2019-09-30
Was thinking about my cousins, and how I don’t get to see them and their kids as much as I’d like. And it got me thinking toward the trade-offs we make in deciding between pursuing the raising of children vs the raising of other pursuits in the world.
Thinking about the careful work of keeping a foot in both worlds — being in touch with adults raising kids, in touch with the kids themselves, and in touch with adults raising ideas. It got me thinking that to be amongst adults raising ideas, these folks perhaps surround themselves in the sorts of memes that can only nourish a small group of people like them. Academics being the deepest example of this, toiling away on perhaps important concepts that are utterly inaccessible to most minds on earth. But at best, a people raising ideas figure out how to help those ideas nourish other adults; how to feed them carefully into the existing minds and cultures that are already living and breathing in the world.
But that same creative space and process perhaps represents a milieu that offers no nourishment to a child’s mind. A kid won’t care what great meta concept or world-bending or society-improving thing their parent is doing. If they experience that as a poverty of attention and information that is accessible to them — here and now in the mental space in which they exist — then that’s a failure as a parent. That child might have a harder time growing into space of abundance that allows them to appreciate what the parent is working on. Or they’ll arrive there with their own baggage and disadvantage.
Anyway, I suppose my realization is that raising kids is its own informational niche; almost like an ecological niche. The mind of the adult and mind of the child are not nourished on the same informational diet. And it’s a place of compromise.
Adults sometimes choose not to straddle the niche of raising children and raising ideas, instead working only on ideas. But these adults sacrifice an important negotiation and compromise that is perhaps part of our deep history. And perhaps this negotiation is very intertwined with what it is to be human. And I wonder if adults who neglect this phase of development (child-rearing), might end up living down a strange path of development, where their minds take a different form than our ancient genes are equipped to successfully navigate.