Tag Archives: #Raising an adult

Because I write about pol­i­tics, peo­ple are ask­ing me the best way to teach chil­dren how our sys­tem of gov­ern­ment works. I tell them that they can give their own chil­dren a basic civics course right in their own homes.

In my own expe­ri­ence as a father, I have dis­cov­ered sev­eral sim­ple devices that can illus­trate to a child’s mind the prin­ci­ples on which the mod­ern state deals with its cit­i­zens. You may find them help­ful, too.

For exam­ple, I used to play the sim­ple card game WAR with my son. After a while, when he thor­oughly under­stood that the higher rank­ing cards beat the lower rank­ing ones, I cre­ated a new game I called GOVERNMENT. In this game, I was Gov­ern­ment, and I won every trick, regard­less of who had the bet­ter card. My boy soon lost inter­est in my new game, but I like to think it taught him a valu­able les­son for later in life.

When your child is a lit­tle older, you can teach him about our tax sys­tem in a way that is easy to grasp. Offer him, say, $10 to mow the lawn. When he has mowed it and asks to be paid, with­hold $5 and explain that this is income tax. Give $1 to his younger brother, and tell him that this is “fair”. Also, explain that you need the other $4 your­self to cover the admin­is­tra­tive costs of divid­ing the money. When he cries, tell him he is being “self­ish” and “greedy”. Later in life he will thank you.

Make as many rules as pos­si­ble. Leave the rea­sons for them obscure. Enforce them arbi­trar­ily. Accuse your child of break­ing rules you have never told him about. Keep him anx­ious that he may be vio­lat­ing com­mands you haven’t yet issued. Instill in him the feel­ing that rules are utterly irra­tional. This will pre­pare him for liv­ing under demo­c­ra­tic government.

When your child has matured suf­fi­ciently to under­stand how the judi­cial sys­tem works, set a bed­time for him and then send him to bed an hour early. When he tear­fully accuses you of break­ing the rules, explain that you made the rules and you can inter­pret them in any way that seems appro­pri­ate to you, accord­ing to chang­ing con­di­tions. This will pre­pare him for the Supreme Court’s con­cept of the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion as a “liv­ing document”.

Promise often to take him to the movies or the zoo, and then, at the appointed hour, recline in an easy chair with a news­pa­per and tell him you have changed your plans. When he screams, “But you promised!”, explain to him that it was a cam­paign promise.

Every now and then, with­out warn­ing, slap your child. Then explain that this is defense. Tell him that you must be vig­i­lant at all times to stop any poten­tial enemy before he gets big enough to hurt you. This, too, your child will appre­ci­ate, not right at that moment, maybe, but later in life.

At times your child will nat­u­rally express dis­con­tent with your meth­ods. He may even give voice to a petu­lant wish that he lived with another fam­ily. To fore­stall and min­i­mize this reac­tion, tell him how lucky he is to be with you the most lov­ing and indul­gent par­ent in the world, and recount lurid sto­ries of the cru­el­ties of other par­ents. This will make him loyal to you and, later, recep­tive to school­room claims that the Amer­ica of the post­mod­ern wel­fare state is still the best and freest coun­try on Earth.

This brings me to the most impor­tant child-rearing tech­nique of all: lying. Lie to your child con­stantly. Teach him that words mean nothing–or rather that the mean­ings of words are con­tin­u­ally “evolv­ing”, and may be tomor­row the oppo­site of what they are today.

Some read­ers may object that this is a poor way to raise a child. A few may even call it child abuse. But that’s the whole point: Child abuse is the best prepa­ra­tion for adult life under our form of GOVERNMENT.