Parent Extremis

Like many parents, I’ve been skeptical of unschooling. Belief in unschooling often seem to accompany disbelief in other limitations, instead of teaching children how to deal with limitations. But MomIsTeaching explains that the point of unschooling is not to remove all restraints, but to let your child follow his or her heart. In other words, don’t try to push them in directions they don’t fit. I can appreciate that. If your children are not good at math, don’t tell them they will be failures if they don’t become rocket scientists.

So how far can we take this? If unschooling can be a good philosophy, how about un-parenting? Or has that already become common?
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unschooling

Kelly Mills, the SF Chronicle’s baby blogger, is now dealing with a six-year-old who appeals to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to protest parental privileges being withheld from children, specifically six-year-olds. She points out her mother’s hypocrisy and responds to her mother’s commands with, “Or you’ll do what?”

Most significantly, this six-year-old girl asks her mother, “Why?” Her mother admits, “The problem with this question is that often the truthful answer would have been, ‘because that sounds really, really inconvenient for me’”

Here are some answers I wish I could give to the question of why my child should obey me:

1. Because I follow that rule too. I’m not a hypocrite. It’s a good thing to do, and I do it. Or, it’s a good thing for six-year-olds to do. I did it when I was six. Or, I should have done it when I was six. I would have been better off.

2. Because it’s right. It’s not merely convenient for me. It’s honorable and noble and someday you will learn to do what’s honorable and noble even when it’s not pleasant or convenient. If I wanted convenience, I would give in to your whims and save my breath.

3. Because there will be consequences if you don’t. And if you don’t see the natural consequences to putting yourself higher than the authorities over you, you will later. If you don’t see the consequences now, I’ll come up with some consequences real quick. I’m creative.

4. Because in the real world, you can’t get everything you want. If you don’t learn delayed gratification, you won’t know true gratification. Sometimes I tell you No simply to give you practice in hearing it. Because I love you more than almost anyone else in the world.

Story 2:

My car broke down in front of a house, so I knocked on the door to ask to use their phone. The woman showed me where the phone was, then proceeded to continue putting her six-year-old daughter to bed.

Of course, as a visitor, I was a distraction, and the little girl began showing off for me. Specifically, she began showing off how she could keep getting out of bed and her mother couldn’t stop her.

Instead, her mother yelled at her, calling her stupid and I don’t remember what else. The girl just smiled. I think I left before she finally went to bed.

Oh, but her mother didn’t spank her. That would have taught the girl hatred and violence. The mother would have seemed non-modern. So yelling and insulting was preferable.

But I would prefer my mother not call me stupid, quite desperately. I would have been willing to endure lots of things before I would want to endure that.

When I was a child, I read child psychology books. Just to make sure my parents were raising me correctly.

One of them said you should never discipline children in anger. You might hurt them.

Another said that you must always discipline your child in anger. How can they possibly understand why you’re bringing suffering into their life, unless they can see that you’re angry with them? Cold, calm discipline would warp their tiny psyches.

How about another alternative? How about disciplining your children in righteousness and justice? Parents should be able to say, “You’re not getting my goat. You’re not getting control of my emotions. And my emotions aren’t controlling me. But I need to correct what you did. Because it was wrong.”

Tomorrow I’ll tell the first of two stories to illustrate what I mean.

If children don’t learn to obey their parents, they won’t learn to obey themselves. Self-discipline is a form of discipline. Discipline has to be taught. Or as an adult, the child will still be unable to choose what is necessary over what is pleasurable.

We have to prepare our children for the world they will be living in. When you ask your supervisor for a raise or a promotion, your request won’t judged by whether you’re a nice person or whether you tried hard. Not if your company wants to profit. Your request will be judged by whether you can do the work.

Are requests for graduation are treated that way? Can you graduate from high school or college without being able to do the work?

It’s so easy to grade your parenting skills on a curve, like your math teacher used to. Or to grade your child’s behavior on a curve. If my child is no more spoiled or undisciplined than other children, I tend to feel satisfied as a father.

But I don’t want to do that. I want to reject that attitude. If tuberculosis were endemic in my town, would I be happy if my child didn’t cough any more than the other children? Society has problems: chronic, possibly fatal problems. And I don’t want my child to have them too. Even if every other child does.

Once I learned how to talk, I developed a habit of talking back to my mother. It wasn’t that I simply disagreed with her sometimes, even as a small child. No, even when she might have been right, I wanted to defend myself from criticism and suffering and correction by getting back at her with words.

The problem was that she wouldn’t discipline me until I made her mad. I could continue talking back to her without any consequences until I reached that point. Even then, the consequences were only serious enough to convince me to stop doing it temporarily. They didn’t convince me to stop doing it in the future.

Yet I knew it was wrong. I felt terrible talking to my mother like that. But once I got started, I couldn’t stop. If I did, I would have to admit that I was wrong and she was right. Too high a price to pay. I couldn’t stop myself. I was only six years old

But still, I remember wishing, somehow, that she would stop me.

Parenting styles really do come from different worldviews. Some parents seems to believe that children are basically good. In fact, one parenting blogger says that it’s possible to make your child love you so much that they will never disobey you.

Other parents say that children are not basically good, the world is not basically good, nobody is basically good. There is hope for everybody, and God’s image is stamped on everyone, but left alone, people will gravitate toward the easiest path. So will children. They may love their parents to pieces, but if they know they can get away with something, they will try it.

Maybe I tend toward the second style of parenting because I was the second type of child.

Some theories of gentle parenting are only compatible with vegetarianism. Parents are trying to teach their children that the world is happy and peaceful, in which case their view is probably not compatible with watching television either. They want to show their children a world without suffering, without sacrifice, but not without meat.

Farm kids know where meat comes from. For most of the rest of us, we let someone else, someone at the slaughterhouse, face the suffering and sacrifice that meat eating makes necessary.

Of course, it’s important to some parents to raise their children to be cheerful vegetarians. If not, here’s a challenge: help them to clean their own fish or process their own chicken. Then help them fit what they see into the view of the world you want them to have.

Lifehacker offers a suggestion to prevent your children from calling you a meanie when you tell them, “No television tonight”. Instead, you can give them tickets, each redeemable for a half hour of television. According to the article, this will “let them take care of their own entertainment time”.

Along the same lines, you could give your child a bottle of whiskey and let them decide on their own when to drink it. This would save you the agony of having to say No. It would also be healthier than much of what’s on television.