People Used to Like Their Parents

We discuss the disturbing trend of people being taught to resent and blame their parents. This toxic attitude promoted in media and psychology isolates kids from families that sacrifice everything for them. Malcolm reads excerpts praising parents from his ancestor's book showing the stark contrast - people back then were grateful despite immense hardship. We must fight cultural forces manipulating younger generations and regain the wisdom to properly judge good parenting.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] So I'll, I'll read a little excerpt he wrote here at the end of this book he wrote about his parents life and his life. The little story I have told about my parents and their way of life and their children seems to me as rather poorly told.

For as good a basis as I had for writing the story, I do not suppose that any man is prouder of his ancestors and all of their descendants than I. If I had been giving an order to someone to supply me with parentage and with brothers and sisters, I would have ordered the very same parents I had, and all the brothers and sisters I had. in order to get this education, he would take these odd jobs, like digging irrigation ditches for people.

Or doing fences for people and then he take this money and he would use it to pay for like first grade, right? And he would do every he would pay for it like 23 months at a time. Maybe even a few weeks at a time. Wherever he would get any sort of a cash windfall.

Which is very different, you know, when you think about how hard these people's lives were and how much they sacrificed, you know, how much gratitude they had for their [00:01:00] lives. Why is it these people today who live these indolent lives where the state gives them education, where the state gives them everything, you know, where they're not, yeah, what, why, why do they feel this way?

You know, why do they feel this level of hatred and entitlement? And I think A key answer here is they're taught to

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: First, I want to tell a little story about you as a parent. So, , one, you've been like totally stepping up over the past eight days cause I have really bad pneumonia, fever, chills, pain. Like this is the worst. I'm finally on medication for it. But you've been really stepping it up with the kids, but then I just discovered like also what you deal with, with like routine kids stuff that we have this, this like routine at night where I, I take our infant Titan or I guess she's like a.

Twaddle her now. And I take care of her. I give her a bath. I like handle her. But you take the boys after we give them their bath and after dinner [00:02:00] and they go up to your bedroom and hang out with you and like they watch the little iPads and the educational videos you've queued up for them and you watch.

something or play a game. What are you playing now? You really like that

Malcolm Collins: Warhammer game? Oh, Rogue Trader. It's fantastic. I like it more than Baldur's Gate, to be honest. It is, it is fantastic. It's a Warhammer fantasy game and I'm obviously love the universe.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So, so you, you do that. And I just assumed like most of the times when I peek in the boys are sitting there, you know, well, always Octavian is under the covers hidden somewhere.

The little kid reading a book with a flashlight at night, Torsten is sitting there, like, on top of the bed. Totally normal. Everyone's kind of doing their thing. But I can kind of now, like, I take a shower after I Get Titan in order and I can see you from the shower if I leave the bathroom door open and I was watching as our son, Torsten, repeatedly crawl up Malcolm's back and then just began pulling on his hair just until he was [00:03:00] like, Maybe like move his shoulders a little bit.

Malcolm would, and then, you know, our kid tour scene would go tumbling off and immediately start climbing

Malcolm Collins: with his

Simone Collins: tablet. Yeah. Like whacking you, pulling your hair. And I'm just like, and there you are just patiently. Playing your game. Like

Malcolm Collins: this goes to our parenting philosophy or a lot of people would be like, why aren't you, you know, why isn't your son better behaved?

And I was like, because we believe not in breaking a child's will, but in stoking their will, the most valuable thing a child has their will. And insofar as they're just goofing around and being boys, like we don't care. And, and, and with tablets actually, and we'll do a longer episode on this. Cause I think this is a really interesting point is people know that generally.

Studies show that screen time is not good for kids and they're like, why would you give your kids any screen time? Right? What they also haven't done is look at the effect size of these studies. Yes, while it is generally agreed across studies that screen time is not good for kids, the effect size, like when people talk about like what's going on with general, it's typically below 5%.

It's like 3 to 5 percent on most measures, [00:04:00] whether it's behavioral measures or academic accomplishment measures. And not all the studies are even aligned. You know, you'll see I think the broad probably two thirds are on the it's not good depending on how it's deployed and how kids engage with it. But if you are a parent and, you know, how much easier it is to sometimes employ screens with preloaded, like, educational shows as part of your parenting technique and then you look at the studies that look specifically at educational programs for kids and see the effect size there.

And he started negative effect sizes. So, Very small. You'd be like, oh, yeah, obviously this is the right thing to do. And so much of parenting today has come to this sort of like, extra curated. Every child needs an adult. They're giving them this perfect environment all the time. And it's like, well, of course, you're going to be low fertility if you're doing that.

Instead of being like, you know, the tiger cub style parenting, which we've talked about in another video which is, I think it was when like, well, if you raise your kids, like Jordan Peterson suggests, there'll be simps which is to say, you know, we picked this up from a safari, you know, and, and Simone was talking about [00:05:00] how the little kids like pulling on me really reminds me of, of seeing the little tiger cubs in the safari, like playing on

Simone Collins: their parents, not, not tigers, just.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, the lion, lion you know, like biting at the, the adult lion and stuff like that. And then just knowing that they get bopped if they cross the line, but the adult, we'll let them know and growl at them first to let them know. But anyway this all comes to this wider phenomenon that happened to me recently.

So I discovered yet another book about one of my family members which happens sometimes. That's when I found it was like publicly available online about a. One of my ancestors named V. A. Collins so this would be my great, great grandfather. And he was in between the ancestor who had all the relatives in the Free State of Jones, and who was the leader of the Jayhawkers.

So this was the anti Confederacy. rebellion group that was like anti slavery, anti confederacy rebellion group that was in Texas during the Civil War. So that was his dad.

And then he, this guy won state office, so he was a state representative in Texas that got a bunch of laws [00:06:00] changed around actually, I have the notes right here.

What did he get changed while he was in office? In 1913, he wrote and introduced the worksmen compensation law because the measure was regarded as somewhat radical. H