Where are all the Techno-Progressive Moms?  busy raising the future

YES!  Kristi has nailed the issues of techno-Moms.  And it’s about time we had this conversation.  I’m sick to death of the perceived childless male dominance on the subject.  Because even the fathers don’t frame the issues in terms of their children.  And why isn’t that acceptable?  A day doesn’t go by when I’m not thinking about how these issues will affect my kids.  And their kids.  Our family talks about this stuff all the time.  My job as a parent is to love my children and teach them problem-solving, adaptability and resilience.  And let them know what’s coming and perceive what might be coming through their behavior.  Because that’s what they’ll need.  That’s what we’ll all need.  It’s the most important work we can do, for our children and our communities.  So let’s hear it for the Moms out there…

PJ, this is so good to hear!! I am thrilled that the article resonated with you. I hope that others moms find this and are also able to connect with as much enthusiasm as you have.

Good to see discussion of *techno-progressive* issues in the here and now, rather than the all too common “transhumanist” dreaming.  Glad you’re back, Kristi.

Kristi, Thank you for this post.  It is so accurate and so true.  Also I find that when we as mom’s, bring our children into a discussion as a factor, we are often dismissed as not being intellectual or scholarly enough because it deals with subjective experience.  Thanks for adding a voice that incorporates the whole experience.

It’s good to be back, Jef. You made me tear up a bit.

Pendula, you’re very welcome. Again, it is good to hear that this is felt by other moms. I hope this gets out to more mothers, they feel empowered in their important role and participate in any way they can. For me, I enjoy reading just the little posts on Facebook. I find them incredibly insightful to what other mothers are going through.

“We are concerned with our kids being online. What they do with social networking and how they navigate the world of online etiquette, bullying and nuance.”

I think the best thing a parent can to is to consider how the kids navigate the online (and offline) world as their own private sphere, and not interfere too much. Of course parents should always be there to help _when needed_ but I think we should resist the (understandable) temptation to help kids _too much_, and let them find out how the world works by themselves, and learn by mistakes.

I am grateful to my parents who always let me fly with my own wings and learn by hard knocks. Never do your kids’ homework (from school or from life), because they are supposed to learn how to do their homework themselves. If not now, when?

I am afraid we tend (again, for understandable reasons) to over-protect and over-support kids, and that may result in a generation of sweet and kind persons unable to cope with life, which, as we all know, is not always easy.

Re “my 4 yr old can operate my iPad and find features I did not know about”

Exactly. (S)he will also learn how to operate life, and find features you did not know about.

 

@Jef re “Good to see discussion of *techno-progressive* issues in the here and now, rather than the all too common “transhumanist” dreaming.”

I enjoyed this article too. I also enjoy transhumanist dreaming. These attitudes are not mutually exclusive.

@Giulio, I agree with your comment, however, part of letting them fly and learn from the school of hard knocks is to be there for them in an educated manner and get them prepared for it. Then when they make mistakes you hope they are learning from them. While your parents allowed you to fly, I would assume they taught you things like good manners, yes? If you were bullied they taught you how to deal with these situations or talk about them after the fact?

For me, the online concerns are a balance of space and normal parenting as it applies to the new social realm. I expect my son, who is the only one of my children old enough to be online right now, to behave online as he does in the physical world. We have discussed the idea of an “audience”, context and privacy. He keeps his inside jokes off his wall and away from audiences that may not be as humored by them.

Bullying online and in the physical world are also something that kids today need to be prepared to encounter. Without going into details, I will never second guess my involvement in the bullying episodes my child had recently. As a parent I was grateful that I had kept up on the news to know when bullying had escalated past the point of kids being kids and could recognize the signs in my own child. I was also grateful that I could use the opportunity to discuss what would have happened if the bullying was done online for everyone to see. Having kids that have an open dialog with their parents about these issues is not clipping their wings. If anything, I hope that they can fly higher as they grow up.

I agree that too much coddling leaves a child unprepared for the real world.  Our concerns as moms are not about putting our children in a bubble, they are about educating ourselves in a variety of areas to be there when our kids have questions. As educated women we should be conveying that information to our kids. Why keep it from them if we already learned it? That way we can learn from each other. I am not too proud to learn from my 4-yr old daughter how to do new things on my iPad. As long as she lets me teach her a few things along the way too.

Shannon Vyff writes in:

I wish I had more time to write for IEET, LongeCity, CI, Alcor, Lifeboat, the Venturists et al. I am distinctly aware of the majority gender writing the articles and the dearth of transhumanist/immortalist childrearing perspectives (especially from a techno-progressive angle)!.

While on the one hand I will say that I spend all my waking hours teaching, loving, guiding my children—I still want to do more for the extreme life extension community. I know I will….some day….

@Kristi re “If you were bullied they taught you how to deal with these situations or talk about them after the fact?”

Not at all. I never talked to them about these things (none of us kids did) and we all learned how to deal with bullying by our own means.

When I hear outraged reports on TV about bullying I always remember the (often _much worse_) episodes of bullying that happened every day at school and on the street when I was a kid.

Most kids learn how to protect themselves after being beaten by bullies a few times. And that is the best age to learn things (think of languages, or sports). Later in life, the ability to protect myself has saved me from a couple of dangerous situations, and I guess I should be kind of grateful to my “teachers.”

What I am trying to say is that of course parents should always watch and be ready to intervene if something goes really bad, but without making too big a deal of occasional episodes. Kids do learn from experience, and much faster than adults.

Re “kids that have an open dialog with their parents”

This is very nice, but remember that often kids do _not_ want to talk of their life to their parents. Come on, wasn’t it so for you? It certainly was for me. Forcing kids to discuss things that they want to keep to themselves can hurt them.

Re “I am not too proud to learn from my 4-yr old daughter how to do new things on my iPad.”

I am sure your parents had to learn how to operate their TV remote control from you, and that your kids will have to learn how to operate their telepathy brain implant from their kids.

@Guilio, I was bullied, told my mom and she told me how to deal with it. I don’t think it weakened me to further encounters. I grew to know how to handle it. What I am referring to are not occasional episodes. Those situations you and I agree on.

The reality is things can get really bad and the internet/cell phones can play a role in escalating things. Don’t judge too quickly on the TV bullying episodes you read about. Things get really bad, really quick. We need aware parents, teachers and school systems who can make these types of educated decisions and are prepared for this new generations take on bullying.

RE “that often kids do _not_ want to talk of their life to their parents. Come on, wasn’t it so for you? It certainly was for me. Forcing kids to discuss things that they want to keep to themselves can hurt them.”

Yes, I did not want to talk about life with my mother, at all. I don’t know that that really worked in either of our favors, unfortunately. However, this is not the same for my own kids. They are not forced to tell us anything. Over the years we have cultivated an environment where they tell us what is going on in their lives. I think if they were forced to, they would resent us and it would hurt them. Things change though. They seem well-adjusted and I sometimes know a bit more than I thought I would

Re “I am sure your parents had to learn how to operate their TV remote control from you”

Funny you mention this because we just had this discussion with our son over lunch today. Except we were the remote controls when we were kids

@Giulio
It’s interesting how we have processed our experiences of bullying in childhood differently. I guess my experiences were somewhat similar to yours in some respects, but unlike you I don’t look back to that with any real sense of gratitude, either towards the bullies or towards the laissez-faire attitude of the adults involved (or rather not involved). Acceptance, yes, but gratitude? Nah.

I think today’s kids have much better things to do than cope with bullies. Besides, we tend to copy the memes we see around us, especially the ones we see around us in childhood. So if we want to build a future without bullying between adults, why wouldn’t we want to protect our children from it?

@Kristi re “The reality is things can get really bad and the internet/cell phones can play a role in escalating things.”

I won’t go into details, but I have to remind you guys that kids can be _very_ imaginative and creative, with or without Internet and cell phones, for the good or for the bad. Internet and cell phones changed nothing, we are talking human nature here, doesn’t change that fast.

@Peter re “It’s interesting how we have processed our experiences of bullying in childhood differently.”

I wonder if and how this influences our positions on social and political issues. You and I have basically similar preferences, but I tend to be much more laissez-faire than you.

This would seem to confirm the possibility, of which I am more and more persuaded, that rational thought plays but a very little role in shaping our values and priorities, with a much bigger role played by raw emotional reactions to conditions experienced very early in life.

@Giulio re rational thought vs raw emotion: I think you’re basically right, and empirical psychology very much backs this up.

Jon Haidt has described the issue of conscious vs subconscious motivations as a human riding an elephant if the elephant isn’t sure where it wants to go then the rider (the conscis mind) has some chance to influence the elephant (the subconscious). By contrast if the elephant is hell-bent in going in a particularly direction there’s little the rider can do about it. Not that rational thought vs raw emotion is quite the same as conscious vs subconscious, but I think a similar analogy almost certainly holds.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we should dismiss rational thought altogether. In fact, one of Haidt’s conclusions (all this is set out in his book The Happiness Hypothesis by the way) is that the solution is to _train_ the elephant. You know that I always maintain that ethics is ultimately a matter of choice, but our ethical positions are often based on empirical beliefs, which may actually be wrong. I think it’s important to remain receptive (i) to alternative ethical systems to which one may not have previously been exposed, and (ii) evidence that may suggest that some of one’s empirical beliefs are indeed wrong. And rational thought of course plays an essential role in both these processes.

@Peter - good analogy!

The elephant is part of us, and I think in many cases the wisest think to do is to let the elephant choose. In other words, we should just accept our core personality, values an priorities. Perhaps they can be changed, but why, and what for?

I like to be kind and compassionate to others, and help others if I can. Suppose some pompous professor writes an article on a prestigious journal, and demonstrates with very rigorous rationality and logic that this is wrong, and the rational thing to do is to let other people starve.

I wouldn’t consider changing my values. If logic is on the side of the professor, screw them both.

Rationality is a tool, not an end.

I agree that in many cases - in fact probably most cases - the wisest thing to do is just let the elephant choose. But sometimes the elephant runs amok. After all, we evolved in the African savannah in Stone Age conditions, and the mental and behavioural habits - that is to say the elephant, with its raw emotion - that we have inherited from our Stone Age ancestors, and which helped them to outcompete their peers in passing on their genes to the next generations, are not necessarily the ones that will help individuals in the modern world to live happy, satisfying lives.

In fact, the thing I really loved about The Happiness Hypothesis was precisely the way in which Haidt was bringing logic and rationality, and good, solid empirical evidence, to bear on that most fascinating and relevant question of all: how to be happy.

Fortunately, the rigourous rationality and logic that Haidt brings to bear on this question does not tell us that the rational thing to do, if we want to be happy (which is basically a tautology in my view), is to let other people starve. On the contrary, the main message is that we tend to be happiest when our core personality, values and priorities converge. What makes us really unhappy is when one three aspects of our identity are misaligned. So if you like to be kind and compassionate to others, if this is in practice what you tend to do, if this is what you instinctively value, and you have set your life goals with this aim in mind, the Logic and Rationality require that you continue to do so.

In my case, I also like to be kind and compassionate to others in principle, i.e. this is an important part (though not the only part) of what I value, and to some extent it’s something I do naturally, though again only to some extent. Part of the point of “training the elephant”, for me, is to ensure that what I do naturally - especially when I’m tired or distracted - corresponds more closely to the kind of self-image I would like to have…including being kinder and more compassionate to others than I currently am. As I read somewhere recently: we shouldn’t try to be better than others, just better than we used to be.

In summary: for me as well rationality is a tool, not an end. But it is an extremely useful one.

@Peter re “for me as well rationality is a tool, not an end. But it is an extremely useful one.”

I most certainly agree!