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.
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Brian wonders about the realities of parenting, citing an example of a mother chaining up her teenagers to stop them going out stealing cars. I posted a comment, but there's lots more to say...
The first most obvious thing about extreme disciplinary measures is, they tackle the absolute most superficial layer of the problem, while leaving the underlying causes completely untouched and simultaneously increasing conflict, which is a great way of making people want all the more to do exactly the opposite of whatever their oppressor thinks they should do. (And that's completely aside from all the moral factors, neglect of parental responsibility that has evidently occurred for such a conflict to have got as bad as it is already, of course).
The second most obvious thing is: when problems have grown to extreme proportions, they aren't going to be easy to solve. Time, effort and thought are necessary. The first thing anyone should do when faced with an extreme parenting problem is talk to the kids. Properly. Hear them out, draw out their problems and ideas, and try to discover what is actually going on and why they are either motivated to do bad things, or why you are wrong that the things are bad in the first place, or whatever mixture of both you are dealing with.
But parents who chain up their kids rarely do this. It's a skill of the kind of parents who are good at helping their kids do better things than become car thieves. In other words, the difficulty is not the failure of more subtle and humane methods: the difficulty is that the parent is useless at subtle and humane methods, hence the problem. Non-existent communication is the cornerstone of crappy parenting. If you don't know people, you can't help them develop.
Thirdly, I do wonder whether society might someday notice that banning thousands of teenagers from earning their own livings, driving cars, and generally having access to adult things, until they suddenly hit magic ages, really isn't helping things much. Of course, we don't want thousands of idiotic amoral illiterates careering about our roads all day. But maybe some kind of carefully judged redirection of teenagers' energies towards fruitful, productive activities, rather than algebraic equations, would go a long way towards helping juvenile criminals to become more sociable members of society. Chaining them up might stop them stealing cars: but it's also the best possible way of turning them into criminals.
I went to a La Leche League workshop at the weekend, and it reinforced my conviction that the "Attachment Parenting" school of baby and toddler care embodies by far the best practical ideas about rational, consentual, growth-promoting that anyone has invented so far for that age group. Which is why I am very pleased to see that AP has now entered the blogosphere.
One thing that La Leche League is very good at is drawing a line between its own, mostly practical, philosophy, and the huge raft of other causes that often get bunched together with AP. As in home educating, culturally there seem to be two broad groups of people who practice attachment parenting. Without being too damingly judgemental, I would characterise the schools roughly as traditional Christian Waltons-style family-values people on the one hand, and "alternative" liberals on the other. Rational Parenting likes to consider itself as something different than either of these (don't we all? ;-)), which is why we expect to disagree with some of the things on this new blog. But our self-imposed remit is heavily on the practical side, and as I mentioned above, Attachment Parenting scores high on our scale as a source of good ideas for helping tinies find their way in the world.
At the workshop I attended, where I gave a session called "Ten more ways towards problem-solving with kids", there were five or six babies and toddlers present, and I saw none of the coercive bossing-around or arguing that one normally associates with providing for little ones while their mothers engage in conferences (erm, actually La Leche League is the only organisation I know of that actually provides conferences where little ones are welcome, and where the discussions actually happen, and produce growthful ideas).
At one point, the mother next to me grabbed a small plastic eagle and brandished it in the air. Another mother had brought a collection of plastic animals for her child to play with, and the first mother wanted to know if the eagle was disposable or purchasable. Her own child had an identical eagle which was falling to bits and needed replacing, and she had tried and failed to find a replacement in the shops. Luckily, the eagle had no great value attached to it, and was happily donated to the needy family.
This kind of attention to detail, awareness of the bits and pieces of things that make up a child's learning world and treasured possessions, willingness to devote time and energy and resources to helping children get the things they want, however small or relatively unimportant they might seem to an adult eye, is very important to helpful, rational parenting. Whatever your child cares about, you should care about too. Parents are important providers of new ideas and resources for furthering the precious projects of their children. Which isn't to say that I will ever enjoy making kinder egg toys for their own sake, but I'm happy to keep constructing them in their droves as long as tiny plastic figures continue to be significant to any small folk around me who can't do the job themselves.
Toy-management isn't an attachment-parenting issue at all. I drew the connection to demonstrate that good parents converge on good ideas. The "Don't be silly, it doesn't matter" school of parenting and the "Oh dear, gosh, doh!" (hang around until child forgets about the problem) school of parenting are both inconsistent with the amount of time and effort required to help children learn maximally. The way we treat our tiniest people matters enormously, both to their development and to the growth of our own humanity. More on this later.
Get up, offer safety suggestions for pancake-making, put the kettle on. Read email, watch daytime TV with child, hunt for tiny toys (found via one phone call and a tracking-down session). Clear a floor which is entirely littered with clothes, toys etc, to enable a game. Unpack a bag, have a bath while shouting suggestions for sibling rapport. (Minor scuffles conclude with affectionate machine-gun game in the bathroom). Go out to building society (with hair still wet), bank, Woolworths (sea monkey food and lego), and Safeway (food, crisps, kinder egg). Get home, put kettle on, sit down with coffee, leaving shopping on the kitchen floor unpacked; blog.
