Breakthrough!

Traditionally, I don’t like parenting advice. I’ve never liked getting unsolicited advice, and I’ve gone out of my way to NOT give others parenting advice. On the rare occasions where it has slipped out, I usually end up backtracking as soon as I realized it (well, this worked for me, every kid is different, I can only speak about what worked for us, etc).

This time, however, I do want to give you—if you happen to be a new parent, who is actually looking for any advice (and by the way, why are you coming here for advice? Seriously?)—a piece of parenting advice:

Yeah, so the government might look down on you for intentionally not teaching your children how to speak. You probably should teach them how to speak, even thought you know that someday they will be snarky back at you. But that doesn’t mean that you need to teach them philosophy. I’m fairly certain that DCFS can’t come knocking on your door for NOT teaching them philosophy.

J was raised with Catholic guilt and I was raised in a church that asked my mom not to bring me back to Sunday school-- because I asked all the wrong questions-- when I was about nine or ten. Seriously, I was Jodie Foster from the movie Contact. I was the obnoxious kid asking about where Mary and Joseph peed on the trip to Bethlehem and how do we know that Jesus was born on Christmas Day because it never snows in the desert and why would any old guy give incense to a baby to play with; don’t they know that’s bad for them?

In other words, we didn’t want to rely on religion as our only source for discussions of right and wrong and morality with our children. Hence, the old, dead philosophizing guys. Not that we wanted to shun religion in our household; quite the opposite. We just wanted to show that people from all types of backgrounds and times had been grappling with the big questions for thousands of years, and they all come back to the same thing: you have to behave yourself.

So when K started questioning what it ALL meant last spring, and I told him that he should hit those books about the old, dead, philosophers, AND he actually took me up on my offer… well, I was feeling pretty darn good about myself.

Fail.

Never take a snarky, too-damn-smart-for-his-own-good teenager, and give him the resources with which he can refute every argument you present on every topic from here on out.

K found Nietzsche, and along with Nietzsche, Nihilism. For those of you not all up on your dead Prussian philosophers, nihilism means that there is no value to anything, really. There is no worth to living in general, and there is really no worth to doing what society expects you to do, specifically, because it really is all for naught.

Yeah, try arguing about the value of finishing one’s homework when your kid keeps using Nietzsche against you. I have to admit it; the kid has had a good run on this one. Every time we’ve had to have a discussion on one topic or another, it went a little something like this:

“K, you should do x. It is important for you to do x.”
“No, Mom, it’s not important for me to do x. It doesn’t really get us anywhere. X does not provide any true worth.”
“Kid, I really think you should be doing x. If you do not do x, I will have to take away y.”
“You can go ahead and take away y, because I do not plan to do x, and frankly, y doesn’t have any real worth either.”

You see? Fail.

I finally got one up over him this week, however. We were having another nihilistic discussion this past weekend, the kind that makes me want to bang my head against the wall until he concedes or I go brain dead, and it came to me. Just like that, all sudden like. I swear, I think the world grew brighter, as the thought popped into my head.

“Well, kiddo, if nothing has any true value, the only value that can be attributed to anything is the value that you place on it. You’re going around making value judgments on things all day long. You can’t avoid it—it’s human nature. In other words, you can go about your life, attributing no value to anything you may run across, but that’s going to be a real sucky existence. Or you can decide what kind of value you are going to attribute to the things in your life. You can realize that you are only going to get out of life what you put into it.”

He sat there; slack jawed, staring at me. I had the momentary feeling of victory. That wonderful feeling of victory has been riding along with me for the past few days. J is cynical about it, but the fact that K had nothing to say back to that, and still hasn’t come up with a retort, means I won the battle.

I have no false illusions that I have won the war. I just know that we’re going back to basics here, and keeping the kid away from the dead philosophers.