This post is a Random Rant, meaning it's mainly therapeutic and a bit scattered. I try to post Random Rants on Fridays and link to them in the title bar.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The blessed sleep past 7, but I wake up with a little girl eager to escape her crib. She doesn't cry, she pouts. And when you pick her up from her little caged nest, she insists on bringing her blankie and bunny.
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| Me and Wins playing with pasta |
My son, lets call him Stanley Oberfieild Smith, is already on the couch playing Mario.Yeah, he konked out around 6 last night so I'm not surprised he's up so early. His eyes gaze away from his game to smile at us, and now Wins is done in my arms and would like to play with her brother.
It's all too early for me so lets make some coffee and throw breakfast at them. We have hashbrowns, great, we'll let the toaster do the work.
Where's the music? I open my laptop to find... System of the down? No, too early... Radiohead? Too sad. You now what? Nobody's around so lets listen to Bruno Mars.
Hashbrowns are done. Throw them in the troff. Coffee cup is full, and with a tad of milk and a long sip I wonder, "where am I?"
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| Lets call him Stanley Oberfield Smith |
2. This Place where I am
I know that I'm not an exception. Somewhere out in the multiverse is another me with more time, and more money, and fewer kids. As Homer Simpson once said, "I have 3 kids and 0 money. Why can't I have 3 money and 0 kids?"
I like to think that this other me does all the things I don't have time for. He hones in on writing as a craft. He works out and still plays basketball. He learned high level statistics which he uses to better understand social science research. He even finishes a Steven Pinker book! He's... not real. Even without kids this version of me is hysterically unrealistic. I wasn't born with the gene for that kind of conscientiousness. Give me a break.
The real no-children me has a whole bunch of extra free time which he squanders. And maybe he's happier, but I suspect happiness isn't what we should be measuring. I'm hardly happy after I watch Don Hertzfield's World of Tomorrow, but it gives me a fullness I take with me. And it's the same kind of fullness I get by having children; watching them learn, seeing them smile, or knowing they're around.
On the other hand, I'm sure I would have filled that hole with something else in absence of kids; something meaningful that I can point to and say, "that makes me full." So maybe I spent extra happiness for the same fullness I could have gotten elsewhere for free.
This certainly isn't a romantic view of family. But I think it's true.
Since I'm obviously thinking aloud here, perhaps for some sort of therapy, let me make one more point before moving on. The other-universe Eli with no kids may have found meaning apart from his offspring. And when you ask him to rank his happiness on a scale from 1-10, he gives a higher number than the this-universe Eli that does have kids. But the other-universe Eli also carries regret with him over what could have been.
I don't think I could have dodged family life without a fair bit of heartache. Maybe that's what this parenting research is missing. The people who tend to become parents need to become parents, or else they're disappointed. I can certainly think of people who just don't "get" having kids, and they drive away into the sunset with time for hobbies and extra cash to spend. And I'm not surprised that these people are happier than others.
But it doesn't seem like most people could do that. I'm not sure that's an option for the family types. My hypothesis is that the family types become less happy after they have kids, but they would become very unhappy/unsatisfied if they grew past childbearing age and never had any. At least, that's how I feel.
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| To my other self: This is what could have been |
3. How I Parent
That is, I try to remember that kids are, in fact, not clay. They are who they are, and I don't make them into my project. I give them good incentives for today and tomorrow, but they're not blank slates on which I can write their destinies.
And I try to enjoy my children a little more.
Still, kids remain challenging. Babies cry a lot, and then they get older and throw valuable electronics into the garbage can, and then they get even older and draw pictures all over the walls. I force myself to make very clear, "if... then" statements and consistently follow through on the then when they enact the if. It seems to work, but it only mitigates the frustration of having children. To my knowledge, nobody has ever created a parenting technique that turns little monsters into perfect angels.
My kids are reasonably delightful. They charm the people in the room and they get complimented on how smart or polite they are. But I certainly don't think I did all of that. Though I believe nature ultimately beats nurture in the long run, in the short run they're much closer to 50/50. If my kids didn't have decent genes no amount of parenting could make up for that. And no amount of bad parenting could be made up for with good genes. The bottom line: don't necessarily blame the parent if her child is being a Tasmanian Devil at the grocery store. Kids start off different before we rear them.
I try to parent to their gaps in understanding, not their gaps in morality.
I don't say, "that's bad," I explain why that's undesirable. Throwing crayons everywhere makes a mess. Hitting other kids makes them not want to play with you. Dropping electronics make them break.
There's this whole idea in popular parenting philosophy that every child becomes a sociopath if only they're not instilled with morality from their parents. I could say that it's unscientific, which it is. Child Psychologists measure moral intuitions from a very early age. But I think my more basic objection to that idea is in what it implies. If morality is something that has to be taught, then what responsibility do the immoral have? Ought implies can. Saying that someone who hasn't been taught morality should behave morally is like telling someone they should fly like a bird, and then blaming them if they don't.
Another reason I focus more on the descriptive than the normative with my children, is that it seems to work a lot better. All people, including kids, follow rules better when they understand the rule's purpose. Telling kids not to do something because it's wrong because you say so is lazy and ineffective.
It occurs to me that this might be a split in liberal and conservative parenting philosophies. Conservatives are much more authoritarian. They also tend to have a Divine Command theory of morality (God said it's wrong, so it's wrong). They frequently set reason aside for the authority of their patriarch, that's much of what Faith means to them. And that idea is transcribed onto their parenting methods. "Honor your mother and father," it's not up to you to question whether or not it is right.
I also think examples work better than words.
The idea that parents teach their children is recent in human history. Nonetheless, the children of the past learned to walk like other humans, talk like other humans, behave like other humans, and grow up into normal human adults. They learn from their parents by watching, not because their parents taught them.
My son says thank you and excuse me all the time, because I say it all the time around him. How do I know? Because that's how he learned literally every other part of his language. Nobody taught their kids every word in their vocabularies. Nobody taught them how to construct grammar. And yet, here they are; little speaking creatures.
You might say that they learn the wrong way to speak, so we have to teach them. When kids use the wrong word or over-universalize grammatical rules it's cute. And I certainly don't think you're doing any harm by correcting them. But they're still learning. If they say "falled" instead of "fell" it's okay, they'll learn the exceptions the same way they learned the universals, by listening to examples.
I'm always astounded by parents who are scared to death that a child might cherry pick a "bad word" by hearing it one time on a tv show, but then think they have to force children into saying "please" "thank you" "sorry" and "excuse me"
Children learn to walk because they're bipeds. They learn to talk because they're social animals. And they'll learn other things so long as they have sufficient exposure.
