Jordan Peterson Interview: “Parenting as Sacred Duty”

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John Bickley: Welcome to Morning Wire, I'm John Bickley.

Georgia Howe: And I'm Georgia Howe.

John Bickley: Today, we have a very special guest, Dr. Jordan Peterson, clinical psychologist and host of the new Daily Wire Plus series, Parenting.

Georgia Howe: Dr. Peterson, thank you so much for joining us.

Dr. Jordan Peterson: My pleasure. Thanks for the invitation.

John Bickley: Look, there's been a lot of excitement around the office about your new show. I say that in complete sincerity. Everybody's really amped about it. You've released episode zero to the public, which is what we're calling it around here. It's sort of a teaser, but episode one goes live Sunday.

Georgia Howe: I want to, of course, ask you about the show, but first, I wanted to ask you something personal. What was one of your proudest parenting moments?

Dr. Jordan Peterson: My daughter, after she had surgery to replace one of her joints in her leg, I don't remember if it was her ankle or her hip. I think it was her hip. She decided to take a motorcycle course because her mobility was impaired and that wouldn't enable her to drive a scooter. And that was a risky endeavor and it was challenging for her and frightening.

Georgia Howe: That was good in many ways. And it also did provide her with mobility for several years and made a huge difference in her life, a hugely positive difference. It also gave her a kind of indomitable confidence to be able to do something that's dangerous like that and risky, even in the face of bone fragility, let's say.

John Bickley: There's been a lot of moments. Mostly with my kids, I'm pretty damn happy with them almost all the time. And that's been the case throughout their life. So, I mean, we've had our difficulties, most of them health related, you know, and if you have to have difficulties, well, those are sort of necessary in a way, you know what I mean?

Dr. Jordan Peterson: And maybe we can cope with necessary difficulties in life. I don't know how well we cope with unnecessary difficulties. That's an interesting distinction. Yeah, a lot of maybe resentment or self-consciousness when it's unnecessary.

Georgia Howe: A lot of stuff that we bring on ourselves, maybe that adds another wrinkle and complexity there. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, it does. It really does.

John Bickley: Life has enough instability, let's say, and uncertainty without adding the additional overlay of unnecessary suffering and stupidity. Unnecessary suffering is really hard on people, you know, and so I suppose because there's an element of moral culpability to it that isn't there with with an illness that that's a rough division and I mean one of the things that I'm trying to help parents be confident in is the their moral right to parent their moral right to run the household in a manner that brings peace and abundance.

Dr. Jordan Peterson: There are obligations to do that. We're afraid of our children in the Western world. And that's partly a reflection of an overweening maternal love, I suppose. But we're afraid that we'll damage our children by parenting them. But, you know, you damage your children by not parenting them as well.

Georgia Howe: So, and the parenting that you should be doing is the establishment of a relationship. And if the relationship is solid, you don't allow and certainly don't encourage your children to do anything that is counter to their best interest, especially socially.

John Bickley: You mentioned Western culture, this being a problem with Western culture. Is this a modern phenomenon, this idea that sort of reluctance, fear of heavy-handed parenting or really embracing the parenting role?

Dr. Jordan Peterson: Well, I would say it's got its roots in a philosophical doctrine, and that would be the doctrine of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that the natural state of man is noble savage, that we're all good and that all culture does is corrupt us, which is an insane doctrine. We're rife with possibility for good and evil. That's our essential nature.

Georgia Howe: And proper cultural intermediation, which is at least in part the role of a parent, fortifies the good and puts what could otherwise be pathological and even malevolent in its proper place.

John Bickley: If you have an aggressive child for example and you socialize that child properly which can be a challenge because an aggressive child, especially one that's extroverted, will push the boundaries hard. If you can socialize them effectively, they can become extremely sophisticated competitors. And that's a pretty high level of achievement.

Dr. Jordan Peterson: So there's the philosophical element, which is a child is perfect and good until they're warped by culture, which is completely one-sided, insane, progressive, naive argument. And then I think the other thing that likely happened was that after World War II, we became wealthy enough in the Western world so that our children and teenagers had disposable income. And then they were heavily targeted by corporations, which have a right to market, but heavily targeted by corporations.

Georgia Howe: And their narcissism, their self-centered narcissism was encouraged and exaggerated. And that's kind of where the permissive consumerist culture of the 1960s emerged that was when you know at the beginning of the 60s you still saw shows like my three sons or father knows best can you bloody well imagine a show called father knows best now and that breakdown of oh yeah well that the only one of the few positive examples I've seen of a man in recent comedic history is Ted Lasso.

John Bickley: You know, and even Ted is divorced and has his problems, but he's a very good mentor. That's quite rare. Saw another good man in Landman. Yes. Billy Bob Thornton. Yeah, yeah. And so that's more of dramatic. And so some of that's starting to make a comeback, but a lot of that dissolved in the hyper-permissive 60s. And all that 60s culture, including its progressivism, was a form of politicized immaturity and a mindless hedonism. It's not useful and not sustainable.

Dr. Jordan Peterson: With the parents that you've spoken to so far for the show, do you feel like a lot of their questions are rooted in this issue, this idea of a fear of embracing sort of the harder edge parts of the parenting roles?

Georgia Howe: It depended on the parent. Some of the people I talked to had genuine problems, let's say. I'm not saying that, I'm not trying to make a distinction exactly between the kinds of problems I dealt with, but some of the parents I saw had a very ill child, for example. And that's just a whole rat's nest of insane, inevitable trouble and conflict. It's certainly something that can split a marriage apart.

John Bickley: There were other parents whose problems were very much likely a consequence of the disciplinary strategies they imposed or failed to impose. And so part of what I did with the former people was to strategize about management approaches to degenerating illness, which is the worst kind of illness, obviously, to have in a child. With the disciplinary issues while we talked strategy and also goal.

Dr. Jordan Peterson: You want to have a sense in your household of how you would want the relationships and the household to operate. You need a vision of that. And that's what allows you to detect deviations from that. And then you have to negotiate disciplinary strategies when that isn't making itself manifest.

Georgia Howe: It's not helpful to have children who are whiny and miserable. It's not pleasant for you. It's not pleasant for them. Parents often use intermittent reinforcement when their children are whiny and miserable. So here's how to have a terrible child. Imagine your child will whine and complain when they want something. Okay if you want to have that happen all the time then vary the amount that they have to whine and complain before you capitulate unpredictably that's what a slot machine does it rewards intermittently and variably and that's impossible to eradicate because what the child learns is if they're persistent enough you will cave and you know you do that 30 times around bedtime, for example, you'll have a problem that might take years to resolve.

John Bickley: I might have caved a few times. I'm just going to go ahead and confess that. Yeah, well, you know, people... It's hard. A few times, it is hard. But generally, especially with things that repeat every day, you know, mealtimes, bedtimes, these little islands of stability and routine, it's very good to be pretty rigorous around those events. Even during times of illness and strife, because otherwise you get regression in the child. And then, well, and then you have to deal with the consequence of the schedule, let's say, falling apart.

Dr. Jordan Peterson: It's good to have a vision of household peace and prosperity and abundance. Like your household is a walled garden. That's what paradise means, by the way. Paradise means walled garden. And the walls are there because they protect you from the outside and they circumscribe a space right And a garden is a place where nature can flourish And if you set up a walled garden properly in your household the children will play and that will give you an opportunity to play house with your wife, which you want if you have any sense.

Georgia Howe: So the emergence of play in your household is an index of optimized harmony. That's an extremely useful thing to know. Same applies in the context of a marriage. And I don't know if this is actually a real study. I've always heard the discussion about the studies that show that children within fenced areas use more of the space than children in areas that are not fenced in.

John Bickley: Is this true, psychologically true, that we want, we actually want boundaries? We want a sense of how far we can go?

Dr. Jordan Peterson: Well, look, boundary is an impediment to exploration, but it's also an enclosure that produces security. So boundary as fence reduces anxiety. And that's the same thing with stable household rules. You might say, well, the rules are restrictions. It's like, yeah, but partly what they're restricting is the chaos that produces anxiety.

Georgia Howe: So now you want to adjust the boundary so the child can expand his or her exploration. But boundaries of the abstract sort, so the principles by which you run the household, produce the kind of predictable stability within which play and exploration can take place, and they quell anxiety.

John Bickley: So you're doing your child and you and your wife a great favor by imposing that regularity. Now, there's another way of thinking about boundaries that the Rousseauian types and the progressives miss completely. So you might say, if you're playing basketball that the rules are boundaries and right they're restrictions you can't do this you can't do that it's like yeah but they're also enabling principles so good rules are enabling principles in that they're game rules right and so it's a misapprehension to only think about a regulated environment as like fences and enclosures and restrictions it's like well you can't play football when you're playing basketball and i suppose that's a boundary but without the rules there's no game right and like there's something that should be burnt into your psyche without the rules there is no game now if the rules are well formulated minimal right but enforced like a good referee, then not only can the game be played, it can be played with multiple people and it can improve as it plays, right?

Dr. Jordan Peterson: And then it can generalize to other games. And that's the purpose of sports, for example, is to teach you to be skilled, but to be a good sport so that you're invited to play many games across the course of your life. That's a very good conceptual schemata for what you're doing as a parent.

Georgia Howe: I love what you said there about how other people can be included. It does, it strikes me that if you set up the right rules of the game, that the most effective games are going to be the one that, that mirrors the actual real world so that they can play the same game as they move on. Right. So what does that, what does that look like? What are the kinds of things that you see that are actually weaknesses in a lot of parenting approaches?

Dr. Jordan Peterson: Well, I think you actually put your finger on it. Like your role as a parent, there's two that are fundamental. One is to encourage your child to be maximally socially acceptable. And you want to have that more or less in place by the age of four. Or there will be trouble and it'll be severe and it will be hard to fix. And then your household should be a proxy for the real world. Which means that it's your responsibility as a parent to encourage behavior in the household that would translate well to the real world so your children roughly should conduct themselves at mealtimes as they would conduct themselves in the house of a potentially welcoming stranger or a restaurant you know now maybe that's a little bit too high a bar for the typical domestic meal but i don't know do you want to raise barbarians who aren't welcome wherever they go

John Bickley: We had children come over to our house at one point. Their parents were completely, they were very permissive and were tyrants because of it. These kids were quite young. They had to follow the kids around every second in our household because they couldn't be trusted not to destroy something. My kids at that point, they knew what they could play with and what they couldn't. And so I could just leave them be. They had maximal freedom because they'd mastered a few simple rules.

Georgia Howe: When we sat down to dinner, the children immediately ate all the centers out of the bread bowl. It's like, well, we didn't invite them back. Right. And now you've got to think about what that means. It means that their poor disciplinary interventions, which were based on either lack of skill or lack of courage, made their children socially undesirable. Right. That's a terrible thing to allow to have happen because, look, most people, terrible consequences. Because that means that when the children go out, they face disapproval and frowns that are often hidden behind a mask. And so that's their world. Vaguely disapproving people who don't want them around for reasons they don't exactly understand.

Dr. Jordan Peterson: Jesus, that's awful. That's awful. And so you a proxy for the world as a parent And so you want to be stringent about what you encourage your children to manifest and what you bring under control And you can If you're aware of that, you know that's your responsibility. You can do that.

Georgia Howe: Final question here. I know we're going to wrap up. For the series, what are you hoping parents get out of this series? What's your ultimate goal here?

Dr. Jordan Peterson: Well, I hope they, first of all, see that the problems that they're having are shared by many people. Right and that they're they're real and that and that there are solutions and that the the series describes some of the actual solutions but it also describes the process by which solutions to many problems can be generated which is even more useful you know how do you identify a problem in the household well something that's disruptive occurs with regularity.

John Bickley: You know, here's another take. People often focus their attention on the exceptional happenings in their life, Christmas or vacation, some special occasion. But your life is what repeats. So I've had clients, for example, who had a war with their child for 25 minutes every night when they put them to bed for like five years. Well, that's their whole relationship. So it repeats every day. You want to get everything that repeats every day right, right? Smooth functioning, right? Because that's your life.

Dr. Jordan Peterson: You know, one of the things you can do with your wife, for example, is negotiate how you greet each other when you come home. Because you come home likely every day or even several times every day. You know, and if the situation is that we'll do a stereotype here, the mother's at home taking care of the kids, the father comes home, and the second he steps in, he's met with a litany of complaints and an insane boatload of responsibility. That's a pathway to associating home with resentment forever. Right. Figure it out. It's like, how do you make the transition? Because you do it every day. You know, you can do the math. Maybe you come home, there's the transition to come home, let's call that 20 minutes a day. So that's 105, let's say 120 minutes a week, that's two hours a week. That's eight hours a month. So that's a workday a year. That's 12 workdays a year. That's the amount of time you're spending. Half a month of days coming home. Right. Okay. So half a month, you get 24 of those things, right? 24. That's all. Your life is in order. Yeah. Yeah. Arithmetic, man. It's very useful.

Georgia Howe: You know, one of the things, of course, this is what you do, but bringing our minds into our parenting in a more strategic way. I think a lot of people parent by emotion and that's part of it, But it's good to hear this sort of stepping back and looking, thinking, what are the trends? How does this turn out over time? Repeat it, say, every single day. Every single day, man. It's a huge impact.

Dr. Jordan Peterson: Well, and you want to think. It's like, okay, what relationship do I want with my children? This is a lifelong relationship. Your children want more than anything to have the best relationship with you than anyone has ever had in their life. That's what they're offering. And you could have that. And then you could think about what that would mean over the whole course of your life, right into your old age. And then you could think, okay, I'm going to start running my household on that principle today. And I'm going to be stringent about it because I want this to work, right? I want the world to open up to my kids. I want them to want to be around me when they leave and become adults. I want to see my grandkids. I want the household to thrive, you know.

Georgia Howe: And then you, having established that aim and thought it through, well, then you can detect deviations and negotiate with your wife and your kids to course correct. And your kids will love that. Like, the kids will push against interventionist attention, let's say. But that's mostly to test it. One of the things we learned with my son in particular, who was a more assertive and competitive person in some ways, especially when he was young than my daughter was very easy child until she became ill um Julian would start to fray at the edges because he was a pushy little rat and my wife and I would get together and say okay that kid he's starting to like fray a bit so like two weeks he's not getting away with anything right and so we'd link arms and vow to be a united front and every single time it was quite shocking because I didn't really realize this would happen every single time he liked us better. It was marked. Like he thrived with that attention because that discriminating attention is, that's the capital that you offer your children. There's nothing they want more than your attention, your differentiated attention. And so use it, use it for the good.

John Bickley: And you say this, you say this in your sort of teaser episode. I mean, what an honor to have that role, to embrace it. It's hard, but in the end, so rewarding, just like you, really convey in your series.

Dr. Jordan Peterson: Dr. Peterson, thank you so much for joining us.

Georgia Howe: My pleasure. Thanks very much for the invitation and the opportunity.

John Bickley: That was Dr. Jordan Peterson and talking about his new Daily Wire series, Parenting, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.