Beating your kids is still a bad idea.

Maybe 2016 is the year we finally put this issue to bed for good? Yeah right.

Correlation is Not Causation

But I'll be damned if it's not a fantastic fucking excuse to not hit your kids.

Does your ability to delay gratification corrolate directly to your success if life?

It would seem so. It would also suggest simple ways to ensure your child's future by teaching them about delayed gratification.

Grand Unified Theory of Parenting

I came up with this nugget a while ago, but I thought I'd dump it from my brain.

You might call it a Unified Theory of Properties All Successful Human Beings Must Have, but thats a bit over-pretentious.

In a person's life there are countless lessons, great and small, that one must learn. Ideally we could just tell each other what they are and be done with it, but unfortunately it seems that people just don't learn from sermons -- they only seem to truly comprehend when they experience the truth of the matter directly.

This poses a dilemma for parents. How do we set our children up for a happy successful life, if they're determined to repeat our mistakes?

My theory is you only need to teach a few basic pillars, and all other lessons follow naturally from those basic premises. They follow in order of importance.

1. The Foundation of All Society: Empathy -- the ability to feel what other living things feel.

Without this pillar, human society, and therefore civilization could not exist.

Having empathy means that you cannot do things to others that you would not do to yourself. This is the Golden Rule, and from the Golden Rule all morality follows.

2. The Foundation of Human Intellect: Curiosity -- the desire to understand the working of the world around you.

Without this pillar, human technology would not have progressed beyond the ability to hunt or gather enough food to just survive, and therefore civilization could not exist.

Having curiosity means that you start by questioning what you observe around you -- how? why? It also means that you must move past the question, and start interacting with your environment in order to begin searching out the answers.

This is Learning, specifically the essence of what we call the Scientific Method. And it is only from science that all objective knowledge can follow. (In the past humans have had pseudo-sciences from which they derived knowledge, but they have all eventually proven to be mistaken.)

3. The Foundation of Human Psychology: Self-Honesty -- the desire to resist the natural human tendency to accept an illusory perception of reality.

The study of adult psychology is essentially founded on the myriad set of biases built into our brain which plague human beings and cause untold misunderstanding. Without a drive to avoid these natural biases, we are constantly mis-interpreting our interactions with the world, especially other human beings, and left confused and hurt as to why we seem to always find ourselves in a position of conflict.

Having self-honesty means more than just a clear perception of bias -- more importantly it leads to a state of mind that finds it difficult, and a waste of time, to be dishonest with others.

Self honest people must naturally lead to all honesty, and honesty is the essence of communication. Honesty is more than just the absence of lies, it is the presence of truth. It means that what you say is an accurate description of your environment, and that will lead people to trust and listen to what you say.

4. The Foundation of Personal Success: Effort -- the desire to continue to face difficulty until it is overcome.

The natural order of life is a continuous process of challenge. We are creatures that resulted from the ego-less life-and-death process of Evolution. There is no cease, just a constant march towards improvement, like slinky walking down an infinite case of stairs. When we accept this process, and not see it as tiring or unfair, we can find the will to continue with our struggles.

Without effort in our actions, most of them would fail immediately, and all success in this world would be a result of mere luck. Every time we pick up after failure, we give ourselves improved odds of succeeding the next time.

...

Starting from only the above lessons, I feel it is possible for any person to naturally directly deduce the entire set of life lessons.

Do you feel anything has been left out?

(Note: religion and dogmatic philosophical interpretations have been intentionally left out, either because I think they are wrong, or they are right, but could be extrapolated from the above. If you disagree, I am happy to hear, and likely challenge, your opinion.)

But its not ok to beat your children

Sadly it appears as if this is no longer common sense anymore. Parents are so worried about saving their children from every hardship, they fail to notice its hardship that teaches us the most important lessons.