The police are terribly unpleasant. They openly wield force and carry weapons, they’re heavy handed, they’re confrontational, they’re strict, they’re punitive, they’re actively dangerous, they wield a lot of power, they get right up in your face, they’re not interested in making you feel good, their direct goal is to challenge you and intervene and prevent you from doing what you’re doing and they’re OK with the disruption and discomfort and confrontation that will involve. They are very unpleasant. No one who has been on the receiving end of police intervention, even when it favors them, can argue with that.

So, considering that a lot of that sounds like very antisocial behavior, and a lot of cops test very high on conscientiousness and very low on agreeableness (they’re not here to make people happy or make friends), why do we tolerate their behavior? From a psychological standpoint, it’s because we need disagreeable people just as much as we need agreeable people to handle the broad range of circumstances life presents us with. We need a balance of both. And the harder we heel toward one extreme the more need we have for the other extreme. Criminals tend to be low in conscientiousness and high in disagreeableness (and so do a lot of children, especially 2 year olds, criminals are often people who never got socialized beyond that phase).

There is one big difference between the action of criminals and that of police, which are fairly similar in nature and expression, and that is the end to which it is directed. The chaos and anger and emotion and disagreeableness and confrontation of criminals is largely for themselves, with no regard for the good of others or the damage it might cause. It’s antisocial.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the police aren’t a dangerous and potentially damaging tool. That’s why the use of force needs clear guidelines. It can’t be purely arbitrary or based on mood of prejudice or feelings. It needs to have a logic to it, and that logic need to be explained and made clear, the reasons behind the response, the charges and punishments, the fixed statues of law, need to be explained and the action directly tied to and justified in reference to it. Prison is a harsh and terrible fate to bring against someone. That’s why we don’t just send people there arbitrarily; we have a process. We make sure that the person knew that what they were doing was wrong, we make a distinction between doing something you didn’t or couldn’t be expected to know was wrong and something you clearly did know was wrong and tailor our response accordingly. If they are a repeat offender and previous attempts to curb the behavior have failed, we increase the severity of the response and sentence commensurately with the established criminal record. If the consequences of the act are minor then we adjust the response accordingly. If they’re pretty extreme, if the long term consequences of continuing that type of behavior are very great, we increase the severity of the response to reflect that and add increased pressure against it.

And parenting is almost exactly the same. There’s only one really big difference. And that’s the environment. Parenting is practice for the real world, so you’re in a much safer space. There’s extra freedom to make mistakes and smaller long term consequences because the authorities are there to work with you over the long haul to rehabilitate you and socialize you. It’s the social and legal system written small, for little people. You’re able to learn in small ways instead of in big ways, by having your parents take away some minor privileges instead of being sent to actual jail or suffering broad social rejection. It’s the substitution of a small unpleasantness and confrontation that can stand in and help you learn on an achievable and understandable scale for your age. But the real work it’s doing is representing to children the really big stakes and dangers and consequences of the adult world.

One other really big differences in the environment is that your parents love you, are personally invested in you, are prejudiced in your favor, want you to succeed, and have the time and energy to really work with toward a good outcome. The law doesn’t care about you personally. It doesn’t have the funding to fix everything about you, especially if you aren’t on board. And if you’ve gone so far as to cause general harm to society, well, those people don’t know you or care about you, they aren’t your family, they don’t have a lifelong connection to you and investment in you. So they’re gonna treat you differently.

Your parents want you to succeed. They care about you becoming the kind of person who won’t be antisocial and run afoul of the law, or even afoul of the more minor but still very severe personal consequences of being antisocial in life. People not trusting you, people finding you unpleasant and unreliable. People finding you unfair and disruptive and harmful. Your goal as a parent is to socialize your kids well enough that other children and adults will naturally appreciate the healthy version of them they have grown to be and not find them a nightmare to deal with and be around. Because don’t forget, people have their own problems; if they don’t have some natural prejudice toward you and aren’t forced to deal with you, they’re not going to voluntarily put up with and suffer from your problems as well if they can avoid it.

Unfortunately, with dog training, with parenting children, with employee training, and with people in general, the fundamental rule of society is that people will do whatever they’re allowed to do. As much as their immediate society lets them do, they will do. To an extreme degree, so that if that society allows horribly antisocial (but personally enjoyable or just easy, lazy) behaviors, people will feel free to engage in them; and also they’ll do it to a broad degree, a huge portion of people will participate, maybe even the majority of people. Whether it’s something as small being an antisocial dog and jumping up on people or stealing food, or as big as something like Nazi Germany, the majority of people (or dogs) will participate. And if they do, the small amount of people who just genuinely don’t feel like doing that one particular thing will be screwed. They will be at a disadvantage, because they won’t be willing to use the tactics and force other people will, and there won’t be any stable system in place to reward them for their restraint. In fact, they will likely be disadvantaged or even punished.

In fact, being a conscientious person is only really as valuable as the society that person is embedded in is stable and just. In an unstable society, you’re just restraining your opportunities, sacrificing the present for a future you can’t predict, and collecting and storing up goods so thieves and opportunists can come and carry them off. If no one had any reason to fear the IRS, the majority of people would cheat on their taxes. If there’s no obvious benefit to being accurate (possibly even a disadvantage) and a clear benefit to being inaccurate, and no obviously immediate or personal bad consequence to being dishonest, the math is pretty simple. You don’t discount the present for the sake of the future unless you’re pretty certain that future is going to happen. And abstract arguments about some sort of general good are far less compelling than your own immediate need and benefit and suffering. Yeah, a Kantian might argue that I shouldn’t embrace any action I can’t universalize for all future actions and actions by all others, but if I’m hungry or jealous or greedy or unhappy or suffering now, if I could benefit now, in my own immediate life, I’m gonna do it. That’s how children naturally think. That’s how dogs naturally think. That’s how people naturally think.

We have a part of us that’s a potential Kantian, and we have a much more basic part of us, the immediate survival instinct, that has its own intuitions and methods and is a lot closer to Hobbes’ “nature, red in tooth and claw”. And part of our goal as humans, whether as dog owners, as parents, as politicians, as teachers, as law enforcement, is to feed and develop and protect that higher consciousness, that superego, and make it strong enough to restrain and direct the energies of the id, the impulsive instincts, and to create structures that reward that effort and confront and restrain the opposite movement toward selfish, impulsive, antisocial behavior. (Not that I’m a Freudian, but it’s a useful framework for conceptualizinf this issue.)

And that’s also why parenting from 2-4 is so important. The child has moved out of the infancy stage. At that earlier stage, the child is essentially always right. It’s entire world is about itself and meeting its needs. And parents are naturally prejudiced to respond to their infants in that way. They cry, they’re upset, you give them what they want. Food, a change, medicine, etc. The world is all about them and they’re pretty much always justified in their anger and tears and unhappiness. You don’t argue with a baby.

But then they go through a transition. They begin to become aware of a wider world of other people with needs and ideas and feelings and goals. And they’ve added intelligence and agency to the survival impulses that they once had as a baby but needed someone else to fulfill. They’ve gained power and the ability to affect others, to accomplish things themselves, to take action, which makes them much more potentially dangerous. Suddenly they’re able to seek and fulfill their own goals deliberately. And they realize there are other things out there, people, who could be used to get those things or could stand in their way. And it’s very much in their interest if everyone else could be like their mother and their parents, someone who they’re able to basically use to fulfill their needs.

And if they don’t get much pushback, that’s exactly what they’ll do. That part of them that recognizes that the world isn’t based around making them happy or feel good, the part that recognizes the individuality and goals and negative and positive experiences of others and seeks to work within that structure instead of imposing their own will on the world and treating everything as just means to the ends of their own private reality will not develop properly. It will grow weakly, it won’t be able to restrain and direct their energies and impulses. They won’t be able to control themselves even for their own benefit in society. And if they’re also aggressive and never learned to restrain that impulse, they likely have a criminal future, because the consequences will be writ so large and unavoidably. There are plenty of antisocial women, but because the majority of antisocial people who are also agressive are overwhelmingly men, they’ll reap larger and more obvious consequences.

So most real personal and parenting disasters have already occurred by age 4. Because if the transition away from natural, impulsive selfishness and ideological and value solipsism didn’t happen by that age, when the child became capable of engaging with the wider, more complex moral and social world, it’s hard to change. They’re going to be playing catch-up their whole lives. How their mind and brain works was being built, and once those structures are in place they get harder and harder to change. They’re not impossible to change, but it becomes harder and harder. And the shift from approaching your child as an entity who is essentially always right, who can operate correctly in a state of complete selfishness and lack of care for or awareness of others and their responsibility for their own actions, to treating them as a moral and social agent whose approach to others and behavior will have real consequences for their future success and happiness is a very painful and complicated process to manage. In your eyes they’re still that perfect, innocent, needy thing. You want to give them what they want. You want to make them happy. You want to soothe their unhappiness and defuse their conflicts. Because that’s what they needed as an infant. But that strategy can become maladaptive if it doesn’t grow and change as the child changes and grows.

So, on a practical level, how does this all affect my parenting? How does all this theory play out and what does it mean? Well, first, it informs my idea of what I’m actually doing and why. It gives me my understanding of what I’m actually trying to accomplish and what my role is. It also reminds me of the value of what I’m doing, what the good result is that I’m earning by my actions and suffering in the present.

Because it isn’t fun. Whether it’s my employees or my children, it would be so much easier, especially in the short term, not to put in the effort to confront them over things that bother me or that I’m concerned about or that bother other employees or family members but aren’t directly affecting me. I would much rather, espwin the latter case, not to have to get involved and take those problems into my present experience and create a crisis by confronting them. I only have the strength to do so because I keep my eye fixed on the future rewards. If I confront this now and pay the price now, I’ll be less likely to suffer the consequences of not confronting it in the future. I’ll help them become the sort of person who knows how to not create these sorts of problems.

I also know that I’m standing in as a substitutionary representative for how the world will eventually react to my children, positively and negatively. I’m a safe translation into a microcosm for them to learn from. If I’m too safe, I’m not being honest. If I’m too dangerous, I’m not making the game small enough and the stakes approachable enough for them to learn from it. So in a sense I need to cultivate my danger to help strengthen and protect my children, but I need to make sure that the danger isn’t too big to face and learn from. And I need to make sure they’re actually learning the rules of the game from my actions, that I’m explaining it and using it to communicate the rules, not just my feelings.

Rough play is like a kind of game where children learn to flirt with struggle and danger and push the limits, and they learn what’s ok and what’s not. If my kids are just getting hurt by me, they’re not learning to control and use their power and danger appropriately. If I just let them hurt me, they also aren’t learning anything. They’re not getting the feedback they need to learn what is and isn’t ok. Don’t just full-on hit me, don’t poke my eyes, don’t jump on me with your knees, let me know before you do that, be more gentle with that person or that part of me. Learn to tailor your actions so you can use your strength and test it and increase it and compete, but in such a way that it’s productive and fun and not hurtful.

Parental discipline is itself a sort of game. You’re giving reward and feedback and setting rules that create a microcosm in which your child’s actions can help them win or lose. So you want to tailor as accurately as you can the game to the thing it’s representing and teaching them about (the world, complex society, adult social relationships, work, school, family, community), and you want it to be tailored as close as possible to being understood and played effectively by your child. And those can both be pretty hard.

I’m a human, and I have feelings and eccentricities, things that bother me and things that don’t bother me. And the first place my kids have to love and adapt and succeed is my family. So to some degree they’re going to need to learn to live within that particular structure that is shaped by my individual prejudices and preferences (and their mother’s). But I also know that I’m representing the world as a whole to them, and since I’m not the whole world, just a bit of it, they need to learn a broader set of rules than my own personal ones. And that starts with the other people in the family. I need to incorporate the values and goals and vulnerabilities of other people in the house, their mom, their sister, into my approach. I need to protect the interest of those people too, so they can have good, productive relationships.

So I need to remind myself that I’m not in it as just a representative of myself and my feelings; I’m there to represent the good of the whole family society and the needs and feelings and interests of people other than myself. So I can’t just take one person’s side. I might need to confront multiple people. And all I can do is trust that they’ll recognize the fairness in that. That yes I called them on the big problem of how they were treating their sister, but I earned the right to do that by also calling their sister on how they were responding to them. I’m not on the side of anyone, I’m on everybody’s side, because I’m on the side of justice for the whole group.

Another thing I’ve had to learn, apart from learning to understand and appreciate my own role and how I fulfill it, is learning to appreciate the role of others. Children naturally look to their mothers for comfort and sympathy. They naturally look to their fathers for play, which is essentially a way to be pushed and to push back, to test limits and risk danger, and learn how to do it safely and productively. It’s not homogenous, but it’s a preferential structure in family dynamics so endemic that it’s an obvious fact about human behavior. And it’s supported not only by colloquial and psychological study, but also biological study.

Setting aside the unique massive increases in oxytocin that mothers get from breastfeeding and men get from orgasm, the increase in (much lower) baseline oxytocin that men and women get when parenting (and really just shows that there’s something they’re investing in and looking for rewards and meaning in something) is mediated through different behaviors. Women get it when the engage in care behavior, gazing on their infant’s face, cuddling them, holding them, comforting them. Personal-focused interactions. And men get it from object/activity focused interactions. Playing, tossing the kid in the air, rolling balls back and forth, messing with them, stimulating them to push back and react. Women who don’t give care and comfort by a vast majority don’t develop the increased oxytocin response. Men who don’t play don’t develop it. The result is the same (invested parenting), the object is the same (the child’s wellbeing), but the mechanism, the approach, if mediated differently. These results didn’t come out of different studies (although many have tested and confirmed it), they came out of the same study. The same study that clearly showed men and women both see a change in baseline oxytocin levels when invested in parenting also clearly showed that they got it by very different means.

The upshot of this, as I take it, is to remind myself to learn to respect the different value and outlook and strategies that my wife brings to parenting. We both have the same goal, we both have the same object. But how we’re pursuing it different. If I can remind myself of that, I can remember to frame your actions properly. I could see your approach, your way of being, as antagonistic to my own, as incomprehensible. As senseless. And that’s wrong. I need it. My girls need it. Yes, sometimes it contradicts my goals and ideas and efforts that I’m engaging in on behalf of the family. But I need to humble myself, realize I have a wife for a reason, I can’t be everything to everyone all the time (or it’s very hard) and learn to accept the gift that I can outsource some of those roles and ways of being to someone I can trust who shares my goals and has some natural ability for those jobs that makes them particularly gifted at them.

It’s hard for me to do both, to accept myself and to accept you. I often don’t really want to do what I feel like I should do. I often don’t feel like I understand or respect you and what you’re doing. They’re both unpleasant in their own way. So I have to remind myself that it’s a dance. And that means learning to understand and value the way the other person moves as well as being willing to understand and value the way I move. And since it can be hard to dance both sides of the pair at once, I need to learn to be appreciative of both. And my kids can’t lose either without suffering, without losing something they need to help them thrive. And of course everyone needs to learn a broader playbook than what comes easy to them. I need to learn to integrate more of your perspective so when I’m on my own, especially, or depending on what the circumstances are, I’m still bringing to the table a perspective my wife has helped me learn and skills my wife has helped teach me.

In learning to make the game fair and productive for my kids, I often have to remind myself to follow the rules you see written large with the law. Make sure they knew it was wrong. If they didn’t or couldn’t be expected to know, go easy, teach them first. Make sure that the response is justified by the amount of understanding they have. Also, make sure the response is justified by their record and the severity of the crime. So if it’s something they didn’t know was really dangerous, but it is really dangerous and could seriously harm someone, I have to strike a balance to communicate that effectively. They didn’t know, but it’s the sort of mistake they can’t afford to make more than once. How do I get that across so they hear me and remember? Have I done more than just get angry? Did I effectively explain why I’m reacting the way I am. If it’s a big reaction, have I explained that the reason is because they knew it was wrong, they’re a habitual offender, and it’s a behavior that really has some bad long term consequences?

If all I do is get mad, but my feelings don’t match up with my reasons, I’m not really being helpful. There isn’t a logic there that a kid can learn from and understand to learn to win at the game (and eventually win at life). There needs to be a clear logic, clear rules, a clear system, clear reasons behind why a confrontation occurred and why that particular type of confrontation occurred. And if, when I’m explaining it, I realize that I made the calculation wrong (which can happen either direction, it’s just as unjust and harmful for everyone to let a dangerous crime go unpunished as to punish a minor crime unjustly), I need to apologize, explain, and make amends so I can do better in the future and so they can make sense of my mistake and see the rules upheld. That makes it clear that there is a system, because even I have to follow it, and even I can get it wrong. That not only upholds the rational defense for when a punishment is too harsh, it also upholds the reasonable defense for when a punishment is justifiably harsh. It isn’t arbitrary, there’s an intelligible structure you can learn to navigate. And even I have to admit it when I failed to honor it properly.

So I’ve had to apologize to the kids a number of times, especially the oldest. Not for being harsh, because that’s just a tool, but for being unjustly harsh. Because injustice isn’t a function of feeling or prejudice or the content, me being upset or not upset at something, me being really confrontive and severe in my response or me being very mild and nonconfrontational in my response. Justice is a function of how appropriate and necessary the response was according to the nature of the person, their knowledge, their history, the current consequences or potential consequences of their behavior, how badly it affects our current and future society, and how badly it matters to their current and future happiness and health. It represents to them how seriously they should take this, how many of those red flags they’re activating.

So I need to always be asking myself, how well am I communicating that information in ways my child can understand and learn from? How well am I representing to them the potential consequences and reactions of their future world in this microcosmic instance (what the results will be if they carry this into their future life, how serious they are). How well do I understand their nature and their potential good or evil (how healthy or maladjusted they are vs how healthy and maladjusted they could become). If I don’t have a clear idea of and vision for and hope for the good version of themselves they could become, I can’t help them. I’ll just be crushing them and fighting them if I don’t have some idea of who they could be that handles this situation well in the future. There’s no positive vision for them to embrace. And if I don’t have a clear idea of the bad version of themselves they could become, I’m not helping them either, I’m not taking the proper precautions, I’m empowering the worst possible version of them and giving it freedom to develop. I’m not giving them a negative vision to legitimately fear and avoid. Kids are young and can’t always think long term, so sometimes they have to fear in me what they can’t understand enough to fear in their future life.

And my goal is gradually to wean them off that substitution to a proper fear and understanding of why they were being taught to avoid that outcome. If you won’t respect and fear the outcome where your sister later in life wants nothing to do with you because all you do is treat her like an enemy, I can at least make you pay respect to the threat it presents in me. I can stand in now for the danger it represents and forbid you from embracing it now, encourage you positively where I can, confront you negatively when it’s needed, and hopefully you’ll learn and change, be encouraged and nurtured in letting your politeness and trust toward your sister grow and be discouraged and restrained in letting your animosity and distrust toward your sister grow.

So what do I need from you? Well, the same things I struggle to give to you, I expect. I need you to see the value in my parenting. I need you to see me not as an antagonist, but as someone who is working for our common good, for the good of the family. I need you to see the value and necessity of me and what I do. I need you to appreciate and accept the gift and opportunity that my being how I am brings to the children. Our differences could be a conflict, a war, but they could also be a complimentary dance that plays to both our strengths. I think the biggest thing I need to do is to try to make sure I frame it that way in my mind and frame it that way for my children. So neither I nor they see me working at cross purposes to my wife, but in compliment to her.

Whenever there’s a conflict between you and the children, I try to see my role quite plainly. My first job is to support you and back you up. Maybe they’re doing something that’s bothering you or hurting you or hurting the whole family. Maybe I wasn’t there to see it, maybe it’s something that doesn’t really bother me or I don’t have an opinion on. Maybe I don’t even understand it yet. But my default duty, right up front, is to maintain a unified support for you. If your mom says this, if you’ve caused this reaction, I’m behind her. There’s time to find out the details, work things out, apply my own strategies and approach, evaluate my own feelings about what happened. There’s time for all of that. But my first duty is to back you up and validate your position as someone who is doing what they’re doing because they’re working with me for the good of the family. I honor that shared responsibility, that shared goal, that shared burden and struggle and contribution.

The kids, by being kids, are just fundamentally more in it for themselves, with a view to their own interests and feelings and knowledge. You and I carry the burden of expanding that consciousness and helping them learn to act independently in a way that will uphold and promote the value of our family as a whole. And that’s a big burden. So my first loyalty is to you, particularly in public. And if I really need to challenge or add to or alter or inform differently anything that you’ve done, I need to do it respectfully, in way that honors and preserves and adds strength, rather than criticism or antagonism, to our relationship and our actions and what we’re trying to accomplish.

I don’t want to confuse and destroy the value of what we’re teaching the girls. I don’t want to make them think that there are actually two different systems that are competing with one another. That’s not a system you can make sense of or win at. You can’t play two different incompatible, antagonistic games and make a sane picture of life. Children can make sense of both approaches if they are presented with a commitment to the unity of the two approaches. There aren’t two different games, there is one game, and my wife and I show respect to one another because we know that we’re actually fighting the same fight and seeking the same goals. Our honor for the other person proves it to them. We may have different approaches for doing to, we may have different strengths, different contributions, different reactions. But those are two paths to one goal, two perspectives on one reality.

Now, it isn’t always easy for me to do this. I can do it fairly easily when we’re all together, or in front of the girls, when the pressure is on, but it’s harder in private. It feels like losing face, sacrificing standing or admitting a fault. And it obviously becomes a problem for both of us if the other person ever seems to be directly antagonizing and resisting rather than backing us up as a parent in front of the girls.

I think this is part of why the police and people who support them get so upset about criticism. From their perspective, they’re not doing this for themselves. They’re doing it for everyone else. They’re putting themselves in danger and using force, being asked to engage in dangerous confrontations for the sake of the good of everybody else. Because they believe it needs to be done. Someone needs to stand up, someone needs to confront the danger, someone needs to be the guardian and stand up to people who are a danger to themselves and others. And they might get attacked or even killed for it. So to be criticized for being the thing that society has asked them to be and needs them to be, when it’s also very costly and dangerous for them on a daily basis, that breeds a lot of natural resentment.

And that’s not a great thing because we actually need them to be dangerous on our behalf, and so they are (so we don’t have to carry swords or pistols and fight duels or form posses any more). We’ve outsourced personal and retributive violence and added structure and controls to it so that this (sadly) necessary aspect of social control can operate less destructively and more cooperatively and in a way that presents less personal risk to us and is more comprehensible and predictable and has clear limits. That’s a big burden off our own shoulders. We don’t have to be prepared to fight and die on daily basis just to maintain some level of security. It’s a different kind of peace from the peace of mutual threat between everyone (guns pointed in every direction).

Being dangerous as part of their job means there can be some pretty bad consequences if the police aren’t being careful enough. More oversight, more careful guidelines as to how their power will be used, more effort to maintain balance and perspective are necessary (compared to other jobs) because of the power of the role we’ve surrendered to them. They’re specialized into confronting dangerous people on our behalf, and that specialization is going to affect how they see the world, at the least.

So it’s terribly important, when we do want to criticize or correct the guardians of a society (any society), to approach them with the utmost respect for their role and their burden and their experience. Otherwise, we undermine the real value they’re contributing and their ability to and willingness to provide it. They get resentful and defensive and feel unappreciated. And that doesn’t help them do a job we really need them to do. So our approach has to unify extreme respect for the importance of the role and its cost with extreme understanding that having such a powerful, important, helpful role can result in mistakes with very serious and powerful consequences. If we don’t respect the relationship we’ll lose the utility, if we don’t respect the utility we’ll lose the relationship. And we need both.

Being parents is a lot like being cops for your kids. We’re the play cops. And just like the real cops, sometimes we need a good cop, and sometimes we need a bad cop. Which is probably too morally loaded a term. We need agreeable and disagreeable approaches. We need admonishment and honesty as well as encouragement and comfort. We need hope as well as fear. We need respect for the group as well as respect for the individual. We need strong people as well as gentle people. We need both the extremes of human expression to help protect the opposite extreme.

There’s nothing like a good disagreeable person to help protect an agreeable person. The agreeable person will find it too hard to advocate for themselves, they’ll be advocating so hard for everyone else. But the well-adjusted, helpful disagreeable person won’t be scared to come in and say, hey, you’re taking advantage of that person, this needs to stop right now. They not only won’t be scared to confront the evil, they’ll enjoy it! A good disagreeable person will help protect an agreeable person from others and from themselves. And a good agreeable person will do the same for a disagreeable person. They’ll curb those excesses, they’ll restrain the disagreeable person when they go too far and it’s hurting others or hurting themselves.

Rather than being antagonists, our opposites are our best protection and our best complement. They’re the medicine to protect us from ourselves and to protect the world from ourselves. And the more we try to antagonize and get by without the other side, the worse a version of ourselves we’ll become. The further we get from integrating and learning from the values of our opposing dyad, the more unbalanced and prone to dysfunction we’ll become. We had better just pray we are trapped into a relationship that restrains us. If we ever got what we wanted we would lose half the world and end in ruin and excess and the poison of arrows in our own unacknowledged achilles heels.

Anyway, I think I pushed the cop analogy as far an it needs to go for now. One further question I often have to ask myself is, how do I know if I’m doing a good job at my goals and being a successful parent? That seems to be a bit harder to judge. Partly, I can look at the results. Each kid is different and might be easier at one age and harder at another, so I have to take that judgment with a grain of salt. I felt like I was doing terrible when Alex was younger, like every day was a full out war I couldn’t win and was making no progress on. And now it looks as I’ve won the war and everything’s great and I’m great. But neither is really the whole truth. And there are always new and different challenges ahead.

So I try to ask Alex and Avalon how I’m doing and to get their honest thoughts and reactions now and then. I try to get some feedback and a job evaluation. I explain what I’m trying to for them and let them tell me how they think I’m doing at it. Alex is pretty good at responding thoughtfully, although her instinct is to be so nice and appreciative and supportive and understanding of my parenting that her answer is a little questionable. And Avalon tends to be so negative and unappreciative and misunderstanding and prejudiced against my parenting that her answers are also a little questionable. I’m both perfect and terrible, so reasonable and so unreasonable according to them.

So I have to control for personality when considering how to weigh their reactions. Neither is really an honest, unbiased opinion. Alex has an almost amazing ability to understand my explanations behind my parenting and agree with them and Avalon has an almost amazing ability not to understand or agree with them. Part of that is age, because Alex used to be quite difficult too, and part of it is personality. I did spend an awful lot of time trying to explain things to Alex, and she just happens to be the sort of person who would eventually listen and have the capacity to understand.

I also try to judge how good I’m doing at running the game by the results I see in the other players. Is Avalon making Alex happy or miserable? Is Alex making Avalon happy or miserable? Have I given them the tools to be good friends to one another? Or do they act in ways that inevitably lead to anger and conflict? Do they make their mom happy or or make life harder for her? Have they learned to be good friends and children who behave in a way that is prosocial to their mom?

Unfortunately, I have to admit that the answer on all three is often pretty dismal. I’ve not done a good job teaching them how to be good to one another. They often act in ways in the family that would be absolutely ruinous in general society and long term relationships (including family, once you reach adulthood and aren’t forced to live together). But I counsel myself that there’s still lots of time, it’s a work in progress, and they’ve got so much growing to do, and I just have to keep investing so the tree grows more harmoniously and more beautifully and ethically, and just take it one day and one incident at a time.

Still, it’s a good measure I use to judge how much I should be concerned and be responding. If the results are consistent unhappiness and conflict between members of the family, there are probably some real problem behaviors driving it. And if the girls are constantly making me miserable when I’m around them together, I’m probably doing something wrong, I’m failing to adequately respond to the situation. I haven’t taught them how to win and how to help us all win by working together harmoniously. I’m not maintaining the structure effectively. And they aren’t, obviously, because they’re children, but I’m the parent who’s responsible for them. So I get pretty frustrated with them for being the particular ways they are, but I can’t change that, I can only teach them to be the good version of that person who is able to live with and be appreciated by others.

By isolating certain people, I can also get a different perspective. When I have just Avalon on her own, how do things go? When I have just Alex alone, how do things go? Is it harder or easier? How long can I keep things going well with just one of them, or just the two of them, or all of us together? That points out my weaknesses, as well as theirs. When it’s just one girl and no one else, I’ve got a big advantage, the society is simple. And it’s generally super easy. Give me a girl alone and I’m golden. We may have problems come up, but they can be handled and I won’t get stressed out dealing with them.

Start adding some extra complexity though, more relationships to manage, more people to keep happy, more concerns and goals to negotiate about, and it gets harder and I get more stressed. Still, most of the time you can leave me with the girls and it doesn’t concern me much at all, whether it’s an evening or a week. We’ll get through it fine and I won’t be too badly affected by it. Things will go well. Society will continue to function and everyone will be mostly happy in the short and long term. Neither the girls nor me get too wrecked by each other. But if I’m feeling stressed or depressed or sick or really busy and can’t get things done, that can sap a lot of my patience quickly. I have had some times when things didn’t go great and I really struggled and ran things badly.

When it’s just me, I have to run a tighter ship, because there isn’t another person’s energy and patience and effort to rely on, no one else to share and divide up the burdens of parenthood. That’s sort of like why large families tend to have stricter rules. The parents’ resources are spread way thinner. There’s a much greater need for the kids to learn to regulate their own behavior and follow the rules within themselves instead of being constantly micromanage by their parents, who often have much younger kids that need their attention. So when it’s just me, I’m more relaxed about some things, I can ease up on a lot of needs and rules and conventions that are there for your benefit, to help conserve your energy and attitude and spirit. But I have to double way down on the things that apply to me and benefit me and bother me. I need to conserve my energy and value and spirit way more.

So that’s an explanation of what goes on inside my head, some of the ways I try to judge my efforts and inform them. Am I a great parent? By my own methods of evaluating and seeking data for that question, no. I’m probably not. But do have a system that makes sense to me and gives me direction. I know why I’m doing what I’m doing, what my goals are, what my challenges are, and why I need to do it, even if I’m not doing it that well. And that helps me keep going through the girls’ failures and my own failures.

A final note on emotions

As an aside, people today often miss out of the value of fear. We have it for a reason. It’s good for us to have it. If we didn’t, we would be worse off. Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom is what the Bible says. One way to understand that, understanding God as meaning the highest conception of the good and the source of the proper order for navigating life, is to understand it as, wisdom is learning to be afraid of the right things. We need fear, just as we need love. And making use of them is largely about learning to love and fear the appropriate things. There are some things that deserve our love, and some things that merit our fear. Knowing which is which, and how much, is something parents help to teach us, by standing in for those things in approachable microcosm themselves, as stated earlier. All the negative emotions have their uses, as do all the positive ones. And all the negative emotions have their dangers and pathology, the possibility for incorrect proportions or inappropriate objects or misapplication, as do all the positive emotions. That’s why we have both types of emotions. Neither are simply good or bad. Both types are useful for directing us toward or away from things we should move toward or away from. How well-founded and how skillfully trained they are to their use and objects, not their content, determines their worth.

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