Committed to finding ways out of the coercion/self-sacrifice mire of conventional parenting. We are variously critical rationalists, libertarians, home educators, attachment-parents, but we take our ideas where we find them.
We like your comments! (click on "Comment" under the blog posts and add your views). Rational Parenting respects children's privacy: please do not reveal personal information about identifiable individuals without their informed consent.
Email us with your comments on the blog, or suggestion for Problem of the Week!
Found this in a Telegraph opinion column today, on the latest controversial Michael Jackson interview:
"Jackson's father used to take a belt to him when he got a dance step wrong. The guilty thought occurred to me that if a whipping helped to produce a genius, perhaps we should all try it on our sons."
In other words, bashing people helps them learn good stuff. Followed by:
"If you want my cod-psychiatrist view of what made Jackson so nutty, I reckon you need look no further than the fact that everywhere he has gone since his early childhood, he has been the centre of attention, mobbed for his autograph and surrounded by swooning women."
In other words, too many people liking you makes you crazy.
I just finished reading "Have Space-Suit: Will Travel", by Robert A. Heinlein, which I first read hundreds of years ago along with lots of other sci-fi in the teen section of my local library. When I'd finished the teen section, I was stuck. The adult section was a) huge, and b) full of stuff I didn't want to read at all, and there was nobody to help me negotiate. Point of the day #1: people need other people who understand their interests to suggest ideas and directions for learning. This applies to adults as well as children, and is one great function of friendship.
Interesting things in this book: the character narrating considers himself averagely intelligent, but turns out to be the child of world-class geniuses (they never quite mentioned this fact to him) and therefore very likely a WCG himself. These parents had some libertarian/liberal traits, such as sending him to a laissez-faire unacademic but kind friendly school, expecting him to solve his own problems to a large extent (eg working to earn money, figuring out ways of getting to space, doing academic study largely unaided). The kid does well, and learns a lot, especially his morals and world-view are very impressive, American and free-thinking, but he has quite a hard time on the way and I think his parents might have helped him enjoy the ride a bit more, and they might all have been closer friends as well having terrific respect and esteem for one another.
I am convinced that young people should all learn about space, maths, calculus, slide-rules and physics now. I feel entirely ignorant due to only understanding the aesthetics of language. On the other hand, the cleverest space-creature in the book, The Mother Thing, is characterised by her ability to communicate non-verbally, so maybe the aesthetics of language (and/or communication) actually are extremely important too. But generally, it is a shame that maths and science teaching makes so little sense and puts off so many people like myself early in life. The Mother Thing also knows how to make technological gadgets and pilot a space-ship and build bombs.
At the end of the book, Earth is put on trial for its sins. As in a million episodes of Star Trek, it is our innate somethingness that wins the day, our unique specialness which we don't know what it is, but we like it. The far more advanced creatures of the universe think we are dangerous and want to clear us out of the way, but rationality isn't quite enough to explain what matters about the human race. In fact, when our backs are against the wall, we seem to do heroic things that make no rational sense at all, like sacrificing ourselves for principles even though there is no logical hope of anyone noticing ever. The Mother Thing sticks up for the humans, with words that I think are both moving and the best argument I've heard yet for cryopreservation (when it gets cheaper):
"Can we expect mature restraint in a race whose members all must die in early childhood?"
Although I suppose one could also interpret that as an insult to the mature restraint of children.
A quick plug for some of my favourite movies about home-educating, available at any video store today. If there are more, I'd like to know about them:
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is very cool: the school inspector lady comes round and tries to send the children to school but their Dad outwits her and they all carry on living their eccentric, much more educational family life regardless.
The Railway Children is a firm favourite in my house: no mention of schools ever threatens this unusually loving and sweet Edwardian family, and although they suffer hardship, separation and injustice, at least the kids get to run around in the fields and look at trains and generally be left in peace to save people's lives and so on.
Of course, it's no accident that all the action, interest and adventure in most children's books happens outside the classroom. The Famous Five really wouldn't have been as interesting in the term-time.
At the ceremony honoring the Columbia astronauts, President Bush reminded us that the fallen astronauts gave their lives realizing their childhood dreams. I don't know if he checked his facts with the bereaved families, but I, too, would assume that anyone who becomes an astronaut has to be a dreamer from way back.
The thing is, childhood dreaming often incites adult criticism and even ridicule. "He can't concentrate because he's always daydreaming!" "She's got her head in the clouds again." Adults who have realized their childhood dreams win approval and vindication; the children who dream get reminded, prodded, and forced to concentrate on the mundane.
I like to believe that people are waking up to the fact that children require time and space to dream. The more demands that we place on their time and attention (mandatory schooling, required chores at home, organized sports, cultural activities), the less they have left to dream. Most children don't even realize that they are being robbed of something precious. Their fatigue and vague unhappiness with the status quo mirrors the experience of everyone around them, adults and children alike; being almost universal, the problem has become invisible.
So where do we start? The next time you see someone with a faraway look in his eye, don't bring him straight back to earth. Let him dream on, and give it a try yourself. Don't let the busybodies keep our heads out of the clouds.
These are my best theories so far on the morality of (intra-sibling) violence:
1. Self-defence, ie violence for the specific purpose of protecting yourself from violence, is morally perfectly reasonable and good.
2. Bashing someone in order to defend yourself under the following circumstances is a mistake: (a) they hit you by complete accident, (b) they hit you because they thought it would be amusing and you might quite like it, (c) they hit you for reason (b) but harder than they meant to by accident, (d) they hit you because you hurt them first in some way that was genuinely bad and actually the whole thing is your fault not theirs.
3. Bashing people under the wrong circumstances can lead to an escalation of violence, which is Not What You Want.
4. Bashing people you want to live closely with and/or care deeply about tends not to be the best way of solving problems with them. Usually self-defence needs to fulfil the following criteria to be a good idea: (a) it works- ie. it stops the attack from continuing, (b) it doesn't leave another worse problem in its wake- generally this translates as, "you genuinely deeply don't care that the other person never wants to speak to you again, because you didn't like them anyway, because they were a spontaneous attacker".
5. Where the problem (of getting attacked and/or hit) can be solved by simply getting away from the other person, this is generally a lower-risk approach.
6. Where what you want is not merely to stop being violent but to get along well with the other person (which one would hope might be the aim of most siblings, bearing in mind how closely they are doomed to live), self-defence doesn't solve the problem. It is necessary to get to the root causes! This will involve (a) creating the circumstances for rational discourse (ie talking about it), and then (b) rational discourse.
How you tell this lot to under-fives is up to you! (Actually, I think there are ways, but they aren't necessarily obvious, or explicit/verbal.)
The book quoted from in the extract from the Heinlein book I quote from below is "Three Men in a Boat" by Jerome K. Jerome. (What a great name that is).
"Have Space-Suit- Will Travel" by Robert A. Heinlein
"You see, I had this space suit.
How it happened was this way:
'Dad,' I said, 'I want to go to the Moon.'
'Certainly,' he answered, and looked back at his book.
[snip of about a page]
"But he added meditatively, 'There must be a number of ways to get to the Moon, son. Better check 'em all. Reminds me of this passage I'm reading. They're trying to open a tin of pineapple and Harris has left the can opener back in London. They try several ways.' He started to read aloud and I sneaked out- I had heard that passage five hundred times. Well, three hundred."
