David Friedman praises his father, Milton's, childrearing methods

This speech was given as David accepted the Goldwater Award for his father in 1997. Milton was apparently unable to make it for health reasons, though he did call in. The award ceremony was MC'ed by US Rep (R, OK) J.C. Watts, who did a wonderful speech that I only wish were more true than it is, as did Arnold Schwartzenegger, and there is a good video of Milton himself on the c-span clip.

But none of it holds a candle to David's stories of growing up as Milton Friedman's son. The guy got fathering right.

I have David's book, Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life. It reads like he talks: witty, mischievous, informative.

My comment spammer reminded me of something

A week ago last Sunday pastor Paul did a great sermon on The Prodigal Son. He based it on something he read by a guy who did an anthropological study by going around the Middle East telling New Testament stories to Arabs and Jews who'd never heard them and carefully noting their reactions.

After church, I said to my family, "You know, if the whole Bible were like that story, I'd have no trouble with it." Then I discovered that I had to repeat the whole sermon for the benefit of those who were in the room with me, but weren't listening.

Jeez Louise.

[Speaking of Jeez Louise, I just corrected a couple of typos that made it past my editing efforts.]

This is really important

And it doesn't end with infancy.

But there IS a way to make new people

Train children to have empathy.

Empathy is knowing what others are feeling. Sympathy is agreeing with that feeling. Agreeing is less important. Sometimes it's even dangerous.

The world is perishing because people ignore the feelings - the humanity - of others. We've imbibed too much of the attitudes of wife beaters [and torturers and psycho-killers - not to mention child abusers] from our culture.

One generation, taught kindness and respect by example by their parents, will completely transform the world. DeMause's research shows that those things have been improving at an accelerating pace since the beginning of history. It's not all hopeless.

I'm not suggesting this sort of thing

The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting

Actually, the backlash is fine. Helicopter parenting is just another form of abuse. Here's the heart of the article:

Dr. Stuart Brown, a psychiatrist and the founder of the National Institute for Play — who has a treehouse above his office — recalls in a recent book how managers at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) noticed the younger engineers lacked problem-solving skills, though they had top grades and test scores. Realizing the older engineers had more play experience as kids — they'd taken apart clocks, built stereos, made models — JPL eventually incorporated questions about job applicants' play backgrounds into interviews. "If you look at what produces learning and memory and well-being" in life, Brown has argued, "play is as fundamental as any other aspect.'' The American Academy of Pediatrics warns that the decrease in free playtime could carry health risks: "For some children, this hurried lifestyle is a source of stress and anxiety and may even contribute to depression." Not to mention the epidemic of childhood obesity in a generation of kids who never just go out and play.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1940395-3,00.html#ixzz0Y5xbN4YN

I think people should read this

Your children ARE DoublePlusHuman

We only crush their wills because we don't want them to show us up.

Our job as parents is to make life safe and secure

for our children so they can... Well, here:

If you have a strategy of having these very finely shaped innate modules just designed for a particular evolutionary niche, it makes sense to have those in place from the time you're born. But you might have a more powerful strategy. You might not be very well-designed for any particular niche, but instead be able to learn about all the different environments in which you can find yourself, including being able to imagine new environments and create them. That's the human strategy.

But that strategy has one big disadvantage, which is that while you're doing all that learning, you are going to be helpless. You're better off being able to consider, for example, should I attack this mastodon with this kind of tool or that kind of tool? But you don't want to be sitting and considering those possibilities when the mastodon is coming at you.

The way that evolution seems to have solved that problem is to have this kind of cognitive division of labor, so the babies and kids are really the R&D department of the human species. They're the ones that get to do the blue-sky learning, imagining thinking. And the adults are production and marketing. We can not only function effectively but we can continue to function in all these amazing new environments, totally unlike the environment in which we evolved. And we can do so just because we have this protected period when we're children and babies in which we can do all of the learning and imagining. There's really a kind of metamorphosis. It's like the difference between a caterpillar and a butterfly except it's more like the babies are the butterflies that get to flitter around and explore, and we're the caterpillars who are just humping along on our narrow adult path.

Link. Watch the video, too.

These are the thoughts we parents need to integrate

Here's an interesting, new way to view history

from the point of view of child-rearing methods. Here's a bit from the first article "The History of Child Abuse":

Indeed, my conclusion from a lifetime of psychohistorical study of childhood and society is that the history of humanity is founded upon the abuse of children. Just as family therapists today find that child abuse often functions to hold families together as a way of solving their emotional problems, so, too, the routine assault of children has been society's most effective way of maintaining its collective emotional homeostasis. Most historical families once practiced infanticide, erotic beating and incest. Most states sacrificed and mutilated their children to relieve the guilt of adults. Even today, we continue to arrange the daily killing, maiming, molestation and starvation of children through our social, military and economic activities. I would like to summarize here some of the evidence I have found as to why child abuse has been humanity's most powerful and most successful ritual, why it has been the cause of war and social violence, and why the eradication of child abuse and neglect is the most important social task we face today.

It's quite a disturbing article so I hope Dr. deMause doesn't mind if I summarize the historical development here, with help from this guy.

From Prehistory to the spread of Christianity deMause theorizes we have the Infanticidal phase.
From, say AD 300 to 1300 there is the Abandoning phase;
C. 1300 to c. 1700, the Ambivalent phase;
C. 1700 to c. 1850, the Intrusive phase;
1850-1950, the Socializing phase;
1950-the present, the Helping phase.

The dates apply in European history only.
I'm the one calling them phases because I'm a weeny. DeMause's term is "psychoclasses." The good thing about that term is that it doesn't imply that the the timeline is absolute. All later phases are infected with remnants of all earlier phases, however large or small.

Indeed, I'd have to say that most parents, especially if they fetishize ancient religious texts, are mish-mashes of most of them, but having not studied more than this few that I've already quoted (and linked), I won't presume to speculate further.

But here's the real deal

See what you can say about this:

The difference that atheism makes to the world is it requires an acceptance of this world as all there is. It requires a rejection of all beliefs that if we commit moral crimes we can be forgiven by accepting a Jewish zombie on our death bed or holding a belief in a circle of endless rebirth that will give us a second chance. It requires compassion for humanity in the here and now because there is no belief in an abstract entity that will provide compassion for us. (Notice that this does not occur in the current world because the compassion of gods have been passed on to the compassion of the state, and it did not happen in past worlds because child-raising was so brutal the compassion was crushed out of the culture before anyone reached adulthood.)

But most of all, it is important because it is a rejection of belief structures that require lying to and terrifying children for the sake of abstract entities. Only with this fundamental rejection of violence against children will we have a world with peace.

Tha'ts the last comment, by Paul C., on this page.