Parenting philosophy

This isn't completely thought out, but I wanted to get it on paper.

My parenting philosophy is aimed at these goals:

1. Create a good person.
2. Create a smart person.
3. Create a capable person.
4. Create a resilient person.

…roughly in that order of importance.

1. Morals

I’m most uncertain about the intervention potential for this one. I’m sure you can impart some moral and ethical lessons to your kid, but I wonder how much of it is inborn empathy formalized into a system of ethics, and how much you’re actually imparting.

If it is possible to significantly affect the future moral feelings of my children, then I want to nudge them towards these moral-aesthetic ideals:

• Compassion is good.
• Suffering is bad, and inflicting suffering is very bad.
• Be protective of the weak. Particularly protect those who truly are powerless; small children, animals, and so on.
• Be brave and stand up to injustice.
• Never cave in to group pressure. Never cave in to authority. Always do the right thing, even if inconvenient to you.

Generally I want my kids to be good, in the classic Western conception of what “good” means, and to an extent, how Abrahamic religions conceptualize good. I’m not going all-out Jesus Christ, because I do think that there should be limits to self-sacrifice, but like 80% there. Obviously, minus the entire cosmology and threats of burning in hell if you don’t do what I say. Remember, one of my ideals is anti-authority!

2. Intelligence

After my children have grown up, I will feel like a failure if they do not have a good way to reason about the world, good epistemology, and developed thinking.

I’m not saying that they need to agree with all my opinions; I am saying that I want them to be able to reason.

In short, I want to enable my child, as soon as cognitively possible, to discern lies from truths, to be able to model the world, to be able to make predictions and amend them when they encounter new evidence, and so on.

One way of doing this is by doing a lot of specialized maths and philosophy, and to frequently discuss things with them.

I want my kids to use practical probability theory. I want them to be skeptical when skepticism is warranted, and to avoid the cognitive biases and pitfalls that humans fall in by default, if they have no training.

The primary goal here is truth, and ways of building up their brains so that they can get to truth.

3. Skills

Being good and being right are great. But to truly prepare them for life, they also need to be skilled. One of the main skills is knowing how to talk and how to convince others.

I want to provide for my children what I feel was missing in my childhood, and that is practical education on the topic of “how things really are”. You know when you read something, you think you understand it, and then someone comes along and shows you “OK, you think you know how X works, but let me show you how it actually works”—I want to provide that for my child.

This includes educating them on human psychology and politics. This means explaining to them what humans want, and how they behave in order to get them. It means uncovering to them the secretive nature of social interactions; showing them the underlying game people sometimes play. The deals, the handshakes, the glances, all of that has an interpretation.

I want to enable my kid to understand social dynamics, to be able to swim social situations adeptly, and also to come out on top: never to be taken advantage of because of naivete.

4. Toughness

Finally, an important cornerstone of parental philosophy for me is to give them the skills to withstand adversity. This includes psychological and physical toughness. I don’t want my kids to be brittle. I don’t want to raise them under a glass dome, so that, when pushed into the real world, they cannot get their bearings. They should be a little wild, a little untamed. They should be able to thrive in difficult situations, and that means not spoiling them. It doesn’t mean to deprive them of comforts in general, but generally to expose them to non-ideal situations.

One way to do it is insist on physical activity, especially outdoors. I plan to take my kids camping starting with a very early age so that they don’t even get time to develop a penchant for comfort. Being out on adventures, doing chores at home, pursuing difficult athletic achievements: the purpose of all that is for them not to break down when life throws something difficult at them when they’re older.