Children, Progenies and Their Inherited Habits
Children are the third party in every marriage. They absorb the politics of the household.
They inherit the physical and intellectual habits of their parents. In doing so, they become the next generation of the same behavioral patterns.
We often think we educate children through words and formal instruction. This is an illusion. Children learn primarily through silent observation. They watch their parents constantly.
They observe how parents react to conflict, fear, ambition, and disappointment. They absorb these reactions not as optional behaviors, but as default templates for reality. All this happens without actual realization that it has occurred.
Programming the Simulator
Childhood is the critical period when the human simulator is built. As discussed in Chapter 1, the mind operates as a predictive machine.
It creates top-down simulations based on prior experience. In childhood, the initial parameters of this machine are set and calibrated.
The child’s brain is highly plastic. It registers the patterns of the family unit as the baseline of the world. If a parent responds to uncertainty with anxiety, the child registers uncertainty as dangerous. If a parent uses pretense to defend their self-image, the child learns pretense as a survival tool.
In this way, children inherit the very structure of their parents’ anxieties. It does not mean that children become photocopies of their parents, for better or worse. Often they turn out to be the opposite of their parents, or of one parent. Some imbibe certain habits from one parent and other habits from the other. The result is not entirely predictable.
This inheritance is extremely difficult to break in adulthood.
The Nursery Race and Corporate Soldiers
Consider a scene in a garden on a morning in winter. A group of five-year-old toddlers is led by play school teachers. The teachers make them sit in two parallel lanes, creating an arena. Soon, two children are picked to race in the middle.
The race begins. One child feels the joy of winning. The other feels the disgrace of losing. Life begins with its worst side too early. Could this not wait a few more years?
This training is not accidental. All modern schools owe their ancestry to military training academies. Historically, early education institutions like Gurukuls in India or Greek assemblies were built to train elites for warfare.
Present-day schools behave like military institutions. They teach fight, strength, and team spirit for selfish wins.
There is no whisper about living or co-existence. The curriculum only creates good soldiers for corporations to fight marketing wars[^1].
The Education of Little Googles
This military structure has serious repercussions. Schools value crammed knowledge over direct observation. Question papers test the ability to retrieve information from memory. They do not test the ability to solve practical problems.
As a result, graduates become little Googles[^2]. They know nothing but remember everything. Talk to them, and they search their memory for keywords before you finish your sentence. They offer an inadequate, pre-programmed response.
If they realize a mistake, they just run another search with new keywords. There is no room for observation or understanding. An individual trained only to serve existing solutions will struggle. Observing and creating new solutions becomes very difficult.
The Obstacle of Authority
Education is believed to be a liberator. But in practice, it creates obstacles to real knowledge. We acquire the habit of seeking confirmation from the writings of wise people. In doing so, we lose the self-esteem required to make up our own minds[^3].
Look at AI. Tell it that you watched an event on video. It will say there is no confirmation. We must remind it that the event is unfolding right now. Therefore, it is not in any archive. The point is that it needs a reference for everything. Yet it does not provide references in regular chat. You must extract them with specific prompts. Often, this extraction reveals that the answer was wrong or misleading.
That is the problem of answering without understanding. Humans too have become unable to express themselves without quoting references. While appreciating historical expressions is harmless, treating them as authority is destructive.
Authority is anathema to education. True education is about asking right questions. It is about finding answers by experimenting and experiencing. Believing in others’ words is intellectual slavery. This creates cults in education to escape loneliness and seek recognition.
The progenies must not become as stale as their teachers. They must keep an open mind to question mythological authorities.
The education which closes the open mind is no education at all. It is a social training.
No-parenting
What happens if there is no parenting, or very little of it? In such a case, the authority figure gets replaced and emulated as a parent. Children raised without an emotional bond show an uncanny ability to live without emotion. Of course, some may cross the edge, but those are exceptions.
There is nothing wrong in being unemotional. It may be a good thing. The children without parental attunement never learn to “cover” themselves. They interact more nakedly, without the emotional disguise adults use for their politics.
At this point we must make a distinction between emotion and compassion. The former gives a ‘high’. The latter exists as part of existence. Emotion is a feeling. Compassion, or as Buddha called it ‘Karuna’, is the essence of human existence. It is a mistake to conflate both.
Neglected children often feel compassion intensely. What’s missing is usually the ability to name, regulate, or express it safely with fellow human beings. Numbness can look like calm but it’s often suppression, not absence. Children diagnosed as cold in behavior often have a good connection with pets or nature.
Compassion is also learned largely through being on the receiving end of it. A child who never experienced attunement has fewer templates for offering it to others. Lack of compassion is often called a left-behind or unlearned skill. It is difficult to accept that it is a mere skill. In any case, to grow up to be compassionless is not a welcome sign.
The case of the unfortunate who have cruel, unemotional, or psychopathic parents is not something we need to deal with. That is a rare exception and does not define life. That is a misery called life.
Social Media
The fruit of the tree does not fall far. When the wind is blowing at tumultuous speed, fruit falls so far off the tree that it does not even know where the tree is. This is the state of parenting today. In this change, there is no divide between poor and rich, or rural and urban. All have access to the network on an Android phone. The cost of the phone may differ, but the content remains the same.
This is the era of Social Media. After the age of 12 almost all children have access to social media. They can watch in a day what their previous generations did not have opportunity to watch in their entire lifetime.
Decades ago, my grandfather confided in me. Watching state-run Doordarshan TV had taught him biology he had no inkling about. That was long before the cellphone came to the horizon. That was one channel. The cellphone brought an infinity of knowledge along with an infinity of disinformation.
Children have far more peer influence today than at any time in the past. They trust peer knowledge over their own parents. The peer group, and worse, social media influencers, have taken over the role of parenting. They shape ideas, habits, and personalities.
Since this phenomenon is barely a decade old, we are clueless. A country like Australia has banned the use of social media by children. Other countries are contemplating similar moves. We do not know if it will work. We do not know where social media will take the parenting of children. We do not know if it will be good or bad in the long run. Ultimately, we must rely on human adaptability.
Humans traverse unknown territories, assimilating, and embracing all. The coming generations will have to survive it too. How they will do so is to be seen.
The Transmission of the Cycle
By the time the child reaches adulthood, the simulator is fully programmed. They begin to run the same loops they witnessed in their youth.
They enter the game of trapping numbers. They build their own fragile self-image. They start the chase for the next blip of achievement.
This is the transmission of the cycle of life. The habits constitute the identity. The identity is passed to the offspring, and the merry-go-round continues.
These factors, facilitated by finances, shape the lifestyle and become the personality we call persona. This will be the discussion in the next chapter.