Kant: The Superior Power of Parents

The will of children must not be broken, but merely bent in such a way that it may yield to natural obstacles. At the beginning, it is true, the child must obey blindly. It is unnatural that a child should command by his crying, and that the strong should obey the weak. Children should never, even in their earliest childhood, be humored because they cry, nor allowed to extort anything by crying. Parents often make a mistake in this, and then, wishing to undo the result of their overindulgence, they deny their children in later life whatever they ask for. It is, however, very wrong to refuse them without cause what they may naturally expect from the kindness of their parents merely for the sake of opposing them. They, being the weaker, should be made to feel the superior power of their parents.

How American parenting is killing the American marriage

The origins of the parenthood religion are obscure, but one of its first manifestations may have been the “baby on board” placards that became popular in the mid-1980s. Nobody would have placed such a sign on a car if it were not already understood by society that the life of a human achieves its peak value at birth and declines thereafter. A toddler is almost as precious as a baby, but a teenager less so, and by the time that baby turns fifty, it seems that nobody cares much anymore if someone crashes into her car. You don’t see a lot of vehicles with placards that read, “Middle-aged accountant on board.”

The Economic Case for Paternity Leave

More maternity leave might sound like a great idea, but as long as mothers are the only parents taking leave, longer stints at home actually worsen job discrimination against them and makes them less likely to pursue a career.

Rather, as the experiences of Sweden, Iceland, and a handful of other countries show, the secret to keeping mothers in the workforce lies not in giving them more time off, but in getting more fathers to stay at home instead

.. Accounting for seven-tenths of global consumer spending, women are “the ultimate agents of aggregate demand,” says Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund. Companies that design and market their goods and services in ways that appeal to women will sell more effectively than those that don’t. Companies led by talented women are more likely to pull that off.

.. Paradoxically, upping female employment levels appears to stave off this peril. Women in countries with higher female employment rates give birth to more children, on average, according to Goldman Sachs.

.. It’s telling that the better educated a woman is, the more likely she is to stay out of the workforce.

.. “Society is a mirror of the family,” Westerberg told the Times. “The only way to achieve equality in society is to achieve equality in the home. Getting fathers to share the parental leave is an essential part of that.”

 

Difference Maker: The childless, the parentless, and the Central Sadness.

Matthew was smart in the way a lot of longtime foster kids are smart. He was a quick and reasonably accurate judge of character, and as soon as he determined that someone was not a threat he began the process of figuring out what the person could do for him. As much of a downer as this behavior could be for people with romantic ideas of helping troubled kids, it was a perfectly understandable survival mechanism, and I grew to respect it.

.. But now I know that I was under the sway of my own complicated form of baby craziness. Wary as I’ve always been of our culture’s reflexive idealization—even obsessive sanctification—of the bond between parent and child, it seems that I fell for another kind of myth. I fell for the myth of the village. I fell for the idea that nurture from a loving adoptive community could erase or at least heal the abuses of horrible natural parents.

.. Or perhaps it wasn’t even sadness we were feeling but, simply, the dull ache of aging. Maybe children don’t save their parents from this ache as much as distract from it. And maybe creating a diversion from aging is in fact much of the point of parenting.