Make Your Children Hard to Kill

In the nicest way possible

Today’s topic: “Is the modern practice of Gentle Parenting Insidious or Not?"  Starting at Gentle Parenting is a bit like starting in media res.  Let's first turn back to see the evolution of Western child-rearing practice over the last few hundred years and examine the number of changes over the past few centuries.  Here are some highlights: 

Puritan America (1629-1692): “Children should be seen and not heard.”  The Puritans believed that all people, including children, were inherently sinful.  Children were raised under a strict religious doctrine, and common corporal punishments included spanking and caning.  However, on one memorable occasion where they did lisen to the kids, Salemites of Massachusetts famously executed a dozen or so adult citizens for Witchcraft (whoops)¹.  

John Locke (1632-1704): “Some Thoughts Concerning Education" was published during the Salem Witch Trials, but likely wouldn’t have changed Cotton Mather’s mind had it been released a decade earlier.  Locke argued that people were fundamentally rational (whoops) while advocating for a more gentle approach to child-rearing, emphasizing the importance of experience, learning, and the development of character over physical punishment.  

“Poor Richard” (1706-1790) and Doctor Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) largely stuck to the John Locke playbook; they distributed a more colloquial and accessible version of Locke’s pedagogy to Colonial Americans.  

Frederick Taylor (1856-1915): The mouthpiece for Scientific Management.  His theories on efficiency and human capital rose to prominence concurrent with the Prussian Education System.  Each emphasized structured environments, standardization, and measurable outcomes. So whether you are teaching a person to operate a textile mill, or to simply increase fire-line discipline in trench warfare, this is the way to go.  Our current public school model is still largely based on this: “bell goes ding, march, sit down, shut up, feuer frei!”  

Doctor Spock’s (1903-1998) "The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care" advocated a more permissive, loving approach to parenting, encouraging parents to trust their instincts and treat children with respect and understanding.  This was a shift away from strict discipline towards a focus on nurturing and emotional support.

Gentle Parenting (ca. 2016- present).  Popularized by Sarah Ockwell Smith. My shorthand read on this philosophy, which I will justify: emotional development supersedes all other areas of development. Including these other 11 that were in vogue until 8 years ago.  

Now we can start.  Right after you…

I read this piece on Gentle Parenting with great interest.  I have young sons.  They are spirited, feral, wonderful kids.  Thankfully, they have a mom with the virtue, traits, and schooling that they are almost guaranteed to be Masters of the Universe in a couple of decades.    

Many millennial women are bought in on gentle parenting, but there are reams of mommy blogs reporting distress that they cannot stick to the playbook all the time.  Having read this article and some others (New Yorker, The Cut, The Independent) - it's clear that Gentle Parenting is an impossible standard.  High standards are good.  I’m all for raising the bar, but does this practice  undermine parental authority?  

Some of the tactics of Gentle Parenting are OK.  Some of it really does help with tantrums in context.  It often helps the parent take a breath, display their own emotional mastery, and be the adult in the room.  AKA: de-escalation and not fighting fire with fire.  Some of it is decent, well-meaning tai-chi, anathema to prior generations kung-fu, which also had a time and place. This is an apt metaphor in the age of mixed martial arts. 

Now for its stealthy subversion.  Gentle Parenting flat out ignores the pretty clear traditional delineation of services provided between mother and father, and perhaps the difference between the sexes.  If you don’t understand the common wisdom that women bond face-to-face and men bond shoulder-to-shoulder, you should investigate this.  I count myself lucky to be in the cohort of affluent and involved fathers of this generation.  American Millennials spend about 3x more with their children than the fathers of 50 years ago. Also, the fertility rate is down 200%, but that’s a different story.

That being said, it’s not wrong to suspect that there is subtle pressure in child-rearing to embrace an entirely female-centric approach.  Just like Disney’s Star Wars, hiring at Boeing, and State Department initiatives, Gentle Parenting has an ideological component: minimization of the masculine in its manifestation as “the Patriarchy.”   "The Patriarchy" is a sort of boogeyman (or as Kurt Metzger says “The Illuminati for Girls”) and seems exceptionally irrelevant in a practical enterprise.   

This is paradoxical, as US children are educated in their formative years by the Matriarchy.  Yes, every mother is a woman, but so are 75% of educators, and 90% of those educators are liberals. Most of these educators have recently been subjected to University indoctrination by professors, 60%+ of whom identify as liberal, and a large cohort of whom self-identify as Marxists.  A masculine approach to parenting is anathema to the current inertia-ridden paradigm.  Men have an excellent opportunity to bring balance to the Force and force the actual correction children need.  

This time period is a historical aberration.  Consider the caveman.  500,000 years ago, human heads got yuge.  Women, once reliant on other women, had to invest so much in their babies that they couldn’t help each other.  Because of the way human babies are born and how helpless they are for so long, fathers took on roles of caring for toddlers and adolescents, teaching, and supporting children so that mothers could focus on either being pregnant or nursing a newborn. Fathers are the teaching parents. They are the ones that teach the skills that are going to help that child survive when they go out into the world. Because all those environments are different, what they teach is very different from mothers.  Mom is there for emotional nourishment; Dad makes you tough to kill.  

In some ways, Gentle Parenting seems like yet another insinuation of Critical Theory into every facet of life.  It started in the universities with the Frankfurt school, and has accelerated into the solipsistic nihilism infecting Western Society writ large.  Before he lost his mind over the “Woke Right”, James Lindsay was lights out on this topic.  Still, he was on the right track - so much so that the SPLC de-facto endorsed him by writing this hit piece.  Progressivism, as a religion, wants wholesale assent to all of its changing orthodoxies.  However, as an open minded guy, I am not prone to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  You can't argue with their success: Progressives have captured literally every major institution in America.  

I want my children to have stable emotional lives.  There is some truth to our inner feelings, and we often have less control of our emotions than we think.  It’s also true that just because we think it, doesn’t make it true.  However, there is real objective truth that exists outside of our minds.  At the very least, truth is an asymptote that we can continually (maybe unevenly) edge closer to.  The lesson I want to teach my children: they are safe with us in our home, their feelings are their feelings, and the facts are the facts.  

One parent to another, one thing that helped me through COVID-mania was acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).  Here are the tenets:

1) Life is often painful.

2) Pain is usually growth, and growth is good.  Embrace the pain.

3) When we avoid pain or attempt to outmaneuver it, we usually end up suffering and with suffering manifesting in neuroses. 

4) A person's ability to experience pleasure and be useful is proportionate to the amount of pain they can endure.

5) That being said, be kind to yourself.

If I'm doctrinaire about anything, ACT is as close as it gets.  I would like my kids to have this perspective sooner rather than later, and craft a balance between their inner world and outer worlds.  

My parents were fond of saying: "You didn't come with an instruction manual."   This is another way to paraphrase Mike Tyson: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."  But there was not a lack of structure in our home.  And every kid deserves at least some attempt at a playbook, appropriate to their age and disposition.  

The current playbook, over-emphasis on emotions, can lead to rumination and poor mental health outcomes.  Cheers to America’s Jewish Tiger Mom, Abigail Shrier, for taking on the Fragility Industrial Complex in Bad Therapy.  The language of therapy has insinuated itself into everyday discourse, child rearing, and education.  70% of therapists are women, yet they still owe their intellectual parentage to male kooks like:

• Freud (perv) 

• Kinsey (perv) 

• John Watson (“A mother’s love is harmful”)

• BF Skinner Box 

• Pavlov (mean to dogs) 

• and Psychopaths Milgram and Zimbardo  

And let’s not leave out Charles Manson and his loyal cadre of lady fanatics. Talk about toxic masculinity!  

The current paradigmatic relationship is essentially Hansel, Gretel, and the witch.  In this case we are fattening our children with a response to emote over all else and have everything validated.  This is a recipe for rumination and neurosis. Gentle Parenting advocates are encouraging fragility.

The point is not to say girls drool, but to point out an imbalance.  If the mechanistic materialist view of our world shows that our outcomes in life are tightly coupled to our associations and our immutable characteristics (gender, race, etc.), then it also follows that men need to further step up. 

This is Everything. You can be a dork and believe in democracy, fret about politics, philosophy, economics, metaphysics, and so forth, but if you’re a parent, that is the most important thing.  Being a parent contributes to your possible immortality and allows you to extend yourself across generations.  

There are congress people right now agitating for the slavery of your progeny.  There are groomers, pornographers, propagandists, and Marxists at the gates of your estate.  Would it be nice to see these people garroted for their trespasses into your private life?  Of course.  But that’s not really an option.  Resist their weird machinations.  Set an example.  Be hard to kill in body and spirit.  Trust yourself.  Trust and verify that your own children can follow suit.  

1. Thanks

Josh Slocum

for correcting a very stupid historical error on my part. The original post said that teenagers were hanged, but it was in fact teenage girls successfully leveling j'accuse at adults in their community.