Domesticating our Kids

I heard today on the radio about how more and more pet owners are abandoning their pets on moving day.  This is negligent, because domesticated animals are ill-prepared to fend for themselves in the wild.  While such negligence may be punishable under the criminal code, and is, of course, morally wrong, it seems to me that there is a more general issue at play here. 

On some level, there is an inherent disservice in the practice of domesticating animals at all.  By sheltering them and feeding them, we undermine all of the instincts they have developed over the long adaptive road of evolution.  This article will not explore this debate any further, but will use it as a backdrop for a discussion on how we raise our kids.

I am about to become a parent for a second time, so, naturally, the question of what constitutes effective parenting is on my mind.  If one were to summarize the role of a parent in one sentence, it might look like this: "To ensure the safety of your child, while empowering him or her to take on life independently upon reaching adulthood".  Though parenting is anything but a bland activity, it can be viewed through an engineer's lens, as an optimization problem.

If one hovers too close (helicopter parent), one's child will never attain the level of independence that is needed to tackle life on his or her own.  On the other hand, a completely 'laissez-faire' parenting attitude at too young an age can place a child in an unneccessarily risky situation.  Thus, the parent must find the sweet spot, where their child is free to explore the world, but with reasonable boundaries imposed on them.

A Toddler at Night as Predicted by Material Science

A few days ago, at around 8:00 pm, my 17-month-old daughter was standing in the living room, when she suddenly began to spin herself in circles in an effort to induce dizziness and fall down.  She seemed to enjoy it a lot.  After a few nice, relatively harmless tumbles, she eventually made herself so dizzy, that she fell, smacking her face directly onto the hardwood floor.  At that moment, the “witching hour” ended with a brief fit of crying, and it was time for bed.

As a parent of a toddler, I am beginning to see the importance of recognizing toddler fatigue.  The witching hour is an unofficial domain of time where an otherwise normal child goes bananas.  Imagine how a prison inmate gradually loses his mind in isolation over a period of months, and condense that experience into one hour, and you begin to depict the decline of a toddler in the evening.  For my daughter, this strange yet entertaining timeframe seems to occur between the end of dinner and bedtime.