This is my last PPD post for the indefinite future. I'm ready to go out and live my life and get out of this mental hospital where I've been living. I would hugely appreciate an effort to engage with all the stuff that I put on the table in this post, even though it's long/involved, because these questions mean a lot to me, and have been on my mind for a long time. I want my future sons to thrive as much as possible and take over the world. Thanks so much for all your help you guys! :)

1: How has the knowledge that you've gained from your own experience and from the Pillosphere shaped your parenting ideas/views/philosophy?

I was raised by a single-mother. She feminized the shit out of me. There was zero testosterone present during my upbringing. I sometimes wonder whether I would be a much stronger and higher-SMV man if a strong/alpha/masculine TRP man had raised me to become the ultimate TRP man. It's an interesting experiment to imagine: what if you raised your sons in the most TRP way imaginable, and immersed them in the TRP sidebar, and immersed them in TRP media only. Could you shape/craft/form them into thriving hyper-masculine alphas who kick ass and slay pussy and endure every hardship with ease because they're so fucking strong/awesome/badass?

I asked my dad about this notion of raising your sons TRP to the core. Just immersing them in TRP from the cradle; making them TRP with every atom of their being. (My dad wasn't around when I was growing up, but he's BP as fuck, so I'm not sure what his influence would've been like had he been around.) My dad agreed that a masculine father can make a difference, but he hedged by saying that "You can't turn a naturally shy kid into Donald Trump." I'm sure that personality-research has shown that there's an immutable genetic component to personality, but I wonder how malleable it all is, and what a TRP dad would've done to shape/design/construct/build my life differently.

2: What do you think about the whole "Tiger Parent" concept?

Don't a lot of those kids turn out to be extremely successful/fulfilled/happy, as long as the parents don't take it into abusive/psychologically-damaging territory? I have an incredible Asian friend who went to Harvard Medical School, and she says that her parents were maybe a bit too strict during her upbringing, but she has a sweet life now. She and her husband are both doctors; they will be very financially successful and probably will have a wonderful life. She plays piano/violin and speaks multiple languages. It's enviable, despite all the "sour grapes" rationalizations you'll hear from less-successful people about how she was "pushed too hard," "didn't have a good childhood," or something.

3: To what extent should a smart/serious/ambitious parent view life as a "race to adulthood?"

My parents said, "We don't want you to grow up too fast" when I was little, and that was their philosophy, and I think it's a very common idea. But that makes zero sense to me. I want my son to grow up as fast as possible, as children in other cultures often do. Often children in other cultures are more mature than North American teenagers or even North American ADULTS. I was a late-bloomer, as were my siblings, and that was because my parents intentionally stunted our growth and kept us trapped in childhood longer than we had to be.

Again, I think that development should be viewed as a race to adulthood; you are trying to "play them in" ASAP; you are trying to "get them up the ladder" of understanding/learning/development in all aspects of life ASAP. Maybe that sounds crazy/abusive, but I think anything other than that could be viewed as crazy/abusive, as radical as that sounds. My view: it's a race.

Sex is a great example: why do we try to shelter our children from it and hold them back? Isn't that a little weird, given the importance of sex in human life? Is it really good for the child to impede their learning/development in that area? The idea is that you want to keep them "innocent" as long as possible; I think that that's misguided. My view is that it's a race.

Those who get there first in life tend to be the winners, as this video comments. I don't see anything wrong with trying to mold your child into an adult ASAP. You can get them to walk/talk/dress like an adult ASAP. You can get them to emulate adults.

I'm sure that royalty and fancy families get their kids to wear little suits, dine with the adults, carry themselves with poise/grace/class/maturity, master upper-class etiquette, and so on. They probably have their kids join them in little mock business-meetings in which they get organized and wait their turn to speak/present their goals/objectives/plans and so on, however basic those goals/objectives/plans are...it's not about the actual content so much as the structure of a daily AM and PM meeting that organizes their life and gives their life structure/direction. They can be "little CEOs." They can learn personal finance ASAP with some good software to help them visualize money. They can shadow you throughout your work day to see how you actually live, and they can take notes and interview you and reflect on it and do a presentation on it and reflect on where they will be at the various stages of their life and what their career will be and where they will be when they're your age. They can try to really inhabit their future adult shoes. They can try to actually see/inhabit their future adult life. Maybe VR will be able to help them truly viscerally embody their future self so as to feel a connection to it; studies have shown that getting young people to see avatars of old versions of themselves makes them lead a healthier lifestyle because they feel a connection to their future self and the consequences of those present-day actions as they will manifest regarding their future body. Just look at the colored graph here and look at the red/pink "Career" section relative to the rest of the graph, and think about how important it is in the grand scheme regarding their life; shouldn't one parent accordingly, and view the early years as preparation for that phase, which is the dominant phase of their life? They can try to actually see/inhabit their future life. You can get them to shadow successful people in the job-market and think about and envision their future career/life/lifestyle. You can get them to carry themselves like an adult. You can do all this warmly/lovingly/non-abusively too; the dichotomy between the "race" mentality and warmth is a false dichotomy IMO.

4: What do you guys think about the idea that you have to get your child to (1) internalize and (2) be absolutely/passionately/100% ON BOARD with and (3) intimately/viscerally/vividly see the vision of their future adult career/life that they're working toward?

They can intensively shadow people who work in certain lucrative fields that align with their interests. They need to understand the why. There cannot be anything (1) arbitrary or (2) Orwellian about the discipline that you and the child together impose to optimize productivity/growth/development. You must never be on the opposite side of the table from them; be on the same side of the table as them implementing a plan together that points toward your shared vision (I mean this "table" thing both figuratively and literally; positioning yourself beside another human being rather than across from them creates a psychological dynamic of cooperation rather than opposition). They must always understand the WHY. They must always understand the wisdom. They must always understand the retrospective vantage from a hypothetical future. Insofar as they are truly on board, you can therefore crank up the discipline without fear that it will be damaging to the child.

I mentioned above that "studies have shown that getting young people to see avatars of old versions of themselves makes them lead a healthier lifestyle because they feel a connection to their future self and the consequences of those present-day actions as they will manifest regarding their future body." Well, imagine taking this logic to the next level. You could get them to inhabit their future self and live various future lives in rich detail on the basis of various choices that they make in terms of discipline/priorities/habits. They could see and feel their future. They could inhabit a disastrous future, a mediocre future, and a thriving future, through their aging avatar, and they could understand that what they do now will put them on the path toward those futures. The immersive VR avatarization of the process could really help this become a realistic possibility, whereas just listening to Tony Robbins's metaphors about how adjusting your golf-swing a fraction of a degree radically alters the path and destination of the ball wouldn't have much effect on a young child. Visualization, simulation, and VR-immersion will offer new possibilities in terms of communicating to the child what the consequences of their actions will look and feel like down the road. Visualization is important. A picture is worth 1000 words, an animation 1000 pictures, and maybe VR 1000 animations. They must feel connected to the avatar that actually is them and looks like them.

They must be 100% on board, maybe even more so than you are and pushing you to push them harder.

They must see and share the beautiful vision.

You want to immerse them in negative as well as positive futures; nothing so negative as to traumatize them, of course, but cautionary tales are useful to show them the logic and the WHY behind discipline and habit-building.

I've sketched out negative/mediocre/positive visualizations, but obviously there are infinite possibilities of what you could show them and immerse them in, and infinite gradations, and it's not just three futures you can show them; these are just three rough buckets.

Once they're truly on board with the VISION, it seems like the sky is the limit.

5: Where do you guys draw the line when it comes to being too "soft" on your kids?

Someone told me something that was really profound to me and really blew my mind. They said to me, "We're all soft compared to kids in the Third World," and that really struck me. I mean, just think about that for a moment. All of us would probably be significantly more successful in every aspect of our lives if we had the drive/discipline/toughness that even children in some African countries surely have. They grow up fast over there. They are strong. They don't have the opportunities that we have, but imagine how unstoppable the combination of (1) First-World privilege/opportunity and (2) Third-World toughness/work-ethic/discipline would be.

Parents sometimes explicitly express the desire to stunt their kids' growth; they don't want their "little babies" to "grow up too fast." They coddle their children. They say, "You'll always be my baby." There are also the nicknames that parents create for their children. None of this stuff is a bid deal in itself, but I think it's indicative of some deep desire (usually on the mother's part?), to stunt the child's growth, and I have no idea why you would want to do that, given that it will harm your child in the long run. I don't think that I will ever give my son a nickname: I will just call him by his name; I want to treat him like an adult.

(Is it weird that people talk to their dogs and their kids with the same cutesy tone of voice, and using similar cutesy nicknames?)

I think that one of the most profound insights that I've observed in my life is that people will "perform" different roles based on how others treat them; people will internalize and "perform" a certain role that their family/friends assign to them or that society assigns to them. This is backed up by sociology research: they found that "old people" had a radical shift in their ability to function if you just played music from when they were young and got them a job. They no longer conceived of themselves as "old obsolete people"; their identity changed; they no longer "performed" the role that society assigns old people where it basically throws them into the scrapheap and deems them obsolete and conceptualizes them as people who are unable to work and are just preparing to die. Like I said, I've seen this in my own life too. My little brother would act like a baby when you babied him; people are like mirrors that reflect what other people project onto them. Children will act like children ("perform" childhood) if you treat them like children. Children will act like adults ("perform" something else) if you treat them like adults. My sociology professor told me that before the Industrial Revolution in England and the birth of the education-system, there was no such notion as childhood. This notion was created when compulsory schooling was implemented to prepare the workforce for factory-work. I'm not saying that beating your children and fire-and-brimstone and child-labor are good things, but the point is that "childhood" is a social construct; children "perform" childhood; children didn't used to "perform" childhood at all, or at least not in remotely the same way that they do now. People "perform" roles. People are mirrors.

6: What do you guys think about the distinction between making your kid successful in various areas of life (1) for their sake vs. (2) for your sake?

My brother told me this thing once here he said that the parent should not conceptualize the child as a CORRECTION for the parent's failures. So if you want your son to do amazingly with women then that's great as long as it's (1) for the sake of your son's happiness rather than (2) as some sort of vicarious correction for your sexual failings.

I would want to challenge this, though. I don't fully understand the distinction between (1) and (2). He said that in the case of (2) a certain bitterness/negativity will bleed through and your son will pick up on that, but I don't fully understand why that's necessarily the case. It seems to me that (2) could be positive OR negative. It just depends on how it is executed and implemented.

In other words, are you making them successful in area X for them or for you?

But my Devil's Advocate position is: "Why can't it be both?"

7: Do you guys agree that your kid would be unstoppable if you could somehow combine (1) America's incredible opportunity/privilege with (2) the work-ethic/intensity/maturity that you see in other cultures from the Third World to countries like China/Japan/Korea/Taiwan?

I'm interested in your views on kids in these other countries. Like I said, some seem like miniature adults. Some seem much more mature than me and many adults I know.

It's interesting to think about this cross-culturally to gain insight about what's possible.