| | Another blast from the past. Basically, I think that among the contributors, they all touched on the key problems and identified or attempted cogent solutions. Not all succeeded consistently. In almost every case, more questions come from even the statements I agreed with.
Except for Kat and Hong, none were parents. Kat and Hong seemed to have different parenting styles, albeit based on the same ideological principles.
No one spoke as a child of their own parents. I see that as a problem. Assuming that no one was raised by Objectivist parents, neither did anyone complain that their mysticst-altruist-collectivist-naturalist guardians made their lives hell. We all probably had the same arguments with our parents one way or another, especially those of us who came to Rand's works while living under our parents' roof.
(In the documentary Something Ventured, venture capitalist Don Valentine - a supporter of the Ayn Rand Institute - said that he and his father, a union organizer, had a lot of arguments. As he says that, his hand comes toward his mouth. I took that as body language, regret for some of that now that his father is probably quite dead.)
I am a parent. I know that Fred is, also, and Tibor, too. Basically, we Objectivists do a lot of theorizing without having to practice.
Myself, I never struck my daughter in punishment. She was never slapped or spanked. You do not teach anything that way, except, ultimately, that might makes right. Here on RoR (and SOLO) we had this discussion before under other topics. I pointed out that those who said that physical punishment did not harm them also advocated nuking Teheran.
My daughter was four when she announced her support for Mondale-Ferraro. At eight, she was still a liberal Democrat. I was happy that she knew or cared and I was not about to argue politics with a child, or prove her wrong, or ask her "teaching questions" about politics. Today, she is a conservative. I do not think that she ever had a libertarian phase. She watched Atlas Shrugged Part 1 and enjoyed it. She is very much like Dagny in all of the important aspects.
But it is complicated. When, at 15, she and her girl friend took our car for a joy ride, the other girl's father and I both admitted to having taught them to drive when they were 12 or 13. I know how that must seem... but have you ever read the Objectivist yarn, The Girl Who Owned a City? A kid might need to know how to drive in an emergency. ... but with power comes responsibility and that is harder to teach... It must be learned. In fact, as a professional instructor myself, I believe that nothing is ever taught and everything is only learned.
And that cuts to one of the points in the original essay:
... parents and guardians were allowed able to override the child’s immediate autonomy where and only where not to do so would be to the child’s detriment, for instance some sort of restraint to prevent the child running off of a cliff or into oncoming traffic, or slapping his hand away if he’s about to get burned.
That is a perfect example of rationalist theorizing in ignorance of empirical fact. Once an infant crawls, you cannot get them to run off a cliff. (The Visual Cliff on Wikipedia here.) Teenagers are the silly ones, which is why so many die in senseless accidents. Again, as actual parents, we had the burning hand incident and you do not need to slap the hand. A simple warning is enough. And it led to an epistemological insight for me.
Our daughter was not yet one year old, barely walking and only beginning to vocalize intelligently. I served dinner and she was about to touch the hot food. "Whoa!" my wife and I both yelled. She looked and saw the steam held her palm toward it and said "Bo!" Fine... A day or so later, I was carrying her around the yard and at the fence, she held her palm to a barb and said, "Bo." I think that offers a Popperian falsification to about half of ITOE. But in any case, you do not need to slap a child to prevent them from hurting themselves.
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