This episode delves into peaceful parenting strategies for getting kids to clean their rooms. It emphasizes honest communication, understanding motivations, and creating a positive environment through open dialogue and modeling desired behavior.
Brief Summary
In this episode, we explore the complexities of getting kids to clean their rooms through peaceful parenting. We emphasize the importance of honest communication, understanding motivations, and avoiding conflicts. By prioritizing open dialogue and modeling the behavior we want to see, we can foster a positive environment for our children.
Chapters
0:00:00 Peaceful Parenting: The Challenge of Clean Rooms
0:02:30 Escalating Conflict: The Battle Over a Clean Room
0:09:35 The Impact: Mother's Demand and Son's Future Relationships
0:11:43 The Mother's Desire for Control
0:25:16 The Importance of Open Communication in Peaceful Parenting
0:27:17 Bullying in Society: A Difficult Situation for Teachers
0:35:21 The Struggle of Working Mothers and Power Dynamics
0:38:30 The Pressure to Conform as Parents
0:39:14 Importance of Respect in Negotiations and Relationships
0:41:25 Consequences of Allowing Difficult People into Your Life
0:41:43 Parents' loss of credibility due to hypocrisy
0:43:55 Political power and parenting as open hypocrisy
0:44:34 Society's Indoctrination of Obligations
0:47:16 Lack of Virtue and Exploitation in Society
0:50:32 Consistency as Virtue and Safety
0:53:16 Apologizing and making amends with your children
Long Summary
In this episode, we delve into the topic of how to get kids to clean their rooms from the perspective of peaceful parenting. We begin by examining the common pattern of parents setting rules and demanding obedience, which often leads to conflict and frustration. Instead, we emphasize the importance of questioning the necessity of the rule and understanding the underlying reasons for wanting our child's room to be clean.
To illustrate the dynamics of the situation, we use an example of a mother wanting her son's room to be clean. Initially, the mother cleans up her son's room, but as he grows older, he desires privacy and resents his mother's intrusion. The mother insists on a clean room, resulting in ongoing battles and escalating tensions. This creates a cycle of conflict where neither party is satisfied.
To find a solution, we highlight the need for honest communication with children. We acknowledge that parents often lie about their motivations for wanting a clean room, whether it be a desire for power or fear of social judgment. However, we suggest that if the messy room genuinely triggers negative emotions in the mother, it is important to express this truth to the child. We acknowledge that asking for a favor from a vulnerable state is challenging, and some parents may resort to aggression instead.
We discuss the principle of changing behavior to make others feel better and the difficulty in expecting someone to change solely for that reason. We emphasize how children can sense hypocrisy, particularly in their parents. To avoid diminishing credibility, we encourage parents to express their emotional anxieties rather than imposing a moral narrative on their children. By doing so, we can break the cycle of demanding changes in behavior to manage emotions, which may also impact the child's future relationships.
Overall, this episode delves into the complexities of getting kids to clean their rooms and encourages parents to prioritize honest communication and understanding in peaceful parenting approaches. We discuss the negative impact of authority on children's well-being, the role of parents, teachers, and schools in protecting children from bullying, and the consequences of parents' choices on their children's well-being. We highlight the importance of modeling the behavior we want to see in our children and prioritizing their safety and happiness. We conclude by urging parents to maintain open communication with their children and avoid bullying or allowing themselves to be bullied in front of them.
Tags
episode, complexities, kids, clean rooms, peaceful parenting, honest communication, understanding motivations, avoiding conflicts, open dialogue, modeling behavior, positive environment
TRANSCRIPT
Peaceful Parenting: The Challenge of Clean Rooms
[0:00] Peaceful Parenting by Stéphane Molyneux. Peaceful Parenting. Clean your room.
One of the most common questions asked by parents who wish to take the peaceful approach is, How do I get my kids to clean their room?
It's a fine question, and I, for one, am not a fan of big messes. So, what is the answer?
Peaceful parenting takes the following approach to all parent-child conflicts why is it important?
Kind of an important question, don't you think? why do you want your child's room to be clean?
A lot of times parents set up a rule then demand that their children obey it And the stage is set for grueling, multi-year, grinding battles.
And for what?
Of course, I understand that parents need to teach their children responsibility and self-care and tidiness and all other sorts of nice and wonderful things.
That is exactly why it is so important to ask how essential is the rule.
[1:24] Let's take a typical example. Mom wants her son's room to be clean.
Initially, mom goes in and cleans up her son's room.
As her son gets older, he wants privacy, so he begins to make demands that his mother not enter his room.
His mother agrees in principle, but says that he needs to keep his room clean, otherwise she will have to go in and tidy everything up.
[1:57] Her son does not keep his room very tidy. His mother marches in, tidies and cleans, and then he can't find anything, and he feels violated.
And then his mother again reiterates her demand that he keep his room clean, otherwise she'll be forced to come in and tidy again, because he lives in a shared space, and she doesn't want to think that there is food or other items that might attract bugs and mice somewhere in his room.
And it smells and she can't find anything if she needs something and how on earth can someone live like that and so on.
Escalating Conflict: The Battle Over a Clean Room
[2:30] Neither person is getting what they want. Both people are escalating and hardening their positions.
And the stage is set for endless, useless, pointless conflict.
[2:47] The mother feels that she is going to lose her position, good sense, and any authority if she gives up her demand for a clean room.
Her son fights back against what he perceives as maternal bullying.
And both parties very quickly find themselves utterly unable to give up their positions or demands.
Sound familiar?
It is a common pattern in a wide variety of scenarios.
What is the solution? The mother wants a clean room.
The son doesn't want to be ordered around and also wants his privacy.
[3:29] Here is the most essential message. Don't lie to your children.
In most of these cases, the mother is lying to her son about why she wants a clean room.
She wants him to clean his room because she feels anxious and unhappy if his room is messy.
She wants him to clean his room because she likes exercising power over him under the pretense of keeping things in good order.
She has unresolved conflicts or hostilities with her son and uses the clean room pretext as an excuse to act aggressively against him.
[4:20] She is afraid of others coming into the house and judging her by the messiness of her son's room.
She is frustrated at her life in general, feels powerless and out of control, and so seeks to wield control over her son in order to counteract her feelings of chaos and submission.
This list can go on and on, but in general, It is not about the room, or the tidiness, or the privacy, or the intrusion, or anything like that.
What is really going on?
[5:05] If the mother feels anxious, helpless, frustrated, and angry if her son's room is messy, messy, then what does it mean to tell her son the truth?
Well, it means that she has to tell her son that his messy room makes her feel anxious, helpless, frustrated, and angry.
But she doesn't do that, right?
Why not?
Well, for two main reasons. The first reason is that she prefers to be aggressive towards him rather than ask for a favor from a state of vulnerability.
Asking someone for a favor does not allow you to bully him.
And that person can always say no, which might reveal how little they care about your negative emotional states.
[6:08] The second reason is that it is an utterly indefensible position to ask your son to clean up his room because you feel bad when he doesn't.
Why?
Because we are untrained in philosophy, that's why.
Let us extract a simple principle from the mother's demand that the son clean his room to make her feel better. What do we get?
[6:38] Well, we get the principle that we should change our behavior to make other people feel better.
It's a universal principle, remember?
Since it is a universal principle, it doesn't just apply from the mother to the son.
It also applies in reverse. verse.
If the mother says, I really need you to keep your room clean because I feel really bad when you don't.
Well, the son can equally reply, I really need you to stop asking me to keep my room clean because I feel really bad when you do that.
Do you see? You see how hard it is to ask ask someone to change his behavior in order to help you feel better?
No, it's far easier, at least in the short run, to make up some moral nonsense about respecting the shared environment, having some respect for yourself, some sense of self-care, honoring your mother, doing the right thing.
It's far easier to bring out the moral club and in a sense beat your child's will into groveling submission rather than ask for a favor.
That can easily be reversed.
[7:57] Children are incredibly good at sensing hypocrisy, particularly in their parents.
If the mother inflicts a moral narrative on her son about keeping his room tidy, rather than be honest about her own emotional anxieties, then her son will fight very hard to avoid submitting to her.
She doesn't have any credibility because she is not being honest about her demand.
If she demands that her son manage her emotions by obeying her commands then he will lose all respect for her in particular because he is a male and that's not how males work at all.
It will also be difficult when she commands her daughter, but her daughter will more likely mirror her mother's habits in her own relationships with others, thus reproducing the demand that everyone else change their behaviors in order to manage the daughter's, and then the mother's, emotions.
[9:13] If the son has to change his behavior to manage his mother's emotions, But she lies about that and claims some sort of moral high ground.
Then he is setting himself up for a life of enslavement to women if he submits to his mother.
The Impact: Mother's Demand and Son's Future Relationships
[9:35] In general, women aren't very attracted to doormats, enablers, and submissive males.
So his mother's demand that he subjugate himself to her emotional immaturity, inflicts potentially irreversible harm to his future romantic prospects.
Would you rather your son tidy his room or get married and have children?
I'm not kidding about this. I'm sure there are countless mothers out there reading this and shaking their heads, but I promise you this is all true.
And if you ask your sons honestly, they will agree with me, I'm sure.
A boy who submits to his mother's emotional manipulations is no fit husband or father to be.
A woman who absorbs and reproduces her mother's emotional manipulations is no fit wife or mother to be.
[10:33] If, say, a teenage boy submits to his mother for no good reason or because she is lying, which is to say the same thing, then he substantially lowers the quality of women he can attract in the future.
He becomes ground-down, submissive, an appeaser and groveler, which is a real turn-off to strong, confident women later on.
A mother who demands that her son submit to her emotional and moral bullying is undermining and destroying his chances of attracting and keeping a quality mate down the road.
By fighting his mother, the son is fighting for his own future happiness and genetic survival.
To put it another way, sons who gave up the ghost and submitted to their mothers either didn't reproduce or reproduced with very dominant, low-quality women, either of which is a disaster.
So that's why the son fights so hard.
The Mother's Desire for Control
[11:43] What about the mother? Why does she fight so hard to control her son?
Well, that one should be obvious, I'm sure.
A woman who gets to middle age or later, who still retains the habit of bullying others to appease her own negative emotions, well, that woman doesn't just confine that habit to her own son now, does she? Oh, no.
If she is still married, then for sure she has a husband who has bowed down before her emotional manipulations and bullying.
What happens to her relationship with her husband if her son mounts a successful resistance and defense against her bullying?
[12:30] I would assume that by the time a woman hits 40 or 50, her retained emotional habits are the foundation of all of her relationships. with the possible exception of her own parents.
In other words, all her relationships are based on the premise that other people are responsible for managing her own negative emotions.
And thus, if she gets upset, other people have failed her and can be aggressed against for their betrayal of love and loyalty and responsibility and morality and so on.
If she feels bad, other people must be bad.
If she feels bad and asks another person to make her feel better, and that other person refuses, then that other person is mean and thoughtless and callous and just doesn't care about her and is a very bad and selfish person.
And she has to punish that person in order to lead him away from the darkness and back towards the soft light of eternal compliance to her emotional demands.
[13:41] If a mother is like this, and her son successfully resists her bullying, well, that successful resistance might very well spread to her other children, her husband, who knows?
Probably her friends are just like she is, but what if her son's successful rebellion spreads to her friends, husbands, and children as well?
Well, it ain't so much fun when the rabbit gets a gun, is it?
The son is desperate to avoid submitting, especially to a woman, for fear of ending up alone or in a terrible marriage.
At the same time, the mother is desperate for him to submit, for fear that any successful rebellion against her dominance could spread to other people in her life, which would reveal her weakness and aggression.
[14:38] Furthermore, imagine if the son successfully resists the will of his mother.
What happens then?
Well, over time, he ends up dating and marrying a very healthy, assertive, and moral woman.
And how will she react to his hypocritical and manipulative mother?
Ouch!
[15:12] How does peaceful parenting resolve this?
As Socrates said, know thyself.
As a mother, it is your job to know deeply, authentically, why you want your son to keep his room clean.
Is it even fair or just all right for you to make this demand?
Far too often we as parents assume that our demands are automatically legitimate and any resistance or rebellion by our children is illegitimate, Well, how do you know? How do you know that your demand that your son keep his room clean is legitimate while his resistance to your demand is illegitimate?
How do you know that you are in the right?
[16:08] The question of what is good and noble and just and moral and right is very deep, very complicated, and has been struggled with by philosophers for thousands of years.
We all treasure the idea that people accused of wrongdoing are innocent until proven guilty. This is a foundational principle of justice.
If your child disagrees with you, you, assume that he or she is right and moral and just and good to do so.
This way, you can ask him why he disagrees with you and really, genuinely and deeply listen to his answer.
Maybe he has a really good point. If you listen without prejudice, without tension, without anger or frustration, well, what a gift that is to your child, to anyone for that matter.
Children should be listened to. We all should be.
[17:21] Don't assume that you are in the right. Have the humility to accept that you might be wrong, for two reasons.
The first is that you might actually be wrong, and the second is that you want to model humility to your children, so that they can also question if they are in the right.
[17:46] Don't expect your children to be humble if all you do is model arrogance.
Which brings me to… Have I modeled the behavior I want in my children?
This can be a very tough one.
Decades ago, a friend of mine lived with a woman who constantly nagged him to keep the place spotless.
After they broke up, he had to drop by to get some paperwork he'd left behind, and he was truly stunned, such was his naivete, to see that she had let the place decay into a complete pigsty.
He was stunned because he realized that she never had any goal or value in keeping the place tidy, but she liked to boss him around with that value as a pretext or excuse.
[18:40] If you want your children's environment to be organized, is your environment organized?
If you want your son's room to be tidy is your car tidy?
If you want your son to listen to you do you listen to your son?
If you want your son to manage your own emotions do you also manage your son's emotions and change your behavior to suit his preferences?
If you say that your son has to obey you because you are his mother mother, then has your son ever seen you disobeying or disrespecting your own mother?
Has he ever seen you rolling your eyes when she calls, or lying to her in order to avoid a social engagement, or getting short and snippy with her?
Do you model the behavior you want in your children?
It's not enough to just be okay at it. You have to be very near perfect.
I mean, you wouldn't take diet and fitness advice from a guy who was only, say, 40 pounds overweight and only smoked half a pack of cigarettes every day, right? No.
You want diet and fitness advice from a super healthy fellow, right? Of course you do.
[19:59] If you say that it is more efficient for your son to keep his room tidy, can you easily find things in your own environment?
Can you answer the inevitable objection that your son will have?
That he would rather spend 15 minutes looking for something than spend two hours a week tidying up his room.
If your son has rational objections to your commandments, are you flexible? Do you listen?
Do you accept that he might have a very good point?
If not, then your son will very clearly and deeply understand that all of your supposed reasons for your commandments are hypocritical nonsense.
[20:45] If you say that he will be happier in a tidy room and he says that he likes it untidy, what are you going to say?
If you brush past his objection, then he knows with absolute teenage certainty that you are just making up reasons why he has to obey you and not telling him the real reason for your commandment at all.
He knows for sure that you are lying to him.
Why should he obey someone who lies to him?
If you have a well-organized environment that is neat and tidy, and he appreciates that, and you remind him over the years how easy it is to find things, and you involve him in keeping the environment neat and tidy, and you accept that he may have different feelings about it from time to time, and you tell him the truth about how important it is for you and you ask for his participation as a favor rather than yelling hypocritical moral commandments at him, then you have satisfied the criteria as a peaceful parent.
If you demand that your son obey you, without reason, you are only training him to be a slave.
[22:14] You want your children to follow good reasoning, good morals, their own conscience.
Not hypocritical harpies who bully them because they feel bad about something. thing.
Don't break your children. Nothing is worth that.
Don't force your son to submit to your will over anything.
You are breaking his spirit, crippling his free will, destroying his capacity for integrity and virtue, and undermining his future attractiveness to quality women. women.
[22:54] You should thank him for fighting you.
Remember when your baby fought you because you tried to put him down for a nap when his diaper was wet?
Weren't you relieved and silently thanked him when you helped him avoid a painful rash?
Perhaps you were annoyed at your baby and exhausted and really wanted him to go to sleep, but then you realized that he was in the right And good to fight you because getting a rash is far worse than having a comfortable and safe nap ten minutes later.
So often your children are fighting to help you rather than blindly oppose you.
I mean, as a mother, surely you want your son to attract a high-quality woman and have a happy and well-balanced marriage, right?
Of course you do. And you understand that if you break his will and force him to submit to you as a woman, then you are shattering his ability to be a strong man in his future relationships, right?
[24:01] Be honest, you are not particularly attracted to weaker, broken men, right?
Don't you find them kind of gross, contemptible? Of course you do.
I'm sure you prefer a man who can stand with his own integrity, even against the subtle erosion of female manipulation.
I mean, it can be annoying in the moment, but it's much better in the long run.
Can we agree on that? I'm sure we can.
So, don't make your son unappealing by doing everything in your power to break his will in two.
Keep him strong, so he can have a happy marriage with an equally strong woman, and give you a good daughter-in-law and wonderful grandchildren and deep and right support into your old age.
Surely all that is worth infinitely more than a slightly tidy room when he is 13. Am I right?
The Importance of Open Communication in Peaceful Parenting
[25:16] Peaceful Parenting and Peer Pressure, now that you are getting the hang of peaceful parenting i'm sure that you can easily answer the following question how do you ensure that your children will not be bullied, but that's right first of all you don't bully them and second of all you don't allow yourself yourself to be bullied, particularly in front of them.
The antidote to bullying is open communication.
Bullies pick on children who are psychologically and emotionally separated from their parents.
Children without parental protection are always weak and vulnerable, easy pickings for the predators who roam the outskirts of human society.
Bullies fear humiliation above all else, which is why they inflict it so much on others.
A bully will not pick on a protected child, and the only protection that children have is open communication with resolute and courageous parents.
If your children aren't comfortable coming to you with problems, their problems will inevitably escalate.
[26:42] There are generally two ways that parents communicate to their children not to come to them with any problems. The first is anger.
The second is panic.
Dysfunctional fathers tend to get angry if their children bother them with problems.
Weak mothers tend to feel overwhelmed and dissolve into mild hysteria or shallow self-pity.
Larger children pick on smaller children.
Bullying in Society: A Difficult Situation for Teachers
[27:17] Unfortunately, society has so configured itself that bullies have a pretty easy time of it these days.
School teachers don't really want to deal with bullying because that means confronting unruly teenagers and their aggressive parents.
If Bobby is being bullied by Joe and complains to his teacher, the teacher will almost always tell Bobby to just try and avoid Joe and keep his head down.
Confronting Joe is a difficult and volatile situation, and Joe could easily complain to his parents, who could then launch attacks and complaints against the teacher.
No, I'm afraid that Bobby is pretty much on his own if he is not protected by his parents.
[28:03] The bitter lesson that authority is only for punishing children, never actually protecting them, has been deeply corrosive to the civic ethics of our societies.
The only credibility that authority has is its ability to serve and protect the needs of children.
If teachers and principals and parents are helpless in the face of bullying, then they have no moral strength, no backbone, no capacity to protect.
They can only punish and shame, and so have no credibility whatsoever, either with the bullies or their victims.
[28:53] Government schools in particular are set up to facilitate bullying because no one wants to confront the bullies or their parents and it has become practically impossible to get bullies expelled.
[29:05] Since parents are taxed to pay for government schools, they rarely have the funds to pay for private options.
But private schools are subject to many of the same moral weaknesses and vulnerabilities with regards to tackling bullying.
Homeschooling is the most viable option if it's legal. However, homeschooling requires that one parent, usually the mother, stays home.
Mothers who have worked since their children are very young don't have as strong a bond with their offspring, spring, and so somewhat recoil at the idea of staying home to teach them.
That's fine, in a way, as long as parents are willing to accept the inevitable consequences.
[29:50] If a child is lonely, understimulated, bored, bullied, and or alienated by school, and mommy would rather work than stay home and teach him, then that boy knows that mommy's work is more important to her than his own safety, security, and happiness.
Women who drop their kids in daycare usually end up making only a couple of dollars an hour after childcare expenses and other employment costs. costs.
When children grow up and get some basic math skills, they can very easily figure out that mommy preferred to make about three dollars an hour rather than spend time with them.
Again, this is fine in a way, as long as parents are willing to accept the inevitable consequences.
[30:50] The inevitable consequences of putting your children in daycare are the following.
[32:12] 7. The children's feelings and preferences are irrelevant because no child wants to go to daycare instead of staying home with a fun and happy mother, 8. The children do what the parents impose on them and the parents do what they do for no particular economic benefit or pleasure, 9. Children have no particular need to bond or trust their caregivers, since daycare workers come and go all the time.
[33:41] Instead, you call her and say, hey, honey, great news.
I have to work late, but no worries. I called the temp agency and they're sending over a guy named Manuel who speaks some English, I guess.
I know he's hungry for sure. And he's going to spend the evening with you instead.
I think he might be lactose intolerant, but I'm not sure. Please check with him.
I don't think he can dance, but it's fine if you teach him.
He has a gardening job during the day and I don't think he's had a chance to shower and change, but I'm sure that's fine.
What do you think your wife would say? She would be outraged, right?
What do you mean you're sending some stranger over to have our wedding anniversary dinner and dance night with me? I want my husband, not some stranger named Manuel.
What? You're kidding. You sent our kids off to daycare saying that strangers were just as good as family. I'm busy.
Don't be selfish. Have a great evening with Manuel. well.
Your wife would never submit to substituting a marginally literate stranger for your company on your wedding anniversary.
But why not? She substituted a stranger for herself by dropping her kids off at daycare.
Oh, or is it only bad for her, but just fine for her children.
[35:05] So, strangers are just as good as family, unless and until it interferes with her preferences.
[35:14] It's utterly incomprehensible, really.
The Struggle of Working Mothers and Power Dynamics
[35:21] Children with working mothers also see their moms endlessly submitting to, usually male, bosses, but often fighting with their husbands.
The mother can be yelling and snarling at her husband, or then her phone rings, and the boss requests something and the mother sighs, agrees, hangs up, and slinks off to do her work.
Even if she finds a way out of it, she still speaks to her boss with far greater respect, submission, and deference than she does to her own husband She is pleasant and agreeable to the stranger but difficult and obstructive to her own husband, If her husband asks her to submit to male authority she will be outraged and rebellious until her usually male boss tells her to do something at which point she submits without fighting him.
Ah, think the children, those outside the family have all the power.
The man in the family has no power at all.
Good luck getting your sons to look forward to marriage after seeing that for a couple of years.
Good luck getting your daughters to respect their boyfriends and husbands in the future.
[36:46] If you sacrifice your children's health, needs, and happiness when they're young on the altar of your own selfish habits and ego again, that's fine, in a way, as long as you are prepared to live with the consequences of your choices.
[37:07] It has been my experience in life that good people respond to sacrifices with reciprocity.
If you lend money to a good friend when you are wealthy and he is poor, he will absolutely lend you money should the situation reverse.
If you do favors for others, they will do favors for you in return.
If your children know Know that they come first in all of your calculations.
They will respect you, love you, and admire your integrity, since almost all parents tell their children that their children come first.
We would do anything for our children, cry parents, barely slowing down at the daycare to drop their sobbing kids off into the indifferent arms of total strangers. dangerous.
We would do anything for our children, cry parents, resolutely rejecting or ignoring what their children actually say they want and need.
We would do anything for our children, cry parents, sacrificing the bond with and happiness of their children for the sake of chasing a few dollars and social conformity, ego gratification, and pathetic material greed.
The Pressure to Conform as Parents
[38:30] Don't you dare succumb to peer pressure cry mothers who dumped their children with strangers because other people might think that being a stay-at-home mom was just kind of lame and well just icky fathers will tell their children to make sacrifices for the family and respect parental authority when they supported ignoring their children's emotional and psychological needs because they wanted to brag to their friends that their wife worked as a professional, don't you know?
If you want your children not to be bullied, don't be bullied yourself, particularly at their expense.
Importance of Respect in Negotiations and Relationships
[39:14] Family, and bullying.
Parents desperately want to be respected by their children because respect is efficiency and the most essential foundation for productive negotiations.
It is impossible to negotiate productively with someone you just don't respect.
What's the point of negotiating a payback schedule for your deadbeat brother-in-law when you know for a fact that he will never pay you back?
If you know that your doctor is just a drug dealer paid by pharmaceutical companies to push their wares, does he have any credibility with you?
Would you bother negotiating a payment schedule for a doctor you never want to visit?
What's the point of negotiating an exchange of value if the other person doesn't have anything you value?
You don't bother, as a matter of fact.
If you let yourself be bullied, particularly in front of your children, it is a virtual certainty that they will either end up as victims or bullies themselves.
[40:30] If, as a father, your mother-in-law snaps at you, telling you what to do, putting you down and laughing at you, and your children see that, you will lose all credibility with them.
How are you going to tell them to have any integrity or pride in themselves if you allow yourself to be pushed around and bullied?
Children are so sensitive to the moods of their parents, an essential survival strategy, that even if you take a draining phone call with a difficult parent in another room, they know the difference when you come back.
You are drained, peevish, irritable, sad.
All your old childhood aches and pains have been reactivated, and it can take you quite some time to settle back into yourself, so to speak.
Consequences of Allowing Difficult People into Your Life
[41:25] If you let difficult people into your life, your life becomes difficult.
If you defer to difficult people, your children will lose respect for you.
Parents' loss of credibility due to hypocrisy
[41:43] One of the main reasons parents hit their children is that the parents have acted in such a ridiculously hypocritical manner that the children do not respect them because the parents have lost all credibility.
[42:03] It's bad and boring comedy to imagine a fat man promoting his own diet book or a chain smoker running a seminar on how to quit smoking.
Of course logically we could say that the fat man might have the best diet book in the world but we know for certain that he either has a bad diet book or a good diet that he himself has no interest in following, if the chain smoker says that it is super important to stop smoking and he knows exactly how to do it this would be laughable right, Would he have even the slightest bit of credibility with you?
Would you pay a thousand dollars to take his seminar?
How much would you pay for the fat man's diet book? This isn't complicated, folks.
If you want to sell something, you have to manifest it first.
If you want to sell exercise, you have to be fit. If you want to sell financial success, you can't be broke.
Parenting is the only place where people completely ignore the basic fact that you have to manifest the values you preach if you want to have any credibility whatsoever.
[43:28] That's because children aren't there by choice and cannot leave. Leave.
Socialist leaders own and control the economy and trap their citizens within the country so they can be as hypocritical as they want and no one can do a damn thing about it.
In fact, one definition of power is the ability to be openly hypocritical without repercussions.
Political power and parenting as open hypocrisy
[43:55] Political power and most parenting in a nutshell.
Monopoly government agencies have endless mission statements about satisfying customers and providing the best possible service.
But that's all nonsense. They don't have to be efficient because you don't have a choice.
As a parent, you don't have to have integrity.
You can basically be as hypocritical as you want. And your kids can't go anywhere.
They don't have a choice.
Ah, but they will.
Society's Indoctrination of Obligations
[44:34] Society pours an enormous amount of indoctrination into children, telling them that when they grow into adulthood, they owe endless obligations to their parents, no matter how their parents treated them.
[44:47] Why does society need all of this indoctrination? Why?
Because so many parents are hypocritical bullies.
People don't need endless propaganda about how they should love sugar or a million dollars or attractive sexual partners or resting when they are tired, Society says to wives mothers of children even that they can and even should leave the relationship with the husband they voluntarily chose if they just become somewhat bored and dissatisfied.
However, lie to, ignore, and abuse your children for 20 years, apparently those kids just owe you everything, no matter what, for the rest of your natural life.
[45:41] Why? Hey, I'm fine if society wants to be consistent.
If you have to love and support people you never chose to have power over you, and who abused you, Okay, then let's make divorce illegal and forbid anyone from quitting a job they chose.
Oh no, we can't do that. What if the husband is an abuser or the company is corrupt? Oh.
So people can un-choose what they chose, but can never un-choose what they never chose.
[46:24] It's kind of funny because the world is very positive towards immigration.
People don't choose the countries they are born in, but it's fine and good to leave the country you never chose and move to the country of your choice.
Oh, but it's really wrong and bad to escape an abusive family you were born into and choose to create your own peaceful family.
It's all such repellent nonsense.
It's just another example of how we don't have virtue in society. we never had, really.
We only have power.
We don't have consistency. We only have exploitation.
We don't have moral rules. We only have shifting justifications that we use to defend the powerful and abuse the weak.
Lack of Virtue and Exploitation in Society
[47:16] We defend parents and attack children. No more. no more.
If you want to have credibility with your children, you have to have integrity as an adult.
If you don't want your children to succumb to peer pressure, don't succumb to peer pressure yourself.
[47:39] If you want your children to make good choices in life, you have to make good choices in life.
If you want your children to take care of you when you age, you need to take care of them when they are young.
If you want your children to respect your wishes, you have to respect their emotional and psychological requirements.
[48:07] If you want your children to look up to you, don't rent them out to strangers for a few dollars an hour.
If you want your children to reason and negotiate instead of using manipulation, threats, and force, then you need to reason and negotiate with them instead of using manipulation, threats, and force.
It's really not that complicated. it. I'm not trying to teach you any new values at all.
This is not some radical new philosophy that tells you up is down, black is white, subjectivity is objectivity, war is peace, freedom is slavery.
I'm telling you just to live your values consistently, the values you loudly proclaim, the values you inflict on your children, the values you want written in stone above your your grave.
Because sure as sunrise, your children will absorb your hypocrisy no matter what you do.
They will learn, and very deeply too, that words never have to match actions, that integrity is a manipulative lie, that the purpose of morality is to punish others while excusing yourself, and that parents only live to hear the sounds of their own words, never see the empiricism of their actions.
[49:36] Virtue is what you proclaim in order to punish. Evil is any demand for integrity.
[49:45] You should never allow yourself to be bullied. Oh, excuse me, my boss, mother, father-in-law is angry. I have to drop everything and submit.
Life is infinitely simpler when we just live our values consistently.
Einstein's simple equation that E equals mc squared gave us virtually unlimited power over the universe.
When we understood that gravity is a constant and everything in the universe falls, we finally understood the true physical structure of our universal environment.
Consistency as Virtue and Safety
[50:32] Consistency is not just virtue. It is safety.
Imagine if we had to learn that fire was dangerously hot every time we encountered a new flame.
Imagine if we were open to the possibility that every lion we encountered in the wild was a friendly vegetarian.
Imagine if we truly believed that our next tattooed pink-haired communist girlfriend would be a sane and wonderful addition to our lives, imagine if we believed that our hunger would just resolve on its own like a headache we would never survive, just live your values consistently consistently.
I'm not asking you to change them. Just stop randomly reversing them for the sake of convenience and appeasement in the moment.
[51:33] As a moral philosopher, I do have some truly radical arguments.
Peaceful parenting is not one of them.
We all know that reasoning with children is better than hitting them.
We all know that you can't teach a child a language that you do not speak.
We all know that children learn empirically, not just verbally.
We all know that we have to model the virtues we want our children to embody.
We all know that leaving abusive relationships is a good idea.
We all know that we reap what we sow.
We all know that peace is superior to force.
We all know that hitting weak and defenseless little people is cowardly and pathetic.
[52:46] We all say that we want the best for our children, that we will sacrifice anything for our children, that our children are our world. and then we live the exact opposite way.
I'm just saying that maybe, maybe not, not anymore.
Apologizing and making amends with your children
[53:16] What if you got up in the morning tomorrow, apologized to your children for treating them badly, made restitution where possible and committed to never hurt them again.
I mean, it would be great to do that in all of your relationships but your children are the only people in your life who have no choice but to be there.
Surely you should apologize first to the people you have hurt the most.
And who have the least choice.
Support the show, using a variety of donation methods
Support the show
Recent Comments