It is important that parents find peace with exercise of parental authority.

A kind of ‘cooperative parenting’ style has become popular in the US. Cooperative parenting does not entail the use of authority. Cooperative parenting exploits the child’s ability to learn lessons. It is a kind of ‘intellectual’ learning. Children learn to pull the lever and the marble rolls through the slot. Parents, when using the cooperative parenting style, educate their child about how things work in hopes of eliciting their co-operation. Repeated experience of ‘how things work’ well prepares them for much in life.

Learning how things work equips children to negotiate a mechanistic world (a world governed by the laws of classical physics). Learning how mechanical things work in no way helps children  navigate the messier world of human affairs which includes the business of being a good person (a world governed by laws just coming to be understood with quantum theory) . Furthermore, the complexity of our larger material world is far beyond even our own ability to understand. We often, just have to do things without fully comprehending why.

Experience of authority in early childhood conditions the system to just act without always knowing why. This enables the system to benefit most from the pattern recognition functions of the brain. Our real intellectual potency is derived from that function, not any lessons learned. Our ability to rely on that system allows us to wing it in life without getting bogged down with intellectualizing; intellectualizing has it’s place but it does not belong every place.

As we adapt to a world with limits (be they traffic signals or the physics of time-it really does take 50 minutes to travel from Oakland to San Francisco)  unquestionably we are adapting to the world as it is, as opposed to how we might want it to be. We adapt to what ‘is’ and go about the business of living. As children adapt to the omnipresence of parental control and authority, they are creating patterns that allow them to accept what ‘is’ in the world. This in no way precludes their eventually becoming a more influential ‘player’ in the world and contributing to social change. 

Interestingly, strengthening of parental control is often an antidote for anxiety in children. It seems that often children ’sense’ they are not up to the task of managing their own lives. Strengthening of the authoritative container wiithin which children move about allows them to relax and go about the business of being a child. Note; in this model, anxiety is a useful signal alerting us to the presence of something amiss.