STUDENT X (with contributions from her partner, ********* *******)

BISSEB 359: Ethics and Parenting – Autumn 2016

Dear Future Child,

We are writing this list of parenting principles to you now even though you are still years away from being born, because we think it is important to start thinking now about what values we want to have as parents to you. While we both love our parents and appreciate all they have done for us, we also see areas where we they could have done better; by making this list now, we hope to intentionally elevate our parenting practices into something hat we can be proud of. While some may say that this makes us idealistic, we view it as having ideals to strive for (Kohn, 2005, 8). That being said, maybe everything on this list won’t stick as life occurs particularly because we haven’t met you yet, but it does give us a model in which to raise you under. We want you to have as much autonomy as possible, particularity in your education and personal decisions, but we also have justifiable limitations to your autonomy when it comes to diet and technology.

The biggest thing we want you to know is that we already love you unconditionally. We will respect the decisions you make, even if they aren’t decisions that we would make. We want you to be a creative, dependable, emotionally intelligent, well-spoken, and driven individual, someone that can help both themselves and others. Mindfulness and the value of turning down sensory information are values that we want you to have. One of the most important things to us is that we have open communication with you at all times; we want you to feel comfortable talking to us about anything. We unconditionally value your existence, but that doesn’t mean we will praise you excessively. We would like to note that a lot of our individual decisions with you will depend on your own level of personal responsibility. If you have a sibling, we want to raise the both of you according to your specific needs, not to how we raised the other sibling. One of the biggest values we have as parents, is that we want to raise you to be a responsible adult, not just to be a “good” child. These parenting principles are not in a particular order, and many are interconnected.

1) We vow to follow the Unconditional Parenting Model:

What: This parenting model contrasts the mainstream Western conditional parenting model, in that it focuses on open discussion on how best to address your needs rather than on a system of reward and punishment. Unconditional parenting accepts the opposite of behaviorism, that behaviors are “outward expressions of feelings and thoughts,” (Kohn, 2005, 15). Rather than assuming children’s emotions are irrational, unconditional parenting looks to find the reasoning behind certain actions. Instead of punishing bad behavior and rewarding good behavior, unconditional parenting creates a discussion around objective moral values without antagonizing the child’s decisions. Unconditional parents want to teach their future adult children that they will be loved despite what decisions they do and don’t make, by teaching children that the amount of love they receive from their parents is not dependent on how obedient they are. Unconditional parenting assumes that the experience of the child is just as important, if not more important, than the actions of the parent, meaning that the child’s opinion always matters (21).

Why: We believe that we are raising you to be a strong, dependable adult, not to be an obedient child. Because of this we want to raise you under the unconditional parenting model, which emphasizes open conversation rather than systems of reward and punishment. We see the conditional parenting method as being too focused on creating obedient children rather than functional adults, while the unconditional parenting method is a more holistic method of looking at the entire family unit as being valuable. We can’t promise that we won’t sometimes get frustrated with you, but we can promise that we won’t physically or verbally abuse you. We will not take privileges away from you as a way to control your behavior. We want you to feel comfortable talking to us about anything, even about the things we disapprove of. While we obviously want you to make the best choices, we also understand that sometimes we won’t agree with what the best choice for you is. We want you to know that we love you no matter what, and want you to come to us no matter what.

2) We vow to help you eat a healthy diet and to limit your sugar intake:

What: We want you to see value in eating healthy, and we want eating dinner to be a mindful family moment. We vow to not put added sugar into your diet until after the age of two, and to continue to limit your sugar intake while you live with us.

Why: There is a lot of scientific research that say consuming too much added sugar is bad for both your physical and mental health. We are constantly surrounded by media messages that make fast easy food just look so good, but we want to raise you to see the value in home cooked meals. We also think that dinner time is a mindful moment for us to be together as a family. The American Heart Association published new nutrition recommendation for children in 2016, suggesting that children ages 2-18 should not consume more than six teaspoons of added sugar a day. To put that into perspective, there are more than 9 teaspoons of sugar in a single can of Coke. An average child (ages 2-18) is consuming two to three times more than the recommended limit of daily added sugar, which makes it unsurprising that so many children today are dealing with nutrition related health issues. Added sugar includes any sweetener that is added during processing, such as high fructose corn syrup or white sugar. The AHA recommendation also included that children under the age of two should not be consuming any added sugar, particular because it can predispose them to prefer those types of treats as they grow older. (Nierenberg, 2016).

3) We vow to limit TV time, and to instead read together every day:

What: We will limit your exposure to television almost completely during your first two years of life, and hopefully teach you to love reading over watching a screen as you grow older. We do not like how absorbed with technology so many people are. That being said, we also understand that technological literacy is important in today’s world, and we don’t want to hold you back in that way. We hope to strike a healthy balance between screen time (consumption) and time to be creative (production), and to have you see the value in unplugging from technology. For this reason, we will not be habitually watching television with you. This is not to say that you won’t watch movies occasionally with us, but it does mean that we vow to never sit you down in front of a turned on TV as a way to take care of you during your first two years of life. We want reading and books on tape to be an alternative source of entertainment for you.

Why: “The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that kids under 2 years old not watch any TV and those older than two watch no more than 1-2hours a day of quality programming” (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2011). Too much TV time is linked to obesity rates, lack of emotional intelligence, and a reinforcement of gender roles. We also want to limit the amount of subliminal priming that is occurring during advertisements. “According to the AAP, kids in the United States see 40,000 commercials each year” (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2011). Reading before bedtime has been linked to children having higher vocabulary and better reading comprehension skills. Reading together has been shown to create benefits at as early as 8 months, which shows that the baby doesn’t need to be verbal to get the benefits. Reading out loud is also a way to teach emotional intelligence, by creating a conversation about the characters’ emotions (Blake & Maiese, 2008).

We have friends and family who raised their children in front of the TV, and as a result they do not have high attention spans and have behavioral issues. We also don’t like the addiction to technology that we see within people that are our age. We realize that by taking this vow, we are also vowing to alter our own technology use, in order to be a good example for you. We want to be full time parents and not use the TV for assistance. We want to read to you multiple times a day and foster a love of reading instead of a love of television. As you grow up we can have family reading times, and book discussions. While technology is going to be very involved in your life with the world, simply because that is the way the world is going, we want you to see the value in stepping back and turning the screen off.

4) We vow to educate you (rather than use scare tactics) about drugs and alcohol, and to normalize the use of alcohol and marijuana:

What: We want to raise you to be aware of the dangers of alcohol and drugs, but also to be able to see their benefits as well. We want to normalize the use of marijuana and alcohol, instead of making it into a taboo topic that you feel you need to hide from us. This is a vow that is very reliant on your age and level of personal responsibility, although we plan to always be very up front with you. Your father and I are not really alcohol drinkers, but we do smoke marijuana. I have struggled with anxiety and depression from a very young age, and have found marijuana to be a way to help me work through my anxieties. While some parents have a zero tolerance policy about drugs and alcohol, we see this as being unrealistic. If there is ever a drug you want to try, we won’t ever dismiss your opinion without hearing it first and want to help you to make informed decisions. We would rather know you are being safe at home, rather than hiding it from us somewhere else. We hope that you can view marijuana and alcohol as helpful tools to use during life, not as something to go crazy with or to construct your life around.

Why: Behind this vow, is the underlying value of open communication; we want to know that you are safe and being respectful of your body. We don’t want you ever feel like you have to hide a part of yourself, particularly using drugs or alcohol. That being said though, we want you to understand why it is better to abstain while your brain is still developing. From our personal experience, when a parent just says no to drugs and alcohol, their child will become more determined to try them and may go to unsafe places to do them. We want to avoid that with you, and to normalize marijuana and alcohol so that you don’t feel the need to binge drink or smoke. We couldn’t find research backing up our exact parenting position, but the normalizing factor makes intuitive sense.

5) We vow to homeschool you, at least during your primary school years:

What: We will homeschool you at least during your primary school years, and then after that we will have an open discussion as to where you feel your education should go next. Other options to home schooling are private school, public school, or alternative public school, and we would be open to any of those options. What is important to us is that we foster a love of learning within you, and that you are in control of your own education. We recognize what a huge commitment it is to homeschool, both in time and financial costs, but we feel strongly enough about this issue to make that vow.

Why: We do not feel like the public school system was created with creative, divergent thinkers in mind. Both of your parents did not respond well to the public school’s system, and ended up transferring to an alternative public high school. We had a much more dynamic and useful experience through that, but we don’t want you to have to wait to get to high school in order to be engaged with your school work. We want to create personal autonomy for you by allowing you to have control over what and how you are taught. Perhaps you will be a child who loves to be outside all the time, we will figure out a way to make school be outdoor centered. Maybe you are really into designing race-car tracks, we can learn about the interdisciplinary aspects involved in making architecture in real life. We want to foster a love of learning in you and take an active role in your education. If, as you grow up, you desire to be in school with more children, we will look into more community activities or perhaps an alternative or private school. Research shows that successful homeschooling actually produces more creative and independent adults, contrary to the belief that homeschooling leads to social awkwardness (Romanowski, 2006).

6) We vow to give you as much personal autonomy as possible, particularly within your personal appearance and taste:

What: Again, we want an open relationship where you don’t feel like you have to hide your true feelings. As long as it is not putting you in danger, we want you to feel like what happens with your body is in your control. You will be able to pick out your own clothes and hairstyles; although if you desire tattoos it’s a conversation we could have when you are at an individually determined age. That being said, we also hope to teach you that you are more that just your outward appearance, and that it is what is inside that matters. We will do our best to not push gender roles onto you; we want you to feel free to express whoever you want to be.

Why: We had so many peers while we were growing up who felt like they had to completely hide their identities from their parents. They would leave and return to their houses in a completely different outfit than the one they had worn while at school, and they hid putting on makeup. That is not the kind of relationship we want with you, and want you to be in control of how you appear to others. We want to be conscious of the fact that you may not want to follow societal gender roles, and we want you to know that that is completely fine. A study of Portuguese teenagers found that the “constant effort to manage one’s everyday life in line with gender norms produces significant anxiety, insecurity, stress and low self-esteem for both boys and girls, and both for ‘popular’ young people and those who have lower status in school” (Culp-Ressler, 2014). You will be subjected to enough pressure throughout your life; conforming to our expectations of you will not be one of them.

7) We vow to give you the vocabulary and empathy to be emotionally intelligent:

What: We want to raise you to be emotionally intelligent, regardless of your gender. We want you to have good people reading skills, and to be able to feel empathy and compassion in social situations. We want you to be a dependable person, and this requires you to be emotionally intelligent. In order to raise you to have strong emotional integrity, we need to have open conversations about what it means to have emotions and respect for other’s emotions. We want to teach you that having an emotion is never wrong, what matters is how you express and deal with it. The emotion needs to be validated and discussed, by using a proper emotional vocabulary. We want to help you to move beyond frameworks of letting your emotions control you; the power of the mind is very real, and it can affect our realities. We want you to become mindful in your emotions, and to also learn to not internalize other’s negative emotions.

Why: Research shows that the Western society is not teaching their children emotional intelligence, and that it leads to children and adults feeling isolated and misunderstanding others (Kindlon & Thompson, 1999). The problem is particularly seen in boys, but regardless of your gender, we want you to able to accurately express your emotions. We want this for you because it will help you to have a better relationship both with yourself and with others.

8) We vow to not praise you excessively:

What: We want to show you that we love you unconditionally through our words and actions, and we believe a way to that is by limiting our praise. It’s not that we will hide our affection for you, it is that instead of giving you a one-sided praise system we want to have an open discussion with you about your successes and failures. We believe that praise should be effort based, rather than intelligence based, because it gives you room for improvement and growth.

Why: Social researchers Bronson and Merryman compiled research that shows that praising your children too much actually hurts their self confidence (2009), and we want to stop that cycle with you. This goes along with our unconditional parenting model: we want to show through our words and actions that we don’t love you any less or more when you act differently. Instead of praising we will create conversations around your successes, more importantly, your failures. We want you to learn to point out for yourself when you do something right and also learn to look for ways that you can create improvement. Studies, such as Dr. Ng’s, show that discussing failures and finding new solutions is even more important than complementing a child’s worth, and will have more constructive results in the future (Bronson & Merryman, 2009).

9) We vow to have an open dialogue with you about politics and world issues:

What: Again, we want to have open communication with you. We don’t want to shield you from the issues of the world, because we think that you will be capable of handling a lot. That being said, we don’t want to aggressively put things into your face; but we do want to be there to honestly answer any questions you may have. We want to put world issues into historical context, by pointing out what other events it is connected to or where people can go from here. We want to be truthful with you about the way the world works, not to make you pessimistic but to make help you to become the next generation of change. We want you to feel connected with the world around you, but we also want you to see how complicated things can be. We want you to be aware but not consumed. We want to teach you the privilege that comes with the color of your skin, and to look out for those that have less privilege than you.

Why: While we couldn’t find credible research to back this principle up, it makes intuitive sense to us. We think that making (age appropriate) daily conversations around world issues will raise you to be educated about the world around you. We want you to grow into an informed adult who feel passionate about the world around you, and who can think through complicated social issues.

10) We vow to teach you to practice mindfulness, in place of an organized religion:

What: Mindfulness is a form of meditation or consciousness practice where one intentionally focuses on the present, in order to live more lucidly and intentionally. We want you to recognize the extraordinary quality of your consciousness. This is not pushing a religion; this is instituting a mindful way of life. (Side note: we want to educate you on all kinds of religions, and give you the freedom to believe what you want to believe). Your father and I are both meditators, and we have found extraordinary benefits in a short amount of time of practice. We want meditation to be a daily family practice for us to do together.

Why: We want to teach you to be in touch with your emotions and feel like you can express yourself. Mindfulness is a form of emotional intelligence, noticing why and when you feel certain ways. It has been shown to have physical and mental benefits, such as with chronic pain, anxiety, and depression. A 2016 research project studied the results of teaching mindfulness to primary school children, and it found that increased mindfulness meditation strongly affected the children’s attention spans and symptoms of ADHD. The children in the mindfulness group also exhibited stronger emotional awareness and an easier time avoiding anxiety, although it did not lead to a change in overall mood quality in such a short period of time (Crescentini, et al, 2016). This goes along with our 11th principle, about mental health, because we want you to learn through mindfulness how your thoughts effect your reality. Your father and I both use mindfulness to work through our anxieties, and we want it be a tool for you as well.

11) We vow to have an open dialogue with you about mental health, and to help you have a good self-image:

What: We want you to know that you are at risk for several genetic mood disorders, such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. We want to be upfront with you about your genetic risks, because we feel that our families were not open enough with us when we were growing up. We want to educate you about the realities of mental illness, both so you can be the healthiest version of yourself and treat others who are struggling with kindness. We also want you to know that we love you unconditionally and will be there for you throughout anything, and that any kind of diagnosis is not a death sentence. We want you to have a positive image of your self and to be confident in your own abilities. This requires raising you to be kind to yourself, and for us to lead you by example by being nice to ourselves. This goes back to our 6th vow on personal autonomy, but we hope to raise you to be the type of person that feels confident in who they are and who doesn’t need to hide behind material masks.

Why: The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry recommends having an open, honest, and age appropriate conversation with your children about mental health (2011). This works to remove the stigma around mental illness, which can be translated into the real world when you grow up. Particularly because you are at risk for several mental disorders, we feel it is our responsibility to try and set you up with a good foundation in which to go through life on. Research shows that children who have a higher sense of self-esteem are more likely to not have anxiety or to not be overly critical with themselves (Kids Health, n.d.), which makes intuitive sense to us. We plan to use mindfulness as a way to teach you emotional intelligence, and to see all the ways that our thoughts can create our realities.

We hope that by writing this list of parenting principles down now, we will be better prepared to be parents to you later. It’s not to say that we might not make mistakes with you, because we know that we will; but it does give us a starting place to begin from. Everything on this list is subject to change, although our underlying values of unconditional love and having open communication with you will not. We recognize even more after writing this list what a huge responsibility it will be to raise you, but we view that as a good thing.

Looking forward to meeting you someday,

Mom and Dad

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