Parenting

Parenting is one of the more developed personal threads in Kyle’s reading, and the books that carry it largely converge on a single thesis: autonomy and relationship, not control, are the developmental mechanism. The Self-Driven Child is read “primarily as a parent,” and its throughline is that “parenting is less about producing outcomes and more about building the psychology behind being good at things” — controlled, age-appropriate stress builds resilience, while yelling and tight control are “ego-driven attempts to regain leverage.” Kyle overlays an LDS frame: Joseph Smith’s “let them govern themselves” rhymes with the autonomy thesis, mapping onto Agency (“agency takes practice”). The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog supplies the neurodevelopmental floor — “what most effectively heals child trauma is increasing the quality and number of relationships in a child’s life,” and “we tend to parent as we were parented,” with the dissolution of the extended family (“alloparents”) as a driver of modern developmental stress. The Parents’ Guide to Boys sits adjacent on boy-specific development and motivation.

A second cluster reframes praise and discipline. The Courage To Be Disliked brings Adler’s critique of reward-and-punishment pedagogy — “separation of tasks,” horizontal vs. vertical relationships with children, and treating a child “like a human being,” not like an adult or a child — which Kyle glosses as “righteous in the dark.” Faith is Not Blind adds teaching children to “deal productively with complexity” rather than around it. The historical case study is John Quincy Adams: John and Abigail Adams’s conviction that “intellect taught without morality was pointless,” the classical curriculum imposed on JQA, and “the most painful thread” — “the same thresher that forged JQA destroyed his brothers and eventually his own sons.” Becoming contributes Michelle Obama’s rejection of “what do you want to be when you grow up?” as “one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child.”

Context: “Parenting” here is a cross-corpus reading theme — Kyle’s standing interest in child development, autonomy, and moral formation — drawn from developmental-psychology books, an LDS framework, and biography, rather than from one source.

Where this appears

• The Self-Driven Child — autonomy and controlled stress as the developmental mechanism; “let them govern themselves.”
• The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog — relationships heal trauma; “we parent as we were parented”; loss of the extended family.
• The Parents’ Guide to Boys — boy-specific development, motivation, and education.
• The Courage To Be Disliked — Adler’s critique of reward/punishment; separation of tasks; “righteous in the dark.”
• John Quincy Adams — education as moral formation; the Adams “thresher” that forged and destroyed.
• Faith is Not Blind — teaching children to “deal productively with complexity.”
• Becoming — “what do you want to be when you grow up?” as a useless question.
• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life — referenced in the parenting/education cluster.
• 4 Styles of Parenting — Kyle’s notes on the Sprouts explainer of Baumrind’s parenting styles (authoritative as the one to aim for).

Quick Capture links — June 29th, 2021

Reading-list links from Kyle’s June 29th, 2021 Roam daily-note “Quick Capture” log.

• https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/upshot/the-relentlessness-of-modern-parenting.html
• https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-future-b0d1b0ea-24f5-4a27-8005-6de46b9e709c.html?chunk=3#story3
• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TjBxIqdkFzE5wuno5-_c6p3wPG0faN9_/view
• https://www.themomproject.com/
• https://www.myvillage.com/
• https://www.kindercare.com/

Related: Childcare

From Roam

• To Do
  • Research managing anger and how best to discipline kids #p2
  • Learn from John Quincy Adams and design a system for spending time tutoring my kids
    • “‘Education has made a greater difference between man and man, than nature has made between man and brute,’ John wrote Abigail in 1775. ‘It should be your care, therefore, and mine to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them a habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue.’ Abigail and John would have recoiled at the idea that intellect could be taught in the absence of morality, for they believed that the goal of education was to produce both goodness and usefulness.” #Parenting
    • ==“Adams spent the spring and early summer practicing the law in his desultory way, reading, and seeing to George’s education, as his parents had seen to his. Every morning before eight he and George took turns reading to each other four chapters of the Bible, and then father and son talked about the meaning of the passages. He showed the countries of the world on a map. He took George and John to a performance of Hamlet.”== #Parenting Gospel Study
    • “Adams and Charles Francis took walks together almost every day, and the father spent hours listening to the four-year-old son read La Fontaine’s Fables in the original, and teaching him to read in English.” #Parenting #Education
    • “Adams spent more and more time with Charles Francis, who was outgrowing the nursery. Louisa was too distracted with grief even to attend to her little boy. Father and son took long walks together, went on sleigh rides, and gawked at the exotic sights of the winter carnival. And Adams lavished his pedagogical ambitions on his youngest child. By the spring of 1812, he was spending at least three hours a day with his son, who, several months shy of his fifth birthday, was reading French, German, and English. By the end of that year, Charles was reading from the Book of Common Prayer.”
• Random Articles
  • https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/the-dangers-of-distracted-parenting/561752/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits