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Liberalism's Failures in Family Matters
Last week there was some discussion on the recent Lindsay Hoax. I would like to bring up some criticisms of liberalism, and why I think societies that follow it as a singular goal will inevitably suffer from the problems we see (birth rate collapse, sex wars, etc.)
On a newsletter warning of the dangers of sports gambling, Oren Cass wrote:
The liberal ideal relies on many huge assumptions. Two of those assumptions are that people will choose things that bring themselves happiness and that externalities (or times when an individuals choices impact others) will be easy to detect and foreseeable. In reality, people will choose things that bring them temporary pleasure or help them avoid temporary discomfort over things that will bring them greater happiness and peace. And maybe the executives of the sports gambling company and the 19 year old with a phone can consent to enter into a relationship where the 19 year old gives the executives all his money, but the 17 year old girlfriend did not consent to being beaten more often. (After the legalization of sports betting, home team losses increase domestic violence by 10%.)
Another assumption of liberalism is that we enter into the world as individuals, without owing or being owed anything. Marc Barnes of New Polity wrote:
It's hard to believe, but the Enlightenment thinkers really thought that pre-historic humans didn't band together in family or social units. And this complete falsehood is somewhat required to make liberalism work.
The word "atomization" is thrown around as a negative. No one has friends to help them, we have apps that facilitate economic contracts with others to help us move houses or buy groceries if we're sick. Children move thousands of miles from their parents to pursue economic opportunity, leaving behind free family babysitting for the kids they'll never have. Men and women are supposed to be equal, but we're obviously not the same kind of human at all. Atomization is the founding assumption of Liberalism though.
Saying atomization is negative is accepted. But to say that Liberalism has negatives is still very unpopular. The only alternative to Liberalism is Authoritarianism, and Authoritarianism is always Bad.
But there are places where Authoritarianism is needed, particularly in family life. Parents have authority over their children. More than that, there is a pre-existing bond between parent and child to which neither consented. A child cannot consent to their parents before they are born. A parent has no idea what their child will be like before they are born. And yet, by virtue of biological reality, they are committed to a shared project of helping the child become a good adult. The child cannot grow into a good adult without this relationship.
In the latest edition of Dr. Leonard Sax's The Collapse of Parenting, Sax describes a family that comes to him for help. The 12 year old daughter has suddenly shown signs of ADHD. Her teacher filled out a form indicating that the 12-year-old's concentration levels are off the charts in a bad way. The girl's family doctor prescribed her ADHD medication to help alleviate her symptoms. They worked, but also left her jittery with heart palpitations and anxiety symptoms.
Sax's first question to the girl's family is how well she slept. Confused, the parents said the girl slept ok, but when Dr. Sax drilled into the details the girl nonchalantly said she was on her phone until 1-2 AM most nights. "Of course, doesn't everyone?"
Dr. Sax told her parents to take her off the Amphetamines and instead keep the kid's phone in the parents' bedroom at night, starting 9 PM. The parents' response was, "Oh, no, we couldn't do that! She'd be so angry at us."
The parents found it easier to give their 12 year old daughter a schedule II drug than to set a simple limit that would have made her healthier. And Dr. Sax says that this is a very common example that he sees often at his practice.
In The Collapse of Parenting, Dr. Sax theorizes that American parents, especially Liberal/Leftist parents, are uncomfortable with the idea of wielding authority over their children. Longitudinal studies show that kids who have strict but unloving parents grow up without knowing how to form loving relationships of their own. Kids that grow up with permissive parents are incapable of balancing a checkbook and make poor decisions due to a high time preference. The best kind of parenting is both loving and strict - a combination the Literature refers to as "Authoritative Parenting." Authoritative Parenting used to be the default, but among left-leaning families there has been a surge of parents fearing that they are overriding their kids innate preferences. Proper parenting is illiberal, and therefore immoral.
One young child arrived to the practice with a sore throat and fever for three days. When Dr. Sax asked the child to open her mouth, she refused. Dr. Sax looked to the mother, and said, "I need your help to examine your daughter, could you help encourage her to open wide?" The mother responded, "Her body, her choice."
The liberal order worked when it was founded on an illiberal order. When humans acted like humans most of the time, raised their children like humans, formed natural hierarchies like humans, liberalism worked fine. I think it falls apart when the government tries to impose liberal presuppositions on every-day human interactions. It falls apart when people think they are supposed to act perfectly liberal in every social interaction. A society based around consent instead of love (willing the good of one another) will fall apart.
I love liberalism, in a way. I love how it shaped American culture for hundreds of years. But I think the evidence points to a need for a safeguard somewhere, similar to the separation of Church and State. A separation of State and Hearth? Americans need to parent better than Rousseau.
Tocqueville famously believed that religion, particularly Christianity, was necessary in America to create and sustain our Democracy. It provided shared values. People had shared common ground beyond their mere desires which which they could identify what is good for all. There is a benefit to having an ultimate Authority, in Heaven, who everyone agrees to serve but who seldom gives specific commands.
Maybe the problem will resolve itself, as atheists fail to reproduce and the deeply religious take over again. Or maybe the cat's all the way out of the bag. But the evidence seems to point towards Liberalism being good but insufficient, and the next best thing needs to be figured out before we lose the goods of Liberalism as well.
I don't think either of those¹ should have been the first choice. Maybe ask why she wants to stay up until 0100-0200, and address that.
¹Beware the false dilemma!
Getting the girl to sleep more is the first choice. It is the only way to improve her concentration and the path to health.
They did ask why she wanted to stay up that late. The answer was that she was scared to miss a message and that any delays in responding to messages might decrease her social status.
How to address this? It is unusual for kids to be more attached to peers than parents. You might scoff, but in the sixties a survey of high schoolers found that, if all their friends wanted them to join a club but one of their parents said no, most would not join the club. Most said that they would respect their parents' decisions over peer pressure. Now most kids don't even understand the concept of their parents having a say at all. Kids need security in an unconditional relationship, and that relationship is with their parents, not with the teenage totem pole.
Small-n and possible bias due to typical-minding, but this was not at all what I observed in my environment growing up (and I would expect the schools I went to to be biased for some measure of well-adjustedness if anything).
What was the exact survey question/setup? Did it come with a guarantee that if you join, your parents will never find out? Otherwise, this would have been confounded by fear of consequences. (Many people are not confident that they can maintain a lie in front of their parents, which could be internalized like "I wouldn't want to live with the guilt".)
More than 50 years ago, Johns Hopkins sociologist James Coleman asked American teenagers this question: "Let's say that you had always wanted to belong to a particular club in school, and then finally you were asked to join. But then you found out that your parents didn't approve of the group. " Would you still join? In that era, the majority of American teenagers responded No. They would not join the club if their parents did not approve.
These figures are provided in Edwin Artmann's doctoral dissertation, "A comparison of selected attitudes and values of the adolescent society in 1957 and 1972," North Texas State University, 1973.
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True, but there is a difference between 'address why she isn't sleeping' versus 'ignore her goals and just issue a decree'.
That would not have been my first guess: I would have suspected either the standard circadian-phase differences¹ or bedtime procrastination².
If someone finds 'loss of social status from not responding to messages quickly enough' to be a worse outcome than 'lack of sleep leading to poor concentration'; the answer isn't to force her to endure the former, but to find a way that she can avoid both. (Note that when she is fully grown, she won't have parents there to limit when she can respond to messages.)
¹There has been much research showing that adolescents tend to function on later time-zones than other ages (possibly as an evolutionary adaptation ensuring that someone would always be awake to tend the camp-fire and watch for hostile mega-fauna), and that later start times for secondary schools would be beneficial.
²A phenomenon in which someone stays up late because they perceive that that is the only time that they have to themselves.
Personally, I think that the answer is to take the phone away so that the child can see "oh, actually this isn't that bad". Fears about ostracization like that are almost always severely overblown, in my experience. But I think what is clearly not the answer is for the parents to refuse to parent (putting limits on the phone) because "oh she'll be mad if we do that".
Like I can respect that one might not want to turn to taking the phone away (and damn the consequences) as a first resort. But if it comes down to it, your One Job (TM) as a parent is to put your foot down when your kid is doing something self-destructive. Whether or not they will have teenage moodiness about it doesn't even remotely factor in IMO.
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