TRANSCRIPT
Over the last several months, quite a few people have asked what I think of Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist. So I started looking at some of his videos, and my initial reaction is that he’s an extremely intelligent guy, extremely well-spoken, extremely precise in his language. He’s a formidable debating opponent. He seems to be able to pretty easily, in a lot of cases, rip people apart, make them look a little silly even. But I didn’t really find anything that jumped out one way or another about him until I started reading his book, Twelve Rules for Life, and I found it quite interesting.
What I started by doing is looking at what his twelve rules for life are, and let me read them to you because once I hit one of the rules, that’s when my antenna went up and I said, “Whoa, what’s up with this guy?” So I’ll get to that rule, and then I would like to analyze it.
So, Jordan Peterson’s twelve rules for life:
- Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
- Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.
- Make friends with people who want the best for you.
- Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
- Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
Well, so far I liked these. They sounded great to me. But then I read number five: “Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.” Well, that’s when my antenna went up, and I thought, “Oh my god, who is this guy?” Because what does that mean? What does that open the door to? If we stop our children from doing anything that makes us dislike them, to me, it’s profoundly arbitrary. And from what I’ve seen as a therapist, as someone who’s worked a lot with children in a lot of different contexts, often children can do things that are perfectly healthy that actually rub their parents the wrong way and rub other adults the wrong way and can rub society the wrong way because parents, other authority figures, and society is so screwed up.
And so what Jordan Peterson is saying that I read just by reading that very simple line is that it’s actually the job of a parent to stop the child from doing things that bother him, that stop the child from doing things that can trigger the parent’s own unresolved traumas. So when I went into reading that chapter, and that’s where I jumped in because I said, “What does he say in this chapter? How does he defend, to me, something that in so many cases is an indefensible position from a point of view of being a loving, respecting, healthy parent?”
Well, one thing I noticed is throughout his chapter, he actually never even mentions trauma. He never mentions parents being traumatized. He never mentions parents having unresolved traumas from their own, to some degree, screwed-up childhoods. And then he never takes the next step and says something that, from what I’ve observed in the world, is incredibly common to the point of being ubiquitous, and that is traumatized parents. Parents who were traumatized as children act out their unresolved traumas on their children.
And what does that mean exactly? This goes back quite a ways in psychology that people who have unresolved traumas in their psyche, in their body, in their life history, in their biography have a yearning to express what happened to them, have a yearning to express the abandonments that happened to them, the harms, the physical abuse that happened to them, the sexual violations that happened to them, the loneliness they felt, the betrayals they experienced in their childhood. And to some degree or other, many of us, or I should say all of us, have some of these things, and many people have all of these things inside of them. This, in many ways, is the history of childhood of our modern world and of our ancient world.
The writer Lloyd deMause does a beautiful and very disturbing, frankly, job of describing what the history of childhood has been throughout the ages. It’s a history of trauma. It’s a history of neglect. It’s a history of deprivation. All these things combined. But for so many children, it’s a history of extreme abuse. This is where we come from as a species: a history of huge, huge amounts of trauma. And many people are profoundly unaware of this. They’re not aware of how traumatized they are. They don’t really explore their own childhoods that much. They don’t know what happened to them. They’re actually split off from the history of their own childhood. In effect, they’re very dissociated. Or some people, they have some feelings. They’re not entirely split off. But what they are is very depressed because they feel some of it. They feel some of what they went through, but they don’t know how to get out of it. They’re stuck in it. They’re suffering. They’re very unhappy, and they’re miserable.
And many people, what do they do? They do different techniques, including taking pills, to try to split off their depression, to make themselves not feel again. And for many people, their children are something that cause them an incredible amount of frustration because their children don’t let them be split off so easily. Their children don’t accept their depression. Their children are expressing all sorts of thoughts and behaviors that might be very healthy, spontaneous, natural behaviors that the parents can easily pathologize. The parents can label as unhealthy.
Now, there’s a flipside in this, and this is something that I think is very important to explore in relation to Jordan Peterson’s chapter on raising children, chapter five in his book. And what that is, is many times children, young children, toddlers, infants even, can be expressing behavior that actually isn’t inherently healthy. Is rageful, is angry, can be violent even, is manipulative. All these things, not as a natural healthy part of what their spontaneous makeup of being children and babies is. Instead, the children’s “bad behavior,” “pathological behavior,” is actually a response to the parent’s behavior. It’s a response to the parent’s unconscious split-off sides that the parents are actually acting out on the children. So the children’s “bad behavior” is actually a reaction to the parental behavior.
And what I got by reading the whole chapter five of this book by Jordan Peterson is he had no acknowledgment of that. No acknowledgment that children’s bad behavior is actually acting out behavior. They are acting out their frustrations. They are acting out. They are expressing what has been done to them, and they’re expressing it through the only way they know how: through behaving what’s considered badly. And yes, this can drive parents crazy. It can drive other people crazy when they’re around kids who are doing this. Children who are bratty, children who scream and cry all the time. Sometimes children who break things and hit other kids and are antisocial, all these things.
Well, how does Jordan Peterson look at these children? Because he goes into a lot of detail in this chapter, giving examples of children who, in conventional terms in society, would be considered brats. Children who are obnoxious brats. He actually refers to them several times as little monsters. He calls one kid a varmint at one point, a little wild animal that you just want to get rid of, the kind of animal that you’d like to kill off. That’s what a varmint is. And his attitude about these children, these little monsters, these varmints, is this is their natural way of being. He describes it very clearly. This is their temperament. That children are not born good. They’re born good and bad. That evil is a normal inherent part of children. That this is our makeup as human beings.
And he goes on to describe an example of how psychological studies have shown that two-year-olds statistically are the most violent of all human beings. They kick, they bite, they steal, they do all sorts of violent things. And he uses this as an example to show that this is the biological makeup of human beings. And I read this, and I thought, “Can he actually be serious?” And the reason I asked that is that not that I’m denying that a psychological study is wrong when it shows that two-year-olds are incredibly violent in many cases, because I’ve actually seen this. I’ve actually worked with a lot of two-year-olds. I’ve been around a lot of families with two-year-olds, and I’ve seen this. I’ve seen kids do lots of horrible things to each other when they’re two years old, and they can be all those things. But where does he come off saying that this is how children naturally are when a child is two years old?
Already been out of the womb and living to some degree independently in the world for two years. And they also had nine months in the womb before that. That’s nearly three years for a two-year-old to have already, to some degree or other, been in existence.
And from what I’ve seen, when two-year-olds, two-and-a-half-year-olds are expressing all of these violent, rageful tendencies and are really cruel to each other and mean to each other, this isn’t natural. This is a reaction to their environment.
And what is the environment of a two-year-old? The environment of a two-year-old is not primarily the outside world, the social structure, the social strata, the political climate, all these things. The society of a child, and to some degree he acknowledges this, even the society of a very young child, is the family system, is the parents.
And what I’ve seen is when children are acting out and expressing all sorts of violent, unpleasant tendencies and hurtfulness and meanness and cruelty toward other little kids, toward adults, toward their parents, toward themselves, even toward their toys, toward their dolls, they are showing what has been done to them. It’s very simple, and to me, it’s obvious.
And what I’ve seen also is teachers. I’ve been around when I worked as a pre-K teacher. I saw the other pre-K teachers. This was a known phenomenon. It was like, yeah, the kids who were acting out, who were violent, who were mean, the little three-year-olds who were cruel and mean. It’s not—I’ve never heard a teacher say, “Yeah, kids are inherently born evil,” because they know it. They interact with their parents. They hear about what their home life is, and after a while, it becomes a truism. These children are expressing things about their home life.
They’re expressing things about their parents’ relationship toward them. They’re expressing things about their parents’ relationship toward each other. They’re expressing things that their parents have perhaps done to their older siblings, and their siblings are doing to them. Because a lot of bad behavior toward children can come from siblings. But it doesn’t inherently come from siblings. It comes from parental traumas toward those siblings, or it comes from parental trauma toward a sibling who passes it down to a sibling who passes it down to a sibling. But eventually, it starts at the top, and in that family system, who runs the show? Who is the authority? It’s the parent.
And I also noticed in reading some and listening to some Jordan Peterson that he’s very against authoritarian societies, against authoritarian political structures, and I happen to agree with him. I think he’s right on. But what he doesn’t see, and that’s kind of confusing to me, what he doesn’t see is that for the little child, their parents so easily can be authoritarian structures, can be authoritarian figures, can be dictators.
When parents are crazy, when parents have unconscious unhealthy behaviors, when parents have perversions, when parents have violent tendencies, all of this coming from their own unresolved childhood issues, from their own childhoods, often from their own disturbed, violent, perverse, unconscious, traumatizing parents from way back when, these parents have a huge amount of liberty to be able to act these behaviors out on their children. And they can get away with it because we live in a world where, first of all, most people don’t even know what happens in the family home. The door closes, things stay mum. Nobody says anything.
Parents have a huge liberty to really mistreat their children, and they can get away with it profoundly. Look how much sexual abuse of little children by parents actually goes unreported. Now, some does get reported, and people get all up in arms about it. But what about the milder stuff? Or what about the stuff that parents get away with that no one knows about? I think it’s huge. I think a huge percentage never gets reported.
Or the other thing is children are often terrified to report their parents, even when the children are older, when they’re eight, ten, twelve, fourteen. They don’t want to go to the police and say, “Listen, my dad or my mom is doing…” And it’s mostly dads, let’s face it, but moms do all sorts of crazy, perverse stuff too so often. But they’re not going to go to the police because they know what’s gonna happen if they go to the police. And yes, some do. But for many, many children, if they go to the police, if they go to an authority figure, they’re not unaware that horrible consequences are going to happen to their family system.
Maybe their parents will be arrested. Maybe their dad’s going to go to jail. Or worst-case scenario, if nobody even believes them and it comes back to the parent, there can be horrible retribution on children by parents. So we live in a society where, in so many cases, from mild to extreme, parents can get away with doing horrible things.
And what got me reading this chapter by Jordan Peterson and him not even remotely acknowledging any of this, not acknowledging how two-year-olds can be violent not because of innate temperament, not because of biological factors, but because of what was done to them. What he does, in effect, and he says it explicitly, is he says when children behave badly, it’s because of their biology, it’s because of their temperament, not because of what happened to them.
That because of this, it’s actually the job of the parent. It’s the responsible job of the parent. It’s his job to discipline. It’s the mother and father’s job to be a firm disciplinarian of the child, to stop him doing this behavior. And what does that really mean? What does it mean for a parent to discipline a child when, in so many of the cases, the cases he actually described in his chapter, those behaviors are coming from what I observe, what I’ve observed by watching people in the world? Those behaviors are coming as a result of what the parents already did to the children.
And what he’s doing is he is siding with the perpetrators. And what he is doing is actually saying to the perpetrators, “I consider it okay for you to take no responsibility for what you’ve done to your child up until the age of two, three, four.” That your child’s bad behavior is no reflection on your unconscious split-off problems, your depression, your misery, your anxiety, your unresolved historical traumas. It’s your own childhood that you never worked out, your screwed-up childhood dynamics.
He says, “Don’t even worry about that. Don’t even look at that. All I will say is you’re a good parent, you’re a loving parent, and your job is to stop your child from expressing this bad behavior, to stop your child from being a brat essentially. And if you really love your child, you’re gonna put a stop to that. And if you don’t love your child, you’re gonna let your child act out and be a brat and be a troubled kid who goes around doing bad things and grows up to be someone who’s gonna have to face the wrath of a very, in many ways, unforgiving world. And your child is going to grow up to be someone who doesn’t fit into our ‘civil society.’
Now, is our society so civil? Is a society with so much trauma, so much split-off unconscious trauma and authoritarianism against children really a civil society? I would argue that it certainly isn’t, not at the primary level of society, the fundamental level of the family unit. I think it’s actually not very civil when we really look into it often. It’s very uncivil, but that’s a slightly different story.
Basically, what I see him doing is setting up what I consider to be a false dichotomy. The dichotomy of when children are behaving badly, again, there’s two routes the parent can go: let them continue behaving in a way that expresses all of their misery and unhappiness and frustration and rage, or find ways to put a stop to it.
And why I consider that a false dichotomy is because I see that there’s a very obvious and much more important third way that he never acknowledges at all, and that is for parents to heal their own traumas, to never set their children up to be so unhappy, to be so frustrated, to be so angry, to be so rageful. And by not acknowledging that, by not looking at it, it’s a huge omission in his psychology of raising children. And also, it’s very comfortable. There’s so many parents, because who wants to look at this? Who wants to think, “Hey, I’m a parent and I’m really actually screwing up my…”
Kid, and it’s also very, very hard to heal one’s own traumas. So we don’t act them out on others. So we don’t especially act them out on the people it’s most easy to act out on, which is the people over whom we have the most power—our own children.
So he doesn’t even look at that at all. Instead, he sets it up where you have to stop your kids from being brats. You have to discipline them, and then it gets into his old idea about how you’re supposed to discipline them with the least amount of force and using positive reinforcement as much as possible. And if not positive reinforcement, then you have to use negative reinforcement, such as an evil glare.
He said, he said that at some point, he said about his daughter how he could stop her from doing bad behavior with just an evil glare. But his son was more ornery, and therefore he had to use higher levels of discipline with his son. Meaning he had to physically hurt his son. He said about flicking his finger—I can’t remember on the hand or on the body somewhere of his son—but he talks about that as a legitimate form of physical discipline. And then he says, well, if that doesn’t work, well, maybe in some cases you need to put your child over your knee and give them a whack. Hit your kids physically. Attack them.
So for me, I just read this and I thought, this is very distorted. This is harmful. This is advocating an unconscious level of physical violence toward children that they don’t deserve. Now, are there such things as biological tendencies toward more aggression or more gentleness? Do children actually inherently, on a biological level, have different temperaments? Some kids being more aggressive, some being less so, some being more compliant, some being more quiet, some being more curious, more intelligent, perhaps less intelligent? All these things, I believe, yes, there is a biology to this.
Actually, I think it’s a truism. It must obviously be true that we’re all, to some degree, different in our biological makeup because we all have a biological makeup. The problem is teasing it out. How can you really get into what is temperament? I’ve read quite a few of these twin studies, reading a book that’s about identical twins who are separated at birth and showing what their temperaments are. But often what I’ve read about these studies is very unscientific, not enough numbers in there. It’s very hard to have control groups— all sorts of different problems with twin studies.
And then the other thing is, it’s very hard to know what traumas has a person gone through, even identical twins. Just because they’re different and the same doesn’t mean they haven’t gone through similar or very different traumas. It’s very hard to tease out what is temperament and what isn’t. I think this is just a personal thing. I think, yes, children do have two different temperaments. I think children do inherently have different genetic, biological, behavioral factors. But I honestly think it’s pretty, pretty small compared to the effect of the outside world on them—the effect of their parents, the effect of their already traumatized older siblings on them.
So I would say if I had to put a numerical value on it—completely arbitrary—let’s say it’s ten percent genetics, ninety percent behavioral effects from the outside world. Ten percent nature, ninety percent nurture. And from what I gather from reading Jordan Peterson, he says it’s a hundred percent nature, and I think that’s ridiculous.
Any person who has observed children a lot and is in touch with his or her own historical childhood remembers what happened to him or her, remembers his or her own traumas from childhood. When they have access to empathy for their own child that lives within them or the child that they once were, they actually can, by the very nature of their empathy, have empathy for other children, have empathy for the feelings of other children, and aren’t just going to put a child’s behavior to inherent biology.
So it really makes me question, who is Jordan Peterson on the inside? What is his psychology? How much empathy does he have for the child he once was and probably, to some degree, still is on the inside? How much does he remember of what happened to him, of the abuses that he may have—and to some degree, almost assuredly, like all of us did—gone through as a child? What is his relationship with his parents nowadays? I don’t know this. I don’t know if his parents are alive. I don’t know what his childhood was like. But to me, I would speculate from this behavior that he’s probably pretty split off from what happened to him, doesn’t have a lot of empathy for the child he was, for the historical person he was way back when. Because to me, his writing shows an incredible lack of empathy for other children.
He, to me, anyone who writes this stuff—stuff like this—and by the way, his stuff is not that uncommon. This is a pretty conventional point of view going back throughout history.
Now I want to close with one other thought because I didn’t come here only to say what do I think about Jordan Peterson’s treatment of children. Because people haven’t even asked me that. I never had any clue that I was getting into that when I started reading about him. What they said was, what do you think of Jordan Peterson in general? So for having a pretty limited awareness of Jordan Peterson’s point of view in general, I want to say that by looking at this extremely fundamental part of human psychology—of the psychology of children, of the psychology of children who have problems, young children, infants even, who have problems—if this is his point of view, I have to question everything he’s gonna say after this.