Using religion for a moral education

There are a great many parents who think that by sending their child to a Christian school or 'play-school' after church, will result in them developing a 'good Christian ethic'. I would like to repudiate this suggestion. The reason is that parenting lessons ought to convey reasons why something is good or bad. It is by conveying such lessons, and being proven right, that the child earns respect for the parent. More importantly, they develop knowledge, so they become a master of their own destiny. If their moral education is dogmatic assertions or disciplinarian action by parents, several problems arise:

1. The child does not develop knowledge, but fear of parental reprisal, or self-doubt because of their inability to deal with the situation.

2. The child does not learn to integrate their life experiences into principles, thus to be able to differentiate when to do what in different specific contexts. Fortunately, religion is not the only education they get, but to the extent that it dominates their 'moral education' is the extent to which it will impact upon their value judgements.

3. Their intellectual development is impaired. Faith is not an education, its an assumption of it without evidence, without foundation. It can only incite delusion and arrogance.

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It does not help that society's values are consistent with a Christian education. This makes it harder for people to develop more reasonable values, as they can't discern Christian values from Christian pretense. For more insights on religious education for parents, refer to my religion blog.

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Andrew Sheldon www.sheldonthinks.com

Should you love your child unconditionally?

From my blogs you will be struck by the need to fight an intellectual war against many facets of society. There is a great deal wrong with society. Those flaws are a product of our education system. Education however starts with parenting. Misguided psychologists are misleading parents into teaching parents that they ought to give their children unconditional love. The whole concept is a rationalisation for the following reasons.

1. They establish an unhealthy dichotomy between mind and body. They say that the child is not bad, that they did bad things. This notion of course comes from reality, where man is a sinner and has to renounce material possessions. Philosophers have developed many such dichotomies to explain or justify their flawed conceptions. The reality is that bad actions are the consequence of bad values or flawed thinking. The consequence of such thinking is that a child is able to rationalise that 'I am not morally responsible' because I am a good person, who happens to do bad things. It also allows a parent to live in self-denial, which is sure to get worse as the parent's unconditional love is demonstrably flawed as a parenting strategy.
2. The other issue is the idea that values are intrinsic. Things are not good or bad for a reason, they are just good or bad....because someone said so, or because you feel it. This is of course the first step in sabotaging your mind because it causes you to discard any justification for values. It results in people not developing a theory of values. In relationships I have had tremendous difficulty dealing with partners with whom you cannot negotiate values because they have no underlying reasons for theirs, and see no need for reasons. My precondition for negotiation is thus a basis for their condemnation of me, as I am making them feel vulnerable. This is the same damage you are doing to the self esteem of your child.

The question then becomes how does a parent morally 'condemn' their children without destroying their self-esteem. I suggest there are several steps:

1. Stop making your values the standard of value. Treat them as if they are independent moral agents, and are expected to be so.
2. Stop conveying the fact that you are always right, even if you are, as it creates a self-righteousness which implies (in the context of society) the sense that you give primacy to your consciousness at the expense of the facts of reality.
3. Negotiate values rather than impose them; i.e. Convey that you are both searching for truth. Morally condemning a child does not convey any respect for facts, and creates an unhealthy focus upon their flaws.
4. Validate the child when they get things wrong. It is a matter of justice to convey when and why people are good and bad. There is a load of nonsense which says you should praise 100x more than you criticise. Arbitrary nonsense. Just have reasons, and empathy and you will be ok.
5. Do you disparage a child, and convey arguments like 'When I was young I made the same mistake...but I learned that....".
6. Teach a child to anticipate - that is to think. My neighbour said of his child when he crashed the car for the second time "He'll eventually learn". My guess that so long as the parent and society don't teach kids to think, to anticipate problems, to prepare, to plan, he probably won't learn, or he'll be so diminished in self-esteem, he will fear learning and acting, and will pursuit concrete self-indulgences which make him feel good in the moment.
7. Don't be a hypocrite. Live the values you teach. It ought to be apparent to most parents that kids have a keen sense for picking up any discrepancies in their parents thinking. If you model hypocrisy, you will be modelling self-indulgence.
8. Don't disparage your kids. My parents modelled argument for me. When I used it against them because of their inconsistencies, they did not disparage me; they simply denied me validation (i.e. justice). You are not in competition with your children. Preserve some respect for reality, and yourself by not disparaging them. Intellectually lazy. Your kids can be your best teacher. Don't kill the messenger.

From this last point I hope you can appreciate the difference between good and bad conditional love. Healthy or objective 'conditional love' is about conveying logical values. Just as you should be giving objective conditional love, so should the child. They ought to love you for reasons, as you should love them for reasons. Logically asserted values conveys knowledge to the child, and gives the child a basis to love and respect the parent. You would be surprised how agreeable or reasonable a child can be when they respect a parent. Some of you have no idea...so in 10 years, when they leave the home, you are glad to see the back of them....for decades complaining about it. Oh my wife turned them against me. Incidentally, your romantic relationships ought to be founded on the same principles.

One needs to acknowledge that just as the field of philosophy is perverted, so is the field of psychology. There are good and bad psychologists. It all comes down to underlying values of the person. My favourites are Nathaniel Branden (self esteem) and Mark Levine (child psychology). It is rare that I can read a science book and not find flaws. These are two scientists who affirm in one's mind that there are intelligible rational people in the world. I'm sure they are others, but only 10% of books leave me thinking I have nothing to say to improve them. These people tend to be more empiricially or evidence based, i.e. They have recognised patterns in children, etc, but they have also retained healthy values. In more abstract topics, the 'pickings are slimmer'.

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Andrew Sheldon www.sheldonthinks.com

Why Bill Gates should not be president

I think kids need to understand that adults are not perfect, that they make mistakes. It doesn't matter how important people are, they all make mistakes. There are a number of reasons why people make mistakes:
1. Negligence or carelessness - whether because of low tolerances for truth, a lack of curiosity or a time deadline
2. Contradictions in their thinking - We all possess a pool or hierarchy of knowledge. The extent to which we are able to frame reasonable or valid responses depends on the extent to which we are able to integrate our knowledge into non-contradictory ideas, as well as our ability to tie those ideas to concrete reality. By doing so we become consistent and grounded.

Children need to recognise that parents lead highly specialised lives, so they are inclined to develop a sense of pride in a specialised area of their lives, particularly their careers, but often neglect other areas of their lives like being a good parent, partner, etc. Another reason people fail to act effectively in these roles is that they were not well prepared to take on those roles because they were not developed as effectively as might be ideal. This will also impact on your standards and expectancies as children of your parents, so its important you maintain a 'sense of reality' as opposed to just pleasing your parents. The best approach is to accept them for who they are, and attempt to understans why they are like that so you can learn how to differ. In exploring those issues you might touch a raw nerve, but persist on another day after your parents have had a chance to frame an answer. Your persistence will force them to deal with the issues, and help them to be better parents. There is no reason why parents cannot learn from children. Paradoxically as it may sound, the answers like within the parents, but often the kids might be better at framing the questions. Because the parent is likely re-visiting the thinking they failed to do as kids.
I want to explore some of the errors by Bill Gates on parenting.
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Andrew Sheldon www.sheldonthinks.com

Parental repression

One of the favourable developments over the years has been the reduced level of repression in people. Do you find that your parents just refuse to engage? There are certain topics that they will evade or dismiss? The chances are they are repressed. By that I mean they refuse to acknowledge facts of reality or premises that contradict their 'world view'.

I think this is interesting because there are some countries which are refreshingly not like that. The southern Mediterranean countries like Greece being one of the best examples, along with the Philippines. These countries have their own issues, in the sense that values are skewed towards emotional self-indulgence. the polar opposite is Korea and Japan, which are rigid, but highly organised.

You might wonder - Why is this important?
The reason its important is that repression has consequences. It is going to result in a number of behavioural patterns:
1. Needy kids who require validation
2. Self righteous kids looking for validation and to disprove the parents

You might argue that this can be healthy in the sense that it motivates kids to be better. But the reality is that positive role modelling can do the same without a legacy of these issues.
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Andrew Sheldon www.sheldonthinks.com

The importance of parenting

I think most parents would appreciate the importance of parenting, but I would suggest parents differ a great deal on how to parent, or what they are prepared to do. There are of course different approaches that you could take:
1. Traditional: You might take the attitude that 'I will teach my kids the same as my parents modelled for me because I didn't turn out too bad'. I actually consider this a variant of the next approach.
2. Pragmatic: You might take the attitude that I will do whatever works. I would suggest that most parents take this approach, and it tends to involve the provision of sustenance, clothing, shelter, security, and if you are lucky private school and a bit of a leg up buying the first house or car. I consider this a very low-maintenance approach to parenting, and its not a bad approach if the parents are good role models and have good communication skills. It fails abysmally if they don't because they end up resenting their kids for any burden they place on them. Effectively they are saying 'I didn't ask for this', but implicitly they did; by not being engaged in their kids lives. This dubious approach to parenting tends to define very limited notions of what constitutes parental responsibility. What they never realise is that its not a matter of quantity, but the quality of time for their kids. Kids can amuse themselves, interact with others, whether siblings, friends, or others, but the interaction with a role model is more important. The other failure of the pragmatic approach is its failure to establish any standards of what constitutes good parenting. They have no measure, or more likely very superficial measures, and often those standards are 'peer pressure'. Oh what would the neighbours think if they knew my son stole stereo equipment, or if their daughter got pregnant, or their son was arrested for some indiscretion. These are calls to action, but parents that need to wait for these hurdles to be breached really are disengaged from their children. Usually its due to a failure to communicate or to provide effective role modelling.
3. Loving: There are those whom argue that all that a child needs is unconditional love. I am not a fan of this approach. These people are in effect saying that humans are intrinsically worthy of love regardless of their actions or character. To be is to be valued. Of course they can't consistently apply that philosophy because life requires choice, thus preferences and standards to differentiate. How do you differentiate if you don't have standards (reasons). So these parents end up defying their 'causeless' love. Life is about the pursuit of value in all its forms, material, spiritual, romantic. The earlier a child knows that the more self-reliant they will be. A child is not maligned by a lack of 'causeless love', they are maligned by a contradictory or causeless absence of it. That absence is likely to not undermine their capacity to be loved, but undermine their efficacy in their thinking at a time when their capacity to articulate their fears, or to understand the pertinent issues is beyond them.
4. Rational: This approach might strike people as cold, but actually there is no dichotomy or contradiction between thoughts and emotions in a person (or couple) with integrity, with good self esteem. Generally the people who exude such confidence are those people who were raised with structured, goal-orientated lives. Some people are better than others. Some got the message too late, for others it was contradictory, for some it was compartmentalised, and for others they had to discover the principles from books, and thereafter struggled for years to correct their erroneous thinking, knowing that it was wrong but not fully comprehending why. A great many people just lack the mental efficacy or ambition and give up. And their is a relationship between those values. The rational people is the person who recognises that life requires deliberate rather than arbitrary action. They realise that what man is (his nature) determines the type of action he should or ought to take. There are a great many philosophers who struggle with the idea that you can get a value proposition from a fact. Does not the fact that humans have a rational faculty imply that one should use it? Of course. All the time? Maybe not. Answering that question is the role of philosophy.

I of course support the last proposition that 'man should be understood in order to define what is the best approach to parenting. This might sound commonplace, but its surprising the extent to which this is not done. The reason why this approach is not heralded as the 'best approach' is political. If you imply an 'ought', a lot of people get scared that government will impose values on parents. Of course this arises because you have a collectivist government imposing seemingly 'objective' principles on people. No good ever came from imposing things on people. The 'good' is that which is understood rather blindly accepted. That requires negotiations. Governments and corporations tend not to take the time to do that because they think that its not productive. The problem of course is that they think short-range. They fail to see that once you 'really' change a person, you have an advocate who is much more powerful than the sponsor because they are an existing relationship or come from the same perspective as the other prospective adherents. The failure to grasp this is the cause of all the world's brutality, whether perpetrated upon kids, armies or terrorists. What do we know about Bin Laden. We know he was trained to fight by the Americans. The American military - the so called defenders of freedom - are the fascists. Arab cultures are just poorer cousins. America is a dying star. Unless it rediscovers its founding values it will continue to go backwards, and of course I mean that in a collectivist sense. There is nothing stopping Americans from being successful however, since they can always export their wealthy. That's one reason why governments support globalisation. The other reasons are not pretty! The problem knowing so much is you easily go off topic. :)
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Andrew Sheldon www.sheldonthinks.com

Is it wrong to hit your children?

Parents since time became have debated the issue of whether it is appropriate to hit your children. There is no question in my mind that there is no need to hit children. There are several reasons for this:
1. Striking a child does not convey an argument: It tells the child that they way adults achieve what they want is to impose their will on others. This is the foundation for creating a bully rather than a compliant child. The parent of course feels compelled to raise the stakes as the child becomes desensitised to physical threats.
2. Striking a child conveys low regard for the child: Parents generally strike a child not for gratification but because its easy. Its a simply solution to a problem. It conveys the notion that they are not invested in their children. You might ask why? Well I dare say they didn't think having children would be so much work. They didn't think their child would be so rebellious. The fact that they are is a reflection on the parent. It shows that a parent is out of their depth, that they draw no sense of efficacy from raising a child. This has to impact on their self-esteem, if they already didn't have self-esteem. Parents with low self-esteem tend to produce children of low self esteem.
3. Striking a child shows no understanding of child psychology: Parents need to understand the motive power of children. The intent is no to manipulate them but to guide them. A child is a human being, and as such they have certain needs. They want to be loved or appreciated, they are curious, they want to explore and understand, and they have certain capacities to understand certain information at a certain age. It goes without saying that parental guidance has to be age-appropriate. If the child is not getting the message, its more likely because your message or approach is not age-appropriate. For older children, its readily apparent that kids appreciate their toys, they like being active, they like being the centre of attention.

Might the argument be made that confining a child to a bedroom or denying them toys is equally damaging to their psyche. I think that is true to some extent if the parent fails to convey to the child the reason why they are being punished. It it also important that a parent conveys the information before the child misbehaves. A great many parents will strike a child for not fulfilling their expectancies. This is not an instance of educating the child, but of externalising responsibility. If a parent does not give the child queues they can't expect a child to get it. The most important point is to empathise with the child.
The biggest mistake parents can make is to think that parenting is a natural gift bestowed on them. It is a choice and it is a challenge that requires skills. You have no built-in parental instincts. You need the tools to perform the task well, and if you are prepared you will derive a great deal of efficacy and pride from the task. The reward will be darling children that have every chance to become productive members of society. Children are pretty reslient, but get it seriously wrong and you will be in constant shouting matches, breaking up fights with their siblings, bailing them out of jail or identifying their body at the morgue.
I'm not suggesting that this is purely the result of striking your child. No parent is all bad, if only because they need moments of appreciation or love from their child, those maybe there are parents who resent every monment with their child, and vice versa. The implications are clear though - if you put junk into a child's mind he will unlikely come out a genius. If he is a genius, its not because of you, but inspite of you. Its because he developed positive standards of comparison, not from reflecting on your skills, but by comparing them with the skills of parents with good values. Children born into gettos I dare say have less possibility of developing such positive standards of value, but its not difficult. People are poor for different reasons.

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Andrew Sheldon www.sheldonthinks.com

Take it or leave it, or comment on it

I have not yet placed a lot of content on this page. Actually there are a great many notes I've written over the years which will take time to post. In the meantime I wanted to acknowledge that I am not a parent, but I have been a child, and have certainly observed parents in different countries.
The argument will be made by someone that "How can you offer advice on parenting when you dont have children". Well I would make the point that I dont profess to be an expert in all areas, if any, though I think I could offer insights that would stretch a great many experts for their lack of thinking skills.
I would make the point that the US managed to fly to the moon without having done it before. Was that really a great leap? I believe it was. It was an exercise in critical thinking because it demanded a great deal of contingency planning. For those not convinced, then I would make the point that most space shuttles explode because of small issues like loose tiles.
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Andrew Sheldon www.sheldonthinks.com