Filling Your Children's Needs
A decent chunk of the charm of life.
Children go through upsetting experiences. It is a challenge to grow up. There’s a limit to a kid’s capacities. This limit lifts over time. Largely, it’s a function of intelligence and brain development. The job of a parent is to shepherd a child along through life’s challenges while helping them to process their upset and trepidation.
Lots of learning is outright fun and that’s all there is to it. I don’t mean to paint everything as a pained challenge for a child. Much of it is a simple joy, especially if you’re parenting peacefully.
Inevitably, a child bumps into the hardness of this world. It is important, as a parent, to spare the child as much of this hardness as possible for as long as they cannot sustain themselves with meaningful economic activity.
Children have these following needs:
-safety
-sustenance
-a learning environment
-play (from siblings and from the parents)
-socialization
-a literate education
My wife and I started our family a little over eight years ago. We are definitely in the thick of it, every day. This is our primary focus in life. Considering our entire lifespans — this is the Big Show. This is what we spent a number of years preparing for, both before we met each other and for a while after we had met.
Our former lives have little bearing on what we do now. Mine is more a reflection of what I was doing before because I am the provider and growing my skill sets is an essential component of this role.
The goal is to bring children up peacefully such that when they’re young adults they have full access to their range of intellectual and emotional expression. Much of my wife and my early adulthoods were spent studying the wrong things, spending time with the wrong people, and thankfully, keeping our noses out of most trouble due to an inherent sense of self-preservation. There were inefficient years. No lost years - just inefficient ones.
When you disregard a child’s needs, those needs don’t get magically met somehow. Those needs lay idle until someone takes up their cause. This is the tremendous need of children. When people express hostility or apathy toward children, they are usually communicating that they didn’t get their own needs met in childhood and now need to spend a portion of their adulthood inefficiently trying to get those needs somehow:
-People who are promiscuous have to replay the inappropriate sexual attention or exposure they received as children in order to somehow master it.
-People who get hung up on video games did not have enough fun and intellectual stimulation in the real world as children - lives of idle despair.
-People who study the wrong thing as adults were not taught how to form the correct questions as children.
-People who eat too much food as adults were not filled up with meaning as children.
On and on the variations go. I think I know them all, at this point. I could probably fill a book with them. Family Formation, my 2025 release, is a good jaunt in that direction. I like jaunts. I’m a walking kind of guy. I want to spend my middle age walking some body of water every day. Right now I’m really happy plugging away at music. It’s something I wake up in the morning motivated to do. Earlier I was laying down some keys.
Scan your kid for needs to find out what they need.
Appraise their emotional state. Do they need some kindness right now? Are they hungry? Is a road trip somewhere in order? How are their clothes? Do they want another sibling? Did someone bother them? Did they have to interact with someone they don’t trust? Is the weather too hot, too cold? Are their bellies full? Are they going to bathroom regularly? Do they have a chore that would engage them? Are they tidying up after themselves sufficiently for their age? Diaper need changed? Baby need burped?
For the first five years of life, meeting a child’s needs is more in the mother’s wheelhouse. As the kids drift toward the age eight mark, they enter further and further into the domain of the father. The father is there to help the child navigate into the broader world.
Some men go Mr. Mom Mode because they are married to weak, self-indulgent, immature women who feel they need to chase careers or remain caught up in their FOO’s drama. This is cheating on the children. A man should not compensate for his wife’s immaturity by playing Mr. Mom.
A man does best to keep up his contact with other men, not become reliant on employment that keeps him a cog in the machine, and to keep a healthy focus on his legacy - the body of work he engages in to improve the moral quality of the world.
If a man does not improve the moral quality of the world through his work, he suffers from a lack of meaning and endures a crisis of conscience until he figures out how to spread virtue. A mid-life crisis is the subconsciousness nailing a man for not having done enough to help. We’ll leave that for another time.
Meeting the needs of children can be a joyous, wondrous experience but only if you go into parenting prepared. Parenting seems to be getting better across the West, which is a refreshing change of pace. Some parents truly do get inundated in meeting the needs of their children and genuinely don’t do any “me” time. But such people are in a tiny minority. What is much more typically true is that mothers are fat, self-indulgent blobs who can’t lose the baby weight and want to stuff their heads into pillows over “post-partum depression” which is just PC-speak for being an immature, evil-inclined poop.
Thanks for being here — especially you donos who keep the gears of the mill turning. You are the wind in my creative and philosophical sails. It wouldn’t be possible without you.