How to Save America's Children from their Parents

Parenting is a complex endeavor, that much is a cliché. Yet, beneath the complexity lies a simple truth: parenting is a relationship, and like all deep relationships, it must be rooted in empathy. Beyond the biological imperative of survival or the social pressure to be "normal," the true foundation of raising a child is the granting of unconditional love to a vulnerable human being who depends on you entirely.

However, a dangerous phenomenon is unfolding across the West. As a vast segment of the adult population becomes medicated or diagnosed with psychiatric disorders, the logic of the clinic has bled into the home. The very mechanism that fuels the mental health system, labeling, monitoring, and categorization, is now being replicated in the parent-child bond.

We are witnessing the rise of a "Coercive Parenting" model that mimics the darker instincts of institutional psychiatry. It operates through constant surveillance and judges the inner soul of the child by external metrics.

In our secular age, the neurotic urge to control, essentially a form of normalized sadism, has migrated from the hospital to the living room. This raises a disturbing question: Why has the compulsive need to monitor become the benchmark for a "good educator"?

It is a profound paradox. "Regulation", the preferred euphemism of the modern anxious class, has become a parental virtue. But this is not parenting. It is an amusing Kafkaesque shield that a unwell society projects onto its children.

The crown jewel of this toxic symbiosis is the Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) system. Under the guise of "self-regulation," SEL serves as a vehicle for institutionalized repression, enforcing the medicalization of childhood behind a wall of empty buzzwords.

This article will demonstrate how this happened, and why it must stop.

Let us start for example with a situation where a child strikes his single father.

The father lives outside the home; the son is with his mother 98% of the time.

Now, let us assume a father is systematically excluded from parental processes a ,common reality in family courts, due to the mother's need for total control. She refuses to co-parent, hides information, and court appointees are less than earnest with the father.

An observer on the sidelines, witnessing the son strike this father, might lazily conclude that the father is at fault for annoying the child or that he is merely serving as a target for projection.

Regardless, seeing the mother’s monopoly on control and the court’s appointees support of it, the observer falls into a modern trap: equating the privilege and ability to regulate with parental merit.

In an society riddled with anxiety and control our observer values the spectacle of dominance more than the non-violence of the child - hence he will view the beaten father as the failure.

Consequently, the father’s lack of dominance is identified as a failure to function.

The paradox won’t be clear to the observer, that the search for dominance which he or she, as a control-focused observer is seeking - is the exact action which the child is taking. And that this triggers the alarm which makes the observer see the father as suddenly inept.

While the authority to guide a child belongs to the parent, that privilege should not mutate into fear. Consequently, the father’s lack of dominance is misidentified as a failure in function.

The fault is not with the violence of the child (living with a controlling mother) - but with the father who suddenly allowed the child to exhibit power he should not have - over someone who should have that power.

There are, of course, other avenues of thought. However, our observer views the dichotomy of power and weakness as a reflection of the status or capacity for violence or control. Consequently, he interprets violent action not necessarily as an expression of human suffering, but as a rebellion against a given authority.

The question they ask is not one of a humanistic paradigm which objects the usage of force. But one of the “correct” placement of force.

They are not upset over coercion or violence, they are upset over the lack of ability to control its direction or flow via correct and appropriate “regulation”. For them violence is an adult privilege.

This alone proves to us, that the control/regulation/monitoring jargon hides a master-slave dynamics of perpetual multi-generational sadism of musical chairs – not parenting, not education and not regulation. Which leads to the platonic joke – “who will regulate the regulators”.

This also reflects the thematic and methodological flaw not only of coercive-parenting but also of the SEL method which sees an external vector (societal expectations and environment) as defining the "well-being" of the child. By doing so, SEL, like coercive-parenting, mimick not only a bizarre hierarchical co-dependence, but negate the essential individuality of the subject - much like some medical professions.

The Pathologization of children through control

John Locke argued that parents often complain about their children, ignoring the fact that they are the ones who poisoned the stream. The concept of 'mental hygiene' prevalent in America has ultimately seeped into the realm of parenting, creating hurt children.

The downstream of violence in the shadow of the mental health crisis was not born in a vacuum; it came from parents born in the 70s, 80s, and 90s into an anxiety-ridden America that viewed the silencing of the individual and their uniqueness as a form of functionality. The barometer of what is considered "healthy parenting" effectively normalizes a need for compulsive navigation of order which is projected on children. it is reflected in sadistic parenting patterns that prioritize external objectives, schedules, obligations, and pleasures, over subjective realities: like the child, their world, their dreams, desires, and feelings.

Take, the "Social-Emotional Learning" (SEL) method, which seeks to regulate the individual according to external settings and expeectations. This is a method whose classic critics are humanists, classical liberals, and people of non dogmatic faith, those who are unwilling to accept the shaping of a child according to an external vector as a standard. Social-Emotional education, combined with the compulsion for control, is transmitting a form of institutionalized rigidity to the next generation. This anxiety originates patially from institutions who absorb hurt humans, and who tgenerate disorder through projection and labeling, effectively mirroring in their own methods the pathology they purport to manage.

This has infiltrated childhood not only through medication but through the very fabric of parental conduct, yielding children who are anxious, frightened, stressed, hurt and violent.

"If 'good parenting' is measured by the level of control and regulation gained over a child’s being (like an animal), then parenting has become a mechanism of sublimating the adult's fear of depression and or anxiety.

Almost makes you wonder why some get a dog before having kids.

This need for control, grows with the breakdown in culture, religion, and community trust. By projecting this breakdown onto innocent children, often cloaking it in medical jargon, parents settle into a standard where success at parenting is judged merely by the execution of power to order.

We must admit: these controlling parents are making life easy for themselves and hard for their children.

Consider the '2% Father.' If his son lashes out at him, the system, sees a failure of paternal dominance. He cannot conceive that the mother, who holds the child 98% of the time, might be suffocating the boy with her own capricious need for control, driving him to violence against the only safe target available.

This truth remains invisible because the 'Monitoring Paradigm' is self-referential. It assumes that whoever holds the monopoly on power also holds the monopoly on virtue. One might ask: 'Shouldn't parents have the final say? Who else should be in charge?' We do not deny that the parent holds the monopoly on authority. We deny that this monopoly should be the blunt instrument used to forge a human soul. If the benchmark of parenting is simply the projection of control, it becomes inconceivable that a child striking his father might actually be striking out against a repressive background. Consequently, the notion that controlling, regulating, and managing children is a barometer for 'quality parenting' is logically flawed and is based on circular conditioning that blinds us to the child's true needs.

The epidemic of anxiety and depression has mutated into a worldview where suppression, disguised as functional order, is mistaken for parenthood.

American adults, unwilling to sublimate traumas or burden themselves with self-cure, project their past helplessness unto kids and mask it as a 'parental philosophy.'

The mental health system, will not help. It too, blinded by its own coercive privileges, has raised a generation of parents in its own image: branded, sanitized, and medicated.

These parents cannot see their children outside their own sense of pain or power; under this fragile and medicalized gaze, the child disappears, and neurotic tendencies are cultivated as early as age three in today's kids.

In this twisted reality, the '2% Father's' explanations for being attacked by a child (who is being neglected by the mother) are treated as meaningless, much like a young man whose depression is dismissed despite being abused. In the eyes of the system, the father's lack of dominance is damning.

The father is blamed for the violence despite it being an externalized projection of the mother's compulsion for control.

Yes the child may have moments of love and grace, but as a general rule, in the world that is based on controlling and obeying - vulnerability and emotion are crimes punishable by shame, guilt, neglect - that lead to pain and hate.

Good job, Avocado Toast Moms.

The 'Social-Emotional' and controlled parenting frameworks are both fundamentally pathological regardless of those operating within them. The inner self is forever sacrificed on the altar of external power dynamics - creating a synergy of obedience running through American education, culture, psychiatry, and starting with parenting.

In this system, coercion leads to reaction which leads to labeling and pain. The hurt son and the alienated father are taken hostage by a pseudo-medical strategy. When a father attempts to practice liberated parenting, allowing his son the freedom of self-actualization, the bystander witnesses only chaos and a 'loss of control.' The observer demands a performance of dominance. Consequently, the father is pressured to betray his own philosophy and intervene artificially, simply to satisfy the societal gaze that craves hierarchy. The result? A profound alienation where both father and son lose touch with their authentic selves.

Any figure, be it a parent or educator, who dares to break this cycle and offer true liberty is treated like a modern Socrates: a corrupter of youth to be punished by the establishment. While this Kafkaesque reality is painful for the father, for the child, it is catastrophic.

The Only Answer: Empathetic Parenting via Narrative and Affirmation

In order to fix this, we must rethink some of our foundational norms and concepts.

What the child brings into the world is first and foremost a story.

Every time we encounter a child, the question facing us is: which layer of the imagination are we able or do we wish to construct?

The role of the parent is to provide backing and an opening for all imagination, to validate it from within the adult world, and along the way, to gently and slowly mediate the post-imaginary reality with love.

Because, as Jean-François Lyotard said, the debt to childhood can never be fully repaid, there is justice in the Rousseauian idea of attempting to replicate the "noble savage" within the child's heart. And indeed, there is further justice in our natural yearning when we engage with a child, seeing them as an infinite reservoir of unrealized opportunities that are ours to love and imagine alongside them.

Children of empathetic and intelligent parents hold a distinct advantage. When treated with gentleness and generosity, it becomes far easier for them to absorb nurturing parental values. When I speak of parental values, I refer to the replication of the loving experience of parenting that the child felt passed on to their own future child.

And if this did not exist, the bravery and awareness to self-parent. Not to run around like a control freak.

For example, a child whose mother raised him with love and attentive listening is far more likely, when seeking to reproduce parenting practices, to replicate them according to this specific parental rubric. The American mental health crisis, about which I have written before, created primarily after the 1950s, caused a painful rupture and disconnection in the American parenting experience.

This was further compounded by the fact that the American parenting experience was shaped against a backdrop of diverse immigrant and cultural backgrounds. This rupture and disconnection led many to seek refuge in "correct parenting," often found in SEL a broad idol that many regulate themselves to fit, even though, in practice, the basic concepts of validation, empathy, and the replication of attentive parenting are not fundamental to it.

Why?

Because we cannot ask an entire generation to admit that the parenting style born from a backdrop of widespread anxiety and depression on one hand, and extreme narcissism pot-head communist idealism, and hyper sexualization, has destroyed the legacy of American parenting in the late modern era.

Therefore, the only path forward is through Narrative Parenting.

Narrative Parenting demands "lowering", requiring the father or mother to descend to the child's height, not just to create theoretical opportunities, but to penetrate directly into the child's world. To use their power not to control or demand “regulation”, but to use their power to bestow it to the child in benevolent fashion.

For the narrative parent, unlike the controlling parent. Believes in humanity and thus can believe in the child.

This is done through fundamental techniques:

1. Incessant Questioning

To deeply interrogate the children's world.

2. Modeling Self-Inquiry

To show the child that it is permissible, and even desirable, to doubt ourselves and to ask questions about ourselves out loud.

3. Asking the Child: "Is My Parenting Worthy?"

This is an idea that many dislike and is considered controversial. However, in practice, without the willingness to do this, there is no conversation between parent and child, there is only a directive.

4. Positioning Emotional Imagination within the Dream Sphere

One must constantly avoid suppressing the child's hidden desires. By enabling personal discourse within the sphere of imagination and dreams, we produce the Shestovian declaration that "everything is possible."

When everything is possible, we produce children who are truly brave and independent. We must remember: a child who exhibits self-control is not necessarily an independent child, he is often merely a tamed child. And taming is for animals.

I once heard a beautiful saying in a small town in Connecticut I visited. Someone told me there are two ways to educate a child:

From this stems the fifth function:

5. The Function of Self-Belief and Uniqueness

In the past, we heard plenty of criticism that "every child gets a trophy." But the truth should have been not that every child gets a trophy, but that every child is, in and of themselves, a trophy for someone. Important to the world. Not to the group, but to the universe itself.

This idea touches on Anthroposophy, but also on Theology. In simpler terms: granting a perception of uniqueness to the child is based on building confidence. But building confidence, because it requires a spiritual/conceptual source, necessitates that the child sees themselves as a reflection of some kind of uniqueness.

Here, alongside the important reproductive function of the transcendental idea, we find the importance of the transcendental idea in education, as found in Jewish tradition regarding the sublime attributes of God, which man must emulate. One can argue that these same functions exist in the small child:

In this sense, God is a wonderful tool for the mirroring and sublimation of positive traits that fill Narrative Parenting with an endless source of grace, even without the need for religious practice.

6. Questions as Learning and Empathy

In the process of getting to know the child, we can read their emotions and feel empathy. But we can also truly find ourselves learning to love and know from a different angle. The moment we tell our child, "I learned this from you today," or "You taught me such and such," the child can themselves exit the field of controlling, compulsive thought regarding structural roles. They can see the parent as a source of love that strengthens them, and understand that the meaning of that strength is their ability to ask questions, even as an adult.

Now, one must ask: Why is this not discussed? Why do educational systems, social workers, and courts not measure the central control factor of parenting, empathy?

Why?

Perhaps more on that elsewhere.