This Is How You Prepare Your Children for the World

how can I best prepare my children to face the world and balance conservative views without them becoming demonized for having them [Applause] what isn't exactly obvious to me that children have views you know you know what I mean it's it's rare enough to meet adults that have views I think I would say I'm I'm going to answer a slightly different question and that might be well what is the responsibility of a parent which is the question in some sense that's lurking underneath your question and maybe you know once your children become Adolescent and they start

to formulate their explicit beliefs explicitly then that problem becomes more relevant but we might as well start with true children to begin with and and we can do that in a way that is related to the topic of the the lecture that preceded this so I I made a case that sanity is something that's an emergent consequence of a well-constituted social hierarchy now that's not all it is because we also made a foray into exploration of the utility of creative achievement but we'll stick with the first part to begin with so then you might ask

yourself well what's the what's the more fundamental moral obligation of a parent and the fundamental moral obligation of a parent is to encourage your children to be great Partners in play that's that's a good way of thinking about it so the primary sources of socialization for your children if you do a good job with your children won't be you 'll be their peers and so that means that their selection of peers is of crucial importance it also means that their acceptability or desirability to peers is of crucial importance you might say and this is certainly

possible the more socially desirable your children the higher quality of peer they will attract and that quality of peer would be associated in turn with the social desirability of those peers because you can imagine that a very highly socially desirable child has a multitude of choices with regard to friendships right whereas an unpopular child is going to have very few choices or none and is is therefore also likely in those situations to have their choices restricted to equally unpopular children and you might say well popularity isn't everything it's like yeah what's your point it's it's

it's not everything you shouldn't sacrifice your soul to transient popularity but it's bloody well not nothing and there are few creatures more miserable than friendless children and that's a reflection of the fact that we're deeply social so what what is it that you should be attending to in relationship to the development of your children well we could refer to a different rule this is from book one and the rule was do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them okay so let's think that through for a minute first of all to understand

that rule you have to admit that you could dislike your children and you might say well I know I love them so deeply I could never dislike them it's like you're a liar so you dislike yourself you dislike your wife like dislike man that comes up a lot and you know with your children not only do you dislike them you should and so why would I say that okay so we already walked through the notion that there's sort of a target of behavior right that if you were functionally optimally you'd be a good partner in

play you'd have balanced chaos in order properly you'd be able to find your place in the social hierarchy you'd be open to social feedback people would want to have you around and you would develop optimally as a consequence of that so imagine that's a pathway imagine that to walk that pathway you have to manifest a certain pattern of behavior and that would be a pattern of behavior that would make you admirable and attractive to other people and that admirable attractiveness is actually a marker of your prowess in walking that path okay the same applies to

children okay so now imagine you have a mother and a father and you take each of them in isolation and you think well this This Woman This mother is pretty crazy and you take the father and you think this father is pretty crazy too and that's pretty much the State of Affairs that obtains between any two people but then you put them together and you think well their weaknesses don't dovetail so one way of thinking about what happens in an optimal marriage is that two fragmentary creatures produce one reasonably coherent Unity and that Unity emerges

from the interplay of their personalities and so your partner has some weaknesses and you have some weaknesses and hopefully you buttress your partner's weaknesses and she does or he does the same thing for you and you do that mutually and you capitalize on your Mutual strengths and together each of you is better than you would have been alone because why be married otherwise and more importantly the union of the two of you makes something approximating one truly sane creature and then you might say well if that creature is truly sane then it's a microcosm of

what's sane about culture so you might think that what you're trying to do as parents is to mirror the structure of the social world to your children and why well because they're going to have to contend with the social world right they're going to have to move Beyond you as soon as they're beyond basic infancy especially by the time they they hit about three years of age because that's when children become truly social the primary world they're going to inhabit is going to be the social world and it's going to be primarily the world of

their peers and so they better be adapted to that world or it's going to be not only is it going to be rough on them and miserable because they're going to be alienated and isolated and Lonesome and have no one to play with it's worse than that because what peers do when they play is to push each other optimally in relationship to development so imagine that you're playing chess with someone and you want to partner to play with what kind of partner do you want and the answer is well you want to partner in play

who's slightly better at the game than you are and you might say well why because if they're slightly better than you you're going to lose disproportionate number of the times why don't you just find someone utterly useless they don't even know how to play chess he just Stomp the hell out of them continually it's like well that's no fun why not well it's because the fun is actually derived from the process of being optimally pushed by an opponent who's worthy and worthy would mean they're not so much better than you that you just get ground

into the dirt but they're not so much worse than you that you can just Stomp Them without thought you want someone who's who can contend with you right and interestingly Enough by the way the the Hebrew word for Eve right this help me that's the King James version translation it means beneficial adversary that's such a good thing to know so what do you want in a wife well you want someone who pushes optimally against you why so that you develop optimally right you want someone you can contend with you don't want to you don't want

a doormat you don't want a tyrant you want to partner in play that's what children want they want to partner in play and they want that because optimize play optimizes their development and so what does that mean in relationship to how you raise your children and the answer is well you want your children to be optimal Partners in play and so if they are doing something that makes you dislike them and let's say jointly right because maybe when my son was young he'd do something that would annoy me and I would go tell Tammy you

know that kid of yours he's annoying me and she'd say well maybe you're just hungry or maybe you're just tired or maybe you're crabby and it's like well okay because it could be that he's bothering me because I'm a tyrant and I could go check with her and we'd go through the evidence that I was a tyrant and or she'd say you know that kid's really bugging me too we'd think ah maybe we're not insane tyrants maybe he's a pain in the neck and so and then there was morally required of us to address that

and this was particularly interesting I would say in the case of Julian because Julian was quite a pushy little kid he's quite disagreeable and so he would definitely push the envelope he was always right on the edge like can I get away with this can I get away with this it's really something to behold he's very very good at that and so now and then that would go a little too far and we'd find that we were not liking him quite as much as we might want to and so then we'd get together and think

it's time to crack down on that kid it's like okay so for the next two weeks we lock arms it's like he's not getting away with anything not one thing if he deviates from the norm from the optimal let's say one iota it's like we'll get him and so we would fortify ourselves and do that and that was one of the things that was so absolutely startlingly remarkable about that was every time we did that he liked us better he loved us yeah it was really something well and the reason for that was obvious is

we were actually paying attention to him right it's like kid stop being a pain in the neck well why because other people will hate you and that's not good for you you know and it's really not good for you and so the theory was something like this look man we love you and we can't stand you so what do you think the people who don't love you are going to think about you you know and we tried to we tried to do this with a certain degree of of light touch because the rule was as

soon as we tried not to hold a grudge it's like as soon as we got we tapped him back onto the straight narrow let's say so he was enjoyable to be around then we just let our irritation to the degree that we were capable of that we just let our rotation go because the point was you know play fair here kid be a good sport you know when we used to put him on the steps when he was pushing the envelope he had quite a temper and he'd sit there and mad two years old very

mad and the rule was you sit there until you feel like being a civilized human being and when you feel like you could be a civilized human being again you just come and tell us that and we'll look at you and see if we like you and and generally the liking would return with a suitable display of Contrition you know he'd get his act together and then he'd come say well I'm sorry I'd rather have a good day and then it would be genuine you'd think oh I really do like this kid and then away

we'd go and it was funny because sometimes he'd be sitting on the steps just like enraged you know because he had he had a pretty good temper he's a tough kid and uh I'd go over and say you're ready to have a good day and he goes not yet you know and you might think that's mean it's like well you know the kid needs to express his anger it's like yeah not if it makes everyone dislike him right no seriously like you know you see kids having temper tantrums in the supermarkets like that's just not

good for anybody it's not good for the kid because the kid is developing integrated ego is then overwhelmed by the circuit of Rage that's what happens and because the temper tantrum is an outburst of rage and it's a defeat for the integrated ego of the child it's exhausting it's stressful because anger is a very stressful emotion it's really hard on the kid it's not freedom to let your kid have a temper tantrum that's not there's nothing about that that's true and I'm not it's not like I don't know that anger is useful and it certainly

needs to be integrated and some integrative aggression man that's your best friend but that has nothing to do with failing to help your child learn to regulate their possession by rage and if they are tantrum prone the probability that they'll make friends is zero because what will happen is you know they'll be playing a game with one of their friends and they'll lose which you're going to do 50 of the time if you play fair they'll lose then they'll have a tantrum it's like well who the hell wants to play with a child like that

and the answer is no one and so what happens is tantrum prone four-year-olds become socially isolated and then they fall behind their peers and then they're in like child jail and that's permanent it's really not good there's a very nicely laid out literature on exactly that pathway of development and so well so what do you do with your children is you see when they deviate from the spirit of reciprocal play and you help tap them back into alignment and you can do that in large part by playing with them you know and this is something

for fathers to know particularly because fathers are particularly good at playing with their children it's one of the things that fathers bring to the to the table and that's especially true in relationship to Rough and Tumble physical play and fathers are very good if they're not afraid and if they're not interfered with too much at taking their children and pushing them to the limits of their psychophysiological capacity which is what you're doing by the way when you're rough and tumbled playing with a child throwing them in the air wrestling with them you know and children

are so thrilled with that they just can hardly stand it they get so excited that it's almost unbearable they're they're so desperate to engage in that Rough and Tumble play like there's almost nothing they like more than that and there's very little they need more than that and you know you help the child explore the Contours of their body because if you're Rough and Tumble playing you show them the difference between acceptable and challenging discomfort and actual physical pain right because one Shades into the other you know imagine you've got your kid on the ground

and you're you're you're playing give up right give up kid and maybe you're twist in his arm it's like give up kid no I'm not giving up like give up kid no I'm not giving up give oh I'm giving up I'm giving up it's like well you're playing with that it's like you're helping the child learn what's tolerable and acceptable physical discomfort and when exactly does that shade into paint and unless they know that in a deeply embodied sense they can't understand it in anyone else right it's really deep exploration and they're going to do

the same with you maybe you let them wrestle with you and you and you let them win you know because you should let the little rat win 30 of the time you let them win and you know you say well you can't put your damn Thumb in my eye and you can't elbow me in the nose and you can't grab my glasses and like there and and you you you can't be too whiny while we're interacting like there's very tightly constrained rules and you think well those are arbitrary it's like they're not arbitrary don't be

don't be a dimwit have you ever played with a dog you think that's all socially constructed there's a difference between a dog that can play and one that can't you know you get a dog often raised by psychologists it's so dumb that it just bites you if you play with it and you know it has no idea what to do it's such a clunk it can't play at all it just bites or drools it's just a pain and then you get another dog that's well socialized and man that thing's ready to go and it it

can indicate to you in a fraction of a second that it wants to play it does something like that it's a universal mammalian play signal it's like you want to go it's like yeah it's a whack you can whack that then you whack the dog just exactly the right amount right and the dog is acts like it's being hit but it knows it hasn't and it pretends to tear off your arm because it is a wolf but it actually doesn't and it's like the dog knows how to do this and it didn't it wasn't socialized

by you know it's not socially constructed that's just insane and a playful child is often very good at playing with dogs and other animals and having a dog around is also a good way of helping your child learn to play because if your child can play properly then the dog will be its friend because dogs like to play and so you're you're trying to enable that Spirit of play and I would say if you're good at that you don't have to worry about whether or not peop what people think of your children's opinions because they'll

be so damn popular that they'll listen other people will listen to your children and you know it's more complex when once you hit the teenage years because you start having to contend with the issue of explicit philosophy but with regards to children you want to you want to encourage them to be the sort of people that other people really want to have around who are always invited to play right and if you do that man they'll take care of themselves and then you'll have done your job properly and so and maybe they'll have the kind

of friends that you would want for your children and maybe they have the kind of friends that you want to have in your house and wouldn't that be a good deal for everybody so that's a good thing to that's a good Pathway to walk down that pathway of of play [Applause]