Dissident approach to child rearing

[Verl]

He has a cat profile picture.
You do not.
The truth is self-evident in that regard.
Simple as.

[Hamamelis]

I have many children (more than two) and have applied what I wrote in this thread. It worked very well. None of them wore diapers, none of them sat in a stroller for even a minute, none of them had a pacifier, all of them lived predominantly off mother's milk for at least 18 months. Apart from reaching motor & social development milestones faster than the 90th percentile, they are also much quicker to learn to go to the toilet on their own (usually before their second birthday). There was never any shit on the floor, and I have never had to change a diaper.

I cannot prove anything (how would I), apart from redirecting you to informative websites that you could find on your own. As said above, I agree with not trying to min/max your child and not feeding a baby foods that are pointless to feed to a baby. However, the point of this thread was to collect informed opinions about how to raise your child in ways that differ from the mainstream ideas. If some people's vision is to feed their child raw milk, I am at least interested in hearing the results, or the reasoning. What I don't need is some faggot talking about Salmonella.
I still don't know if Calico was joking or if he was being serious when he took a comment about diapers being superfluous to "don't let your children shit on the floor". If he was serious he's retarded and should be neutered.

On topic, a point I forgot in my initial post: a baby should sleep next to it's mother, and parents who put their babies in cribs, at worst in different rooms, are torturing their child. In general, I have found a good way to deal with pre-verbal children is to think about how the situation would be handled by a chimp, and then do that.

[anthony]

On topic, a point I forgot in my initial post: a baby should sleep next to it's mother, and parents who put their babies in cribs, at worst in different rooms, are torturing their child. In general, I have found a good way to deal with pre-verbal children is to think about how the situation would be handled by a chimp, and then do that.

I knew a guy who did this. He also slept on the floor with just a mat beneath them. Seemed to work all right for him.

[Guest]

Thoughts on discipline and spanking?

[anthony]

Thoughts on discipline and spanking?

I believe that the overwhelming majority of punishments and discipline meted out against children are just adults venting their own neurosis, frustration, and confusion against the helpless. As I just said a bit in the shoutbox today I had a very "disciplined" upbringing, but my family had no well developed ideas on why they should behave in such a way. The discipline had no end in mind. It was not purpose oriented. They were basically cargo culting the idea that serious upbringing is less fun and involves yelling.

[Guest]

Thoughts on discipline and spanking?

I believe that the overwhelming majority of punishments and discipline meted out against children are just adults venting their own neurosis, frustration, and confusion against the helpless. As I just said a bit in the shoutbox today I had a very "disciplined" upbringing, but my family had no well developed ideas on why they should behave in such a way. The discipline had no end in mind. It was not purpose oriented. They were basically cargo culting the idea that serious upbringing is less fun and involves yelling.

The worse part is that I'm pretty sure adults only spank kids because they are turned on by it. This seems to apply to other "discipline" as well. As you stated the behavior is non-logical, it has no end in mind. That means it's probably related to some weird instinct. If you find dominance/submission/discipline hot at all your parents probably do too since it seems to be highly heritable.

The most mind blowing thing about this hypothesis isn't the claim itself, it's the broader implications of it. It says something huge about the capacity of people to either a) lack any introspective capacity whatsoever or b) lie en masse without shame and b2) have no capacity for principle or reason and no shame towards the hypocrisy of rightfully holding sexual abuse to be horrible while "disciplining" their children because it "feels right" in a way they know is erotic.

In other words they either don't know why they really do it or they do but the average person is such a depraved liar and hypocrite that they don't care.

[anthony]

The worse part is that I'm pretty sure adults only spank kids because they are turned on by it. This seems to apply to other "discipline" as well. As you stated the behavior is non-logical, it has no end in mind. That means it's probably related to some weird instinct. If you find dominance/submission/discipline hot at all your parents probably do too since it seems to be highly heritable.

The most mind blowing thing about this hypothesis isn't the claim itself, it's the broader implications of it. It says something huge about the capacity of people to either a) lack any introspective capacity whatsoever or b) lie en masse without shame and b2) have no capacity for principle or reason and no shame towards the hypocrisy of rightfully holding sexual abuse to be horrible while "disciplining" their children because it "feels right" in a way they know is erotic.

In other words they either don't know why they really do it or they do but the average person is such a depraved liar and hypocrite that they don't care.

I'm a big Alice Miller fan. I'm inclined to think that while it can be sexual it's more often just a result of unconscious internalisation of the failings and shortcomings of their own parents. I used to be irrationally judgmental and disapproving around children until I got out of university and started unfucking my life. If I kept going I would have become my father. As you say it's a question of introspective capacity. And as Miller said I believe that the way to develop that is to learn to sympathise with yourself and your own experiences. I didn't stop being an asshole to my younger brother by thinking about his feelings. I stopped by thinking about my own. Then I was able to consciously see myself in him and didn't hate him for it anymore.

If you grow up being treated like shit over something you'll probably treat people like shit over it. That's how we're built. Not an inherently bad thing. We're built to hold social patterns. Not a good thing when circumstances change. The time has come for new standards. Every generation the old vestigial ones hold on the more damage they'll do.

[Guest]

I'm a big Alice Miller fan. I'm inclined to think that while it can be sexual it's more often just a result of unconscious internalisation of the failings and shortcomings of their own parents. I used to be irrationally judgmental and disapproving around children until I got out of university and started unfucking my life. If I kept going I would have become my father. As you say it's a question of introspective capacity. And as Miller said I believe that the way to develop that is to learn to sympathise with yourself and your own experiences. I didn't stop being an asshole to my younger brother by thinking about his feelings. I stopped by thinking about my own. Then I was able to consciously see myself in him and didn't hate him for it anymore.

If you grow up being treated like shit over something you'll probably treat people like shit over it. That's how we're built. Not an inherently bad thing. We're built to hold social patterns. Not a good thing when circumstances change. The time has come for new standards. Every generation the old vestigial ones hold on the more damage they'll do.

I'll admit I have no idea what you're talking about. I have nothing in my life that relates to what you're talking about, and the things I've read suggest that humans in general don't work like Jewish psychoanalysts thought: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/obs...ture-wins/

There's at least a 50% chance, probably more (but this is obscured on surveys due to introspective issues or lying) that you, or a random person, finds spanking & discipline erotic. This is probably because women want to be raped and spanked for bad behavior by their husbands -- 80% have rape fantasies of course. It's easy to see how this was adaptive -- wife spanking was legal and expected in all of Western history until about 1960. It would seem it was also a part of Ancient Greek pederasty. So any "strict" "disciplinarian" parents that seem to love smacking their child's ass and holding them to standards which are ridiculous for an adult -- incredibly sus. And again we're back to the massive implications of this -- do these people have no introspective capacity, or are they the most shameless liars and hypocrites imaginable? It's got to be one or the other.

[anthony]

I'll admit I have no idea what you're talking about. I have nothing in my life that relates to what you're talking about, and the things I've read suggest that humans in general don't work like Jewish psychoanalysts thought: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/obs...ture-wins/

There's at least a 50% chance, probably more (but this is obscured on surveys due to introspective issues or lying) that you, or a random person, finds spanking & discipline erotic. This is probably because women want to be raped and spanked for bad behavior by their husbands -- 80% have rape fantasies of course. It's easy to see how this was adaptive -- wife spanking was legal and expected in all of Western history until about 1960. It would seem it was also a part of Ancient Greek pederasty. So any "strict" "disciplinarian" parents that seem to love smacking their child's ass and holding them to standards which are ridiculous for an adult -- incredibly sus. And again we're back to the massive implications of this -- do these people have no introspective capacity, or are they the most shameless liars and hypocrites imaginable? It's got to be one or the other.

Have you read Lloyd DeMaus by any chance?

[Guest]

Have you read Lloyd DeMaus by any chance?

No. Psychoanalysis is nonsense though. I've read Freud and he's wrong, simply.

[BillyONare]

@anthony Thoughts on Alice Miller being an abusive mother? Very hard for me to understand.

[anthony]

Have you read Lloyd DeMaus by any chance?

No. Psychoanalysis is nonsense though. I've read Freud and he's wrong, simply.

It's not nonsense. It's personal sense. Look for The Science here and you just become an idiot throwing studies around addicted to drugs that don't work.

---

@anthony Thoughts on Alice Miller being an abusive mother? Very hard for me to understand.

What's not to get? She was an abusive mother. She was a very emotionally disturbed woman and she acted it out throughout her troubled and unpleasant life. As I just said above. Her work is personal sense. Not science. All of her books are her own personal process of making sense of herself and the world. The pretense of objective and detached distance in her earlier work is just necessary obfuscation needed to approach an appreciation of her own feelings and experiences. She admits this herself in her later work.

Calling any psych wrong or looking to refute or debunk them is to misunderstand how all of this works, even if many psychs disagree. It's all personal visions of the world. There is no psychology, only psychologists.

Like how Miller came to understand herself through working through the lives of other people I came to understand myself by working through Miller's working through of others, and then through my own study of Miller herself.

[BillyONare]

You think you would abuse your kids? Seems absurd.

[anthony]

You think you would abuse your kids? Seems absurd.

I think I was an awful older brother for a long time. I found Miller in my early 20s and I believe that, as she would figure, once I started sympathising with my childhood self I was able to jettison a bunch of retarded forced anti-values I picked up around my own "childish" behaviour and then stopped being such a cunt around children. Miller started writing books when she was nearly 60. She spent most of her life with this stuff unresolved in her head. And even then you're never really 100% out. She was largely done with her family by the time she started making sense of her feelings towards children and childhood.

If you haven't looked into the issue at length yet her son actually talks a bit about this and you can see it on youtube. He's also a psych, and he endorses his mother's theories. Just not her practice.




I really like this Daniel Mackler character. Fun youtube channel. Remember. No psychology, only psychologists.

[Hamamelis]

Not having read Miller, I think Anthony is right. Certainly about psychology, but also about the recurring inflicting of the same "abuse" on children over generations. You can only break this cycle if you recognize your own child self in the child before you.
So when Billy asks, would you abuse your child, then the answers is yes. You will make mistakes (which is "abuse" in the sense I'm using here) when raising your child, and these mistakes will be heavily mirror the mistakes your own parents made.

[BillyONare]

Ah I misunderstood. I thought she wrote them before having her son.

[Guest]

I'm shocked that people here are taking a Jewish Freudian woman seriously and are rejecting science by asserting postmodern knowledge relativism.

If you're honest with yourself you'll find that spanking and discipline turn you on and that the only reason you would ever do that to your kid is that you find it erotic.

Somehow this has gone in one ear and out the other, the massive implications of it are ignored, and in its place you're discussing "ideas" that aren't even coherent.

[BillyONare]

Would you say that Lloyd DeMause and Alice Miller lack intellectual virtue? If so, please explain.

[JohnnyRomero]

One of the major themes I have repeated when discussing future child rearing plans with my wife is providing a solid educational foundation for our children while encouraging and enabling their individual interests, cultivating their inborn talents, abilities, and tendencies. Kid shows interest in animals? Buy him some zoology books, take him to the zoo and out into the woods, talk to him and teach him what you know. Kid shows an interest in sports? Buy him equipment, play with him (even if you aren't that good and/or lack interest yourself), go to every game and yell yourself hoarse cheering him on. Kid likes computers? Teach him to code, buy him programming books, and show interest in whatever he's working on.

I think that there are two opposite poles of poor parenting when it comes to children and their interests: on the one hand, you have overbearing parents who try to push their children towards something that the kid doesn't want in order to live vicariously through them; and on the other hand, there are the completely lax and passive type of parents who don't seem to give a shit about their kids. My viewpoint is that a parent is like a farmer, and each child like a mystery seed: you don't know what they are going to mature into at first, but with careful observation and interaction you can gradually discern their nature, what combination of your and your wife's genes went into creating them, and your job as a parent is to ensure that they are healthy, strong, and well-constituted, not just in the universal human baselines of bodily and spiritual health (e.g. good diet, exercise, intelligence, critical thinking, healthy morals and worldview, etc.), but also in ensuring that they are well-turned-out in terms of their own individual nature and particular excellencies. Whatever my children seek to do, I will encourage and support them in it, on the condition that they give it their all, don't half-ass it, and always pursue greatness. I refuse to abandon any of my offspring to the fate of mediocrity and "just getting by."

Also, I agree with much of what Billionaire said except for the part about music. I can see where you're coming from, but I tend to agree with Plato on the inherent value of music, being that it encourages youths to think in terms of order, harmony, and beauty, and thus helps them to order their own souls. I think that learning and practicing music has an inherent value for the soul analogous to the inherent value for the body (and the soul as well) that playing sports does.

[anthony]

One of the major themes I have repeated when discussing future child rearing plans with my wife is providing a solid educational foundation for our children while encouraging and enabling their individual interests, cultivating their inborn talents, abilities, and tendencies. Kid shows interest in animals? Buy him some zoology books, take him to the zoo and out into the woods, talk to him and teach him what you know. Kid shows an interest in sports? Buy him equipment, play with him (even if you aren't that good and/or lack interest yourself), go to every game and yell yourself hoarse cheering him on. Kid likes computers? Teach him to code, buy him programming books, and show interest in whatever he's working on.

You read John Gatto? He was a great teacher because he just did this with every student he had. If a student had a strong interest in something he'd give them as much time as they wanted on the condition they were mastering that subject. One example I remember, a student into comic books. He didn't just let him read comics all day. He told that kid to learn how the comics industry works top to bottom, independently. Some dry detached class on business probably would have filtered this student, but through organically following his own interests he learned all about one particular business/industry with no motivation or discipline problems and ended up successfully working in it. This system of Gatto's worked fantastically. Gatto was raking in teaching awards until people started looking closely at his classes and realising why his students were so successful. Can't have renegades betraying the program like that.