Five Common Extinction-Level Mistakes

Nice Families and Those Weird Fundamentalist Families Both Make Them

In our last transmission we said that avoiding family line extinction is easy.  You have the skills and the environment and the instinct to be a prolific paterfamilias of an abundant family.

Some of our friends pointed out that even a lot of decent people who seem to have good homes have their kids dissolve into liquid modernity.  Even people who try really hard, like hardline Christian and ultraorthodox Jewish and fundamentalist Muslim families, have still had their kids dissolve into liquid modernity.

All the people you know who are having problems with this, including the conservative Christian families, have f’ed up in some common, easy to fix ways.

What are those common mistakes?

1.       Having a small family on purpose.

Get out.  Unthinkable.   If you have a small family due to unavoidable medical problems, you will still have an uphill battle to have your few children understand how important and wonderful having children is, but you can pull it off.  If you chose your relative childlessness,  you are done.

2.       Not being explicitly pro natalist.

You need to hammer home the kids and family message repeatedly to your kids.  Even the smartest people don’t often draw out the lesson from their own experience until its pointed out to them.  Compartmentalization is a fact of human nature.

“Isn’t our big family so much fun?”

Yes.

“Then wouldn’t you like to have a big family when you grow up?”

Oh.  Oh!

3.       Giving your kids to the propaganda feed.

This is the common mistake that your average “nice” family makes.  Part of being in an unsustainable social environment is the proliferation of broken concepts and anti-wisdom deeply embedded at all levels of cultural consumption.  G-rated or Disney-produced is no guarantee of anything.  “Family friendly” is just a euphemism for limited sex and violence.  It does not actually mean “family formation friendly” or “family continuation friendly.”

 If you allow your children’s minds to be formed by the memes of the ongoing extinction event, your children will likely participate in the ongoing extinction event.    How and in what way you extract your children from the main current varies, but you need to do it.  You can school them using the public schools, but you can’t passively allow them to be publicly schooled.  Turning them over to TV, video, or social media is a form of abject surrender.   We can all laugh at the semiotics of Lady and the Tramp, but once you know, you know. 

The common concern about taking your children out of the propaganda feed is that they need inoculation. A certain amount of inoculation is necessary but less than you think.  Think about the pre-Jenner days when inoculation for smallpox meant actually contracting the disease.  If you are going to give your child smallpox on purpose, how are you going to go about it? Are you going to  put a tiny smallpox scab fragment into a small cut and pray hard for the best, or YOLO are you going to airdrop them into a hospital of the dying?

Failures to insulate are more common than failures to inoculate.  Elon Musk has a child who is lost to him because of a failure to insulate.

4.       Having your home life be crabbed and constrained.

This is the common mistake that your super conservative fundamentalist homes make.  They lose their kids because the parents make a fetish of being grim and serious.  You should be having a blast.  When your kids are grown, you want them to feel  nostalgia and the urge to recreate.

A sustainable family in the middle of an unsustainable world will necessarily have a number of rules and restrictions.  You need to take care that your family still feels fun and abundant.  Otherwise when your kids venture out they will feel liberated instead of feeling loss, and this will lead them to have a values revolution into the extinction event.  No one formula can tell you how to be happy, but games, jokes, trips, hobbies, singing together, eating together, memories and stories, extended family, and making high class cultural riches part of your family experience can all play a role.   Mostly, though, it is as easy as not deliberately trying to be grim.

5.       Acting like you’ve finished being the patriarch of your family once they’ve turned 18.

Here’s looking at you, boomers.

The reality is that kids will continue to need your guidance and support beyond then. Financial support for having kids, encouragement, advice, babysitting, matchmaking, entrenepeneurial assistance, and so should all be on the table.  Your work is finished when you die. 

If you have avoided common pitfalls, you will be glad that your work is not finished, because you will not want it to be finished.  Being a father or mother is awesome and you will be glad that it goes on into grandfathering and grandmothering.

To give the boomers their due, it is good for kids to learn to stand on their own two feet. Perhaps the biological concept of hormesis will help explain why helping your children to learn self-reliance is not the same as cutting them off at age 18, or ever. Hormesis says that lower levels of challenge cause more growth and progress than no challenge, but excessive levels of challenge can injure or even kill. Does the modern environment seem like it poses only a mild, comfortable level of challenge to family formation and human thriving?

All the billionaires you read about who plan on donating all their money to some foundation, leaving nothing for their kids, are either stupid or lying.

The proper measure for determining the level of investment in your children once they turn adults before is outcome based. Is this amount of social capital, time, and money enough to make my family sustainable?

For You to Think About

Those are the five common mistakes that suck families into the extinction event. Now here is something for you to think about.

What factors made you want to have kids? 

How can you recreate those for your own children?