On A Gift for My Daughter

Harry Browne had a huge influence on me because he successfully achieved three of my goals: he became financially independent, he designed a life of maximum personal freedom, and he travelled the world an expatriate. I learned how to invest through listening to the archives of his radio shows and reading his book Fail Safe Investing. Another of his books— How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World— was a big influence on my decision to sell my business and leave my career behind.

Many years ago I read an article of his called A Gift for My Daughter. I revisited the article after becoming a father myself, as I have a daughter too. I found the article very thought provoking because I disagree with Harry’s outlook on parenting.

Harry Browne’s Article

In 1966, Harry Browne was divorced from is first wife and had lost custody of his daughter, who was nine years old at the time. He was writing a column that was published in various newspapers, including one in the town where his ex-wife and daughter lived. When he found out that his column was going to come out on Christmas Day of 1966, he sent a Christmas card to his daughter that said “your Christmas present will be on the editorial page of the Santa Anna Register on Christmas morning”.

In the article, Harry explained that the gift was an idea:

If I could give you just one thing, I’d want it to be a simple truth that took me many years to learn. If you learn it now, it may enrich your life in hundreds of ways. And it may prevent you from facing many problems that have hurt people who have never learned it. The truth is simply this: No one owes you anything.

He goes on to explain the significance of this statement as he sees it:

When people do things for you, it’s because they want to — because you, in some way, give them something meaningful that makes them want to please you, not because anyone owes you anything. No one has to like you. If your friends want to be with you, it’s not out of duty. Find out what makes others happy so they’ll want to be near you.

He describes how he uses this knowledge in his own life:

A great burden was lifted from my shoulders the day I realized that no one owes me anything. For so long as I’d thought there were things I was entitled to, I’d been wearing myself out — physically and emotionally — trying to collect them. No one owes me moral conduct, respect, friendship, love, courtesy, or intelligence. And once I recognized that, all my relationships became far more satisfying. I’ve focused on being with people who want to do the things I want them to do. That understanding has served me well with friends, business associates, lovers, sales prospects, and strangers. It constantly reminds me that I can get what I want only if I can enter the other person’s world. I must try to understand how he thinks, what he believes to be important, what he wants. Only then can I appeal to someone in ways that will bring me what I want.

Unchosen Obligations

I appreciate Harry Browne’s emphasis on finding win-win relationships with other people. He wanted his daughter to know that it's better to find positive ways to incentivise people to give you what you want, rather than rely on their sense of guilt or obligation. As a practical matter, relationships are more fulfilling when based on positive incentives than on obligation. This approach informed Harry Browne's whole outlook on life. In How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World, he applies the idea of finding win-win solutions to problems in business and personal relationships.

Underlying the idea that people don't owe you anything is the philosophical principle that unchosen positive obligations are invalid. Nobody owes you anything, and you don't owe anyone else anything, unless you make a deal and agree some kind of debt or obligation.

I agree with the approach of finding win-win solutions and not relying on guilt about owing you something. When it comes to adult relationships, nobody owes you love, or attention, or interest, or respect, or anything else. You have to earn these things in a positive, win-win way with other people.

But A Gift for My Daughter is a strange article because it shows up one of Harry Browne's blind spots regarding obligations. As something that he wrote for his daughter, it is strange that he chose to emphasise that nobody owes anyone anything.

When it comes to consenting adults who have no previous history with each other, it’s true that nobody owes you anything. If you are romantically interested in someone, they don't owe you romantic interest back. If you want to do business with someone, they don't owe it to you to do business with you. If you want people to read your work, they don't owe you their attention. But that isn’t true of all relationships.

Chosen Obligations

Although there are no unchosen positive obligations, there are chosen positive obligations. People can owe each other things. You can have positive obligations to other people, if you choose to take on obligations through your actions. For example, if someone borrows money from you, then rightfully they do owe you something: money. If that person glibly stated that “nobody owes you anything”, that would be annoying. You'd be justified in saying “hey, you borrowed $500 from me and I want it back. You do owe that to me”.

I appreciate the Harry Browne wanted to emphasize that there's no way of forcing other people to feel like they owe you. But it is possible for people to owe each other if they do something to incur a debt or an obligation through their own actions. The most important obligation you can have in life is that which comes from the act of having a child. This is what Harry missed.

Imagine the following scenario: You are on a boat out at sea, standing on deck with a friend. Your friend is leaning over the side of the boat, looking at something in the water. Now imagine you give him a push- enough to knock him into the water. Your friend yells for help. Obviously it would be immoral for you to yell back down, “I just want to let you know that nobody owes you anything in this life”, and then sail off.

If you push your friend into the ocean, then it's on you to save him. You must do whatever you have to do to save this person from their fate, which would be to drown. You must throw him life jacket, or launch a dinghy, or throw down a rope, or jump in yourself. You must get him out of the water. And if you fail to save him and he were to drown, it would be on you because you pushed him in.

We all understand intuitively that if you push someone off your boat, then through your action you have put that person in danger and it's on you to get them out of danger.  If you don't save them and they drown, then that's murder. In these circumstances, the idea that “nobody owes you anything” is not true.

So there are circumstances in which you legitimately owe somebody something, even if you've never made a contract. The story of your friend on the boat is an example where there was no contract about who's going to save who from the ocean. But by pushing your friend in, you have put them in danger. It’s your fault and you have to fix it because you're the cause of the danger. You are responsible for that person's safety now that you've pushed them into the water.

The same logic applies to parenting. When you have a child, you bring someone into a situation of helplessness. By creating a new life you have put a child into a situation of mortal danger who never asked to be put in that position. You put them there as the parents, so it's your responsibility to get them out of that danger. You have to look after your children and give them everything they need to become fully independent, healthy adults with all of the faculties that they need to survive in the world and live their own life. That responsibility comes because you're the one who put them in that situation.

Parents do owe their children a huge amount. That's why it bothers me that Harry wrote this article to his daughter.

The Damage Of Divorce

The backstory to Harry writing this letter is that he went through a very acrimonious divorce with his first wife and had lost custody of his daughter. As far as I understand, Harry initiated the divorce and part of the settlement was that he did not have visitation rights.

Divorce is extremely detrimental to children. Statistically, parents divorcing is a risk factor for a whole range of destructive and self-destructive behaviours in children, such as depression, drug abuse, and self harm. It is also linked to poorer health outcomes in later life. That doesn't mean that it's inevitably going to lead to certain outcomes. You are not fated to a particular life from your childhood, but you do face additional, unnecessary challenges if your parents divorce.

Unless there is violence or physical danger, no child wants their parents to break up the family. My parents split up when I was very young. The break up of my family was one of the worst events of my life. Given this context, Harry’s letter to his daughter seems negligent to the point of cruelty. Parents owe their children a huge amount. Harry was not there for his daughter. He was not providing her with protection or a positive role model as a father.

From the child's perspective, if a parent is willing to give up custody to get a divorce (as Harry did) then this sends a terrible message to the child. Through his actions, Harry effectively told his daughter that his dislike for his wife was so strong that he was willing to give up seeing his daughter in order to get away from his wife. Therefore, his relationship with his daughter was less important to him than getting away. To add insult to injury, by leaving he left his daughter in the care of the same person that he judged so negatively. He wasn’t willing to suffer his wife, but he was willing to let his daughter do so alone. That's a tough message for a child.

Before he presumed to pass on any life lessons to his daughter in a public article, I think Harry could have communicated a lot more humility under the circumstances. He could have apologised for the mess of the acrimonious divorce, taken responsibility for his part in it (especially since he initiated it) and emphasised to his daughter that as an innocent child, she was entirely blameless in the break-up of her family. Without that kind of preface, any advice that he might see fit to offer would have fallen on deaf ears, if I were his daughter.

The Problem with Personal Liberation Movements

Harry was not alone in having a blind spot about his responsibilities as a parent. The problem with his approach goes to the heart of the postwar personal liberation movement, which Harry was a part of. A core weakness of theories of personal liberation since the second world war has been to view children as a barrier to liberation.

When it comes to consenting adults, removing barriers to personal freedom is ethically neutral. I accept the argument that people should be able to live lives of their own choosing and should not necessarily be constrained by traditions handed down to them. The important distinction is between traditions that others impose on you and responsibilities that you incur through your actions.

If you pursue personal liberation without a clear understanding of the obligations that you incur through your actions, then you can end up seeking liberation from the responsibilities of parenting. This is to imagine that the reduction of freedom that comes with parenting is somehow imposed on you (by tradition or someone else) and ignore the fact that it is a result of your own actions.

Now that I have a daughter, I can't just do whatever I want in life. I have to make choices in her interest. For example, I would like to continue our life of perpetual travel, but our daughter benefits from more stability, so we’ve chosen to limit our travel.

I appreciate Harry's message that nobody owes you anything when applied to consenting adults. But it is possible for people to owe you something through their actions, and parents certainly owe their children. In this context, Harry’s gift—coming from a father who was unable to see his daughter because of an acrimonious divorce that he instigated—must have been a bitter pill.

What I Would Write To My Daughter

If I wanted to give my own daughter a message that was a “gift” in the way that Harry did, I would write this:

I just want you to know from me, as your father, that you don't owe me anything. You never asked to be born into our family. When you grow up, I hope you will choose to spend time with me and share things with me about your life, your thoughts, and your dreams. But you don't owe me anything. We gave you life, but you are free. Your life is your own. It's yours to do with as you see fit.

You will encounter many people who try to convince you that you owe them something. People are going to try and convince you that you owe them something just because you were born in this country. They are going to put all sorts of labels on you, like being a citizen. They will expect you to take part in all sorts of rituals to do with the nation and politics. You'll have to navigate all those weird obligations that people try and put on you in your own way, and decide what is the best course of action for you. But I want you to know that you don't owe those people anything either. You're an individual. You are born morally free of any obligations. The only things that you owe are the obligations that you choose to take on through your own actions and choices.

A Critique of Jordan Peterson's Parenting Principles

One of the chapters in Jordan Peterson’s popular book “12 Rules For Life” relates to parenting. The chapter is called, “Don't Let Your Children Do Anything That Would Make You Dislike Them”. His main argument is that you mustn't be afraid to discipline your kids, even though they won't like it. As he puts it:

Parents who refuse to adopt the responsibility for disciplining their children think they can just opt out of the conflict necessary for proper child-rearing. They avoid being the bad guy (in the short term). But they do not at all rescue or protect their children from fear and pain. Quite the contrary: the judgmental and uncaring broader social world will mete out conflict and punishment far greater than that which would have been delivered by an awake parent. You can discipline your children, or you can turn that responsibility over to the harsh, uncaring judgmental world—and the motivation for the latter decision should never be confused with love.

Thus according to Peterson, if you fail to discipline your children, they will have a bad life because other people will punish them. How does his idea of discipline translate into parenting practice? 

Peterson recommends a series of principles for parents which sound reasonable and measured. However, there is a big difference between the title of each principle and how Peterson interprets them in terms of actions as a parent. As I will demonstrate, the way that Peterson interprets his principles does not at all follow from the principles themselves.

Use of Force

Peterson advocates using the least force necessary to enforce parental rules. This sounds reasonable. For example, if you've got a rule which is “don't hit or bite other kids”, then you should use the least force necessary to enforce that rule. That would clearly imply that as an adult, you should never hit your children because, if your child is hitting another child, the least force necessary to stop that from happening is certainly not hitting your child, or smacking, or anything like that. You can simply restrain your child. That is the least force necessary.

But that's not what Peterson thinks the least force necessary means. Peterson is a fan of physical punishment; he thinks it is important and that parents shouldn't shy away from doing it. He says that you should use the least amount of physical punishment which he thinks is necessary. However, he explicitly sanctions using physical violence against children. His arguments for this are frankly pathetic, especially coming from somebody who is a research psychologist who ought to know the literature on this subject, but who seems to have wilfully ignored it. For example, Peterson says, 

For the child who is pushing the limits in a spectacularly inspired way, a swat across the backside can indicate requisite seriousness on the part of a responsible adult. There are some situations in which even that will not suffice, partly because some children are very determined, exploratory, and tough, or because the offending behaviour is truly severe.

Another example:

we should note that some misbegotten actions must be brought to a halt both effectively and immediately, not least so that something worse doesn’t happen. What’s the proper punishment for someone who will not stop poking a fork into an electrical socket? Or who runs away laughing in a crowded supermarket parking lot? The answer is simple: whatever will stop it fastest, within reason

Rather than be explicit in this second statement, Peterson leaves the reader to draw his conclusion for him, which is that parents must use corporal punishment on children. 

Yet his conclusion does not follow from his premises. His idea is to use the least force necessary, which is never spanking. In this example of stopping a child from running away in a parking lot, the least force necessary would be to restrain the child by the arm and stop them from running away. The least force necessary would not be to hit the child. In the example of stopping a child from sticking a fork in an electrical socket, the least force necessary would be to remove the fork from the child. Of course, you could also put childproof coverings on your electrical sockets.

One wonders what the parents are doing in his examples that allow such dangers to develop. What is going on beforehand that leads to a situation in which a child is repeatedly sticking a fork in an electrical socket? Where are the parents? Why does the child still have the fork? Why is it happening repeatedly? In order to bolster his case for parental violence, Peterson chooses dramatic situations of children acting out with no reference to parental responsibility in the lead-up to the problem. He does this because it is impossible to justify parental violence, so he must act as if parents have no role in creating the problem. Poor examples aside, the point is that Peterson is inconsistent with his own principle because at least force necessary is not corporal punishment.

The False Dichotomy

Peterson argues that the choice parents face is between either using physical punishment, or overlooking misbehaviour and leaving your child to their own devices. That's what he thinks the two options are for parents. On this view, either you neglectfully leave your child to run wild and stick forks in electrical sockets, or you discipline your child by physical punishment. This is a false dichotomy. 

Anyone can find non-violent alternative approaches to discipline within a few minutes of searching on the internet. I recommend Parent Effectiveness Training (PET) by Thomas Gordon and RIE, which is best expressed in the podcasts and books by Janet Lansbury. Peterson doesn’t provide a critique of these approaches, he simply ignores them. 

Peterson doesn’t address any of the arguments of academics or parenting specialists who advocate non-violent parenting, just as he doesn’t address any of the evidence on the harm of spanking. His book is written as if none of those arguments exist. Instead, he repeatedly resorts to rhetorical tricks to bolster his argument.  He says “it is wilfully naive to think that you don't need to use physical violence on kids” and he calls it “wrong. Too simple.” These rhetorical techniques are ways of trying to dominate the reader into agreement through fear. When Peterson confidently asserts that his opponents are the naive ones, many will believe him. Who wants to think of themselves as wilfully naive?

The reality is that Peterson himself is the wilfully naive to advocate physical violence in light of the massive amount of evidence on the harm of spanking. As Dr Noam Spencer explained, summarising 9 peer-reviewed meta-studies on the effects of spanking:

The empirical case against spanking is strong, and made stronger by the absence of any empirical case in support of spanking. There is not one well designed study I have seen that links spanking to long term positive outcome.

Spencer summarised the current state of research in the title of his summary article: “The Spanking Debate Is Over”. The empirical studies demonstrate clearly that spanking leads to negative outcomes including lack of impulse control, aggression, depression poor performance in school and worse health outcomes. 

Jordan Peterson is a psychology professor, he must be aware of these studies. He doesn't bother to refute them in this chapter or say anything about them. He just completely ignores them. This is either wilful ignorance or plain deceit by a psychology professor. Both are inexcusable.

Parenting As a Pair

Although there is much to criticise about Peterson’s advocacy of aggression against children, I agree with him about his principle that “parents should come in pairs”. Peterson emphasizes the fact that parenting is very stressful and that if you do it alone then you're more likely to lose your temper on your kids. He advocates empathy towards single parents, especially those who are single parents owing to circumstances out their own control. However, his point is that parenting is better when you do it in pairs. 

Peterson doesn’t go into detail about the evidence that supports this principle, but there is a wealth of empirical studies that show that children simply do much better in families that stay together. Long term statistical studies comparing the wellbeing of children raised in families that stay together versus children whose parents split up, show a clear benefit for children of having two parents.

Therefore, if you want to have kids you should stay together because it is important for your kids' wellbeing. I don't have any argument with that part of this chapter except to say that it's interesting that Peterson didn't focus on this more. It is a well-established finding that parents who break up have a detrimental effect on their child’s development, so if Peterson’s aim is to improve the wellbeing of children, why does he deal with this topic so superficially and yet focus so much on sanctioning the hitting of children? As we’ve already seen, all the empirical studies show that corporal punishment is detrimental to kids, so Peterson’s focus is doubly strange. 

He merely mentions that parents should come in pairs, but I think this should have been his main argument. It is the only argument that he makes about parenting that is clearly backed by the evidence.

Understanding Your Psychology As A Parent

Peterson argues that parents should “understand their capacity to be harsh, vengeful, arrogant, resentful, angry and deceitful”.

When I first read this principle, I thought it was an injunction to self knowledge. I thought that Peterson was going to argue that if you want to have kids, you've got to be aware of your own dark side and you have to be conscious of it. As a parent, you will be in a position of enormous responsibility. You must be aware of your capacity for aggression and you must control it.  You must be aware of your potential to act out, and you must not do so. You can control it. We all have the capability of acting with extreme violence. We all have the capability of assaulting others every day and yet we don’t. We can control it. That's what I thought he was going to say. But his argument is very different.

Peterson’s argument is that as a parent, you have to be aware of the fact that your kids might annoy you. Therefore, don't let your kids do anything that might annoy you because you're such an angry, vengeful person deep down that they will trigger you. In other words, Peterson thinks it is not the responsibility of the parents to stop themselves from acting out. His argument is the children must behave themselves because otherwise they're going to trigger the parents to act out. In Peterson’s mind, it is the children’s responsibility to be extremely well behaved in order not to annoy the parents because otherwise the parents will take it out on them. 

This is a bizarre inversion of responsibility by Peterson. Why is the onus on the children to be the more responsible ones? Given that the adults are supposed to have more capability of managing their emotions, Peterson has responsibility backwards. He thinks kids should be more adult than the adults! Peterson talks a lot about personal responsibility in his book, but he believes children should take responsibility for managing their parents feelings, not the other way around.

I agree with Peterson that we all have the capability of being vengeful and deceitful. Peterson’s conclusion from this that children should take responsibility for their parents feelings makes no sense. Rather, the obvious conclusion is that parents have a responsibility to control their aggression and be  vigilantly aware of their capability to act out. 

Peterson often advocates taking personal responsibility, and I agree with that aspect of his work. But taking responsibility also means taking responsibility for your feelings. Peterson is right when he states that we are all capable of being vengeful and that we all have a dark side. But that is not an excuse for putting the responsibility on your children to be more adult than you. His idea that children must behave because parents can't control their own dark side gets responsibility the wrong way around.

Behaviourism

Throughout his comments on parenting, Peterson advocates a psychological approach called behaviourism. He praises B.F. Skinner  (the most important psychologist in the behaviourist movement) for having worked out how to get the behaviour you want using techniques based around punishment and reward. Peterson’s essential argument is that parents should use punishment and rewards on children in order to train them into positive behaviours. 

Within psychology as a whole, behaviourism has a controversial reputation. There are many criticisms of the approach, ranging from ethical issues to critiques of Skinner’s original overblown claims for how effective behaviourism can be. Particularly with regard to children, there are well known negative effects of behaviourism because the approach pushes children to be extrinsically motivated. Behaviourism trains kids to merely try to please reward givers, rather than internalizing values for themselves. Alfie Kohn’s book “Punished By Rewards” provides a summary of these criticisms. It is therefore questionable that Peterson uncritically advocates Skinner as an authority for parenting ideas, as if this were uncontroversial. He doesn’t bother to offer any defence of behaviourism or acknowledgement of the criticisms. 

Behaviourism’s main application has been in training pets. Nobody has to have kids. If you're going to have them, then it's immoral to treat them as if they are pets. That is what Jordan Peterson is advocating. 

Peterson has a problem: his core message to parents is to advocate the use of physical punishments and yet none of the main theories of child development lend any support to the use of violence on children. I think this explains why he has chosen to rely on behaviourism, despite the fact that Skinner didn’t really focus on child development and behaviourism has a distinctly controversial reputation, especially with regard to children. But behaviourism can be used to justify punishments and rewards.

Peterson’s Psychology

Peterson’s descriptions of his interactions with children are quite revealing about his attitude towards them. Peterson is a psychologist who often speculates on the motivations of others, so it's reasonable to point the camera back to him and explore his attitudes and beliefs about children. Here is a telling anecdote from his book:

I remember taking my daughter to the playground once when she was about two. She was playing on the monkey bars, hanging in mid-air. A particularly provocative little monster of about the same age was standing above her on the same bar she was gripping. I watched him move towards her. Our eyes locked. He slowly and deliberately stepped on her hands, with increasing force, over and over, as he stared me down. He knew exactly what he was doing. Up yours, Daddy-O—that was his philosophy. He had already concluded that adults were contemptible, and that he could safely defy them. (Too bad, then, that he was destined to become one.) That was the hopeless future his parents had saddled him with. To his great and salutary shock, I picked him bodily off the playground structure, and threw him thirty feet down the field. No, I didn’t. I just took my daughter somewhere else. But it would have been better for him if I had.

I presume Peterson was trying to be funny in making that comment about throwing a toddler thirty feet, but there is a definite seriousness underneath his dark joke about assaulting a child. He fantasises about doing an extraordinarily vengeful act to a small boy. I don’t find that amusing.

I'm aware that Peterson didn't assault the toddler and that this was merely a fantasy. I'm also aware that it was probably supposed to be a joke, but Peterson argues that it would have been better for the boy if he had been thrown. What are we to make of that? Peterson supposedly advocates the principle of “mimimim use of force on kids”. Is his fantasy of throwing a toddler 30 feet down a field supposed to demonstrate his minimum-use-of-force thinking?

Why did Peterson let this child repeatedly step on his daughter's hands in the first place? Surely the minimum use of force would have been to remove the child’s foot as soon as Peterson saw the boy moving towards his daughter's hands on the climbing frame. If necessary, Peterson could have lifted the boy off the climbing frame altogether (the boy was only 2 years old). Perhaps there would have been as a discussion to be had with the boy’s parents, which Peterson could have had. 

Peterson was the responsible adult in the situation and he failed to act in a timely way to diffuse the conflict. He cites the situation to show how aggressive the boy was (which he was), but this situation was also an example of failure on Peterson’s part to protect his daughter and stop the boy “repeatedly” stepping on her hands.

Peterson often writes about the importance of establishing dominance. He writes openly about how he sees parenting as a battle of dominance and how important it is to immediately respond to any challenge. For example, he writes that “anger crying is often an act of dominance and should be dealt with as such”. 

He argues that since we evolved over millennia in dominance hierarchies, it is necessary to recognise the reality of such hierarchies within families. This means that when children challenge parents for dominance, parents must win the challenge. He uses phrases like “I prepared for war” when describing his approach to winning dominance over children. When describing how he made his son eat some food, he writes:

I poked him in the chest, with my free hand, in a manner calculated to annoy. He didn’t budge. I did it again. And again. And again. Not hard—but not in a manner to be ignored, either. Ten or so pokes letter, he opened his mouth, planning to emit a sound of outrage. Hah! His mistake. I deftly inserted the spoon.

It sounds to me as if Peterson enjoys asserting dominance over little kids.

Evolutionary Psychology

Peterson’s justification for his emphasis on establishing dominance is that he thinks it is important to recognise the findings of evolutionary psychology. We are products of evolution and ignoring our nature is unrealistic. The fact that we evolved in dominance hierarchies means that we can’t avoid them and should therefore assert them as parents.

Even if we accept the idea that humans necessarily live in dominance hierarchies, this only implies that parents have a leadership role to play. Children require leadership and look to their parents to provide it. But being a leader does not necessitate the use of violence or aggression to assert that role. The fact that we evolved in a dominance hierarchy isn't excuse for abusing your leadership role. It’s not an excuse for hitting your kids, and using euphemisms like spanking doesn’t excuse it either. Good leaders do not rely on violence. You do not need to hit children; to do so is an unjustifiable act of aggression. 

Peterson’s emphasis on evolutionary psychology is also highly selective. He cites it in support of his ideas about dominating children but ignores the findings of evolutionary psychology that would inform other parenting decisions. For example, there are very good  arguments for co-sleeping from evolutionary psychology. In our pre-history, babies never slept alone. It would have been incredibly dangerous to leave babies to sleep alone when we were in the hunter gatherer stage of our evolution (which was for the majority of our evolutionary development as humans). All children would have slept in the same place as their parents. But Jordan Peterson is certainly not an advocate of co-sleeping. He thinks children should be left to cry it out, and trained not to disturb their parents at night.

Peterson’s advocacy of aggressive parenting is not a result of following evolutionary psychology, rather he uses evolutionary psychology to support only those arguments he wants to make, and ignores implications that don’t support his arguments. 

Rationalising Violence Against Children

Of all the parenting issues that Peterson could have chosen to highlight as his main concern, he chose to advocate more physical discipline. His main argument on how to be a better parent is don’t hold back on corporal punishment. 

There are many problems facing children that Peterson could have chosen to focus on to improve the quality of parenting. Parents who break up their family have a lasting detrimental effect on their kids. Peterson mentions this, but only as minor topic. He totally ignores many other pressing concerns for the quality of parenting today. What about neglect? What about the huge number of kids who grow up without dads? What about the fact that school is often little more than a prison for children where they must stay for over a decade? What about the still widespread problem of child sexual abuse? What about barbaric practices such as circumcision? What about the epidemic of giving children drugs like Ritalin because they are so bored out of their minds in school that the only way to get them to conform is by giving them drugs? What about the huge amount of time that kids are stuck in daycare and the lack of time that parents spend with their kids?

Peterson didn’t tackle tackle any of these issues. He chooses to focus on making an argument for why you should immediately counter any testing of your or authority by your children with old fashioned discipline, including corporal punishment. He's chosen to focus on that because he argues a false dichotomy that as a parent you either spank your child and as a disciplinarian parent, or you leave your child to their own devices and they become dangerously antisocial.

Peterson doesn't say so explicitly, but we can infer from his arguments that he spanked his own children. He defends spanking extensively and doesn’t state anywhere that he has changed his mind or learned anything new since he was a parent himself. He is a psychology professor who discusses the topic of spanking without a single mention of the many studies that have demonstrated the harm that it does. The most charitable interpretation of this omission is that he is wilfully ignoring all of the evidence on the detrimental effects of spanking.  

Peterson’s advocacy of disciplinarian parenting are probably a post-rationalisation of his own parenting practices, and perhaps an excuse for what his own parents did to him. He probably thinks that he turned out fine, and that he has great kids, therefore everything he did was great, and therefore spanking is probably good too. In writing a long excuse for his own behaviour as a parent instead of focussing on the real problems that children face, he has done children and parents a disservice.

Conclusion

Peterson is the most intelligent and well-argued advocate of aggressive parenting that I’m aware of. Yet he makes no valid arguments for the use of aggression in parenting. He can’t, because there are no good arguments for using aggression on children.

To make his defence of corporal punishment he had to ignore all the research literature on the bad effects of spanking. He had to rely on a controversial and outdated school of thought in psychology (behaviourism) as the only authority he could appeal to in trying to justify his aggressive style of dominance assertion against children. He had to ignore the entire field of child psychology, none of which supports spanking or aggressive parenting. He had to cherry-pick ideas from evolutionary psychology that seem to support aggression, whilst ignoring evolutionary psychology when it leads to promotion of practices such as co-sleeping. His arguments are so weak that he resorts to rhetorical techniques like asserting that anyone who disagrees with him is wrong and holds views that are “too simple”.

Peterson’s chapter on parenting is called “Don't Let Your Kids Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them”. But that is a mealy-mouthed way of stating his views. He should heed his own advice and take responsibility for his views, which means not using the passive tense. His chapter should be titled “Don't Let Your Kids Do Anything That You Dislike Them Doing”, because that's what he is really saying. When you put it like that, it amounts to merely saying “Don't Let Your Kids Do Anything That You Don't Want Them To”, which is neither deep nor enlightened. It is merely a sophisticated excuse for indefensible aggression against children.