TRANSCRIPT
What does a child really need? They need someone who can intuitively understand what they want and need from the very, very beginning. They need a perfectly empathic parent.
Now, conventional society says a child needs a good enough parent. You don’t need to be perfect; that’s what society says. There’s the idea of Donald Winnicott, the good enough parent. Oh, parents, I’ve met so many today that love that. They stick with it because it makes them feel good. You don’t have to be perfect; you need to be good enough. And in fact, what sickens me about the good enough parent concept is they say if you are too good of a parent, you’ll damage your child. You’ll make your child narcissistic. Granted, if you spoil your child and if you give your child what society says the child wants, and you totally indulge them in a spoiling way, that will make your child very narcissistic. But on the other hand, neglecting your child, which is what the average good enough parent does, also makes your child very narcissistic.
We live in a world where basically everybody’s extremely narcissistic. Some people are off the charts with their narcissism, but most people are very narcissistic. So the question is, if a child does not need a good enough parent, what do they need? Do they need a perfect parent? I think yes, they do.
Now, of course, all the parent advocates and parents say that’s impossible. You’re not a parent, Daniel Mackler. You have no idea what it’s like to raise a child. You don’t understand what we go through. My reply is that your imperfections or limitations as a parent do not change the fact that your child needs you to be perfect for him. And from what I’ve observed, often I empathize with your child more than you do.
Let’s look at the extreme cases: circumcision. Look how common circumcision still is in the United States. Don’t tell me circumcising the tip of a baby’s penis, cutting it off, is empathizing with a child’s need. That’s brutal torture, and people just shrug their shoulders and go. And people who think they’re wonderful parents—it’s like this isn’t like Jeffrey Dahmer; this is like average parents who think this is okay.
Well, I would say to those parents, if you really are so desperate to circumcise your child, wait until he’s 10 years old and ask him if he wants to be circumcised. And tell me how many 10-year-olds are going to want to be circumcised. How many 5-year-olds? How many three-year-olds are going to want to? So instead, they catch the baby when he’s right in the hospital, newborn, or a few days old, or a week old, or 8 days old, depending maybe the religion, and then they do it to him when he has no ability to give consent for it. And what I would say then is you don’t really get what your child needs at all, and you never should have had kids. Because a person who doesn’t really get what their child needs and can’t, because of their psychological stunted understanding, should not have children. They’re the wrong person to have a child.
Now, a lot of people will say in extreme cases, yes, that’s true. Someone who’s completely damaged and can’t love at all and will only violently abuse their child—that person shouldn’t have kids. But the average person, there’s no problem with that. The funny thing is, though, society still lets even the worst people have children. There’s no laws, there’s no limits, there’s no licenses. It’s harder to adopt a cat from the average cat adoption agency in New York City than it is to go out and make a child.
The basic thing is the parent has to work out his or her own traumas from childhood. Otherwise, you’re going to be doing massive amounts of projecting. They’re going to be split off from who they really are on the inside, and they’re going to be projecting things onto the person they’re in the relationship with, be it a friend, a romantic partner, or a child.
So the first key is to resolve those childhood traumas. That’s a massive amount of work. I think for most people, it’s a lifetime of work. Especially the problem why it’s so difficult to resolve one’s childhood traumas in our modern world is that very few people are even trying to do it. And so if you’re going to try to struggle to give it 100% to resolve your childhood traumas, you’re going to be doing it practically alone in our world, and it’s much, much harder to do it alone. I think it would be much easier to do it in community, surrounded by lots and lots of people who are doing it. To the point that if I think thousands or millions or hundreds of millions of people were all struggling together to try to resolve their own childhood traumas, I think a massive momentum would build, and it would all happen much more quickly.
People who have fully resolved their childhood trauma are not going to be projecting their unmet childhood needs that they still hold inside of them onto their child. And that’s what the average parent does. They want their child to meet their unresolved needs. They’ve been waiting their whole life for someone who’s finally going to be there for them. And that’s why most people have children—they want that child to be there for them.
And what’s really the most sad is what they really want is they want their child, who they’ve created, to be their parent for them—the parent that they never had. And they mold that child in the way that they desperately wish they could have molded their own immature, inappropriate parents from childhood. And they make that child into their parents. They make him the perfect lock and key model for what they’ve always wanted, and it’s extremely traumatizing and destructive to the child.
They also try to do the same thing with their partners, their romantic partners. But it’s much harder to try to mold and twist and make a lock and key model out of an adult romantic partner or a friend because adults don’t like to be pushed around and molded. They can be molded a little bit, but not very much. With a child, the child is so desperate to get loved that he will do anything to fit himself and be the perfect complimentary lock and key for his parent. And that gives the parent a huge amount of power to mold and twist that child, and that’s what the average “healthy” conventional parent does to their child.
Two parents who are really both there for that child let the child know from the very beginning that he was fully wanted by two people who were committed to raising him or her as ideally as they could and were going to give their best to do it.
Now, do I sound like a right-wing religious bigot by saying a two-parent household is vitally important? Without that, it’s against God’s law? Well, if some of what I say happens to overlap with some of the things that the religious bigots say, so be it. But in that way, we can learn from some of the things that the religious bigots say.
How about parents who don’t drink alcohol? Which to me means parents who aren’t trying to numb their painful feelings. Parents who aren’t trying to get pleasure out of an external substance because they’re deep down not getting pleasure from within themselves. They haven’t figured out how to do it. So parents who don’t need to drink alcohol, parents who don’t smoke cigarettes, parents who don’t use drugs, don’t smoke marijuana, don’t use other strong drugs, don’t hook themselves on painkillers—I think anybody who’s taking psychiatric medication should not be having children because that’s a sign already that they’re not able to deal with their underlying emotional issues, and they have to use an external drug to modulate their feelings and modulate their whole sense of self.
Parents who have enough money to be able to support their child in a healthy way—does that mean parents have to be rich? Absolutely not. I think tons of people have tons of money or horrible parents, and the money doesn’t make any difference. And there are people who could be very poor, actually, who could be far better parents. Parents who can spend a huge amount of time with their children and parents who are working two different jobs, both parents working, not home a lot, having the children raised by a television.
That’s obvious. That’s terrible for the child. But I think people that need to hire help for their children, that’s a problem. I don’t think people should be hiring help to raise their child. That’s sad. They have to go out and work while they pay someone else to come into their home and work for them.
If we just watch gorillas, gorilla mothers hardly let their child out of their sight for a long, long time. They get it. They don’t put their little baby in somebody else’s care. That child needs them, and they know it.
I’m shocked when people don’t want to breastfeed. It’s like they want to raise their kid on a bottle. Let people stick to one child. That’s enough. And if parents are imperfect, all the more so, give that one child your full attention.
I think lots of people, they have lots of children for all sorts of bizarre, unconscious, sad reasons.