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Notes -
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’m pretty sure you can raise children in orphanages and they turn out fine (They may whine, more on that later).
You just assume that parenting matters. Why? I don’t think anything my parent did made me taller or smarter (aside from feeding me and not hitting me with a rock), so why would it have made me more well-adjusted (or whatever parenting is supposed to achieve) ?
I think the main reason for the
is just everyone obsessing about parenting. The idea that, if you fail to provide the exact balance of ”loving, but strict“(plus ridiculous amounts of money, time and attention), you should not have kids.
Adult children are always whining that their parents either were or were not strict enough. They, as well as parenting experts should be ignored, and apathy should again become the cornerstone of parenting. Before contraception, kids used to just show up, and life just went on as usual, with just slightly more crying and laughter.
Now that a woman has to make a conscious decision, it opens the door to all this anxiety and neuroticism and talk and judgment about what should be an easy, natural and popular path. What’s needed is less your strict authoritarian father than a deeply apathetic one, who just goes “I don’t care”, “It doesn’t matter”, “Have another kid if you’re worried about this one”, “Of course it’s not your fault our son’s a junky”.
Because if you spend any time around children at all it is immediately apperant which ones have more engaged parents/caregivers.
The idea that it doesn't matter is another one of those ideas so manifestly absurd that you need to be an academic to take it seriously.
How do you separate it from a genetic influence?
Most academics think parenting is very important, they’re into the rousseauian blank slate, nurture not nature. Is this your opinion as well, groups that fail are just badly parented?
Genetics provide a high water mark that a human can aspire to, but there are obvious ways a bad parent could cut that short. Concussing the kid, starving the kid, locking up the kid so they never learn language before that critical period is passed.
There is a large body of work suggesting that not setting rules and limits for kids is one of these blunders that prevents a kid from reaching their full potential.
I did note that feeding and not-hitting-kid’s-head-with-rock was a non-optional part of parenting.
After that, I don’t trust this body of work about parenting styles. It sounds like another spurious explanation for group differences, of the kind that produces new and revolutionary interventions in schooling every few years.
Think of it less as a parenting style, and more as a complete neglect of acculturating a child into society. If a kid never learns a word is spoken before sometime between 6 and 12, they will never understand language syntax. Never ever, no matter how smart their parents were or how dedicated their speech therapist is.
If a kid never has a single rule enforced by a grown up and is shielded from the consequences of their actions, are they capable of learning executive function and how to behave in a society which has authority over them? I'm really surprised if you think it doesn't matter, when it is clear from several fields that there are "critical periods" of brain development, and if certain stimuli are not provided during those periods that the window to learn certain skills closes.
Is this language example an analogy? I’m not proposing to lock children outside in a stall for the first 12 years of their lives and never letting them hear a human word. And if it is an analogy, I don’t think a permissible parenting style is comparable to being raised by wolves.
People used to beat their kids. My father was occasionally severely beaten with a hose. Not because my grandfather drank – he didn’t – but because that’s what the parental-educational fashion was at that time. He would know, my grandfather was a schoolmaster. Teachers back then thought they could beat the stupid and evil out of children – and they had a duty to. At some point before he retired, he got a directive from the education ministry that teachers weren’t to do that anymore. He told me he had to let go of a few of the old-timers, who could not stop beating children – they had always done it this way, this was what education was to them, teaching children how to behave in a society that has authority over them.
So after the beatings era, the experts came up with a new theory, where strictness was excoriated, damaging the child’s ‘true potential’ etc. In my opinion they were not any more correct than their predecessors (because parenting and schooling don’t really matter), but at least the unnecessary beatings stopped, and that’s a small win, because it’s unpleasant for both parties, and you could break something.
And now the experts have turned the wheel again and apparently children need strict rules or something. I am skeptical.
The language example is something that has happened several times in highly abusive situations, and has been studied in detail, for example, see Genie. Not enforcing any rules at all may be a similar form of neglect, lesser in severity, but still with consequences.
Yes, people used to beat their kids. As far as I can tell, that is ok, as long as the parent shows love at other times.
The experts have not turned the wheel, the experts have always said "Strictness and love," it's just interpreted through the popular self-help books differently through the generations.
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