Just read an article in Marie-Claire magazine about moms who wish they’d never had kids. I’m not surprised that many mothers feel this way, I’m surprised that we think it matters. The world is filled with people who regret big life decisions (where they live, what they do for a living, who they married), and it probably doesn’t amount to much. Your life is shaped primarily by what you do, not by what you intend to do or regret doing. And my guess is that when it comes to doing, the vast majority of these regretful moms are doing fine. I’ll bet they’re great moms. History will, I suspect, laugh at our culture’s obsession with the inner life. My God, we’re hard on ourselves! It’s like you’ve gotta have your heart in everything you do or it doesn’t count. We need to get comfortable, again, with the idea of people doing the right thing, and fulfilling their familial duties, even when they don’t feel like it. Maybe then we could give a regretful mom a hug, and buy her a drink, rather than judging the fuck out of her.

—John Faithful Hamer, The Goldfish (2016)

The bathrooms of households containing young boys are often disgusting. Seriously, they smell like the public urinals at a rock concert. Of course if you say something about this, as I often do, you’re invariably told, with a sigh and a smile: “Well, you know, boys will boys.” What the parents mean by this, I gather, is that it’s normal for little boys to hose down a bathroom the way dogs hose down a fire hydrant. Bullshit! Many things are normal for boys, but this isn’t one of them. My wife and I have two boys. And our bathroom never smells like the human equivalent of a kitty litter box. Why? Because the dudes in our house sit down to pee. Really, it’s that simple.

Our sons have friends over quite often, and, as such, from time to time, they are forced to socialize another boy into the ways of civilized men. It’s quite comical to watch actually. A typical scenario looks something like this: young boy rushes into bathroom, slams toilet seat cover up loudly, pisses all over the place (getting some in the toilet, but most on the toilet seat and surrounding bathroom floor), fails to flush, fails to wash his hands, and returns hurriedly to play video game with other boys. A moment or two later, one of our boys goes to the bathroom, finds the pungent nastiness left by the previous kid, and returns to the bedroom to make a big deal about it. The kid who hosed down our bathroom is publicly shamed until he returns to the bathroom, cleans up his mess, flushes the toilet, and washes his hands thoroughly. Trust me, that kid never does it again! Ever. Maybe in your house. Maybe when he’s at home with his clueless, uncivilized parents. But not in our house!

In the midst of our obsession with self-esteem and enthusiasm for anti-bullying campaigns, we seem to have forgotten that peer pressure and public shaming aren’t always bad. In fact, they’re often central features of the civilization process. For instance, I know a kid who used to pick his nose and eat it compulsively. Often in public. Drove his mom crazy. She was so embarrassed. Thoroughly humiliated by his behavior. Told him to stop countless times, but to no avail. The kid would sit there in the middle of a family gathering and meticulously eat his own yellow-green snot.

But he eventually stopped, rather abruptly, a week or two into kindergarten. Why? Because the other kids in the schoolyard teased him about it. They laughed at him when he picked his nose. Mocked him for his repulsive habit. And he stopped. Right away. Just like that. What my sons do to little boys who think it’s their God-given right to hose down my bathroom like tomcats is of a similar stamp. And I’m proud of them for it. When they perform this useful service, they are, quite literally, agents of the civilization process and forces for good in the world. After all, sitting down is often the best way to stand up for Western civilization.

—John Faithful Hamer, The Goldfish (2016)

“Let’s say that you are a small child and one Sunday afternoon you have to do the boring duty of visiting your old senile grandmother. If you have a good old–fashioned authoritarian father, what will he tell you? ‘I don’t care how you feel, just go there and behave properly. Do your duty.’ A modern permissive totalitarian father will tell you something else: ‘You know how much your grandmother would love to see you. But do go and visit her only if you really want to.’ Now every idiot knows the catch. Beneath the appearance of this free choice there is an even more oppressive order. You seem to have a choice, but there is no choice, because the order is not only you must visit your grandmother, you must even enjoy it. If you don’t believe me, just try to say ‘I have a choice, I will not do it.’ I promise your father will say ‘What did your grandmother ever do to you? Don’t you know how much she loves you? How could you do this to her?’”
—Slavoj Žižek, “The Superego and the Act” (August 1999)

Žižek argues that the old-fashioned authoritarian father is, strange as it may sound, far less demanding than the progressive parent of the North American suburbs. Why? Because at least the old-fashioned authoritarian father allows you to maintain your inner freedom. He doesn’t insist that you like going to your grandmother’s house. Nor does he even insist that you act like you like going to your grandmother’s house. He merely insists that you show up, play cards with her, listen to her stories, eat some biscuits, and refrain from saying anything stupid.

By contrast, showing up is never enough for the permissive totalitarian father. He’s not satisfied with control over where you put your body. He wants to control how you feel and what you think too. The permissive totalitarian parent doesn’t just want you to do the right thing, she wants you to want to do the right thing. As such, your job, as a kid, is to convince her that you actually feel like going to your grandmother’s house, that there’s really nothing you’d rather do on this sunny Sunday afternoon.

Though it pains me to admit it, most of what passes for “progressive parenting” these days consists of emotional manipulation of precisely this kind: modern permissive totalitarianism. For instance, we often force kids to apologize when they aren’t ready to apologize, and then cynically chastise them for their lackluster acting job: “Say it again with feeling, son!” Are we not teaching our kids, albeit inadvertently, how to fake it? How to hide their true feelings? How to lie to themselves and others about what they really want? And how is this a big improvement over authoritarian parenting? What’s more, how is all of this good for democracy? Doesn’t “the open society” depend upon citizens with precisely the sort of inner freedom that modern permissive totalitarian parenting destroys?

—John Faithful Hamer, The Goldfish (2016)

p.s. I’m having second thoughts about this—it’s such a tough call—because these two things are equally true but hard to reconcile: (1) we know we don’t want to raise bullshit artists; & (2) we know that much of the socialization process involves playing parts that start off as acting but end up real. What’s more, we know that some kids need to be told what the appropriate emotional response to certain situations is (because it’s not entirely as obvious to them as it is to other kids). After all, just as there are slow intellectual learners (who learn how to read later than most of their peers), it stands to reason that there are slow emotional learners (who learn how behave like civilized human beings later than most of their peers). Modern permissive totalitarian parenting might be just what these kids need.