Childhood
Should kids be allowed to play unsupervised? At what age should people start working? How are childhood conflicts best resolved?
In Albion’s Seed, a book that anyone who enjoyed this book should check out, David Hackett Fischer posits that the United States was founded by four core groups whose differing views of children’s wills produced varied approaches to child rearing.
- The Puritans largely felt that a child should have their will broken and that the will of a child was intrinsically evil. That said, they also put a lot of trust in their children and worked to foster their independence and professional development (as can be seen in practices like “sending out”).
- The Southern colonies largely felt children should have their wills indulged and directed to specific outcomes. While male children were given a wide degree of freedom, female children were held to strict standards.
- In addition to broadly respecting children’s inherent wisdom and inner light, the Quakers believed in nudging children’s character toward the “correct culture” and were generally very protective around the ideas and perspectives with which their children were permitted to interact (similar to today’s helicopter parents).
- The back country people believed the flames of a child’s will should be stoked and fondly reinforced willful behavior and independence (while not bestowing too much respect—it is from this cultural set that “little shits” emerged as a term of endearment for children).
These varying cultural views on children produced meaningfully different types of adults in each culture. The same goes for any culture you choose to build or reinforce, so think carefully: What do I want adults within this culture to become, and what do they need to experience in childhood to nudge them in that direction?
To spark your creativity around these questions, we’ll briefly explore them through the lens of three clusters of issues: play and authority, sex and death, and developing engaging, interesting adults.
Approaches to Play and Authority in Childhood
Whether and how cultures encourage children to play and relate to authority figures has a profound effect on how people ultimately navigate power dynamics and push boundaries as adults. Rather than present a dry outline of different approaches, we’ll share how Malcolm’s family traditions around play and authority exemplified a certain cultural view, which provides an illustration of one approach that may help you better think through an optimal approach to your cultivar’s child rearing ways.
For context, while Malcolm’s family had Calvinist origins, they came from the backcountry rather than the Puritan variant of Calvinism. This means their approach to child rearing focused on strengthening the will of the child.
Knowing from popular media that parents should be mad when their kids get in trouble at school, I (Malcolm) was shocked the first time my mother picked me up from detention and didn’t show a whiff of disappointment. Instead, she told me that elementary school teachers made almost no money and that other adults did not respect them. “If they were competent,” she continued, “they would have gotten better jobs.”
My mother insisted that I would not become the man I needed to be if I learned to be obedient to such people. So far as my mother was concerned, as long as I acted with integrity, got decent grades, and protected the weaker kids, detention for disobedience was a virtue. She told me people had to earn my respect and never expect it because they happen to be in a position of authority over me.
This led my brother and me to have a pretty unusual relationship with our teachers growing up—to the extent that we found a recent report card from my brother in kindergarten in which a livid teacher reports that she had passed half a year thinking my brother was partially deaf, only to realize he just selectively ignored everything she said. I even remember being scolded myself once when a teacher told my mom I had “done the right thing” by getting an authority figure to help when I saw a kid being bullied. On the way home, my mom chastised me, emphasizing that “nobody respects a pathetic little snitch” and that I should have taken matters into my own hands (“That’s what fists are for!”).
Below is an excerpt from my brother’s kindergarten report card, which was written while we were living in Italy (a country that demands obedience from children):
At first we thought he had a hearing disability because of his slowness in responding to directions. He gave the impression of being vague and disposed to day-dreaming. Now that we know him better we realize he is deliberately turning a deaf ear to everything he does not wish to hear. It does not interest him to listen unless it is something which appeals to him. … He can be extremely disobedient; authority means nothing to him whatsoever. He has struck up a friendship with an equally mischievous companion and together they cause havoc. …
Nevertheless, he is a dear little boy. … Better luck in September”
While people from cultures that expect children to respect arbitrary authority figures would read the above letter and assume that my brother was a “spoiled” child, those from cultures like ours would see him ignoring this patronizing figure who expects mindless obedience as a sign of willingness to push back against unjust authority even when the odds are against him.
Essentially, we were systematically taught to neither respect authority figures nor trust them to solve problems. While I think my mom went way too far, I see the cultural wisdom in this strategy. First, she wasn’t wrong: Kids over-value the perspectives of teachers and are probably better off deciding for themselves how the world really works and what is moral vs. immoral.
What will become to someone if they grow up being taught to trust authority figures to accurately discern right from wrong? This has been a pervasive child rearing strategy for the past few decades and the susceptibility it has bred into the population makes it easy prey to the cultural supervirus.
Cultures that don’t allow their kids to work out conflict for themselves risk creating individuals who will consistently appeal to authority to solve problems—little fascists. Just imagine the type of adult that will emerge from a child who always calls upon their teacher (an authority figure) to resolve conflicts. It should come as no surprise the epidemic of I-want-to-speak-to-your-manager-style Karens exploded just a few decades after the public school system normalized teachers as arbitrators of disputes (as opposed to letting kids duke it out on the play yard). Nor should it be a surprise that shriekers have learned to react to every offense by lashing out in anger—not with the offender, but with the authority of the mob in hopes that it, in turn, punishes the offender on their behalf.
In my family, it was expected kids would go out, have fun, get hurt, and work it out on their own. This wasn’t the product of some intentional parenting technique. My parents weren’t watching us from a distance, saying: “Yes, dear; look at them learning how to navigate each other’s boundaries and build personal resilience” (more like “Those little shits just drove the four wheeler into the pond again!”). Rather, their culture had subconsciously programmed them to raise kids with grit who took risks, knew their limits, chose their battles wisely (for the most part), and addressed conflict head on, in the moment, rather than submitting complaints, tattling, or developing resentments. That’s the power of cultural traditions around child rearing. Desired outcomes aren’t limited to kids of overachieving parents.
It is up to you to determine an approach to authority, play, boundary pushing, and conflict resolution that works well for your culture, its values, and its priorities. Just be aware of the downstream consequences of encouraging children to appeal to authority in a world in which the authorities may not always have their or your culture’s best interests in mind.
Approaches to Sexuality and Death in Childhood
Another question any culture must ask is when you should introduce a child to certain concepts like sexuality or death. When considering your own cultivar’s approach to this question, think carefully about how you want them to contextualize sex and death in adulthood.
As mentioned earlier in the book, Quakers were so slow to do this that when adult Quaker women went to doctors’ offices, they would often describe anything from their neck to their belt lines as their “stomach” and anything from their belt line to their feet as their “ankle.”
Calvinists went in an entirely different direction, being outright pornographic in their writing to the extent that it was censored when published up until this century.[[169]](#_ftn169) Calvinists were so upfront with concepts like death that historians have found cases of parents asking their kids to stand over empty graves and contemplate their deaths.
To a great extent, the predominating modern pop cultures go so far as to avoid teaching children about death at all. Doctors fight to keep terminally ill patients alive at all costs in many cases, even if doing so only means a few more days of life (at the expense of the patient’s personal comfort and their children’s inheritance). People don’t “die” they “pass away” or even “transition” (which makes death all the more confusing given changing gender norms). Dead bodies are whisked away and cremated. Arguably, this produces adults unable to deal with death and dying—perhaps because it feels like something went wrong, as though death isn’t supposed to happen.
Default pop cultural approaches to sex are even more confusing. When not politicized, sex is often framed as a currency for validation. If your culture doesn’t present alternative childhood framings for death and sex, it will—in many developed Western nations—produce adults with some pretty useless cultural toolsets for approaching sex and death.
How do you want your culture to relate to sex and death? Create traditions and practices that shape people into adults equipped to behave as desired. Because we, personally, want a culture that sees sex as a practical affair and death as a normal part of life, we (among other things) adopted a dog—the Professor—who we will both breed and eventually lose to old age. Throughout her life, the Professor will teach our kids about sex and death in a manner that reinforces our culture’s values without any tedious pontification on our part.
Approaches to Creating Interesting Adults
A final question about childhood we did not think to ask until recently is: How can we prevent our kids from becoming dull adults? We recently met with a childhood friend and for lack of a less crude term, she was the most “basic” human with whom we have ever interacted. She didn’t have a single unique idea in her head. Worse, she was a poor conversationalist, which compounded the problem.
Chickens used to qualify as “free range” so long as they were given the option to leave their cages. A trick chicken farms would use was to raise chickens in cages and only open adult chickens’ cage doors to give them the “option” of leaving. Being acculturated to staying inside their cages, the chickens would never leave, making them functionally caged chickens from the perspective of how much space the chicken farmers needed. Human children face a similar risk.
After discussing why this person had become so boring, we realized that, like one of these chickens, her entire childhood was spent living in one place with a static friend group. She had never needed to build a unique personal identity or learn to engage with new people. An underrated cultural question may therefore be: Are you OK with your children maintaining a static friend group? If not, how do you coax them into the types of difficult situations that will sharpen their interpersonal skills?
Anecdotally, we have noticed that people who grew up constantly moving or around cultures wildly different from their own (a different country, for example) typically have the most engaging adult personalities (so long as their parents encouraged them to engage with those other cultures). Is it worth a child’s potential resentment to subject them to moves like these, which are admittedly difficult? It all comes down to how much your culture values interesting adults.