House of Eratosthenes

That’s the name of a new way to raise your kid. Cassy calls it just-plain-lazy parenting. Looks like just another way to mass-produce liberals without realizing it, to me.

In the consensual living model, father doesn’t know best. Neither does mom. Instead, parents and children are equal partners in family life, according to the principles laid out at consensual-living.com.

Founded in 2006 by a group of families in North Carolina, consensual living is gaining ground in alternative parenting communities and online, including a Yahoo group with about 900 members.
:
Lindsay Hollett of Nanaimo, B.C., says that she began to snap less with her husband, Craig, and her 18-month-old daughter, Kahlan, after she adopted the consensual-living mindset about a year ago.

Her days became more relaxed when she focused more on Kahlan’s needs, she says. If she had a doctor’s appointment but her daughter was feeling grumpy, for example, Ms. Hollett would not force Kahlan to wait with her to see the doctor. Instead, Ms. Hollett might cancel the appointment or arrange alternative child care, she says.

Listening to her child’s feelings doesn’t mean that every last thing is negotiable, such as being strapped in a car seat, she says. But if they have to go somewhere, she adds, “I’ll do everything I can to make the car-seat ride more comfortable.”

For now, Ms. Hollett says, the onus is on her to be a role model for consensual living principles such as empathy and mutual respect for her daughter. As Kahlan grows older, though, “it won’t just be me empathizing with her.”

Understanding a child’s developmental stage is a crucial aspect of parenting, according to Alyson Schafer, a Toronto-based psychotherapist and author of Breaking the Good Mom Myth and the recently released Honey, I Wrecked the Kids.

But, she adds, children must be taught to respect a higher authority, such as social expectations. Cancelling an appointment because of a child’s mood sends the wrong message, Ms. Schafer says. “It’s a parent’s job to socialize a child.”

I was going to enter a comment to the effect that Cassy was being way too premature in her judgment, that I disagreed with her emphatically. It was April 1, after all. But I quickly figured out that I wouldn’t be fooling anyone.

I’d have a great deal more affection and sympathy for this newest method of child-spoilage if it was pure anarchy. As it is…what the hell? Mom and Dad don’t know best, but you have to “respect a higher authority, such as social expectations”?

Isn’t that a rather simplified version of — you don’t know right from wrong, but you need to depend on complete strangers to tell you what it is? From where does all this wisdom known as “social expectations” arrive? From people, right? Who raised those people? Didn’t they have mothers and fathers…who also didn’t know best? So from what terrace does this wonderful knowledge of do-this-don’t-do-that trickle down? Do we just single out whoever among us has the most wonderful hopey-changey gift of gab, and elect that guy President?

Can I be blunt here? Waitaminnit…it’s my blog…of course I can. This universe doesn’t give two shits about your “feelings” or your “needs” — not at any instant in time, not at any moment from cradle-to-grave. It doesn’t care. Hierarchies of human authority, they care. But only in one direction.

When it comes time to get real work done, you have to get your plowing done in the springtime or you can’t plant. You have to get your irrigating done in the summer or nothing will grow, and you have to get your harvesting done in the fall or your product will rot. That’s true of all levels of technology. The compiler doesn’t care if you find the error messages to be discouraging.

It seems to me the real danger of a parenting method like this, is that it will work a portion of the time. It will work when your child is raised to become an adult who is only fit to engage a subset of the experiences that life has to offer. You would have to send such a young adult to college; a good one. You would have to do this, because the life for which you’ve prepared them would be one in which they get to give the orders — using authority they may have, but didn’t really earn with any genuine experience — and then the orders would be carried out by better men than they. Real grown-ups who were raised under a mindset that work, where it exists, is non-sentient, and uncaring about the worker’s emotional state. Guys who can fire guns, sharpen knives and tie knots.

The military has a saying for situations like this: “If you want to know how the war should be going, ask the General; if you want to know how it really is going, ask a Private.” Except that’s different. You have to do a lot of things, grapple with some situations that aren’t under your control, to achieve a pre-defined outcome, to become a General.

Tracy Miller Quinn, owner and operator of a laudable blog in her own right, and mother of two, objects to childless Cassy’s condemnation of the consensual-living model. This leads to a lively and occasionally entertaining exchange. Well, I’m the father of one, who will be turning twelve this summer…so my experience falls short of Quinn’s in some ways, and exceeds hers in others. I think she’s demonstrated here how a point can deliver some merit while remaining devoid of applicability. If Cassy really doesn’t know what she’s talking about (and I’ve been reading her for awhile; trust me, she does), then, in this situation, she’s the stopped clock that happens to be right.

Kids, at the age under discussion, are amazing things. Their brains do not work the same way our adult brains do. They have been designed, and constructed, to do most of their thinking with the orbito-frontal cortex, in a way we can’t match. To do their thinking with the word “no.” This is how they stay alive, when they don’t yet understand the more complicated and involved cause-and-effect thinking, and haven’t yet accumulated the experience necessary to break down abstract ideas according to those terms.

It is…to coin a phrase…an intelligent design. A complex design. A design that incorporates an organism, a maturing process for the organism, and — parents. This consensual parenting, from what I’ve been able to learn about it, is the abjuration of a crucial learning process that must necessarily be achieved in full somewhere around age five, so that the child is ready to build on this knowledge of “no” and absorb more complex lessons later on. If they don’t lay this critical foundation, they can’t be prepared for what’s built on top.

And then what would have to happen is we get more of what we’ve already got, up to our eyeballs: People who aren’t fit to take on real work. Non-sentient work. Work that doesn’t give a flying fig how happy or sad they are at the time they’re expected to take it on. People who are supremely aware of their own emotions, but uncaring about those of others. Because they didn’t learn about that when they were supposed to: At ages one-and-a-half, to five. There never was a need to develop such a skill, at that critical bracket. They would then have to be coddled, their emotions pandered-to, from womb to tomb.

They would be crippled. Severely. If you took a hammer to their kneecaps and put them in a wheelchair for life, you wouldn’t be limiting their prospects nearly as much. Sorry if that comes off as a shocker…but that’s not an exaggeration at all.

Best case scenario is, they will then somehow end up in command of others, who can do the work that has to be done — so they can take the credit for it.

Save up that college fund if you raise your kids this way. Save, hope, and pray. Your kids would have to achieve authority without demonstrating they’re worthy of it, and then cross paths with a prospective employer maintaining high standards for hiring just the right people. But enforcing them only occasionally.

Of course, who am I kidding. American business is being re-defined as I write this…so maybe I’m just another old curmudgeon reciting boring old stories from his rocking chair about the way the world used to work.

“…alternative parenting communities,” it says. There’s no such thing as ‘alternative parenting!” There is parenting, or there is not having children. Those are your “alternatives.”
- Andy | 04/02/2009 @ 11:46
Read the comments in this thread: You can see what has come to pass with children let loose in the work place

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/worst_coworker/
- pdwalker | 04/02/2009 @ 22:54

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Thursday, April 2nd, 2009