By Dale Melchin
The most effective way to pursue liberty and ensure it exists for future generations is to be a good person and, by extension, a good parent, and to take back parental responsibilities that have been stolen by the public school system.
Here are five steps to achieving this.
The first step
is to resolve to be a good person now. People can small fakery from a mile off and your children (and other family members and close friends) will be able to smell it coming off of you even more.
Being a good person consists of being an ethical person; keeping your word; being organized in your living quarters, you finances, your friendships, and every other area of life you control. Tracking toward doing this will lower your stress levels and increase your energy for parenting. This helps ensure that you are not being short with your children and building trust, rather than mistrust.
The second step
is to resolve any personal internal issues (or be tracking towards that). No one is perfect and most of us will not be saints in this life and will have to rely upon the grace of God when we get to the end. This applies to being a good person, but tracking down and resolving any character issues, self-sabotage, or flaws that will cause problems in your family is a strong step to ensuring liberty in your family.
It will make you into someone that your children (and peers) will want to be around and be like.
The third step
is to resolve to get good at persuasion, logic, and making things interesting. (Personally, this is hit-and-miss for me.) I have a lot of people who eyes glaze over when I talk about liberty. However, if you learn to slip little bites of liberty into your conversation and use the various tools out there for teaching your children about liberty, then you will definitely increase your chances of transmitting the ideas of liberty to your children.
The fourth step
is to resolve to have a stable relationship with your spouse. This is probably the most important step of all five I am laying out here.
You cannot effectively teach your children anything if you do not have a good relationship with your spouse; they will pick up on your negative relationship. Do not have children if your marriage is a wreck, and if you already have children (especially young children), get on the path to fixing things before it is too late.
The fifth step
is to resolve to be a peaceful parent. If you have to use physical force to get your kids to do something, that’s a sign of weakness as a parent. (I lived with this as a child, so perhaps I am overreacting.) But if your interactions with your child are characterized by physical force, then something is wrong with you and something is wrong with your family relations. (By physical force, I mean hitting, slapping, spanking, and angry, intimidating yelling.) Those things serve to break the spirit of a child and make them afraid of you. This does not include restraining or moving them if they are making a scene, or raising your voice if they are in danger (i.e. “get out of the road!”). If you want your children to like you and adopt your ideology, then you have top be consistent, and that includes your parenting.
This does not mean that you allow them to make you into a door mat. You can calmly teach them that actions have consequences without hitting them or being short with them. The key is honest communication. You can tell your child that they are getting on your nerves and tell them to stop pulling the dog’s tail or tapping a toy on the table. Granted, this involves making a commitment of time and learning how to push your child’s buttons the right way, without force. It also involves a certain amount of self-care, communicating with your spouse or partner, and being able to take turns. Sometimes, it just involves grit and commitment to the ideal, no matter the cost. If we can learn to do this, then we can undo the morass of tyranny that has been foisted upon us by the public school system.
Dale Melchin is the host of the Simplistic Advice podcast and a frequent guest of WAL Daily.
