Parenting is very demanding yet endlessly rewarding. Roslyn Ross says in one of her blogs, “parenting today is the hardest job we’ll ever love”. But although it is challenging it is perhaps one of the greatest opportunities for personal growth alongside the growth of the children. This is because if we are fully engaged in the task we are often compelled to revise our own acquired knowledge and previous assumptions.

In this Episode of “Living outside the matrix” Roslyn Ross shares her theory of Objectivist parenting and gets right to the fundamentals of our relationship with our children.  With a similar approach to Dayna Martin and radical unschooling, it is a whole new paradigm shift away from the conventional method. Most parenting is behaviourist and authoritarian to a varying degree. Roslyn advocates mutual respect and relinquishing the need or desirability of control. She eloquently presents a compelling case.

Definitions:

Behaviourism

Behaviourism aims to control behaviour by rewarding the desired action and punishing the undesired, essentially harnessing the pain-pleasure spectrum to influence choices. It assumes that all behaviors are either reflexes produced by a response to certain stimuli in the environment or are a consequence of that individual’s history. Most of all behaviourism seeks to control behaviour and is a form of training similar to that used on animals.

Education:

Education is an on-going and self-generated process of acquiring first cognitive means to gain knowledge, and then ever more knowledge, so as to thrive. It is the process of acquiring knowledge for the purpose of a life Earth.

Parenting:

According to Wikipedia “parenting (or child rearing) is the process of promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood. Parenting refers to the aspects of raising a child aside from the biological relationship.”

I would add that parenting has to be about adequately preparing young people for life by enabling their functional literacy. This means, becoming fully able to live a life and take responsibility for one’s self, to be competent to maintain health, run a home and run a corporation if desired, to manage relationships effectively and to learn and develop ones dreams and achieve happiness.

Conventional styles of parenting

According to Roslyn Ross, most conventional styles of parenting are behaviourist in nature. The object is to get the child to conform to some desired behaviour through the main technique of reward and punishment.  These styles focus on getting children to do what we want them to do. Ross questions this fundamental assumption.

The Objectivist theory suggests mutual respect. Similar to Dayna Martin and her partnership parenting model that we discussed in episode 20 of “Living outside the Matrix”, Roslyn Ross emphasizes the rational approach and questioned the need for control from a philosophical perspective. She identifies the controlling aspect as behaviourism (defined above).

Topics covered by Roslyn in the interview

Roslyn explains the problems with behaviourism and gives many examples of how the parent operating with mutual respect would handle various typical situations.

The website ‘simplypsychology.org’ has a page on behaviourism saying “There is little difference between the learning that takes place in humans and that in other animals.” This is at best misleading and incomplete. Yes humans can learn by stimulus and response, but we also learn conceptually as well.