Highlights from The Sovereign Child by Aaron Stupple
Highlights from this book
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There is a sense among parents that kids should have limits set on things they want, because they want it and regardless of what that thing is. I call this sense that it is wrong for a child to satisfy their wants the Greedy Child Fallacy.
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Those who worry about the algorithms used by today’s tech companies need to tell us how their algorithms are fundamentally different from all of these prior advances in persuasion. Tech’s critics like to say it’s the sheer number of users, or the precision of the fine-tuning, or that it’s embedded in our devices, or that the algorithms are designed from psychological research. But the question remains: At what point do any of these features suddenly take control of our minds and actions?
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Boredom is bad for the same reasons pain is bad. Both indicate suffering. Both indicate a problem that needs solving. And neither is a virtue in its own right. We wouldn’t arbitrarily expose a child to pain with the argument that pain is an inevitable part of life that they need to “learn to deal with.” Such cruelty teaches children that, not only are we indifferent to their suffering, but they should accept their suffering as well. Instead, when a child comes to us in pain, we always investigate why, partly for our own peace of mind, but also to give the child context to understand the pain. When we ourselves understand that the injury is minor, we explain to the child that it will heal, and this understanding is soothing. And of course we take a few steps to mitigate the pain and prevent it from happening again. We should apply the same basic process for all suffering, including boredom. All suffering is caused by some form of ignorance, and it can be mitigated and outright prevented by some form of knowledge. All of parenting can be summarized as supplying the child with the knowledge to reduce their own suffering.
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Rules and limits are often enforced to “make kids understand” certain hard truths about the world, such as that you can’t always get what you want, or that life isn’t fair. In reality, rule enforcement can’t teach about the world. As we’ve already seen, the enforcement of rules and limitations diverts the focus away from the problem itself and toward the parent and whatever contrived consequences the parent is willing to impose. Rules are confusing.
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The goal is for children to be free of limitations set upon them by external “authorities” of knowledge. But that’s not to say we pretend they are totally free from constraints. We want them to operate within the constraints of the natural world. Indeed, they have no choice but to accept gravity and the hardness of concrete. And we want them to operate within some of the constraints of the interpersonal world. Specifically, there are two kinds of good interpersonal constraints: Other people’s boundaries. We don’t want kids to think they can demand anything they want from others. Constraints that they accept voluntarily, such as the rules of a game or conventions of politeness. In general, we want kids to understand the natural world, to respect other people’s boundaries, and to accept the interpersonal constraints they understand, and reject those that they don’t.
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The real question for parents transitioning to no rules is not if, but when. Is a sudden change at eighteen years old really a good idea? It’s relatively common for even the most seemingly well-adjusted college freshman to fall apart in some way, drop out, and think themselves to have started real life as a failure, saddled with debt and disappointment. Relative to this dramatic phase change that we all take for granted, is it so radical to wean a child off of rules completely prior to leaving the home?
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Human knowledge growth is likewise the story of solving an endless sequence of problems through a process of variation and selection. But with human knowledge, the problems are not limited to survival—they can be about anything, either in the real world or imagined. And instead of mutation, the engine of variation is conjecture, or creative guesswork. Selection consists of, first, criticizing all of our candidate guesses and, second, choosing only the guess that seems to work best. Often, this involves actually trying out the guess in the real world to see if it solves the problem in question.
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Taking Children Seriously is simply the recognition that, in the realm of parenting, the source of knowledge does not determine its validity, that knowledge does not require authoritarian justification. On the contrary, knowledge creation is an entirely egalitarian enterprise—anyone’s conjecture might solve the problem at hand, anyone’s criticism might be reason to choose one path over another. Kids’ ideas are just as valid as adults’, and they should be taken seriously and accounted for in any solution to any conflict.
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The bucket theory of knowledge isn’t just partially wrong, it is completely wrong. All new knowledge comes from within and none from without. Knowledge is always created, never consumed. Therefore, creativity is central to all understanding.
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influential than features like gravity or mass. Our ability to cause any physically possible transformation means that we can impact anything and everything we care about for the better, from home life to the subcultures to which we belong to how we organize society. It’s not wishful thinking to say that our choices and values must account for the existence of people more so than any other living thing. For instance, if we develop moon colonies, we can easily keep dolphins out of it. But there is no way to keep the actions of earthbound people out of it. A single person down on earth could develop any number of things that affect the moon colony, such as a new political theory, or a new technology, or a new form of entertainment. If you care about something, you must also care about people, because people will think up things that could come to affect it. Knowledge creators have consequences for the entire universe, and that gives us cosmic significance. Since children are fully capable of creating knowledge, they are full-status people who are just as cosmically significant as adults.
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Our ability to cause any physically possible transformation means that we can impact anything and everything we care about for the better, from home life to the subcultures to which we belong to how we organize society. It’s not wishful thinking to say that our choices and values must account for the existence of people more so than any other living thing. For instance, if we develop moon colonies, we can easily keep dolphins out of it. But there is no way to keep the actions of earthbound people out of it. A single person down on earth could develop any number of things that affect the moon colony, such as a new political theory, or a new technology, or a new form of entertainment. If you care about something, you must also care about people, because people will think up things that could come to affect it. Knowledge creators have consequences for the entire universe, and that gives us cosmic significance. Since children are fully capable of creating knowledge, they are full-status people who are just as cosmically significant as adults.
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Despite our ancestors’ pervasive efforts to stifle innovation, ancient people eventually formed cities, achieved technological successes, and established institutions such as mature religions, nation-states, and sophisticated traditions of language and art. But even then, the dominant mode of knowledge transfer focused on preservation and stasis rather than improvement and dynamism. Early civilizations thought that all knowledge came from the past, a fixed quantity that could only decay over generations if the people weren’t too careful. The present time was always considered a Fallen Age.
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If, on the other hand, children get a taste of true freedom from the beginning, if they get enjoyment out of solving their own problems in their own way and orient themselves toward interests that don’t conform with the majority, then this will need to be driven (often beaten) out of them. This may explain why many adults are so quick to crack down on things that kids find particularly enjoyable. Having an outsized amount of fun almost universally signals a straying from the static norms. Conformity is almost never wildly fun. This is especially true when the source of enjoyment is new, such as a novel form of food, technology, or media. A simple rule of stasis is to be watchful and stamp out excessive enjoyment among children.
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There is no reason a voluntary apprentice model can’t be restored and updated for the modern world. Education could focus on real-world training around genuine interests in a way that is guided by providing value to others. College graduates, on the other hand, often enter adulthood hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. This debt forces them to narrow their options to uninspiring jobs rather than taking risks on starting new ventures that might solve problems in novel ways and raise the prosperity of everyone. Instead, college graduates are incentivized to play it safe, to never experiment, and to accept a middling quality of life. This overall outlook—a life of low expectations, where the main virtues are persistence and conformity rather than dynamism—gets passed onto their children as a tragic holdover from the static societies of yesteryear.