Children Should Not Be Worshipped (and other once-obvious reflections)
The consequences of making children feel too special and why loving your children best requires you to, first, teach them their place.
Hello Bar-setters!
I want to start today by referencing David Sedaris’ hilarious audio essay, which takes aim at modern parenting culture. As a Bar-setter, you are likely to agree with much of Sedaris’ argument. But some of his perspectives may strike a nerve. And that’s why they’re worth hearing.
The pursuit of truth was once the obvious point of an education. We believed in the market-place of ideas—the belief that all ideas should be heard and that through competition, the best would emerge. I still believe this.
Sedaris is a humorist. He says things that we normally wouldn’t and he says them in an exaggerated way, so that we can explore what is true without necessarily having to take every claim too seriously. What an invaluable service. Onwards!
How “Good Parents” Have Messed Up Parenting Culture
Sedaris begins by listing a litany of “micro-aggressions.” In one example, an employee accuses her boss of “casual violence” for calling on her in a meeting without giving her any prior warning that she’d be called on. Sedaris continues:
Who are these hot house flowers all so easily and consistently wounded?
People whose parents never hit them? That’s who….
When I was a child, a slap across the face was too minor to qualify as casual violence. It was simply what you got for talking back or holding everyone up.
I see parents now who worry they’re being abusive if they don’t spend at least an hour putting their child to bed. An hour. I said to my sister, Amy. Do you remember ever once being tucked in?… And look at us, we’re fine. We can handle stuff. We never get offended by anything.
Part of that is because there were so many of us. A child needs brothers and sisters—the more the better. Good siblings will press your favorite doll’s face onto a red hot barbecue, then steal the money the tooth fairy left under your pillow… They will, in short, prepare you to live in the real world. Better still, they’ll dilute the… attention given to only-children. My mother couldn’t remember our names half the time, much less care whether we felt anxious or depressed.
One of the worst things that’s happened to us as a country is that people are having fewer children… The problem is that single children receive a freakish amount of love and attention. Most graduate at least 12 times before leaving high school. Their every move is recorded and celebrated. And it gives them an outsized sense of their own importance. Our parents thought we were okay, at best, and I think that really helped us in the long run.
This last paragraph is particularly thought-provoking. Given the dramatic rise in youth mental health disorders (and narcissism), you can’t help but wonder if this tendency to give kids an outsized sense of “specialness” harms them more than it helps.
Still, we should take Sedaris’ comments with a grain of salt. I’m not going to start slapping my kids in the face when they take too long to get ready, nor am I going to stop putting them to bed.
It isn’t the slapping or ignoring so much as the spirit captured by Sedaris’ comments that are so valuable for us today. These comments are valuable because we are a parenting culture in desperate need of rebalancing.
The Source of Our Modern Parenting Cult
Like Sedaris, my book critiques our modern parenting paradigm which pressures parents to overprotect, over-indulge, and over-provide for their children. I argue that one of the reasons that these trends have become normal is that most modern parents grow up without a clear purpose outside of themselves and without clear ideals.
As I write in chapter 7:
Today’s parents came of age in this very individualistic world. After years of aimless self-obsession, they had children and sought a sense of meaning through their new role as a parent. They once were lost, but now are found.
This can be wonderful, but without any other deeply held values, it often creates a sort of child worship where the point of parenting becomes pleasing one’s child-god and dreaming up evermore extravagant offerings. Youth culture grows hollower and more individualistic as these parents put the immediate desires of their children above any higher ideals.
This creates a phenomenon where today’s parents often operate as a pseudo public relations firm for their children. When Junior throws tantrums, he’s far more likely to be rewarded than disciplined. When he cheats or doesn’t do his work at school, his parents are more likely to defend his behavior than to encourage the school’s consequences while adding, “I can assure you, he will answer for this when he gets home.”
Likewise, sports lose their focus on discipline, physical vitality, and learning to sacrifice for a team. They become an arena for individual self-promotion. Rather than helping kids understand that they need to play the position where their team needs them, parents lobby coaches to meet the child’s wants. They work to ensure that he gets the number he wants, the position he wants, sufficient playing time, and ample individual recognition at the banquet. The team becomes an elaborate presentation, bent to satisfy the individual desires of each of its participants and their parents.
My views are echoed in a recent article by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, where she discusses the costs of the decline of religion in American society and the West:
…the “God hole”—the void left by the retreat of the church—has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational, quasi-religious dogma.
Ali focuses on religion, but we’ve also lost a sense of patriotism, citizenship, family, and tradition. We’ve diminished all the traditional sources of meaning and many parents use their children to fill this void.
When parents elevate their kids above any higher ideals, this is what happens:
The Superior Wisdom of… the Young?
“I make honorable things pleasant to children.” —A teacher from Ancient Sparta
It’s in this environment that people have started to argue that society needs to give extra weight to the opinions of young people. Young people are presumed to have special insight into moral truth. A great example of this view can be seen in the influential progressive writer Hamilton Nolan’s recent defense of pro-Hamas rallies. As he writes:
Wisdom means listening to the angry youth…
An inability to ignore the small annoyances of youth in order to welcome the indispensable purity of morality that young people give to us is not a mark of wisdom. It is evidence that one has maintained immaturity even as they have gotten older. It is proof that you have allowed age to shrink your moral universe, rather than expand and deepen it. It is, above all, a reason to think that you should stop talking for a minute and listen to what the angry young people are saying.
“The indispensable purity of morality that young people give to us…” Fascinating.
This may sound nice, but one cannot help but notice that it assumes the exact opposite of what successful societies have throughout history. This progressive delusion is rooted in Rousseau, whose educational treatise, Emile, sparked the narrative that all kids are born with clear eyes, pure hearts, and a depth of perspective that has been beaten out of us wretched adults.
To the contrary, my children are adorable and incredibly sweet, but, had we not parented them out of it, they would bite you for standing between them and a lollipop. Parenting is what convinced them that biting was a bad option.
Similarly, it is history, mentorship, and some foundation in a wisdom tradition that might give a 20-year-old the maturity necessary to transcend the TikTok fueled sentiments of their peers.
In a recent speech, Robert Henderson combats this notion that “wisdom means listening to the angry youth” with some good old-fashioned research:
A 2015 study of more than 1 thousand individuals aged 6 to 77 found that young children and elderly adults are the least likely to tell lies, while young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 were the most likely to engage in deception, and also displayed the greatest proficiency at formulating believable lies….
In my own research, completed as part of my doctoral thesis, I analyzed multiple large datasets from the U.K., the U.S., and globally. The findings were unequivocal: older adults consistently rated moral violations more harshly than younger adults.
For instance, younger adults deemed actions like tax evasion or theft as more permissible compared with older adults. This age difference remained even after controlling for income and education.
More strikingly, younger adults rated physical violence to be more permissible than older adults, including political violence, child abuse, and spousal abuse.
Still, I appreciate youthful idealism. I am a romantic. I detest complacency, apathy, and the type of person who lives to tell dreamers why nothing is going to change.
I just think our reverence for youth has gone so far as to be absurd. We need to restore balance and bias ourselves towards the wisdom of ages. As Will and Ariel Durant express in their classic book, The Lessons of History:
No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history….
It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole.
Get the Spirit Right
This isn’t about putting the kids back in their place. It isn’t about putting young people down so that crotchety old men can feel better about themselves. It is about remembering what is best for our kids.
It does great harm to our kids when we allow them to believe in their innate moral superiority. It keeps them from confronting their own ignorance and wrestling with ideas long enough to hold respectable opinions. And it sets them up to be outraged when the world doesn’t treat them like the brilliant gods that they believe they are.
Likewise, it does harm to young people when they grow up with the expectation that adults should bend the world to their whims. Reality hits hard.
Today, many obvious and subtle parenting norms create these unhealthy expectations.
The obvious:
Parents would prefer to buy teenagers a brand new car or a nice car then start them on a beater;
So many parents continue to pay phone, car insurance, student-loans, etc. even after their 23-year-old leaves college and gets a job. When do you become an actual adult?
The subtle:
At holiday meals, families rarely insist that elders get to make their plate first, or that elder family members pray, or serve any sort of reverent role;
In our parent culture, parents run themselves ragged to give their children experiences and take them to a plethora of sports and activities, but these same parents will not make the time to continue any recreational pursuit/hobby of their own. The message is clear: sports and recreation are extremely important—so important that we will invest lots of time and money so that you kids can do them—but we parents don’t matter enough to get to invest in those things for ourselves.
Over and over our children are shown that older people only exist to raise younger people. They see that the desires of young people should always take precedence.
Is it any wonder that our children don’t want to grow up?
Is it any wonder fewer young adults are choosing to marry and have kids?
Why would you want to become an adult if adulthood means that your life is over and your only purpose is now to serve your children?
Please don’t mishear me. This message could be perverted to excuse lazy or self-absorbed parenting. There are plenty of parents who allow screens to babysit and are too busy swiping their own phones to read Junior a book. In the age of supernormal temptations, lazy, unintentional parenting virtually guarantees that children will be ravaged by social media, porn, video games, and hyper-palatable foods.
What I’m advocating is an ideal-driven re-balancing of the parental paradigm. If we want to raise admirable adults, we need to give our children a strong, motivating ideal of adulthood that they aspire to become like.
Thank you for reading!
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Carry the fire!
Shane