Peaceful Parenting

Prologue

I am fully aware that it seems melodramatic and precious to write an introduction that is basically a giant trigger warning – but it needs to be done. 

This book is the culmination of forty years work in the fields of philosophy, self-knowledge, parenting and ethics. 

Through my show Freedomain, I have had the privilege of having in-depth conversations with thousands of people about their early childhood experiences, and the effects that trauma has had over the course of their adult lives. They contact me in the hope that my training and experience in self-knowledge and moral philosophy will help them untangle the problems in their lives – I hope that I have served them well.[1]

I have interviewed many experts in the fields of parenting, child abuse, family structures, therapy and self-knowledge – these interviews are also available on my website. 

I myself experienced significant levels of child abuse. I was raised by a violent and crazy single mother, who ended up being institutionalized when I was in my early teens. 

I did talk therapy for three hours a week, for almost 2 years. 

At the end of my therapeutic process, and after months of trying to repair my relationship with my family, I decided to separate from them. I have not talked to my mother for twenty-five years. My father left when I was a baby, and I had little contact with him – he died a few years ago. 

I have been happily married for over twenty years, and have been a stay-at-home father for the past fifteen years to my wonderful daughter.

My daughter is homeschooled, and we are part of a truly great community of like-minded parents. 

My daughter and I do comedy shows together – mostly movie reviews – which are also available on my website. 

Now for the trigger warning. 

This is a very intense book. 

I have tried to write it twice before, but faltered at the depth and enormity of the task. 

As a child, I experienced a constant, deep and genuine bewilderment. I was surrounded by people who claimed to be good – and who also claimed to be experts at identifying and punishing immorality. My relatives, my teachers, my parents, my boarding school masters, the priests who instructed me, my neighbours – they all claimed to have the ability to accurately identify immorality and take strong steps to contain and punish it. 

I was punished in school – caned in boarding school – and in church, and by parents and relatives – all because they said that I had behaved badly, and deserved to be punished. 

But it was most strange… 

None of the hundreds of adults who judged and punished me over the course of my young life ever recognized that my mother was an evildoer who violently beat her own children. 

They were able to detect subtle signs of rebellion or disobedience in my demeanour, and sharply or aggressively punish me – but they were utterly unable to identify my mother’s obvious mental and moral dysfunctions – or ask me how I was doing, and take any actions to protect me, and oppose the violence I was subjected to. 

I have been wrestling with this massive issue for over half a century. 

How is it possible that adults can punish children for minor transgressions – I was once caned for climbing over a fence to get a soccer ball – but are utterly blind and helpless in the face of adult abusers of dependent and innocent children? 

When I was a child, I watched endless movies and television shows about heroes confronting, combating and overcoming evildoers. The heroes were good, the villains were evil – the fight was clear, the victories tough but certain. 

I was taught about religious and historical figures who found and fought evildoers almost to the death – and sometimes beyond it, sacrificing themselves to save the world from immorality…

These were the stories, the histories, the theology – yet no one in my life was able to detect or act against a clear evil in their midst – even in their own family, against their own flesh and blood…

Some expert trackers claim the ability to put their ears to a train track, and hear a locomotive coming from many miles away – if such a man were to claim this ability, and offer to listen to a train track – while failing to notice a giant thundering train bearing down on him, not 20 feet away, wouldn’t that be rather – bizarre? 

Wouldn’t that be a sign that he was, in fact, insane? 

Imagine hiring a safari guide to lead you deep into the jungle so you could take pictures of an incredibly rare white tiger. Imagine standing in the camp before you left, listening to him tell you all the complicated and mysterious tricks he was going to use to track this white tiger – and then imagine his speech continuing without pause as a white tiger walked up and sat right at his feet! 

And your guide saw – nothing! 

He just keeps rambling on and on, telling you how brilliant he was at tracking and spotting incredibly rare tigers, without noticing at all the giant animal at his feet! 

Again, would he not be a candidate for a mental asylum? 

Would you trust this madman to lead you deep into a trackless jungle? 

This is the world. 

The world of children. 

The world of the victims of abuse. 

We victims pass through the world – a world that claims deep expertise in the identification and punishment of evildoers – getting soundly punished for our most minor transgressions – while our abusers are either invisible, praised, or protected and defended. 

This is, of course, why the abuse continues to exist. 

Moral punishments are only meted out to helpless victims – never powerful aggressors. 

If, at a family dinner, an adult victim of child abuse finally reveals the horrors he faced, his family will generally be more upset at the open mouth of the victim, rather than the closed fists of the abuser. 

This is just the reality of where and how we live. 

Our world is a long way from heaven – it is hell for the victims, a sadistic paradise for the abusers – and a weird kind of purgatory for the enablers of abuse, who wander around in a foggy disconnected avoidance, claiming virtue, but only punishing the victims who speak out. 

Many people have been awaiting this book with great anticipation. 

I am sure that I will disappoint them. 

I’m sorry – I really am, but this book has to be the way it is. 

Countless people have begged me for years to write this book – I am sure that I will both shock and disappoint them as well. 

I’m sorry for that to. 

But I stand by the necessity of what I have done. 

People expect a book on peaceful parenting to be – well, peaceful, you know? 

It makes sense, I get that…

But bringing about a peaceful world means exposing and opposing evil and violence. 

You can bring peace to a town in the wild West, but you have to take down the bad guys first – and that is not very often a pretty process. 

This book is not about being nice to children – though do I talk about that. 

This book is not about reasoning with children – though I talk about that too. 

This book promotes peaceful parenting by removing the obstacles to it. 

This is not a pretty process. 

I’m not sure how many people will ever listen to me, but I will say it anyway… 

If you have hit your children, I beg you to engage with a good therapist before reading this book. 

If you have yelled at, neglected or called your children names, same. 

If you have significant unprocessed trauma from child abuse, same. 

If you don’t have a kind and trusted heart in your corner, this book is likely to be extremely destabilizing. 

Philosophers and theologians have written about good and evil for thousands of years – but almost never about the ethics and virtues of children and parents. 

Socialists have talked about the evils of power disparities – economic and political – for hundreds of years, but have never taken on the greatest power disparity in the human universe: the difference in power between parents and children. 

Feminists have talked about the evils of the patriarchy for decades, claiming that men have economic and political powers far greater than women – but have never talked about the infinitely greater power that mothers have over their children – and how often it is misused and abused. 

Communists talk about how the owners of the means of production exploit their workers by paying them less than the value of what they produce – but they never rail against the national debt, which is an exploitation and enslavement of the unborn – surely the greatest predatory theft in the history of mankind! 

Everywhere in the world, you see this wild avoidance – people shout their moral condemnations from the rooftops – screaming into the faces of the abstract classes, the political elites, the wealthy and well-connected – but never make their way into the nurseries, into the darkened rooms of hidden and broken children. 

You hear endless diatribes against the power of marketing, propaganda, and the evils of manipulative advertising – but how often is the rampant social programming inflicted on helpless and captive children in government schools even acknowledged, let alone condemned? 

This book will take on all the hypocrisy, lies and manipulations that enable and cover up the abuse of children in our society – all around us. 

In your family. 

Because – you know, right? 

You know some kid in your environment – that maybe you see every day – who is shy and downcast and avoidant and shaky, as if crushed under the weight of an invisible burden. 

As he is, of course. 

As she is…

The burden is not primarily the abuse he or she is suffering – but your silence and avoidance. 

Of course, society is so configured that it is very hard to know what to do in situations of child abuse. If we try to protect the child, that might further provoke the abuser, who still maintains brutal power over the helpless child. 

If we confront the abuser, same. 

I used to think that all the adults around me failed to protect me because they were afraid of further provoking my mother – I dreamed that they would wait until I was independent, free of her, before sitting me down and giving me their sympathies, telling me their reasons for failing to help me. 

I kicked my mother out when I was fifteen. 

I worked three jobs, took in roommates, paid my bills, made my way. 

I was free. 

And I would sometimes look at the phone – my red dusty rotary-dial phone – waiting for it to ring, for the sympathy and explanations to pour in. 

Nothing…

I waited a long, long time for all of this. 

In my mid-twenties, when my relatives came into town for a family wedding, I spent days with them, waiting for a word, an acknowledgement – an apology, perhaps. 

Again – nothing…

It’s been thirty years since then – they are all dead now. 

Pretty sure that old phone is never going to ring. 

But they have helped me, in a way – and through their help, I hope to help the world. 

The adults around me when I was a child did not lecture and punish me because they had moral understanding, a clear capacity to identify wrongdoing, and a strong will to correct immorality. 

No – there was another reason entirely…

I will talk about that later. 

You can join me, if you dare. 

But it won’t be pretty. 

The authority figures of my childhood were not waiting until I was an adult to tell me how badly they felt that I was being abused. 

They either didn’t notice, or didn’t care. 

That is unacceptable. 

Another family used to take me in regularly – half as a refugee from the violence – and met my mother many times. 

Again, in my mid-twenties, I met up with this family again, and the mother asked me, with great sympathy and tenderness, “How is your poor mother doing?” 

Jaw-dropping, really. 

I do remember – even as a child – thinking that, if I ever got to any kind of public prominence, that I would do everything in my power to help the victims of child abuse. 

While I have personally confronted aggressive parents in public, the bulk of my work has been online, listening to thousands of adult victims of child abuse, sympathizing with them, and providing moral clarity about their desperate situations. 

How many of them ever told me that the adults in their lives tried to help them, when they themselves were children? 

I understand that this is a self-selecting group, but the answer has been grindingly consistent. 

Zero. 

No adult in their life – past or present – has ever shown the slightest shred of awareness, understanding or sympathy for the abuse they suffered as children – even the adults who directly witnessed that abuse. 

For 18 years, I have had an open channel to anyone and everyone to talk about whatever philosophical issues are on their minds. I have invited debates on ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, free will – you name it.

Any topic is open and welcomed.

And – what do people want to talk about, when they can talk about anything at all?

Their childhoods, almost every single time.

It sometimes feels like I am the only person in the world who will always listen, always sympathize, and always provide moral clarity to those who have suffered from evildoers.

I never tell anyone what to do, of course – I am a staunch believer in free will, and I would never try to get anyone to substitute my thoughts for their own judgement. 

Perhaps I give people a car – but I never tell them where to drive. 

Morality without control – morality that informs and liberates, rather than shames and punishes – can be deeply disturbing.

If you don’t understand this yet, you will over the course of reading this book.

I’m telling you this: if you choose to read this book, you will quickly realize why it has never been written before. 

The arguments are not complicated – the moral clarity is disarmingly simple. 

This is not a book detailing the mathematics of quantum physics, the wild contradictions of superstring theory, or how to navigate hyper-complex tax laws – or how to balance personal interests, social acceptance, and moral integrity.

This is a book that even a child can understand. 

This is the book that your inner child has been waiting for.

I have always been impressed by the fact that Socrates never used technical language when discussing philosophy with people – you can’t find a single example of him using the word “epistemology,” for instance. 

While I have certainly written more technical works of philosophical examination, I have worked very hard to keep this book as clear and accessible as humanly possible. 

There is no point writing a complex moral manual for the improvement of the planet as a whole. 

I normally write in fairly lengthy paragraphs – this book is mostly bullet points. 

Bullets indeed. 

If you were abused as a child – and most children in the world are, that is the way of the world – then you have my deepest and most heartfelt sympathies. 

It was wrong, it is unacceptable – and it must change! 

No one was there for me, and that is a real shame. 

Some people inflict their pain on the world – some people provide what they were denied. 

I’m so sorry that you are hurt – it was horribly unjust. 

I’m so sorry that – most likely – no one helped, or noticed – either then or now. 

I’m so sorry that no one was there for you. 

With this book, I can be there for you. 

Here for you, now. 

It’s time. 

Let us begin.

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[1] These conversations are all available on my website

https://www.freedomain.com

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