StevenFranssen.com

Tag: peaceful parenting

  • Nostalgia As Self-Erasure

    The truth about family stories…

    Parents will tell these pleasant stories about your childhood when so-and-so did this and it was just so funny.

    That’s the common view of what is happening here.

    Let’s break it down:
    –Pleasant stories – where is the empathy for whether the story was pleasant for you or not? Do your parents actually gauge your response to the story or just blab it out like NPC’s? Be honest.
    -Your childhood – the story is from a parental point of view and since parents aren’t philosophical and on principle, engaging with curiosity first, the story is often told to manage a difficult internal feeling on their part.
    -It’s just so funny – the funny haha stories are usually the ones where there was some sibling to sibling predation that resulted in someone’s embarrassment – yours.

    Haha Jimmy, you little butthole!

    Consider the basic attitude of parents to their children: I own my child, children are less intelligent therefore inferior, and my house, my rules.

    Let’s break it down again:
    -I own my child – parents err here. Yes, in a strict, legal sense, you own your child. We have to have it this way or the State will claim ownership, which leads to all manner of insanity. But the truth is that parents are stewards of their children. Says as much in the Bible. Susses out from a libertarian perspective, as well. Your work as a parent is to relinquish unto an 18 year-old a fully functioning body and brain, absent of damage due to your parenting style. Check out my book Peaceful Parenting for more on this.

    -Children are less intelligent and therefore inferior – this is where parents’ programming comes through. People come from a domination-submission background (aka the entirety of human history): where performative disadvantage on the part of another kicks online programming in us meant to seek an advantage. The tenderness of peaceful parenting can be seen when you take that disparity as all the more reason to equalize with the child. How else can they best learn?

    -My house, my rules – this is just impatient tyranny on the part of a parent, usually the father but more and more so the woman these days. This is communicating to the child that power is the adjudicating factor in human conflict, not reason, evidence, or truth. If you’re too lazy to try and universalize the rules in your home, to make them make sense for everyone – just admit it!

    What is really going on with these nostalgic stories?

    The older parent, now with adult children, is typically trying to put their adult children back into state dependence – to harken back to a time when the adult-child was dependent on them. This induces in the adult-child a sense that their parent still has the wisdom and authority now that they had then.

    Consider it – are you, as the adult-child, asking for stories from the childhood so you can get an honest perspective, some relevant feedback that you can use today? Or are these stories just kind of randomly offered up by nervous people with guilty consciences?

    There is a dominance that creeps into these stories, particularly when they’re at the expense of the adult-child present for the retelling. They’re little humiliation rituals meant to prop up the waning authority of the aged parents. Sometimes they’re told in exquisite detail but suddenly the aged parents practice selective memory if the adult-child asks for a painful memory – such as the time he was spanked or yelled at or degraded with some punishment in response to a transgression.

    One of the most common stories is the, “Remember your first day of school?”

    This story is told quite unconsciously by aged parents, oblivious in their certainty that the adult-child will simply buy into the bit and nod and smile.

    Remember your first day at school? You were so nervous! You cried but then, after a bit, you found it wasn’t so bad.

    There are people out there who will also quite unconsciously proclaim, “I was excited to be at school! See, I’m a winner. I ate school up and you can find no fault in what I’m saying. School was a great experience for me and you’re weird for taking issue with my enjoyment of what turned out to be something really great for me.

    This is a way of propping up their parents’ systematic breaking down of them before school happened so that they would be inured to its effects by the time its presence in their life became fact. People like this speak as puppets of their parents’ denial. The reason for this is because school is philosophically evil and retarded, done with stolen money and modeled after sociopathic “pedagogy” from the late 19th century.

    School is emasculating, people-breaking.

    But good luck arguing with people’s programming.

    The next time you hear a hardy-har-har Boomer story about the time you fell on your face or your sibling shit their pants on a beach trip or you were awkward with a girl or, “Remember the nickname we used to tease you with?” – consider the power dynamics at play.

    Consider empathizing with your younger self.

    Consider the philosophy of the scenario being presented, as opposed to the nostalgia programming welling up inside of you.

    Consider the limits in empathy of the adults in the memory.

    Consider saying what actually needed to be said then but couldn’t be said because you were a powerless, dependent child.

    Consider if that sovereign voice inside of you was sought out by your parents.

    Then sit with the answers you hear and feel your wisdom increase.

    Me at the Studio Ghibli Peaceful Parenting Denmark Conference 2025 – sorry to have missed you!

    Could use some empathy and feedback? Work with me professionally.

    Join me on X.

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  • Where It All Falls Apart For 99.9% Of Influencers

    The unconsidered touchstone.

    Now and then I meander into commentariat territory. That is to say, I look at what people are saying – rather than what is simply happening in the news cycle.

    This is an important habit to keep because it helps me to “check notes” and find context and contrast to what I think.

    There is one area in particular where I have been roundly disappointed in the thirteen years since I decided to engage my ideas publicly: the lot of children in this world.

    Adults swirling around in a sky war of limitless fiat.

    Some people would cleverly argue that their near sole focus on the “concerns of adults” are in fact for posterity and the protection of children.

    At best, there’s a kind of martial attitude that children going to “face a tough world” and so they need combat training and tough love.

    Really all this is is an admission of not having thought much on the subject.

    Why take cues from anyone, anyone at all, on any topic if they haven’t thought through the most important part of our society – the wellbeing and innocence of children?

    So what is it then that you’re listening to? It amounts to canned, derivative, undigested talking points that have no real basis in philosophy and have remained relatively unchanged in the nearly-three generations since White man first woke up to demographics. There is no guiding first principle besides “do what’s best for our people” as if there’s an abundantly obvious cure. No consideration of the training or background or question-making of the doctors who set about to administer the cure.

    How will our parenting shape the future?

    This question is central to the moral improvement of the world.

    Look at how violence-addicted the commentariat has become. Rather than just consider parenting for a single second, people would rather go on and on about a transvaluation of values where the current order is upended. Why? For the sake of “vitality”.

    Liberal democracy has been tried and tired.

    But Nietzschean will to power hasn’t been tried and isn’t tired?

    This is vainglorious. This is a mental backflip in order to avoid discussing children and parenting.

    Rather than simply ask children how they’d like to learn, we end up with this kind of generalissimo non-philosophy:

    The Zoomer generation yearns for order but is unwilling to listen to those who tell them to self-order. This is a generation being primed for violence.

    You cannot have a discussion about self-ordered people collaborating as a team without someone who’s power-tripping insinuating themselves into an order-giving role. Noisy, illiterate environment.

    The highly literate generations that established America as the beacon on the hill had enough self-restraint to let the group dynamics breathe. All they had to do was keep their borders closed, hang the central bankers, and keep the children out of the schools. You can get to that kind of resolve pretty easily if you realize not every human has a “soul” that can be saved.

    Now when you step into the group dynamics, it’s all sycophantic favor trading and ego stroking. There is no room for subtlety because that’s not how social media works! Thoughts are bite-sized and emphatic. There is no cooperation, there is only punctuation. Who’s the mature immature reply-guy who can materialize himself into the room? Hoot like a monke.

    Edge and swagger are being sold as cure-alls. If you’re sufficiently self-assured, you can defeat the outgroups! In a certain culture, it’s called chutzpah. Self-certainty is a superpower! Fuck the Argument lel.

    Watch as the lot of children fades as a consideration the face of all this energy!

    Christian Nationalism was tried in the late 1800’s and it failed because Christians handed their children over to the State.

    Nietzschean stuff? Let’s just ignore what happens to the children. They can, uh, march in lines like the Chinese kids do. They will, uh, learn discipline and shit. Do you think I’m sexy??

    Because people are addicted to violence, they cannot pause to self-reflect. They cannot accurately prognosticate what their aggression is contributing to. Perhaps they perceive they will bring about a new Godhead to transvaluate the “old” values – but ask them how this will be funded and what their views are on Bitcoin and yup, it just falls apart again.

    The new Godhead will fall. The Argument will prevail.

    Idea: we deprogram the Zoomer generation from the violence it has been programmed with.

    It’s not too late!