would people react?
Well, they would be appalled.
They would write letters.
They would try and get the entire show cancelled.
They would report to the regulatory boards for broadcasts.
It would be shocking and appalling.
In other words, if people saw in TV or in the movies, if people saw an accurate reflection of how they themselves parented, they would be outraged, shocked and appalled and horrified.
But that's what you're doing.
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