Growing Your Own

I discovered that Drupal has a built-in module for doing polls. Whee! However, I haven’t figured out how to have it automagically published, either here in the bloggy area or as a sidebar feature. So, for now, I’ll simply point to it from this post, and encourage relevant comments to be posted here.

The poll asks the question, “What do you think is the most important thing a parent can give to a young child?”. I think that anyone who wants to may vote—one needn’t be signed up here to cast a vote. If that is true and some of you wish to make a comment without registering, I’ll do my best to accommodate you. Please either email or PM me at GYHD or The Boondocks with your comment and some means of attribution—either a ’nym or just plain “anonymous” is fine with me. Although ... if we have 27 different anonymice it will be difficult to keep track of the conversation. Maybe label yourself Anonymouse #X? We can worry about the details should that become necessary.

Anyway, the poll will run for a week; and I’ll keep this post atop the blog for that duration. Have at it, if you wish.

Once more I find myself to be well outside the norm of USSA culture. And as usual, I view that as a good thing. However, to the degree that my assessment is accurate, it’s a dismal commentary on our society.

... I just thought I’d have more advance notice.

I knew, just from reading the title, that I would be sputtering with indignation if I clicked through to read Is a taste of deceit with carrots so bad for kids?. I clicked. Consider yourselves warned.

I read this statement a while ago, and immediately agreed with it. But as I thought about it, I started to wonder if it necessarily has to be so. So far, I am inclined to think it is. Here’s the statement, written by John Taylor Gatto:

We long for homes we can never have as long as we have institutions like school, television, corporation, and government in loco parentis.

What do you think? Am I overthinking things again?

I think every somewhat-literate person on the planet—certainly those in the Americas and Europe, and much of Asia—know the Nike slogan, “Just Do It”. I’ll admit to liking it at first. It was inspiring, motivating ... instead of sinking in the quagmire of doubts and fears, just do it! To me there was an implicit promise of seeing things all the way through, and if the result wasn’t exactly as you envisioned, well, you just did it, and that should count for something, right?

Well, leave it to me to find a way to create obstacles out of that inspirational phrase ... but I’ve hit on an alternative that works much better for me.

Lobo was the person who introduced me to the concept of a “way of being”. I immediately liked it; it sounds much more active than “personality”, which I think of as essentially the same thing as one’s way of being. Many people—myself included from time to time still—have a tendency to see one’s personality as somehow immutable under all but extreme conditions. And while it is accurate to describe many specific elements of personality as being genetically determined, it is crucially important to understand that “genetically determined” does not mean “constant” or even “highly predictable”.

The usual suspects, naturally. But it turns out that isn’t all.

Is this something that’s part of the parental territory? Or part of the “wisdom” that’s supposed to come with aging? Or am I just losing my mind?

Warning: lots of self-indulgent emoting and navel-gazing follows.

It is a real challenge for someone who has grown up in servitude, and received an education tailored to keeping them in that condition, to think like a free person. This is often apparent in the writings of libertarians, who think freedom consists of having a longer leash, or a master with velvet gloves. Even among people who style themselves "anarchists" it can often be observed, frequently in a form that I call the "master-behind-the-curtain". The author will obviously feel the need for some control over those "other people" which they believe can only come about through the application of an external coercive force, but since they don't believe in the legitimacy of government they will attempt some slight-of-hand to sweep that force behind the curtain where they can ignore it.

The article on children's rights that Sunni pointed to recently is a good example of this. The author of that piece feels the need to ensure that "other people" care for their children the way the author would like to see them cared for. They imagine a utopia where parents are forced to treat their children like self-owners, with some additional coercion in the form of one-sided "contracts" to keep them from utilizing neglect as a control mechanism. All force involved to be provided courtesy of the master-behind-the-curtain.

This argument is kicked off by the author defining self-ownership as a basic right that all humans possess, starting at birth. Now anytime you see a professed anarchist talking about "rights" you have a good chance of detecting the master-behind-the-curtain. "Rights" is usually used by libertarians in the negative "Bill of Rights" or "Rights of an Englishman" sense: a list of prerogatives that the serfs insist their masters not exercise upon them, upon penalty of revolt. For example: "master shall not piss in our water bowl and make us drink from it". Self-ownership never appears on these lists: if the revolting slaves wanted to be free they would just kill their masters, or have nothing further to do with them, rather than demanding concessions. Since the article in question was supposedly an anarchist's view of child-rearing, this sense wouldn't seem to apply.

I suspect that the author means "right" in the newfangled positive sense: a privilege that a master grants over their slaves. Monopolies of all sorts fall into this category, where the "right" consists of the owner ordering their chattel to buy only from, or refrain from competing with, a certain party. "Entitlements" are another form, where a master transfers some percentage of their slave's output to the privileged party. It has become common for owners to grant such privileges over their chattel to their chattel's children, regularly insisting that their youngest slaves have a "right" to various things at the expense of their parents. "Self-ownership" for the child in this context consists of the parent being ordered to treat their offspring as their master's property, rather than as their own.

Realistically, in a free country a parent would have no externally-imposed obligation to treat their children in a particular fashion. Free-market law-providers would recognize dependent children in exactly the capacity that they would be paid to recognize them in. I suspect that few parents would be willing to pay for a policy that treated their offspring as independent agents. If they signed up for such a policy by accident, the first time they got hauled before a court and fined for placing their kid in "time-out" would be the last time they would pay that premium. Most parents would pay to have their children protected as their most precious possessions: not as "self-owners". Children would achieve recognition as self-owners when they were ready and able to pay for such recognition.

Strong feelings about desired outcomes make many "anarchists" reluctant to discard their masters. Leftist "anarchists", with their concern with social outcomes label the curtain their master hides behind the "collective will". On the right you can see authors struggling with social control mechanisms that will make those darned "other people" behave properly without the strings being so obvious that their audience can follow them to the not-so-invisible hand of the puppeteer. A feeling of personal dependence on a master's beneficence makes it even harder to shake off. Many authors, for instance, can't imagine a world without (their) monopoly privileges. To really think like free people we need to check behind all of our curtains to make sure master isn't still hiding somewhere.

Don’t recall how I found the site The Anarchist Alternative, but I do appreciate the essay discussing children’s rights. Minor nit, though: outside of a planned cesarean section, a woman doesn’t “decide to give birth”. My understanding – ah, verified! – is the fetus decides.

I found this late last night, browsing when I should have been sleeping. In the style of Schoolhouse Rock, but with a much more important message, here’s Pirates and Emperors (or, Size Does Matter):


Direct link to vid on YouTube

If you’d like more information about the video, Pirates and Emperors has some (but the site’s driven by javascript – popups for new pages); or, check out Eric Henry’s web site.

It’s good to see content like this getting out there, even when it isn’t coming from a full-fledged family member. I would love to be part of a creative project like this!

Freedom is also the knowledge that if you accomplish nothing today, in the eyes of the harried world, it is of no consequence. I once spent an entire afternoon on my belly, following a shrew through the leaf litter. .... In a way, I learned more from that "insignificant" creature in that one afternoon than I did in all my years sitting in the prison called "school." The lessons the shrew taught me are not lessons that I can put into words; they are lessons of the heart. I encourage you to take the opportunity to notice the small things and let them teach you your own lessons.

Lessons of the heart ... these are, indeed, the most important lessons available to us. They inform us in deep ways, ways that are more relevant to our unique way of being than anything else possibly could be.

Primarily because I appear to be a little behind Mr. Allport on the path, I suspect – Opening Up to Paradise: My Journey to an Optimistic View of the Future. His opening paragraphs [emphasis in original; hyperlinks not reproduced here]:

For most of my life, I believed that a healthy world – a world characterized by love and freedom, instead of by widespread emotional damage and tyranny – was an impossibility. Even thinking about such a world, much less longing for it, seemed a waste of time. There was nothing I wanted more, yet I could not get past the seeming impossibility of such a world.

Eventually it occurred to me that this was not a productive approach. I began letting myself think about the world I wanted, and forcing myself to see it as a real possibility. I let details of this world sink into my awareness; I thought through the implications of various aspects and approaches. I made the conscious choice to see creating such a world as a problem to be solved instead of as a poignant fantasy that could never be fulfilled.

I was surprised at how difficult this mental transition was.

One immediate hurdle was the unspoken prohibition against even acknowledging the desire for a world of love and freedom. I firmly believe that a world of love and freedom is exactly what every person is born expecting and needing, yet taking the idea seriously is suspect; it is seen as a sign one has gone over the edge, or at least wandered too far from the beaten path. A sane person accepts the world as it is – a vale of tears – and does not expect this basic character to ever change. Or so common opinion has it.

I have been trying to work on similar issues on two levels: for myself, as well as in my interactions with my children. MAL has occasionally accused me of sounding like Cartman’s mom, but that seems to me to be a not entirely deserved charge. I view my efforts as being more in line with Retta Fontana’s – trying to create and operate within a loving framework. It is sometimes very difficult for me, particularly since I am still trying to build or find my own inner peace. But I have found thus far that emotional honesty in a loving context works well. Which is not to say that this is easy, especially since my self-control doesn’t always measure up. These words from Fontana have been very helpful to me, though:

We must be the change we wish to see in the world. If we would know peace and freedom, we must offer those things, provided, of course, that freedom is recognized as the assumption of responsibility.

We must offer our children the dignity we wanted from our own parents. When I honestly and humbly ask for help from my children as I would any friend, their response is a beautiful thing. If I act with coercive force in our relationship, I alienate them as I would any friend. Drawing a line in the sand creates an equal and opposite reaction every single, stinking time.

I still teeter between taking certain parental actions because “that’s the way it’s been done for generations” and forging my own path based on my goal of raising my children to be successful adults in a more loving world. Seems to me that looking to the past for guidance can easily slide into an argument from authority conundrum; and I sometimes wonder how much of that “conventional wisdom” of prior generations is actually harmful psychological programming that few are able to successfully shed. Similarly, it seems to me that my and Lobo’s decision to unschool our children is but one of many ways parents can avoid a lot of the destructive programming that society can inflict on young minds.

As I said, this isn’t easy for me. My own course of discovery has led to shifts in parenting that the snolfs have picked up on, and sometimes asked about. Fortunately, I have never had any problem acknowledging my own fallibility with them; they are remarkably understanding, in the main. I am grateful to individuals like Allport and Fontana who are willing to share their crazy, idealistic, naïve ideas, which I find immensely helpful on many levels. [And now you know one of the reasons why this Salon issue is so late.]