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by sossles
3116 days ago
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The article makes many good points but (as many others have noted) it really misses the mark on rules and obedience. Rules and obedience are an essential abstraction to allow larger organisations of people to function and interoperate. The rules aren't always the best for each individual at every time, but overall they help things run smoothly. There is always some kind of consequence for not following them. To understand (and eventually change) a system you always starts with a high level acceptance of the 'rules' and drill down from there. Why shouldn't children also be taught to operate on that basis? Say they want to question the 'rule' about having 3 meals a day. That's fine, drill down into why and maybe change it. Maybe bed-time is unfair, perhaps the 8yo doesn't want to go to bed at the same time as the 5yo. It should be ok to challenge these things to an extent, but at the end of the day someone needs to make things run smoothly for everyone, and that's the parents' job. Rules (with an expectation of obedience) are how they do that. |
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But rules and obedience are an essential abstraction. With my own young kids, I try to let them challenge the rules and chart their own course as much as I can, but if you go with no rules at all I think you are almost as likely to end up with a bad result as if you parented through only rules and obedience.
When confronted (as all parents inevitably are from time to time) with blanket ideas for "how to raise children" I find it helpful to swap out "children" for "employees" and then "farm animals" and see how the advice sounds from those two additional perspectives.
Children are kind of a middle ground between those (as well as being many other things).
There's very little science to parenting, unfortunately. It's mostly intuition and magic.