Parenting - Ways to know you're being a good father
Ways to know you’re being a good father
- by Jordan Peterson
You need to sacrifice and Don’t compromise their independence
You have a moral obligation as a parent to encourage your child to go out into the world and to be who ever they can be, to be the best they can possibly be. And in doing that, you are encouraging them to pursue the good. You are sacrificing them to the good. You are not keeping them for yourself selfishly. You are telling them that they can go out and live their life and live it properly.
You don’t want for your son what it is that you want for him. You want for your son whats best for him and for the world and you let go in precise proportion to your desire to have that happen.
The good mother fails. This is a brillian observation. When you have an infant, you do everything for the infant because the infant cannot do anything for himself. But as the infant matures and is increasingly capable of doing things for himself, then you pull back and every time the child develops the ability to do something, you encourage them to do it and you don’t interfere. If your child is struggling getting dressed, you help them. But for the most part, you let them learn so that they can do it themselves in the future. Thats better for you and it is certainly better for them.
There is a rule if you are working for the elderly in an old age home. The rule is, you don’t do anything for any of the guests that they can do for themselves because you compromise their independence.
As a mother, you pull back and pull back and you let the child hit himself against the world and you fail to protect them. But by failing to protect them, you encourage and ennoble them to the point where you are no longer necessary. You are supposed to remove yourself from the equation by encouraging your child to be the best possible person that he can be. And you sacrifice all your desires - personal desires and even the desires for your child in relationship to you - to that. Because you want them to move forward into the world as the light on a hill. You don’t get to keep your children at home.
The good father is someone who is willing to sacrifice his child to the ultimate good.
The world is a brutal place and much wisdom comes out of catastrophe. And this is an indication of how much catastrophe your ancestors had to plough through, work through in order to generate the substucture for the conceptions of freedom that we have today - the freedom and the good.
Conceptualize the future that we want and let go of the things that are stopping us from moving forward. We have to free ourselves from the chains of our original preconceptions. It is the optimal pathway of being.
There is a philosopher of science named Carl Popper, very sensible and down to earth person. In talking about thinking and its nature, he said, “the purpose of thinking is to let your thoughts die instead of you”. If you can conjure up a representation of yourself, a variety of potential representations of yourself in the future, you can lay out how those future representations of yourself will prevail or fail, you can call the potential representations of yourself that will fail and you can embody the ones that will succeed. You do that well simultaneouly by conjuring up a representation of your current state and determining for yourself, because of your undue suffering, which elements of your pathetic being need to be given up so that you can move forward into that future. What is it that you are tying to do? You are trying to improve the future. We belive that the future can be improved as a consequence of our sacrificial work. What are the limits to that? We don’t know. We conjured up this remarkable idea - that the future exists. We can see it, even though it is only potential and adjust our behavior in the present in order to maximize the potential of our success in the future. How best to do that? Don’t hesitate to offer the ultimate sacrifice if you want the future to turn out ultimately well. What is it that you want to contract for, if you are willing to give up everything about you that is weak and unworthy?
Book recommendations
1.The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff