The Useless Tree

Chris on Taoist Parenting

Chris, at A Ku Indeed!, has been blogging up a storm of late.  Some great stuff.  I have to call out his rumination, "The Tao of Kids." Without explicitly saying so, he is pushing back against Legalist-like parenting strategies that would emphasize punishment and discipline. Instead, he takes some inspiration from passage 43 of the Daodejing, which in the Ames and Hall translation is rendered thus:

The softest things in the world ride roughshod over the hardest things.
Only the least substantial thing can penetrate the seamless.
This is how we know that doing things noncoercively (wuwei) is beneficial.
Rare are those in the world who reach an understanding of the benefits of teachings that go beyond what can be said, and of doing things noncoercively.           

This translations works very nicely for Chris's project: which is to put into practice noncoervice parenting that emphasizes positive reinforcement of those things his daughter does right, and largely ignoring that which she does wrong.

I like that approach generally (though I will admit that on more than one occasion I punished my own daughter by taking away all her Barbies for a day – I guess within each of us lurks a bit of a Legalist…).  But I wonder if a Taoist might suggest an even more minimalist approach to parenting.

Positive reinforcement, after all, requires quite a bit of knowledge and work.  It essentially imposes a paren-grounded notion of morality onto the pure, empty countenance of the child.  It uses what is an externally generated set of rules (external to child) to mold the child's outlook.  Sounds positively Confucian (which Chris considers here).  Which, in itself, might be OK, but it also might not be Taoist.

I wonder if this excerpt from passage 51 gets at something different:

Giving birth without
possessing,
animating without subjecting,
fostering without dominating.

What would parenting look like if that was the guiding light?  I don't think I could do it but it sure sounds better than the Legalist alternative:

In a strict household there are no unruly slaves, but the children of a kindly mother often turn out bad. (Han Feizi, 125)

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One response to “Chris on Taoist Parenting”

  1. CP Avatar
    CP

    Sam,
    Thanks so much for the mention here.
    I don’t doubt that the connection to Tao is not a perfect one here. In fact, I recognize your point (also Bao Pu’s, who commented at my place on this) that even positive reinforcement may require the application of some set of external categories, and that could possibly rub up against Laozi’s message. I’m not sure (I say more below on this). First, though, some quick comparison points that I think do apply:
    In calling positive reinforcement Taoist (well, I’ll use “Taoish” instead) I was thinking…
    1. …of the way in which positive reinforcement seems to require cooperating with the nature (te) of the child (psychologically). As a result, the line of division between “actor” and “acted upon” gets blurred in this kind of parenting, which sounds Taoish to me. Legalistic punishment reinforces the division between actor and acted upon, creating clearly defined boundaries and dichotomies between logically separate objects that positive reinforcement does not (blurring those distinctions, I think).
    2. …the way in which positive reinforcement does actually require (if you use this and nothing else) giving up a strong sense of individual ego, specifically the type of ego that is based on thinking of oneself as separate in the above sense. Alternatively, if you use positive reinforcement and it doesn’t work in a given case, well, then you should let the child be (the fully “hands off” method), as the only alternative now is to punish and violate the child’s te in an obvious manner.
    But let me say a bit more about whether positive reinforcement is Taoist or Taoish (or neither). I’m not sure here, so I’ll just wing it with a speculative analogy.
    When water moves downward towards the bottom of the mountain (say), it encounters objects in its way. Some of those objects yield, and are carried downward with the water, in alignment with their own nature. Some things do not, and serve as obstacles to the water. As a result, the water is redirected in accord with its nature.
    Now thinking of positive reinforcement: the parent has a goal and idea of good parenting (the water moves in a specific direction). The child sometimes responds well to praise that accords with this, and moves in that direction too (the rocks/pebbles moving along with the water). Sometimes the obstacles do not (the child does not respond). In such cases, the parent must adjust his/her own direction in response to the nature of the child, insofar as the parent must now re-envision what “parenting this child” is all about. The child, in his/her own way, contributes to that continuing narrative by sometimes yielding, sometimes not.
    This ability to adjust one’s style of parenting, situation to situation, seems aligned with the kinds of attentiveness to the particularities of te in any given unfolding situation. It seems here, (perhaps?) that the message that would be contrary to Tao might not be to have a parenting plan, but to allow that plan to stretch too far into the future so that it becomes dogmatic and unyielding to the nature of the child.
    How far this analogy can be carried, I’m not sure. I’m curious what you or any of your other readers think.

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