Treasure Island And Independent Children

My daughter and I were reading Treasure Island last night. I'm certain that I read it when I was young, but I don't seem to remember it much at all anymore. It's obviously a great book, and I really enjoy the prose. 

After she went to bed, I started thinking about what a modern-day equivalent story to Treasure Island might be like. How would it begin? 

I got stuck, though, because I can think of several contemporary analogues to pirates, but I can't think of a situation in which a 13-year-old boy finds himself in charge of running any kind of inn. But that is such a minor detail of the story that most people don't think twice about it. The author, along with the majority of the book's readership over the span of more than a century, took it for granted that a "tween" boy could and should be running an inn while his sick father is on his deathbed upstairs.

Today, most people afford young teenagers so little independence that placing a children's story in the present day results in a literally incredible plot point. And how you do get Treasure Island started without Jim Hawkins running an inn?

"13-year-olds shouldn't be working late!" "Young boys shouldn't serving alcohol!" "Teenagers hanging around with rowdy, alcoholic louses is a problematic environment!" Okay, okay, but how do you get Treasure Island started without Jim Hawkins running an inn?

My Passion

The valedictorian at my high school gave a fiery graduation speech about her belief that life was about achievement. "Achievement is art!" she declared, and that statement has been burned into my memory ever since. Partly, this is because I shared that view with her, and partly because I had a huge crush on her at the time.

You can imagine my surprise when she turned out to have become a stay-at-home mom. What of the passion for achievement, I wondered? She explained later that she simply wasn't passionate about anything. Nothing. She does seem happy nowadays. I wish her well.

There is a good lesson in this for youths and adults everywhere: Passion is about as controllable as the tide at sea. There is no explanation for why some people throw themselves into the various activities they choose to pursue as passions. Some like to dance, others to read; some like to swim, others to learn languages; some love baseball, others gardening. 

Difficult as it is for me to fathom, some people really and truly enjoy being Business Analysts -- they go to all the conferences, pursue all the certifications, they wake up early and crank through JIRA tickets for nine, ten, eleven hours, skipping lunch to have meetings about "roadblocks," and so forth. Well, it's not for me to understand someone else's passion.

But it isn't for them to understand it, either. Few of us as toddlers knew that we would grow up one day to be fascinated by baseball... statistics. Maybe some of us always loved football, but none of us imagined that we'd grow up to be thrilled by fantasy football. Most people don't become avid bird-watchers until later than life and, well, how does that happen? Nobody knows. It does happen, though.

As a youth, I believed that my passion was music. I played a lot of guitar. The truth is, though, that I wasn't a good guitarist until much later, long after I had abandoned music as my passion and had embraced it as a mere hobby. After my passion for music started to wane (at least as the driving force of my direction in life), I threw myself into another passion: economics. I loved it, and I did well in my studies at school, but the higher I went in the economics world, the less it seemed to ignite me as it had in the beginning. I graduated and took on a less high-minded form of economics, office work. I've done it ever since.

I'm good at what I do. I have a somewhat narrow set of expertise that is often in high demand, and I have a complete skill set around that kind of work. This keeps me gainfully employed and assigned to projects that I can safely say I do enjoy, for the most part. But I punch in early and go home after I've worked my hours. I have no interest in overtime, I'd much rather be at home, doing something else. I don't hate my work, but I'm no fan of work in general. I prefer fun.

So, that raises the question: Am I like my valedictorian friend? Do I, too, lack a discernible passion? 

No. I do have a very fervent passion. It might sound cheesy, but my passion is love. From the moment I met my wife, I knew I wanted to love her; and from the moment we became committed to each other, I knew that our love was going to be the greatest project of my life. I have genuinely felt that way ever since. Moreover, upon the birth of my children, they became incorporated into this project as recipients and benefactors of my love, too. My project has expanded to include them.

The way other people describe their passions is how I describe my commitment to loving my family. I don't mean this in a "gosh, I love my family more than anything" sort of way. Everyone (who is sane) feels that. No, what I mean is that I drop everything I'm doing and forego all other aspects of my life for the opportunity to help my wife and children feel loved. They do feel loved, and they know how much I love them; but they also know how to receive love and, I certainly believe, are learning how to love the correct way, too. It's not merely an emotion to me or a stirring of the heart, it's a way of being. It's a way of treating people, a way of reaching out to them, a way of taking on their hardships as my own, and a way of relying on others when we need someone to rely on. It is a modus operandi, a manifesto. 

Well, I don't get paid for this. Some people are lucky enough to be passionate about their work, while others happen to be passionate about an outside interest that means a lot to them. Fortune has assigned me the passion of loving my family over and above what most people understand love to be, and has given me a keen interest in the acts of love and their accoutrement. 

Passion can be for anything, you just have to throw yourself into it. You won't always be paid for your passion; in fact, most of us never will be. But that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't pursue it, and it doesn't mean your life won't be infinitely better for having done so.

The Problem With Heroes

My four-year-old son loves cartoons, superheroes, books, and stories of all kind. If I start telling him stories, he will happily sit on my lap and listen to me for hours. He's never encountered a story he didn't want to hear; and if no one can or will tell him a story, he will make up his own. 

For as long as he's been able to hear stories, he has gravitated toward the villains. He thinks they're cool. He thinks they're tough. He always prefers the villains to the protagonists. As a parent, I would much rather he gravitated toward the heroes and model their behavior, but to my chagrin his interest is always strongly fixated on the villains of the stories.

Why might this be? I decided to find out. I asked him a barrage of questions over the course of many days and weeks to learn why he prefers villains. What he taught me was something we can all learn from.

Fundamentally, the reason is because villains are "cool." They're strong, confident, often witty, often depicted as much more capable than the protagonists. They speak in smooth, deep voices; they command attention and they exude strength and power. Seen from the lens of a four-year-old boy, what's not to like about villains?

The question really isn't why he prefers villains. No, the real question is why doesn't he see the heroes as cool, and from the above paragraph, the answer is obvious. Heroes are none of those things.

Except Batman. My son loves Batman.

In the 1800s, Romanticism was the literary order of the day. Heroes were perfect, villains pure evil, and stories were about heroes defeating evil villains. Eventually, writers began creating more complex stories, in which heroes had weaknesses and flaws that they had to overcome in order to defeat the villain. Every hero needed a "hero's journey." The battle between a hero and a villain became a battle between the hero and the weaker parts of himself.

From there, things just kept getting worse. Heroes weren't men anymore, they were boys, youths. Kids had to save the world from evil villains on their way to growing up. So every heroic story became a story about kids growing up. Eventually, girls wanted in on the action, and most modern tales of heroism are about girls growing up; or, as The Critical Drinker has repeatedly pointed out, girls growing up and learning that they've already been perfect all along. They just really needed to believe in themselves.

From this angle, is it any surprise that four-year-old boys are more interested in villains than heroes? Villains are fully formed characters, true Romanticist gods, ready and able to take what they want and enact their will on the world around them. And all the people who want to stop them are small, coed groups of weak little kids who haven't yet figured out how to be heroes.

God, who wants to be a hero in a story like this?

As a result of all of this, I am going to have to take more of a role in shaping my son's relationship to story time. He needs exposure to more heroes like Batman: Clint Eastwood's "man with no name," Jason Statham's various characters in all of his movies, Schwartzenegger's entire oeuvre, Bruce Lee, Jet Li, John Carter of Mars, Carson of Venus, and so on. 

My son is desperate for some good, old-fashioned literary Romanticism, and I'm going to give it to him. Shouldn't you do the same for your son?

The Purple Bicycle

When I was in elementary school, the sport of mountain biking was just starting to gain mainstream traction, and given that I lived in Utah, you can only imagine what that would have been like for my peers and me. It was exciting.

I remember one store in my local shopping mall, called "Pedersen's Ski & Sports." (I Googled it just now, and it appears that the store still exists, although it has relocated from Provo to Layton, Utah.) Throughout the winter, the store was full of skis and ski boots, but during the warmer months, it was stocked bottom to top with bicycles. Bicycles of every color, shape, size, and price-point! It was not a fun "sporting goods store" to go into when I was into basketball, tennis, and soccer; but when I gained an interest in riding a new bicycle, Pedersen's was a dream world.

I had outgrown my old BMX bike and I wanted something really cool - a nice mountain bike with eighteen gears (more gears is better, right?) shock absorbers (new-fangled devices that I was amazed to find on a bicycle), hand-brakes, and everything else that a little kid might get excited about. One day, my family was at the mall, and I wandered into Pedersen's to look at the bicycles. My eyes gravitated to one that was a metallic grey in color that sort of color-faded into a deep, dark purple. I have no recollection of how good the actual bicycle was, but the color was mesmerizing. I was completely captivated by it.

For weeks and months, I would go with my parents to the mall on any conceivable pretense, just so that I could get another look at this bike. I would dream about it. I would ride around on my Walmart BMX, pretending that I was riding on this fantastic purple bike instead. I would sit and daydream about it. 

I was totally obsessed. It was a good obsession, though. It gave me something to dream about. It gave me something to hope for: maybe when my birthday or Christmas came, I would discover that my parents gave me an amazing purple bicycle. 

In hindsight, it doesn't matter to me at all that my parents ended up buying me a different bicycle. I was a little disappointed at the time, but what I ended up with was still a really fun, white bicycle that I faithfully rode for years and really loved. I got what I needed; the story has a happy ending.

However, this morning I was thinking about that purple bicycle in the context of dreaming about it. My white bicycle ended up being my next, beloved bicycle, but that purple bicycle was my dream. Every child deserves to dream about something. And what I realized was that I never would have had that dream in the first place, had I not grown up at a time and in a place where shopping malls existed and products could be displayed and demoed to random children window shopping as their parents ran errands.

Today, I shop almost entirely online. I don't step into a store if I can help it, because going into a store is an annoying waste of time for me. Besides, I can usually find a better price online, anyway. So, my life is much better now that I can avoid malls and stick to online retailers. 

I wonder how my kids feel about it, though. They don't have a frame of reference for going to malls and checking out what new toys exist, so they don't really know what they're missing out on. But I know that they're not getting as much exposure to the array of available toys and bicycles and items of interest as I did when I was their age. 

An ascetic might argue that they are able to content themselves with the simpler things they can easily access: drawing pads, educational lessons, Amazon Echo games, and so forth. But how much more fun might they be having if they had access to a dream? Again, the fondness I have for the memory of that purple bicycle wasn't that I actually got to own it and ride it every day. No, the fondness I have for that memory is that it was a really beautiful, simple dream for a young boy. I wanted a cool bike, and that was the coolest bike I had ever seen. And I allowed myself to dream about it every day.

What do my kids dream about if they don't pass by bicycle stores with purple bikes on display? That's for me to find out. And to nurture.

Quick! Do Something! Anything!

It's often been said that "haste makes waste." I happen to agree. Unfortunately, most people do not.

In a stunning admission over the weekend, one of my far-left friends said that free speech absolutism was a conservative position. I call this "stunning," of course, because free speech absolutism has been, for the majority of my lifetime and that of my parents and grandparents, the liberal position. If anything, it has been a left wing position, held only by the most ardent of leftists. 

While I'm pleased that the right has discovered a newfound appreciation for freedom of speech, I'm disturbed by how quickly the left has shrugged it off completely. They now accept without question that there should always be some restrictions on the freedom of speech.

Before I continue, let's get the obvious out of the way: In this blog post, I'll be focusing mainly on the ethical principle of free speech and open dialog, the belief that society is freer and better off when all viewpoints are expressed than it would be if certain kinds of ideas were banished from conversation, even informally. I will not be referring to the merely legal concept of a constitutionally protected freedom from a government's legally denying people speech rights. The reason I'm making this differentiation is because it's possible to shut down a conversation without violating any law or civil right. 

The impulse is understandable on some level. When one encounters very abhorrent views, it's natural to want to get the hell away from them. In our personal lives, we can manage to do so very easily, by walking away. If someone decides to follow us around with a megaphone and scream abhorrent views at us no matter where we go, we have a tort to deal with that kind of harassment, and there is really no issue of free and open dialog at play.

But when a cadre of very powerful media moguls decide to collude against a particular strain of free expression, severely limiting society's access to that strain of thought, even if they're within their rights to do it, free and open dialog has been abridged. Not legally abridged, mind you, but abridged.

This, in turn narrows the available array of ideas. In the moment, that might achieve a given end. You might temporarily stamp-out a particular strain of thought, at least until the people who believe that strain of thought figure out a more reliable way to broadcast their beliefs. (I understand that Ham radio is still an option...)

The next time society encounters a strain of thought that it thinks is abhorrent, they will have that much easier a time squashing it out. The problem arises when the thought they're squashing out isn't truly abhorrent with respect to the arc of history. For example, interracial marriage used to be considered abhorrent, and those advocating it used to be reviled. In the long run, though, interracial marriage is good for humanity, and most of us now fully recognize that it's not an abhorrent thing at all.

How did society go from reviling interracial marriage to tolerating it, and then to appreciating it? I think society accomplished this through free and open dialog about interracial marriage. We started by talking about it and making people mad; then we talked about it and made people bored; now we talk about it and make people happy. That's evolution, for you.

Notice that the people who reviled interracial marriage did not know at the time that they were reviling something that was actually not a problem at all. Instead, they thought they were standing up for what was right! Sticking to you own!, they thought. That's how it's supposed to be!

They were wrong, and needed convincing. That's what free speech does for us.

Free speech does something else for us: It lays bare the arguments for bad ideas, and enables smart people to defeat those arguments. Imagine a bad idea that everyone knows about, but that no one is allowed to discuss. Take teenage sexual intercourse, for example. Many teens are unable to discuss sex with their parents, because their parents forbid such discussions from being had. So those teens often grow up either sexually repressed or they get themselves into a kind of trouble that they could have avoided if they had had better information from a trusted source. Talking about teenage sexual activity doesn't lead to teenage sexual activity. The data on that are all pretty clear, and they state that teens who are able to have supportive and informative conversations about sex with their parents grow up to be better adjusted and to avoid more of the pitfalls of sex, such as unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. That's because having conversations out in the open about bad ideas enables us to respond to all bad arguments with good counterarguments.

The critic may here respond, "But some of these people don't care about or won't listen to counterarguments!" No, they won't. You can't control how other people respond to your arguments, however. Preventing them from being able to speak at all -  on whatever platform we happen to be talking about - is the authoritarian impulse. It won't work. 

The left used to understand this quite well. I am sad that they no longer do.

Achievement And The Cognitive Time-Horizon

 At EconLog, Bryan Caplan has a great post on "unschooling," and specifically the fact that he thinks "unschooled" children ought to be required by the parent/instructor to do one or two hours of math a day, even though such a requirement violates the principle of "unschooling."

He thinks so because, in his experience, unschooled children are seldom strong in math. Here he is elaborating on the problem:

Won’t kids who would greatly benefit from math choose to learn math given the freedom to do so?  The answer, I fear, is: Rarely.  For two reasons:

First, math is extremely unfun for almost everyone.  Only a handful of nerds sincerely finds the subject engaging.  I’m a big nerd, and I’ve done piles of math, yet I’ve never really liked it.

Second, math is highly cumulative.  Each major stage of math builds on the foundation of the previous stages.  If you reach adulthood and then decide to learn math to pursue a newly-discovered ambition, I wish you good luck, because you’ll need it.

I think I'm less experienced than Caplan is, but for whatever it's worth, my experience has been this: The main difference between kids who become successful later in life and kids who don't is that the successful ones learn how to engage in "pain today" for "gain tomorrow." It's the ability to relate a current very unpleasant task to a handsome reward in a far-distant future. 

The kids I know and knew learned this skill from practicing either sports or music. Once they learned it, though, they were able to apply that skill to things like math, computer languages, foreign languages, and anything else that ended up giving them an advantage later in life. 

So, I like Caplan's keyhole solution here a lot; but I also wonder what the best way to teach this kind of perseverance is. As I said, the only way I really know how to teach this skill to somebody is by introducing them to a sport or musical instrument and helping him or her excel. The process of tirelessly practicing a thankless task like free-throws or etudes, followed by eventual success, imparts upon the child an indelible sense that hard practice over the course of weeks and months produces excellence. Once you've learned that, nothing in life can stop you.

But, what's your opinion? How do you think we can best teach this skill to children?

A Novelty Problem

There are many reasons why guitars are more popular than pianos. One is that, unless you happen to own a temperature controlled airport hanger, it is impossible to collect pianos. Not so for guitars. You could fit two dozen guitars into a standard-sized coat closet. There are also many different kinds of guitars, each one with its own unique sound, which justifies the purchase of another guitar. "I don't have that kind of guitar, and I need it to make that kind of sound!" They're also priced low enough that one can buy several guitars for the same amount of money as a piano. And then there's all the peripheral stuff that goes with the guitar: the straps, the strings, the pedals, the plectrums, each one with its own claim to improving your tone.

We see a similar thing in bicycles. It's not enough to buy and ride a bicycle. One also has to get the right kind of helmet, riding gear, water bottles, safety lights, fitness trackers, shoes, and so on. If a person decides to make the leap into bicycling, he'll eventually find himself investing in the sport as much as riding his bicycle, just as a guitar player will find himself investing in music gear as much as playing his actual guitar.

Golf, too, is similar. Once you've made the initial investment, there is always something more; a new driver, a better pair of shoes, a ball retriever... anything that will enhance the golf experience. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of club-swinging.

There are many such hobbies and sports. I've chosen to single-out male-oriented hobbies, but I could have mentioned their female equivalents, too. Do you really think women need to buy seventeen different kinds of skin cream, or five colors of eyeliner, or a different jacket for every type of cold weather, or five differently scented candles or soaps that can't be used together without causing some sort of olfactory overload? And, of course, the coed hobbies are the worst of all, since all dollars from sexes and genders can be exploited equally.

Marketeers are quite clever, and armed to the teeth with tools to extract more of your spending money. To be sure, in many cases, there are good reasons to spend more money on your hobby. One very simple reason is that it's fun to own a new guitar, bike, golf club, hair conditioner, or yoga mat. It's fun to complete your collection, to curate a perfect room full of enticing gear, sure to motivate you to do more of what you originally started out doing, anyway.

But if we're being honest, most of us should admit that we over-spend on our hobbies. A few of us will even admit that it would be better to spend less money. So, how do we resist the urge to spend money on fancy new stuff that will surely make us happy -- especially if we're spending within our means?

Here's one solution: Make part of the experience of your hobby the source of novelty, rather than the gear used to engage your hobby. Instead of buying a new guitar, learn something new on one of your guitars. Instead of buying a new bike, go on a new kind of bike ride. Instead of buying a new driver, go to the driving range and perfect your swing with your existing driver.

When we make incremental progress a source of novelty within our hobbies then we are less inclined to buy new things. The trick here is that the increment has to be a meaningful one. You can't simply learn a new song and expect that to replace your desire for a new guitar. Instead, you have to learn something that feels awesome and makes you want to do more of it. You have to learn a new technique, or play a lick you already know at a record speed. You have to impress yourself so much that you don't think a new guitar is as impressive as what you've just done. It's a little more work, but it's ultimately much more rewarding.

This is one of the reasons that children are such a joy. They can learn new things from existing, on-hand stuff and be entertained for hours; meanwhile, the same stuff would typically hold little appeal to us adults. This past weekend, I taught my daughter how to play a new card game. She doesn't usually play with cards, so the opportunity to play a game with dad, using a somewhat novel toy, was irresistible to her. I asked my wife if she wanted to play, and she emphatically said, "No, thanks." Truth be told, if it were only my wife and I, neither one of us would have chosen to play cards together. Those cards had been collecting dust in a closet for a long time. But then again, no one has offered to teach either of us a new card game.

So, my daughter didn't need to watch a new cartoon or a new movie, and she didn't need to buy a new toy. She just needed to expand her ability to play with our existing toys, namely, a deck of cards. It works the same around dinner time, too. She could sit and bore herself to death with cartoons or coloring pictures, or I could have her help me bake biscuits, or cookies, or peel carrots, or measure ingredients to put in the bowl. Things that I find to be relatively mundane, because I do them so often, are new and fun for my daughter. Not surprisingly, I recently found myself in a bookstore, perusing the cooking aisles for a source of new recipes -- something to make my mundane daily task of cooking everyone dinner more interesting. It took me fifteen minutes to realize that I didn't need to buy a new cookbook. I just needed to use the tablet I already own to look up some new recipes!

Again, to avoid seeking novelty in new stuff, seek incremental novelty in stuff you already have. Learning how to make falafel is a nice tool to have in the kit; it's enough to make a person excited to cook again. Learning a new guitar technique, or a better way of chipping onto the green, or a new card game, can all help you find the novelty you're seeking. We seek that novelty when we shop, but we don't need to. We simply need to avail ourselves of the novelty available in our life as it is now.

This relates to another concept I may or may not have mentioned on the blog: depth versus breadth of experience. Finding novelty in a new guitar makes your guitar-playing experience broader. But finding novelty in a new playing technique will make your experience deeper. I, for one, find that to be a positive move.

Book Review: The Proper Care And Feeding Of Husbands

"Dr. Laura" Schlessinger rose to fame during what one might call a golden age of conservative talk radio, in the 1990s. Compared to today, this was a very different time. Angry talking heads had not yet been completely discredited, and traditional media still ruled the roost. Everyone got all of their information from major, corporate news conglomerates. Conservative radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh represented a sort of "underground," where overtly conservative viewpoints could be discussed. Perhaps best of all, every-day listeners could call in and interact with those ideas in a way that didn't happen on, say, CBS Nightly News.

Dr. Laura, of course, was not a conservative political commentator. She was a practicing marriage and family therapist who ran a call-in radio program to help people sort through their ethical dilemmas. But her traditional approach to organizing the family, coupled with her firm take on human morality, found a ready audience among the listeners of conservative talk radio, who then fueled her fame.

As tends to happen with famous conservatives, mainstream media found plenty of offensive-sounding quotes and private scandals in Dr. Laura's past, and amplified them. There is nothing the liberal media likes more than a conservative hypocrite they can parade around and lampoon. Dr. Laura's core fanbase was able to accept her explanations at face-value and her apologies as genuine, but I definitely have the sense that media attacks prevented Schlessinger from rising quite as high as similar 90s talk icons, like Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil.

Published in 2006, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands hit bookstore shelves at a time when Dr. Laura was still quite popular, before she moved her website to a subscription-based model, and before she moved her radio show to Sirius XM. While I believe it is a successful book (in terms of book sales), it has a terrible reputation for being "anti-feminist propaganda."

To be sure, some women who read the book will end up feeling attacked. These women have probably never heard Dr. Laura's radio program, or if they have, find it to be highly offensive for its non-feminist bent. Also to be sure, there are plenty of passages in the book that directly criticize the prevailing views of feminism circa-2006. Anyone who sympathizes with those feminist views will probably object to the book from start to finish.

I, however, committed to reading the book with an open mind. I'm tolerant of people with so-called "black-and-white" moral views, mostly because I, too, lean toward the belief that there is a mostly objective moral right and a mostly objective moral wrong. I believe that it is right and important to "judge" in the sense that judging human behavior helps clarify one's own moral beliefs. Consequently, reading or listening to someone else's view of concrete right and wrong serves the same purpose for me -- it helps me better understand my own moral philosophy.

What I found from reading The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands is that its ideas -- even the non-feminist ones -- have aged remarkably well.

For one thing, Dr. Laura's view of marriage is founded on the belief that men and women simply think and act differently. This was a stark and unpopular contrast to the 2006 feminist view that sex is a social construct. Even so, subsequent research has proven increasingly clear and robust; there are unambiguous cognitive and psychological differences between the sexes, and those differences are precisely the ones that common sense would suggest. Dr. Laura was right.

For another thing, the central principle that permeates the entirety of the book, if only openly stated a time or two, is that people can derive great and profound meaning in their lives from the act of tirelessly dedicating oneself to one's marriage. That dedication, in Dr. Laura's view, should come first and foremost, ahead of all other things. One's commitment to marriage should come before career; it should come before good times, before girls-only weekends, before fatigue, before one's commitment to one's parents, and sometimes even before the children. Such a commitment is obviously difficult, but Dr. Laura's position is that it is worth it. When one commits to the marriage ahead of all other relationships, then that enables people to better raise their children, draw better boundaries between themselves and their friends and family, and most importantly, find profound joy in the bedrock relationship of our adult lives: our marriage.

This notion of meaning found in living a better life at home certainly presages the ideas of Jordan Peterson, although the target demographic is obviously quite different.

Another aspect of the book that might raise liberal hackles is Dr. Laura's approach to sex. Her belief is that men only really find a meaningful bond with their wives through the act of sex. This idea rings true to me, and anyone who has bothered to listen to Schlessinger's radio program can attest to the vast number of men who have thanked her profusely for saying so. The truth is, Schlessinger has a keen understanding of what physical intimacy means to a man, and she incorporates it into her marriage philosophy. Where others might object is when she advises women to try to please their husbands even if they're "tired" or otherwise not in the mood. While a feminist objector could protest quite loudly at that, it's important to understand it in context. Dr. Laura's advice is for wives who are married to loving husbands; it's for wives who have good lives, but who have let their relationships deteriorate through the inertia of a hectic, modern life. So, when she writes that women can often find themselves in the mood if they just get started with their husbands, she's pointing out that two people who love each other can ultimately have a lot of fun, and grow closer together, if the "tired" wife can simply get herself started, even if grudgingly.

I hasten to add, as Schlessinger herself adds at the outset of the book, that her advice is not intended for women who are genuinely abused. In fact, she refers to what she calls "the three A's" throughout the book: adultery, addiction, and abuse. Any of these three A's are, in her view, grounds for divorce.

What's left is a book full of practical tips for wives in less-than-perfect marriages on how to improve the quality of their marital bond. That is, Dr. Laura wants women to take responsibility for and control of their lives, and argues that in doing so, they will be happier and have more profoundly meaningful lives than they ever imagined. Despite its conservative bent, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands is a manual for empowering married women.

This brings me to my main point: The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands occupies a very unique space in the world of ideas, because it articulates a philosophy of conservative sex-positive feminism. Conservatives, as you know, are not typically known to be either feminist or sex-positive. The fact that Dr. Laura seems to be all three things highlights the fact that concepts have far more potential for overlap than our polarized world would like to believe.

If today's feminists could manage to do so with an open mind, I believe reading this book would greatly expand their understanding of what feminism could be. Meanwhile, conservatives have their own lessons to learn from this book, lessons about practicing what they preach, lessons about the importance of sex in a committed relationship, and lessons about putting one's spouse ahead of one's meddling extended family.

It's an excellent book, a very short read, and I highly recommend it.

Exciting Times

I've been listening to a lot of Sublime lately. Sublime sold 6 million albums shortly after their frontman and principle songwriter, Brad Nowell, overdosed on heroin. The death prompted many people at the time to wonder what might have been, since Nowell was a gifted singer and lyricist, an excellent guitar player, and a great songwriter. Sublime was a really good band.

Listening to their albums, I have become absolutely engrossed in the artistic world created by these recordings. Sublime's use of recorded speeches and clips from movies, fused with their deft hip hop sampling techniques and punk and reggae rock served to make their albums feel more like movies than like a mere sequence of songs. Each album is a little treat, from beginning to end; we step into Sublime's world for an hour or so, we enjoy ourselves, and then we wave goodbye. It is an extremely good use of the album platform, showing us how albums can be works of art unto themselves, over and above the songs themselves.

In that context, it is interesting to note the lyrical subject matter of Sublime's work. A lot of their songs are autobiographical. "I don't cry when my dog runs away" is not just a chirpy mantra; Nowell's dog really did run away. He really did have a dalmation. He really did get high. He really did pawn all his gear. I don't know how much of Sublime's lyrics are fictitious, but I do know that a lot of it comprises stories of their lives on the southern California punk/ska scene. It's gritty, and it's real: crime, drugs, sex, poverty, addiction, and lots of music.

What strikes me about this, however, is that when someone actually lives this kind of a life, it is not nearly so glamorous or exciting as it sounds when Sublime sings about it. When you're dog runs away, it's not an adventure; it's just a lot of feeling bad and being unable to do anything about it, and maybe hanging some posters around the neighborhood. Music is awesome and performing is great fun, but there is nothing about performing music that is really worth telling stories about. You get up on stage, you perform the music, you exit. And I do not suppose I need to go into detail about how utterly boring the life of a drug addict is. The only exciting thing a drug addict experiences is the high, and by the time addiction really sinks in, the high isn't even worth much anymore. It's more like misery-avoidance, especially when it comes to heroin.

In short, Nowell lived a life that was not exciting, but he wrote songs as if it were the most exciting thing that ever happened. That is a wonderful skill, and more to the point, it is a wonderful attitude with which to approach your own life.

I once found myself drinking at a bar in Edmonton, Alberta. A large, jovial man approached me and struck up a conversation. He was an interesting character, from Norway, who had some bombastic ideas, or perhaps it was the liquor talking. Either way, we entertained each other for hours over many beers, and then parted ways.

At one point during our conversation, he naturally asked me what I did for a living. At the time, I was a bank teller. I told him this, and he asked what that meant, so I explained how bank tellers in credit processing centers in Canada in the early 2000s stamped, counted, and sorted transaction receipts. (This kind of job probably doesn't exist anymore -- thanks, technology!) It was a dumb job and not particularly interesting to explain to gregarious drunken strangers, but the man took it all in. Then, he said, "You shouldn't say it that way. You should put it like this..." He then proceeded to describe my own job back to me, using much more exciting language, and making it sound like truly interesting work.

His point was simply this: No matter what dumb, boring thing you have to do in life, make it seem amazing.

Brad Nowell and this Norwegian stranger I met had a similar approach to their own existence. Whatever it was they were doing, they wanted it to be exciting, even if it was just sorting transaction receipts or lying around in a drug-addled stupor in a shitty apartment while the dog runs away. Obviously, I don't recommend getting addicted to heroin. The lesson to take from this is that the difference between your life and a more amazing, adventurous life is often not in what you do, but how you tell the story to yourself. You might live a pretty mundane life; but you might also live a pretty exciting life and just not realize it.

I think about this a bit when I'm running. From my perspective, a 6-mile run around one of my usual loops is a pretty mundane way to pass the time. I can't hardly even get excited about it anymore. It's just part of my day, no different than pulling on a pair of pants. But what would an onlooker see? He'd see a guy in a bandana and a fancy pair of sunglasses coolly striding down a scenic river path with the Fort Worth City skyline as a backdrop. It's practically a postcard, if I could only see it from that onlooker's point of view.

This is really nothing more than finding meaning in your life. If you see your life as a bunch of boring routines, or as an unremarkable thing not worth talking about, then you will probably tend to live your life that way, too. If you instead frame your life as a series of exciting adventures, it's possible to grow more enamored with what you're doing.

Kiss your wife when she comes home. It could be just a kiss to say hello. It could also be an integral part of your epic love story. Make your usual breakfast in the morning. It could be just an almost automatic process of pouring cereal and milk into a bowl. It could also be an indelible part of your idiom:

This is especially important for children, because children haven't been alive very long and haven't yet reached the point where absolutely everything is potentially mundane and boring. Fostering in them a sense of story-telling in their daily lives could potentially help them construct a more satisfying personal narrative. But you'll never instill that in a child until you know how to instill it in yourself.

House Work

We hear a lot about how women do the lion's share of the housework. Recently, we have begun to hear about "cognitive labor," which more about identifying what needs to be done, and arranging to have it done, even if you yourself don't ultimately do it. For example, arranging a babysitter, or planning meals that you don't necessarily cook. And researchers are telling us that cognitive labor, too, is mostly done by the women of the house.

There are two possible problems with the idea of "cognitive labor."

The first is that, according to the definition and description of it, a woman who decides she wants new paint in her bedroom, and who subsequently nags her husband to repaint the walls, gets credit for "cognitive labor," even though all she really did was decide that she wanted something and then make her husband do it for her.

The second problem is that people with a lot of anxiety will tend to fret unnecessarily about things, making long "to-do" lists and stressing themselves out about them; this symptom of anxiety could be misconstrued as legitimate "cognitive labor," especially in one who is both anxious and not particularly self-aware. Imagine a person who obsessively cleans the counter-tops at home; does such a person genuinely have a lot of housework to do? Of course not. When people assign themselves unnecessary work or unnecessary cognitive labor, they're not doing more than their fair share, they're wasting time and energy, and typically at the expense of things that genuinely do need to be done.

Provided a "cognitive laborer" is not engaging in those two activities, I think it is perhaps a useful concept.

But, there is another kind of "invisible work" that gets done in a household. We can't call it genuine housework, and we can't call it "cognitive labor." We also can't call it "emotional labor," because that's a term that has already been reserved for a different concept.

What do you call the responsibility a person has toward providing emotional support to the other members of the family? What do you call the work a parent does if she handles most of the disciplinary problems, most of the soothing and comforting, most of the story-telling and happy-birthday-singing? What do you call the work one partner does when the other is feeling depressed or anxious and needs some cheering-up? What do you call it when one partner needs to take a break, and all the responsibilities and interpersonal interaction fall to the other partner: playing with the kids, talking to the kids, talking to the partner who is taking a break, checking-in with an anxious family member, ensuring that homework is done, etc.? What is that kind of work called?

In some families, the majority of the emotional support required of all the family members falls to one person. Despite what other chores might need to be done, the emotional work comes first. After all, you can't get to the pile of dishes in the sink if someone is crying on your shoulder. You can't re-caulk the bathtub if a toddler is going stir-crazy and desperately needs to be entertained. You can't go get an oil change if your romantic partner feels lonely and needs to be held.

Undoubtedly, the mother of the house is often the one who must do the majority of these tasks. But I think it is equally common -- perhaps even more common -- for the father of the house to be the one who does this. It is the father who often serves as the "final disciplinarian" toward children. It is the father who must consistently woo the mother and shower her with gifts to keep her feeling loved. It is the father who must retain cool composure and determination in the face of any kind of hardship. He provides protection against both little spiders and loud noises from outside. He is the jester of the family, the one to turn to when one needs to hear a good joke, or a silly song, or a much-derided "dad joke." It is the father who must teach the son "how to be a man," as well as teaching the daughter "how a woman ought to be treated."

Men do a great deal of emotional housework, and they seldom get credit for it. So, to you men who spend many hours per week providing emotional support to your families, I say: Well done. I notice your efforts.

Is It Okay For Princes To Save Princesses?

I haven't seen the movie, and so I shouldn't overreact; but early reports indicate that the new live-action remake of Disney's Aladdin features a new-and-"improved" Princess Jasmine. This new Princess Jasmine is interested in becoming the sultan herself. She's strong, and capable, and empowered. She can do it!

For the moment, let's set aside the fact that the original early-90s Princess Jasmine was not exactly a swooning damsel in distress; she played an important role in defeating Jafar and was quite headstrong throughout the movie, even going so far as to run away from home rather than be forced to marry a man she didn't choose herself. (Thus, why is making her even more empowered even necessary?)

I have a question for society in general: Is it okay to tell a story about a boy or a man who saves a princess?

I mean, is that okay, or is that problematic? Can boys save princesses, fictitiously speaking? Or does that reinforce the patriarchy?

Is it morally and socially acceptable to tell a young boy a story in which the male protagonist saves a woman who is in trouble, and falls in love with her, and marries her? Or, does that set the boy up to believe that this one story will define his every future interaction with the female sex? If a girl happens to be told the same story, will she be able to suspend disbelief and appreciate its value as a mere work of fiction, or will she, too, be warped by it and conditioned into believing that she is weak, needs saving, and that she must wait specifically for a boy to be the one to save her? Will this one story define her every future interaction with the male sex?

Notice what I am not asking. I am not asking whether every story we ever tell should be constructed this way. I am not asking that we eschew stories about strong girls who solve their own problems. I am not asking that we refuse to tell any stories that shake up the gender roles a little bit and reflect modern values. I am not asking any of those questions because I live in a world and a mindset in which it is possible to tell many different kinds of stories without having to replace one kind of story with another.

I'm just asking, is it okay to tell a story about a boy named Aladdin, who saves a princess named Jasmine? Is it okay to tell a story just about a boy named Aladdin, without having to have some parallel plot arc featuring a prominent girl character? Is it okay if the main girl character in just one story is in trouble, and needs saving, and gets saved by a boy?

Is Super Mario Bros. problematic?

Here's a separate but related question: Suppose it's not okay to tell boys stories about princes who save princesses. Then, what do we suppose boys are going to pretend they're doing when they play make-believe?

The Best Way To Spend My Time

Yesterday evening, after feeling dizzy and unwell all day, my body finally succumbed to fever. I lay down on my bed, closed my eyes, and calmly enjoyed the spinning in my head. I say "enjoyed," because what else can a person do, other than let a mild fever run its course? I could moan, groan, cry, and lament my bad luck, or I could embrace my circumstances for what they are and at least try to endure them with a smile on my face.

It wasn't so bad, really. My body was tingly and sensitive, as bodies tend to be when they have a fever. That, combined with the light vertigo and the bodily fatigue added up to an experience that I ordinarily experience favorably, under the right conditions. For example, I sometimes feel similarly after a long run or bike ride and a nice, hot bath. It's nice to drink some cool water, lie down, and spend a few minutes drifting along to the subtle physical sensations. If I have to be sick, the least I could do is try to enjoy what aspects of my situation there are to enjoy.

A little while later, something else that I was able to enjoy happened. My wife and daughter came home, and my little four year old girl tiptoed into my bedroom. She wanted to see if I was asleep. I gave her a big smile and asked how her day went. After some chitchat, she was ready to go play, but without my asking, she paused to close the door behind her so that I wouldn't be disturbed. It would be a thoughtful gesture coming from anyone, but coming from a four-year-old, I thought it was very kind. The door had been open when she came in, so closing it was entirely her own idea. She was thoughtful of me. I'm raising a kind girl.

I thought back to some recent business trips that my wife had taken. She goes out of town fairly regularly, without my daughter and me. That leaves me home alone to take care of all the parental responsibilities. When there are a lot of things to do - school requirements, ballet rehearsals, grocery shopping, all the cooking and cleaning, and of course carving out part of every day to sit down and play with my daughter so that she has some quality home-time with her father - it can be understandably exhausting. Still, there's nothing else I'd rather be doing.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I'd love to have more time to write music, practice my guitar, exercise, have some fun, or just plain relax. The truth is, I easily could do more of those things than I do when my wife is out of town. The reason I don't do them is because I'd rather be a father. I enjoy singing songs with my girl and reading her books. I enjoy playing with her toys or doing a puzzle with her. I enjoy cooking dinner for her and I love it when she invariably "has an idea" and suggests that we bake cookies together or something. And I do it all; I do it because it's incredibly fun. I love spending that time with her, just the two of us. I love what we talk about, and how we play, I love watching movies together and taking her outside to play with a ball or a pair of roller skates. It's great fun, why wouldn't I love it?

Some of my friends and acquaintances find themselves in a similar position from time to time, as most of us do. I never hear them talk about how much fun they're having. I never hear them tell stories about what they did with their children. Mostly, I hear them complain about how much work it is and how much they'd rather be doing something else.

But I don't understand that. Fatherhood is a blast. I wouldn't rather be doing anything else.

Twists & Turns

I spent the morning wondering what I should blog about. I wanted to write, but the words wouldn't come.

One reason for that is I found out that an old family friend of ours is dying. Not only that, she's dying in a way that there are lessons to learn from. I could have written about that, and about those lessons, but my heart just wasn't in it. I'm sad that it came to this, I'm sad for her and her family, and for my family, as well. I keep thinking about her situation, and about my childhood, and then naturally about my own child.

It's strange to watch someone go from being an ordinary child to being an adult, to being an adult with problems. One can't help but wonder when a person's life went from being about getting good grades and fitting in with childhood peer groups to being about heavy adult struggles and the inability to cope.

When I was a certain age, pretty much the most important thing in the whole world was basketball. Any chance I could get to play basketball, I would. I'd call friends over, and we'd play for hours. We'd play at school. We'd play in athletic leagues. We'd play basketball. What ended all this was junior high team tryouts. Some of us made the team, and some of us didn't. Those who did stopped playing with those who didn't so that they could play with the school team. It's kind of a shame that such a thing would separate us, but I suppose it's only fair. With our basketball-playing group thus dismantled, no further getting together was quite as fun. Eventually the whole thing tapered off. We went our separate ways and got involved in other aspects of our lives.

This sort of thing played out in my own childhood many different times. In the early days, we all ran around together. Later, I got heavily involved in competitive running and spent that time by myself instead. Some of us used to get together and listen to music and jam on our guitars. Then some of us formed a band and the larger group dissolved. Those who weren't in the band stopped playing music and went back to what they were doing before - in this case, Dungeons & Dragons - while the bandmates experimented briefly with being cool. (Don't worry, it was short-lived.)

It's rare to experience a lifelong friendship. I don't have any close friends from when I was a little boy. I keep in touch with some people via social media, but we don't regularly interact. The progressive, lifelong process of becoming more specialized has a tendency to limit our interaction with a broader group. A diverse set of friends can come together, but by adulthood they usually need a common excuse to do it: a book club, a work group, a hobby, etc.

So, it's not that friends ever become less important, it's just that the natural progression of existence is to go from being surrounded by a community of friends to being surrounded mostly by your own family. I'm not at all sure that this is a bad thing.

But every now and then news comes in of an old friend passing away or a former neighbor getting into legal or other trouble, and from our own internal perspective, it's jarring. We weren't there to experience the transition, and so for us it comes out of nowhere. The girl who once had a crush on you passed away in a car accident. The neighbor down the street developed a drug problem. The student-body officer had financial trouble, and then a mental breakdown. The city league teammate you had developed cancer.

Thankfully, it sometimes works the other way, too. The cranky loner with a scowl on his face overcame his depression and raised a happy family. The aloof snob discovered her alternative lifestyle after high school and became open and welcoming of all people. The poor kid started his own business and got rich. The shy wallflower became a social worker and helped hundreds of people have better lives.

Well, that's life. We all play one of these roles. A major part of my blog's purpose has been to comment on the various paths that lead to ruin, and how to avoid them. Maintain a long-range cognitive time-horizon; leverage principles of individuality in the face of strong negative influence; learn effective communication strategies; don't willingly maintain any serious illusions about your life or your world; always learn, always grow, always feed your sense of self-improvement. We can make the world a better place by being better people.

"Then You're Not A Daddy"

I was playing with my daughter at a playground in a park recently when two young boys ran up to the swing set we were playing on and struck up a conversation with us as they, themselves played.

Because the boys didn't know who we were, they did not make any assumptions about my relationship to my daughter. For example, because I was referring to her as "kid" or "kiddo" as I spoke to my daughter, one of the boys, perhaps about four years old, asked me if I had "stolen her."

My daughter laughed and said, "No! He's my daddy!"

"Then why do you call her 'kid'?" the boy asked.

"I call her all kinds of things," I explained. "Kid, kiddo, bub, boop, sweetheart… but her name is…" and then I gave her name. The boy looked confused, but he seemed satisfied at having learned what her name was.

A few moments later, the boy said something I don't quite remember, but he was talking in the abstract about how my daughter, like other kids, should behave well. It was a harmless, playful comment, I just don't remember what it was. Something sort of like this: "You better not make any messes, or else your dad will give you fifty swats!"

"Oh, no," I said emphatically. "I would never swat her. We don't do that at our house."

Seemingly accepting the correction, the boy repeated the same comment, only this time he said "spank" instead of "swat." I corrected him again, telling him that I don't spank my daughter, not ever, and that no one hits each other in our household.

The young boy gave me a bewildered, drop-jawed look and said, "Then you're not a daddy." He was very serious.

After some additional explaining, the boy either understood how discipline works at our house, or he lost interest in the conversation. At that age, it is more or less the same thing, anyway. Still, the situation stuck with me. The question for this small boy was not whether spanking a child is appropriate. The question was much more definition-level than that. To him, a "daddy" is a category of human that is a sub-category of "things that spank children." If someone does not belong to the "things that spank" category, then someone cannot belong to the "daddy" category. And that's just how it is.

We talk about the appropriateness of spanking, but we never consider how that shapes a child's understanding of the world beyond the mere act of spanking or the associated disciplinary situation. How does a child who believes all fathers spank react to the universe?

One possible reaction is that the boy will interact with any male he knows to be a father as though the threat of corporal punishment is always hanging over the exchange. Maybe it doesn't matter; maybe the boy has been through enough spankings that he doesn't fear them. If so, that suggests that spanking is not an effective disciplinary strategy in the long run. If not, then it suggests that spanking is wrong for a different reason, namely that it instills fear and distrust of parental authority figures in children.

I have written in the past about how wrong it is to spank children. All the psychological studies I have ever seen have concluded that spanking is psychologically harmful. There is no scientific argument in favor of spanking. The best non-scientific argument I've heard is that a lot of reasonable people I know were spanked as children and turned out okay. That's not a terrible argument; after all, a process that leads to a widely salutary outcome (good people) is at least potentially a good process. But there's no telling how much better these folks would be, how much better the world would be, had they been given proper discipline rather than spankings.

Take The Time To Notice Your Loved Ones' Accomplishments

An ex-colleague of mine once told me that, when he had his first child, he created a spreadsheet that charted his son's first words. He listed each new word his young son learned, and the date on which it was observed. Then, after some time, he created a graph with time on the x-axis and the count of known words on the y-axis. He said it was interesting to see the line. It was roughly "exponential" in shape.

(I guess I should say that the line was convex and increasing. I have no idea whether it truly resembled an exponential function, and likely neither did my coworker. Hurray for pedantry.)

When you learn Bangla, it can be hard to learn all the different written verb conjugations that exist, and then to learn all the different spoken verb conjugations. Written and spoken conjugations in Bangla all line up one-to-one, but they're different. Khaisi is a different word than kheyechhi, even though they mean the same thing. One you'll only ever experience in written form, and the other you'll only ever experience in spoken form. Written and spoken conjugations each have their own rules, but luckily they both do have rules, and the rules can be learned and applied. The hard part is figuring out what the rules are. Once you know the rules, though, it's no more difficult to conjugate khawa than it is to conjugate kora or any other verb.

It took me about six months of daily practice to get good enough at playing chords on a guitar that I could learn and strum any old pop song I wanted to. That first six months was excruciating. My fingers hurt, and it wasn't any fun trying to sing and play a song because there was a large gap between the strumming of each new chord, as my fingers fumbled for the correct position. That, too, if I didn't have to look up how to play the chord in a book or chart! Memorizing a chordal lexicon and then training your hands to play each chord via muscle memory fast enough to be able to play a song on-tempo is a difficult and slow-going process on the guitar. But it's about six months of work. After that, the number of songs a person can learn increases at an increasing rate.

So, I think it's safe to say that the concepts described above generalize. The hardest part of learning anything is learning the fundamentals. Once you know them, applying them is a relatively straight-forward process. It takes more time to learn and understand the fundamentals than it does to apply the fundamentals to new concepts, so our rate of learning will tend to increase over time. When we know nothing, the learning is slow; when we know a little more, the learning comes much easier.

Of course, learning to communicate, learning to speak a new language, and learning to play a new instrument are activities that all involve much more than the fundamentals. There are subtleties and implications. There are inferences that must be made. There are greater levels of accomplishment to be had. Even though we learn at an increasing rate as time goes on, there are perhaps an infinite number of concepts leading up to mastery, if mastery is even possible. And thus, after a time, our additional accomplishments become less noticeable to outsiders even if we're learning more now than ever before.

This morning, my daughter correctly guessed how to spell the word "habitat." She's four years old, so this is somewhat impressive. She can read, and that was impressive when it finally happened. She knows some good words, words beyond what the average four-year-old knows, among which I count the word "habitat;" and her having a good vocabulary is impressive to me. Still, it doesn't elicit the same kind of emotional reaction in me the way it did when I heard her say "Dada" for the first time. That's not because it isn't equally as impressive, it's just because hearing a child's first word is a leap into interpersonal communication, whereas hearing a young child spell the word "habitat" is a fully anticipated outcome of her having been taught the phonic principles of reading.

Ironically, her spelling "habitat" is probably more impressive on objective terms, even though it didn't rock my world quite the same way. She spoke her first word at about an "age-appropriate" time. It was a developmental milestone that she crossed at roughly the time the average parent might expect. By contrast, she learned to read earlier than average, and I don't know any other four-year-old who knows the word "habitat," much less knows how to read it or spell it.

So, in fact, I am more impressed that she did this today, but it requires some introspection on my part to fully appreciate it. That got me thinking: How many other things will she learn today that would impress me this much, if I but merely took the time to think about it for a second?

I'm not writing this to brag to the world about cool stuff my daughter did. The lesson to be learned here is that I think we should occasionally take the time to appreciate the remarkable things our friends and loved ones do. We don't always notice what's going on. We don't always take the time to consider how impressive it is that they've managed to accomplish what they have. We're naturally impressed when people learn a new set of fundamentals, but after that, we stop paying attention. It becomes harder and harder to differentiate between a person's being able to play The Entertainer and The Moonlight Sonata, except to people familiar with piano-playing. But we don't have to be familiar with piano playing if we merely take the time to follow along with our loved ones as they work through their own sets of accomplishments.

So, the bottom line here is to take that time. Recognize what your loved ones have done. They'll amaze you, if you're paying attention!

Do You Need A Break?

Over the last few days, I've seen a number of local news stories about young children drowning in the bathtub. This news is heartbreaking, just awful. While we all know that the blame for these tragic deaths lies with the parents, simply wagging our fingers over that and moving on with our lives isn't particularly helpful.

Raising a young child can be a lot of stressful work, of course. The earliest years of child-rearing involve some level of sleep deprivation, and as much as we all look back on that period fondly, the simple fact of the matter is that sleep deprivation impairs cognitive function every bit as much as drinking does. Under some conditions, it impairs cognition even more than drinking.

When you combine that level of sleep deprivation with the stressors that come with child-rearing -- crying, pleading voices that demand our constant attention, competing priorities at work, housework responsibilities piling up at home, emotional obligations to our partner and to our other family members, and even mental health obligations to ourselves -- it makes for an enormous mental and emotional burden to carry. The right set of circumstances can set any parent in that condition off on a series of bad judgments.

The news is replete with the very worst examples of those bad judgments, and small children who die while taking baths is only one example. We've all seen the news stories about the strange accidental, and not-accidental, deaths of children caused by parents who somehow, inexplicably reached the edge of what they were prepared to tolerate and it simply broke their ability to cope. I don't mean to excuse it or to minimize these parents' moral culpability. Still, it's important to understand how such things happen, and if you want a hint of understanding, take a look at the stress that can sometimes arise when rearing small children.

Of course, these crimes are at the far end of the spectrum of parental failure. Most parental failure is much less harmful and certainly non-criminal. But that doesn't mean that any parent who has never committed a criminal act has never responded to parental stress in a way that caused their children emotional or physical harm.

Every parent has probably responded to their child more harshly than circumstances required on at least one occasion. Every parent has paid inadequate attention to their child from time to time. Every parent has had to take a phone call despite their child being in a vulnerable position of some kind. We're only human. Parents often make mistakes. Thankfully, most of these mistakes are minor and easily corrected. But we do make mistakes.

So, when we combine sleep deprivation and stress with a human tendency to make occasional mistakes, it all adds up to a situation in which children can be harmed despite parents' best intentions. Children can be unfairly yelled at, blamed, or punished; they can be wrongfully ignored or left alone for a few too many minutes, they can be left to too much screen time or exposed to scary images in books or on TV. Bad things can and do happen when parents are pushed to the edge of what they can tolerate.

For all of these reasons, it is vitally important for parents and other caretakers to make regular use of the following phrases:

• Do you need a break?
• Do you want to take five minutes while I finish up here?
• Should you go calm yourself down while I take over?
• Is it my turn to do this tonight?
• Should we plan a date night this week?
• Should you plan a night out with your friends or alone this week?

In my experience, it doesn't take very much time or effort for a parent to simmer-down when they're feeling stressed out. Usually a five or ten minute break is all a person needs to reset their emotions, catch their breath, regain their patience and their composure, and return to the child in a calmer and more productive state of mind. And, yes, it's that parent's responsibility to take that time when it's available.

But it's the other partner's responsibility to learn to recognize when those offers are needed, and to make them. It's the other partner's responsibility to recognize when parent and child are not communicating well anymore and a third person needs to step in. It's the other partner's responsibility to be there for both the parent and the child when things start to wind up tightly.

It also goes without saying that, for single parents, this third person doesn't have to be a partner. It could be a grandparent or a sibling, a good friend, etc. Whoever exists within the child's emotional support network, who lives close enough to make a difference, ought to be involved in stepping in to offer help, even just five or ten minutes, when it's needed.

This is a vitally important, and too often neglected, ingredient to child-rearing.

Frameworks, And Their Problems

As a long-time blogger, I have more than my fair share of experience with frameworks. For my purposes here, I'll use the word "framework" to apply to any systematic conceptualization of an issue. A framework is any structured way of looking at anything at all, any narrative that does the job of conceptualizing the matter in a way that makes it easier to think about.

To use plainer language, human beings have a tendency to do their thinking via the use of stories. The Big Bang Theory isn't just a set of laws about physics, it's a narrative that tells the story of the creation of the universe in a way that can be absorbed by ape brains. Before we had the Big Bang Theory, we had other theories about the creation of the universe, and most of them really were stories, written in storybooks, which characters who said dramatic things like "Let there be light!" Over time, as we learned more about the universe, we spent less time on those stories, and eventually replaced them with a new one. It would not surprise me at all if we were eventually to replace the Big Bang Theory with a new narrative, one that does a better job of narrating the earliest moments of the universe. Should that come to pass, it, too, will be told as a story.

Stories are useful for what they describe, and useless for what they do not describe. This sounds obvious, but the importance of it is not obvious at all, so I will illustrate with an example: Comic books from the 1950s are really useful for telling cool stories about magic superheroes; but they're really awful, completely useless, for telling stories about how men and women should treat each other. Comic books from the 1950s are broadly sexist, by today's standards, and possibly even by the standards of the 1950s. People still read those old comics from the so-called "Golden Age," but they don't read them in order to learn about gender relations. The only reason anyone reads old comic books is to enjoy cool stories about magic superheroes. These comic books serve that purpose very well; but we shouldn't use them to explore civil equality unless we're looking for a What Not To Do manual.

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Back to my main point: frameworks are useful for describing what they describe, and useless otherwise. Yesterday, I mentioned a possibly racist Scott Sumner blog post. That an example of a framework poorly matched. The "strongman" hypothesis of Donald Trump's political success may be a useful framework for analyzing the current presidential administration - it's not my preferred framework, but I have seen people use that framework to make good points. But the "strongman" hypothesis is not a good framework for describing the results of public opinion polls among Hispanic Americans. It's important to use your framework only for its purpose, to avoid extending it beyond its usefulness, and to only apply it to new subject matter experimentally. (That is, maybe it would be interesting to apply the "strongman" framework to a physics problem or a problem in psychology - but also maybe not; feel free to experiment, but remember that it is only an experiment, and be ready to reject what you find as readily as you might accept it.)

Being wrong is one way that a mismatched framework can cause problems. Being confusing is another way. This latter thing is arguably much worse. For example, this AOC congressgirl recently presented a policy wish-list that attempts to apply the Socialism framework to the Environmentalism problem. One reason this attempt is problematic is that it is wrong: there is probably not enough taxation and redistribution in the United States to change the course of global climate change, especially considering that the major polluters today are in other countries, such as China and India.

Like I said, the mismatched framework is bad because it's wrong. But more problematically, it's bad because it's confusing. If people come to believe that climate change can be solved by merely passing legislation then we won't stop climate change at all. Climate change is not a political problem, of course, but a science problem. It may also be an engineering problem, since technology must be invented to clean our air and our oceans and to establish more environmentally sustainable ways of housing human beings and processing our waste. It might even be true that legislation can help direct us toward addressing the science problem or the engineering problem - the reader knows where I stand on that, but let's concede that it's possible. Even though it's possible, climate change is still fundamentally a science problem that must be conceived of in a scientific framework and solved through a story about science. Not a story about legislation. Our environmental problem is not that too few people understand politics; it's that too few people know how to do the kinds of science and engineering that we need to stop climate change. We'll never get there without the right framework, and time spent on the wrong framework is confusing us.

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We also experience frameworks for dealing with our every-day lives, and thus we experience the same kinds of pitfalls as they pertain to our individual relationships.

Take your sibling, for example. Early on, you developed a framework for understanding the thoughts, feelings, and actions of your brother or sister. To the extent that this framework was accurate and did a good job of explaining your relationship, it was useful. One day, though - or, more accurately, over the course of many years - your sibling grew up and became a new person. It would be foolish to attempt to explain the actions of your adult sister by referring to a childhood framework about her motivations, based on how she once played Monopoly with you.

That's extreme, but we don't have to rely on extremes. It would be foolish to apply the framework you built that explained your brother's drive to be a high school varsity football player to your 40-year-old brother's recent divorce. If you want to apply a framework to your brother's recent experiences, then you need to learn about what he's been through lately and find a framework that explains those experiences. In short, you need to accept that your adult siblings are not exactly the same people you grew up with, that they have been shaped by the years, and that the old frameworks never apply.

Failing to do this will cause relationship problems. The map has to match the territory, as the saying goes.

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An additional problem arises when we try to apply macro-frameworks to micro-problems. Consider how wildly inappropriate it would be to analyze your relationship with your sister using the framework of climate change! It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?

Why, though, do we not hesitate to apply the feminist framework to the child-rearing problem? Why do we become so entrenched in our feminist framework (or, equally, our anti-feminist framework) that we work to make our children an incarnate representation of our beliefs about gender equality?

Why do we attempt to indoctrinate our children in any such ideology, forcing them to behave in accordance with what we see as universally and morally right? Why do we pat ourselves on the back and tell ourselves that we're good parents when our children repeat our own nonsense back to us for approval? Why do cry out in anguish when our children grow up to develop their own ideas about morality and behave in accordance with that new set of morals, so different from our own? Why do we consider that a failure? Why do some parents consider it a failure if their children grow up to gay, or Democrat, or atheist, or a lawyer, or…?

The answer is simply this: We've mismatched the framework and the problem. Child-rearing is not an ideology problem, and so should not be understood using an ideology framework. Parent-child interaction is not political, and so it should not be understood using the framework of politics. Indeed, I'll even go this far: raising a child is not a spiritual problem, and thus cannot be understood using a religious framework.

I'm not saying ideology, politics, or religion are bad; I'm saying that those frameworks only apply to ideological, political, or religious problems, respectively. Using religion to understand child-rearing is as erroneous as using religion to understand a physics problem, and the results will be similar.

Nor can you use these macro-frameworks to solve any of your other micro-problems. You can't get a promotion at work using an ideological framework; how would that even work? You can't mend fences with an old friend using a religious framework; god may have told you to forgive, but nobody told you to steal his lawnmower. You can't pay your weekly grocery bill by thinking about red states vs blue.

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Frameworks are highly attractive, because narratives are the way human beings understand the world around them. Despite all that, the application of frameworks comes with deep pitfalls with respect to matching the correct framework to the correct problem. Not only must we choose frameworks that accurately reflect the problem we're trying to solve, as measured by the usefulness of the framework to describe that problem, we must also apply the right level of framework to the right level of problem. At best, choosing the wrong framework will result in a wrong solution, and your problem will go unsolved. At worst, though, choosing the wrong framework will cause persistent confusion that will render your problem unsolvable.