I was just wondering, is PG married? and if it is so, does he have kids? :D
Lies We Tell Kids
341–350 of 433 posts
Re: Lies We Tell Kids
#342This is a funny post. I see that you got tons of posts. Probably because everyone who has a kid, thinks they are an expert on the subject. Can you post a follow up with the finer points? I have four young kids and all I know is that it is fucking hard work to do a good job and I lie to my kids whenever I have to make life sound fair or fairytale nice.
Re: Lies We Tell Kids
#343I think we want our kids don't develope the full power of analysis, since them they should discover a huge number of contradictions in our social life, perhaps more than they can cope with.
The problem is that this way, when they become adults perhaps follow the same route: Don't think to much since there is no solution to this problem.
Re: Lies We Tell Kids
#344Here's something potentially controversial: I believe the most common mistake parents make with raising their kids is attempting to treat them like adults all of the time. This trend seems to be most common with educated parents. I would bet that when/if PG has his own kids, he would fall flat for it. I'm a parent and became aware of this concept prior to having the first child. Yet I still catch myself from time to…
I know the type of parent you mean (I live in Cambridge, MA), and I definitely would not be one of them.
Incidentally, though I agree treating kids too much like adults is a mistake, I don't think it's the most common one. Only a small number of "progressive" parents do that. From what I've seen, the worst mistakes parents make are (a) setting a bad example and (b) inconsistency.
Re: Lies We Tell Kids
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Blame should be placed always with the actor." I wouldn't have put it the way the GP did, but yeah, "blame," if we have to assign it, probably does always land at least partly on both partners in a relationship. PG was proposing a hypothetical in "outrageous" terms as a counterexample, and arguing about the specifics of the counterexample is probably pointless. We aren't going to establish what the specifics were in…
>You're attaching a heavy moral burden to the notion of a failed marriage, I did no such thing. You did. If you remove that point, you'll see that I'm perfectly consistent in assigning blame to the actor.
I'm not the one who compared leaving your wife to rape and genocide. It's preposterous to do that and then to say that you're not equating "blame" with "moral condemnation." And since you reiterate your consistency, I can only assume that when a woman leaves an abusive husband, she too is solely to blame, or when a man leaves his unfaithful wife, he is solely to blame.
That's a silly position, which considers only proximate causes, and that's my problem with PG's "outrageous" counterexample. I don't think you can show the statement "both partners in a failed relationship are at least to some degree responsible for its failure" to be false.
To take PG's "outrageous" husband--people don't wake up one morning and say, "Well, I'm arbitrary and evil, I think I'll leave my wife for no reason whatsoever." Causes beget causes, and in any long-lived relationship, they do so in such a tangle that you can't possibly ever assign fault, responsibility or blame entirely on one person, even if all that you can see is that one partner chose wrongly at the outset.
Re: Lies We Tell Kids
#346I just loved this one; very thought provoking! Some very strong ideas, with wonderful examples. I think, I am going to go through the whole thing once again, and then ponder over the ideas.
Re: Lies We Tell Kids
#347Just a quick point of identity on which I believe you're absolutely wrong. You wrote:
"Some parents feel a strong adherence to an ethnic or religious group and want their kids to feel it too. This usually requires two different kinds of lying: the first is to tell the child that he or she is an X, and the second is whatever specific lies Xes differentiate themselves by believing."
I won't try to argue with you about religion, but it also denies the existence of ethnic identity.
Here's a counter-example: Black parents can tell their kids that they (the kids) are black, and that's not a lie (unless you deny the existence of ethnicity or ethnic identity), and there is no need to tell any further lies lies by which black people would "differentiate themselves" (even though such lies certainly exist). Skin color and heritage are two very real things that are very relevant for many people.
Re: Lies We Tell Kids
#348The most powerful and far-reaching lies are the lies people tell themselves. Their children are part of them, so they tell them the same lies.
Re: Lies We Tell Kids
#349On Valentine's Day this year my son called me from the passenger seat of his best friend's grandmother's Lexus SUV. "What's masturbation Dad?" I had an answer. I'd been thinking about it for two years. Just allowing the proper answer to surface. This is near and dear for me. I'm in the process of introducing Online Courses for parents to learn methods of raising children without lying. I answered his question without…
What will your son will think when he finds this posting in a few years?
Re: Lies We Tell Kids
#350Wow! Great article. I was getting tired of all of the articles PG wrote about startups - if you ask me, that was too much of a good-but-not-very-good-thing.
If I were to start a startup, I would find some of Paul Graham's advice useful, but also, due to its size, it became a very big and incoherent potato mash in my head. :-)
So I hope to see more essays and articles by Graham about non-startup stuff. I have some good ideas for open-source-but-commercial ventures - not all of them FOSS related, and may eventually become a "professional" webmaster/blogger (= someone who makes a living out of it). But still I find that I'd rather hear general software management and software-development advice and philosophy than something specific to startups.
So I'm glad PG is back to more diverse essaying and wish him the best of luck.